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After many successful and unsuccessful launches and projects becoming popular in social media, there are some very concrete and specific factors that we can identify in every one of them to see why they did so well, or so bad. One of the common denominators is the strategy of anticipation. “Teasing” your customers, or future customers, has been working for a long time in many industries, with the cinematographic one being the best example. What are trailers other than builders of anticipation? Now that social media is installed, companies and people are using the tools and software to create anticipation in different ways.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples that have been quite successful:

Crush It

With the upcoming launch of his book “Crush It”, Gary Vaynerchuk did something that he has seen worked wonderfully in the past. He decided to be everywhere.  There was no mildly respectful site that didn’t have Gary on it participating in some way. Here are some of the things that Gary did:

Giveaways of his book in some form of contest

By giving samples of his book for free, he got everyone interested on the contest, and interested in seeing what the book was about. doing some giveaways costs very less if you consider the amount of buzz that you get out of it. With those contests, word of mouth took over and  made “Crush It” a sensation in social media, especially since he’s one of the most popular heads online.

Interviews, videos and such

He dedicated a lot of his time to be interviewed by many bloggers, since he knows that those are the  people that will put a word for you. If he didn’t live, he recorded it. If he didn’t recorded an interview, he recorded a video for the blogger to put on his site. He really went out of his way to show caring and to build a lot of talking about his projects and book.

Talk, talk, talk!

Gary talks, there’s no novelty there. We are all familiar with his style by now, and when his book was about to get launched, he decided to turn it up a notch. Great way to make us think about his book, great way to build more anticipation. If you have people that listen, use it in your advantage. Tease with them, they want you to.

Untemplater

Last week a new site called Untemplater, focused on “untemplating” your life, launched very successfully. Being one of the founders, I can assure you that anticipation played a big role. We started talking about it way before we launched it. We compiled a Manifesto and sent it to a certain group of influential people a week before launch, we started mentioning the word Untemplater with a certain mystery, which helped at making people anxious to know what we were talking about. In the end, it was a great move, all the  tactics worked perfectly.

Remember, tease with your audience, don’t give it all out at once, where’s the fun in that?

Carlos Miceli. Argentinian. Questioner of things. OwlSparks’ blogger. Freelance writer. Entrepreneur. Every day philosopher. Skill learner.

Tags: community, online marketing, Social Media, Strategy, the right way