If you’re serious about internet marketing, then you need to step up your social media game.
Research in 2019 shows that over half of the world’s population is now on social media—an increase of 9% over 2018.
But far too many marketers create ineffective social media strategies that only turn away followers instead of winning them over.
They’re too pushy, too friendly, or too predictable.
But how can you make sure you truly engage prospects on every social network without burning through relationships and losing the attention you’re trying to get?
By the end of this article, you’ll understand how to grow your brand on social media the right way, engage followers, save time, and build lifelong fans.
Even better? You’ll learn the best strategies to keep social media management under control without spending your entire workday on social networks.
Let’s jump in!
1. Be authentic and provide real value
Before you get started with social media marketing, think carefully about why people use social media in the first place.
While there are exceptions, few people log onto Facebook or Pinterest to chat with their favorite brands.
Instead, they’re there to socialize, the see pictures from friends and family, and to find something entertaining to do.
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As marketers, we’re clearly intruding.
As we start marketing on social media, one of our biggest objectives is to be authentic and make the experience enjoyable for people who are on social media just for fun.
If you want to succeed, you need to befriend your audience. Develop a persona your fans like and enjoy interacting with.
Think of the type of friend you’d like to have on social media, and emulate that persona. Be fun, humorous, and personable. Agree with fans, be honest, and make every interaction pleasant.
While this isn’t necessarily easy—and certainly can’t be done with just a “quick hack”—this is the true secret to successful social media marketing.
Once you can bridge the gap between “marketer” and “trusted friend,” you can accomplish just about anything on social media. But it takes time and effort to build up that reputation.
2. Show credibility (beyond just a brand account)It’s easy to set up an account for your brand.
Just upload a logo, enter the name of your company, and you’re set. But building credibility is much harder than that. Vanity doesn’t have a place on social media, so you need to go beyond.
First, show that you’re a real person and not just a brand account. Sure, there are times when you’ll need to present an “official” brand response. But for day-to-day interaction, show you’re a real human.
This is especially important if you’re the owner of a small business.
Second, explain what your credentials are. People are most likely to trust leaders on social media, rather than nameless social media managers.
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A 2018 study by Brandfog showed that customers are 93% more likely to purchase from a brand after agreeing with the CEO on social media, so feel free to share your title and credentials.
Finally, be accessible. While it’s great to have someone in charge of social media, it’s equally important to show that you’re a team and you work together.
Include employees from across the company in your social media marketing.
3. Don’t market too hard
So far, we’ve covered what you should do on social media: act like a friend, show your personality, and be honest and authentic.
But too many marketers spend time trying to market, and as a result, they lose a lot of the credibility they could have otherwise gotten by being more natural.
If you’re trying to make social media less overwhelming, it can be easy to use copy-and-paste strategies to keep customers engaged.
If you use lots of hashtags, constantly promote products, and repost old content too frequently it likely means you’re trying to find shortcuts to effective marketing.
Instead, take a step back and think about the true types of value you can provide to users. Don’t be on social media purely to make a sale, because it will backfire.
4. Create great content that earns shares
Want to know the secret to doubling your social media traffic?
The answer lies in creating amazing content. If you’re not creating content that deserves to be shared, guess what? Your fans and followers won’t share it.
So the best strategy to go viral is to work hard at creating great content and doing an excellent job promoting that content.
(We’ll cover specific strategies to boost the effectiveness of your promotions in an upcoming section.)
The best way to do this is to write content that over-delivers on the promise of its headline. That doesn’t mean to write weak titles—on the contrary, write incredible headlines and create content that’s even better than expected.
As you keep creating content, you can start picking up trends on the types of content your audience likes and building more and more effective content to keep people engaged.
A great metric to track is the bounce rate, which is the rate at which people leave your website after just one page.
If social media is only driving people to look at one page, then leave, you should probably work to create a more engaging experience on your website.
5. Set up your posts for success
We’ve established that you need to write great content to get people to share it.
But that’s not the only secret to a successful social media marketing strategy. You also need to put the effort into promoting that content the right way.
Great content without a great promotion strategy simply isn’t making very good use of your time. Here are the most important elements you can put into place to ensure people see and share what you create.
Titles
We already mentioned that your content should over-deliver on the promise of the headline, but you still need to have the ability to write great headlines.
First, test different headline options. One way to do this is by posting different variations to Twitter before promoting your article, and see which tweet gets the best traction.
Next, you can experiment with using numbers in your headline. Odd numbers tend to work best, but again test and see what’s best for you.
Social media cards
Different social networks have different types of metadata. Optimize for it to make sure your article shows up well in the feed of a user.
Check out Facebook’s Open Graph tags and Twitter Card protocols to ensure shared articles display well across social media.
