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11 Killer Social Media Marketing Tips
Are you looking for killer social media tips that would supercharge your social media marketing strategies, generate more leads and sell more of your goods or services?
Do you want to know the social media marketing strategies that the experts keep in their social media management toolbox?
You don't need convincing that social media should be a vital component of your overall marketing efforts. Just look at these eye-opening statistics:
Facebook had over 2.5 billion active users every month as of the end of 2019.
Facebook is consumers’ second favorite platform for video consumption after YouTube.
Instagram reached the 1 billion monthly active user mark in June 2018.
72% of teenagers use Instagram.
LinkedIn has over 675 million monthly users.
LinkedIn drives 80% of social media B2B leads.
With these kinds of numbers, not being effective on social media would be uncivilized and with an incomplete marketing strategy.
In this article, you will learn the social media marketing tips that top social media management agencies and influencers are using to drive killer traffic to their websites and make more money.
Let's get started.
Social Media Marketing Tips
#1. Write Down Your Goals And Objectives
Since you're reading this, you understand that social media is a key channel for creating brand awareness, engagement with your audience, generating leads, providing customer support, and much more.
Question:
How can you be certain that you're getting as much value as possible from the time and resources you put into social media?
One way is by setting goals.
Don't just set your goals in your head, write them down.
Writing down your goals makes it easier to achieve them.
Create goals that are in harmony with your entire marketing strategy.
How To Attain Your Social Media Goals:
Use numbers (like, gain 1000 Twitter followers in one month).
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Always set a deadline, like we did with Twitter followers - 1000 in 1 month.
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Be specific and make your goals “SMART”
#2: Focus On The Platforms Where Your Customers Are
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Social media overwhelm is one of the biggest challenges that small businesses face.
The reason why social media marketing is challenging and overwhelming for them is their social media mindset
They think that they need to have a presence on every social platform including the latest social media platform that comes along.
This spreads them too thin and causes wasted time and effort.
The answer is ridiculously simple: if social media makes sense for your business, be where your customers are.
Find out what social media platforms where your customers are hanging out online. After you find out, choose 1 or 2 of the most relevant platforms.
Those will be the social media platforms that you enjoy and that align with your business objectives. Then laser-focus deeply on those platforms.
There are awesome strategies that you can use to find out where your customers are online.
Ask them.
Additionally, use the search functionality in each of the social channels to see if your communities are talking about your brand.
You can also use it to find topics of interest.
Google Alerts provides invaluable metrics of your website traffic.
Gmail account, is easy to set up Google alerts.
Go ahead and set up alerts for your name, business, industry, and topics of interest.
Once you have this setup, Google will be sending you insight into the conversations you want alerts on.
So you get valuable insight on the mentions relevant to your business. Where appropriate, you can join the conversation.
#3: Create Killer Content For Compounded Growth
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By now, you must have heard the content marketing mantra: Content is King!
But what exactly do digital marketers mean when they say that content is king?
How can businesses and organizations benefit from content marketing? Where exactly do you start?
Here are things not to do.
One of the most important things not to do is to create content for content’s sake.
In the early days of the internet, many organizations and businesses were told that by creating content regularly they will get better rankings and insane traffic to their website.
Even today anyone can easily churn out tons of blog posts, create dozens of podcasts, or draw up an infographic, and upload them to their website.
However, creating content without a planned, predictable approach simply means that you are wasting your time.
At worst it can eat up large amounts of the valuable resource that can be used in growing your business.
On the other hand, quality content is like a great movie.
Once you see an awesome movie, you don't care about who produced it, all you're interested in is telling all your friends all about the juicy stuff in it.
By the same token, when you publish useful content, that hits all the emotional triggers with your target audience, oh my, they’ll share it with their followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even on their blogs, and more.
True?
"Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life." – Avinash Kaushik.
If all you talk about on social media is how wonderful your goods or services are, your audience would not consider that kind of spin to be of value to them.
Killer content must be useful, valuable, compelling, engaging, and persuasive enough to make them want to share it.
That means that you must create successfully amazing content that can help you develop and build relationships with online influencers.
In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
You see, after embracing your ruthless killer content, some of your audience becomes your brand evangelists.
They make your story, their story. So, they go ahead and compound, your story - your content, with a compounded growth!
With Social Media Marketing, Go Deep, Not Broad
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Am not gonna sugarcoat this.
Get this:
Creating an awesome and a 'wow' content is not easy. That does not mean that it can not be done. Seriously, you need to set realistic social media marketing goals.
Whether you produce timely content or evergreen, audio, video, or text, knowing your goals is job one.
It will ensure that you maximize the return on your time and resources invested in content marketing.
Every content that you produce needs to be placed into one of two categories - wide or deep.
Each of the two categories has one specific goal.
While wide content attracts new audience members, deep content strengthens relationships with your existing audience.
For a killer content marketing strategy you would need to use both wide and deep content. You should not try to use one piece of content for both goals.
As far as social media marketing goes, businesses and organizations should go deep, not broad.
It is better to become a master of one or two channels than flounder in many.
As you consider your social media channels, it is highly recommended that you group them into social platforms and social networking sites.
Social platforms are like soapboxes; they allow you to establish your expertise and credibility but provide a method for feedback and discussion.
Examples of social platforms include blogging, YouTube, podcasting, and SlideShare.
On the other hand, social networks are more like real-world networking events.
Examples will include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and possibly Pinterest.
You must choose the right social platform or network for your business or organization.
Whether your business is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), it will benefit you to choose one platform and one network to focus on initially.
Then spend the time and resources and develop a deep engagement level with your ideal customers there.
As you become a master of your chosen channels, you can then start to expand into other platforms.
Be Known By The Influencers In Your Niche
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Find and seek out the influencers in your niche.
It is not just good to know them, it is better to be known by them.
You see, if you get on their radar as a fun, insightful source of useful new information or one that tweaks and puts a good spin on what they already know, they might share your content with tons of their followers.
When this happens, you just got introduced to tons of new audiences that may be interested in your products or services.
Is that not what you want?
You see, influencers are important in every industry.
They generally have “real” jobs and are extremely active on social media networks.
Most of their time is spent on sharing content and blogging. Because they are very busy, it is not easy to get on their radar.
Therefore, in order to get their attention, you will need to give away “content gifts.”Originally coined by Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, credited with coining, Social Media 4-1-1.
Social Media 4-1-1is a sharing strategy that makes it possible for a company to get more visibility with social media influencers.
If you want to be successful in your social media marketing, use the social media 4-1-1 strategy, to get more visibility for your business or organization with social influencers.
This is how it works.
This is how companies and organizations are using the social media 4-1-1 strategy.
For every six pieces of content, they share on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, for instance, four pieces of that content is from their influencer target audience that is also relevant to their audience.
That means that you are sharing content that is not yours 67% of the time.
By doing so, you are calling attention to content from your influencer group.
Out of the two pieces of your content, one of them should be original educational content that you crafted.
The other content should be sales-related.
In other words, sales-related content like a coupon, product notice, press release, or some other piece of content that no one will likely pay attention to.
The beauty of this strategy is that when you share content from your influencers, they notice.
And since your sharing their content without asking for anything in return, those influencers are more likely to reciprocate in due time.
#6. Optimize Your Facebook Ads To Drive More Traffic And Sales
Do you seriously want to increase the effectiveness of your Facebook ads?
Are you intensely looking for ways to get more out of your ad budget?
Using his killer social media strategy, you can transform your next Facebook campaign into a resounding success.
But before you invest any money in a Facebook ad campaign, understand your goals.
There are three types of goals:
Awareness
This is the kind of ad you run when you just want to teach people about your brand.
The ad helps your audience to recognize you or increase your Facebook business page visibility.
It is not about increasing site traffic or sales. The ad is specific to boosting the engagement on the content you post to a Facebook page.
It helps you get additional likes on Facebook so that you can expand your business following.
In addition, you might use the Facebook advertisement just to get an impression from Facebook users who do not currently follow or like your business.
Consideration
The consideration stage in any funnel is when you're beginning to acquire leads.
At the consideration stage, you could drive website traffic or collect contact information from consumers.
Your call to action may include visiting your website (and leaving Facebook), installing an app, or downloading a piece of content.
Depending on the type of campaign you want to run, any of those conversion campaigns could work for you.
For instance, if you are launching a pop-up event for the holidays, it’s prudent to use the event promotion option and grow your RSVPs.
At that event, you can then promote your holiday deals and discounts, as well as your products or services.
You may even drop in some videos and other branded materials to give those RSVPers a better feel of your brand and encourage them to stop by.
Keep in mind, though, that you don’t want to annoy them too much. Don’t be Candy Crush.
Conversion
You get to the conversion stage of your marketing funnel, you want your customer to take an action.
Such action may be buying your products or starting a free trial of your software.
Conversion is where all the quantifiable revenue-generating activities happen.
Keep in mind that those are not the only ads you should invest in. It is important to note that every part of the funnel is important.
However, for retailers, conversion is key to success.
And Facebook conversion stage campaigns offer ideal analytics to make sure that the ads are working the way you envisioned.
Conversion is the ultimate goal for most small businesses!
It is highly recommended that you choose the tactics that make the most sense for your current strategy.
How would you know if your ads are performing well for your strategy?
We need data and testing.
Set Up A System For Testing Your Facebook Ads
To be truly effective with your ads, you need to test. Testing your ads is so important enough that Facebook recommends it.
Facebook analytics is not impressive for visually appealing metrics.
Facebook analytics is not impressive for visually appealing metrics.
The best program for this is called AdEspresso.
The app runs a series of split tests all at once and gives you actionable, easy-to-read data on the results.
#7. Make Real-Life Connections For Your Social Media Success
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Using social media to build relationships is not always easy.
We were not born with it. It takes tons of time to acquire.
However, when done right, killer social media relationships can be very helpful in developing and maintaining strong "real-life" relationships.
Don't take my word for it.
There's even data to prove it.
Research done by The Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that 91% of people use social media to stay in touch with close friends.
Interestingly, 86% of people social media to connect with their old friends that they have lost touch.
Then 49% of people use it to connect with people who have similar hobbies or interests.
But seriously, making a transition from a relationship rooted in social media into a real-life relationship is not easy.
One of the realities is that you can't ask for a phone call from a person you've only exchanged one tweet with irrespective of how badly you want to connect with him.
The goal here is to get to a point where you have a mutually beneficial, real-life relationship with your online connection.
But how can you transition from a tweet to a phone call with someone you've just met?
Let's look at an example to see how this can work.
Connect in real life with your social media network.
Take some time to reach out via Skype or even the phone for a quick hello to people who are active in your niche or a complementary business to yours.
Many times there are great ways to partner up with people in the same niche or there are ways that complementary businesses can be referral partners.
Connections in real life or offline after connecting online or social media iare very much richer and amazingly more meaningful.
After meeting offline, you will notice an increase in your blog article retweets, shares, and comments from the people you've met in real life.
Additionally, it is much easier to have online conversations after you’ve had an offline one.
#8. Use “Here on Biz” To Connect With People in Person
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In strategy #7, we've already made the point that you should Make Real-Life Connections For Your Social Media Success.
The reason being that there is nothing more powerful than meeting people face-to-face.
You see, we connect with tons of people online, but when you put a face to that online name and even share a cup of coffee with that person, amazing opportunities arise.
What if there was an app that could help you see, for example, that an influencer in your niche was in your town for a convention?
Imagine the opportunities!
You could invite him to have a cup of coffee with you or offer to bring him out to a local hot spot.
Who knows what positive things that might come out of such networking?
The good news is there's a new iPhone app for that.
It lets you see where LinkedIn connections are as well as being able to send them text messages.
The app offers a real-time networking for business professionals to locate and interact with other professionals in their vicinity.
In addition, you can also use it to check into events.
Since meeting people in person is very important for social media success, you should start using the Here on Biz app.
It's free at the Apple App Store.
After downloading it, you just need to give it permission to access your LinkedIn account.
It connects with your LinkedIn account to show you who’s a local and who’s in town visiting that you may want to connect with.
Here on Biz is a mobile app that will identify the most valued professionals to you and when they are nearby.
You can quickly see their name and title before connecting with them.
You’re able to check into events to see if anyone within your network is attending the same event and even initiate a chat to schedule a meeting.
If you’ve ever met someone in person who changed your business, you’ll understand the opportunities this creates for you.
Look for new ways to create a real handshake with the awesome people in your social networks.
Nicholas Smoot, the company's co-founder, and CMO say that iPad, Android, and Windows Phone versions will be coming at some point.
#9. Get Social Media Metrics From Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics custom UTM parameters on links shared on social media channels.
This will pass the source (social channel name, such as Twitter), medium (content type shared, such as a blog post), and campaign (content name or title) you added for the link right into Google Analytics with your other web reporting.
With Google Analytics, you can add custom campaign parameters to your URLs.
Bonus tip: If goals are set up inside Google Analytics, you’ll also be able to tell when social media was the last source before conversion.
#10. Remember The Law Of Reciprocity
Do for others what you expect them to do for you. Do it first. You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them.
So, a good portion of the time (make it 90%) you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others. Did you get it?
#11. Social Media Marketing Is Not A Sprint, It Is A Long Distance Race
Social media marketing is not a sprint, but a long-distance race.
You must have a good plan and then work your good plan brilliantly, diligently, and consistently, at a good steady pace.
Oh, you have to be in it for the long haul, and with a good attitude - patience. With social media marketing, Return On Investment (ROI) is not immediate.
We can help you build social media marketing campaigns that get results!
The question is: are you ready?
WhatsApp us at: +234 080 331 75396