HACKING SOCIAL MEDIA TO BUILD BRAND FASTER – A LinkedIn EXAMPLE

There is still a lot of trial and error in using social media to build brand recognition. Questions like: “What draws immediate attention to new content?”, “How to engage and provide value to a target population?", “What is the best time to launch content?” challenge the best of social media experts. This is particularly important for an emerging company starting with no brand at all, and usually with limited funds for large PR and paid advertising programs enjoyed by large incumbents.

In an attempt to add some rationale to these issues, the social media team at BreatheSimple undertook a short experiment to understand how best to leverage its resources to grow brand recognition quickly. The aim of the project was to identify 4 key factors that are necessary for maximizing impact on a defined target audience.

The chosen platform was LinkedIn, and the target population was executives in the healthcare sector, with a focus on sleep.

After some initial secondary research, the experiment was narrowed down to investigate these four factors:

EYE APPEAL: in today’s crowded on-line media environment it is important to grab a reader with an immediate visual draw. The two key elements are a) an image that is somehow familiar yet at the same time intriguing and b) a captivating head-line.

RELEVANCE: once eyes are captured the reader has to realize quickly that the content is valuable to them.

CONTEXT: does the content benefit from current news in the broader popular media?

TIMING: what is the best day/time of day to launch content?

The first three factors were rated on a scale of 1-5, (five high) and combined with equal weighting to create an overall “IMPACT FACTOR”. Campaigns were spaced at 3-4 day intervals. The left hand chart shows engagement growth for each campaign measured from launch.  The right hand chart shows the number of engagements after the first 200 hours for each campaign plotted against the BreatheSimple IMPACT FACTOR.

KEY FINDINGS:

·        All three basic factors are necessary to get high engagement values.

·        The relationship between campaign success is highly linearly correlated with the IMPACT FACTOR (Pearson r = + 0.98).

·        Time of launch does NOT affect ultimate engagement value. Time to 50% engagement is 43 +/- 14 hours on the LinkedIn Platform.