The CWC guide to Facebook success: creating a mascot character profile

Costume Characters are a great way to promote your business, charity, sports club, products, services, the list is endless. Where there is a mascot there is usually a buzz of excitement, people taking photographs and generally getting giddy about interacting with your oversized ambassador.

This type of live event creates a memorable occasion for those lucky enough to be there and leaves a positive lasting impression that means hopefully, the next time someone requires what you can offer, you’ll be at the forefront of their minds. But what about all those people that can’t get to the event or live in a different country that would love to know more about your services? It would seem a shame to allow your brand ambassador to live only for their events, especially when the modern world is such a small place.

Thanks to the miracles of technology, no longer are your mascots destined only to be local heroes. From the platform of the internet, your character can shoot for the moon and reach the stars; or potential customers, right across the globe with a little bit of creative thinking.

If you haven’t thought about creating a social media page for your character, then now is a good time to start. Facebook is still at the top of the social media pile with over 1 billion views a day and approx. 2 billion unique sessions a month. It’s a medium for exposure that shouldn’t be overlooked and is a great place to start your mascot’s journey into online personable interaction with your audience.

As well as individual profiles, there are also over 60 million ‘Business’ pages that have been created, such as ours, giving you easily accessible information and keeping you up to date with the latest goings on from company HQ. With all the various page types to choose from, this brings us nicely to our first consideration.

Profile vs Pages

When setting up a page for your character, you’ll be hit with choices right off the bat. The first choice you will have to make is whether you want to create a profile or a page for your mascot. There are differences in the two which will change the way you interact with your audience:

Profile

This is the typical individual profile like the one you would set up for yourself. With a profile page, only those who you invite or accept as a friend will be able to see your content and in a profile, advertising/paid promotion isn’t available. Only one of these pages can be created with one login and password.

Pages

Much more suited to business, pages are a great way to showcase your product, brand, event and you’ve guessed it, mascot. With pages, content is available for everyone to see and instead of inviting friends you invite people to like your page. Pages allow for paid advertising and promotion, so once you’re all set up and happy with the details you can start to put some premium promotion behind your character should you so choose.

Because the Character you want to be promoting is your brand ambassador, I would suggest choosing to create a Page rather than a profile as this will give you the most amount of flexibility with your account.

What type of page should I use?

Once you have made your decision to start and have clicked the pages button, you will be presented with a list of options as to what you would like your page to be. There are 6 options to choose from, but only one that I would recommend for your brand ambassador:

Artist, Band or Public figure – Used to be called a fan page back in the day, this would be the right choice for a fully dedicated page all about your mascot. With this category, you can be a little more personable with the tone of your message as people will be interacting with a character that has its own personality, opinions etc. without the usual corporate undertones you would expect on a dedicated business page. The idea is to build brand association between your products/services and your mascot. People are much better at remembering faces than they are business names so it’s a great way to keep at the forefront of your potential customer’s mind.

If you find that you have chosen a type of page that on reflection isn’t suited to your character, you can always go into your settings to change the page type later.

What next?

So now you’ve made your decision and you are ready to start building the content for your mascot showcase; what kind of information do you need to create a successful page? Below I’ll discuss 5 important points to consider when constructing your character profile.

Back story

Everyone has a back story; a place of origin, likes and dislikes, annoying character traits (we all have them) and a distinct personality. It’s what makes us all so unique and if it wasn’t for these differences, the world would be such a boring place. Real or fictional, a back story is a great way to bring your character to life.

When thinking about your character’s back story, think about where they were born, where they grew up, if they have any family, a romantic interest, favourite hobby, funny story surrounding a calamitous event, how they came to your employment, it can be as elaborate as you want it to be! The aim is to make your mascot more relatable by giving it a history and turning it into a ‘real’ character. If people grow an affinity towards your mascot then there’s a good chance they’ll come to you next time they need your services.

Photos and videos

Essential to any social media page, photos and videos are what your potential clients will interact with most often. These tend to stand out against status updates, post links, and text-based content because our brains can process imagery faster than it can decipher the text.

Over 90% of human interaction is visual so it makes sense to follow this thinking when it comes to social media. Think about the kind of things you look at on social media. I’m guessing that most of the memorable posts you have engaged with recently contain either photos, videos or cats…. far more cats than you would want to admit to but probably in one of the two formats discussed. So logically, the answer is to get a cat mascot costume and to take lots of photos of it.

I jest but having some great promo shots of your character and making sure you travel with a camera to all events will ensure you get some fantastic and interesting snaps to share with your fans, who in turn will share with their friends, and the chain grows longer, expanding your reach far beyond the physical boundaries of a local event.

Other content

Once your character page is up and running; you’ve fabricated your biography and have taken lots of great photos of your mascot, it’s time to start looking at building and planning regular content to keep your potential customers engaged.

Whether it be linking through to an interesting article or playing fill in the blanks, content should be varied and promote interaction between your Brand Ambassador and your page fans. A great tip is to have a look at your potential customer base and to do a bit of research to see what matters to them and what they generally find interesting. If you can tap into this when looking at content for your page, you will find the interaction levels increase when a fan is genuinely interested in a topic.

It’s well known that the hard sell isn’t an effective method when it comes to Facebook, so even though your customer is potentially interested in your product, a direct sales message (unless heavily promoting a significant discount) will be skipped past by most people, so keep it light-hearted.

Another great way to engage fans is to pose questions. Think about finishing off some of your posts with a discussion point or ask for an opinion. We all like to give our 2 cents worth and if it’s a topic close to your customers’ hearts, not only will you get the opportunity to engage, but you’ll also learn some valuable insights into their likes/dislikes so you can further tailor your offer or content down the line.

Competitions can also get your fans engaging with your content. Something like a caption contest or a small sweepstake is all that is needed to start the likes and shares flowing, creating a buzz around your character and their page.

It’s important to remember that the prize on offer should reflect the amount of effort required to enter the competition. If it’s a big prize, then make your fans work a little harder for it by submitting an entry. If it’s information you are after, keep the prize small and make it a simple comment below type of contest. A competition is a great way to gain valuable information and stats from your customers that can be used later. For example, to enter a sweepstake, fans may have to like and share the post and then tell you what their favourite flavour of ice cream is in the comments below. This information could allow you to introduce a new flavour down the line that you know will be a popular choice because you’ve heard it right from the horse’s mouth.

With all content, it is important to remember to promote the core values of your company in the way you present, write and perform with your character both online and offline. If your character is about promoting healthy living, then try not to offer unhealthy prizes, or give information contradicting the beliefs of the company. This can lead to you sending a confusing message to your customers that can de-value the hard work you have put in to building your brand.

Above all, keep your content interesting. It’s better to have 2-3 relevant and engaging posts a week than to fill up your wall with low-quality daily content for the sake of posting.

Account linking

Account Linking is the act of joining two or more social media platforms so that if you post on one, it automatically posts on the other and vice versa. This may sound like a great idea at first; meaning that you can reach out to all your networks in one go but people use Facebook and Twitter (which we’ll use for this example) in very different ways. For example, Twitter posts are limited to a set number of characters (140 characters, not including Twitter handles – the @username) whereas Facebook will allow up to 5000 characters per comment or status update, allowing for longer posts and in-depth discussion right on the site.

Sharing your Facebook update with Twitter can end up cutting out a lot of the comment and can leave your Twitter account looking messy with lots of seemingly unfinished comments. There’s also the issue around replying to fans and potential customers. When linking, there are no notifications that let you know when someone has replied or commented on a thread via the other platform, so unless you log in regularly to either account, your Character might unintentionally ignore your customer base who may search elsewhere.

The best advice I can give you on this is to start with one platform, and only open your character up to more social media avenues when you feel ready to handle them individually. Products like Hootsuite enable you to choose which posts go to which social site, so if you do feel the content is relevant on both, you get the option to share it.

Invitation and promotion

To get your page started, there are two ways to gain a following. One is through invitations, and the other method is through sponsored advertising.

Facebook offers several paid avenues to promote your character’s page, ranging from boosting posts to advertising in your local area. Both are relevant but depending on your end goals, these promotions can work out quite costly. The trick is to fine tune your advert audience interests to only include relevant topics and hobbies to ensure you maximise the spend.

Inviting people to like your page, on the other hand, is free but you can only invite people you either already know personally or have the email address for, which you can upload to Facebook so that it can send out the invites. Some people are happy to receive invites to their inbox, others can be a little wary as they can feel a little impersonal.

Wrapping up

You’ll hopefully find that if you follow our guidelines and post regular and relevant content a few times a week, your fan base should start to grow and your mascot will become more recognisable across the globe and not just locally.  The information above should get you started but don’t be afraid of trying new things as audience interaction is always evolving, especially in the fast-paced field of social media.

If I can leave you with one thing from this article to ensure a successful character page, it should be this short and simple message:

Don’t Market, Connect.

If you feel you need any help or advice on how to set up your costumed character’s page or just want a chat about creating your brand ambassador then send us a message via this form.