50 Social Media Marketing Tips That Will Empower and Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing Success

50 Social Media Marketing Tips That Will Empower and Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing Success

Social media marketing can appear a bit of a daunting task to some people, especially if you have no social media experience already! Each social media site has it's own set of rules and guidelines you'll need to abide by and stick to. Nobody expects you to learn everything in one day, but getting to grips with the basics first is important if you are to succeed in your social media marketing attempts. So if you have a hunger to be successful on social media sites, these 50 social media marketing tips will get you up to speed and empower and supercharge your social media marketing endeavors.

Today we will start with just 10 tips for you to digest, then tomorrow I'll give you another 10 tips and everyday until we've reached 50 tips which will fully arm with everything you need to know to be successful on social media!

Tip #1: Find out where most of your audience hangs out.

Social media marketing doesn't mean using every single social media site you can get on. While having more social media profiles can increase your people reach and give you more exposure online, not everyone has the time to manage just a few let alone 5+, 10+ or more social media accounts, profiles & pages. Sure Facebook and Twitter have huge numbers of users on them, but are they where your targeted audience mostly is? You may be able to achieve much larger amounts of following on smaller social media sites. It all depends where your targeted audience mostly is. Your number #1 mission will be to find out where the majority of your intended audience hangs out and start with those social media sites first. That probably is going to be Facebook let's admit it, but it could also be jus the same for YouTube or Google+ or Pinterest too. Each social media site lets people curate and share content in different ways. Think about what sorts of things your intended audience is most likely to be interested in and then think about which social media site has the most options and features for those people.

Tip #2: Know the best time to post.

After you analyze your data and know which posts and post times have the most yield, you'll want to keep posting around these times for better results because the times in which you post can have a huge effect on how many people see and engage with your posts. So knowing when your targeted audience is most likely to be online can help you to know which times are the best times to post as well. Without a doubt, you'll want to post mostly in the morning, afternoon and evening time too but some days may be better than others such as on a Wednesday or even on the weekend. Think about your targeted audience and what their lifestyle might be like and when they're most likely to be online. If they're the type that is mostly the working class citizen then chances are they will mostly be online after a hard day at work. But some people prefer to only go online on the weekends. Check your statistics and see which days are the best to post for your business then you can focus on posting around those times to see the best results.

Tip #3: Build a lasting rapport.

Some people talk to people, some people talk at people, some people talk about themselves only, and some people talk about other people. You ever notice there's always that one person at a party that talks about himself or herself only? How quickly do you loose interest in talking to these people when they're entirely focused on them self and not asking questions about other people? Very quickly! Don't be that guy at the party that talks about himself or herself only. People will grow quickly bored of your self-centered attitude. Show your audience that you're much more interested in them and their thoughts, feeling and opinions than you are piping your own. Talk to your followers! Engage with them. Ask them questions. Mostly related about your business but sometimes personal questions too. How was your day? How's the weather there? What's for dinner tonight? What's your favorite color? This shows that you're a real person with a real personality and not some machine or someone that is following a strict code that doesn't have time for personal or impersonal questions. And when they reply, reply back quickly! Be responsive and show that you care otherwise people will grow accustomed to you not responding quickly and will quickly stop responding altogether!

Tip #4: Make it worthwhile for your followers to follow you.

Social media marketing isn't always about writing a post and sharing it and then sending traffic to your site and hoping they purchase or subscribe to your list. Some people like to feel appreciated and one way of doing that is by rewarding them and giving away things to them they might be interested in. You don't have to do it all the time, just every now and them to keep them hooked. But offer rewards for being your follower, give them discounts and coupon codes they can use or start competitions or free prize draws that giveaway generous prizes. Obviously don't give away prizes that will put you massively out of pocket but just enough to make them feel like you're not about the taking as much as you're about the giving too. This will also give other people the incentive to follow you as well and keeps people engaged and interested in your brand or service.

Tip #5: Be unique on every of your social media pages.

You don't want all your social media pages to look exactly the same and have all the same posts on them together. If all your pages look the same, people will probably only follow you on one site and not all of them if they think they're going to see the same posts and things come up on those other pages too. I know there are some great tools out there that can combine and automate your posting for you such as HootSuite, Buffer, Social Oomph, Dlvr.it or IFTTT, so that you can post to all of them simultaneously, but this shouldn't be done for every single post. That's great for very important things you want to post such as company news, infographics, videos or a new blog post, but you'll want to post different things to the different pages depending on which platform it is and what you can do on each. Make sure that all your pages have different unique posts on them posted at different times and not all the same time to keep things mixed up and looking dynamic.

Tip #6: Get visual and think in pictures.

People prefer to look at nice eye catchy images rather than read huge chunks of text. They're easier on the eyes and visually much more pleasing. If you're only posting text only posts to your social media page people aren't going to respond to that as well as they would a stunning picture, photograph or video. So share and post highly relevant high quality pictures, images and videos or create your own infographics and publish visually pleasing stuff rather than just posting text only posts. Sometimes those posts don't even have to contain a link in them. It's not always about including a link to your site in that post so much as it's about grabbing their attention and keeping them on your page and engaging with it. You can make your own infographics online quite easily or employ a freelancer to do it or even search SEOClerks for infographic creation and get one put together for you at a very reasonable price. The same applies for video creation as well. Remember - pictures speak a thousand words!

Tip #7: Be personable not personal.

Social media sites are a very relaxed method of marketing but you'll still have to remain professional. But you don't want to give the appearance that your business doesn't have its own unique personality. So don't just post business related stuff to your pages, mix it up by sharing some personal details about you or your business such as concerts or festivals or other events you're going to or would like to go to, peoples birthdays or even harmless office banter. Post your own personal views and opinions on things and give the impression that your business does have a real human side to it too. Sharing the latest political updates, ranting and or badmouthing other business's or people or posting meme after meme isn't going to fill your followers with much confidence in your business. If you're doing it about other people, what's to say you wouldn't do it about them too?

Tip #8: Analyze your efforts.

You can put a lot of work in on one particular social media site but how can you know how effective all that work is proving to be? By checking the stats data of course. By looking at your sites traffic logs, by looking at how many times a shortened link such as with Goo.gl or Bit.ly was clicked and what the majority of visitors countries were. Also some social media sites offer tracking and analysis tools so you can see how many people your post reached or how many shared it and how many engaged with it in other ways. If you can see that one certain post at a certain time of day is doing better than other posts at different times of the day, you'll know which one can be most effective for you and keep repeating that over and over to increase its ROI and productivity.

Tip #9: If it doesn't work - don't keep doing it.

Sometimes in life, things just don't work very well. Not every social media channel will be right for you or your business, and if you've tried all the tricks of the trade, tried scouring analytics, tried to strategize and even tried hiring some fresh blood to bring some more life to the channel, but nothing you are doing is working well enough for you to justify carry on using it, then don't! You are far better off using and investing that time on a social media channel that is working and that is providing better results for you and your business. Obviously don't abandon the channel and don't let it go dormant as that may put any future followers of that channel from following it if they think that it doesn't get updated very often. Try to post at least once a week to channels you're not using much.

Tip #10: Don't carry all the weight on your own shoulders.

A lot of people think that social media marketing is meant to be done only by the business itself or that it might be a job that only someone that knows your business well can do. But that's simply not true. You can delegate and outsource your social media posting by hiring a social media manager. You will need to find someone that is right for the job, has all the skills required and is willing to learn about your business and what angle you're trying to take, keep up and maintain but these things can be discussed beforehand. If you can find the right person for the job, your social media page will see the benefits of that from a social media marketing campaign that never sleeps and you'll be able to watch them grow while you take control and handle more important things.

Okay kids, that's 10 social media marketing tips you can take to the bank! Tomorrow I will post another 10 and so on for the next 5 days until we have shared 50 tips.

I hope you'll find them useful and apply them to your endeavors. Let me know if you have any questions about any of the tips provided and if you want more details on any.

Thanks and power to you!

Mike.

Read Part 2.