Social media offers various benefits to business owners. The evolution of different social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn means that you need to be updated on both the general and the specific aspects of each channel to meet your social media goals.
Here are five tips on social media that will help you save time and gain exposure, more followers, better conversion rates, and greater engagement:
1. Know what’s hot. If you can post information that is current and relevant to your niche, and more importantly, to your customers, you will give your audience a reason to read your social media posts and visit your site from there.
A good tool is uvrx.com. Powered by personalized Google searches, it displays results for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and other platforms. Social-sercher.com is another search tool designed to allow users to review how their chosen keywords are performing on their social media channels. It offers analytics, revealing people to follow, feelings associated with keywords, and the type of posts that are doing well.
2. Social networks speak a new language. And the language is that of images, videos, and infographics. This type of media is generating excellent engagement numbers for businesses that have made it a standard practice to use creatively.
Vine, the app to share videos on Twitter, Instagram, and Flipboard are just a few applications that increase the attractiveness of your posts and help them to stand out in the timelines of users. Creative calls to action can help build a bridge between entertainment, information, and lead generation.
3. Grow your base. Reaching out to followers, subscribers, and friends is key to creating a successful and enjoyable social media campaign.
One way to find new customers is by paying for ads on Facebook or Twitter as a way to increase the number of followers and “likes”, promote blogs, or make offers. Another option is to pay for the LinkedIn Premium subscription which allows you the opportunity to reach potential prospects or partners through InMail.
Another basic (but often overlooked) trick to attracting subscribers to your Facebook page is to direct message the link to new Twitter followers. Similar techniques should be used across all social media platforms to capture the interest of your audience members already on the radar.
4. Save time. Whether you’re running a one-man business or one that uses consumer information through customer relationship management systems, you need to automate certain processes. If you don’t, then these will become slopes that you will begin to avoid, which will decrease their effectiveness.
Some activities that you can put in automatic mode include publishing updates between various platforms, sending emails and SMS with favorite topics, and uploading social media content to the cloud.
5. Accept the change. When a social platform changes its guidelines, you have two options: Adapt or give up. When you bet on the first option, you give yourself a chance to occupy the space left by someone who left the battle.
For example, a recent update to Facebook prohibited advertising the winners of contests held on the platform through the site. Last month, LinkedIn made improvements such as the ability to block spam profiles and messages. These are clear benefits for popular LinkedIn groups that have to deal with large amounts of spam. As you can see, it pays to be updated.
While some of these tricks may seem like common sense activities, the ones that might surprise you with their effectiveness are those that come from observation and learning. Entrepreneurs can be too busy and forget to take time each week for creative thinking. Do strategic thinking regularly and keep looking for ways to get better results with your social media marketing.
