Get ahead of the social media marketing game with these insider strategies.
When people think of social media, the first things that likely pop into their minds are selfies, funny cat photos, and seeing what their friends ate for dinner. As riveting as this content may be, social media also serves a higher purpose: providing a great platform for marketers to share information and spread awareness about their business. Suitably, applications used for social media can have a myriad of useful features, none of which involves “swiping right” or collecting “Likes” like a manic digital hoarder.
The Internet has provided us with plenty of ways to engage people like never before. All that’s left is to apply the information in a useful way that will draw in new viewers. Inbound marketing at your service!
Use the All-Seeing Eyes of Google
Social media apps can have all sorts of handy applications for managing your online presence. In fact, a survey conducted in 2013 indicated that 89 percent of marketers believed that their social marketing efforts have greatly increased exposure for their business. Google is particularly good at collecting this information in an inbound marketer’s dream database known as Google Analytics.
This handy tool provides webmasters information about who’s visiting their page and when. But it goes beyond basic information — proper utilization of analytics can provide you with all the knowledge you need to boost traffic to your content and keep people coming back for more.
While this is great in theory, the data can be hard to manage without proper know how. Certain social media apps, like Quill Engage, can consolidate and repackage this data for you, providing information on the content you produce and even giving you statistics the popularity of your Facebook posts.
While this may be amusing for the droves of people trying to score more hits on funny pictures of their cats, it can be a game-changer for professional social media marketers who gain insight from trending ideas!
We Love Mind Games
We like to be shown things that we’re unfamiliar with. We like even more to experiment with applications to create something that we haven’t ever experienced.
Consider the popularity of the widespread quizzes that abound on media websites, which can offer answers to gripping life-altering questions, including “What is your spirit animal?” and “Which Harry Potter character are you?” The evidence is clear — we like to be engaged when viewing media. Besides, the realization that you’re a snowy owl in spirit will undoubtedly influence your subsequent life decisions.
There are plenty of applications, such as Beatrix, that take full advantage of this desire and make content creation and distribution a breeze. If you’re able to entertain your audience with infographics, interactive videos and innovation, you’re one step closer to creating loyal followers that will annoy everyone on their news feeds with how great your content is, thus becoming ambassadors to your social media presence. Viral status: Achieved.
Optimize Your Content
Previously, if you wanted to create content, you could spend hours uploading posts and data onto various boards with the vain hope that you would grab somebody’s, anybody’s, attention. Nowadays, applications like Edgar can take the busy work out of the equation and even let you know the best times to release your content.
Using keywords and metrics, applications can predict how popular your posts will likely be, discover similar postings to group alongside yours and even distribute the content at pre-determined intervals based on other postings. It’s an extraordinary (and slightly terrifying) set of tools that can optimize your content creation in ways that would have made Bill Gates choke on his latté in the early days of Microsoft.
Conclusion
One aspect of human nature that social media has highlighted is our never-ending need to interact with one another. Given the obscene popularity of social websites, this fact is hardly debatable. With proper use of analytics, engagement and content optimization, businesses that utilize the interconnected nature of social media will be at the forefront of innovation. Those who don’t may find themselves bogged down in the purgatory of outdated technology and ineffective strategies, wondering where everything went wrong as they click through endless funny cat photos.
How do you currently use social media in your inbound marketing strategy? What tools and apps will you implement this year to get the ball rolling? Let us know in the comments!
