The most popular social media networks today are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Tips for getting started
Read and follow the 10 tips below to get
started:
1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use
2. Optimize your
social media profiles
3. Connect your
website or blog with your social media page
4. Add social
media buttons on your website
5. Find and
follow the influencers in your niche
6. Keep a balance
between following and followers
7. Share
interesting content (text, images, videos)
8. Post many times
per day but don’t overdo it
9. Don’t forget to follow back
10. Follow the rules and be patient
1. Decide which social
media platform(s) to use
This is a mistake that
many beginners do and in the end, they quit without having any
benefit.
A nice way to find out
which platform is best suited to your niche is to find
the influencers and analyze where they have success.
For example, find out the leaders in your
niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, Twitter
followers, Pinterest followers, etc.
If they have 100,000
Facebook fans but only 1000 Twitter, followers then this is a good indication that
FB is more suitable for your niche than Twitter.
It is also a sign that
you are more likely to have success with FB than on Twitter, so you
can use your time more efficiently and engage more on
FB rather than on any other platform.
2. Optimize your social
media profiles
Once you decide
which social media tools you will use (at least for the
beginning), the next step is to
optimize your profiles on those sites.
By optimizing your
profiles you increase your chances of getting more
followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO
efforts. Some general rules that apply to all sites are:
Use a real photo,
showing your face – avoid using animals, places, or anything
that is not real. Social
media is about connecting people and if you want to have a trusted profile
you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the web! Write a good
description of yourself or your company.
What is your
background or expertise? What are you proud of?
Mention this is
your profile. Give an indication to users what type of info you will share
although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind
of info to expect from the particular person.
For example in
my Twitter profile, I wrote: “..tweeting SEO, social
media, internet marketing tips,
and advice”.
Include a link to your
website (where applicable) on Facebook including a link in the 'About section’, on
Twitter, and on Pinterest in the ‘Web site Section’. In other
words, do use your social
media profiles for SEO purposes as well.
3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages
After you have your
social media profiles ready the next step is to connect
your website with your
social media pages.
There is a certain
procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important
that you do it correctly. A correct binding between the two means
that search engines and social media websites know which website
corresponds to which social media page.
4. Add social media buttons on your website
Besides connecting
your website with the respective business pages on social media, you also need
to add social media buttons on your website so that readers can
easily share your content.
Depending on the
platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I
suggest you search Google
using “how to add social media buttons to "xxxxx” – replace "XXXX" with the
platform your website is based on.
For example, if you
are using WordPress search google for “How to add social media buttons to
WordPress”.As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold
to increase exposure and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.
5. Find and
follow the influencers in your niche
So far we have
selected the most appropriate social media connected to our website with
the social media pages and added the buttons on our pages
for more interaction.
The next obvious step
is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of
followers, I would say that there are 5 basic steps to
follow to get more followers
and these are described in points 6-10 below.
Before getting into that,
you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche. It is
almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a
new account with no followers but doing so
is important for 3 reasons:
Social media platforms
will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow so following popular people in your niche is like
telling them that you are also in that niche.
When you follow
popular people you are likely to get followed by others as well.
A trick many people
use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that
some will follow them back as well.
They will most
probably share important and useful information about the niche
so you have a chance to learn something
new and re-share that with your followers.
6. Keep a balance between following and followers
Once you start
following people you should always have in mind that it’s better
to keep a balance between
the number of people you follow and the number of people, who follow
you back.
This is important, especially on Twitter and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot: Software applications
are using this ratio (followers/following) to make suggestions on ‘who to follow so
if you have a very high ratio you minimize your chances of getting new quality
followers. It is a matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile:
Someone with 1000
followers but following 2500 or someone with 550 followers that follow 510?
A balanced profile is
better for SEO – SEOs have been talking the last couple
of months about the
importance of social media for SEO and how things are changing and
although it is not yet confirmed, it is more likely that people with strong social media
profiles are in a better position than those with weak profiles.
A strong profile, in
this case, is someone that has more followers than following and someone that
is followed by people who are considered influencers in
the niche.
7. Share interesting content (text, images, videos)
This is the foundation
for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about
publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and this is true in social media
as well.
If you share interesting
and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your
website, and under some conditions more customers as well. What is interesting
content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a combination of:
Articles/Stories/Pages
related to your niche but not only from your own website.Interesting statistics
about your nice motivational Quotes related to your niche or otherwise research studies, Images,
and Videos (If you’re making videos for YouTube
I recommend a YouTube editing software to make your
life easier)Funny stuff- whatever your
niche, you can share once in a while a joke, a funny image
or video to
make your followers smile.
Don’t forget
about hashtags – hashtags (#) can make
your content more searchable so don’t
forget to use hashtags in the networks that support it
(Twitter, Pinterest).
8. Post many times per day but don’t overdo it
A common question by
people who are just beginning on social media is “how many times should I
post per day?” The answer depends on the network.
There are many studies
analyzing the effect of posting
frequency and some best practices are:
Facebook personal page
– As many times as you want a Facebook business page no more than 1-2 times
per day and no more than 7 times per week. Twitter the more
you tweet the more exposure you get. Pinterest – a few times per day
is enough.
9. Don’t forget to follow back
Most people
concentrate on how to get new followers but they forget to
follow back to those who have already followed them.
Every day you should
create the habit of viewing the people who are already following you
and decide who to follow back.
If you don’t do
this on a regular basis then most likely some will un-follow you and this is
why you may sometimes notice a decrease in the number of followers.
10. Follow the
rules and be patient
Social
media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example, there
is a limit on Twitter on the number of people you can follow
per day; Facebook has its own rules, etc.
This
means that it may take some time to build thousands
of followers, so you need
to be patient and not try to rush into results either by breaking the
rules (your account
will be suspended) or by spending your money on
‘buying followers or tweets
or anything similar.
Try
to spend your time creating a great social media profile that
will stand over time and
why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche.
Conclusion
When it comes to social media marketing there are
2 important pillars. The first one has to do with the setup of
your social media profiles and the second one is
about usage i.e. how you use your
social media account.
For the first pillar, it is important to
engage in the networks more suited to your niche and to
have a proper connection between your social media pages and website.
For
the second pillar, it is important to follow the right people,
be followed by the right
people, and share relevant and interesting content always by adhering to the
rules of the different social media networks.
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