Learn From Rick

When it comes to digital marketing, there are tons of different social networks to choose from – each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

To cover just a few, you have:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Tumblr
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Pinterest

And this is before you’ve even covered some of the ‘less obvious’ social networks, or the networks that skirt the borders of how we define social media. These include:

• Reddit
• Snapchat
• Periscope
• Forums
• YouTube
• Vine

So yeah, there’s a lot to choose from here… How do you know where to begin?

Of course, you should be on all social media if possible and the expression you will often hear used in this regard is ‘be everywhere’. But if you had to choose just one social network… which would it be?

Defining Your Goals and Understanding Your Audience

If you look at this in terms of pure numbers, then the answer becomes very simple. Facebook is the biggest social network and as such this is the one you should be on if you want the opportunity to potentially reach the biggest number of people.

But as any marketer should know, numbers aren’t really what’s important. What’s important is targeted numbers. In other words, who are you trying to reach?

And then there are those other factors like ‘susceptibility’ – is now the right time to reach that user? And are you reaching them in the correct way?

To answer these questions you need to define who your target audience is and how best to reach them.

For instance, did you know that Pinterest is the social media site with the biggest proportion of female users? What’s more, it lends itself particularly well to creative topics and to aesthetic and visual subjects.

So in other words, if you have a bakery shop, then you might well find that Pinterest is the right place for you. For a B2B company selling business insurance though, you’re likely not going to have as much luck on Pinterest (how do you make this visual and artistic?). There are ways, but it’s not going to be as easy and there isn’t as much potential here.

So to find your best social network, you need to ask yourself where your audience is going to be and what the best way to communicate what you’re offering is. If you can answer these two questions then you can find your ‘route to market’.

If you have a landing page or a squeeze page that is selling a product or collecting leads, then your business model will be simple: send as many people there as possible.

The more people you can send to the page you just constructed – the page that has been constructed especially to convert visitors into buyers – the greater your turnover and your profit will be.

Social media is a perfect tool for doing this but you need to use it correctly. Here’s how…

Facebook CPA

One particularly useful tool for driving visitors to an offer is the option on Facebook to use CPA advertising. For those who are unfamiliar, CPA is a type of PPC advertising with a twist – you only pay when someone actually takes action. There are many different ‘actions’ you can set up to this effect, but the one we’re interested in in this case is the ‘redeem voucher’ offer.

Essentially, you can create an offer and promote it through Facebook and then only get charged when someone actually clicks through and takes advantage of the discount you’re offering. This is very much the perfect scenario for everyone involved. You will impress your followers by offering a discount specifically to them while the same time only paying when they buy. This is a guaranteed ROI!

YouTube

Don’t be afraid to use video to promote your special offers. In a video you can demonstrate the product you are pedalling and this in turn allows you to show it off in much greater detail, while at the same time using your personality combined with music and other features to really get people interested and to ensure they can’t take their eyes off the screen. Video has the potential to be far more engaging and persuasive as compared with pretty much any other medium!

Events and Promotions

Social networks give you the advantage of having a real life network to leverage. When used correctly, this can potentially allow a link, product or anything else to go viral.

So for instance, you could run a promotion offering to give a big discount if you get X number of likes. Similarly, you can run competitions, or you can provide discounts for people who refer a friend. This way, your initial post can be seen by many more people and at the same time, you can increase engagement.

 

Reddit is a social bookmarking site that operates something like a cross between a forum and a social media site. As with either of those, it allows you to create your own profile and then share posts from around the web. And like a social media site, it lets you choose which content you want to see on the homepage when you log on.

Unlike social media sites however, Reddit is not about updating people on what you’ve had for lunch but rather provides a series of smaller communities (called ‘Sub Reddits’) for discussing a range of different topics. There are Sub Reddits on almost everything from Gaming, to Sonic the Hedgehog, to Fitness, to Agoraphobia. If it’s a niche that exists, there’s probably a Reddit for it. And if there’s not? You can quickly and easily create one.

Within those Sub Reddits, users can then post comments or links which will then get upvoted or downvoted, affecting their prominence and visibility both on the homepage for subscribed users and on the Sub Reddit main page itself. This is ‘social curation’ and it’s a great way to find the most interesting content in your niche.

The Benefits of Reddit

Right away, this provides an obvious and immediate opportunity for marketers looking to promote their content online. Posting in a Sub Reddit and getting enough upvotes can mean instant access to a huge audience of targeted users and potentially thousands or even millions of views overnight.

And there are more uses for Reddit besides this too. For instance, you can use Reddit as a great way to find trending content you can share to your own social media accounts. This makes it very similar to using something like BuzzSumo – but free.

Finally, Reddit offers you a forum to discuss with the community. If you’re creating a product, then Reddit is an excellent place to conduct research from a very enthusiastic audience.

How to Succeed

But there’s a downside to Reddit too – that being that the audience is very cynical and can be very brutal in their treatment of promotional content. If you want to share links without them being down-voted and picked apart, then you need to ensure that you’re only linking to very high quality work and you also need to ensure that you spend your time building your reputation in the community. You have been warned!

Social media marketing can take a lot of time and effort. Especially when you recognize the sheer number of different social sites out there and the importance of treating each one differently.

Thankfully though, there are also a number of tools out there that can save you time and that can even automate some aspects of the process. None of these tools are completely essential to succeed on social networks but any of them can help you to get better results from less work and as such should certainly be considered.

IFTTT

IFTTT stands for ‘If This, Then That’ and is a very powerful app for social media marketing. This essentially allows you to set up ‘If, Then’ statements between different social media accounts, web apps and even hardware.

So for instance you could say ‘IF someone posts X onto Facebook, THEN share it to Twitter’. That’s a very simplistic example however. More creative uses could include updating Twitter with your physiological data using the UP fitness tracker, or perhaps you’d like to save all of your Instagram pictures to DropBox? The sky is the limit here, so be creative and think about how you can enhance your social media campaign with this tool.

Rapportive

Rapportive is a social media tool specifically for LinkedIn. It’s also one of the most powerful and useful tools on the web for digital marketers.

Essentially, what this does is to allow you to see the LinkedIn account of anyone who sends you an e-mail through Gmail. In turn, this then means that you can add them to your connections with a single click, or just get more information about the person you’re talking to online. This is incredibly useful for marketers who attend networking events – it lets you turn an e-mail address into a LinkedIn contact.

Buffer

Buffer is another very useful tool. This one lets you schedule posts to various social media accounts. So you can create potentially thousands of Tweets or status updates in one sitting and then have them post on a regular basis.

The great thing about this, is that it means your profile never looks ‘dead’ and completely quiet. What’s more, it lets you save considerable time.

FollowerWonk

Arguably more important than the number of followers you have, is how influential and how engaged those followers are. FollowerWonk allows you to see which followers are your most valuable as well as other data – such as when they’re most active.

When setting out to achieve anything as a marketer, it is always important to have some set goals. These will not only point you in the right direction but will also outline your trajectory allowing you to look at the small steps you need to take to get where you need to be. What’s more, they also allow you to measure your progress and to see what’s working and what isn’t.

So how do you go about setting goals as a social media marketer? Let’s break it down…

Numbers

One of the simplest and most straightforward ways to look at your success in social media is to measure the number of followers/subscribers you have. Over time, if you are posting content that people enjoy and if you are marketing yourself well, you should find people signing up and getting involved.

While this is the most obvious figure to concentrate on though, it can also be a mistake. As we’ll see below, there are other factors that can provide more useful goals.

Engagement

But numbers alone don’t paint a complete picture of your success. In fact, it’s possible to buy several thousand followers for a relatively low sum but what you’ll find is that this doesn’t do much for you as those followers won’t be engaging with your content.

Engagement means that people are responding to your posts, that they are PMing you, that they are liking/favoriting your comments etc. In turn, this shows that they’re actually finding what you’re sharing interesting and that makes them much more likely to buy the products you recommend or to share your posts with their own network.

You can usually see your engagement by looking at your stats/analytics. Consider that it’s better to have a few highly engaged users than it is to have thousands of unengaged users – concentrate on this number!

Sales

If you were only to focus on one thing as a marketer, this would likely be the number you’d want to pay attention to. The number of sales you get will of course be a result of your followers and engagement and ultimately this is what those things will be serving: your profit.

If you want to keep things simple by looking at just one thing to drive up, this is the number to look at. Bear in mind though, that short-term sales won’t always mean long term sales, which is why it’s normally better to look at a combination of factors.

Social media marketing and content marketing go hand-in-hand. In fact, a lot of your social media efforts will likely boil down to creating blog posts and articles and then sharing those with your audience.

However, in order for your content to get read and shared, you need to ensure that you are approaching it in the right way and that you have the right idea about what works on Facebook and Twitter and what doesn’t.

And by ‘working’, what we really mean is that you’re creating content that will get shared and that will get read.

Let’s take a look at how you go about doing this:

The Importance of Uniqueness

Companies that have no clue about social media will create content that is derivative and dull. How many times have you seen articles on ‘How to Get Abs’? Or on ‘How to Pick Up Women’? These are things that everyone wants to achieve but the articles are written in a way that is highly generic and that doesn’t seem to offer anything new.

On the other hand, you have those ‘clickbait’ articles that go the other way. They are either incredibly hyperbolic, or they create some kind of mystery so that people will be tempted to click. They might be ‘The One Amazing Trick That Will Give You INCREDIBLE Abs Overnight’ or ‘You’ll NEVER Believe the One Herb That Men Are Using to Get Women Into Bed!’. These titles work because they grab attention and offer something completely new… but rarely does the actual content deliver on its promise.

Instead then, try to use the same strategy while actually offering something good. How about: ‘How Cardio Acceleration Burns 73% More Fat’ or ‘How Expert Pick Up Artists Apply Cognitive Behavioral Therapy To Amazing Effect‘. These articles include technical sounding terms that people haven’t heard of and that suggests something new – thus making them likely to click. At the same time though, these are actual meaty subjects that you can write about and deliver on your promise with.

Your Reader ‘Persona’

At the same time, always have in mind your ‘reader persona’. This is a fictional profile of the type of person your content is aimed at. If you get this right, then there should be a certain section of your audience for whom the content is perfect. This makes them far more likely to share as a way to express themselves – because your content reflects their personality – and it means that their friends are more likely to share it with them, knowing that they’re like it.

Remember that at its core, social media is a communication tool. If your content facilitates communication and expression, then it will succeed!

Take a look at the social media marketing of any number of small businesses and you will likely see the same mistakes repeated over and over again.

For a great number of these businesses, their social media ‘strategy’ consists of creating a Facebook site and then just posting short promotional updates as their status:

“Find out why we’re the best EPOS system in the West!”

“Serve more customers with our fast and efficient till system”

“We can’t wait to help you improve your business!”

And then strangely, these companies just don’t succeed! Why wouldn’t people be clamouring to sign up?

The Way You View Your Social Media

The underlying problem here is actually the way that businesses are viewing their social media campaigns. To them, this is a marketing campaign and all they need to do to succeed is to just post regularly and shout about their business.

But ask yourself: would you follow a social media account that did that?

Likely not!

So how should you be viewing your social media accounts?

As products! View your social accounts as products that provide value, just like your core business, and that can exist outside of your business.

A Great Example

Let’s take a look at a company that is doing very well on social media. Etsy is a store that lets creators sell their own home-made products and they have a very strong following on Pinterest. This is thanks to boards like their ‘Cool Spaces’ board, which users can follow to see ideas for interior design and home décor. Here, they’ll see regular pictures of inspiring homes, giving them ideas for their own plans.

Note the key difference: the board itself has a USP and there is a reason for people to follow it. Promotion is not the sole reason for this board to exist and instead occurs as a secondary objective.

So instead of thinking of your social media as a means to an end, ask instead what you can offer to your audience using this medium. This is also how you might succeed on a social media site that doesn’t seem obviously relevant to your business model.

How does a life insurance company succeed on Pinterest? Perhaps by showing pictures of families and inspiring images suggesting days out and ways for those families to bond. Now people have a reason to follow and they might not even realize that the board is promoting your business – until you recommend your life insurance product that is!

Instagram has recently grown to become even larger than Twitter. This clearly indicates what an amazing opportunity the site represents for marketers, particularly those with something very physical to sell.

But still you’ll find that a lot of businesses are reluctant to invest much time or money into the site. Why is that? Often it comes down to confusion over what type of content they should be creating and what type of content does well on the site.

How to Take Great Photos

Apart from anything else, success on Instagram often comes down to knowing how to take great photos. Instagram is an arty app that’s all about showing the beauty in everyday life. As a business, this means showing the beauty in your product or in your niche.

To do that, you need to start thinking of composition in your photos and of how a photograph can potentially tell a story.

How can a photo tell a story? An example might be to show an empty wine glass with a lipstick mark around the edge and a fire burning just out of focus in the background. Perhaps feet lingering in a doorway. This tells the story of a romantic night that has just come to an end and people are free to imagine the details of that night.

Likewise, a photo of a gym kit discarded on the ground next to a protein shaker, suggests a workout. Maybe there are headphones here too and maybe there are muddy trainers, showing that it was a run in the rain. The caption might be something like ‘No Excuses’, from which we can infer that even on rainy days, we should still be working out.

If you’re selling trainers, or a brand of wine, these pictures are far more effective than simply showing the products themselves – as they put your product in context and they ‘show the lifestyle’.

Show the Lifestyle

When you sell a product, you are really always selling a ‘value proposition’. In other words, you are selling the lifestyle or the improvement that your product promises. You don’t sell fat-free yogurt… you sell abs!

Understanding this distinction is very important for marketing because it should be the value proposition that really gets your audience excited – rather than the product itself. Likewise, people like seeing pictures that create some kind of emotional response.

Think of this and start framing your shots in more interesting ways that infer rather than tell, and you will start to gain traction on Instagram.

For many of us, the term ‘social media’ is practically synonymous with Facebook and Twitter. At the very least, we will tend to associate social media with analogues of these two big sites and generally we think of social networks as modern sites where you can log in and share pictures and status updates.

In reality though, the web has been social long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. When the web first exploded in popularity, people were already having discussions and debates about their favorite hobbies and interests but they were doing so in chat rooms and on forums.

And while Facebook and Twitter have more prominence now than those aforementioned chat rooms, they are nevertheless still out there and they still offer a lot of opportunities.

What are Forums?

A forum is essentially a message board, normally attached to a website, where people can post questions and get answers. Users must first create a profile and from there they can create or respond to ‘threads’ as well as doing other things like send private messages.

In other words, these act like the groups or pages on social media, providing discussion that is centered around a specific topic and where only ‘members’ get to contribute. This is one of the biggest attractions of these forums – they have a ‘VIP’ feeling and tend to nurture a much more close-knit community. Many people will make friends on forums, or will even work together on joint projects etc.

The Advantages of Forums

So while forums are smaller than social networks, they are also much more targeted and the users tend to be very committed and passionate to the subject. This creates an ideal opportunity for you to gain exposure for your product or website if you post there.

The problem is, most companies have no idea how to use forums. They will simply create accounts, log in and then post their link like an advert. Bearing in mind how much of a clique the users of these forums become and how protective of their community they are, you can imagine that this is often met with disdain.

To succeed on forums then, the objective is rather to post links only after you’ve established yourself as an active member of that community. To do that, you need to take part: by answering questions, by starting discussions and by finding things you find useful. Though it takes a little work, this can allow you to learn more about your target audience, to demonstrate yourself as an expert on your topic and to build loyal fans and even friends. Once you manage that, you may even find that they actively help you to promote your business!

Social networks provide an excellent opportunity for affiliate marketers and can provide a large amount of direct sales.

In fact, one of the simplest ways to start making money as an affiliate marketer is to pay for targeted Facebook ads and to send people who click on them to a landing page selling an affiliate product. As long as you get the targeting and the CPP correct, you can generate profit immediately and scale it up as much as you need to!

But if you want to go further than this, then you need to start using your skills as a social media marketer in order to build trust with an audience and to spread your message to get maximum clicks and buys.

Sharing the Lifestyle

Once you’ve started to build up an audience for your social media profile, the next thing you need to do is to start generating interest, engagement and trust. Most likely, the people who started following you on social media did so because they were interested in the industry/niche that you’re selling products in. As such, your next step is to get them excited about that industry or niche and to demonstrate your experience and expertise.

Selling ‘make money’ programs? Then post pictures of your laptop with mugs of tea in coffee shops, or of you working from comfortable hammocks. Selling fitness supplements? Then post motivational status updates and images of attractive people working out.

Over time, this will get people who have an interest in your products more curious and it will show off the kinds of things you are promising to be able to do for them.

Writing Reviews

To start clinching actual sales, one of the first things to start doing is writing reviews. These reviews can be written straight onto your social media as posts, or you can share links to blogs and articles where you review products. Either way, now you’ve built up some trust and got attention, people should be more likely to click and to read.

Some Tips and Rules

The temptation now is going to be to give rave reviews to any product you can find with an affiliate scheme. While this can certainly be a profitable approach though, it’s also very much short sighted. This way, you will quickly lose the respect of your followers and you may even be seen as a spammer.

Instead, try to find affiliate schemes for products you genuinely believe in – and be sure to provide genuine advice on who the product is for. You are providing a service by finding and recommending products to the audience you have built – keep this in mind and you will succeed!