A great social media campaign creates viral exposure with the community performing most of the communication.
When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?
Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.
Strategy 1 – Great Content
The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. Content is king on the Internet. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s hot in your market and find an angle so you can distribute the best content.
Strategy 2 – Niched Network Nuances
The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or yours.
People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you are on the right track.
Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored.
The worst part is, if someone is not spreading your message, then the whole concept of this marketing goes out the window. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match.
Strategy 3 – Simplify Sharing
You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network. Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-ín wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-ín list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?
If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.
Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button, put a few sharing links on your page, make it easy for them to Retweet, the easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.
Strategy 4 – Consistency
It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistently, and still give the best possible service and support to my customers and clients.
The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.
You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.
Strategy 5 – Think Engagement
Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.
Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.
This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?
