50 Social Media Marketing Tips - Part 3

50 Social Media Marketing Tips - Part 3

In the last couple of days, I've posted 20 social media tips to help you get the most of out your social media marketing efforts. I hope that you've found them useful and will apply them to your social media pages and profiles. Here we have another 10 social media tip that will give you the edge over your competitors and go on to make you a faster, better, smarter social media marketer. So let's get started!

Want to catch up with the last tips before you proceed? Check out the Social Media Tips Part 1 and Social Media Tips Part 2.

Tip #21: Plan your social media marketing with precision.

Posting your new blog posts, retweeting here and there, or sharing things here and there is fine but wont have much effect in the long run. To fully make good use of social media you need to have a "plan of attack". Much like an army officer plans his attack strategy on the battlefield, you too need to have strategy plan in place. If you already know what your audience is into to and the kinds of things they are responsive to, create a plan on how to create such content and then schedule it so that you know what needs to be posted, when and to where. You can even schedule most of your stuff on social media sites today so that they are posted for you automatically, leaving you more time to make more plans and schedule more posts.

Tip #22: Audit your existing social media profiles.

Before signing up to a new social media platform, check and audit your profiles on existing sites first. Look at the sort of things you are including in your About Us / Bio area. Consider the usernames you're using, do they match up with your business name? Are they hard to remember? Optimize them so they do and they are! Look at any external links you are sending people to, are those links still relevant? Do they go to any broken pages? You don't want to loose business by sending people to links that no longer work or pages that no longer exist! This will help you to keep your existing accounts maintained without loosing any followers or potential sales and clients.

Tip #23: Plan out your engagement and responses.

Even if it's only you that is doing all your own social media work, or you only have one or two people doing it for you, you should think about putting some guidelines into place about how you will engage and respond to people who ask questions on your social media pages and profiles to you. These don't have to be written in stone and can be a bit of trial and error at the start. But when you've got the format down to a t, it will make it much easier to know how you should and will respond to these people's questions. Think about how you will react to people and how fast you should respond. You could create a rules and guidelines sheet that states that you should respond to a mention or tweet or something within 2 hours maximum for example. This will reflect on you and people will appreciate it.

Tip #24: Schedule your posts ahead of time.

Similar to tip 32, although it takes less planning, you can schedule your social media posting to be done for you weeks or even months ahead of time. Some people schedule most of their stuff so they always have fresh new content being posted for people throughout the day/week or month and year. But by scheduling your posts, you can focus more on other things and less on the side of posting and sharing. Most social media sites provide tools that let you schedule your posts and this can save you a lot of time. Just be sure to mix it up with manual posts from time to time to for things you come across that your followers might like also and make sure you're about after these posts just in case any are responded on that you can respond back to otherwise you may just end up making your social media page look like its ran by a robot and nobody likes a robotic social media page they like real humans being in control of it.

Tip #25: Compose a calendar for content.

Similar to a social media plan again, creating a social media content calendar will make it easier for you to plan and schedule your posts for the rest of the week or month or even year and help you to stick to your posting strategy. Think about all the things you can post, then pen them in for certain days or dates. Penning in posting dates for certain things you post can make it easier for your followers to know what to expect and when as they'll know when it's coming. You can create your own social media calendar online. Some places provide template worksheets. Check out Marketo's social media editorial calendar that you can download and edit to plan your posts more effectively.

Tip #26: Use a social media template.

Talking of templates, it's important that your content feels natural and is completely unique to your business but it doesn't hurt to use a social media posting template to make it easier to know what to post and when. You should use a template that suites your unique posting style and then adapt it to fit your particular business's needs and requirements. I could provide links here but there are literally millions of them you can find in Google searching for "social media templates".

Tip #27: Monitor your brands mentions.

You might not even realize it but there could be many people talking about your brand, products or services. Knowing what people are saying about you will definitely show you areas in which you are excelling or could improve upon. Whether it's positive, negative or just generic. Sometimes positive feedback can inspire you to do better and give you more confidence to carry on. Where as negative things can help you to do something about it and avoid that happening again. You can use monitoring tools such as Google Alerts or check out Brandwatch's top 10 free monitoring tools. While these can find lots of things, some of them may well be negative so just don't get involved with these as much as you do the positive stuff unless there is a reason for it and you can resolve it some way in public as that will look good on you too like you care and again, people like and appreciate that.

Tip #28: Correctly use #hashtags.

Hashtags are like tags or keywords and they can be useful for helping people find your posts and content and for letting search engines know what those posts are about. But incorrect use of hashtags can make you look like an amateur and can go ugly pretty quickly. You've probably seen those Instagram posts or Twitter tweets that have an unbelievable amount of hashtags in them and hardly anything else. This just looks bad and can be quite annoying for your followers if you're abusing the hashtag system of that social media site. Using the occasional hashtag or around 3-5 is fine but don't use them religiously on every post and never use more than you need or else you run the risk of irritating and annoying your followers. Experiment with them and find out which ones work the best and provide the most results. Like keywords, it's best to use some specific ones and a few generic ones as well.

Tip #29: Shorten your long URLs with your preferred service.

I know it seems obvious, and you probably already do, but long URLs can take up a lot of space in your posts. Tweets only allow 140 characters and Facebook posts with long URLs can take up a lot of space or break outside the page or return carry on a new line. Using a link shortner can save you space and can also be used to know how many times those links were clicked. But it's important to choose a link shortening service and stick to it. People will grow accustomed to your link shortners and by using different ones it can actually put them off from clicking on it.

Tip #30: Outsource your social media posting.

We all know you can buy 10,000 followers for $10. There's tons of those services around. But it's not the same as actually hiring an freelancer can be much cheaper than hiring and employing a social media manager. You might not need them indefinitely for long periods of time. Just to help you set up your accounts and establish yourself at first or help you to get enough followers in the right way so that you can take over and carry on yourself. This is recommended if you wont have the time it takes to put in at first but will once you've gathered some momentum in your posting.

Okay boys and girls, that completes todays 10 more social media tips bringing the complete number to 30 tips now. I hope you will like them and find them useful! Stay tuned for another 20 tips coming in the next couple days or so. You can follow me to get alerted to them or just check out the SEOClerks Community Discussion regularly to see them show up.

Let me know if you have any questions or want me to expand on anything.

Thanks and to your success!

Mike.