Wednesday 2 December 2015

Social Media Marketing Tips for beginners

Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your products or services through the various social media channels. social media marketing plan template The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers or find more customers.The most popular social media networks today are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and Linkedin. It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media.It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them.It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.It’s the new influencer – more and more studies indicate that social media is turning into business as well with more companies stating that they have found customers from Facebook or Twitter. Visual content can act as a “gateway” to more valuable content. When planning visual content to post on social platforms, think in terms of how it can drive traffic back to your website, products and services.For example, in this SlideShare deck Constant Contact included a link back to a resource page listing multiple blog posts with related content.
Link a short video back to your website from your YouTube Account or from your Instagram profile link and make sure you provide expanded content around the video. social media marketing world For example, Final Cut King drives his fans on Instagram back to longer content on his YouTube channel by asking them to click the link in the description of his Instagram account. Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter (visualize them here on Internet Stats live), which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.Creating the best possible tweet has never been more important. Adding visual appeal to your tweet is a very smart way to get your most important content noticed.You can add up to four images per tweet or one fantastic image if you want. The choice is yours! To add multiple images, use regular Twitter. This isn’t available on any of the third-party sites. Here’s an example of a tweet with multiple images on Twitter. Over the past two years, I’ve moved to adapt written content for multiple platforms, like YouTube, to increase my reach and visibility.For example, by turning one of my List25 articles into video every week, I’ve grown the YouTube channel to 1.3 million subscribers and amassed over 200 million video views. A similar tactic with WPBeginner articles has grown subscribers to over 8,000, and the channel has increased sales for my WordPress plugins.

Decide which social media platform(s) to use

As a beginner to social media you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at the same time. social media marketing tips This is a mistake that many beginners do and at the end they quit without having any benefit.A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find the influencers and analyse where they have success. For example find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, twitter followers, Google+ followers, Pinterest followers etc.If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 10,000 twitter followers then this is a good indication that FB is more suitable for your niche than twitter. It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than twitter so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any other platform. Changing content formats doesn’t have to involve just videos. You can also convert snippets from your existing articles into images—which tend to have better reach on Facebook. These images allow you to leverage the power of social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram. Have you written a lot about one specific topic on your blog? Why not combine those articles into an ebook and use it to build your email list?If you’re not changing content format to improve your overall reach, then you aren’t maximizing the full potential of your content.
So many organizations feel overwhelmed by the need to create content for every social media channel on the planet. social media marketing tools Or worse yet, many brands create one type of content and then blast that content onto every social platform. If that’s you, you need a social media channel plan.Most likely, your goals are different on each social platform. Since that’s the case, the content you develop for that platform needs to be different as well. Here are the components for your channel plan. And this is exactly why content marketing isn’t easy. But if you leverage a social media channel plan correctly, you’ll be able to double down on the channels that work for you and be realistic with your resources on the other channels. One of the best ways to grow your following and increase engagement on social media is to be there consistently. The first step is to put the right systems in place to keep your posts relevant, interesting and valuable for your audience. Enter Edgar. I found out about Edgar a couple of months ago and love the platform.You can also schedule repeat posts indefinitely, so your content schedule never runs dry. Plus Edgar allows you to upload custom images for your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts.Edgar allows you to create your own content categories so you can keep track of the specific types of posts you’re releasing; this ensures you don’t overwhelm your followers with the same types of posts over and over.

Optimize your social media profiles

Once you decide which social media tools you will use (at least for the beginning), the next step is to optimise your profiles on those sites. marketing social media By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.ome general rules that apply to all sites are:Use a real photo, showing your face – avoid using animals, places or anything that is not real. Social media is about connecting people and if you want to have a trusted profile you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the web!Write a good description about yourself or your company – What is your background or expertise? What are you proud off? Mention this is your profile.Give an indication to users what type of info you will share – Although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind of info to expect from the particular person. For example in my twitter profile I wrote: “..tweeting SEO, social media, internet marketing tips and advice”.Include a link to your website (where applicable) – On Facebook include a link in the ‘About section’, on Twitter and Pinterest in the ‘Web site Section’, on Google+ in the ‘Contributor to’ section. In other words, do use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.I suggest you read SEO boost your social media profiles article which includes more examples and instructions on what you have to do to each social media site for more exposure.
Leveraging a social media scheduler like Edgar has saved me time, helped me grasp the big picture when it comes to my social media marketing strategy and allowed me to stay on top of my game when it comes to delivering valuable content to Fire Nation. benefits of social media marketing Social media success is so often about having a conversation with the right people. If you already think in terms of building segmented lists, then you may appreciate knowing that you can effectively list-build on Google+ in many ways.Use a private community alongside regular Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) events, so you can host a dedicated, private experience while having conversations with the right people. Unlike with public communities, when you initiate your event within a private one, the members receive an event invite/notification. This is a perfect way to break through the noise and reach the right audience. If you want to be successful with your social media plan, stop random acts of hashtagging and use a good hashtag to tie all of the pieces of your campaign together.Use a hashtag that is easy to spell and easy to remember. To make sure your hashtag isn’t already being used for something else, check for it on all channels prior to using it for your campaign. Once you create your hashtag, follow and join the conversation!To follow your hashtag, use sites like Social Mention and Sprout Social. Use TwiPho for searching images on a hashtag.

No comments:

Post a Comment