Written by ContentPowered.com
Social media marketing sounds like a complicated job, something that requires a department of workers, an outside firm or at the very least a committee. Yes, it’s a complex field, but it’s absolutely possible to master it solo. You can become a powerhouse in social marketing in a surprisingly short time; all you need is a bit of understanding for the platforms.
Tip: Use Every Platform Available (Within Reason)
At the very least, you’re going to want to promote your business through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and probably LinkedIn. Depending on your bunesiness, you may want to establish a presence on Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. If your business is small and can benefit from a very social, casual attitude, you may consider Reddit and other social forums. If you have specific international users, you may consider profiles on Orkut (Brazil), Bebo (Europe), QZone (China) or Yandex (Russia). For every platform, you need to do a few things when you set up a profile.
- Pick a good vanity URL or account name that relates to your business.
- Fill out your profile completely, including location information if possible. Local searchers love finding local businesses.
- Include links to other social profiles in your About information. Facebook should link to Google+ and Twitter, Twitter should link to Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn should link to all of them – and so on.
- Hold off on posting until you’re ready to launch, outside of test posts. Make test posts invisible. You don’t want to attract users to a profile that won’t be active for another week.
Tip: Leverage Your Email Lists
When your profiles are ready to launch, make use of your email subscribers. When you send out a newsletter, include links to your social profiles in your footer. Make one of your featured stories an announcement about your social profiles opening up to the public, and take the time to invite users to sign up and follow you. Make sure you have some introductory content for them to see when they get there.
Tip: Schedule Posts and Maintain Activity
With every site, follow a posting schedule to maximize your activity. Twitter can stand numerous posts per day, due to their short length, as long as they’re different and interesting. Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn might only benefit from a single post each day; sometimes two. If you have a cross-country userbase or a global audience, you may consider automated posts for different time zones.
Too many people treat social media marketing channels like legs of a table; the table surface is your website, with each leg representing a separate and distinct social media channel. In reality, you could consider the whole system to be a braid of hair; several intertwined channels that bleed amongst each other, with some orbiting frizz and a grand coming-together at the bottom, where your website sits at the bottom of the funnel. Don’t be afraid to direct users from one marketing channel to another. You don’t need to force every post to direct traffic to your website; you can Tweet about a Facebook post, use Google+ to share something you said on LinkedIn or use Facebook to direct users to your Pinterest page.
Tip: Ask Audiences Questions
It doesn’t matter what social network you’re using, you’re there to be social. You’re there to engage users and get them to humanize your brand. To do this, you need to establish yourself as an interesting entity to talk to. Ask questions and, when users respond, use their responses to strike up a discussion. Run polls and use the feedback for interesting conversations. Ask questions does a few things to benefit you. First, it gets users commenting with their answers. Comments are a form of engagement, and engagement grows your brand reputation. Second, it gives you insight into your audience, which allows you to better target the things they’re interested in learning or hearing about. Third, it gives you subjects to blog about and post about in the future.
Tip: Forget the Numbers
In a broad sense, social numbers are important. If you have more Twitter followers, more Facebook fans and more people in your Google+ circles than your competition, you’re probably doing better in the social sphere. However, that’s only true within limits. It’s easy to spend a few bucks and inflate those numbers, but it’s not the numbers that are important. It’s the people behind the numbers. That’s what you need to remember; everything you do on social media is about the people. Higher social media numbers are just an indication of a larger interested audience. To gain and maintain this audience, you need to make your page worth following and, more importantly, worth interacting with on a regular basis. That means, when you post, your posts need to put the user first. The key with social media is to realize you’re not using it as an advertising platform, you’re using it as a means to build trust. Once your users trust you, they’ll be much more willing to click through to your site and, once there, click through to your products. If you’ve built up sufficient trust, users will put their faith in your products and will give them a try.
Tip: Develop a Social Media Calendar
On one hand, social media is all about the organic interactions between your brand and your customers. You can’t plan when an irate customer will leave a negative review. You can’t plan when a user will ask a valuable question. To a certain extent, you need to be available to respond at a moment’s notice. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean managing your social media profiles is a full time job. It can be, yes, but it doesn’t have to be. To help alleviate the problem, you can take steps to automate some of the menial tasks you’re confronted with every day.
- Automatically follow anyone who follow you on Twitter.
- Schedule Tweets and posts on Facebook and other networks to land at calculated times.
- Tailor your notifications such that you’re only notified of the important interactions in real time; comments you can respond to should take precedence over a notification of a simple retweet, for example.
You should establish a calendar for your posts, as well. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at 3 P.M., you can share blog posts on Facebook and Google+. Every day, twice a day, you can tweet about your business, as long as you’ve spent some time responding to other tweets and sharing posts you didn’t make. A schedule does not have to be rigid, but it has to be a framework you can use to guarantee activity with a minimal amount of effort. With the right mindset and judicious uses of automation and pre-planning, social media management is easily a one-person job. You can be a powerhouse; you just need to establish a system.
