Can I meet my objectives with a message that has a lifespan of 1 day or maybe less?

While it is evident that Social media marketing is quite different from traditional marketing, it is also strikingly different from digital marketing. Many a time organizations use these terms of digital and social interchangeably.

The key difference between a social campaign and other traditional marketing is that there is lot of focus on creative design and it is often the area where maximum effort is spent. And quite rightly so!  These creatives are then pushed across various media channels for a minimum of 6-10 months.

Thus, the life span of creatives is a minimum of 6 months for traditional marketing and this can be a minimum of 1-3 months for digital marketing. However, if you compare this with social, the life span of a creative is less than half a day. Any post is already old by the end of day as a new post is ready to go. This also means that the time allowed for a post to get on to fans and followers’ timeline is less than 10-12 hours.

Hence, traditional logic makes one take one of the following positions:

·         The posts and campaigns need to make more impact in less time. Hence the posts need to be stronger in content and visuals.

·         It is quite expensive to create posts day after day with strong content and visuals that create maximum impact

However both these approaches cannot be further from truth.

Consider this, while the earlier successful movies had silver jubilees and golden jubilees with 25 and 50 weeks of continuous run at the box office e.g. Sholay had a run of more than 260 weeks, the current crop of blockbuster movies do more business in a weekend and their lifespan is not more than 1-2 weeks e.g. Latest hit – Singham Returns. Hence the lifespan has come down due to increased reach and increased content forcing their way in.

Given this fact, it is important that social media marketing focuses on generating broad content areas and themes around which communication can be structured. This will ensure that even if the life span of a creative is half a day, consistent re-iteration in various forms will ensure that the themes and the messages around them is driven home.

This is what we call 360 degree approaches on a brand / service. Social media provides an excellent opportunity to etch out a complete personality of the brand that a traditional communication channel does not provide for.  A line from one of my favorite Bollywood films would aptly summarize this point  – Zindagi lambi nahin, badi honi chahiye!

You can read details about this approach on our website www.vondasoft.com  or reach us at info@vondasoft.com

Uday Kelleputtige

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up that is focused on unstructured data analytics. Vondasoft has developed a solution for helping clients to understand and improve the effectiveness of their Social Media Marketing program.