Introduction
This is the second part of the SMM starter pack series of articles. If you made it this far, you must be willing to learn about promoting business through social media. We’ve already considered the creation and management of content in the first part, and now we’ll carry on with testing the designed content plan, content promotion tools and promoting the content beyond a company profile.
Content plans analysis
The next important step is an analysis of your content: what drives traffic the most and the least.
The success of your content plan may be measured by your previous experience of posting on social networks, if you have any, of course. If you do - you have statistics of how users react to different kinds of content. If you don’t - spend a month or two on testing to collect data. You’ll get an idea of what an average value of your KPI is and will be able to discover what topics do well and what don’t.
Don’t hurry with removing them: test another time, test the components of a tone of voice. Let’s go into details and look how we test our content.
What is a good post? It reaches your target audience and makes them complete a CTA. Mind the consequence: your posts must reach the audience in the first place – we talked about it in the first part. Once you’re sure the posting is not in vain – you can devote more attention to mastering the content of the posts.
Thus we proposed a hypothesis: different topics might perform well at a different time. That’s how it looked like:
In the first column, you see the list of tags for the posted articles, demo projects, Medium articles, blog posts, etc. In the second column, you see the time period when those tags perform better and the best posting time - when the particular type of content gains the most clicks.
We carefully checked a number of clicks through the shortener tool goo.gl and a number of sessions through Google Analytics that was driven by these posts for a month. The results showed us a minuscule difference in posts’ performance, so now we don’t pay that much attention to choosing a perfect timing: we just use the most common time when our posts tend to get more reach and more clicks.
Once we made it clear with the posting time, we proceeded to content improvement. Remember us talking about the tone of voice? We developed 3 post drafts for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. All the posts (with few exceptions) must contain these elements:
- Company visuals that include a logo, a company’s name, and a name of article/blog (if applicable)
- Main CTA
- Link that follows the main CTA
- Additional CTA that suggests subscribing to a newsletter (optional)
- Content itself
- Company visuals that include a logo, a company’s name, and a name of article/blog (if applicable)
- Main CTA
- Link that follows the main CTA
- Additional CTA that suggests subscribing to a newsletter
- Content itself (we try to use up to 140 letters to keep it Twitter-like)
- Hashtags (no more than 3, including the tag of the day)
- Company visuals that include a logo, a company’s name, and a name of article/blog (if applicable)
- Main CTA
- Link that follows the main CTA
- Additional CTA that suggests subscribing to a newsletter
- Content itself
- Hashtags (no more than 3)
What to inspect here:
- Number of clicks on your main CTA (use goo.gl, bit.ly, or inner analytics dashboards of social networks to check how well your content helps achieve a goal of a post);
- Number of clicks on content (use inner analytics dashboards of social networks to see a number of clicks on a company profile, logo clicks, content clicks – that would give insights whether your content is interesting for an audience at all);
- Number of clicks on an additional CTA if you have one (that would let you know whether two CTA get on well with each other or the second one distracts readers from the first one).
Content promotion
Although the content creation comes first – you should be able to show your visitors something, right? – you’d better start promoting the content as soon as possible, and later on the content creation and its promotion must go side by side. We’re going to give you a few low-budget insights on promoting your content on social networks. For us, the efficiency of promotion is defined in terms of clicks, website sessions, reach, and followers. You may choose the other ones depending on your goals of presence in social networks.
General advices for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
Website applications
Consider using social media plugins on your website so that the visitors can become the followers.
Signs in emails
An email sign is really underrated: while not being pushy, it allows you to fill it with any kind of content you want.
Mass-following
Mass-following is never a bad decision (until you break Twitter limits, of course). With such apps as “Mass follow for Twitter” and "Twitter follower" it’s as easy as never before. To make this process more consistent, follow people that belong to your target audience (read part 1 to get help with this).
Unfollowing
Following too many people may spoil the first impression about your Twitter profile: no one likes to be 1 out of a million. Watch your list and unfollow people in a timely manner. We use ManageFlitter and CrowdFire to say bye-bye. These services let you know who follows you back, who doesn’t, how influential your followers and those who you follow are, what their spam score is, etc. Simply beautiful. No hard feelings.
Social activity
Social activity is a powerful free-of-charge tool. Interacting with users in real time creates engagement and bonds between a brand and people.
They react, you react - and the next moment your post pops up in the Twitter feed again with no extra effort.
LinkedIn is a real pain for anybody who tried to be promoted there with no budget. But there’s a way out, too.
Getting in touch in LinkedIn groups
Let someone out of your team create a profile on LinkedIn so they can get in touch with your target audience on a neutral territory, for example, in a LinkedIn group. You’re welcome to post a group-related content there, interact with participants.
Sending invitations to connect
Do approach your target audience and expand your network. But bear in mind: explain why you send connection requests and may the force be with you.
LinkedIn suggestions
Expand your social network even more using the default LinkedIn features. First, get in touch with people shown at this page: you have connections in common and they are highly likely to accept your invitation. But don’t forget to explain yourself in a request, okay?
Secondly, do connect with people shown at the right-side bar on a connection’s page: they resemble people that you’ve already connected with and that is highly valuable if you’re looking for new clients on LinkedIn.
Thirdly, connect with your customers or long-term clients on LinkedIn to get even more out of the features above.
Spreading the posted content
Don’t forget to repost the content from your company’s profile page to your own page. You can either like or comment posts, too, and a post you interacted with will be shown in a news feed of your connections.
Building up an audience of a company page
Once you established warm relationships with connections, invite them to a company page saying why that would be beneficial for them. Or you can be a sassy sass and invite your new connections right away in the very first message (:
Interacting with fans
You noticed that Joe Black actively likes and comments your posts? Get in touch and suggest him receiving even more content of yours by subscribing to a newsletter if you have one. Otherwise, ask what services of your company create the biggest value for him and ask for a permission to notify him. As Shopify states, “permission marketing is much more effective than the old days of spamming everyone under the sun.”
Use the LinkedIn database
LinkedIn allows you to download a database of your profile. If you have a permission of your connections to notify them on relevant topics, it may be okay to add their emails to your newsletter database, for example.
Special: Daniel Roth, LinkedIn editor-in-chief, reveals a threat coming from the LinkedIn audience behavior.
They might like to take a digital detox. You’re not gonna catch them wherever they are. Mind your posting time. HubSpot keeps telling us the best time to catch busy business people is just before and right after the work. You’re not invited to a family dinner.
Subscribe to LinkedIn Marketing blog to keep informed about LinkedIn solutions.
Facebook is truly the best. First of all, many of LinkedIn features can be applied to Facebook: interacting in groups, sending invitations, spreading content on profiles of team members, building up an audience, interacting with fans, using the Facebook database. Secondly, you’re allowed to repost content to any group you like (except closed ones) and that drives audience building a lot. Why do we love it? It attracts many new followers in no time!
We want to give you more insights into Facebook specifics.
Business Page description
Facebook is indexed by Google, so you have to use keywords in the “About” section. If you struggle with this task or don’t have a clue how people can find you, use the LSI Graph tool: if you know at least one of your keywords, the tool will show you the connected keywords that you might like to include into the description. Ubersuggest does basically the same: shows you a cloud of connected keywords.
Sending invitations to connect
Facebook is a platform for informal communication, and your sales pitch would look a gazillion times more inappropriate than in LinkedIn. For that reason, pay a special attention to a reason to connect that you write after sending a friend request.
Building up an audience
Facebook is a m a z i n g in terms of default features. One of them is a possibility to invite your friends to like your company page.
Chatting easily
Turn on the possibility to message your business page: it melts communication barriers when people see how easy it is to get in touch.
Ask for help
Insert clear call-to-action into your Facebook content: it’s fine to ask a question, to tag a friend, to ask to share a post. All of those make your post visible in news feeds of your followers.
Special: Facebook trends 2018 to bear in mind
- Following the previous thought, you should know that Facebook news feed now ranks groups’ posts lower, so that people can see more updates from their friends, not business. Thus don’t forget to have your representative present on Facebook and connect with your target audience.
- Video is the king of content: insert it into your content plan already. If you don’t feel like doing any video, at all, create a half-hearted GIF at least. Live videos and broadcasting will do you a favor, too: they assumed to drive more engagement than other content.
- Facebook Spaces (a VR where people can communicate) and Camera Effects Platform are supposed to make it big, too, so keep an eye on these two.
- 360-degree media: opposed to an average photo that you simply skip while scrolling, a 360-degree one can tell a whole story and engage a user even more.
P.S. It’s not directly connected to the topic, but have you heard? Facebook is testing the downvote button for comments. Future is here, guys, so stop spamming and promoting yourselves in comments already.
The content itself is not the topic of the article, but we suppose you take it seriously and work on it.
Conclusion
Time to call it a day. In the next articles, we are going to dig deeper into content crafting, we will tell you how to use the same content several times and why, and what other resource-light ways of spreading your content and warming up leads are out there.
If you got scared because of the amount of work you have to do with your social networks - just let us know and we will do it instead of you. Write your message in this contact form (we check it every day, take our word for it). Cheers!
