Social media has become a necessary tool to connect and engage with your audience—and in today’s marketing landscape, that’s how brands are built.
Social media marketing is simply using social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, to market your business—and, when possible, to create a community of people excited about your brand. This new marketing medium is more demanding on businesses because to promote and build a brand, you must engage in conversations with your target market.
The “2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” by social media researcher Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner, confirms that 88 percent of businesses using social media marketing indicated that their efforts have generated significant exposure for their brand. Improving traffic and growing lists was the second major benefit listed—with 79 percent having success—followed by developing loyal fans, at 69 percent.
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Images can make a big difference in how customers interact with and view a brand. About 90 percent of information that is sent to the brain is visual. According to research by CrowdRiff, a marketing firm that focuses on visual impact, 60 percent of customers are more likely to consider a business whose images appear in local search and while the average person will read only 20 percent of the words on a webpage, they’ll look at every image. A full 67 percent of customers said images were very important in making a purchasing decision. Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without them, according to Buzzsumo. The take-away: Use engaging, appropriate images to keep customers interested in what you post on social media, and consider upping your budget so you can use less generic-looking stock photos.
Exposure can be valuable. According to the “2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” conducted by Social Media Examiner, 91 percent of companies said their social media efforts increased exposure for their businesses by committing as little as six hours per week, and 88 percent of those that used social media marketing for one year or longer also reported an increase in exposure.
The number-one benefit of social media marketing was gaining those all-important eyeballs and an increase in sales (reported by more than 52 percent of respondents); an unexpected benefit was a rise in search engine rankings reported by more than half the participants in the study.
Engaging Online Tools
There are hundreds of engagement tools on the internet that can help you not only start and conduct conversations with your brand’s audience, but also monitor and deepen them. One of the most powerful is blogging. Blogging is derived from the word “web log,” which are websites that are primarily maintained by an individual who regularly entered commentary, descriptions of events, or other material, such as graphics or video.
Websites can become static and dated, in addition to not being interactive, which means you’re not engaging or talking with your customers or clients. Putting a blog on your website allows you to engage in a two-way conversation with your market. To start the conversation, you can post valuable tips, content, discussions, resources, thoughts, and reviews on your blog.
Blogging, which dates to the early ’90s, gained popularity quickly, and today, it is one of the most powerful interactive tools on the net. Whether you already have a blog or you need to set one up, there’s one thing you need to do . . . become active on it. Some 69 percent of respondents in the “2017 Social Media Marketing Industry” report who blogged for at least one year cited a loyal fan base as the biggest benefit to doing so. The other added bonus is that you have the ability to point readers to your other social channels, like Facebook and Twitter, creating a full-circle halo effect for your message.
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Google Alerts are a great way to keep track of buzz and conversations happening about you and your company. Go to www.google.com/alerts and enter your company name and any keywords that might come up in a conversation about your brand. Whenever something is posted on the internet with those keywords, Google will send you an email with the link. You can set this up to keep an eye on your competitors, too.
The key to building readers and followers for your blog is to be active and post valuable and compelling information on a regular basis. Serious bloggers post and market their blogs on social sites daily. Although this is a powerful and effective way to build readers and followers, daily posting isn’t necessary to grow your blog. All you need to do is allocate posting time that fits within your marketing schedule—and stick to it. Consistency is key when you launch and operate a blog. Your readers will begin to expect and look forward to your posts. Be sure to optimize your blog for mobile, as a great majority of people view the internet from smartphones and tablets.
The first thing you need to do is find a blog platform. A blog platform is a site that allows you to set up, design, and even host your blog. Most are free although some offer upgrade capabilities and options.
A few top blog platforms include:
WordPress: http://wordpress.com
Tumblr: www.tumblr.com
Blogger: www.blogger.com/start, a Google platform
Wix: www.wix.com
Medium: http://medium.com
Squarespace: www.squarespace.com
Most web creation tools and sites will also allow you to plug in a blog, either by building it from the host site or by including a widget that links readers back to one of these blog-specific platforms. It’s up to you to make it as fancy or simple as you like—and as your time allows.
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More than half the respondents in the “2017 Social Media Marketing Industry” report said Facebook (62 percent) was their most important platform, followed by LinkedIn (16 percent), Twitter (9 percent), and Instagram (7 percent). That’s an increase from 55 percent in 2016 for Facebook and from 4 percent for Instagram—and slight declines for Twitter and LinkedIn.
Video Marketing
Just as marketing has evolved, so has the internet. What started as static, text-heavy sites have evolved into interactive and informative video pages. According to researcher E2M Solution’s “Demand Generation” survey, 92 percent of marketers used video to leverage demand, more than any other type of lead generation effort online. There’s a reason for that: 80 percent of the respondents in the “Demand Generation” study say they prefer interactive content. Most people think that they need to invest in a big production of storyboards and high-end video equipment to make quality viral videos; however, the opposite is true. The more fun, humorous, and engaging they are, the more likely they will become viral, contends Mike Koenigs, serial entrepreneur and founder of website traffic generation site Traffic Geyser.
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According to Google, almost 50 percent of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store. Consider making even a simple how-to or promotional video about your product or service and post to your website.
Research by Vidyard indicates that more that 70 percent of marketers say video converts better than any other medium. YouTube reports that more than 5 billion hours of videos are watched in the United States every single day in 2018; five years ago it was 6 billion per month. More than half of that traffic comes from mobile device users. Another reason why videos are so powerful in marketing is the fact that they connect with the consumer’s three vital learning gateways—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
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Check out TubeMogul.com, now owned by Adobe. You can use this company to upload and post videos to the top 30 to 40 video sites, depending on what the content of your video is. TubeMogul also offers one-stop programs for video advertising and marketing across different devices and mediums (social, television, etc).
One of the quickest, most affordable ways to create a video is to use a newer-model smartphone and record short videos for your target market. They don’t have to be fancy; they just have to be fun and informative. A quick and easy way to launch a video campaign and make it viral is to create short video clips of two to three minutes in length that are frequently asked and answered questions from your customers. People are most likely to leave a video if they’re not captivated in the first 10 seconds, explains Danny Donchev, an SEO expert and author. Examples of smart intros can be found on his FortuneLords blog (fortunelords.com/youtube-intro-maker/). Keep in mind, too, that you can go live and post video content in real time using social media tools like Facebook Live or Periscope. This is a great option if your goal is to get an immediate reaction from viewers, like when you are offering a limited-time deal that requires them to act quickly.
Overview of Social Bookmarking Sites
Traffic from social bookmarking sites can give your site a huge boost in traffic, delivering thousands of visitors in just a few hours. While the initial effects can be temporary, if you give people a reason to come back to your website, you’ll certainly notice a positive cumulative effect. We’ll cover how to do this in the “Content Marketing Online” section starting on page 649.
What is social bookmarking, how does it work, how can you get people to bookmark you, and what can you expect? A social bookmarking service is a website that allows members to add page links as bookmarks, categorize those links, and provide added commentary. These bookmarks are then made available to the other community members who are also generally allowed to make their own comments on the bookmarked page.
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You can also use Twitter for social bookmarking, making it your own social powerhouse. By posting and/or retweeting links, articles, news stories, and any readable content, you are in effect bookmarking it for later use. You can then revisit your account later to wade through your social saves.
The service that kicked off the social bookmarking craze in 2003 was Del.icio. us. Since that time, hundreds of other social bookmarking services have been launched, with the most popular being Digg (digg.com/), Reddit (reddit.com), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Folkd (www.folkd.com/), and StumbleUpon (https://www.stumbleupon.com/). All these services have the ability to deliver hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors to your site within a very short time, sometimes within hours of your page having been bookmarked if the wider community finds the entry of interest.
Make it easy for site visitors to bookmark you by using a service called AddThis, which offers a free one-step click-and-add button for bookmarking sites. Site visitors simply click on the “bookmark” icon on your site, and choose which of their social networks to post your content to, from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.
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Check out services like http://onlywire.com or www.socialmaximizer.com for automated (or manually curated) social bookmarking options.
AddThis keeps the list of bookmarking options current; plus, the service provides you with stats, such as tracking how your users are sharing your content. When you install AddThis, you’ll begin receiving analytics once your visitors start sharing your content. After you start receiving analytics information, you can use filters to refine your data by domain, time period, and other options. AddThis offers several different analytics reports to help you understand how visitors are sharing your content. These reports include information about popular content, services usage (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and geographic summaries. Your analytics data can even be integrated into your Google Analytics reports.
Another must-have on your site is ShareThis, a little green button found at ShareThis.com. This is another icon that makes it easy to share ideas, articles, and content online. It’s a great tool to increase traffic and engagement, and with one click of this green button, visitors can share your content with all their online networks.
Content Marketing Online
You can harness the power of content marketing by writing short articles related to your respective industry and posting online, either on your own social handles and website or on a related site. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that includes references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the business’ credibility within its market, as well as attracting new clients.
If writing is not your forte and you’re worried about creating powerful articles or content, there are hundreds of sites that offer writing services, such as WritersForHire.com, Guru (www.guru.com), or Upwork (www.upwork.com), where you can set a budget for a project and post the job for hire. You could also engage with Contently (www.contently.com) to produce material, but this can be a more expensive avenue. Another great resource for writers is right in your hometown at the local university or college. Interns are starving for more experience and would jump at the opportunity to write articles for credit. You can post writing jobs in the college career center, or call the intern division in the marketing department.
Before you submit your articles online, make sure you read submission guidelines to ensure timely approval and posting. There are hundreds of article marketing sites on the net. Here are the two top sites:
1. Business Know-How. If your content can help businesses grow, then this is a great site to submit articles and tips to. Business Know-How (www.businessknowhow.com) is known for providing practical information, tools, and resources for starting, growing, and managing small and homebased businesses. The Business Know-How website reaches several million people each year.
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Post articles to chosen sites and link back to your blog, client, or marketing campaign site. Make sure to include tags and keywords relevant to your content topic when posting. Develop a list of relevant industry blogs, e-newsletters, and Twitter feeds and send your link to those, too. Post your most insightful blog content to LinkedIn.
2. EzineArticles. This is a matching service that brings real-world experts and ezine publishers together at www.exinearticles.com. Experts, authors, and writers are able to post their articles on this member site. The site’s searchable database of hundreds of thousands of quality original articles allows email newsletter publishers that need fresh content to find articles that they can use for inclusion in their next newsletter or blog post. The site serves millions of unique visitors monthly and has over 100,000 RSS feeds and more than 700 email alert lists that announce every new article posted to over 100,000 permission-based members and publishers.
Words Heard Round the World
Here are a few quick tips on how to take an article and make it viral online:
Post on discussion boards and forums. Post snippets of your article or the article title in forums and on discussion boards that are related to your target market or topic focus. Don’t forget to include your full name and website or blog URL where the article is located.
Tweet it—and include influential Twitter handles in your posts. Write a 100- to 200-character pithy summary, and use the @ handles of people with many followers (which could be a few thousand in a smaller industry or tens of thousands in a big one) in your industry or reviewers in your product or service space. Take advantage of trending hashtags that relate to your tweet.
Compile articles into an ebook. Compile the articles into an ebook that you can use for lead generation. For example, if you own a gym and want to get more people in to work out, offer an ebook on the top ten ways to motivate yourself to get to the gym. Take these ebooks and distribute them either through your website, to your email list, or via safelists. Give your readers the right to distribute them as well. This is viral marketing at work. If your ebook is for sale, offer to share revenue if readers distribute it to their list and sell it. This is called an affiliate marketing program.
Write a variety of articles. The trick to reaching a massive amount of people is to create a variety of articles. For example, if you want to promote your public relations service, you could post content on how to write an article, how to come up with attractive article titles, what’s the right format and ideal word count, how and where to distribute the articles, how to submit to hundreds of article directories within the shortest time, etc.
Add a disclosure in each article at the end or bottom of the article. Your disclosure statement should say something like this: “This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog, or website. The author’s name, bio, and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.”
Once you’ve posted your content on the article publishing sites, you’ll want to track their success. If you posted your content on EzineArticles.com, for example, you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other nonwebsite sources. On each article, there’s a quick-publish button that spits out an HTML-formatted version of the article, allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or email. Authors are provided with statistics on how many times the button is clicked as well as how often the article has been viewed and forwarded by email and a few other neat statistics. Total views (page views) are also included in the stats. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands; however, they’re publishing more than 100 articles per month. You get back multiples of what you put in, and depending on keywords, titles, and subject matter, you can expect varying results.
Another great analytics tool you can use to track where visitors are coming from, what article pages they visit on your site, and how long they stay is Google Analytics. It’s a free service and fairly simple to set up. Go to www.google.com/analytics to set up an account. The analytics site offers a complete tutorial; however, if you’re still unsure how to use it, you can ask a web programmer to set it up for you in a matter of minutes.
Social Marketing Automation
With all the social site tools available, often the best way to be effective with your social marketing is to automate the process. First, you need to decide whether automation is right for you and, if so, which automation you should set up. Automation can be key in turning your contacts into profits because you can post less, but at the same time, you get more exposure. Social automation, however, can be considered spamming, so be careful with how you set it up.
How does social network automation work? Use tools like Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) and SocialFlow (www.socialflow.com) to automate your social networking sites and TubeMogul (www.tubemogul.com) to automate your video posting. These sites can submit a link or post to not just one or two sites but, in some cases, up to 60. Sometimes, though, the link posted isn’t relevant for the site it goes out to. In other words, the links aren’t even relevant for the members of the network, and sometimes they’re not properly tagged or categorized. This eventually leads to negative votes on the article or post submitted, so make sure you set up your automation properly.
There are many automation capabilities and options available. Here are some automation suggestions to get you started:
Use Twitter to post to Facebook. Every time you post on Twitter, it will automatically post to your personal Facebook newsfeed. While some media professionals have gotten away from this since the @ Twitter handles are “dead links” when they move to Facebook, it can still be a fast and efficient way to automate. However, if Facebook is your primary source of engagement, consider the other way around for automation (see next bullet).
Use your Facebook Page to post to Twitter. Every time you post to your Facebook fan page, it can post to Twitter, which will, in turn, post to your personal Facebook newsfeed.
Link your blog to Facebook. Click on the NetworkedBlogs application in Facebook (www.facebook.com/networkedblogs), and add your blog information as prompted. There’s a verification process that Facebook will walk you through to make sure you’re the author of the blog.
Link your blog to LinkedIn. Go to “Applications” and click on “WordPress” if you have a WordPress blog, or go to “Applications,” then “Blog Link” if you have a TypePad blog. LinkedIn will walk you through the process step by step—and it does change the process sometimes, so check before you attempt to link your blog
Link your blog to Twitter. Dlvr.it (http://dlvrit.com) is a handy, free website and application that will “feed your blog to Twitter.” Go to dlvr.it, sign up for an account, verify, and log in, then click the “Create New Feed” button, and add your blog. It might take a couple of hours to start working, but once it’s going, it’s fairly reliable unless Twitter goes down or has API issues. Check the stream once a week. You can also use this service to link your blog to other social media, as well.
Use a service like Hootsuite, where you can schedule posts months in advance. You can also use the service to link to all your social media accounts, from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and even Pinterest. Your most popular articles or blog posts can be “socialed” months into the future to give them new life. Just be sure to make it clear that they’re older posts (add the phrase “In case you missed it,” or “ICYMI” in Twitterspeak).
Another way to automate your blog so it posts to the social sites you’re active on is to set up widgets and add plugins. You can do this for sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and many more. The way a widget works is every time you post on one social site it will go out to your blog as an update. First, you need to make sure your blog allows widgets. Some blogs won’t allow widgets unless you host the blog on your own site. Once you determine whether you can add these widgets, log in to each of the sites you want to add a widget to, go to the search box and type in widget, and that will take you to the most current directions on how to upload or generate the HTML code needed to post widgets to your blog.
Plugins are applications that can enhance the capabilities of your blog, such as the All in One SEO plugins available on WordPress, which help you optimize your blog for search engines and mobile viewing. Thousands of plugins are available, and they’re usually found on your blog platform under “plugin.” You can also engage services like Thunderclap (www.thunderclap.com) to amplify your message by getting supporters to share your message (automatically) at the same time. More voices at once makes your message or blog post stand out.