Social Media Marketing 101

Social media are highly interactive online technologies that allow individuals and groups to share content, often in virtual communities. Their best advantage is their ability to facilitate engagement, and I mean lots of highly valuable engagement I have often mentioned otherwise, like in posts about nurturing leads through x number of touchpoints down through the sales funnel.  Social media is the tactical side of those discussions. To put it otherwise, the whole point of social media is to network, ie to reach and engage with otherwise strangers.

The game changing aspect of social media is the fact that they are dialogic (ie they provide two-way communication) which varies considerably from earlier monologic (or one-way) forms of marketing communication like newspapers, television and magazines. For this reason, when using it, remember to harness its dialogic super power. If you can do that, you will be exploiting it far more fully than otherwise.

Uses & Benefits (of multiple social media channels. Beware however that, if you wish to use multiple channels, only select the few best fits. Avoid spreading yourself too thin.)

• Improve market reach. Reach as many portions of your market as possible by participating in multiple communities. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket, especially since many of your competitors likely limit themselves this way.
• Improve search engine rank. Your social media presence will be considered as part of the content that affects your rankings. Consequently, if you have your brand’s name on social media, and even multiple websites with their own high page rankings like Facebook, Twitter and so on, your business will piggyback off of those high rankings.
• Improve Customer Service & protect your brand's reputation against negative feedback in 2 key ways. First, social media platforms allow you to track what is being said about your brand. It also allows your customers to communicate with you directly regarding their grievances. You can therefore respond quickly to resolve customer problems. Your quick responses signal that you are willing and able to resolve customer concerns and are therefore a good choice.
• Follow your competition to platforms to reach their customers. Once your competition is on a platform with an audience, you will likely benefit from it also. Review their website or content for a list of all of their social media accounts.
• Go viral. If your content is well received, your audience actually does the promotion work for you. This is a marketer's dream because it costs considerably less that otherwise. Social media sites typically provide some type of function(s) that facilitate this. Examples include Facebook's 'share' function, Twitter's 'retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Tumblr's 're-blog' function and so on.

Social Media Strategy

Do not post just for its own sake. Have a strategy instead. For for-profit businesses, you likely want your posts to convert leads through stages of the sales funnel. A social media strategy involves 1) objectives, 2) tactics and 3) performance measures. 

1) Objectives.  

1. Establish social media marketing objective(s) that align to business goals (like mission statements) and your corporate strategy plans.  Ensure these objectives are S.M.A.R.T, ie specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Common social media objectives include the following.
• improve brand awareness
• encourage engagment
• advertise your products and services
• sell your products and services
• measure how your market perceives your brand
• offer customer service over social media platforms. Example(s).
• To use [a platform, to be subsequently selected] for customer support to lower average response rate to under 1 hour by the end of quarter 2. 
• Track your brand's performance and adjust your strategy accordingly
2. Know your audience as intimately as possible. The better you know your audience, the more consistent and attractive you can curate your brand voice and tone.
3. Know your competitors. This includes looking closely at their offering and social media behavior. Can you create a type of mini marketing communication centric SWOT analysis (using Porter's 5 Competitive Forces and Pestle)? 
• Strength: You can use the special dialects of the small local towns community while the international market leader can not.
4. Select social media platforms that meet your objectives. Key considerations include whether your audience comprises customers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), the type of content you produce, whether you want the content to be  found via daily feeds vs audience searches over the long term. For instance, if you want to know what people are saying about your brand right now, feeds are more useful than search engines. Since pull marketing content requires keywords for search optimization, YouTube is a better option over Facebook. Consider the demographics of your audience. 10-year old YouTube content can continue to generate leads and engagement in ways that Facebook won't. See basic details about different social media platforms to consider when undertaking this step. 
5. Be sure to get your account verified as a safeguard against imposter accounts. See each platform's steps.  

2) Tactics.

1. Create a social media content calender. To this end, establish tentpole events that are most likely to appeal to your target market. For each tentpole, calculate all associated dates that require your action for each tentpole event. Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts well in advance to different platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc).
2. Determine what content is truly valuable and engaging for your target audience. If unsure or need inspiration, follow these tips.
• look at the content of closest competitors, direct and indirect. 
• Sometimes, a competitor is strong on one platform but weak on another. Analyze whether dominating the platform with their weaker performance is an opportunity for you to dominate that platform and attract a lot of the market.
• Use social listening tools. Social listening allows you to know what current and potential customers think about you and your competition. These analyses may uncover opportunities for brand (re)positioning, at the very least in your messaging.
3. Design brand voice and tone that appeals to your target market. Include it in your brand style guideline to ensure that your personality remains consistent, even across platforms.
4. Create content that will appropriately engage your audience. Examples include the following.
• answers to audience questions
• routinely seek out posts of other creators with a significant following. Make some meaningful and positive feedback that could get the attention of their followers. Various platforms have their means of facilitating this like Twitter's retweet feature, Instagram's @tag and so on. 
• In response to an article, you can say "I liked your perspective on X ..." (and NOT simply 'I liked your article"). 
• Demonstrate your expertise. However, for the sake of being relatable, post content that also shows your imperfections like mistakes.
• include images (NOT only text and links). For instance, businesses using inforgraphics generate traffic over 10% more than otherwise. Remember that humans process visual content faster than text. This is particularly noteworthy when considering the limited amount of time in which to capture the attention of an audience online.
• Kylie Cosmetics engaged its audience over 2 years of content in the form of selfies and home videos. They portrayed Kylie just as a luxury lifestyle brand with repeated, obligation-free touchpoints before the launch of her lip kit business. Read my full case study of Kylie Cosmetics.
• Gamification is fast becoming a great opportunity for encouraging customer engagement.  
5. ...

3) Social media audits.

1. Perform a social media audit of your accounts. Since specific steps are outside the scope of this article, read otherwise on how to perform social media audits. Example(s) of common metrics of social media audits include the following.
• engagement metrics. Focus on these metrics (over less meaningful types like vanity metrics) because engagement indicates actual engagement. They include engagement (like comments, virality behavior, etc), click-through, conversion and so on. 
• vanity metrics (number of likes, followers, )
• audience profile as planned? (demographics, demand, etc)
• Find and report imposter accounts that use your name to capture or mislead your target market.
• Useful analytics tools include hashtracking, Followerwonk, etc 
2. Have appropriate expectations for the results. For instance, brand awareness marketing is geared towards long term results like trust, loyalty, authority and so on. Consequently, do not expect immediate 'direct responses' like purchases, clicks and so on from efforts designed for brand awareness. Brand awareness is a more nebulous measure and usually takes several months or longer before sales occur. Here are some common examples. To ensure you are taking a strategic approach, list your metrics in a meaningful way. The stages within the sales funnel is an example.
• Brand awareness
• To drive traffic (with Linkedin) to your website, monitor click-throughs.
• To raise brand awareness (Instagram), track number of Instagram Story views. 
• number of followers, shares, etc
• Engagement (ie how much audience interacts with your content)
• Comments, likes, mentions, etc
• Conversions
• to advertise (Facebook), monitor cost-per-click (CPC).
• Relationship management
• testimonials, repeat sales, your team's average response rate, etc
3. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Summary of most popular social media platforms

Among the most popular forms with over 100 million registered users include the following (listed in alphabetical order).

• Facebook and its associated Facebook Messenger.  
• Audience profile: teens to grandparents for B2C
• Your method(s) of use: business pages; groups; host events)
• Usage: brand awareness, conversion campaigns, B2B, B2C, retargeting campaigns.
• Useful features: targeted advertising; live broadcasting; offers continuously / dynamicallly evolving results for current trends
• Facebook Messenger
• Feature: Businesses can respond directly and personally with target customers who download the app.
• Instagram
• Audience profile: a bit younger than that of Facebook, gen Z, millenials; mainly used as a mobile app
• Business content type(s): visual, photos, short videos, live streams and stories that disappear at the end of each day.
• Usage: brand awareness, visual-first platform, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Useful feature(s): influencer marketing is  potentially much higher on this channel; Interactive questions in 'Stories' make the feature exceptionally good for engagement; Up to 30 hashtags are allowed per post as a means of potentially appearing in the continuously trending search results; @ tags of other accounts are useful for shoutouts for non-competing companies with the same market for new customer acquisition / market penetration.
• Pinterest
• Audience profile: mostly women, millennials.
• Usage: brand awareness, e-commerce, shopping, website visits, retargeting, campaigns, travel, food, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Quora
• Useful features: ranks highly on Google search results pages. It is also a search engine itself. This is powerful for creating backlinks and therefore boosting SEO. Consequently, it is ideal for business promotion. Users select specific topics and can therefore find you if you offer something in which they are truly interested. Your content can be shared and liked by users to rank it higher on results pages. You can enter your credentials in your profile. in order to plan your questions strategically, you can search for questions with the highest number of followers.
  
  
• Tik Tok
• Business content type: short viral videos, creative.
• Audience profile: mainly popular among young viewers.
• Useful features: some of the videos get shared on other sites as well.
• Twitter 

• Audience profile: Males; between 35 and 65, especially below 49. 

• Business content: microblogging (NOT as visual) so best for news and B2B; starting conversations; images, links (back to your business website) and other types of popular social media features

• Usage: brand awareness, retargeting campaigns, politics, news, B2B, B2C, mobile-first marketing efforts.

• Useful features:  polls; retweets (ie virality potential technology); paid private publishing
• LinkedIn  (to boost professional networks)

• Audience profile: B2B professional clients;

  ---

• Usage: brand awareness, recruitment, B2B

• Your content: business-oriented; general posts that showcases your expertise, long-form content, and even job listings; great if you are a startup or entrepreneur looking to boost their professional networks, to reach out to B2B clients, to reach investors or to boost brand recognition 

• YouTube
• Business content type(s): video content; tutorials or demonstration (very popular).
• Usage: brand awareness, educational content, how-to videos, SEO-focused content (NB.YouTube is the second most popular search engine), influencer marketing.
• Useful features: share videos on non-YouTube sites; create playlists; interact with audience on the YouTube platform; content is optimized for search.
• Audience profile: Varied, even including persons over 55; over 2 billion monthly logged-in users and even more viewers without accounts, fastest growing demographics. B2C and even some B2B. 

WhatsApp

• Content type & useful feature(s): text, voice or video messaging mostly to audience's mobile devices; 1-on-1 or group chats (group chats may allow or block audience participation);
• Audience profile: U.S. and globally; especially younger groups.
• Telegram
• (similar to WhatsApp)
• Snapchat
• Audience profile: young audience
• Content: photos, short videos or text messages that remains available for 24 hours.
• Features / benefits: useful for raising brand awareness among adolescents.
• Pinterest
• Business content type: visual; posts of products, blog posts and a variety of other content; fashion; home decor; food; DIY content.
• Feature: search engine
• Audience profile: young people; women.
• Reddit
• Chat bots

CONTENT RELATED TO USING MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

• Sales funnel 101. Social media is useful for the all important 'engagement' phase of the sales funnel.
• Brand voice and tone
• Social media 101
• Instagram 101
• Facebook Groups
• WhatsApp Business
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Chatbots
• Tawkto
• Social media management 

• Social listening
• Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts to various social media platforms well in advance.        

• Be guided by where in their purchase decision process your customers are. This will help you to create appropriate posts, advertisements and other engagement content. 
• Summary of other social media platforms: https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/09/social-media-channels-marketing.html 
• Internal links
• Details of the most popular social media platforms to be considered when selecting social media platforms. 

• Social media content ideas 

Nudge customers closer to buying decision by asking questions like:  

• 'Which do you prefer between A, B and C?, Which is your most favored or hated disliked option?

Use a snippet of the most powerful part of a testimonial in a graphic. Then place the entire testimonial in the description of the post (of Instagram for instance) 

Transparency: Show behind the scenes, where ingredients come from, etc especially if not usually made public knowledge.

Quick tips:

FAQs:

Before & after: results after you helped.

Other related industries:

User generated content:

Long form content (apx once monthly)

Community issues

Direct sales offer 

• Abovementioned case studies in other content
• Instagram 101 | Instagram
• Kylie Cosmetics

Twitter & Followerwonk for Ecommerce SEO

Twitter can be used as a promotional tool for business. If used strategically, it can gain exponential visibility. It will also allow you to connect and communicate directly with your market and business associates.

-- --

1. Communicate with your target market.

Everything you do sends signals and is therefore a form of communication. Consequently, keep ALL activity (even your following, who you follow and so on) on your Twitter account niche-specific. Before tweeting, be clear about your target so that you keep ANY conversations relevant and therefore consistently attractive. If you are running a competition or promotion, you can tweet something like #[promotion-related keyword] will be fun, etc ... Remember to keep in touch, even when you are not trying to promote something. This may involve communicating relevant information around tent pole events.

• Tweet at the right time of day. Remember that Twitter continually loads all ongoing conversations during the day. Consequently, it can be hard for people to find your tweets unless they are unusually inclined to search as if for a needle in a hay stack.
• Go into the 'Analyze' tab.
• Enter your [Twitter account name' and 'analyse their followers'. Click 'Do it'. This will to understand the peak time when most of your audience is likely to be active. Don't fear, most people have low percentages under 10% of follower activity at their highest points. BTW, you can re-tweet the same message at your second highest activity point and say, "Hey, in case you missed my last tweet from last night, ..."

-- --

2. Extend your reach with #hashtags

When you post messages, use hashtags. If you do not use hashtags, your messages will only reach your small number of followers. However, when you use hashtags, anyone on Twitter can access the message.

• Use keywords as hashtags for your profile and ensure that every tweet includes these relevant hashtags. These keywords may be your brand, your interest and so on.
• Use associated company names, event hashtag names and so on to show association. For instance, if you attended an event with your clients (Abusiness) and had a good time, you might post an image with a message like, "A great time you @Abusiness guys. You're #keyword rockstars. #proudxsupporter" 

--

--

3. Raise your market share of followers

Followerwonk.com is the ideal tool for monitoring your market share of followers.

In the 'Compare Users' tab, do a comparison with a major competitor. Several frequency outputs will appear. 

1. A Venn diagram will show different bubbles to represent your competitor and you regarding volume of followers. The size of each individual bubbles will reflect the relative volume of followers. If you share followers, the bubbles will intersect. It will be ideal for your bubble to be as large as that of your industry leader and for the bubbles to intersect (which would mean that you are reaching at least some of the leader's followers).
2. Another output that will appear is a percentage frequency table. This will provide relative percentages of the market of followers between you and your competitor. There will also be a percentage for the shared followers. Ideally, the percentages of your unique and shared followers should be as high to that of your competition as possible and the shared percentage as high as possible.

• Click the link to see the full list of your competition's followers. In fact, you can do this for up to 2 other competitors at the same time. Do comparisons with 2 key competitors at the same time to find followers that are common to both of them but not to you. Such followers are likely to be not simply fans who follow on a whim but truly interested people in some way. They may be experts in the field for instance. You want to get such followers on board with you too, especially those with the most 'social authority'. High 'social authority' followers are more influential because they are more influential simply because they have a high engagement rate. They are in an ideal position since their receptive audience spread their message far and wide. These tend to have the most followers who are attractive to you.
• 
  Follow these influencers. Remember! Twitter is a network of people who connect through discussion. In that case, engage with these people. They will hopefully begin to recognize and even follow you. To engage with them, get known by replying to their tweets and retweeting their tweets.
  
  

  SPECIAL OFFER--Try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial --
• BTW, when you 'reply' to tweets (ie write a comment in response to a counterparty's original tweet), all of that counterparty's followers will see your reply tweet. This is therefore a great way to recruit your counterparty's followers. Your message should therefore focus on attracting them to follow you.
• Alternatively, if you want your followers to see the message, you must 'retweet' the original message to them.

4. Find business contacts.

You may use the 'Bio Search' tab to find potential business associates in a highly specific niche, even if those persons are not part of your immediate network. This is useful for finetuning searches by geographical location, specialization and so on. For instance, if you are seeking a supplier of product X in Nairobi, you can search for that; if you are traveling to an event in a country, you can search for influential people in your field that may add value to your venture in some way.

• In 'Bio Search' search window, type in keywords. If you are looking for a supply manager, put that entire term in quotation marks like "supply manager" so the software will keep the concept whole. Use synonyms also. For instance, "supply coordinator", "supply trader" and so on.
• In the 'More Options" section, enter synonyms also. For instance, rather than only search for "Manhattan", also include "New York", "NY", "NYC", etc.

-- --

5. Some tweetiquette.

• As much as possible, always include multimedia (namely images or video). These elements enhance visibility and responsiveness.
• Tweet as frequently as possible at your optimal time of day to remain relevant. (See notes above about how to use followerwonk.com to establish the optimal hours for your followers). However, do not do this to the extent of appearing like spam.
• Consider sharing links for your offline colleagues. Do so without seeking their reciprocation. Do not make it feel transactional as in 'I did 1 thing for you, you should do 1 thing for me in return. However, if you do need help in the future, consider which of those people from whom you can seek retweets or other link sharing to promote your business.
• Mention people and ask others to mention you using the '@'. This transforms your name into a clickable link as opposed to regular text within your tweet. Clicking on @name links direct people to the profile page.

--

--

6. Analyze your performance (regarding gains and losses of followers). Experiment with new kinds of tweet and retweet approaches, note the time and then check their impact.

• Go into the 'Analyze' tab.
• Enter your Twitter name as [ @name ]
• Select 'followers'
• Set the time period and then 'Do it'.
• Note the date of rises and falls in following. Then review your tweets and retweets for the same dates or time periods to get clues on the causes of the change in following. 
• For instance, rises might be due to attending an event. If so, it a good clue regarding what you can do more of to increase your following. losses in followers are sometimes due to taking a stance on a highly 'political' issue like gay rights, racial matters, electoral candidates and so on. Losses are also likely effects of spam clearings that Twitter does from time to time.

-- --
CONTENT RELATED TO TWITTER FOR ECOMMERCE

• Associate industry keyword hashtag tweets with your mailing list segments. When you send out email campaigns, email sequences and or tentpole marketing, include corresponding tweets that extend your reach beyond those people whose email address you have.

Twitter 101: Quick Tips for Starting

Twitter is another important social media platform for one-to-one and one-to-many communication. One of the key advantages is the fact that its tags are SEO researchable. In other words, if you post content and include your industry's keywords, searching coustomers can find you. This free advertising can be very easily used because, as discussed below, you can provide weblinks. This is ideal because It also offers many of the popular features  seen on other platforms like hashtags, fleets (similar to Instagram stories), communities (similar to Facebook's groups), Super follows (similar to Patreon).

This post will explain the basic elements and features of Twitter before offering tips on being effective on the platform.

Tweets

Twitter messages are called tweets. Tweets are 140-character long messages that you broadcast to followers. They are SEO ready in that your customers' Google search results access them. Tweets may include up to 4 images, polls and emoticons. Tweets can also be scheduled from within the platform. You can configure each tweet so that only persons you authorize can respond. The options are "everyone", "people you follow" and "only people you mention". Tweets can be deleted. (Associated retweets are automatically deleted when you delete original tweets).

Re-Tweets (aka RT)

Retweeting refers to reposting / forwarding another user's tweet to one's own followers.

Direct Messages (DMs)

Direct messages allow you to send one-to-one private messages between users.

Super Follows

This feature involves paid followers (comparable with Patreon). It allow creators to share subscriber-only content with their followers. Creators need to set the monthly subscription for access to such content. This feature allows creators to make money on Twitter.

@ Messages

@john:            Public message to John that will appear on his @page

Polls / Surveys

You can create polls that are multiple choice questions.

Communities

Twitter Communities are like Facebook Groups. Specifically, they provide a dedicated space for discussions on specific shared interests. They are formed and managed by users (admins and moderators) who enforce community rules and keep conversations in line with the group's mission.

Quick Tips for Using Twitter as an Effective ECommerce SEO Tool

1.

Create single Twitter accounts for each niche, department, interest, aspect of your life and so on. For instance, if you create a Twitter account to sell paperclips, do NOT do anything that is irrelevant to this objective like tweet about your automotive products, your dog's new litter of puppies and so on. Keep relevant at every turn. This includes your choice regarding the people you follow, your retweets and so on. In short, allow your activity to send an unambiguous message to search engines, as well as to retain the interest of your followers.

2.

Customize your Twitter account to suit your brand. The following are a few examples of how you can achieve this.

• Create a description with keywords. Remember that search engines use Twitter keywords as meta tags
• Apply your logo
• Customize your background image to include contact details (even though Twitter does not allow the background to be live hyperlinks). This simply provides efficient use of your internet real estate.

3.

Attract Followers. Keep the first golden rule in mind regarding keeping all activity relevant to your business objective. This involves creating associations with relevant Twitter users.

• Follow Twitter users who have similar interests, especially those with a large following that is engaged (ie responds to their tweets). These ideal Twitter associates are called social media influencers. One way of finding them if by searching for niche-related keywords with a hashtag. Followerwonk is an even more powerful means of achieving this objective. (Click here to read an article for steps on doing this with Followerwonk). Follow your competition! Wise competitors are likely to start following you, especially when your account begins to perform well. This is a means of keeping current in your industry and taking opportunities to access a competitor's following.
• Keep relevant in the minds of your followers by communicating with them. The first two of the 3 following Twitter messaging methods are most useful in attracting and retaining followers.
-- --
• Tweets ie messages shared with the public, much like a Facebook post with public settings. However, your messages stand out on the pages of your followers. Whenever possible, place your keywords with hashtags within the first 27 characters. This part of your tweets are comparable with the all important ‘title’ tags of web pages that search engines grab. Tweet about anything relevant whether announcing new blog posts, promotions, announce corporate accomplishments, affiliate program or other employment opportunities, competitions, product links and use tentpole marketing opportunities to send messages that give your business more of a human appeal. If you need to include long URLs (website addresses) into your 140-character tweets, use serves like bitly ( https://bitly.com/shorten/ ) to shorten the URLs to considerably fewer characters.  



• Retweets ie messages that are forwarded. This is useful if a tweet originated within of followers of which your followers are not a part. The retweet introduces the tweet to your followers.
• Direct message, ie private message that are possible only between you and your followers. These messages do not have SEO value.

4.

Connect Twitter to other (social) media. Spread your hashtag keywords through as many communication media as you can. Some of these include email signatures, business cards, promotional web content and so on. In fact, in some cases, cross media connections provide automation. For instance, your tweets can automatically appear as Facebook entries.  

• Log in to Twitter


• Settings (top right corner drop down menu)


• Profile


• Scroll to ‘Facebook’ (and follow instructions)


• Save Changes


• (When done, your Facebook page should automatically have a Twitter icon)

Types of Tweets you should post

Ensure that all of your tweets are doing at least one of the following. 

i. Web-linking. The link should lead to somewhere your brand can engage for longer with your leads. You can shorten your weblinks with tools like Sniply.

ii. Quick questions (QQ). This is ideal for engagement. 

• Do you like X or Y?
• Which design creeps you out?

iii. Industry Buzz. This type of content allows you to reinforce your expertise in your field. Specifically, it shares knowledge in a very authoritative way, perhaps even showing background research, actionable information like tutorials / tips and so on. Although showcasing expertise, the content should be sufficiently relatable that your followers think they could not have said it better and wish to re-tweet the content instead. This type of content gets the most re-tweets and is therefore supremely valuable for virality / market penetration, ie getting the attention of your competition's audience. 

iv. Networking. This relates to actually striking up discussions with otherwise strangers. Example(s)

• Thoughtful compliments are an ideal way of breaking the ice like, "I liked how your video discussed x-y-z. The content was very inspiring." (NOT I liked your video).

Use tools like Buffer to schedule your tweets well in advance.

-- --

CONTENT RELATED TO USING TWITTER

• Social media 101
• Instagram 101
• Facebook Groups
• WhatsApp Business
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Chatbots
• Tawkto
• Use tools like Buffer to schedule your tweets well in advance.
• Internal links