Tip #1: Be Creative
10 Social Media Marketing Tips
Don’t spend all your time creating mindless content with a handful of keywords placed throughout. Not only is that strategy less likely to work with Google’s new Panda and Penguin updates, but it’s also not effective for engaging people. When people use social media, they’re looking for peer recommendation and personal engagement. Use your time wisely, and focus on making unique and creative content. Think of great video campaigns like Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” series of videos and Old Spice’s famous line of commercials featuring Isaiah Mustafa. Creativity counts more than abundance.
Tip #2: Call for Guest Bloggers
If you have a blog, use your social media outlets to kill three birds with one stone. Put out a call for guest bloggers on your social media channels. Not only will this engage your followers, but you’ll also get free content while community-building at the same time. Guest blogging is a great way for other businesses to promote themselves to a new market, so you’ll likely find a few entrepreneurs, other marketers or just regular fans who will jump at the chance to provide useful content for you in the form of a guest blog. In addition, by offering guest blog spots, you create goodwill with other businesses who will likely help you to promote your business via their blogs, media channels, videos or other outlets.
Tip #3: Re-Post Quality Content
Rather than creating all your content yourself, re-post content that pertains to your industry and your customers’ interests and credit the source. You can re-post news articles, videos and photos as well as link to blogs and other quality content around the web. Credit the original author if you can find a byline, and link back to where you found the post.
Tip #4: Outsource Your Content
Again, my number one piece of advice is to get your content from somewhere else rather than spending a lot of time creating it yourself. There are literally hundreds of thousands of content writers willing to produce quality content at reasonable rates. If you want content for your Facebook fan page, your LinkedIn account, or another social media site, provide a content writer with information about your business and have him or her write it for you.
Tip #5: Re-Use Personalized Videos
If you must produce content yourself, create content that you can use more than once. A great social media marketing guru once gave me the following advice: Start a birthday club and create a video for the recipient with a special promotion for your business. Saying the recipient’s first name adds a personal touch and is more likely to make him or her feel special and engaged with your business. However, making videos for each individual person can be time consuming. Save all your videos for future use. Over time, you’ll find that videos addressed to people with common names can be used over and over again.
Tip #6: Hold Virtual Meetings
Use social media for your meetings rather than meeting in person, if possible. Have a Google hangout or hold a discussion over Facebook chat. This saves everyone involved the time and effort of having to meet at a physical location. It also saves money if you can stay home rather than meet for lunch or at other venues where you’re most likely to spend a few dollars for a cup of coffee during your meeting.
Tip #7: Link Your Accounts
Rather than posting in a variety of different accounts every day, link your accounts or hire an expert to link them for you. When done correctly, this will allow you to make a single post populate out to all of your social media sites. Repopulating your Twitter feed is especially popular these days. Setting your accounts up this way saves you time and lets you update all of your potential customers with one post, regardless of which social media site they may be using.
Tip #8: Cross Pollinate
Similar to linking all your accounts together is the idea of cross pollinating. This refers to re-posting your own content from another social media source, and marketers and non-marketers alike already do this every day. One example of cross pollination would be re-posting a video from your YouTube channel on Facebook. You can also re-post content from your fan page onto your personal page. This allows you to reach more people with the same content than you would have with one channel alone.
Tip #9: Post a Picture that’s Worth a Thousand Words
Instead of creating or re-posting written content or videos, things that take time to read or watch — post a picture. Take a photo of something happening at your business or your client’s business, or have your client send you pictures for posting, or use stock images. Pictures are more likely to capture people’s attention better than words do, and you only need to spend a few seconds writing a caption. For example, if your client is an independent cafe, you could post a picture on its fan page of some coffee beans with the caption “Guess what’s brewing? We’ve got a new blend! Stop in this week to find out what it is and receive 10% off your total bill.”
Tip #10: Ask for Input
Ask your fans, viewers or readers for their input. Have them vote on the name of a new product line or promotion, or have a design contest. This will cultivate more fan engagement and more page views, and it will actually decrease the amount of work you have to do. If your fans are competing to name your product, or create a logo or other design, that means less work for you.
About Daniel Tan
