Photo Credit: image from HTSABO
If you have created some great content for your site, then you need to be promoting it as much as you can on social media. People are now spending a huge amount of time on social media and it’s an important place to find new customers and interact with your present ones.
Choose the right platform
There are so many social media platforms available now that, unless you are a large company, you can’t hope to cover all of them. Rather than just spraying around content on many different sites, it’s better to concentrate on a few of them and have some real engagement with people on those sites. So firstly you need to find out which social platform your target audience is most likely to use. For most businesses, you are likely to be best off concentrating on Facebook or Twitter – unless your business has a lot of great imagery to share, in which case Pinterest or Instagram might be better. For those wanting to make professional contacts with other people in their own industry Linkedin is the best site to use, although Twitter can also be very useful for networking with peers.
Create great headlines
You really want to try and grab people’s attention on social media, because there’s so much content being posted that it’s easy to be ignored. Since you will be posting your content multiple times on social media, you can also try many different headlines and see what works best. You could use A/B testing to do this, whereby you use software to see which of your posts is being opened the most.
Use images.
Social media messages with images almost always get better engagement than those without. This applies to all social media – Twitter, Facebook and even Linkedin. Some social networks – Pinterest and Instagram for example – are entirely image based. If you have written an article, you should use images illustrating that article, perhaps alternating the images each time you post. Or if you would like to post a quote, you could put it over a photo and use your company branding. Make sure that you correctly size your images for the social media platform that you are using.
Adapt your message
You need to adapt your message according to the platform that you are using, what works best on one platform will not necessarily work as well, or at all, on another platform. Twitter is good for short snippets of information or comments but you would generally want to provide more information on the same subject on Facebook or LInkedin.
Pick your moment
It’s important to share things at the right time of day when the audience you are trying to reach are most likely to be online and to be active. Set up a posting schedule, so you can post things automatically at the right time of day. Software such as Buffer or Hootsuite are great for doing this.
Post many times
There are so many different things constantly coming up on people’s feeds that it’s likely that they won’t see your post when it comes up. So make sure that you post the same content lots of times – you can change the images used and the headlines so that it doesn’t look like you are repeating yourself.
Engage with people
Social media is all about people, so you want to try and engage with people as much as possible. Asking questions to try and get engagement from your followers is a great way to do this, for example you could make the headlines in your post a question.
Use Video
Videos are a great way to communicate with potential customers because it gives them a chance to see exactly who you are, and allows you a better chance for a personal connection than other types of social media communication. Also, many people prefer to watch videos than to read an article, and you want to try and communicate with as wide a range of potential clients as possible. It’s not hard to make videos on your computer or phone, and you can upload them to Youtube or Facebook.
Advertise
If you are not getting much engagement for your content you might try advertising to reach your audience. The most popular social media site to advertise on at the moment is Facebook, because it has a huge amount of information about its users, which allows you to target exactly the type of person that you want to reach.
Use communities/groups
There are many different types of groups on social media, particularly on Facebook and Linkedin. Join the groups that are relevant to you and then you can promote your content to a very targeted audience. Before you post any of your own content, try to contribute in some other way by commenting on other people’s posts. This will show that you are contributing to the group and not just trying to take from it.