Social media has become one of the leading marketing tools that business owners use to make their businesses successful.  Because of the impact of social media on business success, many business owners had wanted to incorporate their marketing campaigns with social media.  And if you want to be successful like them, you can do the same.  Learn how to crush your competitors and reach the top with these helpful tips…

Perform a Social Media Competition Analysis

Before you start gathering tools and resources, you should first determine the competition that you are going to enter.  You have to measure your stance so that you will know how much effort and resources you are going to exert to be able to top that competition.

The social networking sites below are the first sites that you have to check for competition:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

The social networking sites mentioned above are some of the most popular sites nowadays.  If you want to extend your marketing reach, you should start from there.  But, you should not stop from there.  You can also check other sites that you think are significant for your marketing strategy.

Now, these are the things you have to keep track of, to measure the competition in your chosen niche or industry.  List all your top competitors and visit their social site accounts on a regular basis, noting the following:

• Number of fans/followers/subscribers
• Frequency of posting (content, status updates, etc)
• Type of content being published (text, video, audio, image, etc)
• Content created by the competitor versus outsourced content
• Fans engagement

You should also check your competitors’ blogs and websites to determine how they use social media and how much they depend on social media.  You should do this on a monthly basis to see their performance.

Create Killer Social Media Content

Once you know where you stand, you should now immediately start creating and gathering great content for your social media marketing.  The first things that you have to create or acquire are killer content that will make your business stand out.

But you don’t have to create content from scratch and you also don’t have to just hire professionals to provide you with good content.  You can reuse your old content and repurpose them to come up with lots of fresh content that you can use as marketing tools.

Try these tips to help you have killer content:

• Look for guest bloggers for your blog
• Create content comprising of important details that can be found on other content
• Create a good FAQ and other form of content that offers answers and help to your followers
• Do some interview and publish it on your blog, website and social media accounts

Aside from text, audio and video content, you should also create engaging visual content to grab your audience’s interest.  You can create visual content such as the following to make your website, blog or social network account more attractive.

• Memes
• Infographics
• Graphs and statistics
• Cartoons
• Photos of your company and/or industry

Know Where to Post Your Content

To make your social media marketing more effective, you have to know which content you should put where.  Social networking sites have different platforms and different audiences so it’s important to provide relevant and appropriate type of content to specific social networking sites.

Here are some social networking sites and the appropriate content that you should share in each one.

• Facebook – Visual content.  Make your content as engaging as possible.  Use bold colors and texts in your visual content.  Also, make sure that the images that you are using are relevant to your industry or business.
• Twitter – Short sweet offers.  Create engaging content that are short yet possess irresistible offers.  Make your content stand out by using powerful and compelling words.
• LinkedIn – Informative content.  Because of the longer attention span of members in this site, you can create longer content that contains a lot of helpful information.  You can include researches, case studies, reviews and more on your content in this site.
• Pinterest – Visual content.  Make sure to use attractive and expressive visual content because it is the main type of content that you can use on this site.  Share images that are quite relevant to your industry and business.

Quick Wins

Here are some very helpful things that you can incorporate in your social media content so that you can make them more captivating and optimized.

• Facebook
  • Post tons of images to get more likes, comments and shares.
  • Post short and/or very long posts to attract readers and get more likes, comments and shares.
  • Post more content during the weekend.  More people are online during weekends.
  • Post in the afternoon or at night.

Be More Efficient in Social Media Upkeep

Make sure you can monitor and track your progress in your social media marketing so that you can determine which strategies work best.  You can also determine the things that you need to improve or take away with the help of efficient tracking and monitoring.

You can use the following to keep track of your social media progress:

• Social Media Calendar
• Social Media Scheduling Tool
• Social Media Monitoring Tool

Set aside a day for monitoring so that you can track your progress on a regular basis.  This will help you to effectively determine which ones work and which ones don’t.  By doing so, you will also be able to make necessary adjustments before some errors or problems affect your marketing campaign.

Leverage Other Marketing Channels to Boost Social Media

You also need to integrate your social media with other marketing channels to boost your chances of success.  Doing so will enable you to extend your audience reach and make you marketing much easier.

• Social Media and Email

Integrate your social media with your email marketing tools so that you can send emails, notifications and other offers to your social network followers, fans and subscribers.  You can also directly send your social media content to your email list so that you can present your content and offers without having them the need to visit your account.  This will make your email subscribers aware and interested in your social networking accounts and content.

• Social Media and Blogging

Make sure you integrate your social media with your blog so that your readers can share your content.  This will enable other people to see your content with the help of your audiences’ ‘sharing’.

Make sure you use easy to use share buttons that you readers can easily see.  Also, be sure your content is shareable and informative to increase their share ability.

• Social Media and SEO

Make sure you apply your SEO strategies to your social media so that people can find you on search engines.  Use the keywords on your social media that you are using on your website and blog so that they can also be optimized.  Doing so will enable you to extend your reach to possible audience.

Whatever social media strategy you are going to use, make you track them regularly to keep track of your progress.  Update your strategies as time goes by so you won’t get outdated.  Social media is constant work so be sure to regularly monitor your strategies and progress.  You should also keep your heads up for new strategies you can integrate as they emerge.

By Candy Lowe