As social media grows, develops and refines itself, so do the many ‘tips’ on how best to use it. It can get overwhelming. There’s also the question of whether some of them will become obsolete over the next few years?
While there are plenty of lessons we can learn from 2011, here’s my take on 12 smart tips I think you can continue to leverage into 2012.
- Redefine your writing style. Content will always remain king. But as time progresses, we’ll see a clearer understanding of writing content for your audience first, and only then for SEO rankings. Forget keyword stuffing – write material that people can understand, appreciate, and use. In this regard, you have to upload information that people will want to share, recommend, and bookmark. It should be comprehensive and offer value, guidance, research, or analysis. Search engines like Google are beginning to take notice of social likes, as seen in Google’s +1 or Facebook’s Likes. So it’s important to remember that humans who read the content are just as important as search engines who find them.
- Be consistent in your use of social media. If you have limited time, select only a few channels that you can maximize usage from. It’s better to focus your efforts on one or two networks than to try and work with all of them. There are plenty of tools like HootSuite, which is a single interface upon which you can manage your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts. You can schedule posts and track analytics, which saves you time and effort.
- Develop key performance indicators (KPI’s) for measuring and analyzing your content. Remember you cannot measure social media channels apples to apples, but you can select those that deliver the best return on interest. Before you begin, find a baseline you can use. Also, recognize you can combine several KPI’s into single units. Never used KPI’s before? Here’s a great article on DreamGrow.com, entitled 48 Social Media KPI’s, which will help you kick start your plan for 2012.
- Jump on the tablets and mobile bandwagon. Accessing social media via tablets and mobiles is not only the current new thing, it’s going to be a replacement to desktop computers, and perhaps even laptop computers. Apps which can help your business get onto mobiles and tablets should be embraced. Consider how best you can leverage them for your own business.
- Become a key influencer. Becoming visible is important and one of the reasons its works is because of the influence you assert on your followers and fans and on their extended following. There are a number of tools like TwitAlayzer, Klout and more recently, Google’s circles and extended circles. Use them to help you build your influence, to scope your rankings and grow up your audience interaction.
- Remember that self promotion will not get you fans; offering useful advice will. Blog about problems and solutions, or offer advice or answer questions. This allows for a more interactive setting. Also, the kind of posts you write should be reflective of the kind of blog you host – a B2B blog for example will offer different content –industry news, statistics, research etc. –than a B2C blog.
- Let your personality shine through your tweets and posts. It’s easy to spot automated posts; yet research shows that self-referenced tweets get less retweets. Don’t let ’you’ be the main focus of your efforts. Find a balance between showcasing your services and connecting with your audiences’ needs.
- Continue to analyze your efforts. All social media channels have inbuilt analytical tools you can use to keep track of how you’re doing on the social radar. But if you want to get a more in-depth analysis or if you use multiple social channels, then sites like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and Radian6 allow you to measure social media impact quickly and across channels.
- Include social sharing buttons on your website and blog. These lets your readers share posts they find interesting and helps you build traffic to your site. All it takes generally is adding some code snippet onto your web page. Here are some excellent tools to check out: Tweet Meme and Twitter Share Button for Twitter, Facebook Like Button, Share Button for LinkedIn, and ShareThis, AddThis, and SociablePro which add social bookmark icons to your posts, pages, and RSS feeds.
- Spontaneous tweeting is wonderful, but take advantage of scheduling options that allow you to plan and post a schedule in advance. Some applications like Crowdbooster will also recommend the best time for you to schedule your tweets to maximize exposure. Other tools worth checking out include CoTweet, Social Oomph, Twaitter, and MediaFunnel. I know I keep mentioning Hootsuite, but it’s such a versatile tool – you can use it for analytics as well as to schedule posts.
- Continuously offer something of value, whether it’s a free download or a question/answer page. If you are going to ask people to ‘like’ you, then you need to give them a valid reason to do so.
- Build a single unified brand across social media channels. This could be by using your name, your product name, a common logo etc. This is particularly important if you have more than one employee or person in charge of your social media marketing efforts. Too many executives can result in branding efforts becoming diversified, which in turn hinders the core message and results in low or poor audience conversion rates.
For those already socially savvy, 2012 promises to be an exciting year with lots of opportunities in the B2B and B2C sections. For those who haven’t jumped onto the social media bandwagon, there’s never been a better time to do so than now. I’m personally looking forward to some great social initiatives next year and in particular, exploring mobile and tablet marketing.
Are there any particular trends you foresee for your business? What will you do to ensure a successful year ahead on your social networks?
