Social Media Marketing
January 10, 2024
There are plenty of different tactics and hacks to grow your social media presence, but it’s often more helpful to see a company that’s already built a strong social media presence and just reverse engineer what they’re doing well.
So in this post, we’re going to break down the social media strategies of some of the top performing companies across:
You’ll learn key takeaways from each company’s strategy and how you can implement it into your own social media strategy. So let’s jump into it!
Archer is a sustainable aviation company that is producing excellent LinkedIn content, and they have been rewarded by the algorithm accordingly.
Here are a few key things driving their social media success.
The mission behind their company, making aircraft more sustainable, gives them an advantage as any kind of sustainability efforts naturally tend to drive more engagement. However, the content they created to sell the story was also very compelling.
Here’s an example of one of the videos they produced where their Director of Safety outlines their approach to building a safe aircraft. Not only is the video very high quality, but the ideas discussed (how they make sure an electric plane is safe) are also interesting and explained in simple terms anyone can understand.
So as you’re creating content, think about how you can focus on the mission you’re working to achieve and frame it in a way that makes people feel excited about the future.
Archer also uses employee advocacy to promote new LinkedIn posts.
So as soon as a new post is published, employees jump in and engage with it (share, like, or comment), which exposes the post to your employees' professional networks.
In addition, the immediate engagement is a positive signal to the LinkedIn algorithm, which increases the likelihood that LinkedIn will give the post even more organic reach.
Archer uses our platform, GaggleAMP, to execute its employee advocacy strategy and ensure the right people engage with the right content.
The videos Archer creates are professionally produced and feature interviews and footage of the aircraft in action.
While the professional production team gives the video a polished look, you don't necessarily need to use a professional video crew to create great video content. Instead, just pull out a cell phone and record a video of your product or interview certain team members. The real benefit of the videos is that it helps capture attention and put a face to your brand.
Stryker is a medical equipment manufacturing company with a strong LinkedIn presence.
Here’s just one example of a LinkedIn post that earned over 800 likes:
They regularly generate hundreds, if not thousands of likes on each post, so we wanted to break down their strategy. Here are a few key things they do to grow their social presence.
A crucial part of Stryker’s social media strategy is employee advocacy. Every time they publish an important social media post, they help it achieve more reach by having their employees engage and reshare it with their professional network.
They use our platform, GaggleAMP, to organize their employee advocacy strategy and assign specific engagement activities (like, share, comment) for each post to specific employees (salespeople, executives, etc.). The employees then receive a notification that they have an activity waiting and can complete it directly inside the platform.
GaggleAMP also offers an analytics dashboard where managers can see KPIs like total reach, estimated earned media value, and other metrics to help them accurately assess the success of their campaigns.
Posting frequently is important for social media growth because the average post is only relevant for a matter of hours. At Stryker, they post about 4-5 times per week and while all of the posts provide some kind of value, only a handful are highly resource intensive to produce. So if you’re struggling to post regularly, re-evaluate your content strategy and see if you can mix in some content that only takes 15-20 minutes to create.
Repurposing content or recycling older posts that performed well is a great hack to post more consistently. As only a fraction of your audience sees your posts anyway, you don’t need to worry about boring your audience by reposting the same content.
LinkedIn is a powerful marketing tool, but it's also a social media platform, so it's important to create content that features real people. Stryker checks this box by producing posts that feature employees, culture, and philanthropic efforts.
This post highlighting International Women in Engineering day is an excellent example:
Elastic is an open search and analytics engine that consistently generates high engagement on its LinkedIn posts.
Let’s break down their strategy and what you can learn from it.
Elastic publishes a lot of product-focused content, which doesn’t always perform well on social media. However, they use well-designed video content to show how the product works, and each video usually scores hundreds of likes and plenty of shares.
Here’s an example of one of their product-focused posts:
If you look at their other posts, you’ll see that all of them follow this video style. If you want to create videos like this, you can hire a designer on Upwork or Dribbble to do it for you.
Elastic also used GaggleAMP to implement an employee advocacy program, which has played a significant role in their social media success.
By organizing employees to engage with each post, Elastic is able to get in front of a much larger warm audience. In addition, the immediate engagement is a positive signal to the LinkedIn algorithm, which helps the content generate more organic reach.
Here's a great example of how Elastic uses employee advocacy:
You’ve probably noticed that all of these companies use GaggleAMP to improve their social media presence. If you’d also like to improve your social media presence, feel free to book a demo and see how it can help you attain your social media goals.
Glossier is a beauty brand that sells makeup and skincare products. They’ve built a loyal customer base across multiple social networks, including Twitter, and their content marketing strategy is dead simple; retweet content that customers post about the brand.
This encourages followers to continue posting about the brand and it clearly shows off how much people love the products.
For example, a customer created this meme, which shows off how excited this person is to receive her new hoodie.
Glossier also has a very distinct brand voice, and they talk with their customers the same way two millennial or gen Z girls might chat with their girlfriends:
StarbucksStarbucks was among the top 10 most followed Twitter accounts in 2019 and currently has over 11 million followers. While they certainly have a strong brand backing them, their social strategy is also quite good.
First, each post is infused with the same humor Glossier uses to engage its audience. Here is just one example of their brand voice in action:
They also use a variety of different content styles, including:
Starfield, a game from Bethesda Game Studios, has done well on Twitter, with many posts generating well over 100 comments and thousands of likes.
Almost all of their content are either clips from games or behind-the-scenes sneak peeks:
So a key takeaway is that if you find a particular type of content that resonates with your audience, stick with it and don’t mix it up too much.
Another noteworthy aspect of Starfield’s content strategy is that they post several times daily. While you always aim to make every piece of content excellent, quantity is important due to the short lifespan of social media posts. Therefore, try posting more frequently and see how it impacts your social media account’s performance.
Food brands tend to perform well on Facebook, though Crumbl Cookies truly takes the cake! The average post generates well over 200 comments (many generating well over 1,000 comments), and they’ve built a very loyal following.
Their main content strategy is pretty simple – they post professional pictures/videos of their cookies and highlight limited offers.
For example, this post which unveils a limited offer generated over 5,000 comments and 2,000 shares.
They have also done an outstanding job crafting a distinct brand voice that targets a younger Gen Z and millennial demographic. The comments exemplify it perfectly:
You can also tell that people are genuinely obsessed with the brand, so another thing to think about is how you can craft a product that people want to talk about it naturally. While Crumbl's product (cookies) is something that people naturally enjoy discussing, it's still possible with B2B brands and other B2C/D2C products that people don't naturally discuss.
For example, is there a way to create a remarkable experience that's not typical in your industry? Improving brand loyalty is another factor that can influence social media performance, so reconsider your brand loyalty strategy as well.
ClickFunnels has a substantial following on Facebook, and an even more engaged Facebook group. While plenty of brands perform well posting on their Facebook business page, it seems that the most successful brands on Facebook also have groups (either private or open to the public).
So if you find that most of your new customers are already on Facebook and you want to engage with them more effectively, consider creating a private Facebook group.
Within its private Facebook group, ClickFunnels offers free training, tutorials, templates, and answers member questions. The team has done an excellent job fostering the culture of the group, and each question usually generates a variety of thoughtful responses from the members:
The New York Presbyterian Hospital is excellent at letting customer and employee stories speak for their brand.
The post below, which outlines the journey of a patient that overcame fibrolamellar liver cancer, is a perfect example of their social media strategy:
In addition to using an inspiring patient subject, they carefully optimize each post for maximum engagement.
First, the story posts always include a visual to capture the scroller’s attention. In this case, it was a before and after photo, but they’ve also done full video productions to tell the patient’s story.
In addition, they always craft the copy so that the user will click the “see more” button, as the algorithm views this as a positive user signal and often rewards the post with more organic reach.
Finally, the social media team often responds to comments or at least likes each person’s comment. The additional engagement is great for the algorithm, and it encourages a two-way conversation with other people.
Vrbo, Airbnb’s main competitor, has built a strong following on Instagram, and its core strategy is sharing customer experiences. For example, this Instagram post features a family that stayed at a Vrbo house and used the testimonial as the caption:
One similarity across all successful Instagram marketing campaigns is that the images and videos are all visually appealing. So even if you’re a B2B company, think about how you can make the content fun and visually appealing. For example, post images of company retreats and other employee excursions.
Each post also features a handful of hashtags and tags the original customer who shared the post to generate more engagement. So don't forget about basic post optimizations.
Patagonia is a sporty outdoor clothing company, and its Instagram account has nearly five million followers. Their main strategy is posting user-generated content and featuring stories of their customers. Here’s an example of one of the stories they posted of a customer's family:
So rather than posting about your product directly, think about how you can let your users tell your brand’s story for you.
Here’s another example of one of their popular customer stories:
Notice that with this post, Patagonia took the time to actually interview the customer and write a full story about his experience rather than just sharing some pictures. While resharing content posted by customers can work, writing a full story can be even more effective.
Foundr Magazine is an excellent example of a B2B company that has done well across all social platforms, including Instagram. Their posting strategy is mainly posting well-designed quotes from successful business leaders like this one from Jack Ma.
While these quotes are quite easy to create and don’t provide groundbreaking ideas, this kind of content tends to generate a lot of shares on social media.
In addition, they post about 4-5 times per day. So if you’re currently spending a lot of time in the content creation process and can only afford to post a few times per week, consider creating content that is less resource intensive yet still visually appealing and increase your posting volume.
There are plenty of different hacks to grow your social media presence, but we’ve found that the most effective method is simply leveraging your existing employees and asking them to engage with your content.
That’s why we built GaggleAMP.
It’s designed to help you streamline your employee advocacy program by enabling you to automate engagement assignments and allowing employees to schedule their engagements to publish at a future date.
If you’d like to see for yourself how GaggleAMP can help you implement a successful employee advocacy program, schedule a demo today!
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
