Marketing your Station with Social Media
by Eric Corwin
Impact Target Marketing
The state of radio today is such that most broadcasters have little or no marketing budget to promote their stations. Sure there is the station’s airwaves, but preaching to the present listeners alone is not enough to help you gain the ratings advantage over your competitors. Let’s discuss some of the “no cost” and “low cost” options to help you affect your ratings.
A social media strategy can increase ratings
Let’s talk a little about your station’s social media strategy. Do you have one? What is the goal? If you’ve set up a Facebook page and are Tweeting, good for you. The real opportunity lies in your ability to understand how to increase the size of the group or the number of followers and create effective ways to engage present and potential listeners using social media.
Here are some of the things you need to focus on when executing an effective social media strategy designed to increase ratings:
Give the power to your audience
Keep content fresh and engaging
Make contests fun
Develop fan only content
Leverage great content so they will share
Leverage holidays and events
Listen to your audience
Give users tools to become advocates
Engage users with simple polls
Use fan pages for acquisition programs
Engage users on your wall with good questions
Done correctly your social media strategy can impact your ratings but you have got to use the right tools with compelling content to affect station awareness and usage.
Whether you market your station or not it will cost
Everything that you do or don’t do to market your station requires some form of cost. If you implement a well thought out social media plan your biggest cost is time. You’ve got to commit one or more individuals to the process of creating engaging content. Then they have to push that content to as many social media sites as possible.
If you can not market your station using external marketing solutions like direct mail, telemarketing, television, cable, etc then you are reducing your chances of successfully increasing your station’s ratings. If you don’t have the financial resources to market then your ratings and revenue will suffer—an obvious statement that bears repeating.
