Daniel Zarrella, Social media Scientist with HubSpot, is a specialist in web development for social media marketing and uses his passion to study social media behavior from a data-heavy position. http://danzarrella.com/bio#
A few days ago, Dan held a webinar on “The Science of Social Media” for Denver-area marketers where he addressed some of the more common myths surrounding social media:
Myth #1 – “Ideas go viral because they are worthy”
Not so. Sometimes it’s just plain luck that turns a blog, video or social media post into viral marketing material. Dan does say, however, that there are 5 points that will increase the likelihood that your post will go viral;
- Reach – this is where pure numbers of connections, friends and followers play a big part. The larger the number of social networking connections (friends and followers), the more people will read your marketing content and increase your exposure.
- Attention – If your post is memorable, humorous, or in some way can stand out from the crowd, you will get the attention of your readers.
- Style – use a natural style when you write you posts. Simple and straightforward. You are writing to inform, not compete in a literary contest.
- Upbeat—stay positive and avoid negative issues. Stories of encouragement and support work the best.
- Motivation— how do you motivate your social networking connections to share your content? One, make it simple to do so. (For instance, include social networking buttons on your page).If you have written marketing content that is positive and informative, it is more likely to get shared.
Myth #2– “Engaging in conversations is the most important thing on Social Media”
According to Dan’s data, marketers with the most social networking contacts are not usually the one’s with the most conversations on-line. it is the marketers who pass along the most valuable links that will have a lot more followers.
As well, lots of Facebook conversations doesn’t result in lots infulence, publishing interesting content works better by far!
Myth #3 – “Don’t call yourself a guru”
In fact, people that refer to themselves with an authority title (such as “Author of,” “Guru,” “Official,” “Speaker,” “Founder,” or “Expert” buiold and an average 100 to 200 more followers on Twitter than those who don’t. The take-away here is that social networking contacts will follow you more frequently when you identify yourself as an expert.
But a word of caution. Dan has also found that when marketers talk just about themselves and how great they are, they will have fewer social networking contacts.
Myth #4 – “Friday, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to publish content or send out emails”
Email click-through rates are higher during the week-end. And people tend to “share” more posts during the weekend. (But I believe this weekend activity is targeted more toward the consumer side of marketing rather than the B2B side, but you be the judge.)
Bonus tip:
Finally, Dan shares the fact that “requests” for the readers to take some sort of action (“Please re-tweet this,” etc.) do work. If you ask nicely and don’t do it all the time, your readers will respond, so especially don’t forget “calls-to-action.” Also, posts that include the word ‘comment’ in them – do get more comments.
So, as always, thank you for re-tweeting (or linking to this) and please comment below!
