Social media has become a vital part of our lives today. Whether personal or professional, we all use social media for one reason or another. While some use it as entertainment, others may use it to leverage their businesses. Social media can be one of the best ways to maximize your digital marketing strategy and use it to its full potential.
To get the most out of social media, around 80% of businesses now indulge in social media collaborations. They are familiar with the impact of social media strategies through these collaborations. Executing these collaborations with influencers in the right manner can play an important role in leveraging marketing. Social media collaborations help to build strong business relationships that can be good for your social media growth, especially in the long run.
Advantages of Social Media Collaboration
It is anticipated that by the end of 2023, there will be 4.89 billion social media users globally. Considering such high traffic on social media platforms, isn’t it necessary to have a presence here as well? Some of the major benefits of social media collaboration are as follows:
1. Find New Customers Within the Community
Whether you collaborate with an influencer or business, there is always a possibility of acquiring new customers. With collaboration, you get to know more about your target audience. At the same time, your target audience also gets to see you and become familiar with your brand. This will eventually make them a part of your sales funnel.
2. Interesting Posts
If you have struggled to keep up engagement with your posts, it is probably because the audience may not find it interesting enough. Well, you can have the chance to break the cycle with collaboration. Collaboration is one of the best social media strategies that will help you create posts in an interactive manner to drive the attention of customers.
Let’s take Revolve (a fashion wear brand) as an example. They collaborate with influencers and upload really interesting reels about their upcoming collections on their Instagram page. These posts keep the viewers hooked on the page, as they want to see more and more of the collection.
3. Let the Creativity Flow
Collaboration ensures working together for a post. This paves the way for creativity to flow as you learn about many other perspectives. When you collaborate with businesses on social media, you will understand their perspective. With a broader perspective, you infuse more creative ideas.
4. Community Engagement
Social media collaboration is important for the brand to engage with the community. It is an excellent approach for startups to collaborate with already established brands and find who their potential target audience is.
For example, Starbucks UK partnered with Mermaids, a leading organization that supports the growth of gender-diverse youth and transgender people. Through the hashtag #WhatsYourName both units focused on promoting trans rights.
As a part of the campaign, Starbucks UK also sold a mermaid-shaped cookie to raise funds for the organization. The video campaign was posted on YouTube, which garnered over 605,000+ views and the Instagram post also received 1000+ comments.
5. Social Proof
Collaborations are one of the best ways to develop authenticity for your brand, which is one of the significant benefits of social media collaborations. Influencers know what type of content to create that can gather attention from the masses. Around 86% of customers believe in authenticity. Thus, they will give their full support to the content creators.
Examples of Successful Social Media Collaborations
Integrating the social media collaborations within your profile will not only help to increase your social media reach but also a higher revenue with effective business promotion. Here are some of the examples of successful social media collaborations to try out:
1. Sponsored Content
Influencer recommendation through a sponsored post can significantly impact your audience. Sales increase after an influencer recommends the services or posts by the respective brand. With sponsored content, you need to pay an influencer to develop and share your content across their social media platform.
In terms of social media strategies, sponsored content has a lot of potential, so you shouldn’t take it lightly. You must lay out the rules you want the influencer to abide by as a brand looking to expand in your specialized market. These guidelines would act as an effective source of understanding the marketing objective.
For example, various celebrities get paid to promote the products. One prime example of social media collaboration is famous cricketer Virat Kohli promoting Puma products on his Instagram page.
2. Brand Ambassadorship
Brand ambassadorship programs are constantly increasing across the fashion and beauty industry. 73% of marketers either already have a brand ambassador program in place or have plans to start one soon. Your brand’s ambassadors are your biggest cheerleaders. How? They get you customers even without the demand of getting paid. An ambassador program is one of the prime social media collaboration examples, in which you can get new customers and have customers advocating for your brand.
You must keep your brand ambassadorship program and test it. Giving your ambassadors some free products or an early sneak peek into your launches is advisable.
One of the leading brands to conduct brand ambassadorship the right way is Paradyes. This semi-permanent hair color brand has a para-rep program that has been able to attract a lot of new customers. Honestly, it is one of the best trade-offs for any brand.
3. Gifting
You may not realize it, but gifting can significantly impact your brand’s reach. All you need to do is hook suitable social media creators to give your brand a shoutout in exchange for free samples or products.
Gifted products can help you develop your presence amongst already established influencers. When giving these influencers genuine free products, they will likely go the extra mile to promote your products. It is one of the best win-win situations for any brand. Many small businesses on Instagram are growing owing to this system.
Solawave Beauty is creating a stir on social media with their products through gifting and setting some of the best social media collaboration examples. Influencers are taking to their accounts to promote these products.
How to Implement Social Media Collaboration into Your Strategy?
Your social media strategy is one of the most crucial driving elements, especially in bringing growth to your business. Around 49% of customers find a new brand by seeing targeted ads. Most of these ads are a result of social media collaboration. So, this is why brands should start harnessing the power of collaboration to drive results.
But how? Here are a few ways to influence the impact of your social media strategies on collaboration and bring significant changes to your business, especially in terms of engagement and growth:
1. Find the Right Influencer to Collaborate
If you want to reach out to the right audience, you must collaborate with the right influencer on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, or any other platform. Partnering with the right influencer helps expand your reach and find an audience that genuinely cares about your products and services.
Your main goal here shouldn’t be to work with an influencer with huge followers but with someone who can add value to your work. This kind of partnership is sustainable and can last a long time.
Some of the key factors to consider while choosing the right influencer to collaborate with are as follows:
Their engagement frequency with the audience.
The follower count and reach of the influencer.
Type of content they produce and alignment with your brand objectives.
Reputation from past collaborations.
Ability to measure and provide data based on the performance of the posts.
2. Know Your Goal
You must be very clear about your goal and targeted achievements so that you can work towards it from the beginning. You must constantly monitor your campaigns to track their progress on Instagram or TikTok history.
Whether you want to sell your products/services or increase your follower count, your strategy can help you build those accordingly. When you collaborate with the user, make sure to discuss the end goals at the beginning itself. That will give them a better insight into your requirements and how you can work on achieving those.
Setting up SMART goals requirements can help in achieving the end goal. How? By following the steps below:
Specific: Be very specific about your brand goals. Explain to the influencer what you want to achieve from the particular collaboration.
Measurable: Establish metrics to track and measure the performance of the particular campaign.
Achievable: Analyze how achievable those goals are. Get an understanding of the influencer’s audience size and reach to know how long the campaign will take to show results.
Relevant: The content the influencer is making should be relevant to the brand and align with the target audience- market and demographics.
Time-bound: Set a specific time within which you want the results to be achieved.
3. Foster a Strong Trust Among the Audience
To win over your audience, you must develop trust with them. When you are growing your social media, your audience starts trusting you. It is your responsibility to uphold the trust and offer the best advice to the audience.
To add value to your customers, think from a customer’s point of view. Try analyzing what problems your brand is solving and what else you can do better. Walking in your customer’s shoes will give you a broad spectrum of what to achieve from the brand.
4. Make Your Campaign the Talk of Social Media
Your campaign should be strong enough to ignite a fire amongst the audience. It must carefully trigger your customers’ emotions and get everyone talking about it. When customers talk about your campaign, consider it a win. Why? This constant talking about the campaign will help to create more awareness for your brand.
Conclusion
Social media collaborations are a great way to grow your follower count and revenue. Making these collaborations a regular part of your strategy is advisable to keep attracting new customers.
To run a successful campaign, it is essential to have a well-thought and planned social media collaboration strategy. Be clear about your goals from the start and implement those strategies accordingly.
The impact of social media strategies in today’s world is undying, so you can never neglect that. If anything is not working, you can make some minor changes there. Your hard work will eventually pay off if you keep practicing these diligently.
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