25 Strategies from Social Media Marketing World 2015 #Infographic

Social Media Marketing World is an annual event organized by Social Media Examiner, where you can learn from who’s who of Social Media, live! But what if you can’t make it to the event like me? Thanks to the elaborate blog posts from awesome folks like Kristy Schnabel, atleast you can update yourself with the latest happenings in the world of Social Media and also learn some cool strategies discussed in the event. I found Kristy’s post 25 Strategies I learned at Social Media Marketing World 2015 so impressive, that it inspired me to create this infographic to share with my friends and clients.

Why Should You Know these Strategies?

No matter whether you are an Entrepreneur, running a Startup, building personal brand online or managing Social Media for your clients; it’s important to learn from the real experts in the industry and stay updated. Rule of the Social Media game is constantly changing. You can’t just learn once and keep doing things in same way forever. If you are a beginner, you might have many misconceptions, like ‘I don’t want to repeat my contents’ or ‘I don’t want to share low quality videos’. Only when you learn from the experts and from real data, what’s working and what isn’t, you will be able to take your Online presence to better height.

Social Media Marketing World 2015 Infographic

I’ve created this infographic out of that awesome blog post, so that you can digest the strategies in quickest possible way. (Hope Kristy doesn’t mind).

Want to share this Infographic?

You can copy the code below and paste it in your blog post (Don’t forget to share your blog post link in the comment section). You can also hover your mouse over the infographic and share on Social Media using the share buttons.

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My Social Media Tips Related to These Strategies

Let me share whatever I know that can help you implement the above strategies in best possible ways.

Pinterest Tips

Pinterest is incredibly powerful, specially when you are using the right tools and strategies.

Start with/Upgrade to Pinterest for Business

Pinterest for Business has may extra features and tools, useful for your business. As it’s a FREE upgrade, I don’t understand any reason to use Personal account.

 Apply for Rich Pin

Having Rich Pin enabled for your site, whenever someone pins content from your site, the pin will show extra details making sure you get the traffic and attribution back to you. Here is how to enable Rich Pin.

Make Image Sharing Easy on Your Site

Use plugins like SumoME Image Sharer, so that visitors can see share options while hovering their mouse on images in your site.

Viraltag – Pinterest Secret Weapon

The number one reason, for which most people fail to utilize the full potential of a particular Social Media platform is – lack of time. Think about it, do you have the time to Pin images whole day? No way! That’s why you need Viraltag.

Using Viraltag you can:

• Schedule images to post in multiple Pinterest and Tumblr accounts. It’s like Buffer for Visual contents. ( Viraltag supports other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook page too, but you have Buffer and Hootsuite for those. But you can’t schedule Pinterest and Tumblr posts from any other tool I know of. )
• Bulk scheduling feature is the real lifesaver. You can upload multiple images right from Viraltag dashboard or you can grab all the images within a webpage using the browser extension. Then you customize the Caption, url and posting schedule and you are done!
• You can even discover interesting graphics or create Canva graphics right from Viraltag.

Facebook Tips:

If you are ignoring Facebook, you are missing out big opportunities. But using Facebook is not enough, you need to know the right approach, otherwise it will backfire. Make sure you are avoiding these 10 Facebook Mistakes.

Use images of right dimension on Facebook

I have seen Facebook pages of so many brands, with cropped profile photo, beheaded cover photo and incompatible timeline images. This actually portrays an unprofessional image for your brand.

Why would you use images of wrong dimension, when you can easily create Social Media graphics of right dimension easily using Canva for FREE?

Quick list of Facebook image dimensions:

• Profile Photo: 180px X 180px
• Cover Photo: 851px X 315px
• Timeline Photo: 1200px X 1200px

For more details, check this infographic by Jon Loomer.

Share Links on Facebook in Right Way:

• Use better featured images in blog posts. Dimension: 1200 pixel X 628 pixel. Captivating, attractive enough to click. But definitely not misleading. Facebook measures how fast a user abandon the links you share.
• Keep the number of characters in post title in check. ( Read this ). It’s better to write the title in ‘Abcdef Abcdef Abcdef’ (First letter capital) format.
• Keep the Meta description within 150 characters. It should give an overview of the post.
• Check each post in Facebook Debugger before sharing on Facebook.
• All of these things becomes easy in a self-hosted WordPress blog using WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Understand How Organic Reach Works:

When you post an update in your page, Facebook shows it to <10% of your page fans at first. If they engage, Facebook pushes it to 10% more. With engagement from each batch, Facebook pushes your update to some more. In this way a viral post reaches beyond your page fans to the friends of fans. But without initial and then growing engagements, your posts will never reach most fans organically. That’s why it’s very important to engage with comments immediately.

Use All Areas of Facebook:

Awesome suggestion from Andrea Vahl. Let me share the Facebook features I use:

• Even if you have a Facebook page for your business, don’t underestimate the power of Facebook profile in your personal branding. Your audience love to know the real person behind the brand. I noticed better engagements in Facebook profile posts. ( Also 90% of my clients are either my friends or referrals from them)
  
• If you understand the Facebook Privacy option well, then you don’t have to worry about using Facebook profile.
  • Don’t accept friend requests from unknown people. Enable follow button instead. People following you (but not in friend list) will be able to see your Public posts, but not posts with other privacy settings.
  • Even if you accept friend request from a person you are not confident about, add them to ‘Restricted’ list. They’ll only see your Public content.
  • Instead of being afraid of some annoying people, use the ‘block’ feature to get rid of unwanted people.
• Facebook search is super useful.
  • Now you can search and find any past posts.
  • Read this article from Jon Loomer – How to Use Facebook Graph Search to Learn About Your Fans .
• Facebook Groups is great to build a community. (not for spamming though) You can:
  • Ask questions.
  • Share files.
  • Buy and sell.
• If you’d like to re-share some posts in future, write as Facebook notes instead of Facebook posts.
  
• Facebook Page has many features. See how many you are using:
  • Scheduling. ( You don’t need third party tools to schedule).
  • Post targeting.
  • Facebook Page Insights.
    • Top performing / engaging posts.
    • Best time to post.
    • Page audience insights.
    • Competitors monitoring.
  • Facebook page Custom tab ( Facebook page apps).
  • Cover photo Call-to-action Button.
  • Tag relevant people and pages, don’t spam though. ( Trick to tag people in your page posts: You can’t tag people while writing the post, but you can by editing after the post is published.)
• Don’t hesitate to Invest in Facebook ad. Probably it’s the cheapest way (offline & online) to reach laser targeted audience.
  • Keep running a Facebook page like campaign for your target  audience. Keep building the community.
  • Even a 1$ boost (targeted to right audience) can give your post significant reach.
    
  • Remember Paid reach increases organic reach too.
  • Familiarize with Facebook Ad Manager.
    • Choose right type of ad campaign for your goal.
    • Use images with right dimension. (Everything is written on the setup page, just don’t be blind)
    • Use Audience Insights not just for creating ready-made target audiences, but also for researching your audience even when you are not using Facebook ad.
    • If your goal is to increase sale or newsletter signups, use Conversion pixel.
    • Unless you are using Facebook custom audience, you are not in the league of the Pros. ( You might be showing ad for a blog post to the audience, who had already checked that post. Spending money to annoy people. Custom audience can prevent it.).
    • Use Power Editor for most flexibility and features.
    • Stop complaining that you have to pay to Facebook, to get results. Facebook isn’t a charitable foundation. Learn how to use it right instead.
    • Analyze each ad campaign using reporting, then refine targeting and placement. You’ll get better results spending same.
• Facebook videos would normally perform better than YouTube video links.
  • Don’t forget to add CTA when sharing a video from your page.
  • If you want a Custom thumbnail for your video, Create an 1280px X 720px thumbnail image and add it as a still frame for atleast 10 seconds within the video, while editing.
• Your page posts should be value packed, not promotional / misleading / link-bait.

Social Customer Service:

Gone are the days when Customer Service meant solving problem of your customers only when they called your helpline or mailed your support team. In this Social Era, if you are not reaching out to your customers and solving their problems, you’ll keep losing your customers to your competitors.

• Monitor what your customers are saying online. It can be simply monitoring different keywords or search streams on Twitter using Hootsuite, or in more advanced way using Social Listening tools like Talkwalker or Simplify360.
• Use Social Customer Service solutions like Zenddesk, Uservoice or GetSatisfaction. Create support ticket right from online conversation.
• Use Zendesk Inbox to collaborate on Support Emails. A shared inbox for your whole support team.

Do It Yourself Videos – Get Started to Get Ahead

Everytime I suggested someone to post videos on Facebook, I got following hesitations:

• I don’t have professional equipment for quality recording.
• I don’t know video editing and can’t afford one.
• I am shy / not good looking enough / can’t speak well.

Some even discouraged me when I started posting videos. Some said the quality of my videos was bad, some said lighting was not good enough, some said that my English sucked.

But I knew that if I didn’t get started, then I wouldn’t improve.

I don’t know much about video, but from what I know about Social Media I understood the point that was discussed in Social Media Marketing World event –

If you look at the most pop­u­lar videos on the web, they’re not per­fect. In fact, they are often blurry and shaky, so con­cen­trate more on what you are say­ing — giv­ing value — than how are say­ing it. Truly, all you need is a smart phone, a selfie stick, and a bit of day­light, and you’re good to go. ( from Kristy’s artile).

I am a total amateur in video editing, but incase you want to know I use Camtasia to edit my videos.

Learning Copywriting isn’t Optional

I am so glad that I started following Brian Clark ( CEO of CopyBlogger ) long back. Otherwise I would have never understood the importance of Copywriting. Everyday I meet people with excellent writing skill, but zero copywriting skill. Kristy explained it perfectly:

While view­ing a social media feed, it may be the image that makes you stop in your tracks, but it’s the copy­writ­ing that com­pels you to take action. Entre­pre­neurs need to empha­size ben­e­fits to their audi­ence to win their atten­tion.

2 Copywriting resources I recommend everyone are:

1. Copywriting 101 by Brian Clark.
2. Definitive Guide to Copywriting by Neil Patel.

Mobile Friendly Website

Having a mobile responsive website is not optional. Google has officially started tagging mobile search results as ‘Mobile-friendly’. So visitors might abandon your website even before clicking on your site link.

Open your website from a mobile device. Do you need to zoom to read the text? Can you see the sidebar at the side? Then your website is not mobile friendly.

To confirm,  run your website through Google’s official ‘Mobile Friendly Test‘

If your website is not mobile friendly, then you’ll see suggestions right on that page.

Tips to Repurpose Your Content:

Well I learned this late, but since I learned I repurposed each of my content to drive best engagement online. Let me share what I do:

• When I write a blog post, I create image quotes and/or infographics related to that blog post. I share these images on different networks separately with a link back to original post.
• I turn the blog post to PDF using PrintFriendly and add that to Slideshare and other document sharing sites.
• I add the Slideshare PDF to my LinkedIn profile.
• I sometimes create video from the blog post and upload on YouTube, Facebook with a link back to the post.

 ‘Trigger Sentiment’ for your Target Audience

Social Media is more than broadcasting. Do you pay attention to how your audience engage with your content, or what they post in their timeline? For this reason, you need to pay attention to analytics tools.

It’s apparent from the performance of the above post, that trigger sentiment for my page audience is ‘challenge faced by wanna be Entrepreneurs in Indian Middle class families’.

And once you can find the keywords related to these trigger sentiments, you’ve found your ‘trigger words’.

Be the Unique YOU

Social Media is getting crowded everyday. The only way to stand apart from the rest, is to reflect your unique identity. That is something no one can copy.

This is why we tell our clients, to contribute as much as they can, even when I and my team are managing their Online Presence. We can transform your online presence, but if you just add your personal touch to the recipe, the result will be phenomenal.

Social Media is a Marathon, not a Sprint:

At first interaction, most of the clients are looking for immediate results. I understand the importance of ROI. But they need to understand that some immeasurable efforts taken consistently over long term, produces far better results, than those measurable ones.

• Running targeted Facebook page like campaign.
• Posting quality contents for free consistently.
• Engaging with your audience.

… doesn’t result in sales or other types of immediate conversions. But when done properly, they’ll transform your business in the long run. Imagine having 1 million loyal followers, who know that you deliver value and trust you. They’ll not only prefer to buy what you’ll sell, but also amplify your brand messages to larger audience. You can’t build that within overnight.

 

Now it’s your turn! Tell me what did you learn from these 25 strategies? Did you find my tips useful? What about sharing some tips and tools that you use for your business? Did you write a blog post including this infographic, don’t forget to share the url in the comments, I’d love to read.