You may know that, in between my first business in publishing and now – at the very start of social media – I was a Social Media Marketing Coach.
I’ve been sorting out some files on my computer today and found a pdf download that I used to use as a lead magnet, entitled ‘Top 10 Social Media Tips’. I read it fully expecting it to be out of date and rather passé!
Interestingly, what I shared was evergreen, constants about social media, so I’m sharing them here!
1. Claim your business pages at the various social media sites…before someone else does!
2. ‘Listen‘ first. Use tools like Hootsuite to monitor keywords relating to your business and niche to find out what people are saying.
3. Decide on what you want to achieve with your social media, what you can physically do to make that happen and then just concentrate on doing just that. Don’t spend all day on social media or feel guilty for not doing so!
4. Build relationships, be helpful, have conversations. Don’t focus on selling your products and services. People buy people and don’t want to be sold to (though they may want to buy!).
5. Encourage interation, conversation and engagement. Ask questions, request feedback, create controversy (as approproate!). Get people talking.
6. Use images and video in your status updates and use sites like Pinterest to create interest and variety in your social profile. Imagery is a bit trend at the moment that promotes engagement.
7. Make sure you respond when people do try to interact with you. Ignoring people in public is damaging – clearly!
8. Ensure you include ‘calls to action’ at appropriate moments to get your audience to ‘do things’, eg download a report, like a post, retweet etc
9. Focus on what your audience / followers / community want and consistently deliver it to keep them engaged and wanting more.
10. Know that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You need to commit some time and effort to start to see results. Relationships and communities aren’t build overnight.
It’s interesting to see how the basics of social media haven’t changed. There are many ‘tactics’ and more sophisticated strategies that you can use with your social media marketing nowadays (not to mention newer platforms) but these top 10 tips have stood the test of time as a basis for getting started!