Five Reasons to Consider a Social Brand Takeover

Any brand marketer will tell you that building a popular, and highly-engaged, social media account takes a lot of work. There’s decisions to be made about how to create compelling content, how to best interact with fans and customers and how to ensure the brand’s messages are communicated in an engaging way. While there’s no perfect answer to each of these challenges, more marketers are discovering that social media “takeovers” (where a creator or personality takes over a social account for a period of time) offer one great solution.

There’s a variety of benefits to brand takeovers, including the chance to build consumer buzz and generate press attention, as well as providing a healthy injection of creativity and a fresh voice to branded social media accounts. But beyond the increased attention and creativity, there’s also a number of business benefits as well. Here are five reasons to consider a brand takeover as part of your future social media plans.

1. They can be more effective (and credible) than traditional ads: What’s the best business reason for trying out a brand takeover? The resulting content is likely to perform better than just running a standard ad. One recent study of sponsored Tweets found that paid posts featuring branded takeover content was on social users’ screens 50% longer and was twice as memorable as standard paid content. For marketers looking for a way to gain more share of voice, that’s great news.
2. They can help brands attract new audiences: Marketers often rely on social media to help reach new audiences. But trying to build this audience on your own can be difficult. The benefit of a social takeover is that it exposes your chosen creator’s own follower base to the brand’s account. A great example of this is a brand takeover grocery store Meijer organized with musician Maddi Jane and food creator Bobby Parrish of “Flav City” in honor of the launch of a new M&M’s flavor. Parrish and Jane created a Facebook Live video during their visit to the M&M’s factory, referencing Meijer throughout to their respective audiences of music and food-loving fans. The resulting content not only grew Meijer’s social following, it also brought in new consumers that were not previously familiar with the brand.
3. They keep social fans engaged: Savvy brand marketers will tell you that having lots of fans on social isn’t the only measure of success. The other challenge is keeping those fans engaged enough that they choose to like, comment and share the brand’s posts. One example of a brand that’s used a takeover to help boost engagement is the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, who were looking for ways to keep their fans interacting with their content on social. The team partnered with social star Shaun Ayala, who took over the team’s Snapchat account and created a series of fun games and challenges for fans based around football training camp. The resulting images and art created by fans helped boost the Chargers’ social engagement while also generating fresh fan-created content for the Chargers.
4. They can help brands launch new products: New product launches are a particular challenge for marketers. The new brand not only needs to build awareness among consumers, it also needs to kick off a brand-new social media account, which starts with zero audience. Mountain Dew is one example of a brand that used a takeover to solve this problem. To help boost its social fan base and build awareness for new flavors of its morning beverage Kickstart, the team partnered with Snapchat stars including Jerry Purpdrank, D-trix and David Lopez on an interactive fan-driven campaign to create the perfect “Super Bowl pre-party.” The collective audience of these three stars, which Captiv8 estimates reaches more than 15 million followers on social, helped Mountain Dew double the brand’s Snapchat friends in just two days.
5. They mix up the brand’s content creation efforts: It’s downright difficult for brand marketers to constantly come up with fresh social media content on their own. That’s where a brand takeover can be particularly effective. Brands get access to fresh content, along with a new perspective that’s likely to keep fans clicking, liking and sharing. Just examine the social approach of a car brand like Maserati. While the luxury positioning may make this car company seem unapproachable, Maserati emphasizes the aspirational nature of its cars by inviting a different creator every week to take over its Instagram account. The resulting mix of creators keeps the Maserati account fresh, diverse and interesting for fans.

Creating compelling content for branded social media accounts takes work. But with the help of one of these brand takeover ideas, brands have plenty of opportunities to simplify the process in the future. Ready to brainstorm some brand takeover ideas of your own? Get in touch with the team at Captiv8 today.