Pfizer's Social Media Strategy: Piss Off John Mack, Get Hundreds of New Followers!

Ray Kerins (LinkedIn profile and @RayKerins?) -- Head, Global Media Relations at Pfizer -- and I were among the few people attending yesterday's "Social Communications & Healthcare" conference who did NOT have a bad hair day in humid New York City. We both have no hair on our heads to speak of! I made the mistake of Tweeting about that at the beginning of the conference. Later it came back to me. No good Tweet goes unpunished as they social media marketing chicago say. It would have been bad enough if all this happened in the privacy of our own notebook computers and iPhones. This Twitter exchange, however, was available to all attendees to see on a separate huge screen on the stage! The conference organizers were using some diabolical Twitter app to project on that screen all the #BDI Tweets as soon as they were made! The technology, however, did not work fast enough so they had a good-looking young woman sit on stage to click "update" every so often. I think her presence added a certain je ne sais quo to the thing. How did I achieve my 15 minutes of fame? It was all due to Ray Kerins, social media brand marketing who mentioned me so often in his presentation ("Pfizer's Social Media Strategy"), that Fabio Gratton (@skypen) Tweeted: "How to get followers on Twitter: Piss off John Mack ;)"

HOW TO GET MORE FOLLOWERS ON INSTAGRAM IN 2 WEEKS.

Followers. It’s the ultimate Instagram metric that basically states in raw numbers how popular you are. For brands, it defines how many people will be able to see all the nice images you publish. Followers are basically like cute puppies; the more you have, the better off you are. So the big question is, how to get more followers on Instagram? to make your business explode? Like, lots of followers? And quick? Well, we might have found one cost of social media marketing pretty good solution of doing just that. About two weeks ago, Foundr launched its Instagram account (you can find it here. Check it out!) Within two weeks, we went from 0 followers, to over 10,000. We achieved this by following a relatively straight-forward process we hacked together. We’ve written out all the steps in the process, so read on if you’re interested in growing your Instagram account and making your business explode! As you can see from the image below, Instagram has increased our customer conversion rate by over 30%! This might seem obvious, but we always see it get neglected. Find out what your customers enjoy seeing on Instagram or what themes resonates with them, and populate your account with relevant images. A good way to find out what your customers like is by checking define social media marketing out what your competition is posting up, or what kind of imagery is used in the websites or blogs that are popular in your industry. There are some types of images that work well with most industries in general though; posters with inspirational or humorous quotes, food photography or scenic images are a safe bet in general. If you’re in a industry where what you’re selling is already visually appealing, photos of what you do is not a bad idea as well. However, keep those kind of images you to a minority; posting a lot about yourself on social media is just like being the person at BBQs who only talks about themselves.

You’re Running to Reach a Number of Followers for the Wrong Reasons

When it comes to internet marketing you expect everything to be fast. Your website should load fast. Your online customer response time should be fast. Your SEO plan execution should be fast. That’s all true. However there are times when your online strategies need to step back and take a breather. This is especially necessary when it comes to social media. This may seem contrary to everything spoken within this website marketing blog, considering that I’m always advising you on how to beat your customers to…everything. But I find that when it comes to social networking, many brands are too excitable, attempting to move things along too quickly without taking the adequate time to follow each network’s respective best practices. Today I am providing a few things for you to watch out for, social media marketing plan pdf items that will help you identify whether or not you’re moving too fast to see where your social strategy may be going in the wrong direction. This is most certainly the most common mistake made by businesses on social media. The perception that social networks are hosts to popularity contests for brands is a fallacy. So much attention is placed upon building followers to “x amount” by “x date” that brands are forgetting to concentrate on the following they do have, and on building a quality base of fans over quantity. This misguided race to reach numbers is almost always born from upper management pressure. If you are the one handing down social media marketing best practices these goals ask yourself why you’re putting them to yourself, and/or your online marketing manager. Are you insisting upon reaching a certain number of followers because that figure matches or exceeds that of your competitors? Or are you simply pulling an arbitrary number out of a hat? It is far more important to build a following of truly engaged users on each social network, those that match the customer demographic that your business needs to prove an ROI on your social network activities. I will recommend 10 “qualified” followers over 100 random ones any day, regardless of what that looks like for your brand’s public facing popularity on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or any other channel.