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Free Social Media Marketing Part 2: Promote Your Business on Twitter Without Spending a Dime

Last week we discussed social media marketing strategies to help your business promote itself on Facebook without spending money on things like boosting your posts. In this week’s post, we’ll identify similar tips for free social media marketing on Twitter. These simple “hacks” can help your business drive site traffic, reach its target audience, and increase brand awareness – all for free!

First, What are Twitter Ads?

Free Social Media Marketing Part 2: Promote Your Business on Twitter Without Spending a Dime

A promoted Tweet

Twitter ads are very similar to the Facebook ads that you’re probably familiar with in your newsfeed. Businesses will typically adopt a social media marketing strategy that focuses on driving awareness, engagement, or direct action from their audience, and they’ll choose an ad campaign tactic to match (such as the one at right, pulled from the Young Marketing Consulting Twitter feed.

While these ads will certainly get your message to the top of the tweetheap, they’re not the only way to succeed on Twitter.

 

Social Media Marketing Tip 1: Know when to tweet

Timing is everything in social media marketing. According to data provided by Kissmetrics, 6% of all retweets occur around 5:00 PM. Furthermore, while click-through rates are fairly steady throughout the week, Wednesday has the highest CTR. Now, it’s important to note that not every business is the same. You might run a business focused on weekend activities, and see your engagement spike on a Thursday night. For more business-focused content, you may see impressions at their highest early in the morning. The important thing is to experiment with different days and times throughout the week to find the optimal time for your business to Tweet. Consider where your business is located and who your target audience is (and when they use social media). You may find it helpful to use an analytics tool for your Twitter account. Hootsuite has an autoschedule tool which chooses a time for you based on when your tweets have performed best.

How to effectively advertise on twitter without spending a dime

Source: Kissmetrics

Social Media Marketing Tip 2: Create relationships

Whether it’s in person or online, a good marketing strategy builds relationships in order to reach more consumers and increase brand awareness. To start creating meaningful relationships on Twitter, begin by finding your like-minded people. Search Twitter with relevant keywords and hashtags to identify influencers in your industry. These are people who have already established themselves and have a larger following. Additionally, check out who is following these influencers and add them to your list as well.

After you identify the right crowd, your next step is to engage. Twitter lists keep your followers organized so you can engage with different groups of people at different times. For example, your business could have lists of current customers, prospects, employees, etc. Reach out to people who aren’t familiar with your business by retweeting or starting a conversation with them. Monitor what your target audience is posting and post content that seems relevant to them. Ultimately, when it comes to Twitter, being social and creating conversations is your number one goal.

Social Media Marketing Tip 3: Create engaging tweets

This is arguably the easiest technique to increase your audiences’ engagement with your business. In 2014, Twitter analyzed over 2 million tweets to determine what type of content was retweeted the most. They found that photos averaged a 35% boost in retweets, while videos averaged 28%. The data also revealed that tweets which used quotes, used a number, and/or included hashtags had higher engagement levels. More recently, you can now tweet live broadcasts via Periscope. Viewers can further engage with your live session by typing comments. Whether it’s using graphics or tweeting a statistic, creating engaging tweets is a simple way to reach your social media marketing goals.

3 ways to effectively advertise on twitter without spending a dime

For higher engagement rates, tweet quotes as images

So there you have it, a few quick and easy ways to improve your social media marketing on Twitter, for free. If you’d like to talk more about how social media can help your business, why not contact Young Marketing Consulting today?

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3 Ways to Effectively Advertise on Facebook Without Spending a Dime

According to Forbes, 50 million Facebook business pages exist as of December 2015. And each one of those companies are competing to figure out the best way to reach Facebook’s 1.7 billion monthly users. Facebook Ads, boosted posts, and other paid options are certainly an effective way to reach your target audience, and these options have garnered the lion’s share of marketers’ recent attention. However, with Facebook’s recent shift to return its newsfeeds to more user-shared content, the ROI pendulum for smaller marketers will likely swing back toward the classic “free” content sharing approach. This post will outline various ways a business can promote itself on Facebook without spending a dime on advertising.

1. Know when to Post on Facebook for Maximum Visibility

Facebook engagement is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays.

Although the best time to post on Facebook varies by industry, generally, your business should post and share content on Facebook in the early to mid-afternoon. According to the graphic below from Kissmetrics, Facebook usage also increases just after 7:00 PM (note that other data sources prefer posting anywhere from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM). Furthermore, Thursdays and Fridays are typically the best weekdays to post, because engagement is 18% higher at the end of the week. Posting during these hours and days can give your business the potential to reach more customers and increase site traffic more than it would at other times. Consider including specific times when creating a social media content calendar for your business.

How To Advertise on Facebook Without Spending a Dime

Source: Kissmetrics

2. Interact with Your Facebook Fans and Followers

According to a recent study, 64% of marketing executives stated that they believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing, which is what draws so many marketers to Facebook in the first place. However, many social media marketing plans become overly focused on gathering a large number of followers or likes. A growth in Facebook likes might look good in a report, but your goal is to find the individuals who will become loyal purchasers, and to do that you’ll need to encourage word of mouth by connecting with your fans on an individual level. Always respond to followers who interact with your page, no matter how they interacted with you (posts, comments, etc.). And once you do, treat them just like they were a friend sitting next to you at a party. In other words, keep the conversation going. Once your followers feel like they’ve connected with your business on a personal level, they are more likely to become a brand evangelist and share your content with their network.

3. Engage with Influencers Who Have a Larger Fan Base

Social media influencers are people who have already built an army of fans and followers to a point where they’ve now become a trusted information source in a particular industry. These influencers can provide access to an entirely new market, but in order to reach them you’ll have to earn their trust. The easiest way to think of how to approach an influencer is to treat them just like you would someone at a networking event. Start with a sell so soft it isn’t even a sell: commenting on their posts, liking their pages, sharing a link or two that might be of interest. Then, build the relationship until you’re able to join your influencer in regular conversation so that they’re willing and able to help promote your brand as well.

Above all, keep in mind that social media marketing is about connecting and having a conversation. So go ahead and jump in!

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How to Monitor Social Media Analytics

Social media was made to be monitored.

Social media is, at its heart, an ongoing conversation with your customers. And to help them better understand their audience’s behavior, savvy marketers have turned to social media analytics. Ultimately, social media analytics are your guide to creating a successful social media strategy. Without monitoring analytics, you’re essentially playing a guessing game when it comes to what content is working and what is not. But before discussing what tools you should be using for social data, let’s discuss the most important social metrics you should be monitoring on a weekly basis. 

Three social media metrics that matter:

  • Impressions: Impressions represent a social media platform’s best guess at the number of unique individuals who saw your content. Impressions are easy to calculate and monitor, but come with varying degrees of accuracy. For example, impressions on YouTube represent the number of times someone has clicked play on that video in YouTube, and are relatively accurate. Twitter will show the number of impressions one of your tweets received simply by clicking “View tweet activity” on the tweet, while Facebook and LinkedIn provide impression statistics in similar fashion next to each post. However, if you think of how quickly you scroll through your own feed, you’ll understand that these impressions do not necessarily indicate that someone has actually seen your content. Which brings us to….
  • Engagement: Engagement measures how your audience interacts with your content, and tracks interactions like shares, comments, likes, and retweets. Different interactions may have varying degrees of importance to your business. For example, a share on Facebook may be more important than a like on LinkedIn, depending on your marketing goals. And thousands of retweets by people outside of your target audience won’t necessarily help you sell anything. Which brings us to the most important metric of all.
  • Conversions: Social media conversions occur when someone takes action to qualify themselves, either through a sale or by indicating interest in a potential purchase. The action that specifically constitutes a conversion will differ across social media marketing campaigns, but a few examples are sharing content, filling out a form, clicking through to your website, signing up for a coupon, or making a purchase. Ultimately, conversions are your most important metric, but many marketers are surprised to learn that social conversions can be difficult to come by. This is one of the reasons why social media analytics have become so important. 

Conversions are the only social media metric that matters. Everything else is window-dressing.

Now that you know what social media metrics matter, let’s talk about what tools you should be using to monitor these metrics. Below, we’ve narrowed down what we believe to be the top social media measurement tools of 2016.

2016’s Top Social Media Analytics Tools:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to measure the effectiveness of your social activity. And even better, it’s free! The acquisition overview report on Google Analytics shows how many people clicking through to your website have come from social traffic. Digging more deeply into the Behavior tab lets you see what content on your site is most popular, while looking at referral traffic will show you where your content is being shared. To help keep your social momentum up, it’s a good idea to have social plugin buttons on your pages (such as the Facebook “Share” button) to help your visitors share your content.

how-to-monitor-social-media-analytics-google-analytics

Google Analytic’s overview report provides conversion value based on social traffic

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another widely successful social media management platform, and for good reason. Hootsuite tracks engagement and conversions from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, but takes things a step further by adding demographic detail and “sentiment” to the conversation. If you need to know who’s talking about your company on social media in the moment and whether or not their satisfied or upset, Hootsuite is a great tool

How to Monitor Social Media Analytics - Hootsuite

A quick look at what your Hootsuite dashboard may look like

3. Klout

How to Monitor Social Media Analytics - KloutKlout approaches social media from a slightly different perspective, having developed its own social media metric (Klout, of course) that attempts to quantify your brand’s influence on the social media platforms you use. This influence score is graded out of 100 based on other users’ engagement with your content, and serves as a good proxy to measure how effective of a thought leader your business is becoming.

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Six (More) Social Media Best Practices for 2016

Last week, we covered our first round of social media best practices for 2016. In that piece, we looked at the three most popular social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to discuss how brands can best reach their audience through these platform. This week, we’re diving a bit more deeply into what were once the “newer” social media networks: Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. These social media platforms are much more visual than their bigger and more widely-used brethren, but they still pack a marketing punch that savvy marketers can exploit. Welcome to our overview of six (more) social media best practices for 2016.

Instagram Best Practices

First, a caveat: Facebook owns Instagram, and many of our Facebook feeds are already regularly interspersed with Instagram posts. Over time, the two channels will no doubt converge more and more. But for now, Instagram remains different enough that we believe it warrants its own inclusion in a discussion of social media best practices. And that reason is that Instagram stands alone as the epitome of the “lifestyle” feed – pictures with short descriptions that give a brief window into the lives and aspirations of its account holders. But not every brand is suited for this space, and for that reason we offer our two best practices for Instagram marketing.

  1. Tell an Emotional Story Without Words: Words are few and far between on Instagram (except in the post comments), and so you’ll only have imagery to tell your brand’s story. For that reason, an Instagram best practice is to become crystal clear on the need state your product or service solves among your target audience, then build your visual story around moments where that need state is met. It’s one thing to post a coupon for a can of pet food, it’s another to show a contented pet snoozing in its owner’s lap. People will connect with images that speak to their shared experience, and in order to do that you’ll need to tap in to what they actually want, rather than a traditional marketing or sales offer.
  2. Do the Hard Work to Create a Following: Social media marketing is always a conversation, and the best social media marketers are adept at sharing and promoting others so that those individuals return the favor. Be sure to use relevant and trending hashtags related to your posts, engage with your audience by following them and commenting on their posts. Promote your Instagram handle on Facebook and other social media. Link your posts to your Facebook and Twitter to reach a wider audience. But more importantly, talk to people. Have fun with contests and sharing. Your goal is to let others share and participate in your brand experience, and the best social media marketing practices draw other users to your conversation by rewarding them.

YouTube Best Practices

Almost one-third of all internet users in the world spend time on YouTube. With hundreds of hours of video uploaded each day, backing by Google’s aggressive content marketing/Google Play efforts, and auto-play features whisking users from video to video, it’s conceivable that YouTube will replace broadcast television in the next few years. The platform has been a resounding success, but that success makes it even harder for marketers to be heard. The following best practices for YouTube may help you get a leg up against the competition:

  1. Stick With Content Formats That Work: While anyone who’s ever uploaded a video has no doubt dreamed of seeing millions of views, the reality is much different. With estimates for the typical number of YouTube views beginning with a few dozen, our first YouTube best practice is to stick to video formats that are proven to be strong search and share draws. These formats include how-to videos, reviews, vlogs, and, of course, comedy. Social media marketing can be difficult on YouTube if your brand does not easily lend itself to these formats, and so we encourage you to consider the return on your videos versus the effort you’ll be making. Posting regular content on Youtube can be time consuming, and if you’re not able to grow your audience it may be more time-effective to post responses or Q&A videos rather than original content.
  2. Adjust Your Uploads to be More Easily Recognized in Search: Our second YouTube marketing best practice is to always keep in mind that the primary reason you’re posting content is to help your target audience find you. So a video with little description and the title “hilarious” won’t get you very far. But adding video transcripts and adjusting the titles of videos to include keywords should boost your views and engagements. YouTube is currently the second-largest search engine in the world after Google, and a best practice is to follow the same SEO practices you use on your business’s website when posting content.

Pinterest Best Practices

Pinterest is the social network of the craft and hobby enthusiast. You’ll find more recipes, handicrafts, and jaw-dropping wardrobe ensembles here than in any catalog, and this cornucopia of craftiness is one of Pinterest’s primary draws. More than any other social network, Pinterest represents 21st century window shopping, and can be an ideal social media marketing vehicle of used properly. Let’s take a look at two Pinterest best practices for marketers.

  1. Post Original Visuals: While this can be considered a standard best practice for all social media, nearly 80% of Pinterest’s users do not post any original content. Those brands that do will be ideally positioned to spread their content with so little market competition. Of course, Pinterest isn’t for every business out there. If you struggle to find original content to post that doesn’t have strong shareability, Pinterest probably isn’t the place for you.
  2. Capitalize on Pinterest’s Homemade/Catalog Nature: What happens when someone stumbles across your original Pin? If they’re interested, they’re going to want to know how to create what they’ve seen or where to buy it. The best social media marketing on Pinterest begins with the Pin, understanding that a Pin is the initial invitation to bring your followers into your brand’s world. Your Pins should link to how-to tips, blogs and vlogs describing other ideas, and a whole world of tips and tricks for those enthusiasts who are constantly in search of new ideas. A social media marketing best practice is to keep your followers engaged, and the more content you link to from your pin, the more you’ll keep them coming back.

So that’s our list of six (more) social media best practices for 2016. Remember, the most effective social media marketing strategy entails choosing the right platforms that will help best reach your target audience. If you follow these tips and still don’t see the results you’d like, it may be time to try a different strategy or platform. Or you could contact Young Marketing Consulting, and we’ll be happy to sit down with you and discuss all your social media marketing needs.

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Six Social Media Best Practices for 2016 – Part 1

If you want to market to an audience in 2016, you’ll find them on social media. Facebook’s user base is now larger than the population of China, Instagram grew 50% in 9 months, LinkedIn has nearly 400 million members, and it seems that a new site or app pops up every day that demands our audience’s attention. With so many options and networks to choose from, the sheer scale of social media marketing can overwhelm marketers. But a coherent social media marketing strategy is essential to an effective digital marketing campaign, and social networks are growing ever more savvy about helping marketers reach their audiences. So, with hope on the horizon, let’s start by looking at what some of the most popular social media sites are, and what they aren’t.

The first thing to keep in mind when marketing on social media is that each social medial platform began with unique functionality that evolved to drive different forms of discussion. Twitter, for example, is a way for customers to have direct, public conversations with a brand (or anyone). But if you want more involved professional discussions, you may need to head to Google+ or LinkedIn. According to the Pew Research Center, LinkedIn’s users are more likely to be aged 30-64 than 18-29. On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram are more popular among younger generations and are much more visual modes of communicating.

So, as we review the best practices for social media marketing below, keep in mind that the best social strategies adapt to their channel. If you have any questions or would like to a review of your social media strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact Young Marketing Consulting.

Facebook Best Practices

Facebook is taking more and more steps to keep users on the Facebook platform by autoplaying videos and housing news articles within its site, rather than having visitors click away to other sites. These efforts make things tricky for marketers looking to drive traffic from Facebook, but you do have some good options:

  1. Ramp up your organic Facebook activity: there’s still no substitute for a post that goes viral, so make sure that you’re regularly posting engaging content and responding to users who interact with your posts to build your community. Be friendly and personable, and remember that Facebook is primarily a visual medium. The platform currently has more video views than YouTube, so the more images and videos you’re posting the better. If you’re struggling for topics, try how-tos, “listicles,” comparisons/quizzes, or just plain humor. Many Facebook users also wear their hearts on their sleeves, so cause advocacy can work well in this space also.
  2. Use Facebook’s advertising and post-boosting tools: Facebook is doing more than ever to integrate advertising within its platform, and if you haven’t yet experimented with its targeting capabilities now would be a good time. Facebook allows strong targeting based on user interests, and its advertising cost-per-click rates are some of the more affordable of the various PPC advertising channels. While conversion rates from social media ads tend to be lower, you’ll at the very least know that you’re getting your advertising in front of the right audience.

Twitter Best Practices

Twitter is still an evolving social media platform. At its best, Twitter allows for lively conversations among diverse groups, while giving a unique form of direct access to brands and individuals that would not otherwise be possible. Here are two best practice tips for Twitter from the team:

  1. Engage with influencers on an individual level: One thing that’s easy to forget in the Twitterverse is that there’s a human being behind the computer screen who’s reading and reacting to what you’re saying. The best analogy for Twitter is that it’s like a cocktail party – you don’t want to stand in the corner shouting to yourself, you want to reach out to people, ask them questions, help them out when you can. And by doing so, you’ll begin to build your own influence. Directly tag people and respond to them in a timely manner – etiquette matters in the online world.
  2. Keep up with hashtags: Hashtags let everyone chime in to a single conversation, and are great tools to use when you don’t have large numbers of followers. They’ll also show you trending topics that you’d like to be involved in that you can take advantage of in the real world as well. Hashtags.org is a good resource to identify popular and trending hashtags. A few other words of wisdom on Twitter – try posting in afternoons and later in the week, and include pictures when you can. Keep your conversations natural, and don’t force a sales message into a discussion. It’s the quickest way to see yourself blocked.

LinkedIn Best Practices

LinkedIn is the most popular “professional” social network in the U.S., and the conversations you’ll find here are very much geared toward testing ideas and asking for advice on business topics. For this reason, it’s a much better B2B marketing tool than any other social network. Here are a few tips for maximizing your reach on LinkedIn:

  1. Engage in discussion groups: Discussion groups are some of the lesser-known features of LinkedIn but are a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Adding quality responses to industry-specific discussion groups will add to your credibility and build your audience among those who don’t know you. The topics will also show up in searches as well, which never hurts. One thing you don’t want to do is hit LinkedIn with heavy sales messages. LinkedIn users are savvy business people; the hard social media sell will turn them off. By the same token, company posts are not the best places to engage in discussions.
  2. Remember that your company is a collection of individuals: People follow other people, not companies. Your company officers should be posting on LinkedIn and tagging your company or promoting those posts. In addition, your CEO or spokesperson should be regularly commenting on news, engaging in discussions, etc. The more conversations you can get your teams involved in, the greater your reach will extend throughout the platform.

We hope that these social media best practices help set you up for success in 2016 and beyond. Next week, we’ll cover some of the “newer” social media platforms out there: YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and more!

 

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