Do you have the latest social media marketing tips – Here’s some you should certainly add to the list if you want to enjoy success.
Have A Plan For Your Social Media Channel
Many companies find it overwhelming to have to create content for their social media channel. Worse, some companies create one type of content and then send it out across their social media platforms.
You need to be creating a plan for a social media channel. Your plan needs to include choosing a channel (i.e. Facebook), the goal (i.e. sales goal), who you are targeting, the structure, type of content (i.e. video), your tone (i.e. funny), the desired action (what behaviour do you want from the user) and your channel integration.
Consistently Deliver Content
One of the quickest ways to grow the number of followers you have is to be consistent. Put the proper system in place to make sure you are always providing relevant posts that are valuable and interesting to your audience.
Don’t overwhelm your followers by providing the same types of posts repeatedly, instead manage your categories and make sure you are not repeating posts.
Strategically Implement Hashtags
One way to help to increase your social media success is to avoid random hashtags and instead use a strong hashtag that will tie your campaign pieces together. Use a hashtag that’s both easy to remember and easy to spell.
Make sure it’s not already being used by someone else. Once you have your hashtag created you should follow the conversation and then join it.
Try Pinterest And See If It Works For Your Brand
Pinterest is a popular social media channel, especially among women. You do not necessarily have to have something visual to show to be successful with Pinterest. Play with it, experiment, see if it can be helpful in branding your product.
There you now have 4 excellent tips that should be part of your repertoire for social media marketing success.
10 Ways To Build Your Credibility On Social Media
Social media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool that can help you to reach a potentially unlimited number of people with the very minimum investment in terms of time, money and effort.
But while social media might be incredibly powerful, it’s still only going to be as good as the strategy you have in place and if you haven’t first established yourself as a credible authority then you’ll find that everything you do falls on deaf ears.
To improve your effectiveness then, you should make this one of your biggest focuses.
Here are ten ways to build that credibility:
Create a Blog
Then fill it with well-researched, in-depth and informative posts and share them on social media. This is content marketing 101 and one of the best ways to establish trust and authority. If you can’t write, hire someone who can to do it for you.
Build Followers
Unfortunately, if you have a social media account with 14 followers, you will have a hard time convincing people to put stock in what you say. Of course, it shouldn’t necessarily matter but it does. People see this as an indicator of your authority. So get to work growing that number.
Be Personal
People like to know that there’s a real human being behind a social
media account which can help to build trust and therefore credibility.
Every now and then posting a personal image will help to build that connection with your fans.
But Not Too Personal
That said, a drunken rant or a Tweet about your toilet habits can also seriously undermine your respectability. You might think it’s amusing/poignant, but your business account is not the place for that kind of content.
Branding
Your social media pages should have strong branding that utilizes high definition images and well written information. Make sure that everything says ‘quality’.
Spelling
Does a misspelling necessarily mean that your interesting fact isn’t true? It shouldn’t do really but to a large portion of your audience it does.
Post Regularly
If you go days, weeks or months on end without posting then your social media will look like a ghost town which suggests it’s not a professional account.
Network
One of the easiest ways to be persuasive is to appeal to another authority on a given subject. If you can get a referral from another big social media account, then this will help you greatly.
Participate
Communities on social media give you a chance to answer questions and demonstrate that you know your stuff. You should consider this almost as an opportunity to ‘advertise’ your expertise and know how.
Deliver Quality
Most importantly: make sure that all your posts are interesting/entertaining and that you are consistently delivering quality and value.
Reasons To Use Social Media In Your Business
If you run a business and you’re interested in extending your reach and spreading the word to as many potential customers as possible, then ignoring social media is simply not an option.
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for any business that wants to promote itself to a large audience and has been instrumental in the success of many modern products and services.
In case you’re still thinking you can do without it, read on to see some of the reasons you should definitely be using social media:
The Market Is Huge
It’s a well-known fact that Facebook would be the third largest country in the world were you to take every member and put them in one place.
That’s an absolutely insane number of users that you can gain access to then, simply by signing up to the platform and starting to promote yourself there. Then if you consider all the other social media platforms available, this is simply too huge of an opportunity to miss.
It’s Conducive To ‘Virality’
If you want an idea, video or article to ‘go viral’ then you need social media. Social media’s design makes it perfectly suited to helping media to go viral as all the tools for sharing and are right there and the networks are already in place.
It’s Interactive
Social media isn’t just about reaching your audience, it’s also about interacting with them. Because social media lets you respond to comments, it means that you can actively engage with them and thereby build a relationship.
It’s Personal
Social media is also personal and often the networks that are in place are based on real-world social networks. So, when you see that someone ‘likes’ a product that isn’t just a meaningless statistic, it is a referral from a friend or colleague who you trust.
It’s Targeted
When you sign up to a given social media channel as a user, you will start out by giving your personal details. These include your name, age, marital status and more.
In other words, you are providing tons of information that can then be used by businesses to identify their precise target demographic. You don’t just have a huge market here but a tailored one!
And there’s more!
Social media has many benefits beyond these five though. Whether it’s the incredible networking possibilities you’re interested or the tools and apps that make it so easy to manage your accounts there are many more ways that social media sets itself apart as one of the most powerful tools available to businesses of all sizes.
What Is The Ideal Length of Your Content On Social Media Platforms
How long should a Twitter post be? Well, how long is a piece of string?
In reality the ‘ideal length’ of any content is likely to vary depending on your niche/ industry, your target demographic and the intent of said post.
That said though, statistically speaking there are some useful guidelines to keep in mind when deciding how long to make any given post.
Here we will look at what has been shown to be most successful across a variety of platforms:
On Twitter the ideal length for a post is apparently 100 characters. This is according to Twitter’s own ‘best practices’ guidelines where they state that tweets of 100 characters or less enjoy 17% higher engagement. That’s not an insignificant stat so keep it short and Tweet!
Research from Buddy Media though only somewhat supports this claim, finding that retweets peak for Tweets of 100 characters while longer ones do better than shorter ones. It seems that 100 is definitely the Tweet spot (sorry).
It seems that brevity is also preferred on Facebook where 40 characters and less seem to do best. Jeff Bullas conducted a study on retail brands on Facebook and found that short posts and particularly those below 40 characters would receive 86% higher engagement.
Many more studies have similarly supported the idea that shorterdoes- better on Facebook. The point to remember is that people are in a rush. All the time. And especially on social media. If your content is really long, chances are they won’t read the whole thing.
Blog Posts
While it’s not social media, chances are that you’ll be integrating your social media strategy with content marketing. So how long should a blog post be?
According to a site called ‘Medium’ the content that gets the most attention is 1,600 words, taking the average reader 7 minutes to read.
It seems that a little more depth is actually a good thing at this point!
Gaining The Trust of Your Audience On Social Media
Marketing is largely about building and maintaining trust. It’s one thing to be able to reach out to a huge audience but that doesn’t mean anything if said audience is simply going to ignore everything you post.
This is why it’s so incredibly important that you ensure you are doing everything you can to build the trust of your followers and to establish yourself as an authority.
So how do you go about doing that?
How Building Trust Works
The first thing to understand when it comes to building trust and authority through social media or any other means, is that it takes time. This is not going to be something that happens overnight or with a single post but rather something that you need to develop and build on.
At first when people read your posts, they are likely to pretty much ignore them. If you manage to get them to stop and take it in and if you manage to teach them something, then it might sink in. Still though, they are unlikely to become paying customers at this point.
The second time they notice a quality post of yours though, you might find that it registers with them and sparks a memory but only if your branding is good.
In other words, they might remember that they enjoyed the post you shared last time and therefore they might decide to pay attention to you in future.
Over time they will then go from ‘taking note’ of what you say, to actively seeking you out’. It’s only once you reach this latter point that you will then have their trust and attention and it’s only then that you can start effectively making sales.
The trick here then is consistency and quality. It’s tough going to continually be posting relevant, informative and accurate information but that’s what it takes to really become a thought leader in your industry or niche.
Helping Things Along the Way
There are a few things you can do to speed up the process though. For one, if you can get a mention from someone that your audience already trusts this can go a long way by sharing some of that trust.
Likewise, it’s also important to engage with your audience, to respond to their questions and to make sure you appear approachable and responsive.
Pay close attention to what the leading names in your industry are doing and you should be able to pick up more pointers that way. It’s not by accident that some accounts rise to the top but rather through careful planning and hard work.