5 practical learnings from working on Social Media campaigns

I have been working at The Population for just over 9 months now, In this time I have worked on a number of campaigns. I learn something every project I do. The following are six learnings from working on these campaigns;


The best conversations occur in online forums
We looked after the Al Bino - Beautiful Day for Cancer online properties, what we found was that the best conversation around the topic were occuring in forums. Blogs and Twitter are rarely as engaging as forums.


News Portals still break and hold most news stories
People who say that they will only read blogs in the future are joking, what we found when doing the online audit for Listerine after the Cancer scare was that all the chatter was occuring around the major news portals, people would just repost the stores on their blog or twitter links to the stories. No one was actually discussing the matter except on the news sites.


Facebook Pages work after the transaction.
Working on the My Year Without Sex fanpage, we saw that it was very hard to get people to become a fan of the page before they had seen the movie, people needed to see the movie then become a fan.


In online publicity it is all about the subject line
Doing the blogger outreach with Dosh Wallets and Skins we found that we needed to get straight to the point, long emails will get no response, you need to get your information across in one paragraph.


Getting video content into newsportals will significantly boost your audience
We created the video content '5 things that stop sex' for the movie My Year Without Sex, when it was picked up by Fairfax blogger 'Ask Sam' we saw a dramatic increase in views.

The most important lesson of all is;
Social Media does not work on its own it needs to work as part of an overall digital strategy

Have you had an learnings from working in social media? I would be interested to hear them.