Meet the company that owns half of your favourite Twitter accounts, without you even realising.
Social Chain is a social media marketing agency that specialises in influencer engagement. And you need to know about them, because you probably follow some of the near 300 Twitter accounts they run. Oh, and they can make a hashtag trend in the UK within minutes. Oh, and the average age of their employees is 22.
Earlier this month I went to their inaugural ‘Create, Influence, Engage’ event in Manchester, with a bunch of people so crushingly cool I felt like I was back home in Hackney. I could barely move for beards and lilac balayage.
Social Chain owns accounts with a collective total of more than 66 million followers. They’ve got brands offering hundreds of thousands of pounds to work with them; their parody accounts are giving you daily marketing messages embedded within the hilarity of those precious 140 characters. Thought accounts like @BritishLogic or @HogwartsLogic were run by a single, passionate fan? Not the case, in this case.
Contrived? Yes. Clever? Absolutely.
So what’s the secret? The secret is there is no secret, really. They can move quickly. They can experiment. They’re the same age as the audience they’re seeking to engage. They speak the language, and they’ve never ever lived without the Internet. They know how to make noise in a crowded, infinite digital space.
Social Chain CEO, co-founder and mind-blowingly impressive entrepreneur Steve Bartlett offered us five tips for digital engagement of us millenials. I managed to condense them into a single tweet, but I thought I would go into a bit more detail here. As a digital professional I found everything about him and his company entirely fascinating. Never quite managed to make social media work for you? Read on.
1. Make people feel 2. Give more than you receive 3. Jump on relevance 4. Ask them 5. Platforms aren't the same 🙌🏼 @_stevebartlett #CIE2016
— Jen Grieves (@MissJenGrieves) February 3, 2016
- Make people feel.
If you love or hate something, you’re likely to talk about it – to your mates, in the pub, online. Your brand will fade into oblivion if people are indifferent towards it. You simply have to connect with your audience on an emotional level. Also… negative publicity can sometimes work in your favour.
- Give more than you receive.
Clicking ‘follow’ on an account is an investment – make sure your followers are getting a return, rather than just focussing on the end goal (sales) and link-baiting the shit out of your website. Create content that doesn’t always directly push the product. Build a personality, have something to say about the world. Entertain or educate, or both. This will develop loyalty, which in turn will mean that consumers are more likely to want to spend their money with you when a product does appear. innocent drinks are an example of a brand completely nailing this – the perception of this brand is as powerful (if not more powerful) as the product itself.
- Jump on relevance.
Again, this is about being aware of the world around you – that there are things going on outside of your brand. Jump on topics that people are talking about anyway – things that they care about – and weave yourself into the conversation. WORD OF WARNING: do it with integrity. Brands that jump on sad events and shoehorn their product in = not cool.
- Ask them.
You’re not entitled to shout at people just because they’ve chosen to follow you. Put a question mark on the things you are saying and invite a response. Reply. Listen to people who have taken the time to stop and speak to you out of the sea of tweets in their timeline.
- Platforms are not the same.
Twitter behaves differently to Facebook, which behaves differently to Instagram. You cannot create one piece of content and chuck it out three times. Each platform needs its own treatment – what’s the uniqueness of that platform? What behaviours or content types are favoured?
Social Chain. Hats off, guys.
What do you think of these tips? Are there any social media behaviours that you really hate?
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