As an avid basketball fan, I have grown up playing and watching the game since I was 5 years old. I was able to catch the end of of Jordan’s career when he won his last championship with the Chicago Bulls and have been hooked ever since. The game has evolved tremendously over this time, but the one thing that always catches my attention and reminds me of how far we have come digitally is the presence of basketball on social media.
When the Golden State Warriors play any game it is a social media frenzy.
They started the 2015-2016 season with a record breaking 24 straight wins. You couldn’t pull up any social media platform without seeing some sort of Warriors highlight or update of their greatness. I would like to dive into the impact social media can have on an organization (Golden State Warriors or your own business) as well as how it can positively impact your brand and bottom line.
I will use the Warriors as an example here because they are the team that nearly all basketball fans are enamored with right now. Steph Curry, reigning MVP and Warriors top man, has over 4 million Twitter followers and consistently gets thousands of retweets on each tweet. He has done this by building a loyal fan base through showing he cares about them and being transparent as a basketball player and family man.
Social Media and Small Business …
Let’s scale this down to a smaller business with 15 employees. Now, let’s focus on what kind of impact its employees have, as well as how it affects the company’s culture and brand. Here are two questions to get the discussion started:
- Do your coworkers share educational articles you’ve published on your personal LinkedIn profile?
- Do your coworkers retweet your Twitter posts to help promote education within your industry?
Social media has the ability to be much more than just a source for information about products or certain sales a company is running. I believe a company who shows behind-the-scenes looks of corporate events or even highlighting a birthday of an employee goes a long way in building a brand. Organic growth can still happen on social media, but it’s becoming increasingly more difficult with each passing day. I challenge each of you reading this to take a look at your own social profiles to see if there are areas you might be missing that can build value for yourself or even your team (company or sports team). Steph Curry is certainly building value for his organization while using FREE tools to do so.
My take on paid ads …
I believe these can be one of the most cost effective ways to reach true in-market customers. The amount of targeting you can get with each campaign continues to grow, and you can dial in each campaign to only hit a certain demographic in a very targeted location. One of the main reasons I am an advocate for these paid ads is the ability to have in-depth analytics and reporting on each ad you run. Unlike traditional media, you will know exactly how many people see this ad and how many are actually converting.
I return again the concept of transparency. When you partner with a marketing agency, both you and the agency need to be transparent about your brand—who you are and what you do—and you must remember to hold your agency partner equally accountable for transparency with where the money is spent in digital marketing, and, specifically for this blog, in your paid ads.
Social media is always changing, and there are countless strategies for each platform. I encourage each person reading this to really focus on one platform and test both organic and paid posts. We are constantly changing our strategies and making updates based on what’s changing with shopping behaviour and love looking at this data. As we like to say, data beats intuition.