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Do you want a higher return on your social media marketing efforts?
Are you simply covering the basics in your daily marketing routine?
You can build on your current social media tactics to make them work better for you.
In this article I'll share 4 tactics to get better results from social media without working harder.
#1: Add Credibility With Real-Time Sharing
In addition to creating and publishing content and engaging with your audience on social media, it's important to keep up with trends in your industry.
There may be an important conference or breaking news within your niche that your audience needs to know about. Being the first to tell them helps build your company's credibility.
To make sure you don't miss the important information your audience needs to know, you can use Google Alerts and Brook.
Google Alerts are easy to set up and configure. Just choose which search terms are most important to you (e.g., specific topics or events), complete the form and choose how often you'll receive email updates.
You can set up as many alerts as you want, but if you're just starting out I suggest sticking to two or three queries.
You may need to tailor a query a bit more to get the kind of information you want, or you may need to change how often you're receiving alerts.
Once you have your system down, set up alerts for influencers in your industry, one for your competitors and one for mentions of your top-ranking keywords to see other related content people are sharing.
Another way you can keep up with trends in your industry is through the third-party Twitter tool Brook. It gives you a daily digest of the five best tweets from people you want to keep tabs on.
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When you first use Brook, it gives you recommendations on people you may know or want to follow. Carefully choose folks on Twitter who are important to your industry and regularly update with the kind of content you'd search for.
Keep in mind you're using this tool to focus on real-time trends in your industry.
#2: Maximize Reach With Reshared Content
Your RSS feeds and Pocket can definitely help you take control of your curated content. But are you getting the most out of that content?
If you're only sharing via social channels once, you're missing out on new traffic to your site. Here's an infographic from KISSmetrics on how multiple shares of one piece of content can impact how well that content performs.
When you share your newest content via social channels, change how you present it. Position it several different ways by adding a question or using a particularly interesting stat or snippet from whatever you're linking to.
And find ways to share relevant content created by thought leaders in your industry, your peers and even your customers.
#3: Save Time With Automated Curation
Creating and finding relevant, interesting content is time-consuming, don't you agree? I have two ideas on how you can optimize this process: RSS feeds and Pocket.
RSS lists are a useful way to gather great content from industry-specific websites I trust. RSS feeds bring that content to me so I don't have to remember to go looking for it. I use Feedly to create my lists.
When you create a Feedly account, you can type in a search term that's related to your business, and you can add any of the returned results to your Feedly RSS feed. In the example below, I typed in “social media.”
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Now you have a running list of websites you can browse, read and pull content from to share to with your audience.
Of course, RSS isn't the only way you'll find content. As you read your own social profiles, you're likely to find articles worth sharing, but it may not be the right time to share them (e.g., they may fit with an upcoming series on your editorial calendar).
In those cases you want to save the article for later. You can do that with an app like Pocket, which lets you save links in a central place.
Apps like Pocket give you a lot of flexibility in ways to store articles. For example, you can email links to your Pocket account or install browser plugins for one-click storage.
A lot of apps like Pocket are also integrated with services like Twitter so you can easily save content no matter where you are on the Internet.
#4: Get More Clicks With Optimized Updates
Are you optimizing your content for each social network you market on? If you're not taking full advantage of the publishing nuances of each network, you're probably missing the part of your audience you want to market to most.
Here are some examples of how you can get the performance you want from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
Twitter's inline images make your tweets instantly more appealing and clickable, getting more out of your 140 characters than ever before. If you aren't already, now is a good time to start using Twitter cards.
Visual content is the crux of success on both Twitter and Facebook. Catching someone's eye is the best way to get him or her to click through or share your content.
Facebook allots even more space to visual content than Twitter. Facebook users see larger versions of pictures, images and video.
Your business Facebook page works very well as a conduit for sharing your YouTube channel. Share compelling videos that provide important niche information, or better yet, entertaining content promoting your products or your company to encourage more clicks.
When you embed a video in a Facebook update, your audience can watch it directly in their stream. They appreciate not being forced to another site to watch the video.
Twitter and Facebook aren't good places for over-promotion. Your audience doesn't care for it and may stop coming by for information.
Since LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, it's really the place where marketers like you can talk about your company on a company page without sounding too self-promotional.
Your LinkedIn company page is where you should be putting any important company updates.
Not all of your content is relevant to each person in your audience. Google+ circles let you create tailored updates and share those updates with specific people or circles.
Marketing directly to a smaller targeted audience can lead to much more interaction and even sales.
Over to You
Go beyond rote content sharing and incorporate these four tips to set up an efficient system that gives you more time for your myriad tasks—and more clicks as a result!
What do you think? Have you used any of these tips? How did they work for you? Do you have any tips to add? Please leave your comments below.
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