by Elizabeth Lambe

Summer is known as a slow time in the world of business social media accounts. Everyone is too busy lying on the beach to pay much attention to what you are posting. When your potential audience is on social media, chances are they are sharing vacation pictures or looking longingly at the places their friends are going. Because of this, businesses try to get important posts up before the start of summer, making May a time when  EVERYTHING happens at once. The busyness of the month presents a unique challenge for social media. When you have so much competition for every set of eyes, you have to find a way to make your posts stand out. 

One of our long-term clients provides an excellent illustration. For the past few years, Commute Options Memphis has hosted the Commute Challenge, offering the public a chance to switch gears from driving alone to biking, walking/rolling, carpooling, or taking public transit. The month is full of fun activities throughout the city and is strategically timed around National Bike to Work Day. The challenge occurs during the chaos that is the month of May. 

Each year, the entire Campfire Collective  team comes together to assist Commute Options in making the event a success. As the account manager, I spend hours creating posts the month before and schedule everything further in advance than usual. That leaves time in May to constantly add additional posts as events happen.

The event has always earned the highest number of social media impressions for the year, but the 2023 Commute Challenge blew our expectations out of the water. There was a 793% increase in impressions from the previous month.

When I started to break things down, I discovered that three things caused the drastic change in impressions.

Collaborating with partners.

We do this throughout the year, but we take our relationships with partners to the next level during the Commute Challenge. We create collaborative posts on social media. We tag multiple partners on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We meet with our contacts prior to the month, giving them a heads up on what to expect so they are ready to re-share our accounts. We all have a common interest: changing the face of transportation in Memphis. So, we join forces to see the goal come to fruition. The key to collaborating with partners is communication. Don’t just tag people in posts; create strong relationships by talking directly with partners.

Inviting the public to join the fun.

Throughout the Commute Challenge, we offer prizes for people with creative commutes. Each week, community members  can enter to win by sharing their  commute and tagging Commute Options. When someone tags you in a post, their audience becomes your audience. Every time someone entered to win, they were sharing the mission of Commute Options on their platform. We invited the public to join us…and they did! 

Creating relevant content.

Stock posts can only get you so far. We love evergreen content, and it does have value. However, there is something special about time-sensitive content. When you are sharing about events on a certain date, people feel an urgency to pay attention, share, and respond to your posts. Along with this, live posts shared at Commute Challenge events performed higher than anything else. Why? These posts featured people. Real faces, having real fun. 

Every month won’t look like the Commute Challenge, but these three things can be part of a monthly social media strategy. By creating relevant content, inviting the public into your campaign, and collaborating with partners, you can actively work to increase your audience.