Jawad KhanLike search engines, most social networks have also evolved significantly over the last few years. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have gradually changed their algorithms to encourage quality content and user engagement. That is why you should no longer measure your social media success by the number of followers or page likes.
In order to effectively use social media, you need to change your approach and view it as a part of your broader blogging and content marketing strategy.
With this background, here are a few tips that’ll help you increase the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and achieve more tangible results.
1. Invest in Your Most Profitable Platforms
There are dozens of social networks on the internet right now. But you can’t master all of them at the same time. Your objective for using social networks is to drive traffic, engage your audience, build brand image and generate leads.
For this, you need to focus only on the right social networks that your target audience uses. For example, if you’re a clothing brand, targeting women buyers, it’s much better to focus on Pinterest and Facebook as compared to LinkedIn and Twitter. The majority of your shoppers use Pinterest, so why focus anywhere else?
The most successful social media marketers know where to spend their time and money, and how to make the most of their target social networks.
2. Follow a Social Media Calendar
Spending too much time on social media for too little return is one of the most common mistakes that bloggers and marketers make. Social media is addictive and can easily suck you into it and eat up hours of your time.
To ensure that you remain productive and only use social media for business benefit, try creating a social media calendar. A social media calendar helps you organize your social media marketing efforts, allows you to focus on the most profitable channels, manage your social content better and identify the content that performs the best.
Almost 74% of marketers saw an increase in their website traffic from social media when they limited their focus and spent just 6 hours per week using some form of a social media calendar. Social media might appear to be a casual and informal marketing channel, but in order to achieve success from it, you need to organize your efforts and make the most of your time.
3. Optimize Your Blog Content for Social Media
Blogging and content marketing are closely linked with social media. You need to optimize the structure of your blog for social sharing so that your posts get the maximum engagement on social media.
For this, you need to create blog content that people like to share with their social media circles. You also need to add a few lines of code to your blog and enable Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cardsand Rich Pins so that when your blog content is shared on social media, it appears properly with an image and meta description.
Also make sure your blog has floating social media sharing widgets, like DiggDigg or AddThis installed so that people can actually share your stuff.
4. Use Social Media Keyboard Shortcuts
A simple practice that can save tons of your time on social media, make you more productive, and simplify your marketing activities, is using social media keyboard shortcuts. These keyboard shortcuts will allow you to simplify your day to day social media activities by using a combination of different keys.
For example, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts on Facebook.
You can find more keyboard shortcuts for social networks like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc in this infographic.
5. Re-Purpose Content on Social Media
Another great way to get the most out of your social media posts, is to re-purpose your successful content into different audio and video forms.
For example, you can identify the most popular posts on your blog, create a bulleted summary of those posts, and convert them into video clips that highlight their key points. Such videos can be easily created using the standard Windows Movie Maker that comes with your Windows operating system. You can add voice overs yourself or simply use a text to voice solution to convert your bullet points into professional speech and add it to the clips.
Once the clips are ready, you can share them with your social media followers along with a backlink to the original post. This would not only give a different dimension to your content but also make it more interesting for your followers.
Wrapping Up
Social media is a powerful tool for generating traffic to your blog, building your brand image and engaging your followers. But in order to make full use of it, you need to know smart tactics that some of the marketing pros are using. The tips I’ve shared in this post are not only easy to use, but also guarantee a high return on your marketing efforts.
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