I’m guilty of it as much as any blog or social media blog.
It’s good to get into the basics. How to use social media to get more followers, more engagement and ultimately more business.
For this post we’ll change things up a little bit and go into some of the hidden corners of social media marketing.
These are things that work really well, but are still overlooked quite a bit. Even if they’ve been mentioned for a long time. And I’ve mentioned a couple before, but there are a couple new ones.
Let’s get into it.
1. Twitter Search
I’m a big fan of Twitter Search. There are lots of ways to use it.
You figure Google is the biggest search engine. I think YouTube or Facebook are the next in line. We’re talking billions of searches a day.
People like the basic search function. They do it on Amazon and on social media too.
Twitter has a great search function.
A couple great ways to use it for marketing purposes are:
Listening: This includes saving a search for something specific. Maybe a phrase people use when they’re ready to buy your product. Let’s say you’re a dentist. You could save the phrase “new dentist” and search that once in awhile. See who’s posting updates like, “Looking for a new dentist. Any recommendations?” or “Anybody know a new dentist in Chicago?”.
Questions: This is when you look for questions people are asking in your industry so you can get inspiration for helpful things to post on your profile. Answering questions and helping people is a great way to build a following. One way to do this with Twitter search is to search for the replies of an industry influencer. That influencer probably can’t get to all the questions. But you can see what people are asking them and answer those questions. Here is saved search for @GaryVee’s mentions.
2. Hashtags
I’m a big believer in hashtags for growing your following and increasing engagement. But most people, if they even use them, use them to try and be ironic and things like that.
I’m all for having fun and laughing with witty hashtags.
But there is a huge opportunity with them. It takes some time. You have to know the right ones to use. And it takes a couple extra seconds to add 2 or 3 to your updates. But it’s worth it.
Let’s say that dentist shares a great tip. They might share it with their 500 followers or whatever. Add the #teeth hashtag to that and a few more hundred people will see it. The same with the #dentist hashtag.
Follow influencers or competitors in your industry. See what hashtags they’re using. Experiment with others you think are popular. See the ones that get the most engagement and use them all the time.
3. Partnerships
How do you get followers if you don’t have any?
It’s a huge challenge with social media.
Actually, it’s a huge challenge in a lot of areas of life and business.
There are ways to build the following. One way that’s common in a few industries is the partnership.
Think of opening act in music. They get paid very little and maybe even lose money on the deal. But in return for warming up the crowd for the headliner they get exposure to the headliner’s audience.
That’s a great opportunity.
You can do that with social media. Look for people to partner with. Create content. Videos, ebooks, blog posts, contests, etc.
Offer to put in 90% or more of the work on a project. You bring the effort. They bring the audience.
4. Guesting
Building on the idea of partnerships is simply guesting.
Being a guest on podcasts, videos, interviews, Q&As, etc. Maybe just taking over someone else’s account to answer questions. You see that in sports sometimes.
A driver in Nascar might take over the @Nascar account to answer fan questions.
Or a rockstar takes over the radio station account.
The dentist…they could guest on the local newspaper’s Facebook account for a live session to answer any and all questions people have about teeth. It’s on the newspaper’s channel. The dentist gets exposure for themselves and for their Facebook account.
5. Longform
Social media has been about short little snippets of content. I’ll kind of expand on that in a bit.
But one big time overlooked area is longform.
You do this see this sometimes on Twitter. People will write a note on their iPhone and take a snapshot of it and post that as a pic. it’s a way to get around Twitter’s character limit.
And people like it.
Some of the most viral posts on Facebook are really long posts. Just text posts.
But this applies to audio and visual too. Long podcasts. Long videos.
Interviews, stories, etc. People love it and it’s very overlooked.
6. Snippets
This just doesn’t mean short updates. Everybody does that on social media obviously.
This is more if you create content off social media. Like a TV show or radio show. A podcast. A video series.
Movie trailers or sneak peeks of scenes are snippets.
An account I follow is really good at this: Secret Golf
They have an entire website full of great video content.
Everyday they post snippets of that video. You get just a little taste.
It’s a great way to reuse content you’re already creating to fuel your social effort.
7. Frequency
Speaking of reusing content, frequency is a big thing. Most people know that the more you post the more followers and engagement you’ll get.
But it’s a challenge to post often.
That’s why it’s good to reuse content you’re creating for other channels. Like your blog or YouTube channel or whatever. Or to reuse your most popular social content. Things you’ve shared in the past. Reuse that stuff.
Just because you shared something last month doesn’t mean that everybody saw it. Reuse that content to help boost your frequency.
Conclusion
Hopefully these are a few new things for you. There is lots of information out there about simple things you can do on social media. These are simple. They do take effort in most cases. But they’re overlooked. And that’s where you can really gain an advantage because most people aren’t doing these things.