Social Media Marketing Techniques [For 2018 and Beyond]

Feb 20, 2018 | Social Media Marketing

According to Statista, there are 2.46 billion social media users in 2017 and that figure is expected to grow up to 2.77 billion in 2019. That’s why it matters for every business to be on social media because that’s where people are. They’re online and actively engaging in every social networking site they wish to be in.

Being on the radar of your target market is just one of the many ways for your business to thrive online. Social media is a gift of heavens for entrepreneurs. You can connect with potential customers and engage with them even if they’re far across the globe. Up your game by making use of your social media accounts with an effective marketing strategy.

Easy to say, right? But it takes hours of research and analysis to figure out the best social media marketing plan for your business. Fortunately, there are brilliant tools you can use to manage all your social accounts and get valuable insights in the most efficient ways possible. Create a well-structured strategy so you can identify which parts of your plan need help from social media tools and apps.

I know you’ve already heard you need not be on all social media platforms (unless you’re Taco Bell). Don’t spread yourself too thin but instead focus on the ones where your target market is. So what’s the best strategy to be on top of the social game?

There are social media marketing techniques that worked in 2017, which you can still improve and include in your plan this 2018. Take a good look at each of them and see which ones you haven’t given enough focus on.

Social Media Marketing Techniques You Need to Do

Paid Advertising

If you’re spending most of your time targeting new customers on Facebook, you know running ads is the most cost-effective way of reaching out to a bigger audience. Now you can’t just post a content from your site to Facebook and watch the engagement and conversion rates explode. You need to invest money in ads and boosted posts. In Q4 2017, 82% of all paid social advertising investment was spent on Facebook.

Facebook lead ads

If your topmost goal for using Facebook is to generate leads, the world’s largest social networking site has got you covered. Lead form ads are helpful in promoting and encouraging people to register for your event. People who will click on your Facebook lead ads can easily sign up with pre-filled out form in just a few taps without leaving the social network.

Stories

Instagram launched Stories in August 2016. After 10 months, its daily active users have reached 250 million. It’s one way of sharing not just content but also the culture of your business. Stories are the best way to share behind-the-scenes, a-day-in-the-life-of content, and even 24-hour promos if you don’t like uploading a random off-themed post on your perfectly themed Insta feed.

Live video

Live videos earn 6x the engagement of non-live ones according to Facebook. How did your live videos perform? Were they among your most engaging content in the past year? Facebook will once again shift its focus on bringing people closer to those who matter the most to them a.k.a. their families and friends. That means content, including live videos, from people in their network rather than business pages will receive utmost visibility. That’s sad news for business pages but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it anymore.

Chatbots on Facebook and Twitter

Created to engage followers and respond to messages faster, chatbots play an important role in the customer journey. Being there from the initial point of contact to providing answers to questions and clarifications to guiding leads until they’re turned into customers, consider your chatbots as your 24/7 customer support team that will optimize your engagement and conversion opportunities.

What else could dominate social media in 2018? Here are some trends you need to prepare for:

1. Voice search and artificial intelligence will be big in content and brand discoveries
2. Virtual reality will become more popular as businesses will use it to provide an immersive marketing experience
3. Brands will maximize the use of messaging apps as channels to enhance their customer service
4. Augmented reality will be part of the buyer’s journey

Other Techniques You Can Improve

Are there social media hacks you’ve tried doing but didn’t really yield awesome results?

Chances are, influencer marketing is one of them. You could have even spent thousands of dollars on that deal with a popular TV host but didn’t gain your expected traction.

What to do next time: Try peer-to-peer marketing instead. People will check out your brand if someone they know made the referral. The endorsement is more believable because they know that person actually uses your product/service.

You’re posting in-depth articles and high-quality images but click-through rates are not super impressive.

What to do next time: Convert an article into a video content. See which version earns more engagement and gives higher CTR.

You’re sending automated messages to new followers but they’re not engaging. It’s simply because automated messages for most people are boring and manipulative.

What to do next time: Give them some time to get familiar with your brand. Don’t throw content links too abruptly. Let them explore your website or your social accounts without you pushing them. Interact when they shared your content or mentioned you in their post.

Conclusion

Do you realize how fortunate you are in this day and age to have business tools and resources right at your fingertips? But like anything in this world, social media changes constantly. For your business to survive, be ready for every opportunity that comes with those changes and prepares to adjust your strategies accordingly.

About The Author:

Ryan is a Digital Marketing Specialist at the Bradford based Digital Agency, Harrison Mann. Being in the digital marketing field for 7 years now, he enjoys keeping up to date with the latest in all things digital and search. As a silent type, Ryan expresses plenty of his thoughts through writing.

12 Tools of Social Media Marketing You Never Knew

May 29, 2017 | Social Media Marketing

There are numerous numbers of platforms and tools that you can use to help promote your business. However, many people are using these tools inefficiently with undesirable results achieved. It is important that you only use tools which help you boost your business in an effective manner. There are tools which are expensive and complex to use, it is better to search about them before using. Once you get the hang of social media marketing through these tools you will never go back.

To make you utilize your time and resources in an effective manner, we are here to guide you. These 12 tools for social media marketing will help you boost your business more than you can imagine.

• Social Clout: This is a great tool for monitoring all types of audience engagement on different posts. It can get hectic keeping tabs on every social media network manually, it takes more time than required. This app gives you a graphical view of all statistical reports and insights from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and various others.

• BuzzSumo: One of the best tools for interpreting content once it has been published. It is very simple to use and makes your campaigns more powerful. You just have to enter a keyword and it will immediately give you all activity relating your content and how the performance is within the targeted audience.

• TweetReach: If you’re promoting your brand through Twitter more frequently and you want to know that how many people you’ve reached, then this is a good tool to get the job done. It gives you a detailed analysis of any social profile required. Also, really helpful if you want to compare results from your competitors. Basically, it shows you the activity and response generated through your tweet.

• Mention: This tool is used by thousands of marketing professionals to maintain and operate their daily activities. By specifying your keywords this tool will alert you of all the social media engagements. Receive alerts of who is retweeting or reposting your content and reply in no time to stay updated. A very productive tool to help you manage everything in one place.

• Post Planner: To plan all your Facebook activity, this is one of the tools that come in handy. It is a Facebook incorporated app which lets you publish your post by scheduling for specific times and audience. This gives you the freedom to easily target your audience by age, gender, location and various others to get you the desired result on your Facebook page. Post Planner will also show you post engagements of different trending content. By scheduling your posts, you won’t be bound to sit around and wait for the specific time it needs to be posted, Post Planner will do that automatically.

• Buffer: A very popular tool to control scheduled tasks and content amongst all famous platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. Every social media can be controlled by this one tool. It comes with a chrome extension to make it easier for the users to stay connected across all platforms. The buffer is useful to keep your followers updated all the time and save time by getting your message across all social media platform at the same time. You can even customize your message to post on different platforms or you can choose to keep it the same.

• Addvocate: This tool is very advantageous in making your marketing experience better. It is a fact that even though your business following is a lot, content that your employee’s share on their personal accounts might gain you more followers. Addvocate is useful to keep track of which employee generates more traffic and engagement. It generated sharable contents and forwards it to the employee’s so they can share it on their accounts.

• Compfight: In this world of social media it is getting really hard to capture the attention of the audience. Researchers have figured out that pictures on blogs, Facebook, Twitter draw the reader more towards the content rather just the plain old content itself. To make your business stand out, you need to figure out a way to make your pictures look different. Compfight will help you do just that. If you have this tool then you don’t need to spend a lot of money on hiring a professional photographer to take pictures or design specific ones. It uses Flickr to search pictures, ideas that might be helpful to you. But whatever photos you use, you need to provide specific attribution to the photographer.

• Tagboard: This tool can give you all kinds of conversations across all platforms from a specific hashtag or a keyword. You wouldn’t have to search each platform individually to check your business or other businesses. You just have to enter the keyword and voila, you have all the information from every platform right in front of you. Great tool to gather conversations, articles regarding that specific keyword. Tagboard is free to use which makes it a must tool for social media marketing. Easy and simple to use too.

• Socialbakers: A very effective tool to give you results of how your business is doing against the competitors. It will analyze your performance by comparing data and content. This will be an edge to your business if you know what and how your opposite team is doing.

• Ice Rocket: If you’re a blogger then Ice Rocket is the best tool for you. You can easily search articles and contents among all blogs. Can be used for research and to gather ideas.

• PageLever: This is a Facebook incorporated feature which will allow you to see the overview of how your page is doing. All the information in graphical forms to help you better understand where the traffic is coming from and give you an insightful view of the page. Very useful for maintaining track of all activities of the page. It shows you total engagement on your recent posts, fan growth, clicks per day and various other features.

About The Author:

This article was written by Jacob Arch, who is a business graduate from a reputable institute, who enjoys writing for blogs in his free time and currently works at pay someone to do your assignment an online company.

How to Take Advantage of Paid Social Marketing?

Nov 10, 2016 | Social Media Marketing

Starting from scratch with SEO to build free traffic can take you almost half a year to see any real results. To actually see your efforts turn into profit, you may need almost a year and a half. As we can see, to create really good content is no longer enough, especially if you want to see immediate results. This is where paid social marketing comes in. With paid social marketing, you can attain good traffic and generate revenue with less the amount of time.

How to Implement Paid Social Marketing

Review your budget and see what works best with your available resources. With the budget in mind, think about the business goals that you want to achieve both for short-term and for the long-term.

Consider the best choices for the social media platforms that you can integrate together to help you in achieving your goals. Observe the social media platforms where your competitors hang out and see how they are performing in their marketing. By studying their strategy, maybe you can get some of the best practices which you can replicate for your own strategy.

Another thing to think about is the internal sources you may need in allocating for paid marketing. Paid marketing can give you great results but not on its own; you still have to craft really good content to attract your target audience. You have to know the audience that you will be engaging with your high-value content and your paid marketing.

Experimenting with Paid Advertising Platforms

Now that you have brainstormed with your team and have found some platforms that you think will work for you perfectly, it is time to test the waters. For starters, you can experiment with a $100 budget on the ads in the social platform of your choice. Basically, you may launch your first campaign on Facebook because it is arguably the most accessible.

Paid social marketing will cost you some money. However, you ought to treat it as an investment. In return for this investment, you will see an increase in your engagement and you will get a high organic reach. With paid social marketing, it becomes easier for you to reach new audiences with the use of the granular targeting options. These are available for most of the social media platforms.

Using Facebook Advertising

There are ways that you can leverage your Facebook advertising. To get started with Facebook advertising, do the following steps:

• Go to Promote
• Proceed to Ads Manager
• Select “Send People to Your Website.”

This way, you can send traffic to your landing page. Also, you can send readers to your articles. It is important that your appropriately set the demographics. Your content and your site should match your target audience.

When you send out a post, allow the readers to interact organically. You can start promoting your post with a minimum budget of $10 a day. Target ads that cost 10-15 cents per click. If it costs less, you may increase your budget.

If you run a blog with multiple authors, you may also publish a roundup of the best posts every week. To do this, you can share a lookbook image of your articles. Doing this will allow you to get more click-throughs to your content.

Using Twitter Advertising

Twitter advertising is similar to Facebook. To be able to launch a new campaign, the first thing you need to do is to log onto Twitter Ads. The next recommendation is for you to use Twitter cards. These are posts with rich media, either image or video, than the typical 140-character tweets. This will get you more attention and engagement.

Take advantage of Twitter by tweeting more often. However, pay to promote the best content that you have only. Promoting your good tweets might weaken the effect of your best content. The first thing you can do is to send out tweets organically. You can monitor the initial reaction. If it results in good engagement, then you can promote it.

In your analytics dashboard, you can look at the tweets and find the one that is getting the highest engagement. You can then promote them by choosing the “Select an Existing Tweet” option. You can find this inside the campaign option.

Remember that Twitter is a fast-paced platform. Your ads can get stale and lose engagement fast. You have to keep an eye on the cost per engagement. Monitor if they are getting low and decide to make a new ad and start to promote different pieces of content.

Media Mentions

While you optimize your paid social marketing, simultaneously, you can also pay attention at media mentions. Imagine if you can get your content in a highly-esteemed media platform, you can get the credibility and traffic that can drive your site forward.

To do this, make sure that you research on the kind of content formats that are being written and are trending in the media websites at present. The next thing to do is to perform email outreach to the influencers that have shared recently a piece that is similar to your content. You may use Buzzsumo to find the sharers.

An alternative way to earn mentions is to find authoritative blogs in your niche and consider guest posting there. It will promote the top 20% of your content.

Takeaway

Taking advantage of paid social marketing and including it in your content marketing strategy can greatly help you in gaining credibility and the much-needed traffic to your website.

Paid social marketing can give you results that are consistent. Especially if you are starting from scratch, paid social marketing can give you a boost and increase your traffic. It may take a few bucks out of your pocket but take it as an investment that is sure to bring you great results and profit.

However, remember that you still need to create good content that you can share and promote. Good content will get the attention of your audience, and from there, you will get lots of engagement. While you create great content, paid social marketing will allow you to fast-track the process.

Disclaimer: All images are provided by the author.

Author’s Bio

Patrick Panuncillon started doing SEO management out of his curiosity and now he is one of the reasons why the team over at LinkVista Digital Inc. provide results for their different clients overseas. Connect with him at LinkedIn.