This document outlines key principles for developing effective social media campaigns, emphasizing the importance of integrating social media in the early planning stages. It highlights defining success through digital metrics, optimizing messages for each platform, understanding the audience, and creating a content calendar. Continuous performance analysis is crucial for improving engagement and adapting strategies based on analytics data.

1. Developing Successful Social Media
Campaigns
Understanding the Principles of an Effective
Social Media Campaign.
By Josse Alex Garrido, UTRGV Social Media Manager.
July 2016

2. Outline
Infuse social media at the roots.
Define success.
Define your message.
Understand your audience.
Gather the right tools and elements.
Create a content calendar.
Analyze performance & continue improving.

3. The biggest mistake organizations
make is to think of social media as an
afterthought.

4. If you want your campaigns to be effective,
you must include social media very early
in the planning stages of your marketing
efforts.

5. Define Success
Success can mean anything,
from simple awareness of your
campaign to measurable forms
of engagement.
Set your expectations clearly,
and make sure you keep your
main goal in mind as you are
developing your social media
campaign.

6. Define Success: Digital Measurements
• Clicks to your website: This campaign objective is ideal when you have a
properly optimized landing page and want people to visit the page to learn
more about your program or article.
• Conversions: When developing paid campaigns, several platforms allow
you to keep track of specific actions you want to track (for example, how
many people applied to your program or how many calls you received). You
can also keep track of conversions by asking people how they found out
about your event/program.
• Digital Engagement: The number of likes, comments, shares, etc., that a
post has. The more the engagement, the higher the impression rate and
the more people likely to find out about what you are trying to promote.
• Impressions: How many people have seen your post/update. Impressions
by themselves are not a good benchmark metric, but can help you
understand the general preferences of your audience.

7. Look at your numbers from different angles.
A post about a deadline might not get a lot of
engagement,
but it actually might turn out to have a lot of
impressions.

8. Define Your Message
What are you trying to do?
• Persuade: Make people do something, enroll in a program, attend an
event, or engage with your cause.
• Educate: Inform people about a program or project, provide additional
insight about a topic or help people understand the importance of
something.
• Entertain: Amuse people, by providing content that is unique,
interesting and timely, in order to entice people to keep coming back for
more.

9. Define Your Message: Optimize Your Message for Each Platform
• Facebook: Content with high entertainment value.
• Twitter: Very short content and videos. In the first 5 words, you
need to capture people’s attention.
• Instagram: A primarily visual platform.
• LinkedIn: A professional network. Great for alumni.
• Snapchat: Share “in the moment”
• Pinterest: An inspirational platform.

10. Understand
Your
Audience
What kinds of
posts/updates generate the
most engagement?
What does the ideal
audience(s) for my
campaign look like?

11. Sometimes,
it is all about time.

12. General Weekday Patterns
• BC: Not very enthusiastic but love positive messages.
• AC: Enthusiastic about school spirit/pride.
• Morning busy period: Not very engaging.
• Around lunch: Quick reads and high engagement.
• Afternoon busy period: Rough period for engagement.
• After work/school: Ideal for most updates.
• Night: People want entertaining content at this time.

13. Gather the Right Tools and
Elements
Each social media platform is unique.
Something that might generate lots of
engagement on Facebook might fail to
gain any interactions on Twitter (that is
often the case).
Keep in mind that you will most likely
need to develop content that is
specifically tailored for each platform --
an animated gif for Twitter, but a
graphic for Instagram and a video for
Facebook, for example.
Source: 9Gag

14. Create a Content Calendar
Some tools that can help you create and maintain your content
calendar:
• Trello: Project collaboration, approvals, comments, etc.
• Google Sheets: Excel-like, auto-updates, easy to work with.
• Google Keep: Allows easy task-collaboration and sharing.
• Wunderlist: Great for task-lists.
• Yammer: Multimedia internal collaboration tool.
• Excel Online: Greater privacy-control for collaboration.
• Dropbox: Allows a centralized cloud storage for projects.
• Google Drive: Similar to Dropbox, integrates easily with other
Google products.

15. Create a Content Calendar: Things to Keep in Mind.
• What regular events are happening around the time you are
planning to post your updates?
• Use an active, human voice.
• Be very mindful of your schedule and change it depending on
current events.

16. Be very mindful of your schedule and change it depending
on current events

17. Analyze Performance and Continue Improving
It is important to keep a close eye on engagement metrics and overall
reach.
Even if you have planned around a past content schedule that was
effective a few months ago, be open to switch things around if you are
seeing that the updates are not giving you the engagement you had
planned.
Let your analytics data guide you in both the implementation and
review of your social media campaigns.

18. facebook.com/utrgv/insights/

19. analytics.twitter.com/user/utrgv/tweets