What is The Social Media Strategy for Your Business?

How to use social media to increase your website traffic and your website conversions. When people go to build a website or remodel a website, they know that there's a list of social sites that they want to be on. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, but they don't always have a social media strategy. For example, what content are you going to share on each of those platforms? Is there going to be different content on each of those platforms? Who is in charge of publishing that content on a daily basis? And what is the target audience you're trying to reach and why? And what you want them to do once you have them reach your content on your social media? The thing with social media sites: Facebook Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram - they're not all the same they don't have the same audiences. They don't have the same context. Facebook: let's start with that one. The king of the hill. Facebook is pretty much ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Almost everybody is on it, but unfortunately not everybody sees your post or your page - posts from your page. And that's because Facebook has something called EdgeRank. The more that somebody interacts with a connection, a friend on Facebook or a Page that they've liked, the more that they're going to see Posts from that friend or from that Page. The less that they interact, the less that they are going to see their posts. Facebook wants you to spend money on advertising. They want you to boost your posts. You have to know what your reach is. You have to see how much things are spreading. Fortunately, with Pages, you can see how many things are seen throughout other people's streams. Once you get to a certain level of Likes, you can kind of see the stats of how far your content is reaching. What I use Facebook for is to share articles, to add a photo or a video. Something like that: something that is useful, that people will find interesting or helpful or insightful. Or engaging. And you want to get a small cluster of people to start spreading your content. It's no use having a Page if nobody spreads the content. You want to get people to spread that content. Facebook advertising is highly targeted thanks to all the information and data they have gathered with Open Graph. They can target your advertising to an exact demographic, in an exact city. With people who like the exact things that you're looking for, so that is useful. Twitter is the second-biggest social media platform right now. Definitely, it's more for sharing links. You can't really share a lot information in 140 characters. It's not what people think it is. It's not what people thought it was when it first started. It's not about what you had for breakfast or things like that. You want to share links. The people who are the power users of Twitter: they are the more intellectual - You're going to skew toward the more intellectual side. You want to share links that people - that your target audience is finding useful. Things that, if you're looking for information, that you would want to find. And my advice for everyone: For each of YOUR links that you spread, you know from your blog, spread like 10 or 15, or twenty links of other people's information. Now you're a thought leader. You want to follow other thought leaders within your niche, your industry, your business, and try and get them to follow you, and spread your content to their audience, as well. Pinterest is another huge, huge opportunity. It's a visual platform with a heavy female demographic. A lot of people use it - I know a lot of designers use it as well, because they like infographics and visual things, of that nature. You can also embed videos - you can embed videos in Pinterest. A lot of people don't know that. You can also upload any image you want, and tie it back with a link to your page. So you want to find the most visually interesting things and share those on Pinterest. Link it back to an article on your site, or you know have that image already in your article. Or embed a video. Which brings us to YouTube. YouTube is powerful, incredibly powerful, and it is a social tool, if you use it as such. It is about sharing information. You teach people through YouTube. You teach them, and you inform them - you advise them. But you have to get that social part right for it to be as powerful as it can be. Interact with your audience, answer questions to let people know that you're listening. YouTube can be an incredibly powerful tool. People don't read so much, they watch videos. Amazing. Now, for the younger demographic: To reach younger people, you're going to want to use Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine. I know the animated gif made a comeback and it's called Vine. But Instagram, it is incredibly huge right now with young people. They don't care about Facebook anymore. If they use Facebook, it's just to get a hold of their friends. But a lot of them use Instagram, and that's really where it's at right now. And here's the thing in five years, these platforms could all disappear, there could be new ones on the horizon. You can't just go with whatever is hot right now and just ignore things are up-and-coming. The sharing of the information, the teaching of information, being a relevant person: not just tooting your own horn, but sharing things that are relevant to your audience that are beyond just your site, or just your service, or just your business. That is how you are going to win people through social media. And that is the part that people get wrong. And the other part that people get wrong is they don't assign anybody to be in charge of those accounts. You have to know who's going to be the voice of your brand. Your account has to be consistent on all platforms. It has to be the voice of your brand your business, your company: It has to be consistent. It has to be regular thing. You have to post regularly. That's the thing. You can't have a presence on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram and not have any posts. It makes your brand look dead. It makes you look like - like you just are not a source of information. Like you not a trusted source, like you're not - you're not with it. It's almost better to just not have a social presence on a social network if you're not going to use it. So choose very wisely. Choose wisely. Whether it's - you know, no matter what you use: if you choose like three, four, five platforms, make sure that you have people that are posting to it. Different content- not just, tick the box on your website that auto shares to all the networks, all the same time. And yeah, that's not good enough. You want to have unique content on each site. Because you're going to have different followers on each platform. You're going to have different kinds of followers on Google+ (and that's a whole other discussion, too). Google+ is incredibly - it is going to be incredibly important too. For search, for Google authorship, that's a whole other ball of wax. Anyway, I hope this helps. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching me ramble. Just remember: Social is part of your whole brand strategy. It is not as afterthought; it has to be consistent with the voice that you're showing on all your other platforms and networks. Thanks a lot. If you need help LockedownDesign.com/contact John Locke, signing out.