The popular DJ has brought the world together with dance and good vibes—he can also teach organizations a few things about organic social media engagement
Last night a DJ saved my … social media strategy. The U.S. (as well as many other parts of the globe) was just a few days into being locked down due to COVID-19 when we were reintroduced to New York native DJ D-Nice. D-Nice, homebound like a lot of the country, took to Instagram Live to host a virtual party on March 17. This virtual atmosphere quickly created a phenomenon that allowed celebrities and non-celebrities alike to surround themselves with positive vibes and forget the madness of the outside world for a few hours. According to Rolling Stone, DJ D-Nice had roughly 200,000 followers prior to March 2020, but after four months of compelling content—which yielded significant engagement and organic social media strategy—his followers grew to 2.4 million. That’s a 1,100% increase!
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Here are three ways businesses can implement strategies used by DJ D-Nice to achieve organic social media mastery.
Love Story
Similar to the Taylor Swift hit song “Love Story,” creating a social media strategy is equivalent to creating the perfect love story between your brand and your customers. The foundation must begin with a goal. As face-to-face events and overall nightlife paused nationwide, DJ D-Nice quickly pivoted his service to Instagram and found success leveraging innovation that connected and reached not only his current audience, but also a new audience. In several interviews, DJ D-Nice made it clear that his No. 1 goal was to get people dancing—and dance we did. Sometimes 100,000 people would tune in to his Instagram Live parties, affectionally named “Club Quarantine.”
Business takeaway:
Businesses should create the perfect love story between their brand and customers on their social media platforms. To begin, businesses should define clear social media goals. Once goals are identified, an execution strategy should be created to help achieve those goals. The great thing about social media is that it’s an owned marketing channel of the business, meaning the business can immediately pivot messaging and strategy when the occasion presents itself. Maintaining optimal performance through a freshness factor of frequent social media usage is key. Here are some concepts to consider:
- Define your business’ purpose for utilizing social media. Understand which platforms your business will use and why, and further the intended goal for the campaign. Social media goals could be brand awareness, virtual event promotion, whitepapers or new sales.
- Using the audience profile for your product or service, do research to understand what platform best serves your audience. This will cut down on ineffective campaigns on platforms that don’t deliver.
- Set groundwork for content and success metrics that will help in achieving these goals.
- Finally, a social media calendar that contains all postings, visual usage and live event schedules is a lifesaver in a fast-paced climate.
Talk That Talk
The classic Rihanna single “Talk that Talk” reminds us to persuade our target audience with alluring content and social conversation. DJs often use their social media accounts to showcase photos of them with their celebrity friends or to announce their upcoming events. Because there’s been a pause on in-person and celebrity events, DJ D-Nice pivoted his social media content to be more appropriate to the current environment. By live streaming his DJ sets and partnering with virtual events that target his key audience, he created revolutionary content that was relevant and accessible.
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Ready for another party? Excited to team up with @MichelleObama’s @WhenWeAllVote this Wed. Starting at 6:30pm ET on IG Live to play a set while volunteers across the country text eligible voters to help them register to vote. You can sign up to help too: weall.vote/couchparty
He also welcomed an abundance of people into his home weekly to soak in the welcoming vibes of Club Quarantine and make new friends virtually. Those elements of relevance and accessibility drew consistent activity to his live streams and main social pages. It showcased his ability to curate innovative content that identified with his audience while maintaining a welcoming atmosphere throughout his social media profile.
Business takeaway:
Charm your target audience by “talking that talk” and construct appealing content and social conversation. Assess your business messaging and glean insight into how your business can curate innovative content that is relevant and accessible to your target audience. Additionally, ensure your business social media profiles remain genuine in nature and create a warm virtual environment. Consider these steps:
- Instead of hosting a webinar on your business website, condense content for a live stream from your social media profile this tends to be more informal and allows audience more real-time access for questions and comments.
- Make social media posts less about making a sale and more educational or informative. Social media readers favor succinct and relative information.
- Make social media posts less about making a sale and more educational or informative. Social media readers favor succinct and relative information.
- Don’t fall into a tone-deaf trap of posting about current events that are trending but not related to your brand. Stick to what is relevant to your product or service and remember the key for creating compelling content is to personally identify with your target audience
- Create a more inviting social profile by showing some relaxing images of your brand or company environment, i.e., show family or lifestyle images or consider hosting a happy hour event to give customers the ability to virtually network directly with a face(s) of the brand and other customers.
Crazy in Love
As a result of creating a winning social media strategy, followers and fans will—as Beyoncé would—express how “Crazy in Love” they are with your product or service.
This will be indicated by growth in followers and engagement, which in turn will lead to conversions. DJ D-Nice’s exponential growth in social followers is atypical, but the year 2020 is an atypical environment. D-Nice’s results are sustainable because he exercises a secret ingredient in social media mastery: Engage with as many followers who comment on your posts as possible. His followers not only like and follow his content, they express their love for him through additional engagements such as comments and shares, bearing in mind the strong possibility that he will engage with them. D-Nice mastered the ability to convert his most loyal fans into brand advocates, as they regularly engage with his live streams, social media posts and purchase his official Club Quarantine apparel.
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Business takeaway:
Concentrate on more than just increasing likes and follows. Measure other social media metrics to help build out and gauge how effective your social media strategy is with your target audience. Also, engagement produces more engagement. Remember your customers will show how “crazy in love” they are with you by various means of engagement, show some love back to produce a more sustainable audience. Hootsuite suggests considering these key measurements:
- Average engagement rate: The level of engagement that your social posts are receiving. The goal of this metric is to ensure that your social media content is resonating with your audience.
- Audience growth rate: The speed or level at which your business social media platform acquires new followers. Essentially, this gauges your fans’ engagement as well as the speed of which net new fans follow your business’ social media profile.
- Social media conversion rate: The conversions or actions taken from your social media profile. This ties in with whether your content or product resonate with your audience.
When you have a great product, all it takes is one window of opportunity and getting in front of the right people. Use your social media platform to quickly pivot and create perfect harmony with your audience through compelling strategy that leads to success.
Lead photo via DJ D-Nice Instagram.
Tiffany K. Schreane is a marketing, advertising branding professional with over a decade of experience working with Fortune 500 clients globally and domestically. Schreane’s professional background includes media director roles with Publicis Media and Ebiquity. Schreane is a marketing professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Borough Manhattan Community College.