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Envisage Cloud does pay for social media marketing on occasion, such as using Google Adwords, Twitter Cards and sponsored updates on LinkedIn but Hayes admits it will “try and do it every other way, it’s not a given that we’re just going to pay for it. If we feel we need to, we will pay for it”. Recently, the company paid for Twitter card where people clicked to enter a draw for free flights. The follower level increased substantially. While the people who entered were anybody and everybody, the company sought to qualify them with a ‘call to action’ to download an e-book or something else, such as a case study, to find people that it could engage with.
She accepts that if a company is not paying for promotion on social media then it is hoping that its content and text will stand out from the crowd. “It comes down to your cleverness and innovativeness when it comes to content, even down to the words you use to try and attract the right people to you.”
Some times it can just be serendipity. One person who can testify firsthand to the way that a little bit of social media marketing and promotion can gain exposure and interest that stretch beyond the parameters of traditional marketing is Eamon Moore, managing director at E-mit. The company was one of 600 Dell registered partners in Ireland but when it achieved the higher status of preferred partner last year, Moore wrote a blog post about the subject. “It was very well-received,” he reports. “There were a large number of hits on our website.”
Moore and E-mit tweeted about the blog and it was favourited and retweeted by one of Dell’s heads of social media and digital marketing in Texas. Moore sent him a direct message via Twitter and they ended up having an hour-long conference call. During the call, Moore asked whether CEO Michael Dell might be willing to give E-mit’s blog some promotion via social media but was informed that the CEO controlled his own social media.
“[Social media has] been a real game-changer for us. And it’s all from one tweet” – Eamon Moore, E-mit Solutions
A little while later, Moore was woken up in the night by his two-year-old son. After settling him back to sleep, Moore looked at his phone and discovered “a ton of e-mails telling me we had lots of new followers on twitter. Then I saw that Michael Dell had retweeted the blog post to just under 1 million followers. Then he connected with me on LinkedIn.”
He believes Dell was interested in the blog because E-mit was trying to do the same thing as the vendor in becoming an end-to-end solutions provider. “We had a lot in common,” he remarks.
As a result of the interest in the blog, E-mit’s follower numbers have increased to more than 1,000, including a number of people in Dell. Moore has a monthly conference call with the social media and digital marketing operation in Texas. “It’s been a real game-changer for us,” Moore concludes. “And it’s all from one tweet, I suppose.”
So there you have it. All those marketing professionals still without an effective way of measuring RoI on social media marketing can take solace from the fact that sometimes it can be as random as the CEO of a global computer company clicking retweet.
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