Zinc FM Townsville has been experimenting with social media to see how important it is to regional audiences. If you use it to capture the right mood it can be very important.

Prime Radio Townsville’s promotions manager Marcus Paul took a photo of the local paper’s headline after the town’s footy team was ‘robbed’ of victory in last week’s semi-final match against Manly.

“I literally took the photo on Saturday morning, and posted it to our Zinc 100.7 Townsville face book site – and it went nuts,” Paul has told radioinfo.

The station has been encouraging its staff to increase their use of social media to build the brand through social media, without having lots of money to spend on external marketing.

“As our content director says, to generate facebook activity our posts need to capture a mood, be topical and local, then the posts will generate comments and discussion.”

That’s exactly what happened. Zinc FM’s website would normally have 1500 people on it and maybe attract 30 – 50 comments, but the response to the mood of the town the day after their team was ‘robbed’ of victory by some controversial umpiring decisions sent the station’s Facebook page into meltdown.

The picture was liked over 21,000 times. It was shared over 500 times and had over 1000 comments.