The following is a guest post by Wendy Dessler of OutreachMama.
There is more to running a powerful social media marketing strategy than just posting your content and hoping it yields the best results. If you take this route, you will likely be disappointed with the results more often than you will be satisfied. Instead, getting attention on social media comes down to posting relevant and compelling content as well as doing everything and anything you can to boost engagement.
In short, you want to be doing more than simply sharing content to your audience. You need to take steps in boosting active engagements, as the conversation is what will push your brand ahead. This leads to the million-dollar question: what is the best way of hacking social media engagement?
Statistically speaking, social media marketing is one of the best ways to attract traffic, engage your audience, and drive sales. Today, 92 percent of marketers are already working hard at increasing exposure via social media – on platforms like Facebook and Twitter – and 80 percent of them are realizing positive traffic results. Other benefits include improved sales, reduced marketing expenses, and increased fan loyalty.
However, it is critical to emphasize that there is a huge difference between using social media socially, and using it to market your business. What works on your personal account likely work will not for your business page, especially if you are just getting started on social media or looking to grow your online audience. If you want to unleash the true power social media has, you need to leverage a few key elements. Here are five critical hacks to snowball your social media marketing efforts.
1. Perfect Your Content Strategy
As mentioned earlier, social media marketing is not only about posting and promoting your content. You need to share a wide variety of content that is of interest to your followers. Social media gives you a platform to strengthen your brand personality and voice. Once your business is capable of creating a strong brand voice, you will resonate more with your audience and bring in the right customers.
Do not beat around the bush with your audience. Instead, tell them exactly what you would like them to do. In fact, when you tell your audience what you want them to do you may increase engagement by up to an amazing 2,500 percent!
In addition, find and share content using content curation tools like Feedly. Such tools will help you find content that is relevant to your target audience based on specific keywords and keep that content organized in a single place. From there you can easily view and share content via your business’ social profiles.
2. Do Market Research
The effectiveness of any social media campaign relies on the ability of your business to appeal to the desires and values of your audience. One company that has clearly used this strategy to get into the mindset of their target audience is Airbnb, through their “Live There” campaign. The company carried out market research on their target audience and found that 86 percent used their platform because they would like to live as the locals do when they travel.
3. Use Current Events
Many people turn to social media for interaction with companies, but they also use the platforms for getting the latest information and news. One way of exponentially growing your following is by integrating both elements. This means keeping track of the trending hashtags while interacting with your audience.
Using hashtags makes it easy for you to join in discussions on events while you help your customers discover more about your brand. However, make sure you use the appropriate hashtags at the right moment. Hashtagify and other platforms will help you locate popular hashtags relative to your keywords.
In addition, make use of tools like Google Trends and Facebook Trending Topics. These tools will help you brainstorm relevant content based on current events and garner more buzz on your social media platforms.
4. Ask for Help
More and more marketers are spending time and resources on influencer marketing because it has the potential to deliever up to 11 times more ROI than other forms of online marketing. Traditional marketing is something you should consider, but here is a revolutionary idea: Why don’t you ask folks you already have relationships with to strike up conversations using your social media platforms?
For instance, once you post a killer update, talk to about five influencers that you know would be ready to help promote it. Once someone starts a conversation, others will be more likely to jump in and share what they think. To succeed in this social media growth hack, all that is required is the help of a few individuals willing to push the conversation your way.
5. Create Competitions
Competitions are a great way to encouraging engage and grow your following on social media platforms. For instance, you can have followers post their opinions on contents, like videos or images. You can also consider setting up a sweepstakes-like landing page where your web visitors can enroll in a contest to win some great giveaways.
Optionally, you can ask your followers to post photos of themselves doing something related to your particular business niche. Make the contest time-limited, giving your followers an opportunity to participate for a short duration to add some urgency to your campaign, and concentrate the engagement into a short time frame. You can even print a contest hashtag or social media call to action on promotional materials to publicize the contest.
Successful social media marketing campaigns require planning, active participation, and effort throughout the process. However, they are still worth every bit you put into them as they help to get the word out about your business, products, and services. The hacks above should provide you with the ideas and inspiration required to run your own campaign.
