Last week, I attended one of the largest social media webinars in the world. The event, hosted by Hubspot, shared strategies to help increase business’s brand visibility on social media. Social media experts talked about advertisement methods and shared tips and best practices to get the best out of social media efforts.
Since sharing is caring (and we care at WMT!), here are some of the important social media marketing tips from the webcast + our advice to help you succeed in 2014. Let the learning begin!
Make a Damn Good Impression
The rumor is true. Looks matter. It’s the first impression on your Facebook and Twitter that is important. People need a compelling reason to follow you. Draw them in with appropriate photos that represents your business well.
In filling out the description on your Facebook or Twitter account, be accurate about your business locations, hour, and website links. The more details you give your audience, the easier it will be for them to understand and reach out to your business. Its the little things that count.
Be Human on Facebook
Just because its your Facebook business page, doesn’t mean you should sound robotic on it. Talk to people online the way you would talk to a person right in front you. Show your Facebook fans the company’s culture. An example of this would be posting photos of the team having fun at work. Our team sometimes shares music we listen to during work with our Twitter and Facebook peeps. It’s a fun way for our followers to get to know us. This week we chilled out to Broken Bells. Oh yeah!
Be Professional On LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, you should always consider a more professional mindset. Share tips that are helpful to your followers and provide the valuable content regardless if its from your company or not. Constantly experiment and pay attention to the metrics provided to see what type of content works best.
Build Relationships on Twitter
Tweet about relevant industry topics and reach out to people in your industry to help build relationships. In the example above, we tweeted an article we wrote and tagged appropriate people who were mentioned in the blog post. Just like that, we can build relationships as well as awareness about our brand.
Using hashtags is a way to help drive engagement and add value to conversations. In the example above, we created the hashtag #markEDing. This is a term created by Lorrie Thomas Ross which literally means:
Marketing + Education = markeding [Click Here to Tweet This Tip]
Anyone can create their own hashtags, just make sure they are easy to understand and align with your company’s purpose and goals.
Another Twitter tip: post appropriate photos on Twitter to help increase the visibility of your tweets. Remember, the photos don’t have to be yours, but you should credit the source. The marketing experts from the Hubspot webcast talked about the 80/20 rule on content. They encourage 80% of your content to not focus on what you are selling.
Lastly, treat social media networks as different platforms. In other words, unhook all social media accounts and treat each social media account individually. Linking the same content on all of your social media accounts is, well, lazy.
Huge thanks to Scott Engelman, Jed Clevenger, Russ Laraway & the team at Hubspot for inspiring us to write this blog. Feel free to send us your marketing questions at @webmarketing_rx!