Are you using social media marketing to help promote your business? Social networks are all highly competitive platforms and without a good strategy behind you it can be difficult to stand out and actually reach your audience in a meaningful way. Thankfully though, there are all kinds of ways to spice up your social media presence and drive results for your business.
In this blog post, I’m going to share 3 effective social media tactics to help you stand out from your competition.
We will cover several social media marketing tactics that can help you drive engagement and followership:
- Using content curation to establish trust and build your audience
- Encouraging employee advocacy to boost in engagement
- Repurposing your content to drive more results
Curate quality content consistently to build trust and grow your audience
When used right, content curation can be an incredibly powerful tool for marketing yourself and your business.
However, a lot of people seem to think of content curation as sharing occasional blog posts and videos on their social profiles and calling it a day. But that is more “sharing” than content curation – curation can be a much more complex strategy, and one that can yield some great results for your business, if leveraged.
Put simply, content curation means searching for (and, of course, finding) quality content and then sharing it with your audience in an organised way.
But why exactly should you curate content? How exactly does it benefit you?
There are actually several benefits to curating content; for one, it’s a great way to build trust and engagement on social media. By sharing quality and relevant content consistently, you are helping your audience and showing them that you’re not just about promoting yourself. It’s also a great time-saver; although it does take time to curate content, it definitely less time consuming than actually having to create content. And plus, content curation is a great tool to help you become a thought leader, to show that you are knowledgeable about your niche, that you’re up to date with the latest news and developments, and that you’re willing to share all of this with your audience too.
One of the most important things to remember about content curation is that you need to take the time to personalize your message.
Don’t share a blog post (or any other content) and leave the initial automatic update; rather, take the time to share your own thoughts, to explain why people should check it out, or to comment on a point brought in the post.
Two other very important elements of good content curation are quality and relevancy; any content you share needs to be of high quality (whether it’s a 5k word how-to guide or a funny meme) and it also needs to be relevant to your target audience and your industry.
To help, there are a plethora of tools that you can use. PostPlanner, for example, is built with social media content curation in mind:
You can use it to find content (all rated based on content quality and engagement), as well as easily customize the message; plus, there’s a Canva integration so that you can even create customized images to share with the curated posts. And, of course, you also have access to social media scheduling tools so you can post the update at the optimum time.
Encourage employee advocacy to build trust and engagement
People tend to – understandably – mistrust brands and businesses promoting themselves. Word of mouth has always been a much more effective promotional tactic, one that helps create trust amongst audiences.
One of the ways that you can build up word of mouth is with employee advocacy – meaning in this case, getting your team to help promote your business and your content on their social profiles.
While they might not have huge audiences on their social media profiles, they have something else that works to your advantage: trust. For all intents and purposes, they are regular people sharing content with their friends and followers. And when you count all of your employees, their combined reach can be quite impressive, so having them share your content regularly can make a big impact on your traffic, shares, and overall engagement.
To set up an employee advocacy programme, you can use a tool like Smarp to help; this way, you’re making the whole process is easy as possible for your employees so that if they do want to get involved and help grow your business, they can do so more easily without hindering their other work.
Your employees can use Smarp to stay on top of company news and content, as well as the company’s latest social media posts and any curated third-party content, so that they can share it with their audience:
Employees can also communicate and engage with each other and in order to make the whole process more fun, the tool gamifies employee advocacy so that users earn points when they take certain actions (such as inviting another colleague to participate or sharing content).
Repurpose your content to continue driving results
You’re likely spending a lot of time creating great content; not just for your social media, but your blog, website, email list, and so on. You’re creating articles, how-to guides, videos, presentations, and all kinds of other content – so why not try to re-use it to continue driving results from top performing content and revive your social media presence?
Not only will it help you save time with content creation (and coming up with ideas, which can be just as difficult in some cases), but it will also allow you to generate better results as you’re using content that has already proven itself as successful.
You can repurpose almost any type of content you created; for example, videos, blog posts, how-to guides, white papers, and even older social media posts. But, in most cases, this is evergreen content – content that is relevant months and even years after publishing it.
Here are some of the best ways to repurpose existing content:
- Use tools like Canva to turn quotes from your blog posts into shareable social media images
- Use the best quotes from your blog posts as text updates for your social media profiles
- Turn a blog post filled with data into an infographic
- Turn a blog post into a short social media video
- Cross-post the same updates, but change the wording/optimize them to fit that particular social network
- Use older social media and blog images as backgrounds for new images
- Re-share the same content at different times and with different text updates
When repurposing content, focus on those pieces of content that have already generated great results in terms of traffic, shares, and engagement. For example, if you published a how-to guide that performed very well, that makes it a great candidate for repurposing.
Conclusion
As you might’ve noticed, the strategies in this list have something in common: they’re all about leveraging existing resources – other people’s content, your own employees’ reach and influence, and your content.
And yet, they can be incredibly effective in the long run; the “trick” is to stick with them, experiment, and continuously optimize so you can improve your strategy and grow your results from social media.
What are some of your favourite social media strategies and tactics? Which tactics do you use the most for your business profiles? Let us know in the comments below.
