The Winter Olympics are in full swing (better than the ‘normal’ Olympics in my opinion but that’s another blog post!) & the nation has, once again, as it seems to every four years, fallen in love with curling. I’m not surprised, it’s awesome, I’m hooked when it’d on & both our men & women of Team GB are performing really well.
As the world of social media jumps on the #lovecurling hashtag (myself included!) I thought of a curling team as a social media strategy, sort of, stay with me on this!
You’ve got your team, and a competitors. Each of the 4 members of your team is one of your social media accounts, ie. Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc. The house is your ultimate goal, you’re aiming to be more successful than your competitor(s) in getting your messages into the ‘house’ for your customers, followers & heroes to see.
Your first stone is a guard, a blocker, a safe tweet, nothing too drastic, just creating a bit of interaction, perhaps a little controversial, annoying for your competitors to see. The opposing player delivers their stone & places it just inside the house, barely into the blue section. That’s a good Facebook post – they’ve delivered a good message, engaged their followers a little & people are talking about that company/product/individual more so than they are about yours, even with that blocker in place. You see where I’m going with this? (probably not!)
What I’m trying to say is that whilst your social media accounts are separate & need to be treated as individual monsters (rather than just going onto a platform like Hootsuite & tossing the same messages out to each network) they also need to tie up to reach the end goal. That goal, you should know what that is as it’s your business/product/account , but ultimately it’s taking each of those stones & make them work for your strategy.
It isn’t about constantly hitting the middle of the house as we’ve learned with curling, it’s about putting your stones into places that work to reach your objective. Yes, other stones will appear & knock yours off the target, but by working hard, conjuring up the creative & always being in sight of that end goal, you’ll have the most stones closest to the middle of the house & achieve your gold medal.