Wednesday 2 December 2015

Quick social media tips for beginners

I have worked in social media before, but only as part of a wider role and only really to help out other people here and there. social media marketing plan template I’m therefore little more than a beginner myself, so I thought it would be good to put together a list of things I wish I’d known about the various platforms when I first started using social. Plus it’s just nice to have everything in one place. I’m writing this assuming you understand the basic technical ins and outs of these sites, such as writing a tweet or uploading a photo to Instagram. If you’re not consistently posting content your followers will lose interest. There’s no reason not to shout about good stuff you’ve done in the past, especially if you have evergreen content.It’s annoying. Include imagery in your tweets where possible. People are much more likely to share this kind of content. Wendy’s following is just over 1,500, but this published post got more than 61,500 views, 350 likes and 500 comments! 60,000 people outside of Wendy’s network were exposed to her and her work.While most posts will not achieve such extreme reach, all posts have the potential to reach new people.Each time you publish, all of your connections and followers will receive a notification. The post also has a chance to be included in the email LinkedIn Pulse sends out to its members with suggestions for posts that might interest them.To increase your chances of success with Publisher, create professional-looking posts that address the needs and pain points of your audience. Make sure you avoid adding spammy or promotional information.
Post valuable content that your network will share with their connections, and your reach will grow even more. social media marketing world Unless your company is a big brand, it’s unlikely your customers are scattered across multiple social media channels.Therefore, to make the most of your limited resources, find the one channel that is densely populated with your ideal customers and inhabit it like no other. If you run a small business, creating or curating content can be relegated to the back burner. The problem is that an erratic publishing schedule can alienate your audience and break trust. There’s a way around this.Schedule a baseline of curated content. While there are a number of tools out there that can help, lately I’ve been choosing to use Hootsuite’s new Suggested Topics under its Publisher tab. As I mentioned, this is baseline content. If you want to rock your social media marketing, you still need to create and curate your own posts, as well as engage with your audience. However, this tool lets you stay in front of your audience even when you’re making sales calls, writing proposals and brewing that second pot of coffee.One thing that holds many businesses back from actively posting on social media is having to come up with ideas for what to post. When you batch content and social media update creation, it’s much easier to come up with interesting ideas for status updates relating to that content.

Don’t overlook niche social media sites

When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. social media marketing tips But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites.If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious.Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category. It takes a lot of time and effort to attract visitors to your website. When you do attract relevant visitors, it’s important to maximize the potential of that visit even after they leave your website.
Whenever you create a piece of content (article, podcast or video) for your blog or website, social media marketing tools come up with a list of 10 to 20 social media posts at the same time that can be used to promote that piece of content.This same concept will work for your product pages, sales pages or any other piece of content you want to promote. Once you have a list of social media updates, add the updates to a spreadsheet to keep track of them all in one location. This can be a simple spreadsheet that includes just the update and a link to the content, or it can be a more elaborate one that tracks all of your content and social media updates for multiple networks.This will save you a lot of time over the long run. Also, you build a library of tweets and status updates that you can use for years to come. Whenever you need to schedule some updates, just come back to the spreadsheet, create a .csv file, import it into a program like Hootsuite and you’re good to go. By publishing new and previously published content on LinkedIn, you can grow your audience and network while increasing your status as an expert.Through this open publishing platform, your original content becomes part of your company’s profile, is shared with your trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. There are now great retargeting options where you can follow your website visitors to other sites like Twitter and Facebook, and encourage them to take further action.

Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter

The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. marketing social media You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these directories and odds are many will follow you back.Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community.Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later. Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?) As with anything in life, nobody likes a know-it-all. Be humble. Ask questions. Teach, but don’t preach. Let others do the hyping for you. And they will if you’re helpful and humble. For example, to target your website visitors on Facebook, display “page like” ads and encourage them to become fans. This currently costs us 15 cents per fan. In return, we get a relevant fan and another place to reach our audience. Whether you are running a small, local operation, or heading a global, enterprise-level effort, the statistics above make it clear: Your customers are online.
They are interacting in social channels with their friends, colleagues, and other brands in search of information, recommendations, and entertainment. benefits of social media marketing If your company is not around to answer, a competitor will be. In doing so, your competitor will quite likely take away the customer at hand, along with anyone else listening.There are tons of opportunities to add value—even to delight!—and making that connection can help build a person's relationship with a company, brand, or representative. Those relationships create the foundation for what can eventually become one of your greatest marketing assets: customer advocacy. Advocacy is the nirvana of social media, and it is through advocacy that your efforts start to truly scale and grow. It shows that your brand is doing such an amazing job that your customers shout about your brand from rooftops, sharing their opinions and experiences with their networks. That sharing is the best marketing a brand can ask for. Identifying potential advocates is a good first step. You can use social tools (many of which are outlined in the rest of this guide), site data, customer data, and even your own observations to help you pick out which customers are likely to go to bat for your brand. You'll want to figure out what is most important to those potential advocates.

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