Thedailyvidette

CNBAM: Division 4 Management M5: Best Social Media Strategy During the 2013 fall academic semester at Illinois State University, The Vidette implemented a new social media strategy to increase social media traffic on both Facebook and Twitter. The thought behind the strategy was to use a promotional item of some monetary value that would spark the interest of students to increase traffic on our social media sites. Since on Illinois State University campus the restaurant Chipotle has one of the largest popularity amongst the students, we decided that handing out gift cards for there would grab the student’s attention.

The way the marketing team decided to implement this idea was by determining a set goal that would be behind this promotional event. The first goal was to determine how much social media traffic would be acceptable to make this promotion a success. At the start of the promotion our Facebook account was around 2,150 likes and our Twitter account had about 2,130 followers, so we determined at a far stretch we want to reach a number of 4000 for both accounts.

After that, the decision to determine how much each gift card should be valued at, that would gain students interest without breaking the budget needed to be set. The decision was made at $50 for each gift card, so that if Facebook reached 4000 likes, then one of the two gift cards would be handed out and vise versa for Twitter. For the third step was the creation of the graphical design work, listed below in the appendix is an example of the graphical design work that has been shared across multiple different media channels. The final step in this promotional event was the actual distribution of the social media promotion across the different media channels.

During the distribution of the promotional event though different media channels, the marketing team was able to target a large group of our main target audience. Since the main target

audience for The Vidette is Illinois State University students, the primary media channel was flyer distribution on the quad. This was done by The Vidette marketing team staff during their street team hours. They handed out over 800 individual fliers to students during passing hours of classes. Some of the other media channels that were target during this promotional event were social media pages, print within the newspaper itself, social media sites, and The Vidette online website.

The promotional event was successful in generating more social media traffic than usual, but not as we originally planned. The initial goal was to increase the overall amount of users that would be connecting to our social media sites. At the end of the event we only managed to achieve about 300 new Facebook likes giving us about a 14% increase in social media likes; and for Twitter we increase by over 470, giving us an increase of 22% in followers. Although we know our original goal was a huge stretch and we did not reach it, the event was run for a relatively short period of time but still very successful in other ways. One of the big things we did notice was an increase in social media content that involved likes, retweets, shares and comments on our sites. Thus because of the increase of actual content that was being created on our pages, we felt the event was extremely successful. This event does have the opportunity to continue over into the spring semester, although some of the goals and rules will be altered to better manage the promotion.

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