Social media offers diverse benefits for business owners. The evolution of different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn has meant that you need to be aware of general as well as channel-specific hacks to fulfill your social media marketing objectives.
Here are 5 social media hacks that will enable you to save time and gain wider exposure, followers, higher conversion rates, better engagement, and more.
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Know what’s hot – If you can put up information that is current and relevant to your niche and most importantly your customer, you’ll give your audience reason to read your posts on social media and from there visit your website. One really great search tool is uvrx.com. Powered by Google custom search, it throws up results for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and others. Social-searcher.com is another search tool meant to check out how your chosen keywords are being treated by the various social media networks. It offers analytics data, which informs on folks you can follow, sentiments associated with the keyword, type of posts doing well, etc.
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Social media is speaking a new language – And the language is of images, videos, and infographics. These media types are generating excellent engagement numbers for businesses that have made employing visual media in a pertinent and creative manner standard practice. Vine, the video sharing app for Twitter, Instagram, or Flipboard for iTunes are just some of the apps that enhance the appeal of your posts and make them stand out on your followers’ pages or timelines. Creative calls to action used with such media help in bridging the gap between entertainment, information, and lead generation.
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Grow your audience – Followers, subscribers, friends, etc are central to a successful and enjoyable social media campaign. Two relationship-building techniques commonly used are approaching folks with requests and via paid ads or as in the case of LinkedIn, a paid subscription. A fairly basic but often overlooked hack for more subscribers for your Facebook page is to immediately DM the link to new followers on Twitter. Similar creative, cross-fertilizing hacks should be employed for all social media platforms to capture the interest of your audience when you’re already on their radar.
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Save time – Whether you’re running a one-man show or an enterprise level social media operation with data being fed into CRM systems, you need to automate certain processes. If you don’t then these tend to become chores that you may begin to avoid and in the process, decrease your effectiveness. Updates across platforms, email and SMS updates on favorite topics, auto uploading of social media content to remote storage, etc are just some of the activities that you can place on auto mode. IFTTT.com [If This Then That] offers handy solutions.
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Embrace change and be in the know – When a social media platform changes its guidelines, you have two options. You can either take the change in stride and adapt or give up. When you opt for the former approach, you give yourself an opportunity to occupy the space left vacant by those that gave up the fight. For example, a recent Facebook update prohibited informing contest winners of results through Facebook; however, this restriction has since been relaxed. Last month, LinkedIn introduced enhancements such as the ability to block profiles and unwanted messages. These have clear benefits for popular LinkedIn groups that have had to deal with a lot of spam until now. It pays to be in the know.
While most social media hacks are little more than common sense activities, the ones that often surprise us with their effectiveness are those that you come up with through observation and learning. As entrepreneurs we get busy and can easily forget to allow time each week for creative thinking. Set time aside regularly for creative thinking and keep coming up with ways to extract better results from social media marketing.
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