how to win at social media: awesome hacks across 4 major platforms
TRANSCRIPT
How to Win at Social Media
Social media marketing is a fun, challenging,
and demanding task—one that saavy marketers
are always looking to scale and hack. With so
many platforms and so many different ways to
try (and fail!) at effectively promoting your
business across social media, who wouldn’t
want a simple list of proven ways to maximize
your efforts without overexerting yourself or
your team?
Well, we’ve created such a list, and we’re
sharing it here so you can benefit, too. Check
out our awesome social media marketing hacks
that will help you win on Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest, and LinkedIn:
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Twitter Hacks to Try
Twitter Hacks
Twitter is a social media network that keeps marketers constantly on their toes. From
Twitter Polls to the platform’s recently proposed 10,000-character count tweets, the people
at Twitter are always coming out with new features that marketers can take advantage of to
entice audience engagement and convert viewers into leads. Stay creative with your Twitter
campaigns, and try these hacks:
Add Twitter Cards to Your Site. Twitter Cards are an underutilized hack that allow you to
turn shares of your content links into rich media posts. We’ve used them ourselves since last
year and have seen our number of tweet engagements and shares soar.
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Here’s an example Card:
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Twitter Hacks
You can add Twitter Cards that drive traffic and clicks to your intended website, app, or
content offer simply by adding a few lines of HTML to your webpage. There are also a
variety of different Card options available—including Summary Card, App Card, and Player
Card—each designed with a specific goal in mind. Our previous blog post includes a total
breakdown of these Card types, including how to add Twitter Cards to your site.
Find and Engage Influencers. Many marketers feel that the power of Twitter lies not in your
ability to engage your own followers but in the potential of reaching the followers of your
industry influencers. It’s important to find and engage these influencers so that you can
ultimately reach their vast audience.
But who are they? Industry influencers are usually very active on social media themselves,
and have an active blog with lots of reader engagement in the form of comments and shares.
If their followers are so engaged with their insight on topics you’re already an expert on,
there’s no reason they wouldn’t be as engaged with yours. The Keeper has a great guide on
targeting Twitter influencers and getting them to share your content.
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Twitter Hacks
If their followers are so engaged with their insight on topics you’re already an expert on,
there’s no reason they wouldn’t be as engaged with yours. The Keeper has a great guide on
targeting Twitter influencers and getting them to share your content.
Use a Link Shortener. This is a best practice that, if you’re not using it already, you’ve likely
been exposed to and subconsciously responded to. Across most social media sites, users
engage more with posts including links that have been shortened rather than those that are
copied and pasted as is. It could be the aesthetically unappealing ellipses that accompany
unshortened links that users dislike, or perhaps they’re responding well to the fun link
names you can customize using shortening tools—whatever it is, it works.
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Twitter Hacks
Below are two tweets of ours promoting blog posts on similar topics, both PPC-related, that
also include almost the same hashtags:
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Twitter Hacks
As you can see, the tweet with the shortened link received a lot more likes and retweets
than the one without. Frankly, if improved audience engagement is as simple as shortening a
link, why not give it a try?
We recommend and use owl.y ourselves, as Hootsuite is our social media calendar and bulk
scheduling tool of choice, but bitly is another great tried-and-true option.
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Facebook Hacks
Facebook Hacks
Facebook boasts a massive 400 million global users and counting, and over 100 million of
those users are from the United States. The sheer amount of potential customers alone is
compelling enough for most businesses to create an account, but few take it to the next
level and optimize their strategies to drive conversions and sales. Use the following
Facebook hacks to maximize your use of the site:
Leverage Native Video. Marketers are constantly looking for engaging formats and new ways
through which to interact with their audience and develop relationships with potential
customers. Native video content—videos that are uploaded to or created on social
networks—is an excellent way to drive brand awareness, boost social shares, and extend the
reach of your content. Why? Because videos are compelling and engage a viewer both
visually and aurally. It’s easy to see why marketing professionals around the world name
video as the content type with the biggest ROI.
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Facebook Hacks
Short video content is perfect for social media sites—in fact, Facebook native video receives
more than double the interactions that YouTube or other videos do. You can even add a CTA
to the end of your Facebook video—such as Learn More, Watch More (featured above), or
Shop Now—providing followers with the very “next step” that could convert them into your
customer. Check out our previous blog post to discover how to successfully leverage native
video content across Facebook.
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Facebook Hacks
Crowdsource your content marketing. One Facebook hack that many businesses fail to take
advantage of is actually very simple—let your followers tell you the topics they want to see
on their newsfeeds. This will not only engage your current followers but will also lead to
improved audience interaction with your posts down the road, as you’ll accumulate new (but
similarly interested) followers who will appreciate that you’re creating content for their
benefit.
Not only does crowdsourcing content topics help ensure improved audience engagement, it
also makes your job easier! No longer will you and your team have to spend the time and
effort scouring analytics to determine quality topics, and the best part is that this is an
effective strategy across all social media networks. Effective ways to crowdsource topics
across top platforms include:
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Facebook Hacks
Facebook/LinkedIn: Ask via update that followers comment with a problem that they’re
experiencing (related to your services) that they want solved in your next post. To entice
more people to engage, let your followers know that you’ll be rewarding the top 3 comments
with a free consultation or a small prize.
Twitter: Use a Twitter Poll to ask followers which topic they’d prefer to read a post about.
The only set-back with this crowdsourcing strategy is you can include just two options for
followers to choose from in your poll—so choose wisely. For more tips, check out our
previous post on using Twitter Polls.
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Pinterest Hacks
Pinterest Hacks
Pinterest is a relatively newer social network making a huge name for themselves. A visual
pinboard, Pinterest has over 100 million monthly active users who use the site to become
inspired, source new trends, and plan their purchases. Pinterest provides an especially large
opportunity for ecommerce businesses who can use the site to promote their products in a
compelling and visually-appealing way. Read on to learn how you can hack Pinterest:
Optimize for search engines: Most marketers have at least a secret goal of getting their
content pieces ranked on the first page of search engine results, and Pinterest can help you
get there. However, to optimize your content for search, you can’t just stuff keywords into
your pins. Instead, add them naturally to your profile and product descriptions, and cleverly
insert them into the names of your boards. In our previous blog post, we share even more
tips on improving your Pinterest search visibility.
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Pinterest Hacks
Highlight text to use as your pin description: For this hack, you’ll first need to install the Pin
It button from Pinterest (which is, perhaps, it’s own hack). If you’re a frequent pinner looking
to expedite the pinning process, this trick allows you to automatically input a pin description.
The Pin it button on a Chrome browser
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Pinterest Hacks
The hack works as follows: Highlight the title of the post or the descriptive text that you
would like to use for your pin’s description (you can use up to 500 characters) before
clicking the Pin It button. Then, click the button and the highlighted text will become your
description! This is a simple hack, but one that can vastly improve the productivity of
marketers using Pinterest.
Use Your Competitors to Gain Followers. If you’re looking to grow your account and
accumulate more followers, you know by now (from the Twitter section above) that engaging
influencers is a great strategy. On Pinterest, finding these influencers is easy—you just have
to know who your competitors are.
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Pinterest Hacks
To get started, just input your competitor’s website into the following URL:
pinterest.com/source/[competitor’swebsite.com]. There, you’ll find the most recent pins
from your competitor’s site and can begin to assess who the most powerful Pinners are.
Once you’ve determined the influential Pinners whom you want to target, connect with
them and begin letting them know how awesome your business is.
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LinkedIn Hacks
LinkedIn Hacks
LinkedIn is a widely-used professional network that is an
essential social marketing channel for B2B companies
looking to promote their products and services. From your
company profile to LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, many
aspects of the site can be customized and optimized to
facilitate audience engagement and lead generation. We
share our LinkedIn-specific hacks, below:
Create a Showcase Page. LinkedIn Showcase Pages are
extensions of your company page designed to highlight
your specific products and services. You can create up to
10 Showcase Pages, and big brands like Microsoft and
Adobe are already using them successfully to generate
interest in their many offerings.
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LinkedIn Hacks
If you decide to create Showcase Pages on LinkedIn, make sure that you also commit to
optimizing it to drive results. Spend time developing unique page content, as you don’t want
to be hit with any search engine penalties. For best practices and a walk-through, check out
our previous blog post on creating a stellar Showcase Page for your business.
Leverage Thought Leadership
In 2015, we saw the rise of thought leadership content, and audiences loved it. Publishing
via Pulse—LinkedIn’s long-form content publishing platform—became increasingly popular,
and now over 130,000 unique pieces of content are posted there each week.
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LinkedIn Hacks
In 2015, we saw the rise of thought leadership content, and audiences loved it. Publishing
via Pulse—LinkedIn’s long-form content publishing platform—became increasingly popular,
and now over 130,000 unique pieces of content are posted there each week.
To hack your LinkedIn content marketing, get high-level employees within your organization
involved. A whopping 60 percent of LinkedIn’s members state that they are most interested
in reading about industry insights, so take advantage of the expertise you have within your
own network and ask executives to create a post or contribute to one you’re working on.
Convince those who claim they don’t have the time by reminding them of the 380 million
members who use the platform—those users are also Pulse readers who could turn into
potential customers for your company.
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