How Smule’s social community has spurred 70% increase in growth (webinar)
VB WEBINAR:
It’s a tidal wave: Every day over 2.5 million Facebook posts, 277,000 Tweets and 216,000 Instagram photos are shared. If your social media strategy isn’t on point, your content is getting lost at sea. Find out how to surf the wave.
Register here for the free webinar.
Smule’s astonishing growth is a testimony for the power of social media. A global leader in social music, Smule boasts a vibrant community of over 35 million monthly active users, and sales are up 70 percent year over year.
Smule users are the engine driving this growth. The platform allows users to create, share, and discover music, as well as connect and collaborate with other users. Smule users tend to stick around, and regularly recruit new and loyal users from across the globe.
It’s no question that the company has what seems like a golden ticket when it comes to shareable content, say Jeffrey Smith, co-founder and CEO of social music giant. Those 35 million active music creators and curators have become 35 million promotional channels for the service. But the same principle applies to any company — find a way to build community and turn your users and followers into your brand ambassadors.
“Social media only works if the content is expressive,” Smith explains. “Rule number one, when you’re trying to drive content growth and community growth, expressive content works, and content that isn’t expressive doesn’t.”
What the the company needed to focus on was making it easier and more fun to create that expressive content. Perhaps even more importantly, they turned their attention to developing a collaborative community in which users feel uninhibited and creative, and collaboration and sharing is encouraged.
“We’ve spent seven or eight years trying to crack the code of trying to figure out how to get users to do that, how to build that engine, how to get people motivated to do that,” Smith says.
“We’ve tinkered with building incentive systems to motivate people to share more content,” he continues. But as Smith explains, that tactic totally backfired. To be sure, uploads doubled, but click-throughs dropped by half.
“What that told us what that when we were incentivizing the behavior, we weren’t getting good content,” Smith says. “We weren’t getting content that other people were really interested in and sharing across the network.”
It all comes back to authenticity, Smith says. Users want content that comes from a real person, and seems agenda-free. They see through the veneer of traditional marketing, but they rally around realness.
This is essential even for B2B companies. “This authenticity is becoming critical for anybody who’s trying to build more awareness for their brand or even generate more leadflow, if people are going to discover their brand through social media,” Smith says. “That’s kind of the world we live in right now.”
Smith joins VB analyst Stewart Rogers who will spill research insights from VentureBeat’s latest report, “Social Media Management: Tools, tactics — and how to win.” The report surveyed over 1,000 social media managers, scored and ranked 28 social media management tools, and dove into 10 tactics for success. Join the webinar, and you’ll hear the most important takeaways — and hear from Smith with deep insights into the social media ecosphere.
Don’t miss out!
After the webinar, you will:
- Understand how social media management can help your brand
- Know the best social media management vendors to investigate for your business
- Recognize the tactics, metrics, and techniques you need to promote your content via social media
Speakers:
- Jeffrey Smith, CEO, Smule
- Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
Moderator:
- Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
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