Who are you and what does your company do?
My name is Sorin Mihailovici, I am the Founder of the Travel by Dart series which is a reality show web series. In every episode, we throw a dart at the world map and we go wherever it lands, regardless of how far, difficult or expensive it is. We go there to help the land of the people. For example, if we hit Uganda, we go there and build a school, or if we hit Argentina we go there and build a library. So that's what the business is.
How and why did you get started in social media?
Social media is the new television so to speak... you don't need your weather channel anymore - you open your social media and you see everyone in your city telling you it's snowing! Everything is on social media. We have Facebook to connect with friends, Twitter for news and on Instagram, we use pictures, which are a thousand words... that way we can express what we're doing easier than writing or filming.
What do you believe the benefits of using social media for business?
Using social media is something we didn’t do 10 years ago. Now you can reach 10 million people maybe in one day, versus traditional television for example, where a decent TV network has, say, 100,000 views. So you can certainly reach a lot more people in showing what you're doing and this helps grow your business.
What do you think are common mistakes business owners make when building brand awareness on social media?
People do not like to be pitched; they don't like to be sold things. We learned that over the years and I see this mistake being made by a lot of companies still. Whether it's Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, it's all about their business, failing to realize that their promotions and advertising are not catered strategically to the viewers' interests. We did that in the past too, but we smartened up long time ago. At the end of the day it's not really about you, it's about the people you are talking to. If you talk a lot you don't have time to listen. Nowadays it's really important to listen to know what you should be delivering.
What qualities do you think social media managers should have?
Communication is the main thing, we've been reading a lot of books on how to influence people's minds, to tell them how to think without telling them how to think. That's why the term influencer came around. A regular person's tweet is not the same as an influencer's. Obviously that influencer built his power and strength through his communication skills.
How do Business owners know if their social media campaign is working?
I think the main thing in measuring your business is optimizing your campaigns and seeing what's working and what's not- you adjust according to the results. It's rare that a campaign will be successful from the first time, you have to do augmenting all the time. We know we're successful by the responses of our audience. People tell us what they want to see on our show, and it's great to see the number of followers and fans growing every day.
How do you see social media evolving over the next 5 years …what do you hope to see?
I'd like to see more videos in absolutely everything. They are more effective and easier to ingest when compared with text. Conversions are much higher. Videos are more entertaining than text.
If you could share one best practice about using social media to grow a business, what would it be?
The best practice would be to be very active, but smartly active. It's not just about a million tweets a day, but rather the quality tweets from every industry, not just your own. So if you are a construction company, you don't have to post everything about construction, you can post about sports and every other sector people are interested in. At the end of the day people see the name of your company and logo all the time, so when the time comes for them to need a construction company, the first thing that will pop in their mind is you and your business, because they've been seeing you every day. That's the best practice, keep active with good quality posts so everybody would benefit out of them, even if it's not in your industry. It's the divide and conquer strategy.
What are you favorite social platforms?
At the moment we are really happy with Twitter and Facebook. Our Instagram is growing but Facebook and Twitter is where we interact most with our fans. We also have a YouTube channel of course, a video platform is a must.
