So you’re a busy business owner or inbound marketing professional?
Are you using that as an excuse to skip social media marketing?
You may have heard that maintaining accounts, creating content and posting on a regular basis is time-consuming and difficult. Well, the fact is—it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.
Use these tips for more efficient marketing with social media, and you’ll see it’s easier than you may think to make social media work for you:
Request user-generated content
Your fans, connections, groups and followers are a great source of content. Since content creation is a major part of the time spent on social media marketing, soliciting content from others makes the job a whole lot easier. Not only that—it offers readers different perspectives and the expertise of a wider range of people.
Ask those connected to you on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn to contribute guest blogs to your site. Are any of them professional writers? Hire them to write posts and tweets. Start discussions. This is all user-generated content that populates your accounts and attracts attention—with very little effort on your part.
Crowdsource
Social media is one of the best crowdsourcing tools out there, so use your accounts to solicit ideas and solutions from your fans and followers. Get discussions going and ask for opinions. Encourage them to send you links to helpful resources. Most people are happy to do the work for you, provided they get to participate—and maybe get the chance to win a promotional offer?
Repurpose Material for Your Social Media Marketing
Inbound marketing pros have heard this one before. Repurposing involves taking content already created once, and then repackaging it into different forms for your audience. It’s a smart way to squeeze more out of your valuable content and spend less time on the content creation process, to boot.
For example, several blog posts could be combined into a “white paper” and linked to your social media accounts. Send your followers to a call-to-action that allows them to opt-in to an email list to access the white paper. Voila! For the time it took to write a few blog posts, you have a white paper downloaded by (perhaps) hundreds of social media fans and followers—and your subscriber list just got a big shot in the arm, as well.
Link Your Social Media accounts
Linking your social media accounts gives you the ability to have all content post automatically to all of them. This saves a lot of time over manually posting separately to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Along these lines, don’t forget that you can cross-pollinate with social media, to get maximum exposure for your content for minimum effort. An example of this would be to take a video you posted to YouTube and re-post it on your Facebook page, and/or link to it on Twitter.
Use images
Don’t forget—images are “content” if labeled properly, and they are powerful. Simply by adding a few compelling images, you can keep text to a minimum and still make a big impact (they don’t say a picture is worth a thousand words for nothing!). So take advantage of this! If you come across images that tell your story and reinforce your point, post them—and frequently. Interesting images always have people coming back for more, and it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to share them.
A note regarding images: Search engines for the most part can’t “read” images, so be sure to make the file name of the image descriptive of the topic you are writing about. If you are familiar with alt-tags, be sure to use them to detail the image’s topic as well. This will ensure you are also receiving credit from Google for your images.
Whether you’re new to inbound and social media marketing or not, try these tips for more efficient social media marketing. You’ll see how easily social media can fit into your schedule. It can be fun, rewarding and profitable—if you follow the tips above.
