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The 4 Best Social Media Marketing Tactics Businesses Need To Know
The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for many businesses. If you want to make next year the best one yet for your business, you need to be on top of your social media marketing.
During the last few years, social media marketing has gone from a practice that many people questioned the effectiveness of something that businesses of all sizes view as essential. But just like other online strategies such as SEO, knowing that social media marketing is important doesn’t make it easy. Given that large platforms like Facebook and Instagram continue to change their algorithms, many businesses struggle to use their social reach to connect with the types of prospects they care about.
If you’re committed to finding success with social media marketing but aren’t sure where to focus your attention, we’ve put together the top four tactics that will help you thrive.
Redistribute Content
Social media has become a very busy place. This means that when a business shares a piece of content, not all of their audience on that platform is going to see it. Although this can be frustrating, the good news is there’s a simple way to solve it. Instead of viewing sharing as something you do once and then move on to the next thing, you should make content redistribution a standard practice. Whether it’s three or seven weeks later, you should find the interval that works for your audience and standardize redistribution into your content efforts.
Work With Influencers
From a business that sell clothing to those that operate in a B2B space, every industry has influencers that target customers keep up with on social media. Instead of competing with influencers for attention, you should find ways to work with them. By exploring options that can range from sponsored giveaways to co-publishing a white paper together, collaborating directly with influencers who have a large social audience of the people you want to reach is a proven way to fast track your social efforts.
Get Comfortable With Video
Not only has the amount of time spent on YouTube exploded, but other platforms like Facebook and Instagram emphasize video. Since this a trend that’s here to stay, your business will benefit from getting comfortable with creating and sharing videos, including live ones.
Focus on Engagement
While social media can definitely drive sales, many businesses forget that these platforms are generally at the top of the funnel. That’s why the businesses that do best with social media, make engagement their top priority. Once you find the best ways to interact with your audience, you’ll create a loyal following that will convert into sales.
By redistributing content, working with influencers, getting comfortable with video and focusing on engagement, you can put all the pieces in place for your social media marketing efforts to thrive.
While converting social media users into leads or customers requires more than a single click, getting them to engage with the content you share and produce is an important step. Since the right approach to posting can have a huge impact on the results you see from social marketing, let’s cover 10 different social media posting ideas that have proven to be very effective:
1) Quality Rules
There’s no reason to drown your followers with updates. Instead of feeling like you always have to be in front of them, focus on sharing the absolute best content possible. By really thinking about every piece that you share, you can ensure that people are truly excited whenever they see a new update from you.
2) People Love Images
This applies to all the major social networks. Since people like sharing images a lot, make it a priority to create or find great ones to share.
3) Curate Existing Content
Although creating killer content is a great strategy, not everything you share has to be made from scratch. Because there’s so much online, you can really pique people’s interest by taking the time do so something like adding real value by curating a collection that contains lots of actionable information in a format that’s easy to digest.
4) Test And Analyze
The more you use social media, the better you’ll get at knowing whether a piece of content is going to be a hit or not. However, that doesn’t mean you want to fly by your intuition alone. It’s important to use a social media dashboard to monitor every piece of content. This will help you confirm the types of content that generate the most clicks, which in turn you can use to guide your future efforts. Utilizing analytics will also give you insight into topics like the best time to post on social networks.
5) Always Think Of Sharing
Even when you’re not on a social site, if you’re doing something online, try to think if there’s a way to create any type of social tie-in that will get people interested.
6) Monitor What’s Going On
In addition to monitoring how well your own sharing does, it’s also important to monitor what’s being said within your industry. Just seeing what other people are talking about will give you a lot of inspiration for new social media posting ideas.
7) Limit Self-Promotion
Although it sounds counterintuitive, the less you promote your own business and instead focus on providing real value, the more you’ll ultimately attract engaged followers who can actually turn into leads or customers.
8) Get Creative
There’s no reason to be afraid of experimenting and trying something new. Since you’ll be able to analyze its effectiveness, the worst case is a certain type of content doesn’t catch on. If that happens, you can simply cross it off your list of things to try.
9) Really Understand Social
It’s important to remember that there’s no substitute for spending time on social media and seeing for yourself what type of content people are engaging with on a daily basis.
10) Craft Campaigns
A great way to get users engaged and clicking are to think beyond individual updates. When you start thinking in terms of larger campaigns, you’ll find it’s possible to get other users very involved. And even though a great campaign can take some work, the right social media publishing tool can help a lot in terms of managing it all.
While there may be times when it seems quite hard to come up with good social media posting ideas, as long as you remind yourself that there are many places to look for inspiration, you’ll be able to continue generating lots of clicks.
This article is an original contribution by Michelle Hummel
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