Over the past two years I’ve picked up many different tips and tricks which I am going to try and summarise below. These things though quite simple to implement have helped me not only save time, save money, but also to get amazing speakers to give talks at the events I run (SSDC / SwanseaCon).
Social Media
People often turn their noses up at particular social media sites or even social media all together, but if your pushing a brand, event or anything else it’s important to make the most of the different types of audiences and maximise opportunity!
I tend to focus on four of the following social media accounts which perhaps because of their types of users, you may not have thought of reaching out to?
- LinkedIn to me has always been a professional network for people looking for a new job or to get connections to lead to other things.
- Facebook, a place to just chat with friends, people you used to go to school with, family/friends you don’t see so much any more
- Twitter, an opportunity to follow people you’d probably never meet and see their latest thoughts or what their up to.
- Google +, I’ve always had an account but never really knew many people using the platform to interact with or share things with?
Myths
When looking on-line about social media marketing, the most common things I would read were;
- Choose only one or two social media channels
- It’s all about the number of fans/followers
- Social media cannot be measured?
From my experience I’d recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket, experiment using different networks. It’s also about quality not just the quantity of followers or interactions, just one connection could help you sell a ticket, a product, get an introduction etc. Many social media networks have built in analytics allowing you to measure audience reach, interactions (clicks/views) etc.
LinkedIn I believe is so much more than just finding that next job or building up a CV.
Getting free traffic
One simple trick you can use to drive traffic to your product or website is as simple as using the built in search and setting your professional tagline and current position.
First go to your profile and set a professional headline and also ensure your current position is related to the ‘thing’ you want them to notice. The trick is to try to catch the persons attention as soon as they view your profile.
Using LinkedIn’s’ built in search and the various filters offered (locality, industry etc) you can drill down to find potential people who may be interested in what your trying to push.
Once you’ve found a potential person just simply view their profile - when somebody’s profile gets viewed they get notified who looked and most often than not they will most probably view the profile of the person who viewed them!
Once your all searched out consider viewing your contacts to see who they are connected with, get introductions, network and spread awareness of your ‘thing’.
Facebook allows you to create a page for your ‘thing’, here you are able to create posts and schedule them to be published when ever you like for free. Facebook pages also give you various analytic’s enabling you to see how big an audience reach your posts have as well as seeing who has interacted with each post.
Though Facebook in my experience seems to be mainly a place to catch up with family, friends etc, you can do some great validation on your ‘thing’ with these people. I personally find my friends and family my toughest critics which is good, they are honest with me and it enables me to get great/quick feedback.
Twitter is a social media network that I see drives the most traffic to my website or what ever else I’m trying to promote. A way to verify this is as simple as embedding Google analytics on your website and see where the referral traffic comes from, which for me is Twitter.
Gaining followers
When trying to gain followers or drive traffic to my site a simple trick is to just view your competition and see who is following them. Follow those people, they will most often follow you back! Get peoples attention of the thing your trying to get out there!
Retweets (RTs)
Don’t be shy ask for retweets! People are understandably shy about asking for retweets. In fact, less than 1% of brands have asked for a retweet. This is a huge missed opportunity. When you clearly ask your followers for a retweet, you have a good chance of getting one. Salesforce reports that asking results in 12 times more retweets.
Hashtags
Use hastags. Hashtags double your engagement rate—they are their own implicit call to action. Plus, they create higher visibility on Twitter.
What surprises me is that only 24% of tweets contain hashtags. I would caution you to limit yourself to two hashtags per tweet though.
Google +
Search engine positioning
It’s is the name, Google + is Google’s social media platform, one of the the benefits I’ve noticed of posting to my Google + account is things you post do tend to float fairly highly on search pages depending on the relevance of the thing you post and what people are searching for
Sniply
“Attach a call-to-action to every link you share”
Sniply simply allows you to share a link but embed your own call to action on somebody elses webpage for free! The platform also gives you analytics of interactions, as well as allowing you to run A/B testing on your call to actions.
Next time instead of simply just sharing a link to something interesting you’ve found on-line - embed your call to action on that website, helping get you some free advertising!
Automating Social Media
Buffer
Buffer is such an amazing platform, I use it weekly to automate posting to my Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media accounts. The free account allows you to schedule up to 10 posts for free which is ample.
Pick the best time
Timing is everything. Buffer analyses interactions on your social media accounts with the things you post using their platform, and using their awesome algorithms they can calculate the best times for you to post your content and automatically set your schedule to post at these times for you.
A picture’s worth a thousand words!
Buffer has a great free service named Pablo. This service will let you quickly and easily create images for your posts.
“People don’t engage equally with every tweet, adding videos, links and photos will result in an impressive boost in the number of interactions/retweets” - Twitter
That old adage is most definitely true when applied to social media. Visual content in your tweets and Facebook posts is key to catching the eye and upping the clicks.
“Tweets with images get 18% more clicks!” - Buffer
Drip feed it
Buffer allows you to ‘drip feed’ to different networks. You can schedule a post but it can post it at different times for you when it thinks your audience will most likely see the post. Again using it’s algorithms like above it can see when people on each different social network interacts and post at the times it thinks would reach the widest audience, this is really powerful and effective.
Same old posts
Do not be afraid to keep scheduling the same messages (especially on twitter)
Chances are people following you will also be following quite a few other people. At certain times of the day your messages may not even be seen. From experience, there is only so far I would personally scroll down my tweet list to see what’s been said that day (I follow lots of people!).
Make the most of analytics
Buffer gathers analytics about everything you post via its platform and it will show you the posts with the most interactions. Make sure you re-schedule your top posts!
IFTTT
IFTTT (If this then that) will pretty much let you automate anything…
The great thing about IFTTT unlike Buffer is that there is currently no cap on the number of things you can automate.
Social media - automate all the things!
Using this platform you can link your social media accounts so when you post on one network it then posts to another network - continuing the chain until all social media networks have been updated with the message your sending out
You can even link your blog to post to your social media accounts. Every time you write new content on your blog or website automatically drip feed it to your social networks.
Never miss an important date again
Put your events on your google calendar (e.g. call for speakers open/closing, product on sale, early bird tickets etc). You can automate IFTTT so when ever an event appears on your google calendar IFTTT will automatically send messages that you decide (calendar date, title etc) to your desired social network.
Keep it fresh
IFTTT will let you use RSS feeds and push it’s content to where ever you like. A useful thing for this could be to get RSS feeds or news/articles related to your ‘thing’ and get it to post them to your social media network(s). It helps build an audience and keep things ‘fresh’ and engaging.
Crowdfire
Using this platform you can do quite a few things which helps you connect with your followers on Twitter. The platform will allow you to
- Automatically thank people for following you
- Send people private messages with links to your ‘thing’ when they follow you
- Thank top interactors automatically on twitter
