Elijah Burns, a 16 year old boy from Surrey BC, seems to have figured out social media marketing better than most large corporations. Eli loves to sing and he is amazing at it so like most aspiring performers creates and posts videos of himself on facebook.
Eli recently posted on his facebook page “70 likes for a video of me singing. You guys choose the song”. Within 3 hours he was at 100 likes, and with only 900 facebook friends that’s an 11% engagement rate. If we look at large corporations like L’oreal Paris Canada, they are only at an average of 0.05% and Chevrolet is at 0.1%. So what did Eli do that was so different from the big players?
- Involved the audience – Eli could easily have just made a video and posted it. But instead he first posted a status with a clear call to action, generating interest and excitement as well as engaging the audience by letting them choose the song. All 100 people that liked that status were then waiting for Eli to post the video and eager to see which song he chose. Obviously companies can’t do this before every piece of content they post, but instead of just broadcasting content they think their customers would like, they should ask more questions and allow their audience to participate in what they are doing.
- Scarcity – Although Eli talks about his singing a lot, he rarely ever makes a video or performs. When all of his school friends saw he would post a video if they clicked “like”, they became intrigued and excited to actually hear how he sounded. Many companies think the more content they post, the more engaged they will keep their audience. Maybe they should try the scarcity approach and post less…or maybe they should try talking about a specific piece of content a lot before actually releasing it.
I mentioned it in my last blog post but corporations need to start thinking like regular human beings when they participate in social media. What if they started thinking like an average 16 year old boy trying to engage his facebook friends in what he loves to do? The most interesting part is that I doubt Eli even realized how smart and strategic he was being with that post.
And because I talked a lot about Eli’s video without actually showing it…and now you are really wanting to meet this guy and hear him sing…here it is: 