How Can Social Media Increase Your Marketing Potential?

By Jennifer Montgomery

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Are you looking to increase your marketing and branding power? Do you want to expand the reach of your company or personal brand on social media? Are you looking for creative, expert tips to expand the reach of your social strategies?

All of these things require the effective use of social media. This can be time consuming and overwhelming, especially with the various platforms that you would need to manage. However, with some basic

Tip #1: Schedule Posts Ahead

Social media can be a full-time job -- and if that's not your only role, you need to find a way to let your marketing strategy live on its own. One expert way to do that is to invest in a content scheduling platform that will let you optimize and schedule ahead.

You can queue up a month's worth of posts and sit back and watch them fly. Best of all, you can switch around the order of scheduled posts easily, simply by changing the date and/or time if something pressing comes up that you need to get out on social media.

You can also use a queue to publish the same content at different times of the day. What you see on social media platforms often depends on what time of day you post, so reposting can help you capture additional views that you may have missed the first time around.

Tip #2: Optimize Send Times

In social media marketing strategy, the time you send a social post really matters. You'll need to know your audience across social platforms and when they are online and active. You can use the reporting analytics from platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to figure this out. Other content management platforms can auto-analyze your feeds and recommend optimal times for scheduling your posts.

For example, you'll find most millennials online late at night because they are up studying if they are in school and often are night-owls. You'll find a mid-aged adult online between the hours of 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. because by this time they will have gotten off work, gone home, had dinner, and put the kids in bed.

Knowing something about the lifestyle and habits of your target audience will help you identify the optimal times to catch them online. And, with so much popping up in their social feeds, you need all the help you can get to get their attention -- if only for a few seconds.

Tip #3: Focus on the Emotive

If we know anything about social media, we know that emotions translate. Emotions motivate you to want a product, to buy a product, and to recommend it. They motivate you to share a post or a video from the brand account to a personal page. Emotional and intriguing headlines tend to get more views than headlines that simply state what they are trying to tell you.

As you are crafting your posts, make sure you are tapping into those emotions -- and using visual and multimedia elements to underscore and deepen your message so that it truly resonates with your audience. You should also craft your headlines to provoke a reaction. It doesn't necessarily need to be a clickbait article, but try to find some way to spin your topic to cause the reader to feel something.

Think about the result you want from your customer. What do you want your customers to feel and to do? From there, try to tap into that motivation with the appropriate emotion -- from nostalgia to happiness to fear and more.

Tip #4: Use Striking Visuals

If you want to reach a more varied audience, create a content library of striking photos that communicate something meaningful about your brand. Perhaps you are marketing a reunion weekend for a university's alumni base. Collect beauty shots of the campus and post messages that evoke nostalgia. Having this database already prepared will allow you to choose the best picture without having to delay while you go take the picture or find one online.

This taps into Tip #3 as well. You'll constantly want to blend the emotive with the beautiful. That's a home run on social -- and you can find and curate dozens of these photos into a photo library for easy sharing and posting throughout the month.

Tip #5: Never Underestimate the Power of Video

Today's social world prioritizes video posts above all others -- particularly live video feeds. If you want your audience paying attention to you, then consider doing a behind-the-scenes live video on Facebook or hosting a live Q&A.

It takes only a few resources to get this going -- including a smart phone and a phone tripod. From there, you can create exclusive, fun live video events that you broadcast directly on your feed.

The fruits of trying this are that you get your audience's attention in a way you won't with other static content -- and you give them an opportunity to engage with you via leaving a comment or posting an emoticon to react to your live video. Experiment with live video at least once a month, making it a part of your standard marketing strategy.

Tip #6: Don't Be Afraid to Be Personal

Many marketers are afraid to get too risky on social -- and sometimes the idea of being too personal evokes the fear. But trying to show your true personality at least once on your social platforms will be worth it. It will teach you how your audience reacts and if a strategy falls flat.

You don't have to a crazy unique personality to write a humorous post. Being clever in your writing also is a form of humor. Another tip: Featuring cute photos of your customers and/or their families are another form of personalization that can work will on your feeds.

Social users love to see themselves online -- and the more you can incorporate them and their stories into your posts, the more engagement and reach you may see on your channels.

Consider, for example, hosting a contest in which your customers post cute photos of their children wearing your brand or participating in activities that support your brand. You can give swag and other prizes for the best entries. You may be surprised how fun and easy this is to do -- and how it energized and engages your customer base.

Tip #7: Experiment with SEO

No matter how long you have been in the business, you can always learn a few new tricks of the trade – and sometimes that means incorporating what is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, into your social marketing strategy.

SEO-optimized text is privileged in web search rankings, such as Google. The better your SEO copy, the better chance your content has of rising in the ranks. An easy way to start incorporating SEO is to do a keyword search for words that are optimized to promote your business. A Denver SEO consultant recommends finding an expert with a proven track record to help you. As SEO has gotten more complicated, it can easy to make costly mistakes that hurt your website’s reputation.

Ready to Get Social?

Are you ready to improve your social score for your personal or company channels? If so, then keep this quick guide of social savvy tips handy, and try to incorporate one into your overall social strategy once a week.

By giving yourself a week to focus on each social media marketing tip, you'll be able to experiment and figure out what has potential and one isn't gaining traction for you.

Your Social Management Guys

We won't just do social media strategies. Social Hire will work collaboratively with your team to ensure your business gets genuine value from us and that your team gets the most out of the service. Our experienced social media managers are motivated to make a enhancements to your social media marketing and reaching targets in a way that realistically makes a difference to your business goals.

What the Social Hire gang loves is making a difference for our clients, and we don't want to waste your, or our resources on campaigns that aren't right for your organisation, if it doesn't get your organisation the difference you need - we take a different approach. When your business utilises social media management, Social Hire get your brand the exposure it needs and offer your business the lift it needs to improve.

Our group of specialists are an organisation that helps our clients boost their online marketing by offering social media management services on a monthly basis.

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