social media marketing tips Archives

Building Your Brand: Social Media Marketing 105

Businesses big and small all use social media to connect and communicate with their customers. Many bigger businesses pay for a social media strategist, but we believe you can handle the basics on your own! In “Building Your Brand: Social Media Marketing” editions 101-104, we covered the basics of social media, building your brand, and how to gain traffic with search engine optimization. Now that you’ve got your social media profiles up and running, we’ll take the skills you’ve learned and put them to work creating high quality, desirable content for your viewers.

Experts in social media marketing agree that content is the single most important factor in your brand’s online presence. But it’s not as simple as snapping a photo and uploading it to your page. There are over 3 billion people active on social media, including your customers and colleagues. If you want your clients to engage with your content, you have to make your posts stand out.

Give The People What They Want

There’s not one formula for creating high quality content, and not one thing that makes people share a post. What works for one brand might cause your business to lose followers. You have to know your audience, and what they want. The New York Times published a study about social media engagement, highlighting factors that motivate people to share content. The study found that people use social media shares to:

woman with hijab on looking at her phone smiling — *Grab potential customers with emotional content that draws them to you.*

Define themselves to others
Engage with valuable and entertaining content
Grow and nourish relationships
Spread the word about products and causes they care about

The study also found that for people to engage with it, content must be inspirational, meaningful, or informational. Your content should convey:

Emotion: If something isn’t emotional, we tend to pass it by. Even content that fills the reader with sorrow, or fear, will gain more engagement than something shallow.

Humanity: We all crave connection! Storytelling is a great way to forge relationships virtually. Tell the story of your business, a product, or your community to create relatable content that makes people feel good when they read it.

Information: Posts that offer insight or information get shares at incredible rates, across niches and platforms. Posting how-to videos, educational blogs, or an infographic can boost your views, and establish you as an expert in your field.

The bottom line? Create authentic, evocative content and the rest will fall into place. But in case it doesn’t, we’ve compiled some of the best tips and tricks for engaging, shareable content.

Tips and Tricks

Engage, engage, engage! When someone mentions you, tags you in a post, or shares your content, respond to them as quickly as you can! That might be as simple as a thank you, or it could involve some problem-solving customer service. Either way, it shows that you care about your clients and will help to get your name out there.
Engage right away when you get a notification and do not be afraid to seek feedback!

A picture is worth 1,000 words. Humans are simple creatures. We see something attractive, we like it, we share it. It really is that simple: posts with images are 150% more likely to be shared than those with just text. They also have an engagement rate that is 40% higher than posts without images.

Don’t be afraid to go live. People love engaging with live action. Studies show that brands who go live see views grow by 113%, so it might be time to get over your stage fright! Going live doesn’t have to be a scripted performance. You can pop on quickly to introduce a new product or service or give a demonstration, or go for a lengthier live post showing “a day in the life” or a tour of your workspace.
Seek feedback. Customers love to have their voices heard. Try hosting an “Ask Me Anything”, posting a poll, or sending out a survey.

Put a face on it. Keep it personal by highlighting the individuals who make your businesses tick. You can share a client success story, or post a weekly staff profile.

Share customer content. Sharing content from your community shows that you value their posts, and gives you a break from creating your own content. You can ask people to share photos of your product or service using your branded hashtag, and then reshare their creative images. Since user-generated content is voluntarily produced by real-life consumers, it feels more authentic, and can boost your credibility.

It’s a well known fact that social media trends come and go. Videos and blogs go viral for about a week, and the creators are never heard from again. But the strategies we have given you are tried and true, and will help you keep creating content that gets noticed and shared. These tips and tricks will help you form human connections with your customers and community, and these connections will last much longer than a video of a grumpy cat.

Building Your Brand: Social Media Marketing 103

Thanks to social media, connection and communication has never been easier. Companies are building personalized relationships with clients through social media platforms, using online marketing strategies, digital events and sales, and even managing customer service through social media. Tech-savvy business owners are using social media to network and engage with customers locally and internationally. With our social media marketing series, you can too.

In Social Media Marketing 101, we covered forming a mission statement and introduced the 6 major social media platforms. We also looked at how social media can be used to boost your business, research your competition, and even form partnerships. In Social Media Marketing 102, we discussed creating profiles, finding the voice of your brand, and using social media effectively. Now that you have an identity and presence, it’s time to increase your visibility across social media platforms and draw in new clients.

What is visibility?

“Increasing visibility” means exactly what it sounds like: getting your pages seen. You’ve dedicated time and energy to creating social media profiles and coming up with engaging content. Now it’s time to be sure that people are actually seeing your hard work! When a consumer searches for keywords related to your field, you want your profiles to show up as a result. Here are some helpful ways to expand your reach and draw fresh faces into your online community.

Choose the right time to post

We touched on timing in Social Media Marketing 102, but this is worth repeating: timing is key. Social networking platforms use algorithms based on engagement (meaning clicks, likes, and shares) to determine how your posts are ranked in search engines (more about this later!). The more people engage with your posts and pages, the higher their ranking is. So, you’ll want to bolster engagement by posting during peak social media traffic hours:

Morning: 5-7 am. Many people wake up to an alarm on their phone, and spend the first few minutes of their day checking in on social media accounts, or scrolling while sipping their coffee.
Lunch hour: 12-2 pm. Students and employees will often browse social media during lunch breaks to escape the classroom or office for a while.

Evening: 5-7pm. After work many people enjoy decompressing by tuning in to social media. This is one of the best times to capture their attention, as people commute home or look for distractions from their daily worries and evening chores.

Late night: 9-11pm. Studies show that more and more people use social media at night to relax and unwind before bed.

These time frames are only relative to your local time zone. If your business takes place internationally or across time zones, you’ll have to consider timing your posts correctly. There are many free automated post scheduling resources available, like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Crowdfire that can help if you want to cater to a time zone that is vastly different from yours.

Create useful, exciting content

This might seem obvious, but if you want to increase the number of people viewing your content, it needs to be high quality, interesting, and useful. People should want to watch and share it.

For 2020, the top-trending content is video.This might be “brand stories” that highlight the consumer experience, informational how-to videos, live Q&A chats, or inspiring motivational videos.
People enjoy educational content that adds value to their life. Consumers want to know that you’re an expert, and they want to feel a little like an expert, too. Teach them something and they’re likely to share it with their own network, spreading your name via word of mouth (or tweet!).
High quality content is worth the work! You want to “wow” your online community. Try using bright, beautiful infographics or quotes, unique photographs, and high-resolution videography to make your content stand out.

Incentivize Sharing

Increase visibility by offering sharing incentives such as discounts or free shipping.

In addition to creating exciting, beautiful, and useful content, you can also increase the return on your content by encouraging viewers to share it with their networks. Here are some ways to incentivize sharing:

Offer an in-house discount, free shipping, or extra entry into a contest for sharing a social media post.
Host an engagement campaign: For every like/comment/share, your business can donate money or time to a foundation you care about.
Re-posting people’s commentary on your content is an easy way to let your viewers know you’ve heard what they’re saying and that you value their feedback.
Have employees include social media icons in their email signatures and social media profiles. Encourage them to share posts with their own networks.

Social media marketing can be an uphill battle. Sometimes it might seem like you’re at mercy of unknown powers, but you can take matters into your own hands. Following these tips for posting timely, engaging content, encouraging sharing, and understanding a little bit about algorithms and SEO is the first step toward mastering social media marketing.

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