Social Media Marketing
Only about 20% of your content should be self-promotional. The other 80% should be posts that are intended to provide information or foster engagement with your audience.
Social media marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach and engage with buyers. Because it’s almost universally used—by consumers and brands—it’s one of the most effective (and perhaps cost-effective) channels to connect with your audience.
Social media marketing goes far beyond the traditional platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter—giving you a range of ways to reach your target audiences, engage them with relevant messages and build lasting relationships. Because certain demographics interact with social media differently, metrics are crucial to measuring success.
Social media is also a way to increase demand because it gives you a compelling, personalized way to connect with buyers and humanize your brand. Incoming links from social shares can impact your bounce rate and time-on-site engagement and communicate value to search engines.
Facebook is one of the most widely adopted platforms. It can make your business more discoverable in search, allow you to connect one-on-one with customers and give you deeper insights into your audience. It’s now integrated with Instagram, so you can combine a mix of fun, ungated content with more educational, gated content.
A few useful tips are:
Use the cover photo to promote large assets, announcements or events, and use tabs to promote assets, a landing page or other important items.
Incorporate live video into your posts to engage your audience and use Facebook Groups to grow your network.
Embed links using Facebook’s link format, which can receive twice as many clicks.
Consider using “dark posts.” These are ads that are NOT published to your timeline or directly to your fan’s timeline, but rather only to a specific set of users you’re targeting.
Take advantage of Facebook’s Carousel, Slideshow and Canvas features to turn photos or videos of new products or events into an interactive experience.
Optimize for mobile - this is the preferred source for the majority of users.
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Social Media 101
Twitter is a strong platform for thought leadership and for events. It has become a space where both corporate and personal brands can develop relationships with followers. It’s fast paced, so it’s important to create engaging tweets with relevant links on a regular basis. It’s a good idea to create a Twitter list for your employees, competitors, influencers and top followers.
Here's a few things to keep in mind:
Create hashtags for events to encourage real-time tweets.
Create hashtags for product announcements and other campaigns.
Regularly engage with influencers by interacting with and sharing their posts.
Retweet or quote tweet to highlight a theme or event.
Use Twitter lists to segment a group of accounts that regularly feature interesting content.
Utilize Twitter for customer support/troubleshooting - it's a great way to build trust and rapport with your followers.
Using hashtags to monitor conversations around a product or technology can help uncover leads/sales opportunities by identifying the individuals talking about/searching for solutions. PRO TIP: Employ social listening tactics to automate and maximize the effectiveness of these efforts.
Use your character limit wisely
Keep your point short
Use verbs to convey strong CTA's
Use a URL shortener
LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest professional networks. It is most useful for sales teams as it puts a face with a name. LinkedIn now offers company pages, a highly targeted advertising solution and a publishing platform.
Encourage employees to participate on LinkedIn Pulse and LinkedIn Groups.
Create a group for customers, brand advocates and industry professionals.
Optimize your LinkedIn page for SEO.
After updating your pages with your company logo and images, it’s time to craft a business description. “Companies with logo images get 6x more traffic to their pages.” – LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
10 Ways to Optimize your LinkedIn Profile
Marketing Solutions from LinkedIn with Guest Speaker Chris Elder (Enterprise Account Executive at LinkedIn)
Here's a few tips and things to know before you hit record:
Find your niche. Even large companies team up with industry gurus and thought leaders to create content that resonates with their audience.
Use YouTube analytics. As one of Google's subsidiaries, these are analytics you can trust!
Stay consistent with your company branding. Update your page's channel art and channel icon.
Create an effective channel trailer. This is the first thing people will see/watch when they visit your channel.
Use YouTube's Video Editor tools. You don't have to be a pro. YouTube has tools to help add audio, create mashups and a free library of music.
Create titles that are short, sweet and creative. Choose a thumbnail that tells an interesting story.
Optimize - See YouTube's Best Practices for Metadata.
Content doesn't have to be perfect! Half the battle is getting out there and consistently creating. Find a balance between quality of content (not production quality) and quantity of videos uploaded.
Video marketing helps build trust with your customers: It lets you create a human connection with stories and conversation, whether it’s a customer testimonial or brand narrative. You can use videos on your website or landing pages, in emails, on social media and more.
You can use unique, relevant video content to generate, score and convert leads. Depending on your goals, video types may vary from interviews, webinars, courses or workshops. For informational videos, you can use tracking platforms like Wistia, Vidyard or Brightcove. For videos that are more social, you can use YouTube, Facebook or Vimeo. Another recommended platform is OneMob, where you can tell your story with a custom landing page of videos, documents and more - all with the ability to track your audience's every move and interest. Check out their offers on Marketing Velocity Central.
Include a video thumbnail in email campaigns, and check the time it was opened. It’s likely that you can send a follow-up video at the same time the previous video was sent.
Keep it short and visually appealing: In less than 30 seconds, a customer can get the information he needs about any business.
Set up a video delivery schedule and space the videos out evenly.
Create short-form videos for sharing on Twitter and Instagram: Micro video apps help shorten the video content to less than 10 seconds.
FUN TIP -Customers can help!
Invite customers to create their own video. Offer a prize for the best video showcasing customer use of your product and you'll likely get a great response.
The target audience does not need to directly mention your organization but rather must leverage keywords in order to be pulled into the conversation queue.
Facebook offers a wide variety of ad placement options based on the intended goal of your campaign. Ads can be paid for and bid based on cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). The Facebook ads platform is one of the most flexible when it comes to campaign media, allowing advertisers to create ads utilizing single images, image libraries, product carousels, videos and even collect lead form information natively within the platform. In general, Facebook ads are used to drive website conversions, offers, page post engagement and likes, event registrations or video views.
In-Feed Placement One of the most popular Facebook ad placement options is directly within the “feed.” This puts your ads directly in the viewer’s timeline amongst organic posts from their existing friends and liked pages. Feed ads appear and act as organic posts, allowing commenting, reactions and significantly more real estate for images, video and text. These features allow your ad to blend in, greatly increasing the chance of engagement, unlike other traditional ad locations. Mobile First Feed ads are also part of a select group of ad placements that are shown on mobile in addition to desktop. In 2017, 95.1% of active Facebook users accessed the network via mobile device. Why does this matter? Simply put, if you’re serving ads using the traditional “right column” placement, chances are your intended audience will never see the ad. Taking advantage of mobile-friendly ad placements is critical to ensuring visibility for your ads.
Twitter offers a number of advertising options within its platform. Ads can be designed to increase awareness, promote engagement and interaction, grow your following and send additional traffic to your website or landing page. Similar to Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads are served in an auction style format to a user-defined audience and placement is based on your desired cost-per-engagement. There is no minimum budget required, however it is recommended that you dedicate at least $30 per day in order to consistently reach your targeted audience.
Promoted Tweets Promoted tweets are at the core of Twitter’s advertising platform. Depending on your objective, different display formats are available. A few of the more commonly used options are as follows:
Plain Text Tweet: Basic tweet limited to 280 characters with no imagery. Best used for thought leadership.
Image Website Card: Similar rules as a basic tweet, but allows you to add an image and a link to your website.
Promoted Videos: Supports videos up to 2:20 in length as well as the standard 280 character text limit. Also allows you to place a video title and description under the video.
Direct Message Card: This unique card is intended to promote direct messaging right from your tweet. Use up to 256 characters, add a custom messaging CTA and embed an image or video.
LinkedIn’s advertising platform is an excellent way to reach business professionals and decision makers of all types. It is unique from the other social platforms in that most active users are in a business-minded state, rather than simply browsing for pleasure. This allows advertisers to approach their messaging differently than they might on Facebook or Twitter. In addition, audience targeting on LinkedIn is refined for the business professional allowing advertisers to select their audience based on employer, role/title, role type and more.
Like Twitter and Facebook, the majority of advertising on LinkedIn is paid for in an auction style format, with advertisers determining what they are willing to pay based on CPC or CPM. One exception is with the cost of LinkedIn’s InMail where you only pay when a message is delivered.
LinkedIn Sponsored Updates let you expand the reach and impact of a post by showing it to all of your followers or to a customized group of targeted users outside of your network. Updates can contain text, video, links, and images and allow comments and sharing.
LinkedIn’s InMail feature allows you to send a direct message to a targeted group of users, even if you aren’t connected. This option enables you to deliver personalized messages that can drive more conversions than email.
YouTube serves both in-stream ads and discovery ads. Video ads can be served to a targeted audience based on interests, demographics and more. In most cases you’re only charged when someone views your ad for at least 30 seconds or engages with your ad - like clicking on a call-to-action overlay, a card or a companion banner.
In-stream ads play before or during another video from a YouTube partner and are offered in two formats: TrueView and non-skippable With TrueView ads, viewers see five seconds of your video and then have the choice to keep watching or skip it. You pay when a viewer watches for at least 30 seconds or to the end of the video (whichever is shorter) or clicks on a card or other elements of your in-stream creative. Non-skippable ads may appear pre-, mid- or post-roll while viewing partner content. These videos can be up to 15-20 seconds. Viewers must watch the ad before they're able to watch the selected video. Non-skippable ads typically have a higher CPM than TrueView ads.
Video discovery ads appear alongside other YouTube videos, in YouTube search pages or on websites on the Google Display Network that match your target audience. You pay only when a viewer chooses to watch your video by clicking on the ad.
Now, let's put it all together!