iGB Affiliate 55 Feb/Mar | Page 75

INSIGHT have planned to see when you’ll feature these too. Figure 2: How often to post by channel: 6. Ruthlessly respect the 80/20 rule Fill your feed with promotion, after promotion, after sales message, and it’s social media suicide - every follower you’ve earned will disappear or ignore you. It’s all about striking a balance. You earn the right to share something about your brand such as a promotion or competition, by sharing and posting things that add value to your audience over 80% of the time. The cheat here is all about sharing content - find a few trusted sources of content that your audience will like and build your posting plan around these. This can be a mix of your own helpful blogs (if available) and useful or interesting third party content. Just seek out ways to link the third party content you share to your offering. You can even set up automatic posts from RSS feeds with tools like Hootsuite too. 7.Scheduling is your new best friend It is entirely achievable to keep your ongoing social media management down to an hour of set up per week, plus a few real-time interactions via your phone. All you need is a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or TweetDeck. Using these tools you can schedule all your planned posts for the week in one easy sitting. Plus you can set up streams to keep track of activity too - such as competitors, notifications, or particular search terms - making interaction even easier. 8. Be visual On Facebook, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more clicks. On Twitter, photos or content shared with images, generate an average 35% boost in retweets. It goes without saying that your conversational posts don’t need to include images, but when you’re sharing content incorporate a relevant image where you can to increase standout on your feed. 9. Increase reach with #Hashtags Put simply, your posts reach your followers but posts including a #hashtag reach anyone who is searching for posts with that hashtag too, so it significantly increases your reach. Watch out though, recent research shows that you shouldn’t include too many: on Twitter, two hashtags per tweet result in 2x more engagement, but 3+ per tweet result in 17% less! To find the best hashtags for you, do a bit of research. Seek out ones linked to your industry that are active; as well as ones that your target audience is using. You can also look for trending hashtags, but never hijack ones that aren’t relevant to you. 10. Plan ahead for real-time events Following on from the free reach you can get with well-used #hashtags, it’s worth seeking out events that have hashtags you can get involved with too. This happens a lot with sports and games, as viewers are really engaged in the moment and you can utilise this momentum to engage and get involved too. 11. Invest in highly targeted paid ads So you’ve got a professional looking profile, with an organically grown audience and a social schedule that is perfectly manageable, with the right balance of content and promotional posts. Now is the time to promote the actions you want with social paid advertising. It could be a featured tweet on Twitter, or a promoted post on Facebook - but all the social media paid options are fantastically targeted, letting you choose exactly who you want to reach and when, with small and fixed budgets too. To start, try using posts with a contest or competition that has received some good organic interaction as this tells you it’s attractive to your audience. 12. Track results then scale You know all about tracking results - so just take the same analytical approach to your paid social ads. Set benchmarks, run a small test, check the stats, improve and repeat. Try different messaging for each post, try different offers, and target audiences, then build a picture of what works with your audience. From this solid base of learning, you’ll know what drives the action you want. With a consistently filled newsfeed and credible profile you have created yourself a whole new marketing channel to amplify your wider marketing campaigns, and given it’s highly targeted and affordable nature, it’s one you want in your marketing mix so it’s worth putting in the initial set up time to earn it. Good luck! on tina Richards Name: Chris 5 :4 15 ry, brua When: 5 Fe 1 Where: Room CHRISTINA RICHARDSON is cofounder and CMO at Openr, the tool for driving action from content shared on social. Christina spent much of her career managing FMCG brands worth £100m+, then turned her hand to young start-up brands and has never looked back since. As well as this she teaches Entrepreneurial Marketing for UCL, is a start-up mentor and a regular speaker and writer for industry events and publications. iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016 69