Are you looking for new ways to supercharge your social media marketing? Social media can be a great source of leads, engagement and traffic, among other benefits. Businesses can reach a larger audience and promote themselves and their products or services, and they can connect with their fans and customers on a deeper level. In this blog post, I'm going to share 5 top tips to help you supercharge your social media marketing.
Generate more leads and engagement with a Facebook contest
Facebook contests can help you generate more leads, as well as more engagement from your fans. Plus, they can also help you reach more people and find some new fans for your business Page.
There are all kinds of different types of contests that you can create, such as:
- Sweepstakes
- Photo/video contests
- Instant wins
- Essay contests
- Hashtag contests
- Giveaways
Ideally, when you create a social media contest, you should give away a prize that is closely related to your business - better yet, one of your own products or services. The reason for this is that, even if you might get less participants than you would with a more general prize that appeals to a larger audience, the participants you get will be higher quality leads, as they're showing an active interest into your product or service. Everyone wants to win a trip, or a tablet and so on, but if they're not genuinely interested in what your business has to offer, you won't have much to gain - except for engagement and reach.
To create a contest, you have a plethora of tools at your disposal that make the process as easy as possible. In fact, it can take minutes of your time to set up a contest. Some of the best tools to create Facebook contests are:
- Agorapulse: a social media management tool with multiple types of Facebook apps; you can use it to create quizzes and personality tests, photo contests, instant win contests, sweepstakes, fan voting contests and as a bonus, you can also create Facebook coupons for exclusive discounts for your fans.
- Woobox: Woobox lets you create contests for websites and social networks; you can create giveaways, instant win contests, photo, video and hashtag contests, as well as create exclusive coupons
- Facebook: you can also create some types of contests directly with your Facebook account. You don't have as many options as you would with other third-party tools, but it's very easy to create a contest and you have full control over your contest forms.
Connect with social media influencers
Social media influencers are great connections to have; they can help you reach more people, generate more engagement for your profiles, get more fans and followers and more clicks on your shared links.
Before starting to find and connect with social influencers, it's important to establish what makes a good influencer for your business. Forget about follower numbers and instead take a closer look at their engagement on social media:
- Are their fans/followers engaging with the influencer daily?
- Is the influencer engaging with their followers?
The more engaged they are, the better - when they have a direct line to their audience, that boosts their overall influence. Otherwise, even if an influencer has hundreds of thousands of followers, if their audience is not engaged at all, then you won't be getting the results you're hoping for.
For example, as AdWeek reports, micro-influencers are more beneficial for marketers to work with. Micro-influencers are influencers with fewer than 100k followers - although, as mentioned in this article, even influencers with fewer than 30k followers can be more beneficial.
The reason for this is most likely the fact that the bigger you get, the more difficult it is to really engage with your audience and not to mention, it's also quite likely you're getting busier and busier.
So to sum up, when looking for social influencers, look beyond numbers and get to the nitty-gritty to really understand how engaged they are.
Another very important thing to consider is whether their audience is truly relevant to your business. What types of links are they sharing on social media? What are they writing about on their blog? What products/services are they promoting?
In order to be as efficient as possible, you need to focus your attention on those influencers who share a very similar audience to yours.
To find influencers, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo to get you started:
As you can see, you can get a quick glimpse of their engagement (retweet and reply ration, average retweets), as well as a list of the links they shared in the past.
You can also make all kinds of settings to filter your search so you only get the most relevant results.
Once you have a decent list of influencers to target, start engaging with them to build a rapport. To make things easier, you can create a private Twitter list where you keep them all so you know exactly who to engage with.
Visit and read their blog regularly, leave comments and then go an engage on social media as well - share their content, ask them questions and answer theirs, like their updates and generally try to engage as much as possible. If you have a blog, (if you don't have a blog, find out how to start a blog) you can also mention them in one of your posts and then tell them about it so that they can share it with their audience.
As you build up these relationships, it will help you get more shares, more likes and more traffic to your website.
Diversify your content
Are you diversifying the content you share on social media enough? If you're only posting the same types of updates, time and time again, your audience could get bored and stop engaging with you. On the other hand, when you diversify your updates and post more engaging content, you can reach more people, get more followers, more shares and retweets and more likes and comments.
Apart from text-only updates and images, you can diversify your updates with:
- Videos: produced videos and live streaming videos; don't forget to also add subtitles in any video you create as most people watch videos on social media with the sound off; for example, on Facebook, 85% of videos are watched without sound
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GIFs: GIFs can be very fun and engaging; when interacting with other users, try to incorporate GIFs in your replies. On Twitter, for example, you can add GIFs easily from within the update box.
- Quotes: quotes continue to be very popular on social media, so you can try creating beautiful images with quotes to generate more engagement
- Holidays: celebrate any holidays (from Christmas to Pancake Day) with fun images, GIFs and videos
- Contests: as I mentioned earlier, contests can help you generate more engagement, more fans/followers and more leads
- Polls & quizzes: people love interactive content, so creating a poll or quiz from time to time can help you attract more engagement.
Use brand ambassadors
It's not just social media influencers that can help you promote your business on social media, but also brand ambassadors - meaning, your best, most engaged followers.
Take a look at your audience and your shares - who's consistently sharing your updates? Who is engaging with you the most, on a regular basis?
These types of fans/followers hold their own influence over their albeit smaller audience. It's because they are regular people, in fact, that their opinions and recommendations hold more weight than most ads and promotions you could use. Put simply, it's word-of-mouth at its best.
To get you started, you first need to identify your brand ambassadors - or if there aren't any followers that reach that can get that title, identify your most engaged users.
From there, it's just a question of engaging with them and giving them a good reason to keep supporting you. Try to interact with them often and better yet, give them small gifts - give away a product, provide them with free trials and so on.
Measure your results
Last, but definitely not least, one of the things that can really help you improve your social media marketing is measuring your results. How does it help? In short:
- It helps you understand what types of updates your audience likes best
- It helps you identify the updates that don't work
- It gives you a better insight into the best times to post updates
Before measuring, though, it's best to establish what you want to measure. Ideally, you should set clear goals on what you want to achieve - and be as specific as possible. For example, a good goal would be "to increase social media traffic by 10% in 60 days". Once you have the goals, you'll be much clearer on what you need to measure.
Plus, setting goals helps you focus on what matters. You will be able to better plan your future updates and optimize them so that they help you reach your goal.
What you measure will depend on what your goals are; but generally, some of the most important metrics to measure are:
- Your updates: which generate the most attention and which don't? Why?
- Social media traffic: which updates/social profiles generate the most traffic? You can easily track this by using shortened links, such as with gl
- Your audience: who forms your audience? When are they online? What are their interests/passions and how can you use this knowledge to improve your content?
Conclusion
Social media marketing can be an amazing asset for your business when you make full use of its capabilities. That doesn't necessarily mean spending more money or more time, but rather it means that you should focus on tactics that work and learn from your successes and mistakes.
