Social Media Takeover – Let's see what's the fuss all about?
Rachel Smith
Communications Executive
February 5, 2022
February 5, 2022
10
min read
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You cannot escape social media takeovers because they are all over social media!
This fun influencer marketing strategy is increasingly becoming more and more popular amongst brands. Whether it is a well-reputed brand creating hype for its new launches, or a newly launched brand trying to raise awareness of its existence, a takeover is a creative way to add fun and spice up your social media content while keeping your community engaged!
A social media takeover is exactly what it sounds like. It is when an individual takes over your brand's social media profile for a predetermined period of time. It is when you work with an influencer in your field or niche and allow them access to your brand's social media accounts. Basically - you hand over the posting rights to an influencer and allow them to post what, when, and how they want for a short period – could be for a few hours, a day, and so on.
Such takeovers are most popular on Instagram and Snapchat. However, you can hold them on other social media platforms as well.
3 Main Reasons Why Brands Should Conduct a Social Media Takeover
Besides being super interesting, social media takeovers have several benefits. Here are the three main advantages of conducting social media takeovers:
Increases Brand Awareness When you partner with an influencer who has a loyal audience base and following, you are paving a path to reach out to more people to expand your brand awareness within your niche. When an influencer takes over your social media profile, they introduce your brand to their followers, thereby increasing brand awareness.
Social media takeovers work really well for new brands looking for exposure and for big brands launching new products and searching for the right people to connect with their products.
Expands Reach to New Audiences & New Followers Social media is all about building relationships with your customer and making your brand feel more relatable. Influencers have built an audience and have gained the trust of their followers. These followers, when they engage with the influencers they follow on your brand's social media profile, are likely to follow your brand as well.
So, when an influencer takes over your brand's account, their followers will come with and engage on your account. This often leads to them witnessing or experiencing an alignment, which encourages them to follow your brand as well.
Increases Engagement Influencers have a way of creating content that followers engage with. When the right influencer takes over your brand on social media, the content that ends up getting created is different and unique, which often increases engagement for your brand.
When brands allow influencers to take over, they often witness a huge surge in engagement as the format generally provides for many opportunities for open dialogue and interactions with the influencers, which end up being about the brand itself.
5 Steps to Conduct a Social Media Takeover
Social media takeovers are not complicated. Follow these simple steps and ensure that you are on the right track!
Define Your Goals
Before you begin your influencer hunt, define what you would like to accomplish after this campaign. Are you looking to increase followers? Do you want to boost your account engagement rate? Or increase clicks on your website? Do you want to promote a product?
Once you are clear with your objectives, narrow down the list of social media platforms you would conduct this campaign on.
Find the Right Influencers
After defining your goals and the list of platforms, start with your search for the right influencer. There's a lot that you need to consider when looking for the right influencer to do a social media takeover for your brand. Don't select influencers purely based on their follower count. Sometimes an influencer with millions of followers has negligible reach. Instead, you can choose a micro-influencer with less follower count but a highly engaged audience. Whom to with it all depends on your goals and needs for the campaign.
You can rely on research skills and list down names of influencers in your niche you think would fit all the boxes. A better way to do this would be to utilize Affable.ai's platform to get matched with the perfect influencers for your brand and your campaign. We have a detailed post on how to find influencers that you might want to go through for more help.
Do not assume that the first influencer you reach out to will be interested in this campaign. Always be ready with a list of at least three to five influencers. And once you have the list ready, use Affable.ai to automate the process by sending out multiple outreach messages and managing your campaign – all from our influencer marketing platform.
Learn how Affable.ai can help you find the right influencers!
Once you have selected the right influencer for your campaign, delve into details and set some parameters. No matter how great the influencer is, you should never turn over the account rights without guidance.
You also need to sort out who will create and post content. If the influencer wants to create content, set some ground rules. Also, if you follow a specific social media style, provide those guidelines to the influencer.
Other things that need to be discussed are what platforms and how long the takeover will last, what type of media to share, whether the takeover will promote a hashtag, and how many posts will it last, or will it be in the form of a LIVE?
Promote the Takeover
Remember, you are doing a social media takeover for a purpose, and you want everyone to know about it. Once you have chosen the influencer and strategized everything, ask the influencer to promote it on their social media while you promote it as well.
You should also promote the takeover on other social media channels besides where the takeover will happen.
Measure the Success
What is the point of a campaign if you do not track its success? Several analytic tools are available for monitoring the success of your campaign. Depending on your goal, measure the follower growth, engagement rate, views, click-through rate, and more.
These metrics will give you an idea of what worked and what did not. It will help you with more successful social media takeover campaigns in the future.
Affable.ai allows you to find influencers, reach out to them, manage your influencer marketing campaigns, and track results – all from one platform.
Let's take a look at a couple of examples of social media takeovers that have worked well.
Example #1: Wooly's
Wooly's is a small music venture in the small city of Des Moines, Iowa that has hosted some pretty big names in the music industry like Boombox, Rebelution. In 2015, they had about 7,535 Instagram followers. But today, they have reached 15.9k followers.
A part of their success is heavy pre and post-event promotions by performing bands on Wooly's account. They let these bands control their Instagram account and let them showcase the fun things they do behind the scenes and where people can meet them.
Wooly's granted its Instagram account access to the performing bands like the American musical band The Maytags. In 2015, they reached Iowa for a concert at Wooly's and announced taking charge of the Instagram account by posting the band logo. They sold their merchandise through Wooly's account. Their Instagram takeover gave a first-person view of the main concert, along with relevant details and Wooly's hashtags in each post.
The consistent brand name mentioned by Maytag in every post was essential to serve Wooly's business aim of creating brand awareness. It got people excited about the concert and helped Wooly's and The Maytags reach new audiences. This is definiutley a good social media takeover example that other brands can learn from.
Example #2: The City of Calgary
The Calgary Stampede is the biggest annual city-wide party held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This ten-day festival attracts over one million people every year and features one of the world's largest parades, rodeos, stage shows, concerts, and much more.
In 2016, they announced a contest on their social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, where they invited people to snap pictures related to this big event with the hashtag #InstaStampede. Among all the talent, the nine best photographers would each be given a chance to take over Calgary Stampede's Instagram account for an entire day during the annual 10-day event. Each winner got tickets to Stampede's main events, $100 in food and drink vouchers, a gift card, and $50 in Stampede bucks.
Running this promotional takeover campaign proved to be a massive success for building a brand for The Calgary Stampede event. This yearly event is a massive hit among the locals every year. Through this social media takeover, the Stampede visitors could document their experiences freely and, in return, build up anticipation before the big event by keeping Stampede on top of everyone's mind.
Wrapping Up
Bringing new perspectives to your social media accounts is always refreshing and beneficial for your growth. Hosting a social media takeover should be fun for your audience, the influencer, and your brand and can bring in some rewards if done right!
Planning is key, and execution is even more critical, and that's where automation can be a game-changer. See how Affable.ai can be the game-changer for your brand by getting in touch with us for a free trial!
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