Many people believe they only need to provide great content for consumption to be successful in the digital age. Great content is necessary, but not sufficient for success. You must build a platform to inform and draw others to your content and that is why effective social media strategies are so important.
I have been ‘playing’ with social media for the last two years. Most of the time invested has been wasted. I was busy, but not effective. By researching, sharing experiences and ideas on what might work and what might not, I learned eight lessons that have had a direct impact on improving my social media results. There are several others pointers I could mention, but these eight lessons have provided direct evidence they work, or at least worked for me:
- Maintain a focused, well-defined niche and target audience: When I started, I was all over the place and lost more followers than I gained. As I narrowed my intent and defined a clear focus, my followers grew and they were more aligned to my intended audience.
- Provide a feature capability tied to your brand: Make it easy for your audience to engage. I introduced a writing ‘quote of the day’ (#qotd) and have had an increase in followers, likes and re-tweets. It is easy to do and authors and readers look forward to their daily writing gold nugget. I have also introduced a ‘tip of the week’ for both my writing and publishing blog and my wine blog. Another approach is to use an educational theme similar to what I am doing with this post: “Eight lessons…” or Five Rules…”
- Publishing schedule consistency: You must publish regularly and consistently! I have previously built fan bases only to lose a portion of them when I had lapses in publishing. Your audience demands you reliably and consistently publish. This is so important that I moved from a target of publishing two to three times weekly to a very defined schedule of publishing blog posts on Sunday (being a review or educational in nature), Tuesday (with focus on a personal story or lifestyle post), and on Thursday (my tip of the week post). I have created a list and am building blogs and tweets in advance to get ahead of the curve and ensure I publish consistently.
- Use (but don’t over-use) #hashtags: I did not get #hashtags in the beginning. Now I am starting to understand and use them more effectively. People follow #hashtags of interest to them and the proper use of #hashtags puts you right in their sight. I use #wine and #winelover for my wine blog and #qotd, #writing, #publishing, etc. for my writing and publishing blog. It may take some time to figure out what works best for you, but start and try some out. You can always adjust over time.
- Find your influencers: While my Twitter followers and Facebook page Likes are increasing, they are still 1/10th or 1/100th of the most popular people and companies using social media. While I get re-tweets and Facebook Shares, they had been few and far between. But when someone with 20,000 or more followers has re-tweeted or re-posted one of my blog posts, I have had ten times the number of page views. Without stalking or expectations (and especially if I am praising them!), I now use #hashtags or Twitter handles to let them know I mentioned them favorably. Occasionally (and more frequently once trust has been established), these people or companies of influence then help promote my posts or tweets by sharing onward.
- Understand and monitor your Klout score: I hate ‘gaming’ the system and manipulating the numbers. I resisted the idea of catering my writing to SEO engines, but now use SEO engines to help me articulate keywords of notice to achieve better rankings. Klout provides the defacto score for your social media influence. When I first looked at my Klout score, I was disappointed in my lack of effectiveness when it came to social media. By understanding how it was calculated, it helped me understand what I need to do to be more influential. Both Chrome and Firefox have add-ons or plug-ins you can easily install to be used with Twitter to show you your and other’s Klout scores. I am now monitoring my three different profiles and those of others to see how they change and understand what was done to impact a positive movement in Klout score. I now have specific goals and activities to help increase my Klout score.
- Sharing, retweeting, helping others: Social media is a two-way street. It is not just about promoting yourself or your product, but it is about sharing and helping others. While not always reciprocated, when I like something or think it provides interest to others in my intended audience, I re-post and re-tweet, or minimally favorite or mention them. They then are aware of who I am and in the future may help promote me and my ideas.
- Using a social media management system: As my social media profiles and channels has increased, so has the time required to mange them. I was alerted to several different social media management systems, and after review decided on Hootsuite Pro and am very happy I did. Within several hours, I had my dashboard defined, was scheduling and publishing tweets across multiple channels with ease and was able to monitor my activities and which ones were making a difference. Three major and immediate benefits were (1) time savings of 20 – 30 minutes per day managing social media, (2) much more consistent presence and ability to publish with ease, and (3) deeper insights into what was happening and how effective I was (or was not) with social media.
Each of these eight lessons deserves a blog post on its own to help better understand why and how to increase your social media presence, but hopefully this overview provides some ideas to try that return immediate benefits. If you are putting in five to ten hours on your social media platform (and you should) per week, you want to make sure you are effective and not just making yourself busy. I spend six hours per week on average writing blog posts and several hours to communicate and promote them. Now that I have been smarter about what to do, the results are showing in a tangible manner.
© 2014. Steve Shipley, author of Wine Sense, due out early 2014
Twitter: @inkitpub
Twitter: @shipleyaust
Still Stupid at Sixty (published under my writing pseudonym Blake Stevens)
