If there is one thing that all social media marketing agencies are trying to crack, it is to craft that contagious content that makes their client’s brand a force to reckon with overnight. And, if your client is a startup and lesser-known, it’s tougher due to limited resources (time and money). After going through loads of ‘case studies’, ‘understanding why people share content’, ‘understanding client’s target audience’ and taking inspiration through various other brands; we, at Madarth (earlier known as PixelBoy), finally managed to get 1000 shares in just 24 hours. I would like to share with you the story of how I did it.

1,000+ shares in just 1 day.
Pure luck, you would say?
It’s the emotion we would say!

Three years back, It was Friendship Day and we thought of creating content for our client ‘CollarFolk’, that would help to promote the Brand. CollarFolk is an online portal which helps you plan a vacation with your pet. The task was to choose a theme that’s relatable/that has a wide appeal. Everyone knows the fact that ‘Dogs are a man’s best friend!’.

After a lot of brainstorming and rounds of discussions with the team, I decided to bring out the unconditional love that dogs give to their Humans (a.k.a pet parents). I chose to show the difference between ‘just friends (humans)’ and ‘best friends (pets)’ through funny illustrations, which would help to evoke the feeling of ‘awww’ among the target audience. I came up with ideas of 7 posts, wrote the content that depicted the unique bond shared between a pet parent and his best friend (pets). Friendship Day is the day when everyone wants to shout and tell the world, what makes their best friend unique and special! Best friends are special because they are different, unique and hold a very special space in our lives. No matter, how much they annoy us or trouble us, we still love them, because they mean the world to us, and soo do our pets! Capturing this simple emotion, helped us to touch the emotional chord of all the pet lovers. I decided to choose minimal graphics with illustrations with a simple copy & came up with an album titled ‘Best Friends FurEver’.

Rather than posting the album on Friendship Day, I posted one post each day, throughout the week to build the excitement and keep up the momentum till the D-Day. The entire album was posted just one day before Friendship Day and it just went viral!

The copy/text wasn’t too much. We had probably less than 2 seconds to hold on to the user’s attention as he/she browses through his/her timeline, even more, when every brand is communicating about Friendship Day. CollarFolk had only 2,000 followers at that point of time, so I didn’t expect an instantaneous barrage of likes/shares from the followers.

We chose illustrations rather than actual graphic pictures and supported it with a copy for a cute look & feel in-line with our brief to make the followers go “awww”. The overall album was in sync with CollarFolk’s brand imagery – emotional, quirky, cool, entertaining yet relevant.

We made sure that each post captures the real-life events that happen in a pet-parent’s life. I aimed to cater to CollarFolk’s target audience –Pet Lovers and Pet Parents and have an instant emotional connect with them.

We knew it has touched a chord when people started sharing how much their pets mean to them and they shared the post tagging their other friends. Notifications started ticking in & comments like “So true! My <pet’s name> is my Best friend” “other comments” rushed in.

We knew it was bigger than we thought. That’s perhaps the power of a content that is relatable, as they say. We just enjoyed the ride later on & watched in amazement with the number of shares increasing. It was a nice surprise to get such a good reception. We did many high fives in jubilation & reached 1K shares, 105 comments and 3.4 K likes in just 24 hours. The page got 500 new likes as well!

It also requires that enough people create momentum by sharing it because even the best content can’t go viral if people don’t see it. This part is largely dependent on emotion and relatability. The audience would not share the post if they feel, they are being advertisers for the brand.

The campaign proved to be extremely beneficial for our client and I was delighted to see how happy she was.

This was a campaign that was and will always be very close to my heart, as it was my first viral! Understanding the target audience and setting the emotion right, helped us go viral! I’m grateful for it and gave a pat on my back, but then I got back to work, because success isn’t one event, it’s a culmination of all the small things we do over a long period of time. I had to work harder and better to crack something even bigger and better.

If you missed it, here’s the link to the album.
http://bit.ly/collarfolkfriendshipday