As you know Social Media has opened up a new world of opportunities for companies and individuals alike. But as a company, how can you use it to your advantage? How do you use it effectively? It is not always easy to know what to do when you hit a plateau from social networking, that is why we have provided seven effective ways to help you improve your Social Media Marketing.
1. Create a Twitter Card for your business
Twitter cards help drive engagement and increase traffic to your website by adding more content, media, and calls to action on your tweets. There are 8 different types of Twitter cards to choose from to fit your business needs. Twitter cards come with their very own set of analytics data to see how successful the card is doing, and much engagement they promote.
2. Grow your email list
There has been a lot of talk about email being dead when in fact email is still very popular. According to a survey by Exact Target, they reported 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis.
What does this have to do with social media?
Email can be a big player in a marketing campaign. You can use social media to gain more email subscriptions. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to offer incentives or prizes to the consumers who join your email subscription.
There are different ways to do so, for example, you can run a giveaway and make one of the required entries a link to your email subscription page. Format it to where the participant will receive a code that can be entered back into the giveaway to receive the entry points.
3. Send the right message to the right platform
You want to understand the different social platforms and the audience it attracts. Rampton from Entrepreneur stated, “Evan Page, a writer for HootSuite explains that Twitter users enjoy an image that has been attached, Facebook users like pictures, and can’t stand asking for likes, and Google+ followers are passionate brand advocates.” You should also test these platforms to see how your audience responds. It is also important to understand the demographics of each social platform.
4. Use posts that are useful to your audience
Reach out to your target audience and provide information they are interested in such as answering questions and providing feedback. Remember to be consistent throughout your social media, but that doesn’t mean adding the same content on all channels. Your audience didn’t come to see an archive of tweets on another channel, that isn’t what those media platform are meant for.
5. Share at the best times and more than once
Be sure to cover multiple time zones by posting the same content more than once, allows you to reach your followers in different areas globally. Other benefits include gaining more traffic and engagement with people who have followed you since your last post. Many of your posts will remain relevant months after you publish them. Previously posted content will still provide value to any new followers.
6. Don’t just rely on organic strategies
Organic strategies are fine, but there are also other things that can help to increase traffic to your website. Working on a Digital Marketing Plan is something that could definitely make the difference. Social media opens up opportunities for many businesses and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter which are 2 of the major social media platforms that offer the ability to purchase ads and create a fan page. By purchasing ads you are able to reach a broader audience outside of your contacts in a more fast and effective way, and creating a fan page allows your audience the ability to reach out and contact you on that particular platform.
7. Acknowledge and reach out to viewers involved with your content
One of the main reasons you have social media success is because of the people who share your content. It is important to acknowledge and interact with those people, especially on the media platforms they are active on. It helps to build both your connections and your visibility by seeking out the people who are actively and regularly spreading your content. Once you begin to engage with these people, they may start contacting you and sharing on other media channels they are on. Remember, these people are doing this just because they like your content, and that’s enough of a reason to pursue interacting with them. Methods of doing this include:
- Thanking people who like your Facebook posts.
- Thanking or messaging them when they share your content on Twitter.
- Use Google+ to mention and thank all the commenters on your content.
- Giving shout-outs toindividual followers on any media platform, because dedicated fans like being acknowledged.This can be done with:
- Google+: Do a “Best Of” post with a couple links of that person’s post and write on why you feel viewers should notice this person
- Facebook: Make a post series that points out members of the audience doing great work with sharing.
- Twitter: Determine a day to tweet out to several of your viewers to give them some acknowledgment to your whole following, make sure tweet one last time to say why you’re doing this
- LinkedIn: Use the publishing platform to highlight an audience members work and explain why people should consider adding them to their network.
- Answer and ask questions from your audience, it’s both simple and powerful, getting to know your audience and what they like about your content means you’ll know better on how to keep and attract more viewers.
Authors
This article was written by University of Missouri – St. Louis Social Media Marketing Undergraduate students Renee Richardson, Miquel Subira Ribas, Kyle Dermody, Kathleen Harris, and Martin Gwozdz.
References
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-boost-posts-promoted-posts/
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235906
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/9-best-from-buffer/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/18-social-media-marketing-ideas/