This is part of a series highlighting brands that effectively use social media to connect with their customers and generate sales. Social media’s influence on purchasing decisions is strong and only getting stronger. Check out the full series to learn specific ways your business can use social media marketing.

Pedialyte is a growing business, making a small but mighty brand pivot that is resulting in a rise in sales. If you're like many people, when you think of Pedialyte you think of kids. It's a children's drink, meant for nutrition and hydration following a cold or flu. Right?

Wrong.

Pedialyte now positions itself as being for both kids and adults — and social media marketing probably played a part in its brand repositioning.

Check out a few ways Pedialyte is using social media marketing to stay relevant and reach a whole new demographic for sales.

1. Two Words: Social Listening

As millennials grow older and have kids of their own, they apparently never got off the Pedialyte juice. The drink is being lauded for being helpful for recovery from strenuous exercises like marathons or spin classes.

Oh, and long parties: Pedialyte is now part of many consumers' hangover kit.

And the brand knows it.This is one advertising example from Facebook.

This is genius for a few reasons, including:

It's seasonal. It's summer here in the northeast US, which means that it's going to be hot, humid and accompanied by picnics, barbeques, pool parties and more — which may include beer consumption.
It's cool. This is rather subjective, but Pedialyte looks like the cool kids are using it. This just screams: ditch the Gatorade and pick up Pedialyte to feel better, faster, after an over-indulgence.

How did Pedialyte figure this out? Probably a mix of great marketing talent, robust market research and proactive social listening.

Social listening — i.e. using social media to as a market research tool — can be incredibly powerful to understand market trends and demands. This applies across industries because consumers use social media to communicate to each other.

Brands are foolish not to listen because it can only enhance the customer experience. In this case, social listening allowed Pedialyte to breath new life into an existing product and gained millions of potential customers in doing so.

Not sure how to do social listening?

You want to participate in social listening for your brand because it can generate new ideas for how to become or stay relevant to your target audience. This, of course, leads to more sales for your business.

To do this, you can add a stream in Hootsuite — a social media content scheduler — for your brand name and/or for specific keywords, as shown below.

Step 1: Add the stream

Step 2: Select the social media profile and network you want to listen on and add your brand name or a keyword associated with your product or service

Step 3: Keep an eye on this stream to understand how social media users are discussing your brand or your product

Adding stream for social listening - monitor this

This is available in the free Hootsuite version, so even if you’re a startup or small business, there’s no excuse to not be participating in social listening. Other social listening tools include Sprout Social and Sprinklr.

Whether your annual marketing budget is $0 or $1 million, you can afford social listening and it can help you create better, more relevant advertising and content.

2. Twitter Engagement

Twitter is known for being a tool to build transparency and trust. Many Twitter users tweet whatever is on their mind. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's political and sometimes it's just the mundane reality of day-to-day life.

And Pedialyte is on standby to respond, as seen in this example:

twitter engagement and customer service example

By responding and engaging to Twitter users mentioning their brand, Pedialyte creates a personalized customer experience.

The brand isn’t just shouting its self-serving messages into the Twittersphere; it’s actively reaching out to people who use its product.

This is also a great example of a brand humanizing itself through social media engagement. “Humanizing” your brand doesn't mean winging it, using slang, emojis, or just letting your intern respond to Tweets.

In this instance, the Pedialyte brand has a clearly defined brand voice; one that’s friendly and upbeat, but not trying too hard to be relevant or hip. This brand knows what it is — and what it isn’t.

If your brand doesn’t have a defined, specific brand voice, here’s a great article outlining 5 easy steps to define and — and use — your brand voice.

3. User Generated Content (UGC)

User generated content (UGC) is when a company repurposes a photo, text or video that a consumer has openly shared for their own social media profiles. This is one of the simplest ways any sized business can use social media marketing to generate awareness for their product.

From mom-and-pop shops to corporate giants, this is a great way to add a dash of authenticity to your marketing efforts, too. As seen on Facebook — without solicitation — Pedialyte customers show off their uses of the products, and the brand’s social media team is on standby to ask to reuse it.

For the younger crowd, Pedialyte also grabs UGC from Instagram users who share their love of the drink for rehydration purposes.

In fact, if you scroll through the Pedialyte Instagram account, the majority of the content is UGC. For your brand, regardless of what you’re selling, you can take an hour or two to search on Instagram for hashtags related to your product or service, and you’ll probably find some relevant UGC.

Apply These Marketing Tactics

As the saying goes, evolve or die.That’s exactly what Pedialyte is doing: evolving the brand to lean into consumer trends and accepting that they’re not just for kids with the flu any more. They’re also for Gen Zers who enjoy beer pong and rooftop bars. And they’re for Millennial winos and craft beer connoisseurs.

Really, they’re for anyone who wants to stay hydrated and feel their best.More than 50 years ago, this drink was invented for children with the flu. Today, more than one third of the sales come from adults buying it for themselves, and adult use of the drink has increased by 57% since 2012.

Make social listening a priority for your brand and business, and you just may uncover a whole new segment to target and make sales to.