There’s no shortage of social media marketing tactics to promote your brand online, but not all of them are efficient. As a social media marketer, you have a finite number of hours in the day and a finite budget to work with, not to mention pressure to get the best results possible. Social tactic “effectiveness” can be categorized in a few different ways, but one of the most important is a degree of efficiency — how effective is a certain tactic when compared to the effort it takes to execute?
These six social media marketing tactics offer some of the most “bang for your buck,” giving you the biggest impact and broadest return for the least amount of initial investment:
1. Content distribution. Hopefully, you’re already engaged in a content marketing strategy. If you aren’t, you need to get started — one of social media’s most powerful roles is as an outlet for promoting your published material. Whenever you publish a new post, use your social media channels to boost that post to the public. This will do a number of things for your brand — you’ll attract more initial traffic to your post, achieve more visibility (especially if that post is shared), and encourage more customer loyalty (especially with consistent updates), all of which can have indirect benefits toward improving your SEO. Best of all, it only takes a few minutes once your post is live.
2. Content re-distribution. Content distribution is about making a recent post available to more people, but content re-distribution is about maximizing the value of your older posts. It’s a good idea to keep a running list of all your “evergreen” content pieces, and re-post them on an occasional and rotating basis. This will help keep your social media profiles full of regular updates, and will maximize the long-term value of every evergreen post you produce. The trick is to time and frame your posts so your followers don’t get sick of seeing the same things over and over. Even doing so, this is not a time- or budget-intensive strategy.
3. Discussion engagement. Discussion can attract more people to your brand and keep them there for the long term. A new discussion in a newsfeed gives unfamiliar users the chance to get involved, and familiar users that engage in the discussion will feel they’re an even stronger part of your community, driving more traffic and conversions down the road. Your approach to discussion engagement should vary; sometimes, you might happen across an interesting industry-related discussion and throw your own opinions into the mix. Sometimes, you might come up with a discussion topic of your own and ask your audience about a topic directly.
4. Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing wins for sheer virtue of its potential. Though there are several potential tactics here, they all have the same basic function; you’ll engage an influencer in some way, and tap into their pre-existing levels of visibility, earning a better reputation for your brand and possibly gaining some of their followers through association. At 100,000 followers, even a 1 percent gain would mean 1,000 new followers for your brand. Your approach can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be; sometimes, even a basic action like sharing a post or replying to a question can be enough to earn you this visibility.
5. Live updates. The social media world is rapidly shifting toward real-time experiences, with platforms and technologies that support such in-the-moment posting capabilities. Your users want to know what’s happening right now, so why not give it to them? Live updates, in the context of a public forum or special event, can be extraordinarily powerful ways for you to engage with your customers — it gives them a first-person perspective of your company’s active participation, and it only takes you a few minutes per post to keep them in the loop.
6. Contests. Contests are effective because the promise of a prize or reward leads to more initial engagement, and users will be likely to share your material, giving it more potential visibility. This is especially powerful if your contest involves some means of user-based content generation, such as a photo submission contest. Either way, the money you’ll pay for a prize will pale in comparison to the visibility and reputation benefits you’ll reap.
Among the myriad social media tactics you can use, these ones will guarantee you some of the best overall returns on your time and monetary investment. Even though such a measure is hard to definitively calculate, you’ll find the power that these simple actions have for your campaign. While these shouldn’t be the only things you do in your social media marketing campaign, they should be ones that you prioritize. Keep them an integral part of your social media marketing strategy, and keep tabs on how your influence and reach develop over time.
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