With 2.8 billion active social media users,
maintaining an active presence on these networks is becoming
increasingly important in getting your business infront of your ideal
audience. These days, more and more consumers are looking to engage and
connect with their favorite brands on social - in fact, research shows
that a third of Millennials actually prefer to communicate with brands via social media.
Developing a strong social media marketing strategy will help boost
brand awareness, increase followership, drive traffic to your website
and generate leads for your sales funnel. In 2017, no brand should be
without a plan that actively places their business on social media.
Here are five simple tips to help you formulate your social strategy in order to build a stronger presence.
1. Be Clear on Your Target Audience
Knowing and understanding your target audience is the prerequisite to
a working digital marketing strategy. It’s important to know who you’re
aiming to reach in your marketing so you can focus your efforts on
engaging and connecting with that audience.
The best way to do this is by developing buyer personas.
In this process, you’ll outline the pains, challenges, and interests of
your ideal customer, enabling you to align your content to meet
those needs.
2. Know Your Social Media Goals
Every post that you publish and share on your social networks must have a goal, an intent.
Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Are you looking to
boost engagement (i.e. Likes, shares, and comments)? Or do you want to
build your leads list?
Having a clear goal in mind for each post helps you tailor your content in a way that focuses on meeting it.
3. Share Engaging Content
Sharing valuable content is at the heart of any working inbound
marketing strategy - by offering helpful advice, tips, and expertise,
you work to position your brand as an leader in your field, which will
then attract prospects to your business.
This same concept applies to your social media marketing strategy -
the goal is not to solely promote your products but to share value so
your followers view your brand as a credible, valuable source that they
can turn to for assistance.
Here are a few ways to share engaging content on social media:
- Capitalize on the engagement live-streaming videos - According to Facebook, people spend 3x longer watching live videos
versus those that have been pre-recorded. Go live by hosting Q&A
sessions, discussing a recent blog topic, or taking viewers
behind-the-scenes at an event.
- Ramp up on images - Many studies
have shown that social media messages which include images capture more
attention than those without. High-quality images that relate to your
brand, relevant memes and GIFs, infographics, and image quotes can all
be excellent content pieces which will help boost engagement with your
message.
- Increase your reach with organic video - A recent study by Quintly showed
that native videos on Facebook have a 186% higher engagement rate, and
are shared more than 1000% more, than videos linked to from other
hosting sites. You can use videos to share content, answer common
questions and provide product details and insight.
- Post links to blog content - Social media can drive
tons of traffic to blog content. When posting your link, be sure to use
an image that populates from your blog post. This way, when users click
on the photo, they’ll be directed to your blog content
While some of these may be fairly obvious to those working in
social, the accompanying data points serve as a sold reminder of the
value of these best practices.
4. Be Social
But don't simply share your content and hope people will interact
with your business. Be social - it is, after all, called 'social' media.
Comment, Like and share your follower’s content. When fans respond to
your content, highlight them in the comments. You could also message
customers and prospects personally to show appreciation for their
support.
You’ll be amazed at how these small, personal touches can give you an edge with your audience.
5. Test your results
When executing your strategy, you need to test your efforts to ensure
what you’re doing is actually working, and resonates with your
audience. Leveraging a social media management tool like Hootsuite or Buffer will
give you access to analytics tools which enable you to get a better
understanding of the shares and content which are generating the
most engagement - along with those that are not.
This is invaluable information, as you’ll be able to determine which
content to focus on and provide your audience with more of what they
want.
Conclusion
Implementing these simple tips will help guide your social media
strategy in the right direction, and move your further towards your goal
of building brand awareness, gaining followers, boosting engagement,
and ultimately, growing your leads.
What advice could you give?
By Travis Huff
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/5-steps-developing-strong-social-media-strategy
No one likes Twitter. At least, no one admits to liking it. In the last
year the social network has come under continual,
the-switch-on-the-flamethrower-must-be-broken fire for failing to deal
with harassment, becoming a home to neo-Nazis and, on top of all of
that, not even managing to make any money out of it.
Tweets criticising Twitter gain thousands of retweets, with users most
recently irritated by the decision to change the default avatar from a
cartoon egg to a faceless man. On 30 March, when the site changed its
“replies” system in a way that arguably made it harder to see who was
talking to who, users snapped. Over the course of the next week, tens of
thousands of internet opinionators flocked to Mastodon.social, a Twitter alternative.
Mastodon is a free, open-source, and decentralised social network (more
on that later). Contempt for Twitter is so vocal and raw that it was
only inevitable that, when a new competitor came along, we’d switch
right over. And we did. In our thousands. And then we switched right
back.
There are an abundance of technical reasons for Mastodon’s sudden rise
and fall. Let's start with the rise. Some features that attracted users
were: its 500-character posts (significantly higher than Twitter’s 140),
its content warning feature (that allowed users to hide sensitive parts
of posts), and its lack of adverts. Most importantly for ex-Twitter
users, the site has a strict policy that outright bans any racism, sexism, or discrimination.
But many features also turned users off. Mastodon isn’t a social
network in the same way as Twitter and Facebook. It is actually a free
and open source software (Foss) network that means anyone can create an
“instance” – of which Mastodon.social is one. Users of different
instances can see each other’s posts and interact, which can be
confusing (people have complained of not being able to find each other).
The site is also clunkier than big brand social networks, has already
shut off registration due to “exceptionally high traffic”, and suffers
from, to be honest, having a shit name. What is a Mastodon? Isn't that a
heavy metal band? How do I pronounce it? Why are tweets called “toots”?
Yet though there are an abundance of technical reasons why Mastodon
looks likely to fail, there are also an abundance of psychological ones.
Even if no one likes Twitter, plenty of us are addicted to it – and
many like the feelings it brings.
New competitors like Mastodon – and Peach, a social network which lived and died in a single week last year – simply can’t offer the same buzz.
“Changing social networks is a bit like changing mobile phone and
having to re-enter all your contacts by hand,” says Dr Sharon Coen, a
social and media psychologist at the University of Salford.
She explains
that one of the main motivations behind using social media is nurturing
social connections, and people don’t want to “lose” these connections
by moving to a different site. Not only do you lose your friends, she
adds, you also lose your memories. “A study has recently shown how
Facebook has now become a sort of personal diary for people," she says.
"Therefore abandoning it is a bit like losing a record on one’s personal
history.”
Yet some people – known as “early adopters” – are willing to take this
risk. Early adopters are tech enthusiasts who happily try out new
innovations, and Mastodon benefitted when sort-of-celebrities such as TV
writers Graham Linehan and Dan Harmon became some of theirs. But though
thousands of people signed up for the site, it simply wasn’t enough.
Who cares for Harmon when your best mate isn’t about? As Sarah Jeong in Motherboard
acutely summarised: “You aren't on Mastodon because your friends aren't
on Mastodon. Your friends aren't on Mastodon because you're not on
Mastodon. And I wouldn't be on Mastodon, either, if I hadn't promised my
editor to write an article about it.”
And although early adopters like shiny new toys to play with, most of
us are creatures of habit. It’s not a kooky coincidence that Mastodon
looks and sounds exactly like Twitter, nor is it an accident that
Facebook has spent the last few years copying Snapchat. New social
networks need to walk the tricky line between innovation and ease.
“Social networks do combine a ‘slick n quick’, intuitive user
experience, with the ability to easily and frequently share photos,
videos and written content. This appeals to our predilection for
simplicity and our limited capacity for processing information,”
explains Allie Johns, a freelance brand planner and media psychologist.
Yet at the same time, sites need to offer something new in order to be
worth the change. Mastodon offers something Twitter users desire – a big
fat no-Nazis-thanks policy – so why isn’t this working?
“Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have worked out what their
users want, as all good socio-cultural anthropologists would do. But it
took them a good few years to do that,” says Johns.
Though Twitter users
seemingly want a nicer environment, they don’t want it to be too nice.
In Motherboard, Jeong explains that many users began to find Mastodon
too clean – with content warnings for mere mentions of Donald Trump. “My
relief at being on a social network that Julian Assange does not post
on is almost perfectly counterbalanced by my regret that I cannot troll
him,” she writes.
Fundamentally, however, social networks are a place to be social. Why
would anyone swap 3,000 followers for three? Johns argues one of our
main reasons for using social media is to “build social capital”,
meaning many of us are reluctant to throw everything we’ve already built
away.
For a new network to succeed, she says, it needs to allow people
to build up this capital “quickly and creatively” – something that can’t
happen when new sign-ups are temporarily stopped, as with Mastodon. But
ultimately it is not technology, but people, that determine whether a
new social network will live or die. And people, unfortunately, are
infinitely more complex.
What do you prefer?
http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2017/04/mastodonsocial-why-does-every-new-twitter-fail
