30 Days of Social Tips
September was #SocialMediaSeptember on my social profiles. During the entire month of September, I posted a tip a day on how you can better and more effectively manage your social media marketing campaigns. This also tied in with a month of blog posts all dedicated to social media marketing!
I have collected all 30 days of tips and compiled them here for quick, easy wins and actionable tips for improving your social media marketing today!
- Automating messages and other engagements with your audience should be avoided. Audience interaction should be personal and unique. Utilizing pre-made templates for interactions should also be avoided if possible.
- Use consistency across all of your accounts. Use the same bios, profile pictures, header images to create unity across your brand. While you will be using to the same assets across platforms, make sure they are optimized for each individual platform.
- Experiment as much as possible when you are first starting to ramp up your engagements. Analyze your engagements to determine the optimum time to post on each platform in order to reach maximize reach potential
- Let your personality shine and be authentic and true to your brand. Nobody will engage with dry or boring content. Have fun with it
- Don’t spread yourself too thin – pick a few social channels to utilize effectively and cut out the ones that you won’t. When you pick the ones that are not a priority for you, it is still a good idea to book your account and username in case priorities change in the future.
- Integrate yourself into the communities your audience is already apart of. Be helpful and try to engage as much as possible. Do not do this just to sell. This should be done purely in a way of adding value to the community.
- Set a goal for your marketing plan and define key metrics for it. Track and analyze these metrics carefully. Use this data as a baseline to keep yourself on track to reach your goal.
- Repurpose blog posts and other research based pieces of content into smaller individual pieces. Curate this content to fit to the strengths of a particular platform.
- Aim to build a level of authority with your audience via social media. Answer questions that you know, provide answers for what you don't know and just be helpful in general when interacting with your audience.
- Be consistent with your brand across all social platforms. While not needing the same content on each platform, the overall tone and aesthetic should match on each platform.
- Aim to engage on every interaction with your audience. Posts should always have clear call to actions and conversations should build trust.
- Use buyer personas and market research to determine the best way to curate your content and posts specifically to your target audience.
- Jump on new networks early to see if they will stick. Try to be the first on the platform, but do not necessarily expend tons of resources on it unless it gains traction. If it gains traction, being an early adopter will allow you to ride it.
- Use search features or sites like Quora to find people asking questions or needing help. Engage them and build trust. Be helpful, answer questions, and appropriately tie it to your brand if possible.
- Utilize the ability to go “behind the scenes” of your brand with services like Facebook Live and Instagram Stories
- Get involved with other brands in your niche. Participate in how they are engaging their audience, collaborate, and build community.
- Identify one key goal to measure in your social media efforts. Create and schedule content or planned engagement time to help propel these goals
- Be real with your audience. The old saying of "fake it 'til you make it" is dead. Share your struggles, tell stories of failures, and learn in public. The more transparency the better
- Do not rely on one single social platform to build your entire brand off of. Trends come and go so quickly that you need to build and maintain at least two main social platforms
- Studies by AgoraPulse determined that photo albums on Instagram do not perform as well as single photo uploads
- Let your audience know where else they can find you at online. Cross promote other social platforms on your profiles.
- Start conversations and engagements as often as possible without the intent of pushing forward your own agenda. Add value to your engagements and you will grow your audience.
- Create a community for your audience to engage with you in. Facebook groups, Slack, Discord, and Discourse are great opportunities to grow your brand and keep your audience involved.
- Photos posted to your Instagram feed should feel on brand. Utilize stories and create moments for videos that do not fit in brand – overall feed aesthetic can be important for some brands.
- Keep promotional posts and content on your feed to a minimum – focus more on providing value through content, which will make your promotional posts more appealing to your audience.
- Only spend time on social networks that make sense. Putting legal business on a platform like bandsintown would not make sense.
- Run a promotional ad where clients can earn/win something for spreading the word about your brand. Use methods like this with caution as it can backfire and cause meaningless engagement
- Share quality content that will be impactful or useful to your audience, even if there is less of it. This can be leveraged when you are just starting to build your content resources up very effectively.
- Utilize paid ads on Facebook to target very specific groups of people when trying to establish an audience base or reaching into a new audience type.
- Share content others create that is relevant to your audience, especially when you do not have much recyclable content. Add your personal touch by providing meaningful commentary or opinions on the piece of content.