Social media has become an integral part of the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of consumers. And in the past several years, many marketers have focused on leveraging the expansive reach of social media platforms into a weapon for advertising. And so social media marketing has become one of the most powerful marketing strategies ever implemented.
Generate traffic, foster audience interaction, capture leads, drive sales, and more. Social media marketing (SMM) can do this all with minimal cost to the organization.
Everyone is doing SMM now though so the competition is quite stiff. Ultimately, it all boils down to who has the better strategy and who can implement it first. Here are the five most powerful social media marketing hacks of 2017 that can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your SMM strategy.
- Curate Content
Social media is more about sharing relevant, useful, and informative content than posting original content of your own. Social media users get bored easily so you need to show them something new on a frequent basis. You won’t have enough content to share if you rely solely on the content you create.
This is where curating content comes in. Find a wide variety of content that your audience will find interesting. It can be a time-consuming process to search for content, review it, then publish it on the scheduled time but the benefits will be worth it. Do it properly and you can establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
There are various tools available that can automate your content curation. I recommend Feedly. Feedly is a feed aggregator. Enter the keywords relevant to the content you want to find and it will scour the web for you. It will even organize the content it found based on your preferences.
With Feedly, all you need to do is review the content it has gathered, pick the ones you like, and then set a date for posting for each of them. You can do all of this right in the app.
- Tag Influencers
It is simply not possible to achieve viral social media growth on your own, regardless of how perfect your strategy is. You need help. And the people in the best position to help you are the influencers.
An influencer is a non-competitor who has a huge social media following. Pick content that you think will interest a particular influencer’s audience, share it, and then tag the influencer. If the influencer likes it enough that he shares it, you’ve just managed to reach all of his followers.
Do this successfully with numerous influencers and your followers will increase in number at an exponential rate.
Some influencers don’t respond to tags so you can send them a direct message or an email instead.
- Schedule Your Posts
Don’t just post content immediately when you find it. Know your audience. Determine when most of your followers are active on the social media platform you are using. Then schedule the sharing of your content at the optimum times.
You should automate the posting of your content for convenience and accuracy. I recommend Buffer. Buffer is a social management tool that makes it easy to schedule posts, track their performance, and manage all your social media accounts across all platforms in one place.
Buffer also organizes the data so it is easy to interpret. Analyze this data to determine your best sources of traffic and find ways to improve your strategy.
- Talk About Current events
Gone are the days when people go to the websites of their favorite newspaper or news channel to read news online. Today, when people want updates on current events, the first thing they do is check their Twitter or Facebook.
Supplement your sharing of relevant, useful content with postings about current events. If you establish yourself as a reliable source where people can get the latest news and hottest information, more and more social media users will be checking on your page on a daily basis.
Keep track of trending hashtags on Twitter, Facebook Trending Topics, Google Trends, and other major social media platforms. Use these hashtags on your own posts so you can be a part of bigger social media conversations. Treat each major news event as an opportunity to connect with consumers outside of your following.
- Hold Contests
Very few can match a good old contest when it comes to inspiring interaction. A social contest can make your followers feel like they are actually part of the organization. Here are the three most popular contests that you can incorporate into your social media marketing strategy:
- Voting Contest – present a set of items such as videos, images, or a mix of videos and images and ask your followers to vote for the one they like the most. A person usually gets invested on something he has voted for. Publish the results of the poll at least once a day. This will keep your audience coming back to see how their bet is doing.
- Photo Contest – ask your audience to submit photos of themselves doing something relevant to your niche. Tell them that to qualify, they should also share the link to the contest using your chosen hashtag. You can then pick the 10 or 20 best submissions and ask your followers to vote for which one they think should win. This will encourage the participants to ask their social media friends to vote for their entry too which is a great way of expanding your following.
- Raffle – set up a landing page where visitors can enter for a chance to win free stuff. The prize can be a discount coupon or a popular ebook relevant to your niche. Make sharing the contest page a requirement for joining.
These five social media marketing hacks are just a few of the many techniques you can employ to empower your SMM strategy. Just follow me at AwesomeMarky for more hacks.
