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OUR ‘APPROACH’ TO SOCIAL MEDIA
26/11 2009 // aaron
As our blog nears its second birthday, I thought I’d take the time to share some thoughts about the way we approach social media here at Advance.
Like most agencies, we’ve felt the need to properly get to grips with new channels. Social media’s impact on the communications industry has been profound in the extreme and no agency that claims to understand consumer behaviour can afford to ignore it. From the start, we set out with an open mind and a determination to experiment and learn.
Blogging
I run the blog together with Annette – one of our planners – and we mainly see it as a way of keeping people up to speed with what’s happening at the agency. Ideas for content come from people all around the house. We share case stories, news about new hires, pictures from parties and so on.
We don’t have a huge audience – around 50 unique hits a day – but that’s been growing steadily and traffic has doubled over the past year thanks in part to simple measures like Advancers promoting the blog on their Facebook pages and inserting the URL in our email signatures.
YouTube
More recently we’ve moved Advance into other channels. Our YouTube channel has been up for a year now and we’ve been gradually uploading a lot of old content (Advance has been around since 1977).
Early on we noticed that our LEGO content was proving especially popular. As I don’t work on the LEGO account that much we decided to hand over control of the channel to Mads, a graphic artist here at the agency who works on the account and understands the community.
To date we’ve uploaded almost 60 videos and these have had around half a million views. We have 100 subscribers and have had approximately 3,000 channel views. We’ve especially enjoyed getting to know the LEGO community – interacting with them, learning from them and discovering great content along the way.
We decided against an official agency Twitter profile, but not because we’re ignoring it. Instead, we’ve narrowed our focus and concentrated our Twitter efforts on promoting our ongoing Agency Future project. The Agency Future Twitter account has so far gathered around 100 followers and has grown quickly enough for us to continue to dedicate resources to keeping the project running.
Another reason why we chose not to start an agency Twitter account was that both me and Morten (our creative director) were already active there and knew first-hand the effort involved in building a good following. A happy compromise was simply to put links to our personal Twitter accounts over in the sidebar of this blog.
Flickr/Facebook
Finally, we also use Flickr. We’re less active there than we are on YouTube and we mainly see it as a fun way of keeping a pictorial record of events at the agency.
We don’t have an agency Facebook page. We considered it but decided there was a risk of overexposing and overextending ourselves. We love Facebook as individuals but we couldn’t see the value for an organisation like ours. We asked ourselves how much time we spend interacting with organisations on Facebook and the answer was very little.
Having said that, we’re prepared to be corrected. Let us know what you think. Would you join an Advance Facebook page?
What we’ve learned
We quickly found that some of our efforts took off faster than others. Our YouTube channel quickly spread in the LEGO community and we realised we were providing real value with our content. The channel has become our most comprehensive showreel and is now an important new business tool. As such we are dedicating more time and resources to make sure we continue to build relationships with our subscribers.
By the same token, we quickly realised that Flickr worked better as an internal tool and so we haven’t devoted much time in attempting to build our community there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, by immersing ourselves a little deeper in social media we’ve learnt valuable new skills about the dos and don’ts of navigating this space. So when it comes to advising our clients, we can now call on first-hand experience.
Our tips
- Engage! We haven’t always responded to comments and questions as promptly as we could. It’s bad etiquette and we’ve learnt from our mistakes.
- Excite! Great content trumps all. We love putting our work out there and getting great feedback.
- Experiment! Don’t be afraid to fail. You’ll still learn from the experience.
(Our social media team. From left: me, Annette and Mads.)
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