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10 things you can do right now to maximise your social media marketing success
The document outlines strategies for effective social media engagement on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, highlighting user demographics and suitable content types. It emphasizes the importance of customizing stories, utilizing visuals, and establishing success metrics. Additionally, it suggests leveraging discussions and ads, as well as managing feedback effectively.
10 things you can do right now to maximise your social media marketing success
- 2. 1. Choose yourchannel
- 4. Facebook 1.3 billion users worldwide, people are catchingup with friend and families Twitter More likely city dwellers than suburban, news source LinkedIn Used by professionals in business – B2B, succeed in business Pinterest Females, <age 50, used as inspiration source Instagram 18-29 female skew but males are on there too, visual story Google+ Techies, innovators, self-employed. What’s new?
- 5. 2. Determine yoursuccess metrics
- 7. 3. Customise yourstory
- 9. 4. Use thumbstopping images
- 11.
- 13. 6. Publish apost on LinkedIn
- 15. 7. Download thePages App
- 17. 8. Start agroup discussion
- 19. 9. Advertise onFacebook
- 23. 10. Respond tonegative feedback
Editor's Notes
- #2 10 things you can do right now to maximise your digital marketing success
- #4 Strategic Considerations There are so many digital marketing channels to choose from. It can be overwhelming and tiring just thinking about your options let alone choosing one that will help you meet your marketing objectives. It can be a simple formula though. Your first consideration is: Where are your customers? Where can you make the most impact? Will you need to advertise to gain traction? Facebook advertising is really slick, LinkedIn Advertising is not so great if you are targeting regional geographic locations, advertising on Twitter and Instagram is still quite new and really only being used by large organisations at this point. What are your objectives? How will you use that channel to engage? If you have decided that Instagram is your channel, then where will you be sourcing your images. Tip: Do one really well rather than 10 half heartedly Best practice – If you set up 6 channels – don’t just publish exactly the same content to each channel. Customise the content to that channel.
- #5 Facebook – locally - the largest active group on Facebook seems to be females aged between 35 and 44. Twitter – LinkedIn - in Port Macquarie and surrounds there are over 17,000 people on LinkedIn
- #7 Strategic considerations People often ask me how can I tell if my marketing is working? How do I know which channels to invest in and how much money to spend on each marketing activity. This is what the most brilliant thing about digital marketing. There are so many different metrics that you can measure your activity on. Of course measurement and metrics will always relate to exactly what you set out to achieve. For example. If I’m a business who has decided that as an organisation, we have an awesome team of experts who are terrifcly good at their job, they are experienced and they can achieve great results. But I’ve condcuted and anectodotal research and word on the street is that while we know how fantastic our consultants are. Our clients don’t. We also know that a lot of our ideal clients are using LinkedIn. So we set ourselves the objective of increasing brand awareness and positioning ourselves as a brand and our team members as experts using LinkedIn. We set our SMART goals (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, T) which include connections gained by each employee but more than that. We decide we are going to join some groups and publish some content as well. So our measurement metrics are most likely going to be how many relevant connections are made by each employee on LinkedIn, how are those published posts doing on LinkedIn – lets see A. how many people have viewed them (conveniently indicated by a little eyeball icon), how many people have liked, commented, shared etc. We may have also decided to publish post as a company page on LinkedIn. If you set up a company page, you can use the advertising feature of LinkedIn and target you’re the content that you post to people in a specific job function, in a specific metro city, that earn a particular salary level. Another example, As a business I’ve decided that Facebook is going to provide me with an opportunity to communicate with our customer in a highly targeted and cost effective manner as well as provide a forum for us to develop and strengthen our relationship with them. My main objective in the first instance is to build a community. Top tip. I very rarely run an advertising campaign that just acquires Facebook likes. What you will find is you can run a campaign that meets another objective such as collecting email addresses or increasing traffic to your website and just by running that advertising campaign, you are also letting your customer know that you have a Facebook page and community – the page likes will often increase as this campaign is running. Your measurements will be based on – are you meeting your objective of gaining page likes, how many people are seeing your ad – this is called ‘reach’, how many people have clicked on your website or how many email addresses have you managed to collect.
- #9 Customise your story Use tools such as canva.com to create a personalised image Conduct a landscape analysis on whichever social media channel you have chosen to use and then think about how you can do it differently. How will you create breakthrough.
- #11 Use thumb stopping images. Humans process images 60,000 times faster in the brain than text 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text. For Business to business and professional services – this can definitely be a challenge. We don’t have the luxury of posting gorgeous outfits, interior styling vignettes. We need to be creative. If you are like me and don’t mind the odd dose of shameless self promotion – put yourself in the picture. Give people a glimpse behind the scenes. Tips: 1. Invest in a suite of exceptional photography. By using your own images you are reinforcing 2. Choose a single image instead of a collage 3. Always choose pictures you take over stock photography
- #13 Hashtags explained: They were developed for Twitter Developed as a keyword search mechanism, they are used to promote global conversation. Type #cake into instagram to find cake decorating inspiration, type #socialmediamarketing into Twitter to view tweets containing useful information about social media marketing. They are mainly used on Twitter and Instagram And occassionaly you will see them used on Facebook. The search functionality on FB is not great so it doesn’t work as well as on Instagram and twitter. They are being widely used at the moment within event marketing. Such as today. We are able to track all of your social activity that has been generated today by use of the simple hashtag. What not to do: Weird hashtags will be difficult for your community to remember.
- #15 Publish a post on LinkedIn Business to business You’ll need a personal LinkedIn profile. Go to the ‘Home page’ Click on ‘Publish a post’ This will then sit on your personal profile and be placed in the newsfeed of your connections to view. Professional services This is how you can demonstrate your expertise. A perfect example of creating ‘helpful marketing’
- #17 A common query I am faced with regularly is from people trying to access update their business page from their Facebook App. I’m not sure if anyone has epxerienced it here but often when you try and update a business page on your blue Facebook app – the post, comment or like will appear that it’s coming from you personally as opposed to the business. If this is the case. Head over to App Store and download the Pages App. The Pages App was developed for mobile business page management. You can access analytics and limited Ads Manager etc. Best of all is when you are on the Page you manage in Pages you will always be posting as that business. Warning – it can be restrictive with some functions. If you are finding you do have limited functionality and you are unable to perform a task on either the blue Facebook app or the Pages App – access Facebook from a desktop
- #19 Did you know that when you start a discussion within a LinkedIn Group, that discussion gets emailed straight into the inboxes of every member of that group (unless they have opted out of group notifications) So how do you contribute to Group discussions. You need to have a LinkedIn personal profile In the top search bar, start searching for industry keywords such as marketing, small business, accounting etc. and you should be presented with some options. One you can all start with on a local level is the Port Macquarie Small Business Network. You will most likely need to ‘request to join’ and then once you are a member, you can contribute by starting or joining a discussion. Let’s take our conversations online. You’ll find the Groups that you have joined under the Interests tab. Top tips for Group discussions Don’t use this as a spamming ground. LinkedIn Groups allows you to initiate discussions with like-minded individuals as well as comment on discussions that others have made. There is plenty of opportunity to position yourself as an expert and ‘network online’ if you like in these groups. Two local groups you could start with are the Port Macquarie Small Business Network and the Hastings Business Womens Network. When trying to find groups, look for industry groups but also consider the groups that your clients might be a member of and request to join those groups as well.
- #21 Firstly – I’d like to proceed this point with the fact that in order for you to gain traction on Facebook now, you absolutely need to factor Facebook advertising costs into your marketing budget. There is so much I could talk about and share with you about Facebook Advertising. I love using it and have had a lot of success using this as a highly targeted and cost effective marketing tool – both for my business as well as for my clients. Today I’ll focus on one important consideration for Facebook Advertising. Facebook is a business, it’s a publically listed company – it’s makes sense to charge businesses money if they plan to make money themselves from utilising the platform. But more importantly than that. Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world because people love to use it.. Mark Zuckerburg knows that if Facebook turns into a massive sales platform where brands are shoving their messages down people’s throats – people will not use it. He is 100% focused on maintaining a positive user experience at all times. In light of this – he spends a lot of time guiding and enforcing brands to contribute to people’s Facebook community in a valuable way. One of the things Facebook do to encourange businesses to contribute positively is by sending them little emails once in a while showing them best practice, sharing tips and so forth. One of the things that Facebook does to enforce that brands don’t pollute newsfeeds with sales messages is they enforce a rule in advertising that your image that you use must only have 20% writing on it. But we don’t have to use images – we can use graphics – such as this one. This graphic passed the 20% rule So here is an example of a graphic Tip: To advertise on Facebook your images need to have less than 20% text. Facebook strives to provide an exceptional user experience. It discourages to pollute peoples news feed with sales messages that don’t add any value to people’s lives. Even when you are advertising – tell your story As advertisers we are trying to stop people in their tracks with engaging content not sales messages
- #22 This one passes
- #23 This one would not.
- #25 Social media is a two way conversation. We are opening up the lines of communication between our customers and our organisations. In doing so we gain a more in depth understanding of our customer which we can then use to service them better. Most of the time we’ll attract positive response and engagement with our channels but every now and again someone will use our Twitter or Facebook pages to air a grievance. And that’s OK. This to me presents a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the professionalism of your organisation. Best practice. Address the feedback, apologise for the experience (if warranted) and then perhaps offer to take the conversation offline. Things I try to avoid are: Offering something for free to disappointed customers – you can do this offline if you feel it’s appropriate. You certainly don’t want to encourage opportunists! Entering into an argument or being rude or abusive back Trolls are different. So what is a troll? Basically it is someone that is being abusive on your social media page. For example…Dragonfly example All social media channels have really easy to access processes to deal with trolls. Tip. On Facebook if you feel there is an abusive comment that tarnishes your environment – Hide it – don’t delete it. Deleting comments is like a red rag to a bull. By hiding it – the troll can still see it – their friends can still see it –but no-one else can. Another point to note here is that you are legally responsible for all of the content on your Facebook page – that means comments that other people make, posts that other people post