Using Social Media & Paid Social Advertising

With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network in the world. From a marketing perspective, Facebook serves as a powerful platform for building a community of advocates and increasing word-of-mouth marketing.

In order to grow your Facebook fanbase, you need to make your company page on Facebook as discoverable as possible.

Here are a few things you can do to help make that happen:

1) Fill out your company information completely. 
Be sure to include an overview of what your business offers as well as a link to your website.

2) Invite existing contacts to like your page. 
Reach out to your friends, family, and existing customers and ask them to “like” your page on Facebook.

3) Integrate Facebook into your other online channels. 
Use Facebook’s social plugins (including the Like Box and Like Button) to get people to engage with your Facebook page without having to go to Facebook.com.

4) Add value by sharing content. 
If you’re in tune with your buyer personas (representations of your ideal customers), you’ll have a good idea of what’s going to resonate with your audience.

5) Pay for engagement using Facebook advertising such as boosted posts. 
Due to Facebook’s algorithm, you may find that just posting updates on your company page doesn’t get you much engagement. Consider boosting these posts to get in front of more people.

Best Practices for Advertising on Facebook

• Create a targeted audience for every ad placement. You might reach fewer people, but targeting by demographics, interests and location can help you increase engagement as your content will be more relevant to a larger portion of your audience.

• Take advantage of all components of your ad creative, such as the call-to-action button and news feed link description.

• Choose what medium your ad is displayed on. If conversions is your goal, consider limiting ads to just the newsfeed. If you have a longer form on your landing page, you may want to limit it to desktop-only.

Twitter is a social network on which people share 140-character messages, and users can “follow” each other’s updates.

However, unless you’re a celebrity or your brand is already a household name, amassing a huge following on Twitter isn’t exactly easy.

However, there are a few things you can do to effectively attract quality followers for your business’s Twitter account:

1) Create and optimize your Twitter profile.
Let potential followers know who you are, and provide a reason why you’re worth a follow.

2) Tweet 24/7.
Your greatest tactic for growing your followers is to tweet around the clock. Tweet content you create, content created by others, and tweet that content more than once! You can use scheduling tools such as Hootsuite to manage your posting frequency.

3) Curate your content. 
Use Feedly, Goodreads, Alltop, Twitter (lists), StumbleUpon, LinkedIn Pulse, and what’s hot on Pinterest and Google+ to discover great, relevant content to tweet.

4) Make tweets visual. 
Take the time to create great visuals and add them to your tweets. It pays off in engagement, conversion, and click-through rates. You don’t have to be a designer to create beautiful images!

Best Practices for Advertising on Twitter

• Use the right type of ad for your goal. You can use ads that are geared towards improving engagement such as retweets and favorites, website clicks or conversions, followers, or even leads. If you want to generate leads, use the website clicks ad. If you want to get blog subscribers, consider using Twitter lead generation ads.

• Always use images. Ads that use images perform 3 times better than text-based ones.

• Don’t use hashtags in paid tweets. Each link you add reduces the click-through rate on the website URL you’re actually trying to drive users towards.

LinkedIn is a social network that you can use to engage with prospective customers as well as prospective employees. As such, it is a truly unique space on the web, one that blurs the lines between a knowledge-sharing platform and relationship-building tool.

Just like with Facebook and Twitter, the first step when starting out with LinkedIn is to make your business easy to find. Your ultimate goal is to build an engaged audience and to position your business as a thought leader in your industry.

Here are a few simple steps you should follow:

1) Optimize your company description.
Make it easy for the right people to find your company page on LinkedIn by adding keywords in the description and ‘specialties’ sections.

2) Be visual.
Keep your company page fresh with rich cover images that reflect your company’s accomplishments, events, and offerings.

3) Share company updates regularly. 
Every like, comment, and share increases your reach. Prompt your followers to take action on your updates by asking thoughtful questions.

4) Publish long-form content.
LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing content aimed at your industry. Have your executives and other leaders at your company regularly publish longer pieces to build your brand’s thought-leadership.

Best Practices for Advertising on LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B companies – so if you’re selling products or services to another company, consider utilizing this platform for high-value clicks.

• Sponsored updates with video or images tend to perform better than those without. When choosing what content to promote, consider trying these formats out.

• Use 60 characters or less for the description of your ad so that the text doesn’t get cut off the page.

• Target your ads to the right audience – with LinkedIn, you can get the most granular with your targeting out of all the social media platforms available, so make sure you find the right audience. You can even target employees at specific companies, so if you have a targeted campaign aimed at a few enterprises in a certain industry this might be a great way to drive the right traffic back to your website.

1) Instagram

With over 500 million monthly active users, Instagram has become an essential element of social media marketing for business. In fact, businesses using it saw a 93% growth month-over-month in 2014.

While Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great for sharing and promoting content, Instagram is a way to humanize your brand.

However, it’s important to set up your Instagram account in the right way. Initial steps like writing your bio, experimenting with the best times to post, and which hashtags to use are all important. You’ll also need to consider what the goal of your business’s Instagram account is.

2) YouTube

Organic Facebook followers are much harder to reach than they used to be, and Twitter followers see a torrent of tweets by the hour, making it likely that your tweets go unnoticed.

Unlike any other social network however, nearly 85% of adults consider themselves a “regular” YouTube user. In addition, it is extremely easy to use, since a Gmail account is all someone needs to create their own playlists, vote on videos, comment, or become a subscriber.

The ease of use makes YouTube an important part of any social network marketing strategy. These users are going to see your new videos, they are going to pay attention to the message in the videos, and they can even help attract new subscribers.

3) Snapchat

With nearly 300 million monthly active users worldwide, Snapchat has evolved into something so much more than what it used to be.

While it’s certainly not the cornerstone of every marketing strategy just yet, the channel has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation.

Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands – one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way.

4) Google+

Google+ isn’t a ‘normal’ social media platform; it’s essentially the ‘social layer’ upon all of Google’s products and services.

Once you enter the Google+ world, you’ll encounter a great deal of resources in one single place: Hangouts, Communities, YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and many others.

It’s the social network endorsed by the leading search engine, and one that is only growing in popularity. With over 300 million active users, it’s time to start using Google+ for your business if you aren’t already.

Social Media Listening

An important part of leveraging social media for business is to understand what industry-related conversations are happening online and recognizing when you should respond.

Below are some tools you can use to monitor your business and industry mentions in social media:

• Google Alerts – Set up multiple Google Alerts for your company, brand, products, industry terms etc. The alerts will get delivered directly to your email at the frequency you indicate (e.g. daily or as they happen) and they are a great way to track mentions of your brand and relevant keywords on the web.

• Social media management tools – These tools allow you to save keyword searches as a live stream so you won’t miss out on what’s being said about your brand, your industry, and your products.