Do you first want to burn your own money to experiment and then find out which is the most effective social media platform? Or would you like to learn from our mistakes?

My Pain:

Which is the most effective social media platform?

How do I target a specific segment of audience in Social Media?

How to launch a campaign in social media?

My experience:

We initiated an advertisement in the in-flight magazine (please read our blog How effective is it to advertise on in-flight magazine). Our objective was to communicate to maximum people (our own customers database & maximum corporate Air travelers) who were to travel in near future, about our free stay contest in the in-flight magazine (honestly the purpose was not that the people were dying to win the contest but got an excuse to reach out to all travelers about TrustedStay). Means our objective was to create an awareness that TrustedStay is a Pan India Service apartment provider. We were not bothered about leads at this point of time.

We had to launch an awareness campaign across all social media platforms Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram and also our own customer database of 35,000 that we had in our CRM database.

Audience: We defined our target audience as under.

Job Title: Our serviced apartments decision makers are Admin, Facilities, HR, Procurement & Travel desk. The idea was to reach out to all these people in Social Media with any of the above designations who could be our potential client.

Company Name: Our service apartments users were mainly the following Industry, Banking, Insurance, IT, Automobile, Engineering, Pharma, Start-up’s, Major Corporate Group companies. So, we thought of targeting all employees in these companies.

Own Customers: We have a database of 35000 customers who contacted us for serviced apartment. Which includes customers who gave us the booking and who did not, but we captured their details in our CRM database. We thought of non-intrusive communication to all those who are in SM platform.

Social Media Platform:

Facebook Campaign:

Login to business.facebook.com/home/accounts

Create Campaign: Select “Reach” Enter “Campaign name” (Inflight Magazine)

Ad-set-1 (wanted to reach audience having specific job titles designation)

Detailed Targeting (Job Titles all variation in designation of Admin, Human Resource, Facilities, Purchase) Audience meter indicated a reach of 4.7 lacs

Ad-set-2 (wanted to reach out to all employees of a particular company/companies)

We wanted to target audience who are currently working in that company but FB picks up also those who are talking about that company and its agents/dealers. Resulting in a wrong audience so we dropped it.

Ad-set-3 (wanted to reach out to all our database of 35000 who were present in FB)

Audience Uploaded  35000 customer list. The matched size was 20000 (means 20000 out of 35000 of our customers had account in FB).

LinkedIn Campaign:

Login to https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions

Create Campaign Group : Enter Name: In-flight Campaign Select: Brand Awareness

Campaign-1 (wanted to reach out to all employees of a particular Job Titles)

Who is the Target Audience: Job Titles: After defining all Job Titles 36 , Target Audience size was 8.5 Lac+

Campaign-2 (wanted to reach audience having specific Company/Companies)

Who is the Target Audience: Company: Company Name: Enable audience expansion: then selected almost 80 companies. The target audience was 14 Lac+

Campaign-3 (wanted to reach our own customer database)

We did not find this feature in Linked in wherein we can upload our contact details and match who had account in LinkedIn.

Twitter Campaign:

Login to https://ads.twitter.com/login

Create Campaign:  Select “Reach”  Enter “Campaign name” (In-flight Magazine)

Ad-group-1 (Wanted to reach out to all Industrialist twitter handle & their network)

Audience Features: Followers Look alike: Twitter handles of all the Famous Industrialist. A list of 86 Industrialist twitter handles were selected. Audience summary was 28.7 Mn – 35.1 Mn. The expectation was that the industrialist followers will have his management following and hopefully our targeted customers.

Ad-group-2 (Wanted to reach out to all Company twitter handle & their network)

Audience Features: Followers Look alike: Twitter handles of all the Famous Industrialist. A list of 99 Companies twitter handles were selected. Audience summary was 9.6 Mn – 11.8 Mn. The expectation was that the Companies followers will have his Co employees following and hopefully our targeted customers.

Ad-group-3 (Wanted to reach out to all our database customer twitter handles & their network)

Audience Features: Bulk upload your customer list. Audience summary was 1.44 K-1.76 K. The expectation was that non intrusively we will connect with our 3,000 odd customers. The number was too less.

Results:

Facebook:

Audience	Reach	Total Amount Spent	Period	100% Video Views/ Rs 1000 Spent
Own Customers	20K	Rs 8,000	27 Days	425
Job Title	4.7 Lacs	Rs 4,000	11 Days	260
Company	NA	NA	NA	NA

We felt that a reasonable good numbers of our own customers were on FB and reaching out to our own customers FB was the best way to reach out.

LinkedIn:

Audience	Reach	Total Amount Spent	Period	100% Video Views/ Rs 1000 Spent
Job Title	8.5 Lacs	Rs 15,000	20 Days	693
Company	14 Lacs	Rs 5,000	10 Days	300
Own Customers	NA	NA	NA	NA

We felt that Job Title wise Audience was the most effective and targeted audience.

Twitter:

Audience	Reach	Total Amount Spent	Period	100% Video Views/ Rs 1000 Spent
Industrialist	300 Lacs	Rs 4,000	11 Days	801
Company	100 Lacs	Rs 1000	9 Days	806
Own Customers	3K	NA	NA	NA

Over all, though no of Videos per Rs 1000  spent was high in Twitter. We did not get the confidence that it was reaching to the right audience. We found that in the company like say whirlpool company’s major followers were its dealers rather than the employee. Also in Industrialist the followers were politicians and unwanted segment. While Own customer on twitter was a disaster. Concluded that its not a good idea to create awareness  on Twitter.

My Conclusion:

Here’s my rating.

Facebook: Job Title: 3/5, Company: 1/5, Own customers: 5/5

LinkedIn: Job Title: 5/5, Company: 3/5, Own customers: 1/5

Twitter: Industrialist: 3/5, Company: 2/5, Own Customers: 1/5

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