Through social media, people run to seek answers, make a comment, or register a complaint toward a company with which they have had some business. It is also as a tool of communication and an area where people can get updated with the latest events in their day-to-day lives.
Many people use internet as a source of information, do you represent your organization on the Web? And if not, then you are not getting in touch with nearly half the possible customers out there in the market. Most people including the online adults are active users of the social networking sites and it is estimated that nearly 72% of them are users of the site.
If you are already a routinely using social media for your business or if this activity is new for you, it is necessary to keep up with it in terms of achieving the goals. Find out these seven strategies to leverage the diversity of social media activities and create a boost in the results.
1) Internal experiments & Campaigns
This is how, in between large scale campaigns, your multiple-platform initiatives may lack excitement during certain time periods. Internal experiments are really useful in changing the approach, spicing up the social activities and guaranteeing constant posting.
An example of which experiment you can try is on different elements of post. For instance, let’s assume that you want to shift the frequency of posting on various platforms and compare the interactions obtained from each platform. Design an experiment that will last for two weeks on post length so as to control and manipulate your variables in order to get accurate and solid results.
This is a two-week period to experiment with the length of your posts and hold everything else constant, including the time of day, the tone, calls-to-action, types of resources, and so on. As with most elements of your posts, it’s important to experiment with the post length in a way that will help you later.
If you insist on further probing you are always gathering new data, which can then be processed – that, ladies and gentlemen, is a precious asset indeed for any social endeavor. Besides, you will post a wealth of material daily on your site, or as often as it is dedicated to your posts.
The other approach that you could take is to develop a small scale internal goals campaign. Well oiled social machine, you should have some goals already established in front of you to achieve. However, you can take your efforts to the next level by coming up with other specific goals for the shorter period, say 2 – 3 weeks’ goals.
Ensure that you set targets that are slightly out of your reach such that you would require to inspire and search for ways on how to meet those goals. It also shows you how you could easily stick to the schedule in posting something – perhaps even more frequently than usual! There are few strategies which are as follows – Work with your content team and challenge each other. That is possible with the intent of changing things and creating a significant shift.
2) Specials
Sometimes everyone knows what we need is an injection of a new type of post that will change the normal days’ postings. Offers are another effective tactic in which you change the pace of your daily posts and introduce something new into your social strategy. These specials – essentially, presumably daily or weekly repetitions of some activity – turned out to result in high levels of interaction and user return.
The initial approach in developing a series of posts for the motivating the consumers to take an advantage of the specializes offered is to determine the approach you’re going to use in your hook. It could be something as profound as a quote or some sort of information if you’re using a messaging strategy of a certain culture or following. And it may be something stupid to be demonstrated through a video or photo story.
3) Guest Posting
We’ve seen it for years – brands requesting outside companies or industry thought leaders to take the helm and manage a company’s social media presence for a period of time. Well, the fact of the matter is, these ‘guest’ appearances are usually well-intentioned and usually result in poor selfies at best. Though, often it seems that there is no proper way of doing it.
In order to create a guest posting opportunity that will be relevant for your business, there are certain steps you need to take first. Ideally, the person could be a fun and an enthusiastic client, a leader in the industry, or a flexible partner, or an employee from your organization. Then, decide what they will be doing – will they be tweeting about an event as it unfolds, blogging about some conference, or will they be more focused in ‘attending’ a day in a life of someone type?
Ideally, you should have at least two pre-guest posting meetings – one with your content team where you will outline the period of time during which the guest posting procedure will occur and brainstorm; the second one, you (or whoever will be guest posting) will discuss with the schedule – you should have at least a good portion of the content ready and scripted.
This will relieve the pressure of the day and also guarantee that even when everything is not going as planned there must be posts being posted at different times of the day. On the day of execution the guest poster must be informed on what the plan of action is and where they can find all login details. Moreover, make sure to ensure that there is a least one person who cross verifies all the different accounts during the day.
4) Countdowns
Decide countdowns are also another fantastic method of spicing up the social promotion and getting more engagement. Of course, this is pretty easy to do if you have an event coming up, or something big to launch soon and all that, but what do you do without the event? Not a problem. The one thing that you should know is that countdowns are very useful particularly in the promotion of content that you intend to release.
In the past, content promotion is directly carried out after the content is published – you may have those Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts stacked until the content is complete and is out, but why wait? It has been advocated that countdowns are used well to create awareness and create hype towards your content especially before the content is launched online. If you are early, then you are even able to publish your landing pages and take pre-orders on whitepapers, ebooks, videos and factsheets.
5) Snapchat
Already being withdrawn from the niche social platform to a serious contender with features millions of users. If you think your firm is friendly towards millennials, there can’t be any doubt that you have something to gain on the platform. Marketing is getting easier on the platform, but it had no way of helping its users search for other users. To perform the general search you need to know the exact user’s handle and can’t just search for hashtags as it is possible in Twitted and Instagram.
As a results, the process of getting found has been rather challenging, at least on Snapchat. Fortunately, at the start of this year the functionality of Snapcodes was introduced, which means that cross-channel promotion is far less of a problem than it used to be. This means that brands can now popularize and build up their snapchat accounts through sharing of their Snapcodes in the facebook and twitter accounts.
6) Alternative Social Platforms
Specialized social networks have been emerging like mushrooms, and if such obvious successes as Snapchat and Instagram have been managed, do not think that they will not continue to appear. As a marketer, you have no business being associated with such a platform (if the platform becomes dead, just say goodbye to your profile).
But whatever you do, ensure that it was planned and purposeful – if you are creating a Beme account, then the purpose is to acquire as many users as possible and one of the ways is using the other platforms. Meerkat is an amazing thing and is currently very popular and active on Twitter – leverage this. Astound your Twitter audience with new social content feed and encourage them to interact with your brand in new exciting ways.
7) Image Series
Any social efforts spoil when users get that impression that some factors are missing such as value proposition for content, and the circulation and meaning connectivity of the content. And if you lose any of the above, don’t be surprised if the others are not too far behind the exit door either.
Here’s only one technique you can use to ensure your following remains engaged; you must use an image series. Visuals have ensured higher interaction from the time the social media platforms came into existence – so nothing new here. However, if you include a recurring, building block element to the images you post, this will trigger memory recall, ‘membership effect,’ and a sense of community among your followers.
With an image series the opportunities are literally endless, however, be sure to have some clear view or plan as to how you want the series of posting to be. Talk to your viewers about the character and the overall theme of the series even if viewers have not seen at least one of the pictures. Occupy them, inform them and perhaps compel them to wait for the other images in the sequence!
When you get assigned to be in charge of the social media posts, it may be exhausting if you’re actively posting on a daily basis or if you are not posting as frequently as possible.
