Guest Post by Dan Vassiliou
What do casual internet users, bloggers, webmasters, businesses, and even government offices all have in common?
An increasing obsession with worrying about how many friends or followers they have on their social media profiles.
While numbers can correlate to higher conversions, shares, and a greater likelihood of your posts going viral, just amassing thousands or millions of followers is a narrow view of how to approach social media.
In order to tap into the true power of social media you need to foster an engaging community that interacts with what you have to share...
The Benefits of an Active Community
Let’s just start off by stating the obvious: it’s not hard to build a large number of followers on most social platforms. There are plenty of “cheap” ways to get followers from giveaways to actually buying likes and followers. All this allows you to do is shout to whomever will listen that you have “10,000 Twitter followers!” Stop worrying about increasing that number, and start worrying about getting the followers you do have to start engaging with you and start seeing these benefits.
Improve Your Social Media Traffic
Even if you’ve gained a big percentage of followers simply through a promotion, you’re still likely to see spikes in visitors coming through social media every once in a while. But the goal is to see a continual upward trend in your unique visitors.
To do this, track your social media traffic with Google Analytics and see which posts of yours draw visitors into your site, and also pay attention to the Bounce Rate (how long they stay on the page). If they’re jumping in and out faster than jack rabbit in a fox den then you know that your landing pages and content need work. Paying attention to the analytics can give you a big picture view of how your social community is interacting with your brand and posts.
Good Timing is Everything
It might be a cliché that is reinforced in every single romantic comedy since A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but timing really is everything when it comes to social media. If you share your posts when most of your followers are asleep or at work, you’ll see very little interaction because they’ll often go unseen.
This means you have to time your posts to your demographic and share the same post multiple times in order to get as many of your followers to see it. This post on Mashable highlights the best times for sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
But you, or your marketing team, can’t be at the computer 24/7 to post and re-post at the most opportune times in order to drive clicks towards your site. To address this concern, there are a host of automated or managerial programs that can be used to scheduleyour updates automatically so you do not need to be engaged on a device to do it. This linked post breaks down the differences between the three most popular applications: HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer.
Keeping Your Followers Engaged
A big part of engaging your followers is not flooding them with posts at the same time, which the apps above help you do to, but it also means not flooding them with posts that only serve to help yourself. It’s important to share the love and promote work from outside sources (other than yourself) that you think your followers will like, and even highlight certain followers who have helped you out in some way.
This could be as simple as retweeting someone or mentioning them in a post, or even sharing their own works. This helps to show that you recognize who makes your brand powerful.
Baiting for Likes and Re-Tweets
Nothing is more demoralizing on social media than to see your posts go ignored time and time again. If you’re varying your tweets by sharing other people’s content, breaking news, some funny posts, as well as your own great content then you should be getting interactions anyway, but if you’re not you may need to look at how you’re tweeting. Here are some tips to clean up your tweets:
- Try to use slightly less than half of the allowed characters for tweets that you want to get traction. Known as the “65 character rule,” this allows people to add their own voice to their retweets without having to edit your post down. Make it easy for them.
- Utilize hash-tags, but don’t overdo them. Two is the magic number and make sure you use them naturally within the post, not before or after the fact. And make sure you’re contributing to an ongoing conversation – not just making up a new hash-tag for every post because #omgnobodyissearchingforthis.
- Ask for retweets and views! It may sound spammy, but if you can fit it into your tweet (remember the 65 character rule!) then you should have a call to action that asks users to “retweet” or at least “RT.” Tweets that directly ask people to retweet and share have been reported to have 12x the interactions as tweets that do not ask.
Don’t get lost in the wide ocean that social media has turned into.
Rather than worrying about how many followers you have, worry about cultivating followers that you can support and who will support you in turn. A small group of users that retweets and shares your content is worth much more than thousands of followers who ignore most of your posts, and that small group will grow over time as they (and your brand) attract the same type of followers.
Dan Vassiliou is the owner of Endurance Seo, a forward thinking SEO agency that looks to provide effective solutions to clients online marketing requirements. If you want to discuss this post with Daniel, or anything internet marketing related, then you can contact him through www.enduranceseo.com . You can also get him at his local office in Derby UK by clicking through this .
Please feel free to leave any comments expressing your views regarding this post below, I will happily respond to them. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
