Social media is huge. When you combine the traffic of sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, etc. you pretty much get access to every single person that ever breathes in this world. This traffic, thanks to the social sites, are pretty much sorted by age, gender, interests etc. and served on a platter to the marketers for carrying out their promotional activities.
There’s pretty much two ways to reach this audience. Every social site has their own method of doing pay-per-click ads, where you as a marketer can pay your way to build an audience. However, if you are low on funds then there’s the free option where you can directly reach your target audience’s time line with great content and marketing.
All this sounds good, but one still needs to build a content marketing strategy to get this audience. Here, in this article, we will discuss several social media management tips to gain social media traffic and convert them to achieve your goals.
1. Choose your social media sites: Every niche is different and based on your niche, choose the best social sites and put your full concentration on those. For example, if your niche is home and garden, then along with the top tier social sites like Facebook and Instagram, you should also focus on Pinterest. On the other hand if your niche is marketing or career or jobs, then your target social site should be Linkedin.
2. Plan and Stick to your Posting Schedule: The first rule of scheduling content is to make sure that you have a long queue of future content ready for your timeline. This content needs to be scheduled for months in advance. In such a case, first schedule content with weekly updates. When you have that ready and your bare minimums are done, start scheduling further so that you can post multiple times a week, to make it further regular with multiple times a day.
3. Make use of existing content: If the brand you are working on is absolutely new than there won’t be anything to re-purpose. But mostly, that won’t be the case and chances are that your brand has been running for some time now. You might have valuable content on the blog section, there might be an email newsletter and auto-responder in place, and chances are that you have run some guest posting campaigns in the past. All this content can be easily repurposed and recycled and posted and shared on the social media.
4. User Generated and curated Content: User generated content is an easy way to boost up your social calendar. This way a lot of content can be easily added and scheduled for your timeline. There are many places from where you can curate relevant and useful user generated content, for example your comments section, social media replies, brand mentions on social media and incoming backlinks and even testimonials can be great places to curate content.
5. Outsource: To speed things up, one needs a team to delegate tasks. A social media management work has several components like creating content, getting graphics ready and finally scheduling it. All of these tasks can be delegated to others so that you can speed things up.
6. Look for Events and Holidays: Now that you are scheduling content on your social timelines for months in advance, it is also important to take note of the important events that will fall during your scheduled times. If any major holiday or event falls during the time you have scheduled content for, then you should make some space for posting something related to the event.
7. Upgrade content with Canva: Several times you will notice that the target content, whether they are from your own blog posts or guest posts, or they are curated content, they all miss the addition of good graphic. But it does not need to stay that way. With the help of Canva, quickly make images that will go well with the content of the scheduled posts.
8. Use Trending Topics and Hashtags: Always make way for trending topics. These are the topics that can be easily pulled from the latest trending hashtags and if they are relevant to your niche, then share them on your time line. This can be further improved by creating catchy graphics, finding something that is available in your blog and is relevant to the story which is trending and then share it with the hashtag.
9. Check messages and notifications: Social media is all about connecting with your audience. There are still people on the social media who send direct messages, not the automated spam and marketing messages but real messages from real people. It is important that we make sure that such messages don’t go unread. Same goes for notifications, as normal people tag and respond to updates, it is important that you respond back.
10. Sometimes Re-Publish content: When you create some good quality micro blogging content, it isn’t enough to share it just once. The attention span of the social audience is small and the timeline scrolling is slippery. If the content is good, unique and deserves more attention and feel free to re-publish it again, give a few week of time in between and publish it again.
11. Show the real you: Social media has too many bots; you never know how many of your own followers are ultimately bots. But that said, you don’t need to be a robot yourself. Share photos of your work place, tell your stories that shows the real you. There’s so much that can be shared from office parties to vacation pics, anything that is relevant and connects your brand and business can be worth sharing.
12. Track reports: Checking reports helps to know what is working, that way you can do more of what works and minimize content that does not get much attention. There are many tools that provide social listening features which help you to track your content progress further. Use those tools to know what kind of content does well.
Social media management is an easy way to organically connect your brand with your followers. It does not requires a lot of money, simple ways of sharing content, responding to queries and making sure that you and your business is out there and is easily reachable is simply enough to get started.