Incorporating the various social media and professional networking sites in your marketing efforts continues to be an important part of our business brand and marketing process on a consistent and efficient basis. By using the various social media platforms in this manner our potential audience reach (who sees and engages in our content posts) is broadened for best results.
In this article I provide a series of important guidelines for effective promotion of your content following the first live publication and beyond. Getting the news out about your new blog or article post quickly and efficiently is essential.
Providing fresh, informative, engaging content that immediately grabs attention and maintains interest is key to optimizing our audience reach and response levels.
· Share once in the first 24 hours after your original live post. If it is business related posting set up a Business Page on Facebook. This is a highly ‘social’ site and many abhor business content on personal pages and will promptly ignore/un-follow you.
· Monitor your Facebook business page analytics, in particular your ‘Reach’ data and graphical display, daily to follow notable changes and also weekly, monthly data and beyond to get a feel for flat periods and dates/times of significant increase or decrease in reach and also engagement, comments, shares. Review what was posted to your page on those dates of significant change. You will begin to see a patter for increased audience reach and engagement through the data and a thorough analysis of your content posted on those dates of increased connection. You must know and understand what information your audience responds best to and therefore wants or needs. You MUST target your audience through your content and tagging. If you post about content your followers have no interest in you are wasting your time and theirs.
· Posting Frequency: Through your Insights data determine when best to post your business page content based on best results for your audience reach and engagement. Post at optimum days and times using the Facebook Post Scheduler. Experiment with different post frequencies and the day/time of postings through both scheduled and intermittent posting to see what works best for your audience.
· Remember your targeted audience, their geographical location and time zone. If you post when the majority of people are in bed asleep your results diminish accordingly. Your ‘reach’ data will tell you the days/time of day when, on average, your audience connects with your posts.
· Gauging Reach Performance: From your Facebook Insights data you can determine your page’s average reach experience as a baseline to compare your future reach experience. Always focus on the content that your audience responds best to and that best helps you achieve your post objectives.
· ‘Pages To Watch’ Feature: This is a useful feature to monitor on Facebook. You can follow the reach experience of up to 100 other pages of your choice, your competitors and beyond, to see which pages are achieving significant audience reach in comparison to your own. Then you can connect with those pages and see how that significant reach is being achieved.
· Types of Facebook Updates: Your audience responds in their own individual ways. Curate and/or create your content for updates in varied forms including blogs or articles, videos and image posts. Monitor closely your audience reach and response indicators ie likes, comments, shares and Insights data to determine which format works best overall or in combination with your general audience. Watch your new page ‘likes’ patterns as well to see what posts are generating new interest and following.
· Post Sharing: Periodically, ask your page friends and followers to share your business posts on their personal pages while being aware of your relationship with them and awareness of any potential sensitivity. Generally, if a person sees value in what you post they will be willing if not eager to share your content with others.
· Schedule your new content posting 3-4 times during the first 24 hrs. after original post reasonably spread out over optimum viewing hours.
· Post unrelated tweets and/or do re-tweets in between your own content posting. If your posts are ALL about you (buy me, buy my product, buy my services) you will turn people off. Avoid overly self-promoting or followers will ignore your posts or even un-follow.
· Hashtags, Images & Headlines: Remember to utilize these components consistently in order to achieve your broadest audience reach by capturing their attention for clickthroughs.
· Connection & Networking: Engage with your followers and beyond. When someone ‘favorites’ or ‘re-tweets’ your content respond with a message or tweet of thanks and seek to engage in conversation (one on one) with them through natural, un-pushed and meaningful dialogue and stay in touch with those who appear potential new associations or customers. Add them to your ‘Lists’ on Twitter to highlight that potential relationship as a customer and/or influencer. Be acutely aware of the current day importance of networking. Results can easily translate into revenue – it takes time commitment and effective planning and execution but fruits of your labor will come to bear.
· Following: Before following anyone, especially where they have favorited a post of yours without following, take a look at their profile first. If their number of followers is far more than the number they follow chances are they are only mining for follows and have no intention of following you, especially where there is no mutual relevance and/or they are so geographically distant that any new association or customer relationship may seem highly unlikely.
· Tweet Visibility & Lifespan: Remember that by virtue of the scrolling post platform on Twitter, as new tweets come in after your own, your tweet gradually drops down the visible display window. The estimated visibility and lifespan of each tweet is approximately two hours. Typically, most followers do not dig ‘pages deep’ to find posts they have missed earlier in the day.
PINTEREST & INSTAGRAM
· Pin Blog Post Images: Be sure to only post images on relevant Pinterest or Instagram boards. Like any other social media platform it takes an active board following practice to attract their follows in return.
· Age Demographics: Remember that your audience’ interests, to a fair degree, will vary depending on their age. Your Pinterest audience will typically be middle-aged or older on average and Instagram audiences tend to be younger.
· Reach & Engagement: Monitor your referrals and engagement rates to identify trends among your followers to determine what image content they prefer the most. There is no sense posting images that will be ignored consistently.
· Post your content link within 24 hrs of the original post going live.
· LinkedIn Publisher: Post your content link via the LinkedIn Publisher if you have access to it. LinkedIn has a huge and rapidly growing user base and is THE place to be for professional networking and business content sharing. Upload a high resolution, relevant image to head your post. You can share your entire post right in the update but if your objective, like my own, is to funnel web traffic back to my hub location (blog or website) where your content originates, copy and paste the first one or two opening paragraphs followed by ‘Read More…’ linking to the original content. That way you engage the LinkedIn audience and also gain valuable exposure to your primary/hub website or blog. Be sure to include the three allowable tags to help broaden your reach even further.
· LinkedIn Groups: Post your content link to groups that you have joined on LinkedIn. Make sure that what you post is fully relevant to the group itself as irrelevant content posting will be deemed spamming. You should also be actively participating in the group discussions otherwise your posts may go largely ignored. Be fully familiar with each group’s Rules or Terms of Use guidelines to avoid compromising those requirements through inappropriate posts.
GOOGLE+
· Share your content within the first 24 hrs after the original post goes live.
· Post your shared content and links to your Profile and also relevant Google+ communities you participate in. Again, abide by the individual community guidelines or terms of use when posting.
SCHEDULE SOCIAL POSTING
It is very important to establish consistent posting habits on the various social media and professional networks. Create a calendar or other means to schedule posting, preferably one that provides automatic individual or repeat task reminders on an ongoing basis to help keep you on track. Consistent posting results in better engagement and reach statistically, especially where sites like Twitter have the scrolling tweet format and no follower post notifications. In that case you need to do manual browsing through your feed or individual tweet pages of those you follow in order to see their posts beyond current feed page view.
Best practice is to always monitor analytics and insights data to help you determine when best to post your content and links when it will have the greatest audience reach (YOUR audience) and when it will most effectively help you achieve your own company objectives. Use auto post scheduling wherever possible when your real-time posting is not coinciding with those best times to post. When using auto posting apps be careful about their posting dynamics to ensure your audience does not find the timing/frequency of posting intrusive, spam-like or otherwise annoying to them or you will lose followers and potential customers/clients rapidly. As you can appreciate, their tolerance for such annoyance is minimal to none.
Was this article useful to you? If so please share the post. Your comments are encouraged and welcome.
By Don MacIver, Owner, Editor, Writer
© Lasting Impressions Editing 2015, Penticton, BC, Canada