There about as many social media strategy guides available online as there are social media users—at least it seems that way—and for good reason. Businesses of all sizes can no longer ignore the impact of social media marketing, and while effective strategies vary depending on the industry and your company’s goals, there are a few tips that nearly everyone can use to transform social media engagement into actual conversions.
Tip 1: Post selectively on Facebook
Posting the best content that’s highly targeted for your audience might seem like obvious advice, but posting frequently with mediocre content can actually do more harm than posting occasionally with top-notch content. Facebook’s algorithm favors engagement, so if nearly all your posts are inspiring commentary, it will result in Facebook sharing your content more widely in general.
Tip 2: Schedule tweets ahead of time
Secondary apps like TweetDeck and Hootsuite allow you to schedule tweets ahead of time, which can be useful for pairing content with major holidays, pop culture events, and other notable dates.
Tip 3: Mine Facebook’s “life events”
Targeting potential customers is always tricky, but connecting with the right people at the right time is incredibly effective. For example, wedding venues can set ads to appear to newly-engaged couples and baby stores can do the same for people who recently announced they’re expecting. Businesses without a direct connection to life events will have to get creative, but according to the pros, it can be done.
Tip 4: Trial-run content on Twitter
In order to test responses for content, or gauge interest in a new subject area, post a snippet of the content or related image to Twitter first and check the analytics. If a tweet is largely ignored, the content contained might not be worth exploring. But if the engagement rate is higher than expected, you can expand on the content before posting across platforms.
Tip 5: Curate negativity out of Facebook
When your business grows large enough, it will eventually catch the attention of so-called trolls or disgruntled customers looking to vent, whether their complaints are legitimate or not. There are two key ways to keep negativity off your page. First, you can ban inflammatory words such as “unlike,” “unliking,” and “clickbait” (this can be done in Settings), which will hide the entire comment from the general public (although it will still appear on the person’s page); and you should mute trolls instead of blocking them—this removes them from your page, but they won’t know it and retaliate.
Tip 6: Break blogs into multiple tweets
With Twitter’s 140-character limit, it’s a challenge to summarize an entire blog post in one tweet. Pulling key lines, quotes, or subheadings and tweeting with a compelling image or GIF will boost links, and you can even schedule the blog breakdown in advance.
Tip 7: Know when to outsource
The most important tip of all is knowing your limits. Small business owners are especially overwhelmed, but the only thing worse than no social media marketing is bad social media marketing. If you have the resources but not the time or personal attention to devote to your company’s social media, it might be a good idea to outsource responsibility to a trusted professional.
At AGW Group, we can customize a social media strategy that works for you and your specific goals, so contact us today for a free consultation.