The Social Angle With Jane Davis

Engaging content is a must on social media

By

Jane Davis – Connolly's RED MILLS

More and more businesses in the thoroughbred industry are using social media to strengthen their brand and reach out to current and potential customers and clients. Jane Davis, Equine Brand Manager at Connolly's RED MILLS, shares her insights on their strategies for social media marketing.

TDN: What are the benefits of social media marketing for businesses in the Thoroughbred industry?

JD: From our perspective, social media offers the opportunity to connect with our customers and our online audience and share content with them. First and foremost, we use our social media channels to establish the personality of the brand to give our followers and people that engage with the content a sense of what Connolly's RED MILLS represents.

Connolly's RED MILLS is a nutrition company that produces performance feed for the high performance horse. We are very lucky to work with some world-class riders, yards and stud farms and social media gives us an opportunity to share insights into their stories, experiences and successes.

We also engage in a wide variety of event sponsorships across both the racing and sport horse industries and again social media allows us to shine a light on this activity and share our message.

It is important for us that we also use the platforms to share information about our products and to share nutritional advice and insights.

TDN: What social channels do you prefer, and what type of content do you post on each platform?

JD:One of our biggest challenges when using social media is that we talk to quite a few different audiences. We focus predominantly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and we can see that different audiences use different platforms. With the thoroughbred media and the trainers, jockeys and breeders, we see strong engagement on Twitter. The show jumping audience is more active on Instagram.

We try to create engaging and informative content that is relevant to our audience. Content on Twitter needs to be news worthy and in real time. On Facebook, we use very good imagery and video. The racing industry provides such stunning, beautiful imagery and that is something we are trying to make the most of.

TDN: Do you look at other organisations, inside or outside the Thoroughbred world, for inspiration?

JD: Yes, I follow all sorts of brands from different industries and I enjoy seeing how they tailor their content. You can learn some things that are done well, and you can learn some things that aren't done well.

I think that the racecourses and the racing authorities in Ireland and Britain do a beautiful job in creating content. The Irish National Stud, with their videos or mares and foals, is another good example from our industry.

TDN: How do you measure the success and popularity of your social media content?

JD: Engagement, video views, link clicks and traffic to your website are all so easy to track and measure and that is the beauty of digital marketing. I set different objectives for our campaigns, for example to capture e-mail data, or get entries to a competition. And some other posts are just fun and engaging pieces.

It also allows you to experiment and adapt your content. You can come up with new content and measure its performance. Sometimes it is the simplest things that get the most engagement. Just that one beautiful picture of a horse breezing or in full flight. We had one incredible picture of Ballycasey and Ruby Walsh jumping a fence at Gowran Park and that got an unbelievable amount of engagement on both Facebook and Twitter. It can sometimes be surprising to see what works and what doesn't.

I always measure the engagement and the reach we are getting from the posts, and if that is organic or paid for. I want to see organic – unpaid – reach and engagement, because that shows that something really caught the eye of the user. People are engaging with their social media predominantly via mobile and on the go, and a post must be vibrant and interesting to catch people's imagination and hopefully get them to engage with that piece of content.

TDN: What are the biggest mistakes to avoid making? 

JD: As a brand we try to have a very positive tone on social media. We are quite celebratory of the industry and the sport that we are a part of and that we are contributing to. I personally don't like to see brands engage in competition, or brands that are overly opinionated or negative.

Also, don't be too pushy. I much prefer to see social media used to make friends, create connections, and share information. Of course it is also a channel to direct people to more sales focused information and content, but I see it more as an information provision and a conversation piece. There must be a balance between your engaging content and your sales focused content.

TDN: What is next on your social media agenda, and what social media trends are you looking forward to? 

JD: Video is high on our agenda, as it is for a lot of brands, because it is very effective across social media. A challenge is to reduce the length. Traditional corporate videos might be a couple of minutes long, but we need to make them much shorter. We are experimenting a bit with videos and looking at different content, including live video. There is so much you can do on your own phone. Video content can be taken at an event and published live in the moment.

Something else on the agenda is the likes of stories, such as Snapchat and Instagram stories. Instagram stories is something that we are trying to embrace when we are onsite on different events and that has been successful for us. When people can't get to an event or they can't get to a certain thing, you can use your social media channels to bring people in and make them part of that. We also want to do some behind the scenes content here in Goresbridge. All the feed is manufactured here and we want to be able to use our social media channel to show people what goes on behind the scenes.

Facebook: facebook.com/redmills
Instagram: @redmillshorse
Twitter: @REDMILLSHorse

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