Make It Work Fridays: Open Office Hours: Top 3 Social Media Marketing focuses

Today’s question is from Doug Green, from Auburn California. Doug Question’s is:

What are the top 3 things I should be doing right now as part of my social marketing strategy? Where should I put my effort into?
This is a great question that I get asked all the time.  In this week’s “Make it work Friday: Open Office Hours” I talk about:

• How to get people interested in your business and your message using social media
• Steps to amplifying your reach
• Monetising your efforts

Watch this week’s Make It Work Fridays: Open Office Hours now and leave a comment! 🙂

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to Make it Work Fridays. My name is Sara Nguyen owner of socialmediarocketeer.com and in Make it work Fridays, I take your burning social media questions to help you get unstuck so you can rocket your reach and build your brand profitably using social media. Now, today’s question is from Doug Green from Urban California and Doug’s question is: What are the top three things I should be doing right now as part of my social media strategy? Where should I be putting my efforts? And this is a really great question that I get asked quite often. Social media is this extremely overwhelming space and when people particularly businesses get started with the social media, what I often see is firstly they don’t know where to start so therefore they don’t do anything or alternatively they start posting random things without a strategy and what happens there is that they’re posting a few things on Facebook, they’re sending out a couple of tweets then nothing happened and they get disheartened and they stop their effort completely.

Now, I want you to start thinking more strategically about social media and how you use it because it’s not meant to be used in isolation as random posts and random tweets here and there. Instead I want you to really think about social media as a way of getting eyeballs on your content, eyeballs on your content to deliver a message. So, in entity to your question Doug, the top three things that you should be doing right now as part of your social media strategy so you can get focused and start doing something, first of all, the first step I would recommend you do is to create which content and I’m going to break this down. Because a lot of people talk about creating content but what does this mean and how do we actually action this? And when I’m talking about content, I’m talking about videos such as the video that you see here, I’m talking about infographics, I’m talking about blog content and it’s really about content and information that helps your customer solve their problems and that they’re looking for answers to.

And I think it’s really important that we deliver this in a way that we find these topics is by doing keyword research, is by asking customers doing surveys and using that as the foundation to make up content that you will create. I don’t believe that content needs to be long but I do believe that it needs to be consistent. So, once you start putting out blog posts, once you start putting out videos, you need to do this consistently and that’s the first component of my recommendation before getting started with your social media. Now the second component is once you’ve created this content, what I see very often as well in the marketplace is I see people put out their content and then they post it on Facebook, they tweet about it and post in on Google Plus and nothing happens because they haven’t got a really big following behind them. And once again this disheartens them because they put all of this effort into creating this amazing content and then don’t get any traffic, they don’t get the eyeballs in front of it.

I think after you’ve created the content, you really need to be strategic and really have a lot of intent behind how you promote it and you use social media to do that. I really believe that with Facebook, when you post it to Facebook, you need to consider doing Facebook ads and not just relying on organic reach because we know Facebook continually changes the algorithm and makes it harder for us organically to get more eyeballs in front of our content. So, post it on Facebook. Look at running some Facebook ads. You don’t need to run much to get started. You can be spending 10, 20, 30 dollars per post that you do, that’s driving traffic to your content. And then also consider putting it on things such as YouTube where once again if it’s video, you can run some ads towards the video as well and just consider these small little boosters I like to call them to get more people seeing your content. I believe in doing white hat practices, I believe black hat is very lucrative and it’s very seductive but it hurts us in the long run.

So, I believe in doing the right things, the right way. So, that’s the second thing I would recommend. So, firstly create your content, secondly promote your content using social media, using paid means as well as organic means as well. When we’re talking about social media where to post a common question that I get asked is which platform do I focus on this? So many and once that I would really focus on, well, first I recommend you pick the few that resonate with you and that you’re willing to update. There’s nothing worse than having 20 social media platforms which you don’t maintain. If you’re maintaining a couple of them really well that will serve you better then to have 20 that are redundant or where it’s a ghost town. So, I definitely recommend that you consider using Facebook, posting to Facebook because you can run Facebook ads. I definitely recommend you put on, you consider using Google Plus because it’s a great platform to reach people with and there are lots of really active communities that you can post and share your content there as well.

I do really love YouTube. I think YouTube, if you’ve got videos, it’s a great way of putting your content and promoting your content using YouTube’s advertising options as well depending on your market. I really believe in the power of Pinterest, Instagram to as other considerations. But they’re not perfect for every market. Just consider is your brand relevant to this and is this something that you want to maintain or you can outsource to someone to maintain? So, that would be component number two of using social media to promote your actual content. Now the third component of putting your effort into your social media strategy is we’ve gone to create content, we’ve gone to promote our content, now what happens after that? What are we telling people to do? How are we looking to monetize the traffic that we get? So, once people have seen your content on your website that they’ve seen from a Facebook ad, what happens then? Ideally and this really needs to be key is that we really want them to opt in to your list because the assett is in your list.

Once you have people in your list, you have a means of communicating with them regularly and once you start to build more content, you build more trust with them, they start to know like they can trust you, the higher the propensity exist for them to actually buy off you. So, then we need to be strategic about what do we do with people after we’ve got their attention, after that we’ve got their trust that they’ve given us their name and email and how we are going to make money off this. Strategically, what I see happens quite often is people grab a name in email, put it a list and then they blast their list with offers every single day and this I think is quite damaging because, you know when you walk through a really busy street and there’s a hundred vendors screaming at you just telling you to buy that’s not really the environment where you want to be spending your money. It’s not a pleasant environment for them. It’s really about finding that balance of continuing to deliver content, build that relationship and put out offers and not be afraid to put out offers and find the balance between not being afraid to put out offers and not spamming people as well.

But the third component really is about strategically thinking. Okay. We’ve captured the name and email, how are we going to monetize this, how are we going to put out campaigns, how are we going to put out offers that are relevant to the market so that they buy off us and we make money as businesses. So, the power of social media really is about creating and engaging with an audience. We’re building content, we’re helping people to solve their problems and we’re serving them. But this communication needs to really be intentional and deliberate and it needs to be consistent. And the whole effort is about leveraging your Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Instagram as a whole, not just as isolated little bits and if you need help with developing a social platform strategy, you can click on the link in the description of this video to apply and we can see if we’re a good team to work together.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this video that pretty much wraps us up. If you have a question and you’re on my list, watch out for the email that will come out to submit your question and if you’re not on my mailing list and you want to ask a question, if you have a burning social media question that you need to answered, please click on the signup link in the description of this video as well and I will see you next week for another episode of Make It Work Fridays.

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