Social media are so accessible that it seems relatively easy to manage activities there. However, a lot of marketers struggle with reaching their business goals – “thanks” to many reasons such as lack of conversion, lack of marketing budget or lack of strategy. We know that even if social media is your bread and butter, it often can be tricky and may not deliver results, or one simply can get lost in the ocean of possibilities.
We decided to ask more than 30 marketers from all over the world, working for various industries and companies, about their social hacks: how to manage the online presence, what to publish and what to… avoid? Answers surpassed our expectations. Take a look at all of them!
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Rickardo Gherkiere | B2B SaaS Growth Evangelist @Fastforwardonline | www.fastforwardonline.be
Understand the rules of the channel you will be using. The algorithm of Linkedin gives more priorities to plain text vs video. On Facebook, it’s the opposite. Having a clear view of who is using the channel and why they are using it is the key to success.
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Neil Napier | CEO @Kyvio | www.kyvio.com
Social media is all about creating a good relationship with your audience. If you want them to trust and appreciate you you’ll need to give them a reason to. So never forget to offer value in social media before everything else. Also remember that social media are a two way communication channel. Embrace that and use it for your own advantage. It’s always a great way to listen and get to know your audience better.
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Ruchi Gupta | CEO @Shane Communications | shanecomm.com
As businesses, bloggers and influencers, we create and edit our content on desktops. What most of us forget about is a vast majority of people are now accessing social media on their mobile devices. Hence, it is imperative to format your content to present well on mobile devices as well.
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Bruce Harpham | Content Marketing Specialist | http://bruceharpham.com/
-manage your online presence: pick a few social networks and go all in for them. For most companies, Facebook is a good bet. LinkedIn is also a good option especially since they added a publishing tool and support for videos.
-mistakes: assuming that a social media following is enough. You still need a website of your own and need to build an email list.
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Klaudia Zylka | Marketing Specialist @Sotrender | www.sotrender.com
Creating a strategy is a must. Think what you want to achieve with social media. You don’t want to waste time and money. Do you want to increase sales profits? Ensure your brand’s online presence? Raise awareness about your brand? Or help your HR team in the recruitment process? You have to know that before taking any action. It’s also essential for analyzing results as you’ll be looking at different metrics and KPIs when monitoring each of this goal.
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Isaac Bullen | New Zealand Director @3WhiteHats | https://www.3whitehats.co.nz/
With organic reach on platforms like Facebook declining, use a combination of Ads and Facebook groups to maintain visibility.
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Noman Rehman | Digital Marketing @Associate Concept Schools | http://nomanrehman.com/
Social media marketing has become one of the fastest ways to create online awareness for a business and get more traffic to the business website. Creating good content and posting it on social media consistently will show up results in no time. Brands should invest well in their social media marketing strategies and get the company or brand on the top.
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Rahul Narayan | Owner @Golden Touch Digital | www.goldentouchdigital.com
Consistency is the name of the game. Customers who have allowed us to be consistent have seen crazy growth. Post regularly and at least 2 to 3 times a day for best results.
The biggest challenge we see is that most small business lack consistency and patience when it comes to Inbound marketing and brand building.
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Agnieszka Zawadka | CMO @Livespace | www.livespace.io
Social media requires willingness, perseverance, and dedication to engage. You must jump out of your sales and marketing role and interact with your target audience on many various topics – respond to questions, face complaints, and offer helpful advice. If you want to act in a consistent way, choose the platform which matches your brand’s identity and corresponds well with your product. Consider which social platform your customers visit the most, where you can access your target audience the best, and analyze your performance carefully. This will help you get a better understanding of what works best for your company.
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Pollyanna Ward | Digital Strategist & Digital Brand Manager @Vifit Sport
In eCommerce, your social media presence is essentially your shop front. You wouldn’t walk in to a brand’s sports shop and expect to find cushions with memes on, other brand’s products in there, a mixture of peoples’ second hand goods as well as the brand’s own products… So don’t do the same on your own pages. Keep your content focused, create brand pillars, ensure that any partners or influencers you work with are aware of your product’s benefits, and keep posting frequently.
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David Trott | Lead Digital Marketer @Impact Business Advisors
The biggest mistake we encounter with new clients’ social media is the expectation that their target market will do all the heavy lifting. That if they post something about their offer, and why it’s great, that people will read this – and then try and figure out if it’s right for them.
The truth is, people just won’t go to this level of effort.
So instead, make it as easy as possible for people to apply your social media posts to their own situation – if your product is brilliant for busy parents, then explain – CLEARLY – why it helps them. If your product solves a problem for restaurant owners, then explain – CLEARLY – how their restaurant will benefit. Get this bit right, and the rest of your social media will fall into place.
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Bohumil Pokstefl | CEO @Kontentino | www.kontentino.com
These are the general rules:
- Set the right goal (brand awareness, traffic, sales….)
- Plan everything ahead
- Always get it reviewed and approved by art directors, team leaders and/or clients
- Schedule it and boost/promote it with the objective aligning with your goal
- Analyze the right metrics and KPIs according to your goals, set your benchmarks and learn from your own numbers.
- Use those take-outs when creating and planning new content.
Mistakes to avoid: Always get your social content approved by someone. This eliminates all kind of f***ups
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Gloria Ziencina-Kawula | Global Community and Marketing Manager @BRAND24 | brand24.com
Managing online presence is crucial nowadays to build strong brand awareness and manage online reputation for your brand. Here media monitoring would be an absolute must. By using a dedicated tool as BRAND24 you’re able to track and engage all public conversations relevant to your brand and products. Thanks to this you are able to react and engage quickly to real-time comments made about your brand, follow-up on positive comments from your brand ambassadors, or respond to a dissatisfied customer before the story gets ahead of you. Never leave any comment, especially negative without an answer – every situation can be won! Using media monitoring is also a great way to track where your potential and actual customers are and choose the best social media platforms for your marketing campaigns.
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Oksana Chyketa | Marketer @Albacross | https://albacross.com/
Social media campaign is an incredible way of promoting your content via one or more social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, among others. The biggest mistake people frequently make is to use every single social media platform in pursuit of promoting their content. It’s much better to focus your attention on those channels where your prospects spend most of their time. Thus, the very first, and I think the most important, step to promote your content on any social media platform is by identifying and exploring your target audience. After familiarizing with your target audience it will be easier to distinguish which social network best suits your audience.
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Vlad Calus | Co-founder @Planable | www.planable.io
Social media doesn’t have to be hard, and it’s no rocket science right? I think many of us still can’t nail this marketing strategy. I’d say that engagement is all you need, participate and create conversations around you, tag people, ask questions, get back to them, reach to influencers and things will start happening. If you have multiple accounts, this blog post may help. I’d say focus on LinkedIn, if you want to grow your personal profile and brand, it’s the easiest platform to do that and the most powerful. Post stories about yourself, make people believe in that, and feels something from it, be inspired. Stop sharing articles on your pages, it’s not working, nobody clicks on them (I tried), unless you do it smart, with a long post, and video content. One more tip, video is super-super cheap on Facebook Ads atm.
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Justin Hartzman | Co-Founder & CEO @needls | http://www.needls.com/
Managing your online presence is as simple as using the right tool. Hootsuite or Sprout Social are both great and allow you to schedule content for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even LinkedIn. It’s important to stay relevant and engaging, so your posts need to “matter” to your audience – don’t post for the sake of posting. People often think that there’s no point in organic posting on social media because of low reach and they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s so important that we even built an automated content posting service for our users.
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Cordny Nederkoorn | Owner @TestingSaaS | http://TestingSaaS.nl
LinkedIn is my main channel, with Twitter as second best. Be structured in using LinkedIn. Spend a minimum of 20 minutes per day on LinkedIn Publisher and in the main feed leaving meaningful comments on posts. Also, test sharing different kinds of content to see the level of engagement you receive. I recommend that for seven days, you make a goal of creating a specific number of posts around a topic relevant to your industry.
Then, based on how people have responded, tweak your approach and spend another seven days posting. After a month of doing this, you should see your engagement start to skyrocket. Marketing is all about metrics, don’t make the mistake of publishing content on LinkedIn and NOT monitoring these posts for engagement.
Then you will never know what content triggers your prospect to react and the publishing only increases sending, but NO returning to your postings, eliminating engagement.
Structure and test, test, test!!
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Martin Hennig | Senior Marketing Transformation Consultant | http://www.peregrine.se/
I believe very few brands can afford not to be active on social media. Yet still, do it right or not at all. It is not a side gig for your interns and needs attention, strategy and business alignment. It’s not just another publishing channel, but an engagement platform, which means you need to monitor, respond and ‘be social’ in real time. Focus on a few key platforms (FB, LinkedIn, Insta and maybe Twitter and Pinterest, depending on your product type and customer profiles). It is not enough to have accounts everywhere if you don’t have the manpower and budget to actively work them on a daily basis. Don’t post the same content with the same image and caption on all available networks at the same time. Be personal, yet don’t take things personally. And don’t feed trolls.
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Eden Spodek | Founder & CEO @Spodek & Co. | http://spodekandco.com
It may sound obvious but don’t forget to be social! Active and consistent engagement builds communities. That said, be sure you understand a community’s culture before you post. Online communities are often like cocktail parties – don’t be the person at the party no one wants to chat with. Spend some time listening first, then participate by contributing to the conversation and adding value. Remember to share the love – like, favourite, retweet, regram, and share posts from others. Also, be generous but authentic with praise.
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Hemant Jani | Co Founder & CMO of Abhisi | www.abhisi.com
Social media is most vital in order to maintain your brand presence.
Few basic tips that are very common but still many miss them out.
- Consistency – Posting on your social media on regular basis help your followers to be loyal.
- Generating Good content is always difficult, but an essential element for social media success.
- Content formation- Use of text with Images and videos. Use of Popular hashtags is also vital.
- To maintain the credibility of your page and brand sharing important stuff is important.
- Avoid grammatical mistakes and miss spells the most common phenomena observed on social media.
- Avoid sharing topics that are not relevant to your audience this can be determined by the stats and engagement ratio from your previous post.
- When to post is the most controversial topic the discussion can go up to hours. I say keep it simple share your post on different time slots. This will help determine the most relevant time to post for your audience. IS it suitable on weekdays/weekends also the best response is during office hours or after office hour and many other parameters.
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Ben Culpin | Content Marketing Specialist | WakeUpData.com
The biggest mistake to avoid is just joining a channel for the sake of joining, and posting any content, regardless of its message or your target audience.
The main thing I would say is key to developing a successful online presence on SoMe is to develop SMART goals. This means they should be Specific (with channel and metric to measure), Measurable, Achievable (don’t try and double your follower base in one week!), Relevant and lastly, Time-bound (e.g. meeting the goal by the end of Q3).”
I believe those SMART goals would be the key and from that you can then start to develop your audience, your tone of voice, creating visual, eye-catching posts and begin to nurture and build relationships with your audience base.
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Georgios Chasiotis | Marketing Hustler & Co-Founder @Slide In | https://www.slidein.gr/
As one of my favorite marketers, Noah Kagan, says:
“You don’t build your house in another man’s property.” Use social networks but don’t get used by them. Your most important asset should ALWAYS be your own website.
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Enes Karakash | Account Manager @PikselLTD / http://piksel.mk/
Always be present. That and the original angle (throughdesign and copyright) from which you represent yourself and the brands you promote will make you noticed and knowledge.
The mistakes are inevitable and perhaps one of the best things that can happen in every digital marketing agency. If the Account and Community managers aren’t making mistakes then, they are doing something wrong. Just try not to lose a client because of a mistake :).
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Matteo Volani | Founding Partner of isac/volani | www.isacvolani.com/home/consulting/
Well this is a tricky one. The most important thing we always make clear with our clients from the very beginning is: you don’t need to be on every social media. There’s still this belief of being active on 4-5 social networks at a time, but it can become a big waste of time and resources. First of all, you need to focus on the 2-3 platforms who are most relevant in your industry and that are filled with the audience you want to talk to.
There’s no golden rule about what and how to post, it really varies from the Social Network we’re talking about. What’s really important is to not just duplicate content and adapt it for different channels, otherwise your followers will find your content game boring: use different social media for different purposes. Twitter for instance can be great for engaging and interacting with players in your scope and users, LinkedIN can be the log diary of your entrepreneurial journey while Facebook due to its vast audience should be more focused on your offer or product.
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Tereza Litsa | Social Media Manager @Lightful | www.terezalitsa.com
Start social media marketing by knowing the benefits of joining each platform. There’s no need to join every single platform if it doesn’t add value to your business. It’s important to understand the tone of voice and the content you will share so always spend time to at first to learn the company you’ll be working with. If you’re starting from scratch, you need to be patient to showcase real ROI. I’ve been approached by many prospect clients in the past who wanted to “get sales from social media” without having the patience to reap the benefits of real growth. It’s easy to get fake followers or increased metrics that don’t matter to your business but the real challenge is to use social media strategically to meet your objectives.
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Nick Stephens | Freelance Digital Marketing Expert | www.njstephens.com
Find the platform that works for you. Just because someone you know is killing it Instagram it may not work for your business. Make good use of the metrics your chosen platforms offer. Once you find what type of content works double down on that, use the medium more, spend some money on advertising etc. Look long term, review your progress monthly as well as weekly. Some strategies take a while to work
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Nina Kozlowska | Content Designer @BrainyBees | http://brainybees.eu
Don’t rely on only one platform even if it works wonders for you. Find a few touchpoints with your target group and try to juggle with formats you offer them. By doing this, you not only increase the reach and frequency of your communication, you also avoid being “screwed” in case your main platform disappears one day.
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Do you have some more advice, or would love to be featured here as well? Give us a shout!
