Have you ever heard of social media takeover? We’re not talking about hacking a social media account! It’s a creative marketing strategy that falls into the influencer marketing category.
This method usually involves leveraging influencers’ established presence to achieve a brand’s goal like gaining more Instagram followers, driving website traffic, or getting more engagements across social media platforms.
Curious about the concept, benefits, and how to run a takeover campaign? This blog is for you! Let’s dive into a complete social media takeover guide!
What Is a Social Media Takeover?
A social media takeover is when an influencer, employee, or customer temporarily takes over a brand’s social media account to post content and engage with their followers.
In social media accounts takeover, the guests use their expertise, creativity, or established online presence to offer a unique perspective of a brand and help them achieve specific goals.
What Are the Benefits of Social Media Accounts Takeover?
You might be wondering if running a takeover can help you get new Instagram followers or go viral on TikTok. Let’s break down some of the most important advantages of social media takeovers:
- A Fresh Perspective: New content styles can offer a fresh perspective to your brand and keep your audience engaged.
- Expands Your Reach: Running a takeover can expose your brand to larger audiences, mainly influencers’ followers, and help you reach more people on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms.
- Higher Engagement: Fresh content and a new style encourage users to actively engage with your posts (like, comment, or share the content).
- Increase Brand Awareness: Social media takeovers also create excitement around a brand leading to more brand visibility.
- Valuable Insights into Audiences: It provides insightful data into your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
- Improve ROI: Ultimately, higher reach, engagement, and brand awareness have a great impact on ROI.
How to Do a Social Media Takeover?
Now that you know the social media takeover meaning and its benefits, let’s walk you through the steps to run a takeover campaign for your social media campaigns.
How to Run a Social Media Takeover
1. Set Clear Actionable Goals
First off, identify clear and SMART goals. What are you aiming at? Do you want to improve brand awareness, social media engagement, or drive website traffic?
Consider your business needs and preferences and set the goals accordingly. Remember, you need specific and measurable KPIs. For example, instead of general objectives like increasing engagement, aim for certain targets like “increasing Instagram engagement by 50%”.
2. Choose the Right Guest
This is the leading part of your takeover plan. Whether you choose an employee or an influencer, they should have the following qualifications:
- Align with your brand values and identity,
- Have sufficient expertise relevant to your industry or product,
- Target the same audience as your ideal customers.
How to Choose the Right Host for Your Account Takeover
Here are two main tips to consider when selecting your takeover partner:
1. Do Thorough Research
Create a list of related influencers, and analyze their social media accounts including their follower count, engagement rate, audience demographics, etc.
Remember, the follower count is not as determining as the engagement rate. Your guest doesn’t have to boast millions of followers. A nano-influencer with a higher engagement rate would bring you more reach than a macro-influencer with a lower engagement rate.
2. Select Partners Based on Your Goals
Whether you let an employee take over your account or an influencer largely depends on your goals.
If you want to focus on your brand culture and values, build stronger connections with your followers, or answer FAQs about your products, you can rely on one of your employees.
However, to highlight your product’s benefits and rapidly expand your audience, it’s best to invite relevant influencers to take over your social media.
Wondering where to get relevant Influencers? Ainfluencer allows you to find influencers in your niche by location and number of followers across TikTok and Instagram and connect to them. Ready to run your takeover campaign?
3. Create Clear Social Media Takeover Guidelines
To have a smooth and effective takeover, you need clear and objective guidelines that clearly define your expectations, content requirements, key messages, brand tone, CTAs, and more. Here are the most critical elements of social media takeover guidelines:
1. Brand Voice and Tone: Clearly define your brand tone and communication style. Is it friendly and casual or formal and serious?
2. Visual Identity: Provide your partner with your logo and brand colors and ask them to stick to them.
3. Hashtags and CTAs: Create a dedicated hashtag for your takeover posts and ask your guests to add it to the content.
4. Compliance with Instagram Guidelines: Ask them to adhere to Instagram rules and terms of use.
5. Interaction with Audience: Set clear expectations on how to respond to comments and messages.
You can expand your guidelines and include details such as the takeover duration and the number of posts. However, don’t go overboard with limitations that may mess up your guests’ creativity!
4. Set up Permissions
You’ve agreed with an influencer and it’s time to set up permissions for posting content. You have three options:
- Full Access: You hand over your login info to the person and they take full control over your social media account. While the guests have maximum power to create content and engage with the audience, there are significant security risks. So, you should use this method if only fully trust the person.
- Limited Access: In this method, you permit to create and edit posts but restrict access to sensitive information and other settings.
- Pre-delivered Content: This is the safest option, in which you ask the person to provide the content in advance. You can review and schedule the posts yourself. However, the guest can’t engage with your followers.
Here are some security considerations you need to take within this step:
- Try creating a temporary password for your takeover partner and change it after the takeover.
- Turn on two-factor authentication to add an extra layer of security.
- Learn about each platform’s security settings and permissions to use them effectively.
5. Promote Your Takeover
Now, it’s time to build anticipation and promote your takeover across all social media platforms. Use different engaging methods like teasers, countdowns, or behind-the-scenes to create buzz.
Ask your takeover partner to promote it over their social media accounts. In addition to social media, you can also send emails to your subscribers and let them know about the campaign.
6. Track Your Social Media Takeover
Once the campaign is over, check how your posts did. Look at KPIs like impressions, reach, website traffic, and sales. You can use platforms’ built-in features like Instagram analytics or choose third-party tools that offer more advanced insights. See if you gained followers, shares, or likes. Figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Unique Social Media Takeover Ideas
You can run takeovers on all social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Having catchy takeover ideas can be tough, but don’t worry! We’ve got some ideas and social media takeover examples to inspire you.
- Find an influencer or expert in your niche and invite them to host a Q&A in your posts or stories.
- Share behind-the-scenes of your employees in different departments. It could be a work habit or simply a part of their daily life. Check out this post from Canva to get inspired:
- Another idea is to invite an influencer and ask them to test and review your new product, just like this one from Starbucks:
- Let an influencer or one of your employees take over your social media account and cover a live event with your audience.
Wrap up
In conclusion, running a social media takeover can significantly improve your reach and attract new audiences. However, just like any other marketing strategy, it’s important how to execute it.
Set specific and measurable goals that match your overall business needs and objectives. Avoid unclear goals like “boost reach” or “gain followers”. Moreover, choose influencers who align with your brand identity and values.
FAQs
Here are some common questions about our topic:
1. What Are the Best Social Media Takeover Campaign Examples?
Some of the best social media takeover examples of all time include:
- Adidas and David Beckham on Twitter
- Starbucks and Tyler Oakley
- Sephora and Nikkie De Jagger
- Vogue Finance and Mika Schneider
- Revolve and Aimee Song
2. How Can I Announce a Social Media Takeover?
You can use various methods to announce your takeover:
- Create a dedicated post to introduce the host and what they’re going to offer.
- Use stories and interactive features like polls, GIFs, and quizzes to share behind the scenes of your campaign.
- Send emails to your followers to inform them about the takeover.
- Share teaser posts or countdowns across all social media platforms to create buzz around your takeover campaign.
- Create a certain hashtag related to the takeover and encourage your audience to engage with it.
