Let Me Help You Help Me Help Yourself

Now that you have a good solid foot in the door to social media marketing, it's time to broaden your user base. How to do this? Get the attention of influencers relevant to your industry and get them talking! Like I said in my previous post, it's not all about you. A large chunk of what you put out there on social should be from your customers, and hopefully influential ones. Once you get their attention, you can move on to advocacy, which is a gold mine. In the end, you are helping them and they are helping you help them. Sounds confusing, I know. But it works.

You're a Jerk (I Know)

It sounds like common sense, but just like deodorant, people who need it the most tend to never use it. So, let me just go out and say it: if you want your business to succeed and want to enhance your social media presence, don't be a jerk. The key to a meaningful social strategy is to be genuine with your posts and your interactions. After all, social media is just that: social. By definition, "social" is characterized by "friendly companionship or relations." Interactions among social beings. Engagement between multiple parties participating. We are inherently social. Why can't our Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams, etc be too?

This isn't the time to pelt your consumers with an overly branded compilation of stuff like they are some kind of human dart board. Companies doing it right have found that being genuine and talking about what the consumers want to talk about drives engagement and results in better conversation.

If you just realized that you are in fact being a slimy jerk with your social media efforts, that's okay. The first step to recovery is acknowledging that you actually have a problem. Here are several steps to save you from the depths of social media suicide and bring you into the light.

1. Give and take. It is a delicate balance between the two. Finding a happy medium is vital.
2. Find a personality. Having a personality to your social media presence will make it easier to turn a non human technology into a human one.
3. Connect and care. You can't always be the center of attention. Make a connection and build off of that. People love to talk about themselves.

Stop, Look, and Listen

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side, but first he had to stop, look, and listen.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Those words have been engrained into my mind better than any Taylor Swift song that the radio insists on playing at the top of every hour of every day. My parents taught me them so I wouldn't die while crossing the street. And guess what. IT WORKED. Because I was able to put those words into use while making the treacherous journey across 4 lanes of overly caffeinated suburban women in SUVs, I survived. And I thrived. Imagine if social media marketers could do the same.

I cannot stress how important it is for marketers to learn to shut their mouths (or rather, their fingers) and listen to their audience. Users are more than ready to share what they are really thinking on social media, and when they do, that's where the real beauty lies. Listening for what the consumer wants encourages a two way communication that will lead to loyalty, engagement and perhaps even advocacy. Sometimes, the most beneficial thing a social media marketer can do is to stop, look and listen.

So, why did the social media marketer cross the road?

Platform Politics

We've all seen it. We have a favorite brand that we follow on every platform of social just so we can stay up to date on sales, new campaigns, new news, etc. We have liked them on Facebook, followed them on Twitter and Instagram and occasionally even enjoy their funny Vines. Then we notice something odd. Well, it may not be considered "odd," since so many brands are doing it, but you know what I mean. We notice that the content put on Facebook is strikingly similar to the content put on Twitter. Oh, that 's because it is!

Social media marketing is adapting from being just a last minute option for growing your business to being absolutely vital to staying up to date and relevant in the eyes of your consumers. With this comes the need for businesses to be educated on how to use each of the platforms to their highest potential in order to attract and retain customers and build their brand. So, I present to you, Platform Politics.

Facebook:
Facebook, despite the rise in several other platforms over the years, is still the most popular social media platform by a long shot. Here are a few things to focus on when using Facebook as platform for marketing:

• Track engagement: Facebook has some pretty awesome features that will help you determine the level of engagement you get with your posts. It will allow you to measure what content resonates with what customers. Want to continue to be relevant in the eyes of your best customers? USE THIS.
• Tag other pages: What 's better than benefiting from someone else's hard work? Just kidding. But tagging other pages relevant to your company can increase the number of people that see your brand. this basically opens up a hidden gold mine of previously unreachable users. 
• Use photos: Posting photos instead of or in addition to text has proven to increase engagement by 120%. BEWARE: Dumb cat pictures are dangerous. Use caution.

 Twitter: 
Though Twitter is second in popularity, it actually comes in fourth when it comes to usage. Here are some good ways to use Twitter for your business:

• Push offers: Consumers are more likely to follow a brand on Twitter than on any other platform. This is where they come to stay up to date. Take advantage of their curiosity and use this platform to advertise deals and offer coupons.
• Develop a personality: Use Twitter to build a human-like personality for your brand. Best practices include talking about trending topics, being cultured, and being entertaining. The best brands act like a real human would on Twitter, not some creepy robot.
• Community management: Twitter is best used when the brand is focusing on building a community of followers rather than just e-commerce.

Instagram:
As social media marketing goes, Instagram is the new guy. While extensive research has not been done, here are some tactics to keep in mind when using Instagram as a platform for marketing:

• Sharing: Encourage the people that buy your product of service to share their own experience. This will build your brand and increase your reach, as your brand will now be visible to your sharer's followers.
• Make a stand: Instagram allows you to create hashtags about anything and everything. Create a hashtag the resonates with your followers and the campaign could go viral.

Noise: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

Let's be honest. We all want to make the sale. Whether it be selling medical equipment to multi-million dollar hospitals or selling a single glass of lemonade to that annoying neighbor who always seems to have a problem with the color you stain your fence, the end goal is to end the day better off than how you started. In a world shifting toward online marketing, the burden to make the sale has become exponentially lower. Gone are the days of door to door salesmen and marketers jamming their product in your face while you're just trying to enjoy the one meal a week that you managed to not burn in the oven (or is that just me?) Today, our fingers spend more time scrolling, typing and swiping looking for things than they do sifting through mail or flipping through the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

It now becomes the marketer's job to adjust to the inevitable and learn to adapt to new norms of online marketing, and more specifically social media marketing. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Vine are taking flight and you can either stay and freeze your butt off or fly south and bask in the heat of the social marketing world.

But wait, it's not that easy. So many brands these days just get it flat out wrong. Joining the social media marketing world does not mean posting a video of a dad getting hit in the crotch with a baseball bat, slapping your brand on there, and then calling it a day. This is what I like to call "The Foreign Exchange Student" of social media marketing. You know, that new kid in your class who is trying really hard and thinks he's doing a great job, but in reality he makes no sense and is just confusing the crap out of everybody. Having a presence on social media is vital, but if the content is just making noise and doing nothing to build your brand, then you might as well move in with Tila Tequila and Paris Hilton in the Land of Irrelevance.

Marketing is all about having an end goal and taking different approaches, some direct, some indirect, in order to achieve that goal. My blog, Know Soliciting, aims to deliver today's marketing professionals with the insight needed to do exactly that. I will help you develop important and necessary tools in creating relevant and meaningful content for the social sphere and maybe even entertain you along the way. So join me or judge me, either way you'll be talking about me.