Mediaboss Marketing

Marketing on social networks is hard, and as weve all witnessed, bad marketing can be worse than no marketing at all. Maybe unsurprisingly, there is one demographic that seems to have mastered the art of social self-promotion far better than corporations who spend millions: college kids.

Kids like Logan Paul. I would lose sleep about thinking how I need to get Vine famous, Paul, a 19-year-old freshman at Ohio University, told me over the phone. I was jealous of these kids who were like 16 years old and 200,000 people know them... I was like, I want that, I need that and I can have it if I just put some effort into it! Four months ago, Paul had 900 Vine followers. Today, he has 1.7 million.

A company called Sumpto is trying to capitalize on kids like Paul. Sumpto connects brands with top college influencers, giving the brands exposure to their target audience and giving a few kids a little extra cash. The company has found 33,000 of these campus social network celebs nationwide, 75 of which have followings over 100,000, averaging 343,000. Now the company is doing promotions for companies like JackThreads, whose brand engagement on networks like Instagram is a fraction of the engagement on content created by Sumpto's influencers.

Is this the promised land of social media marketing? Are these kids the real deal? I spoke to three of them to find out.

Paul and his brother had been making YouTube videos for a while when they came across Vine. He says Vines recent addition of the reVine tool was key.

I had a sense of what people find funny because of the YouTube stuff that my brother and I were doing, but with Vine it's a little different because you have to pack everything into six seconds. So I'd look on the popular page--I'd look at what the top people were doing, and I'd see, 'Oh this is what people like, this is what they find funny on Vine.' So I would... take that and then twist it, mold it, mend it to make it fit my own unique style," he says.

With a little practice, he got good. "I made some funny videos, not bad, good for starting. But the one I made when I had 900 followers, it got reVined by another big Viner who had 400,000 followers. And that was huge.

Most marketing today isnt done on Vine, but that may be changing. The network appears to have survived the introduction of Instagram video, and has been adding features. I personally veered away from Vine after the reVine feature was introduced because it clogged my feed with videos my friends liked, but I had no interest in. But from a marketing perspective, this is an ideal feature.

Paul says he uses Vine as the so-called "top of the funnel" to draw people in with pure personality and lead them to his other social profiles. Vine has been the biggest catalyst because it's a glimpse of my personality. People are like, wow, okay, this kid looks interesting, I'll go follow his Twitter too, says Paul. If you create good content, then people are going to start to notice that.

Hes onto something crucial that big companies arent doing yet: differentiating social feeds with content meant for different purposes. Come for the entertaining Vines, stay for the tweets. With all the various forms of social mediums out there now, lots of companies figure that redundancy is easier. But a better strategy may be not to cross-post everything, thereby making unique personalities for yourself on each account.

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These Campus Celebs Are Huge On Vine And Instagram