Most companies have a social media marketing plan and offer a number of social media marketing jobs. You’d be crazy not to embrace the benefits of social media marketing. There have even been a huge number of social media marketing books written! In our last article we gave you some general tips on how to improve your social media marketing, and promised that this time we’d go into detail about some of the things you can do on specific platforms. Well, it’s now this time so… read on, I suppose.
Instagram: Use private messages to reward your followers
A lot of marketers and businesses really struggle to think of ways to use Instagram for marketing. If you’re not a big brand like Nike or Starbucks, how can you really market effectively without a huge number of followers? The answer, my good reader, is by using Instagram’s new direct messaging service. With the new DM feature, your private messages (which can contain up to 5 pictures) can be sent to a maximum of 15 people at once. It’s a great way to give your followers rewards, information on promotions that aren’t public yet and even just for answering queries via text. While it won’t build you a huge following by itself, it makes sure that those followers you do have feel valued and stay loyal, making them more likely to bring others into the fold as well as support your business.
Facebook: Respond to EVERYONE
This one can be quite tough, especially if you have a lot of fans, but it’s incredibly effective if you can pull it off. By responding to every wall post, comment, mention and even share (if you can manage it), you’ll massively improve your audience’s view towards you, which will improve your fans’ loyalty and make them more likely to bring other people to your business. If you can’t respond to everything, consider assigning a whole team to the job to make sure that everything on Facebook gets answered. By answering with personal, friendly comments or help, you’ll see a massive increase in follower gratitude. Remember that there are dedicated social media marketing companies that you can hire to manage your social media, and many of them offer social media marketing courses to teach you the ins-and-outs.
Twitter: Consider using Twitter’s paid advertising
Twitter offers 3 main methods to advertise: promoted trends, promoted accounts and the main one: promoted tweets. Promoted tweets make your pre-selected tweet show up in the feeds of people who fit specific criteria that you set, such as geographic location, followed accounts and so forth. One of the best things about promoted tweets is the fact that you only pay if someone interacts with your tweet, i.e. by retweeting, clicking on a link, replying or favouriting. Seems fairly normal, you say, but wait! The best is yet to come. Once your first customer has interacted with your promoted tweet, you don’t pay for any of the subsequent interactions caused because of that. So, if a friend or follower of you original ‘click-ee’ reads your promoted tweet and retweets or follows a link you may have placed in it, you won’t pay for that, which I think we can all agree is pretty darn good. Promoted tweets are a great way to reach a wide audience, even if you don’t have many followers. In August, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain launched their #VoteForBob campaign, trying to get people to vote for ‘Bob’, a red squirrel who claims that “A vote for me is a vote for nature”. Bob’s twitter page quickly grew thanks to the promoted tweets, and as of September 1st, over 71,000 people have voted for Bob on his website and he gained more than 2,900 twitter followers in less than a month. This shows the immense power of promoted tweets.
An image of Bob’s Twitter page, which gained over 2,900 followers in just 3 weeks
If you use these tips in conjunction with the ones from the last article, you’ll improve your social media marketing in no time. Remember that we here at Pogo Digital are, among other things, a social media marketing agency. So if you have any questions about your social media marketing strategy or social media management, we’re happy to help in any way we can.
