Social media is dense, and getting noticed is hard. Here are a few hacks to maximize your discovery and visibility. Practice these ideas consistently and you will have yourself a formidable social presence.
It is important to collaborate with employees, customers and fans.
For your message to travel on social media, it has to be carried by people. What most companies overlook is that they already have their people on social media – employees and customers.
1. Make social advocates off of enthusiastic employees
Social Employee Advocacy is when your employees advocate your brand on social media by sharing promotional content. When implemented the right way employee advocacy could increase your visibility by as much as 561%.
Why this matters
Of all representatives of a brand on social media, its employees are the most influential. Plus, they have more social connections ( put together) than the brand does, and are also more credible (brands are considered commercial by default).
How to make it happen
Begin by getting them excited about representing the company. Show them how their efforts can help build a brand. Recognize employees’ participation and include incentives. You could use DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform which has a built in points system and leader board for employee engagement.
If you’re getting multiple promotional shares it also has to be supplemented with other useful industry related content, or your employees’ shares might be blind sighted as commercial…
Curating top notch content is hard, but its easier when you’re using a reliable algorithm to do it for you. DrumUp’s platform also lets you curate content and share it with your employees, apart from uploading the promotional content that you have created.
A sound balance for social media success.
When implementing employee advocacy, run a pilot. Share different formats of content with a set of messages and see which types of content:
a. Get most shares by employees
b. Receive most engagement on social media
And then implement the program on a large scale.
2. Happy customers equal valuable social capital
Happy customers incite trust in potential customers. Get content out of happy customers on social media and you have valuable social capital that could persuade more people to give you a try. According to a study, 71% customers have admitted that they make purchases based on social media recommendations.
It isn’t easy to convince people to put in work, but set your activity around the right motivators and you can get your audience to follow suit.
– Create a fun contest that requires taking a picture with your product
– Have one that makes them use your product creatively
– Do a run of the mill story writing contest
– Turn customer testimonials into powerful social media posts
– Share success stories of customers to encourage people to use your product
– Use FAQ on your website to create a useful blog post
– Communicate frequently with valuable customers on your social profiles
There are several great examples of social media campaigns to generate content from customers, but these are my favorite.
3. Friend your fans and encourage them to share
Don’t ignore your fans. This seems obvious and unnecessary to say but several brands are so focused on content curation and marketing that they overlook the networking and engagement parts. All the content you post is directed at your audience, so you have to acknowledge their needs, concerns and interests for your content to be successful on social.
– Request people to share, this increases your chances of getting them
– Make your posts conversational and
– Initiate impromptu conversations on your social feed, really get to know your audience
Most importantly, make it easy for them to share your content. The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.
Create tweets on your blog posts and create provision for your readers to share it right from there.
You could also create contests that drive more traffic to your social pages.
4. Make your social content search-friendly and share-worthy
For your content to move on social media it must be discoverable and share-worthy when discovered.
Optimize your content to platform specific search mechanisms.
For instance the hashtags you use on Twitter are critical for visibility. Hashtags categorize and tie together conversations on Twitter.
Using the right one, or combination of hashtags and you can earn exposure to larger, more relevant and engaged audiences.
To choose the right hashtag you need to know:
a. What’s trending
b. Who’s talking about it
Hashtagify tells you that and more. Leverage Hashtagify’s maps to discover the popularity of hashtags and which influencers are using them so you can ride the wave and make your tweets visible to wider and more specific audiences.
On Facebook and LinkedIn, what you put in your page descriptions matter. Every social media platform has a search engine of its own. Think about what your target audience might search for and include those keywords in your company description so your company page shows up when it should.
One your page does show up, it has got to look good. Make best use of your cover photo space and every other field provided to your for any kind of content.
When you create or curate content, make it visual. Visual content can’t be compared to plain text. Period.
Finally, for all your content, remember to orient it towards your viewers, their ideas, their interests rather than your own. Whatever you post, ask yourself if it is useful to your audience and if they will like it before you do.
Author bio
Disha Dinesh is in charge of content at DrumUp. Her interests include social media marketing and content curation.
