A lot of students have been using facebook and twitter to promote their projects. Many succeeded but there’s also a lot who failed. Let’s learn from their failures so we can get better at promoting our projects.
No momentum
Social media is about viral marketing. People will want to help you promote your event or club if all their other friends promote it as well. That’s affect of social pressure and social proof. This requires the viral aspect to start with a bang, and will ensure that it will spread rapidly. So, how do you start with a bang? It’s not necessarily about numbers of people liking your page or the quality of stuff you put on the page which brings to our 2nd reason students fail to maximize use of social media.
Not Enough Early Supporters
If your fan page or group has only 4 people in it will not attract people to join. This is because people will think, “Only 4 people? Must be a boring facebook page!” and they would not want to join your page. Before you try to spam the facebook page to everyone, get all your project committee members to like the page first. At least get 15 – 20 people to like your page. This would make it ‘look’ like the page is worth ‘like’ing. After that you can start spreading the page to whoever you want.
Not enough content
Don’t bombard your page with spam of your project. Diversify it with some other stuff that might still be related to your page. It’s all about giving value to your members , and that’s about providing relevancy. So, put some articles from other blogs or websites & maybe some motivational videos & etc.
Not good enough
Social media does not make promotions more effective, it merely allows people to share things easier, and people only want to share good things only. You realize that videos of cute kitten spread more easily than stuff about your projects right? Well, I guess it’s because people like cute kittens more than they like your project. Either way, we should learn to make our project and its marketing message as close to what people want as close as possible.
Anyway, social media is still something relatively new and so many things change in the social media landscape. Try to experiment and see what works, and who knows with this experience you might even can go professional.
Be.You.
