For effective social media marketing we can all take a lesson from ants. While ants have large communities, they divide their work up to smaller groups of specialized ants. Those smaller groups get their various jobs done.
Just like an ant community, those involved in social media don’t have to have thousands and thousands of followers and friends to keep their messages alive, you just need to have a good group of “specialized” people who are dedicated to helping you spread your thoughts and ideas. I’ve done this with a group of ants (really a group of dedicated event attendees who will probably kill me for equating them to ants but this works out well for my analogy….).
Last summer I needed help getting the word out about a summer concert series (once again having to market without any marketing budget). I asked the DJ at one of the first concerts of the season to mention that for those in attendance who were on Twitter to tweet about the concert and use the hashtag #LakeArrowhead. There were maybe 10 people in the audience who tweeted. The following week we asked again and another 10 or so people tweeted.
I set up a column in Tweetdeck to follow the hashtag so I was able to follow the progress of the concert tweets. After a couple more weeks an amazing thing happened. Suddenly people were tweeting early in the week about the concert coming up, there was tweeting during the concerts and also tweeting following the concerts. People who didn’t attend the concert tweeted about the concert saying they wished they could come up for it. People tweeted that they were planning on coming up on certain future dates. We went from a moderate amount of people in attendance to SRO at most concerts throughout the rest of the summer.
The ants had done their job! These ants truly marched one tweet by one tweet. They spread the word about the concerts and the army of concert tweeters began to grow and in the end made the concert series the biggest and best by far. The ants kept us in the social media headlines, grew the concert series and made it a wonderful success.
So, the moral of this story is – mobilize and empower a few dedicated ants with your special message and watch how they keep you in the headlines.
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*The Small Town Marketing Handbook (free short ebook) discusses how social media allows each of us to be part of our own “small town” regardless of where we live. Form over on the right hand side of the page.