It’s just another Friday afternoon in the life of a social media manager. Your daily social posts are set and you’re crossing off all of your end-of-week checklist items. Then something happens…you get a Instagram notification that reveals someone famous has visited your location and tagged your brand on Instagram. Almost immediately, your jaw drops, your checklist is now in the trash, and an entirely new and unexpected list of social activities must begin.
Don’t Panic! When Someone Famous Tags You
The picture you see across the top of the page is the surprise social media bomb that went off in our world last Friday. Fortunately, this is the unexpected explosion you WANT, one that drives direct and indirect exposure to your brand on social media.
Brendon Urie, the frontman for the wildly popular band, Panic! At The Disco was in town for a show in Philadelphia. Hours before the concert, Brendon got thirsty and found a local spot to grab a beer, which just so happened to be 2nd Story Brewing, a client of Bad Rhino. Panic! At the Disco’s official instagram account shared a picture of Brendon holding up one of our client’s beers and tagged their location for all to see. You can find that picture here.
When our team received the notification, we made sure not to Panic! and instead focused on a mini-action plan, with a new checklist. While it’s not everyday you’ll find yourself in a similar situation, we thought we’d share our Don’t Panic! plan with you and the action items you should take if someone famous blows up your social media one day soon.
5 Things To Do When Someone Famous Tags You
1. Confirm What is Going On
Wait? What just happened? Do you know why they are there? Do you know if it’s actually the famous person, band, etc?
In our Panic! At The Disco scenario, it turns out that they didn’t realize who he was until the tag on Instagram. It wasn’t a very packed time of the day, which we can assume is one reason why the artist decided to go out at that time.
Try to get as much detail as possible and confirm what’s happening before moving to the next step.
2. Comment and “like” the Original Instagram Post
It’s time to take advantage of the situation and capitalize on some easy exposure. Create a simple comment to thank them for stopping in to your business/store/whatever. Make sure to tag them back. Maybe they’ll see it. Maybe they won’t. What matters is that potentially hundreds of thousands of others who are engaging with the post WILL see it.
3. Look for Spots to Engage Potential Customers in the Comments
This is the fun part. Certain comments on the original social post will offer great spots for your brand to jump in and engage. In the example we’re sharing here, Panic! At The Disco is in Philly to perform, so a number of Philadelphia residents are commenting back on the picture. Some of them have left comments saying that they either live in Philly, or have visited the brewery before, or want to visit the brewery.
In the example on the left, we had to be a bit more strategic in our comment. They’re bummed to be out of town during the band’s visit, but we offer up a way they can recapture the moment and visit us when back in town to see where Brendon enjoyed his drink.
4. Develop Social Media Posts to Highlight Their Visit
The next step here is to create social posts for your own channels to keep the conversation going. It’s very possible that some of your social audience follows your famous visitor, but many do not. You want to show your current audience and new visitors to your page that you’re an awesome place to be…and clearly so, because an awesome person stopped in.
There are always a few methods to share, but we went ahead and took a screen shot of their post on Instagram. Make sure you get the location tag, so people KNOW it was your restaurant, store, etc, that they had visited. Also, make sure to tag them in the post again.
5. Use Paid Social Advertising to Increase Reach and Exposure
Organic reach, exposure, and engagement should take your new post far, but it will go so much further with a social ad push. In this situation, you may want to have a few different ads set up and you can test different targeting groups. You’ll want to try to tap into the audience of the person that has tagged your social channels, but you also want to target your perfect audience as well.
You can see above that the organic reach for this post was. 4,349. That was a great number but the paid promotion took it to a total reach of over 17,000. We’ll continue promoting this post for the next week or so and we’ll see how it continues to grow.
Would you like to get started with a custom social media marketing solution from Bad Rhino? Click here and contact us now.
