It is agreed, written down and emphasized that social media is central to the experience of marketing online. Using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other social media sites are crucial to the success of a marketing campaign and can significantly help in fetching revenue. With all your marketing strategies in place, how further can you go in ensuring social media success? Well, there is no dearth of tips to enhance social media marketing and here are a few tips that you must include in your marketing practice.
Live Events, Webinars and Teleseminars
Facebook and Twitter offer possibilities have holding webinars and seminars at a very low cost. Assuming you have a business page on Facebook, it is very important to interact with your fans and followers on a regular basis so that their questions, concerns and suggestions are addressed and noted down. There are many webinar platforms such as Linqto, LotusLive, GoToWebinar and others. You could make use of webcams to get other participants to hold webinars too. Twitter does not allow this directly, but key points from a webinar can be tweeted live, and a custom hashtag may be employed.
Be Altruistic, Help Others
Once you have achieved some success in your social media campaign, it is important to share your knowledge, success and expertise with those who are still budding. Also, look for opportunities to help people even if it is not related to your business. Outward displays of altruism have a positive effect in social media marketing. Twitter is extremely useful in this area, as you can easily recommend people who are unknown, retweet certain people’s tweets and leave comments on other people’s blogs even if they do not have a high ranking blog. It is important to choose your beneficiary carefully.
Focus Less on Marketing
Most businesses don’t understand that there is something ‘social’ about social media marketing. People do not like to be inundated with messages and tweets that shove a sales pitch at them all the time. They like to imagine their favorite companies and businesses as concerned, social and human. Thus, it is important for you to be so, genuinely. While marketing in social media is what you are supposed to be doing, you also need to be social and friendly. That also means not driving a sales pitch all the time.
Understanding What Customers Want
There are tools like Research.ly which help you to monitor what your fans and followers are talking about on Facebook or Twitter. These social conversations provide you with important insights that will help in discovering new opportunities that you probably didn’t know existed.
Bringing Social Media to Real Life
Twitter meet-ups and Facebook meets are all too common these days. It can be a great way to build relationships with your fans and followers. In fact, there can be a subtle marketing pitch in these meet-ups. By throwing contests and offers, you can meet winners in real life and engage with them just as ‘friends’ would do over coffee, drink or dinner. Other kinds of meetings include Twitter/Facebook meets where a number of people may be invited to meet at a designated place to discuss and talk about issues that concern a brand or product or even a general trend.
Be Controversial
There is always a shock-value attached to controversies and social networks are great places to tap into this part of the human psyche. No matter how great your content is, if it does not attract and sustain attention there is no point in sharking it on social networks. Using negative flavored language and slightly provocative themes can help drive a lot of traffic. Everyone likes to read controversial stuff especially if it is entertaining at the same time. A title such as “How to Invest in SEO and Fail Miserably” attracts more attention than “Steps to Avoid in SEO”. This strategy works best with how-to and informational content.
Research First, Invest Later
Just like conducting a market research before starting a marketing campaign, you would need to study your social signals and target audience carefully. Understanding the demographics, best time to interact on Facebook/Twitter and learning your target audience’s quirks and psychographics can go a long way in ensuring that you stay relevant and in sync. Researching your target audience also helps in making sure that you are not missing any opportunities that you may find among social conversations on Twitter or Facebook. Spending decisions must be based on internal priorities, customer-facing priorities and technological priorities. These priorities can be understood well after researching the target audience.
Bring Experts and Share Knowledge
You could invite guest bloggers to write posts or get speakers to interact with your audience during Facebook/Twitter webinars. You may also want to have interviews fixed with industry experts right on your Twitter/Facebook account and get them to answer questions posed by your fans, friends and followers. Sharing knowledge increases your authority and influence in social media and that is precisely what you should be looking at.
Of course, each company or business will also have to explore other possibilities to optimize their social media campaign in a unique and endearing way. The bottom-line is that companies and businesses must stay social on social networks and avoid being too keen on only marketing.
