Managing all of your social media can be a bit like herding cats. While there are tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite — to help ease the burden on the front end (i.e., getting your message out in all of your various channels), the back end (i.e., where people end up and what they do once they get there) can be even more problematic. Strategically positioned microsites can be a cost effective way to aggregate social media campaigns in ways that can’t easily addressed within your primary website.

There’s no question that social media campaigns are an excellent, and I’d argue essential, strategy to reach various communities. The cold, hard reality, though, is that these audiences are often very fragmented — a fact that’s compounded by the standardized formats of social media tools, which limit flexibility and creativity of the message presentation. There’s not much you can do to make a 140-character tweet visually impactful, although Twitter Vine has enabled the capability for 6-second videos. Even adding an image to a LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+ post isn’t exactly earth-shaking in its design appeal.

How does using microsites overcome those limitations?

• Driving all external traffic for your call-to-action to a single-theme, highly targeted microsite gives your marketing campaign more control over the brand message.
• Adding missing depth and detail to a fragmented brand story that can’t be told in the 140 characters or a couple of sentences in a social media post.
• Employing a flexible and engaging tool that can be laser-focused on the niche market to drive higher levels of response, engagement and lead generation—without requiring IT involvement or major changes to your primary website.
• Centralizing into a single database so you can aggregate responses and measure

Of course, you’re still dependent on getting the front end right, creating compelling teaser copy and offers tailored to each of the social media tools. But once users have reached the final destination, microsites can make life a whole lot simpler—while driving a virtuous circle of increased social media shares and engagement.

How have you used Social Media effectively? Have you considered how a microsite could aggregate diverse platforms and drive results for your next campaign?

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