If you are, or know a social media marketer, you will know how long it takes to plan an ongoing marketing strategy. Let alone, one that provides your business with the social media success it’s been dreaming of?
Social Media Marketers make it look like a walk in the park, but what is beneath the surface of how cool they are, we never truly see the work involved.
Three Golden Steps to Social Media Success
Building and ideating a strategy.
Planning and ensuring timing is just perfect for their audience.
Publishing it – then praying that the results can speak for themselves.
What we don’t realise, is how these marketers stay on top of everything from Facebook and Instagram, to Twitter and LinkedIn.. How they can manage an entire month’s worth of content at a time without breaking a sweat.
It’s not easy – it never has been and let’s be honest, it only ever gets harder from here.
But don’t let that deter you.
Social Media Marketing getting harder is actually a good thing.
Eventually, your competitors are going to give up. They’re going to be swamped with ‘networking’ that they’ll quickly lose their footing online and get lost in the world of social media (as intended).
So how do you prevent that from happening to you?
How do you stay on top of things whilst having the time to run the rest of your business?
And most importantly, how do you and your team stay motivated?
The trick is you build a solution that works for you as closely to automated as possible. Break it down to the simplest steps possible without digging too deep.
That’s how the pro’s do it.
They understand good content buys them traffic, and they progressively get better at applying what they understand and most importantly – how they understand the raw data they see.
Remember these three steps: Ideate, Plan and Publish.
What’s next?
For the most part, there is a strong connection between what you’re sharing and what you’re selling.
It’s just a matter of being able to separate the two and treat your audience for who they are and how to engage them.
So what do we know about your audience?
Well, for starters – we know they have needs. Real people don’t just look at the face-value of what they’re told.
Your audience will dig, hunt, Google and research the heck out of you. On top of that, they’re quite powerful in vocalising their thoughts too.
That’s why it’s just as important to monitor the effect of what you’re sharing. You need to identify if the content you’re sharing is useful, insightful, purposeful and beneficial to your audience.
Stand taller online and share more than just the cheap likes and basic memes – social media success lies in the effort you put in, not the 5 second meme search a week.
Dig deep into the data to translate what is happening and understand how brevity breathes results. Visualise what the results are and adapt to your audience.
Most importantly, never stop posting.
If you and/or your team had only 15 minutes a day to make the most out of your social media campaign, how would you spend it for your social media success?
Now is the time!
The weekend is upon us and now is the time to push your marketing efforts through social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.. you name it!).
Have you ever heard about the Science of Social Timing?
HubSpot’s very own Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella spent the better of 2 years analysing into the best times to send emails, update blogs, post on Facebook and Tweet. And here’s a quick break down of what his research says:
– Saturday is the best day to share on Facebook
– Noon is the best time to share on Facebook
– Midweek and Weekends are the best days to tweet
– 5PM is the best time to tweet
So we know that right now is the best time to post, and in case you miss that time slot prepare it for next week.
Marcus Wong from Warrior Forum always recommends preparing your shares 3-4 days in advance on a content calendar. That way you can always pull a last minute switch without worrying too much about breaking your posting streak.
Knackmap now has Social Media Reporting!
You’ve read above and got the point that reporting and best times of day are super important, right?
So let’s start talking about how you can work out what the best times are to post for your brand! I mean after all, every community is a bit different.
We’ve launched a social media reporting tool for Facebook, which allows you to check out the brand activity, audience demographics, post results and also some optimisation tips, including when your brand is posting vs. when people are online (COMING SOON: When are people engaging with your brand). You’ll see a preview of this below.