Social media marketing is in full swing and with more than three billion users spread across all of the major social platforms, it’s a battle every single day for new traffic. At the same time, there is always the chance for going viral or getting the attention of influencers around the world. The best brands in the world are spending millions of dollars on social media marketing, but it’s also a level playing field for the smaller players as well.
Traffic isn’t the only asset that is up for grabs. In the world of social media, everything is changing all the time. It’s also a world for bragging rights and where numbers speak volumes. From brand building, follower counts and getting users to engage with and share your content… it’s all of the utmost importance.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been using social media marketing for the past decade or just started last week. Unlike SEO and Google rankings, social media results and ROI can be instant.
To discover the many different ways to win with social media, be sure to read our quick recommendations and tips below.
Creating Custom Images and Thumbnails for Each Platform
When is the last time you logged into your favorite social platform? Even if it was just a few seconds ago, there are likely hundreds of new status updates and posts for you to see.
Some you will scroll over, others you will ignore and a handful might actually get your attention and deserve a click.
If you want to get the attention your content and brand deserves, you will need to make sure you have attractive images and custom thumbnails for all of your content. And don’t forget each social platform has different dimensions for best viewing.
Using a Social Media Scheduling Tool to Republish Content
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram are five of the largest and most active social platforms on the internet today. They all deserve your attention, but if you were to manually add and update content to each of them manually, this could take several hours per day.
To speed up the process and have better control and management over your social media marketing efforts, be sure to consider your options with a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or MeetEdgar.
Add Easy-to-Use Social Sharing Buttons to Your Site
Like creating content for your own site and bringing users back to your own platform? If so, you aren’t alone, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is by sharing your content with your audience on each social platform, but also to make it easy for other users to share your site content with their audiences as well.
This is something that can easily be set up within WordPress in minutes. All it takes is a simple install of a free plugin like “Sassy Social Share” and you can instantly have attractive click-to-share buttons placed at the top and bottom of your best content. There are plenty of other tools and solutions out there for non-WP sites as well.
The easier you make it for your audience to take action and share your content, the more shares you will start to see. A bonus tip is to try and get the user to join your mailing list and submit their email while they are at your site, so be sure to work on those call to actions as well!
The Importance of Tagging Influencers and Using Relevant Hashtags
Social media is all about interacting with others and getting the attention of audiences around the world. Twitter and Instagram are great with hashtags and trending topics, while Facebook is geared more towards the conversation and linking to other Pages and Users.
With this in mind, if you want to win the game of social media marketing and branding, don’t focus on making the conversation just one sided. Stay away from only blasting out content, ads and promoting your own sites.
The more value you can provide, the more likely you are to see followers like and share your content. To see what’s currently working best, just take a look at any of the top influencers and trending hashtags to see what’s already being shared around and getting a lot of likes.
The Never Ending Journey of Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms will come and go, but your audience will always be around–as long as you are building your in-house traffic and list!
Even with all of these great social media marketing tools, solutions and recommendations in place, you don’t want to be held captive to a specific social platform, or needing to spend money just to reach everyone.
Use social media to your advantage, but don’t focus on it as your beginning and end of everything. Focus your efforts on creating great content and building a real brand that has the ability to redirect users from social platforms back to your site, where you can then collect their email or remarket to them after they leave your site.