Most social media marketing campaigns are primarily designed to help gain more social following, increase product/brand visibility or drive traffic to a website. Here are quick must-know tips you should consider when rolling out your next social media campaign.
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1. Reserve your username across all platforms
Reserve all your usernames across all the social media platforms even if you don’t plan on using them now. This will help to keep off impostors and squatters, and keep your branding in tact across multiple channels. You don’t need to (and shouldn’t ) plan to start with all of them now, but having the account reserved will allow you to use it later, when you’re ready to.
2. Decide which social media platform(s) best suits your needs.
Not all social media platforms are suitable for your kind of marketing campaign. Trying to build a presence and stay active on all available social media platforms can be time consuming and counterproductive. Instead, you need to identify platforms that bring the best results and focus on them. Where does your target audience hang out? What platforms do they use to look for solutions to their problems or keep in touch with their audience and colleagues?
3. Optimize your social media platforms
Once you’ve decided on the platform you intent to use, focus on optimizing your profiles in order to get more followers. A few things to consider include using a real profile picture, write clear and comprehensive profiles, and where applicable, include a link to your website. Also, keep in mind that what works for one platform may not be the right fit for another, so be sure to tailor your profile for each platform as needed.
4. Connect your social media accounts to your website
Having all your active accounts connected to your website helps to keep the conversation going. Visitors on your website can link to any of the listed accounts and your followers on social media can find out more about your offer. With a WordPress site, this can usually be done with a plugin. Just be careful that the plugin doesn’t increase the load time of your site too much. Some themes may also include this functionality, so double check before adding a plugin to duplicate efforts.
5. Find and follow leaders in your niche.
Find the most influential people in your niche and follow or favorite them. Chances are they will share useful information about your niche or share their progress about a certain project; and you can look over their shoulders for inspiration. But remember – you don’t need to start where they are now. If the big names in your niche are constantly sharing lead magnets and optin and content upgrades, don’t feel pressured to do all of the same all at once. They didn’t start where they are now; they built up to it. And remember – inspiration doesn’t mean copying what they are doing.
6. Don’t forget the hashtags
Yes, it’s not just a pretty function to make your phrase turn into a link and look cool. Most people actually use hashtags to search for stuff on social media. And it’s a nice way to make your stuff (like you upcoming product launch) trend on Facebook. Just don’t overdo it.
Just like with the profile, different platforms have different expectations. While adding a bunch of hashtags is totally acceptable on Instagram, using more than a few on Twitter (or any on some platforms) may turn off your followers and make your posts seem copy/pasted rather then genuine.
7. Stay social
Whether you are running a personal profile or company/brand’s social media account, you need to actually stay social and interactive. Follow other users, send friend requests, comment on stuff, like other people’s stuff, update your status regularly, share interesting stuff, and so on. Don’t just post your content and ignore everything else. Plus, interacting with others’ content is a good way to gain more followers and visits to your profile.
8. Stay out of trouble
Each social media platform has its own sets of rules, and some rules cut across all the networks. For instance, Twitter has a limit on how many people you can follow per day, Facebook has restriction on friend-requesting people you don’t know and so on. And these rules can change often, so try to make sure you’re staying on the right side of the line.
9. Track mentions
Use available tools to track every mention of your brand across all platforms and find out what people are saying about you or your brand. Don’t miss a chance to neutralize any negative talk. Tools like Google Alerts can be really helpful for this. You can search for mentions of your business name or your name, or even as a hashtag, if you’re not using tools to do it for you.
10. Post as many times per day but again, don’t overdo it.
The number of times to post per day will depend on the platform, the numbers of your followers and how interactive your audience is. On some platforms, it’s best to try to space out your posts (like Twitter and other platforms that show in real time) while on others, you can post all at once since your posts are shared with your followers based on an algorithm. Although a quick Google search will give you tons of results for “how often to share on social media,” use those as guidelines, too, and pay attention to your audience to see what they respond to best.