20 Social Media Marketing Tips For Social Media Success

By Deepak Kanakaraju in Social Media Marketing — Dec 4, 2017

It’s time for some social media marketing tips to get you started and lead you on the right path. Most marketers and businesses start social media marketing, run with it for a while, and then get stuck. Because, they don’t see the extraordinary results the social media gurus out there promised and aren’t sure what to do next or how to proceed further.

In this blog post, I’m sharing 20 social media marketing tips that’ll help you during such difficult times.

Let’s start.

1. Have a Plan Before You Begin

I know it sounds cliche. You might be bored of hearing me say it more than a few occasions. As I said above, many marketers start social media marketing and abandon it even quicker than they began to just because they didn’t have a plan. They thought starting is good enough to get the results. Unfortunately, it isn’t. You need to know where you want to go to choose the right path to travel.

To succeed at social media, you need to have a plan.

Even though the concept of social media remains the same, each social media channel is different. Because, people use them for various reasons. I use Facebook for a set of reasons, Twitter for an entirely different set of reasons, and LinkedIn for some reasons. That’s why different channels need different plans of their own.

Posting the same update on all social networks and having the same plan for all will not help your goals. So, take a moment to think about what you want to achieve from the social channels you want to focus and plan accordingly.

3. Don’t Take Shortcuts

It’s kinda boring and disappointing to see the fan counts trickle slowly at the beginning and getting no likes or shares on the post you’ve worked hard. It’ll be tempting to get 1000s of fans and followers overnight and get 100s of likes. If you’re a social media marketer, your boss will even ask you to buy more fans and likes.

Don’t do so!

The number of fans and likes won’t matter if they don’t belong to your target audience. It wouldn’t help your social growth and goals. It’s OK to struggle at the beginning to build your fan base than failing entirely with fake fans and likes. So, resist the temptation to grow overnight.

4. Monitor Your Competitors

If your competitors are already on social media, monitor them. Look at:

What they post
Who they follow
Who follow them
When they post
How frequent they post
What’s their headline and call-to-action
Their hit posts

And keep track of them.

The purpose is to understand what they do, why they do, and how they do. Learn what works for them and your audience. Don’t try to copy them. Your audience doesn’t want to see another me-too post on their social timeline. Use the data and learnings to device a strategy to get better results.

5. Be Helpful

The purpose of the social media is to be a community and help each other through sharing the content and knowledge. Successful brands are the ones that are focused on helping their audience to live better. Everyone knows this, but only a few actually practice it. Businesses and marketers want to stand out from the crowd and to do so they focus on talking about them – how they are better than their competitors, how their products or services are superior to others, and so on.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work.

You become a better brand, a brand your audience would love, and want to do business with, by showing them that you care about them. And you want to make their lives better and your service or products geared towards it. It can only happen when they trust, and the trust will come only when you help them.

So no matter what you do, make sure it is helpful to your audience.

You want to post regularly and frequently. You want to make sure you appear on your audience’s timeline. You want your content to be seen, liked, and shared. You might be tempted to post a lot hoping that it will help your cause. No, it won’t help you.

The social media is loaded with too much of information. People are overwhelmed by it. They don’t want more content. They want better content. They want quality content that either entertains or educates them. That’s your key to success. Stop producing more of mediocre content that no one will like or share and start producing content your audience will love.

7. Drive Interest With Variety

So, you’ve great content that’s helpful and entertaining to your audience. How will you deliver it to your audience? Of course, you can always go with the regular text-based post – a well-crafted article. But, delivering the content in the same format will be boring and will reduce the impact of the content.

You wouldn’t want to eat the same food every time even though it’s good for you, right? You need to add some variety to the format to ensure your audiences are interested in what you are posting.

How can you do it?

Post pictures and photos.
Record a podcast detailing your experience or interviews.
Record or share interesting videos. People love videos.
Create awesome looking, and information filled infographics.

But don’t try to do everything. You start with any two types of content you’re comfortable with and then expand to other types as you grow.

8. Use a Content Calendar

Doing things randomly and posting updates here and there wouldn’t lead you to success. To succeed, you need to know what works well and to know it; you need to be organized and have a content schedule. So, use a content planner to create and organize your social content schedule.

To start with, you can use something as simple as an excel sheet or Google Sheet and then go for an advanced tool. The idea is to keep track of what content is published and how it performed so that you can plan your further actions based on actual data.

9. Use a Content Curation Tool

It’s hard to come up with content to share every day, and if you’re focused more on providing quality, it might cost you a good amount of time to pick the right content. You can do it manually when you start fresh but, you’ll need a curation tool when you want to scale up and automate. Try different curation tools available and pick the one that suits your needs and preferences.

But, don’t let the tool run your social updates. You should check the content before sharing them on your business or personal profile. Because, it’s your reputation at stake.

10. Do a Weekly Podcast

People are busy to read, and when they do, they just scan. And people are more interested in listening than reading. They can do it while commuting or driving or working. You can use this shift in behavior to your advantage. Create a weekly podcast, discussing hot topics in your niche or giving how-to tips, or interviewing celebrities in your niche.

Having a podcast will help you reach the audience who doesn’t prefer reading long posts and articles. You can create a transcript of the podcast and satisfy the audience segment who prefers to read. And talking is somewhat easier than writing a 2000 word blog post.

11. Use Targeted Call-To-Actions

Shockingly, many marketers fail at this.

They post fantastic social updates and end up with fewer likes and shares compared to a mediocre social update. The difference is, the average post asked the people to like the post or share it while the awesome post didn’t.

People don’t take action unless they are asked to. They don’t have time or interest to do something unless they are impressed entirely or asked to. So use right, targeted call-to-actions like – find out more, check it out, like the post, share the post, retweet it, and comment your feedback, etc.

12. Test Your Headlines

This is what separates social media rockstars from wannabes?

Testing the headlines.

Ordinary social media marketers share an update and then move on to the next. Either it works or fails. They don’t know why it worked or why it didn’t and they are not much interested in knowing it.

But rockstar social marketers don’t work like that. They share a post, then share it again later with a different headline, and repeat it. It’s not that they don’t have other content to share.They want to learn which headline gets the best results for the update. They test different headlines to get the maximum engagement for each of their updates. So, go and test your headlines.

13. Make Quora Your Best Friend

Quora is one of the less utilized marketing tools in content marketing and social media marketing. It’s a goldmine to learn what people want to know about your niche. You can leverage Quora to find what questions people are asking about your niche and answer them on Blog, Facebook, & Quora.

14. Ask Your Audience

Do you want to know what content to create next? Or what video to record? Or which topic to discuss on your podcast? Do you want to know what makes your audience happy or worried? Or what they want to learn next? Or what could make their lives better?
Stop wondering about the answers and ask your audience.

Asking them about their dreams, goals, problems, and pains not only helps you to create better posts and content but also helps to get more engagement. Social is all about helping your audience, and there is no better way to do it than asking them straight.

Well, those are some tips that’ll help you both long term and short run. You would want some tips you can implement right away and get some results. Here are some.

15. Promote via Email Signature or Profile Link

This is one of the simplest ways to promote your page.

Do you email people regularly? Or do you have a social media profile that gets more visits? Then promote your page or profile through email signature or profile link. Also, update your page link on all your profiles and post about your new page on your personal profiles.

16. Update Your Cover Photo

Many marketers tend to take their Facebook cover photo lightly. It doesn’t get the attention it actually deserves. Consider it like a promotional billboard and update it regularly to convey your latest brand message.

17. Use CTA On the Cover Photo

When someone visits your page, your cover photo is the first thing they notice. Make most of that moment of attention. Ask the visitor to sign up to your newsletter or like the page or check your latest video or blog post or something. Have a call to action on the cover photo.

18. Pin a Post

This is another quick action you can take that’ll help you instantly. Pin your important post to make it visible to most of the visitors. Pinned posts are hard to miss when someone visits your page. So pin one today.

19. Experiment with Emoticons

Make the quick polls interesting with emoticons. Ask them to record their preference by picking an emoticon. It works really well with millennial audiences.

20. Leverage Video and Facebook Live

Videos are the hot thing on Facebook. So communicate with your audience through videos. Make them short and direct to the point. Connect with them via Facebook live. The engagement for videos and live are tremendous.

I believe the tips shared in this blog post will help you get better results from your social media campaigns.

What’s your favorite tip? Share it in the comments.