With the Christmas season upon us, businesses need to advertise and market across multiple media platforms to create greater viewings of their promotions. These days, social media, alongside email marketing, is an unrivalled platform on which to direct Internet users to your website and your business. The more followers you have across the major social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest) the more traffic you will generate towards your website and/or your up and coming campaign. However, this will only be achieved provided you are creating regular and fresh content for your potential customers to view.
Creating daily fresh content is considered a must in the social marketing world – after all, it is free promotion with the only cost being that of your time. Following the six steps below, you will be able to generate fresh content effortlessly:
- Add credibility with real time sharing
In addition to creating and publishing content and engaging with your audience on social media, it’s important to keep up with trends in your industry – particularly heading into the Christmas season. There may be an important conference or breaking news within your niche that your audience/customers needs to know about. Being the first to tell them helps build your company’s credibility.
- Get more clicks with optimized updates
Are you optimizing your content for each social network you market on? If you’re not taking full advantage of the publishing and application of each network, you may be missing the part of your audience you want to market to the most.
Visual content is the crux of success on both Twitter and Facebook. Catching someone’s eye is the best way to get him or her to click through or share your content. Facebook in particular assigns even more space to visual content than Twitter. A key highlight of Facebook is that your business page works very well as a medium for sharing your YouTube channel. Sharing compelling videos that provide important niche information, or better yet, entertaining content promoting your products or your company to encourage more clicks and shares
- Following followers
A great tip to keep growing your audience is to keep a close eye on your followers who are most actively engaging with your content and posts. If anyone leaves a comment on G+, Facebook, or LinkedIn, be sure to reply to it, so as to encourage this engagement and prompt more dialogue and shares in the future. Accordingly, anyone who is re-tweeting your tweets deserves the favour returned, providing its appropriate to your company’s focus – the same applies for your other platforms.
Sharing other users’ posts on your own pages also gives customers a gist of how reliable you are as a company. An extremely helpful tactic is sharing posts that positively reflect your brand and product – a ‘free’ review, in a sense. You will gain more followers, which will lead to more clicks on your website, which is one of the biggest goals of social media marketing.
- Time your posts for optimum reading
Like you, your potential clients and customers will probably be working a similarly scheduled day. Lunchtime will likely be somewhere between 12 and 1pm, and any meetings will probably be scheduled on the hour. In order for your Tweets and posts not to be missed by your targeted clients in ever-more cluttered and updated news feeds, then you want to try and catch them when they are more likely to be checking their smartphones and social media.
Somewhere within that lunch hour is the most obvious time to start sending out your fresh content and, with any luck, you should find more referrals being generated by your posts during this time.
- Review
The final tip is to make time every day to scrutinize your analytics. This way you can simply find out which posts got shared the most on which platforms, which tweets got re-tweeted, how much traffic you generated today and where it came from. This will keep you better informed as to where you need to focus your efforts going forward, what’s popular and what’s not, in order to continue to improve your social media marketing routine and keep your number of followers growing.