Social Media #Success: Working for CGEye as a Social Media Marketer

  There are so many misconceptions about social media marketing, and I came into this job believing them all.

Working in a niche technology market proves more difficult than the main illusion that all social media marketers have to do is follow a few people, and in return watch their own follower count increase second by second. Job done, right?

One of CGEye Ltd's first projects many years ago - redevelopment of Ipswich Marina, Suffolk

More than meets the (CG)eye:

As with anything, social media marketing wasn’t as easy as I was expecting, or hoping for that matter. As I mentioned above, the small market that the companies targets means I’m aiming at a limited audience. ‘The companies’ I am referring to here is ‘CGEye Ltd’ and ‘Rise AR’. CGEye Ltd is a visualisation studio that specialises in computer generated images (CGI) for architects. This was pretty simple to negotiate, and managing Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts for CGEye proved fairly straightforward. Rise AR on the other hand, develops augmented & virtual reality apps and experiences for businesses in order to enhance customer appeal. Finding and approaching an audience on social media platforms that were interested in a fairly underappreciated market is where the real challenge lied!

 First Steps:

The key to social media marketing is understanding the product and the business you are actually promoting; you cannot engage with potential customers and influencers successfully if you yourself are not even sure what it is you are engaging with. Ok, so this sounds fairly simple. But did I know anything about augmented and virtual reality? Well, no. So before I could even make this crucial first step, heavy research into the market was needed! I started off by logging on to all the social media platforms for both CGEye, and Rise AR. It was beneficial to see what other people were posting and talking about on news feeds, walls etc, and this proved a successful starting point to enhancing my market knowledge. I also scrolled back to past tweets, posts and uploads to get a feel for how both the companies approach marketing their products, and their strategies for doing so in a professional yet successful manner.

CGEye LTD creates stunning visuals for architects to show what a future building development would look like on site

By this stage I had a much greater understanding of both computer generated imagery, and augmented and virtual realities. Now to start seeking out the audience we wanted to approach. As I’ve said before, coming to terms with the accounts associated with CGEye was fairly simple, and as the more established business, their accounts already had a large audience base for me to play with. Rise AR is a fairly new company that was set up us as a sister business to CGEye. Rise AR’s twitter feed hadn’t been running for long, and with a grand total of 40 followers, it meant that there was a lot of work to be done! 

Rise AR develops Augmented and Virtual reality applications

Getting the ball rolling:

Since starting at CGEye, I have learnt that there are three really important things to remember when approaching social media marketing. The first is engagement and interaction – If you are using Twitter to promote your product or business, try and join in on as many twitter chats as possible. Twitter chats are online conversations that are followed through a shared hashtag, about a certain topic or decided discussion point. Another good idea is to search specific hashtags and see if you can comment on/retweet articles or advertisements that relate to your business or product. On Facebook and Instagram, interacting and engaging are slightly trickier, as Direct Messaging on any social media platform has the potential to come across as spam, and have the opposite effect and push people away. The second key thing to consider is consistency and persistency. I don’t mean that posts should be the same across multiple social media platforms; this will come across as monotonous and perhaps boring if the same material is recycled. By consistency I refer to time – tweets need to be posted at all times of the day to reach all audiences across different time zones. Instagram accounts cannot be neglected, a post every other day or so works best. As for Facebook, scheduling posts that appear across different times of the day in which advertise different things needs to be constant…Unfortunately social media requires around the clock attention and persistency! The third and final point regards personality – all posts regardless of the social media platform are typically more successful if they don’t sound like they have been generated with a machine. Be passionate about what you’re selling, but more importantly, be approachable! This leads me on to the next section quite nicely…

 Oh I get by with a little help from my friends:

So not friends as such, but managing sites are a great way to help you out with social media marketing; sitting glued to a computer 24/7 is not really ideal. My favourite management site to use is ‘Hootsuite’. For free, you can connect up to three social media accounts that you manage for your company, which makes keeping up to date on all platforms so much easier. You can create ‘streams’ for any social media account you connect it with. For Twitter, you can create streams for when you have been mentioned in a tweet, for when you receive a private direct message, and even for specific hashtags. This is just one of Hootsuite’s great features. However, the element I favour the most is their ‘publisher’ tab. From here, you can schedule posts for any time of the day, meaning that reaching out to audiences in different time zones becomes so much easier, for example. If you would prefer to do this without the help of such social media sites, for you already have so many accounts to deal with so why introduce another, Facebook has its own inbuilt scheduling system that works just as well!

 Keeping up appearances:

By this point, I was nicely into the swing of things. The next job: keep it up! This is when the third point that I made earlier about consistency and persistency really comes into play. Creating a marketing strategy is another great way of making sure you are on top of everything; sometimes it’s hard to juggle multiple accounts and as I’ve said before, it’s important they are all active 24 hours a day. Planning the day ahead can sometimes be tricky as social media trends constantly change, meaning predictions can be hard to make. Having a strategy does make it slightly easier, however, once you are in the flow; you will learn the best times of day to approach your audience on each social media platform, so you can start to work around this.

 Patience is a virtue:

I haven’t been working as a social media marketer long for CGEye, but I’d like to think I’ve had a positive impact so far. Naturally, working and building up social media audiences takes time, so patience is key. In some cases working with social media can be annoyingly frustrating; no matter how hard you try people just don’t want to know, especially if the account you are working with is fairly new. But in others it is very rewarding; seeing hard work and efforts payoff is obviously satisfying. It’s a slow process, but worth it in the end!

“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.”

 Pam Moore, Social Media Power Influencer

Why not give us a follow?

Twitter: @CGEyeLtd and @rise_ar

Facebook: CGEye Ltd and Rise_AR

Instagram: cgeyeltd

Or visit our website: http://www.cgeyeltd.com/ and http://www.risear.co.uk/