How to Survive “The Hunger Games” of Social Media

What do The Hunger Games and Social Media Have in Common?

You Have to Fight to Survive!

With all the buzz surrounding the adventures of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games franchise, have you considered the social media lessons marketers (and business people) can learn from The Hunger Games?

In the social arena, marketers are in a hunger games of their own with keeping their posts and promotional content alive and shared. Similar to how Katniss Everdeen puts on fiery dresses to attract sponsors, social media marketers need to adopt a mix of eye-catching imagery and personalized content to “make an impression”. Every piece of content you post is a tribute trying to survive and emerge victorious with customers.

In spirit of the soon to be released The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, we have developed five tips for social media marketing to channel your inner Katniss and exploit any opportunity to connect with your audience and emerge from the social media arena a victor!

1. Get People to Like You:

(As Haymitch once said… “not what you expected?” )
To get followers to engage and share your content, you have to take on a Peeta persona to win over your customers and get them to follow you. As a marketer and/or business owner you have to turn on the charm and win over the hearts of your customers. The most important relationship for a social media marketer is the one that consumers have with a brand. You don’t want to build a brand that has “as much charm as a dead slug.”

2. Make Sure They Remember You

In The Hunger Games, a small pin of a mockingjay bird grew into a symbol of Katniss’s brand promise — freedom. Your visual brand identifiers, such as your logo, needs to be used consistently to raise awareness of your brand’s values and recognition. In time, these will come to mean something to your audience just as the mockingjay did for the people of Panem.

3. Make an Impression

Find your brand’s voice, whether it’s strong and confident like Katniss or loyal like Peeta, and stick with it across all channels of communication with your audience. As a business, don’t be afraid to be true to yourself. The world knew that in Panem the capitols’ flashy hair and skin colors were merely meaningless wrappings. Corporate fluff  and fake messages without any substance will lose in the end. Rather, embody values of transparency and integrity, so whether if you’re in the Hunger Games or the media world you win.

4. Have A Game Plan

Determine your goals and how you want consumers to interact with you — either through impressions, likes, tweets and shares or maybe it is to drive traffic to your website.

5. Avoid the Jabberjays

Like Katniss, who is too busy leading a rebellion against The Capitol than to put up with an overload of company promotions, your customers won’t tolerate them either. So avoid the social equivalent of the cannon blast signaling a tribute’s demise; don’t become a victim of the unlike button and leave the social media marketing games early. Avoid these 5 social media pitfalls:

1. Having no social media strategy or content calendar
2. Creating accounts on too many platforms too soon
3. Paying for fake followers
4. Talking about nothing but the brand
5. Using irrelevant and excessive hashtags

If you follow this guide for your business to distribute great content online and create favorable customer experiences, perhaps the followers will be ever in your favor! The ‘mockingjay’ of social media success is persuading fans to persuade each other to promote you either through likes, shares, or even through their own posts.

The competition is fierce, but with your now finely tuned content, you are on your way to setting your social media platforms on fire!