What is a collaboration strategy in social media

At the heart of such a marketing strategy is building a social media team by bringing together companies or brands with bloggers.

On different social media platforms, such as Instagram, there are a lot of collabs between famous bloggers and influencers with popular brands. This trend has become a new type of promotion in social media for individuals, groups, and companies.

There could be multiple forms of cooperation:

  • Mutual PR of people who work in the same or related field of activities. This option is often used by musicians or artists. They can do a joint project or promote each other’s non-competitive projects. This is effective because the interests of their target audiences coincide.
  • Sharing posts in stories, for example, or SFS (shoutout for shoutout). Using the story feature is very effective. These are short stories lasting 10 seconds in the form of a small photo or video with captions. You can use it by agreement with your social media partner to publish a screenshot of their account or some post in your story. Your partner will do the same in return.
  • Promotion through a blogger with a large number of subscribers. The company negotiates with the blogger and can also offer big discounts on goods, mutual advertising, certificates for various marketplaces, and much more. As part of such a promotional campaign, a blogger can also give gift coupons, discounts, and other benefits to their subscribers for the active spreading of advertising information.
  • Extra tools to improve the effectiveness of advertising. In social networks, the easiest way to do this is through tagging and mentioning other users and brands in posts.

Social collaboration benefits

Would you like to collaborate with a brand, but this is your first time and you’re not sure if it’s worth it? Let’s see how this may benefit you:

  • Combining your target audiences. Every company has a more or less established community of regular and potential customers, subscribers, and those who are already aware of the brand or its products. When collaborating, each party has the opportunity to inform the partner’s target audience about their products and, as a result, increase the number of customers and sales.
  • Reducing costs. Conducting combined advertising campaigns allows you to optimize advertising costs. Partners can also significantly reduce the costs of developing new technologies, projects, etc.
  • Successful building of a positive image. Collaborations show openness to cooperation and partnership, which positively affects the image and business reputation of the project participants.

Best practices for social media collaboration

The main motive of collaboration is to expand the scope and market for goods or services. Therefore, when choosing a partner, you need to understand what benefits can be obtained from this. That is, whether the subscribers of this partner can become your target audience – are they suitable in terms of age, income level, interests, and other factors. On top of that, you need to estimate the approximate number of subscribers who can become customers.

Pay great attention to the choice of product – it should be interesting to your audience. Collaboration brings results when products or company values complement each other. For this reason, cosmetics stores reach out to bloggers to cooperate, and fashion houses reach out to artists.

It’s also important to negotiate a partnership and test the idea. You can work separately, but more often it is easier to achieve the desired result by working on a project together. There are many digital collaborative tools that will allow you to do so simultaneously – one of the most popular ones is Google Docs. But, of course, depending on the specifics of the project you may use other platforms for collaboration.

And last but not least: remember that a new product and partnership should be beneficial to both parties: you and your collaboration partner. Only a win-win situation will help you increase the revenues and attract new customers in non-standard ways.