Be on every single social network.Don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to maintain an active presence on every single social media site. Research and learn about the makeup of the audience that populates each social network so you can figure out where you should focus. If your audience isn’t there, don’t waste your time. And as new social networks pop up (as they do all the time), feel free to experiment with them, but be ready to let them go if they don’t work for you, and let your analytics be your guide.
Focus on Facebook …
… or LinkedIn … or Twitter … or social network XYZ. Yes, you should want to focus your social media marketing efforts, but at the same time, no single social media site is the Holy Grail. Experiment with a few sites, determine where your audience hangs out, and focus on the few that are the best fit for your company.
You don’t need email.
The day Oprah signed up for Twitter and user registration skyrocketed, we didn’t all cancel our email accounts. I’ve been using Twitter for 5 years, Facebook and LinkedIn for even longer, and I live in my email. Social media didn’t make email marketing extinct; it just added another integrated channel to make email even stronger. Remember: One of the first steps in signing up for a social media account is usually to provide your email address. And communicating via social media, in some cases, is the same as communicating via email. For example, a LinkedIn Group message gets emailed to the group members via LinkedIn. On top of that, many people still prefer email for communications, or prefer different types of content via email vs. social posts.
Social media is the new SEO.
If we’re talking buzz words, then yes, social media is the new SEO. But social media, in terms of function and strategy, does not replace SEO. In fact, it’s just another case of two marketing strategies working better when they’re together. Social media posts now show in search results, social media engagement influences search rankings, and SEO can drive more people to your social profiles and posts. Once again, social media is an additional channel — not one that replaces existing efforts like SEO. Billions of searches are conducted every single day, and you don’t want to miss out on that traffic.
You can automate all of your updates.
Social media can be time consuming, so the automation of your updates is, of course, appealing. But the tough reality of social media is that it’s all about people talking with people, and people can easily see through crap. Especially automated crap. Automating all your updates (and believe me, people can tell) screams “I don’t care about actually being here. Just come read my content.” While it’s okay to automate some content publishing (for example, your latest blog articles), you still need to support that with real conversations and interactions with your network.
Send an auto DM to all your new followers.
Whether you want to thank them, tell them to visit your website, or anything else, please please please don’t send an auto direct message (DM) to every new follower you get. Auto DMs are incredibly impersonal and perceived as spam by most. Sending auto DMs not only seems inconsiderate, but it also makes you look like a complete newbie who doesn’t understand social media etiquette.
Include popular hashtags in your tweets to get more exposure.
There was a time when hashtags were used as a great way to organize tweets. In fact, it’s still great for specific campaigns or events so a group of attendees or participants can share and monitor content related to that campaign/event. But when it comes to topic-related hashtags (e.g. #marketing #boston), people don’t really monitor those hashtags, so your organized content is not reaching a new audience. Using such general hashtags makes you look, once again, like a Twitter newbie who’s trying to game the system. It’s also commonly referred to as “hashtag hijacking.” Today, hashtags have also become a way to make a comment about the rest of the tweet. For example: “Had to wait for AN HOUR to get my iPhone 5 today. #1stworldproblems”
Your prospects aren’t using social media, so you don’t need to be there.
First of all, your prospects are using social media. According to Pew Research Center, 69% of adults use social media. Do you think none of your prospects are included in that majority? If the stats aren’t enough to convince you, try out any social network’s advertising targeting platforms (you can often go through the targeting process without launching an ad and spending money) to see how many people on each site actually fit into your target market. On top of that, there are reasons to get involved in social media aside from communicating with potential or current customers or expanding the reach of your content. For example, you can connect with influencers and reporters who may be looking for an expert in your industry to interview for an upcoming story.
The more you publish, and the more sites you’re on, the better.
Simply having a presence on multiple sites and spraying your content as much as possible won’t work. Yes, more content is better because it gives you more valuable social media fodder, but you need to make sure all that content is high quality; otherwise, people will see straight through the crap. Unfortunately, people are getting overwhelmed with more and more content. This means the bar for remarkable content is starting to rise, and to be successful, you need to make sure your content reaches that high bar.
Use a tool that autopublishes your posts to all social networks at once … to save time.
We’ve talked about how automating all your social media updates is never a good idea, but we also said it’s okay to automate some of your content sharing. But there’s an exception to that rule, because you should never publish one message and send it out to all your different social networks at once. Yes, it will save you some time, but it’s also a terrible practice. Not only does this look automated, but you should also consider that different social media sites favor different types and frequencies of content. For example, images do fantastically well on Facebook. And you can post much more frequently to Twitter than to Facebook than to LinkedIn. Furthermore, you likely have people who are following you in all three of these networks. How obvious will it look that you’re automating your efforts if they see the same message posted to all three social networks at exactly the same time? With these key differences, you simply can’t autopublish the same post to all sites at the same time and remain effective.
More to come in Part 2 of 3