It takes time to see a return on investment when it comes to your social media strategy, and the benefits are not always obvious.
Using social media can have a huge impact on the traffic driving towards your website. But this involves more than just holding a presence on social media platforms, engagement and involvement are key, and there may be a number of new traffic generations methods you may not have considered.
Promoted Tweets
Promoted tweets are just like regular tweets, with the advantage of reaching your potential followers. Promoted tweets still appear in user timelines and search results on all applications (laptops, mobile desktops and tablets). Your tweets are effectively placed directly in front of your target audience’s eyes! You can define your target audience through a number of ways, by interests and gender, by device, by geography or by similarity to existing followers. Your promoted tweets can be analysed using twitter’s ad tools to help you follow anything from follower’s activity to engagement. You also only pay when people engage with your promoted tweets!
Exposure
Social media gives you the option for repeat exposure, putting your message in front of your audience over and over again. There’s an old marketing saying that it takes six to eight exposures to a product before a customer decides to buy. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc all give you the opportunity to take advantage of exposure. Set yourself a schedule on social media reminders for a particular product or service – and make sure not to bombard people with messages, just the right amount of messages so that people remember you for all the right reasons, not the wrong reasons!
Stand out from the crowd
Create a niche in your social media strategy, stand out from your competitors – chances are they aren’t likely to be doing a very good job with social media! Create videos on your website to chat about on social media, get involved in your community – what are they doing, what do they like, what don’t they like. Making yourself unique to your followers and engaging them in something that other companies don’t offer can grab their interest instantly.
Grab big wins
Aim high! Connect with high profiles on LinkedIn, get in touch with media influencers on Twitter and communicate with main players in your industry on Facebook. This may take some time, and it certainly doesn’t happen very often, but when it does – the outcomes can be huge! One major connection could make all your social media efforts, the time and the cost, all worthwhile! Even a retweets from a high profile account could make a huge difference for you – so always aim high in your connections (but don’t exclude everyone else at the same time!).
By Gyles Seward
