ByDo you want to get the best out of social media? Would you like to try out some different social media marketing techniques?
When most people get started with social media marketing, they think all they need to do is post content onto social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to get results. But this is just one technique, social media management.
There are scores of other techniques you should run side by side along with management to get the biggest benefits social media marketing has to offer.
Therefore, to give you a quick start I have created a list of 3 social media marketing techniques you must try alongside social media management…
Social media listening:
You’re probably already conducting social media monitoring activities. This is when you monitor people resharing your updates or responding to them or mentioning your company online and you take steps to respond to all these messages.
But a lot of users will not mention your handle or tag you. According to mention, 30.72% of tweets just contain your company name without a tag. If you don’t respond to these updates you won’t be getting back to all complaints and you will miss out on several sales opportunities. Hence, you need to use the technique, social media listening where you track all mentions of your company both with and without the handle.
Through this technique you can quickly respond to all complaints before they pick pace and create a bad company reputation. And when people ask questions about your company and products online you can make the most of them and get more sales.
Using social listening you can also keep track of several keywords which can include the names of your competitors’. This can help you analyse your competitors marketing strategies and find even more sales opportunities.
The data gained can also be used to find trending content for your content marketing strategy.
Another feature most social listening tools have is sentiment analysis which lets you see if the comments being made about your business online are positive, negative or neutral in real time. This can help you check if your current social media campaign is having a good or bad effect. It can also be used to modify your plan to stop a calamity and prolong positivity.
A tool you can use for social media listening is Sentione. It has all the features that execute the above tasks. It can even find influencers for you.
You can also set email alerts so that you are notified as soon you or your competitors or any other keywords are mentioned online.
Influencer outreach:
No matter how many followers you have it is always important to do plenty of influencer outreach.
If you run an influencer outreach strategy every time you publish a blog post or ebook, release a product, etc. you will reach even more people than you normally do.
A tool you can use to find influencers is Ninja Outreach. After you find relevant influencers you can either reach out to them via social media or you can email them directly with Ninja Outreach.
You will need to reach out to several people because only a small fraction of them will share. Make sure you thank this person and return the favour. This can help you build a mutually beneficial relationship. You can make a list of all these people so that you remember to share their work regularly.
GNC was able to get 383,000 Facebook fans, 60,000 Twitter followers and increase sales significantly with an influencer outreach program.
Another option is to do sponsored posts where you reach out to very popular influencers and pay them to share your product or content on social media. For more tips check out this post on Instagram influencer marketing.
Running contests:
An effective method that can be used to get plenty of sales, followers and shares is running contests. Contests have this ability to get big results in a matter of days and weeks at low budgets. But you will need to spend plenty of time to create a strategy and organize the contest.
Frist decide on what you want to achieve with the contest. This will be your primary goal that will accomplish something major like gaining traffic or sales or email subscribers. Next you must choose one or two secondary goals like getting shares or followers or impressions. The contest should be devised to help you achieve these primary and secondary goals.
Give the primary goal the priority, only work on accomplishing the secondary goal if it will not have a negative effect on the primary goal.
Next choose a prize the winner of the contest will get. This should be a relevant prize your target audience will like. Usually the best option is to give away one of your products and services. Never give away an expensive product everybody wants as you don’t want everybody to participate in this contest. You only want your target audience. Travel Country made sure only people interested in traveling took part in their contest by offering a backpack, tee shirt and water bottle as the prizes.
After you choose the prize, list the steps people need to take to enrol in the contest. These should help you accomplish your primary and secondary goals.
For example, if your primary goal was to gain sales and your secondary goal was to gain followers, you can ask people to share a product from your website onto social media and follow you to take part in the contest.
Make sure you don’t force people to Like your Facebook page to take part in a contest as Facebook doesn’t allow this.
Remember that people should be willing to put in the time to complete the steps to win the prize. So make sure it is worth it.
Once you have all this ready, you can begin promoting your contest on a landing page. Run it for a few days to weeks depending on how quickly you want to achieve your goal. To get the best results always make sure you run a contest on one social network at a time.
Try out the above three social media marketing techniques; social media listening, influencer outreach and running contests along with your everyday social media management activities and you will see stronger results. Once you get these right you can add in other techniques.
Have you ever used any of the above social media marketing techniques? Would you like to add others to the above list? Please leave your comments.
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