This is an often-overlooked social media tactic since we feel that we need to be 100% unique. The easiest way to get up to speed on how the social community works is to find yourself a reputable mentor. Watch and learn how they interact with others, comment on their posts and retweet valuable information they post. This will help you get your feet wet as well as provide you with some exposure to onlookers.
By commenting on someone’s negative comments you have a chance to set the record straight. Take these opportunities to show people that you’re a real person too. You can often easily win someone over who wasn’t already a client or customer by gracefully correcting a negative comment or using a sense of humor to show that you can take yourself less seriously than the competition. Turn those lemons into lemonade.
What is optimized content? It takes a little extra work, but find out which keywords are driving people to your site and write with those words in mind. Don’t let your content suffer at the expense of increased search engine optimization. If your content stinks then it doesn’t matter if it gets to the top of Google’s search engine…the reader isn’t sticking around long enough to care! Whatever short-term results you gain from overloading keywords into your blogs will be squashed by downsides in the long run. Google will penalize you in the search results if readers are exiting your page quickly because it knows your content is not keeping them engaged.
Don’t always try to write for search engines. Write for your intended audience and the search engines will come anyway. Google and Yahoo will always change their algorithms, but great content that gives quality information will always win over regurgitated fluff. Write the best posts you possibly can and let your customers help you decide what to write about next.
Tweets or Facebook posts that start, “Check this out. . .” or “Here’s what I think. . .” and then a link is not nearly as fascinating as you hoped can seriously damage your online reputation. Always give people a valuable reason to click, not just a backless juicy temptation to leave the page they are on. Always reward their decision with a great photo or article, it could be the first or last link of yours they click on.
Regularity is important, people will forget you if you disappear for days or weeks without updating your profiles. This doesn’t mean you need to be on social media 24/7 – you wouldn’t have a business if you were!
You need to find out if it is working. The general rule is that it takes 3 months to see if your social media strategies are worth spending time on. There are a number of tools out there to help you measure the success of your presence (Tweetreach or Klout), in terms of fans, followers, clicks, retweets. Having said this, don’t get too hung up on the numbers long term, make sure you also think about the content you put out there alongside the numbers.
There are many ineffective social media tricks that people use that don’t get the results we hoped for. Which social media tricks have you found most effective? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter @spcan or by visiting our website at www.spcan.com