Social Media Marketing Guide Part One

Social Media Marketing Guide Part One – Do the Work

Social Media Marketing Guide Part One

When it comes down to it, the most important thing about your content is that it is actually read by your ideal clients. There’s absolutely no point carefully crafting a beautiful piece of literature if it doesn’t tick all of the boxes that you need it to tick, which are:

BOXES TO BE TICKED EACH AND EVERY TIME

  • To answer the questions your ideal client is asking in their head (NB this may or may not be the same as the keywords they typed into any search bar).
  • To convince your ideal client that what you do is the answer to their prayers.
  • To persuade your ideal client that rather than continue looking for more information, it’s time to take action – now. With you.
  • And if you’re not actively using social media marketing – it’s critical that it will appear as a Google Search Result when your ideal client is looking for answers, in a high enough spot that they will click on the link and read what you have to say.

Agonising about the right adverb, or torturing yourself to get exactly the right word will get you absolutely nowhere, fast. It is, in fact, a form of procrastination. Which, while it has it’s advantages from a creativity point of view, doesn’t tend to get your products or services sold. So instead of wasting your time creating something that the important people will never get to read, spend a bit of time doing some research up front and work out exactly what it is that your ideal customer actually wants and needs to read about.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO ATTRACTING ATTENTION ONLINE IS AS FOLLOWS:

You decide who you want to talk to. You decide who you want to work with. You imagineer your IDEAL Customer. Now… Ideally you’d have done this before you’d actually produced anything. But given that a lot of businesses started before the Internet was a Thing, it’s entirely possible that this won’t be practical. However, those businesses can still catch up from the next point onwards using an Avatar of their existing customers, and perhaps ones that they’d like to work with from now onwards.

  • You go on to make a fairly in-depth analysis of who exactly you think these people are. What do they do for a living?
  • Where they hang out?
  • You assess the kind of language that they use – is there a type of language that is unique to people who would LOVE to work with you? Try and identify commonalities.
  • Then, you put some serious time into researching the kind of information that they might be looking for online.
  • Then you create something that you know they are looking for; You use the language that they use, and you put it in place where you know they will see it when they are looking for answers to their questions. Possibly you even take into account WHEN they will be looking for these answers.

The best way to do this is to stand on the shoulders of giants. There are absolutely superb websites already in existence and rather than reinventing the wheel, just take a look at what they doing already.
Quora
Buzzsumo
Facebook
Twitter
And, in fact, pretty much any other social media platform out there. So if you want your people to come and work with you, then first work out where your people are, listen to them, and then create something that you know they want to know about.

The best way to use Quora is to research what other industry specialists are talking about. Look for questions to do with your product, service or industry that have lots of views and up-votes. These are topics that generate a lot of interest – QED there is a large and engaged audience out there looking for more information.

If you want to test the waters, start answering pertinent questions – write something yourself. This will have the double outcome of establishing you as an industry expert, and garnering the response to what you are trying to promote.

This is a huge shortcut, and it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Buzzsumo collects and collates a huge amount of information for your researching pleasure. Type in any topic and it will show you the MOST shared articles on that topic. Internet-wide. And alongside that, it will show you how many shares were made on which social media platforms – a good indicator of where you should spend your time.

Obviously if something that is along the same lines as the subject matter you are going to talk about performs brilliantly on LinkedIn, but woefully on Pinterest, then it would serve your purposes to concentrate your efforts on LinkedIn and leave Pinterest for another time.

And not only does Buzzsumo do this, but it also gives you links to the articles themselves, plus a list of backlinks to the articles. Backlinks are made by people who are interested in the topic. Websites that are linking to articles along the same lines as the ones you are going to publish would bear some closer examination as well. They might have Facebook groups – ones that you can pop into a custom audience and then advertise to.

So, take your topic, and start searching about it on Facebook. You’ll find pages, groups, events and all manner of information.  Trawl through it all for a while and see what kinds of information has the most likes and the most comments. In fact, what is already there that has the most response to it.

Bear in mind that it’s possible that someone else’s bad handling of a situation could turn into your ideal blog post. The comments on any post are usually more valuable than the blog post itself, because you can use them to get an overall idea of how the public feel about what has been written.

Go to Twitter and do the same thing as you did for Facebook. There are plenty of resources out there to help you see trending topics, and the responses to what those trending topics are.

These are great places to look if what you do is more product than service based. Take a look to see what has been shared and what has been most pinned, and absolutely take some time to convert those kind of things into Instagram hashtags.

Then have an in-depth look at what is popular – how many posts are using that hashtag? How many people are liking and commenting on those posts.

The Internet has got some AMAZING free resources, and if you have the time and the energy to learn how to use them, then that research will reward you abundantly. You’re welcome to download our Free Guide – How to get the most out of your social media marketing.

If, however, you can’t squeeze any more hours into your day, but you still want to get involved, then you can pay-to-play by engaging an online advertising agency do the work for you. Check out the services we can provide – we hope that you’ll find them useful – after all… you’re reading this article, the one that we researched and then wrote, especially for you.

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