10 Ways To Become A Social Media Rockstar

Are you afraid that you might need a little help in the social media department? Fear no more, we are here to help!

Social media is an easy way to share your content, build relationships with your followers and increase brand engagement. It’s also an easy way to communicate with people locally, nationally and globally. Social media allows for the discovery of new content and is considered a search activity that in turn helps with SEO efforts.

You can’t just jump into social media without a little bit of planning. Check out these tips and tricks to help you on your way to becoming a social media rockstar!

Tips on How to Become a Social Media Star

Create A Social Media Strategy

Before diving feet first into social media, you need to create a well thought out strategy. First and foremost, consider your goals, and ask yourself these questions to get started:

• What are you trying to achieve by marketing through social media?
• Who is your audience?
• What is it that you want your audience to see?

Once you come up with answers to your goals, you need to decide what channels of social media you want to use based on your goals and what you want to achieve.

Frame Content Towards Your Audience

Figuring out who your audience is will determine how you develop your social media content. It wouldn’t benefit you to write about automobiles when your audience mainly consists of mothers who are more interested in information about children’s health. Once you determine who your target audience is, you can begin producing quality content to be posted on different social media outlets.

Furthermore, it’s important to note that your audience may vary slightly per channel you’re using. When writing social copy, avoid using the same posts across all platforms you’re using. For example, moms looking for information about children’s health on Facebook may be interested in a lengthy post, but moms looking for this information on Pinterest are more likely searching for pictures with creative healthy snacks or how to keep their kids active and entertained.

Share Content Multiple Times

There are many reasons to share your content multiple times. They range from receiving more traffic to reaching new followers. By resocializing content after the initial post, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to generate more traffic and engagement. Many posts are still relevant for months or even years after they’ve been posted, and you may have gained some new followers since you first posted your content. By reposting relevant content that’s a little older, new followers will probably be seeing it for the first time and will benefit from the reposting, while old followers may receive a nice refresher.

Maximize Posts

Posts with an image or video are twice as effective than those without one. People are attracted to infographics or images that are easy to understand. In fact, research has found that if a social content paired with visuals, people are 65 percent more likely to retain the information. Additionally, including links to posts is another way to keep your followers engaged with your content and lead them back to your website.

Pay attention to the length of your posts. If your posts are too long your followers might not engage with the post, or your text could be cut off. Here are the best social post lengths, according to Hootsuite:

• Facebook: The ideal length for engagement is 80 characters or less.
• Twitter: 70-100 characters is recommended, but the maximum length is 280 characters.
• LinkedIn: The LinkedIn post character limit is around 210 characters (or 25 words) or less, exceeding it will cause your LinkedIn posts to get cut off.
• Instagram: These captions can be a bit more lengthy, with approximately 138-150 characters. Additionally, 5-9 hashtags should be added at the end of the post.
• Pinterest: Keep your pin descriptions around 200 characters for the best performance.
• YouTube: Video titles should be around 70 characters and provide SEO value while describing the contents of the video. The ideal description length is 157 characters or less, because if you go over this it will be cut off.

Be Consistent With Your Postings

The best way to grow your social media presence is to be consistently present. Tools like Facebook Business Manager and TweetDeck can help you with this. They allow you to schedule posts, preventing you from having a content “dry spell” and keeping you present on your follower’s feeds. Not only do tools like this save you time, but they also keep you on top of your marketing strategy and your game. If you have the budget, you can “boost” your post through Facebook Business Manager. Boosting allows you to promote your content to a larger audience.

Be Smart With Your Hashtags

If you want to be successful with your social media, not everything needs a hashtag. Use a hashtag to pull your campaign together, but only sparingly. Twitter and Instagram are appropriate platforms to use a hashtag, but on platforms like Facebook or Pinterest, they appear excessive and a little annoying.

If a hashtag campaign is something you’d like to start, think about how the public would respond using your hashtag. If you believe there is a chance followers are going to use the hashtag as a way to vent their frustrations or share negative thoughts, a hashtag campaign may not be the best route.

Market Across Multiple Platforms

The best way to reach your audience is to get in touch with them in a variety of ways. This means all type of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Google+, Youtube and Pinterest. Different platforms work for different things and not every platform may be beneficial to your business. Picking two or three to utilize for your social media marketing may be your best option. You could create a commercial and post it on Youtube, and you could post stills from the commercial or behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram.

Be Conscious of When You Post

It’s important to know the best days and time to post your content on social media. For the majority of businesses, the best times to post are Monday-Friday between 10 am - 4 pm. This isn’t the case for everyone though! Posting times vary depending on who your target audience is, which requires a little bit of research on your part. Here are the best times to post broken down by channel:

• Facebook: 10 am - noon on weekdays
• Twitter: 10 am - 3 pm every day
• Linkedin: 3 pm - 5 pm Tuesday through Thursday
• Instagram: 9 am - 6 pm Tuesday through Friday

Use Analytics

How many people did my last post reach? What content are followers responding to the most? It’s important to know whether or not your social media campaigns are making an impact, whether it was a total success or a failure. The rise of social media has been accompanied by the rise of tools that can analyze your social media presence. If you’re serious about your online presence, analytics are essential. There are many free tools for you to use, including Google Analytics, HootSuite, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights and more.  

Make Your Content Easy To Share

One of the goals for posting content through social media is to have that content shared by your followers. Keep your articles titles short but catchy enough to draw people in. Though the title should be brief, it needs to express clearly what the content is about. Your meta-description is also very important. It needs to motivate your followers to check out your content. If you want your content shared through social media, it needs to be high quality. Good content is going to generate shares simply by being good content.

Take Your Social Media Presence to New Heights

With these 10 tips, you’ll be on your way to becoming a social media influencer in no time. If you need a helping hand, the Blue Compass team of experts can tell you which social platforms Iowans spend the most time on and help you elevate your social media presence across all channels. What are you waiting for? Learn about our social media marketing services and become a social media rockstar today!

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Mac & Cheese

Mac and Cheese is on the Digital Bark-eting team at Blue Compass. He loves greeting his team members when they arrive for the day, encouraging fun breaks during the workday and taking naps in various places throughout the office. He also enjoys saying hello to clients and other visitors - especially the mail carriers who bring treats! Mac is an important part of our team of digital experts at Blue Compass, where we help brands succeed online through web design, development and digital marketing strategies.