When building a business or brand, the way that one connects with their customers, followers, or fans makes all of the difference. In the past, you needed tons of money or fame to reach audiences around the world. Today, social media makes it possible for almost anyone to reach large audiences — if they use it the right way. Unfortunately, some may feel social media isn’t the right tool for them. It is too difficult to navigate or not enough followers to spread their message. This can leave people defeated and thinking that social media isn’t the best tool for them.
Brendan Kane, business and digital strategist for Fortune 500 corporations, brands, and celebrities, is here to help. This social media guru has helped build brands for Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Micheal Strahan, Disney, and more, and he was able to do it all through social media. He generated one million followers for himself on Facebook in just 30 days. He knows how to optimize analytics, data, and paid media to help companies achieve massive growth.
Kane learned early on that unique value is what people want to see. An example that he used was how the social media platform, MySpace, advertised in its early days. They used banner ads on people’s pages that the users would choose themselves. For example, someone could put their favorite Nike poster, new music video or movie trailer on their page and voila, free advertising on MySpace. This still proves true today, even more so than before. If companies put the right content on their social media platforms, the content can do all of their advertising for them.
One of Kane’s focus points is that the fastest ways to grow an audience for your brand is to already use an existing audience that can put you in front of a large number or people. While this may sound confusing at first, on Big Questions Podcast, Kane explains exactly what he means by this and provides several examples of how this method worked for him and his clients.
One example that Brendan discusses on the podcast of how to create an audience using an existing audience is with AirBnB. AirBnB is an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent out their properties with those looking to travel to that destination. When the site first got their start, they would go to Craigslist’s rental page and get in contact with the renters. They would tell them to go to AirBnB to list their properties because it was safer. Once they were able to get renters to do that, AirBnB went back to the original Craigslist page of the renters and posted that if people were still interested in renting these properties, go to AirBnB to do so. AirBnB took Craigslist’s audience and made it their own.
Kane ran one of the first YouTube influencer campaigns back in 2006 for the action movie, Crank. The film had a very small marketing budget so Brendan developed a plan. It was right around the time that YouTube influencers started to emerge. Kane saw these influencers had millions of followers so he thought, why not tap into them? He reached out to about 100 different influencers and essentially asked them if they wanted to interview a movie star. He had 5 respond, all of them with massive followings, they conducted the interviews and it wound up being a highly successful marketing campaign. When explaining the campaign, Kane discusses how he just saw so much potential to tap into with the YouTubers and no one else seemed to notice it, so he jumped on it. It was something no one else was doing at the time.
Social media is a free and easy marketing tool — but it’s also filled with complexities, which can make it challenging for businesses to identify success. With over 60 billion messages sent across social platforms each day, consider booking Brendan Kane to ensure your post is the one that is seen.
