Benchmark ConferencesContent Marketing & Digital PRSocial Media Content Social media tactics to implement today Jul 3rd, 2017 Lukasz Zelezny, Head Of Organic Acquisition at uSwitch.com – responsible for brand’s organic visibility, conversion rate, traffic and engagement – is an enthusiastic and popular social media and SEO speaker. He appeared at our 2016 Benchmark Search Conference and will be speaking again at this year’s event Lukasz’s article kicks off a series of posts from Benchmark 2017’s speakers, to give you a taster of what you’ll learn on 21st September. It will teach you how to: Engage users through the LinkedIn Pulse platform Amplify content through the Viral Content Bee tool Group followers of Twitter accounts Send automatic messages through Twitter An introduction The world of social media is a fascinating social and cultural phenomenon. It can be more immersive than World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, a day is not flexible and is still only ‘the regular’ 24 hours, which often proves to be too little. In this article, I will show you a couple of tactics which, throughout the last couple of years, I have implemented in my communication methods on LinkedIn and Twitter. They allowed me to save a lot of time and make taking action much more effective. Engaging in content through the LinkedIn Pulse Platform In the introduction, I mentioned LinkedIn. For me, it is a global window of opportunity. Communication through the built-in messaging system is often much more effective than email accounts. In the case of LinkedIn, there are no newsletters, spam and other unwanted information, which often distract us from what is urgent and important. LinkedIn is also a great channel to reach a business client. To really get the client to remember you, it is a good idea to use the built-in blog platform, LinkedIn Pulse. It is a simple, but very effective platform, which enables you to share content both with your profile’s followers and the users who visit your profile for the first time. It is important to select the language used to communicate with the readers of our content. If the receiver is from the same country, it is best to use Polish as a base language. If the idea, product or brand reaches outside of the borders, English will be more viable. Another thing is to choose the title. The internet has a couple of tools to help us choose one. The two I use are: Portent Content Idea Generator https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator https://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator Imagine that you are writing an article about social media. Below, there are sample titles from the tools above. What can be problematic is that the tools only help you with content ideas in English. This is however due to the nature of the language. In the language of Shakespeare, there are no special cases, which enables the creation of such a generator. In the language of Mikołaj Rej, a language of exceptions and multiple special causes, the situation gets much more complicated. A good middle ground is to generate a title in English and translate it to Polish afterwards. The titles are of different nature – some, for example, use lists. Top 10s, 12s, and so on, are the cornerstones of publishers like Buzzfeed, Mashable or Lifehacker. It is important to make sure that the list is not too long. Example wise, when I was travelling to Budapest, I asked Google what was worth seeing in the city. One of the results pointed to an article titled ‘1001 places to see in Budapest… this weekend’. The reader can often feel overwhelmed by such an overflow of information. This is why I recommend not to use more than 20 elements. When the title is ready, we should consider the call-to-action aspect. Think about the ways the article you shared on LinkedIn can help you in business actions. A couple of examples are listed below: By publishing a large fragment of an article on LinkedIn, you can encourage an interested reader to explore the rest of the text by going to an external website By describing online products, point to external sites with affiliate links Don’t forget about synergy between accounts – add a YouTube video or SlideShare presentation to your text Add graphic buttons (they work best in the PNG format) that direct to external sites If the article is interestingly written, there is a high chance that you will be selected as a featured article. This enables the multiplication of new readers, especially ones that have not yet heard about you, your company or the products and services you offer. I have previously mentioned that LinkedIn Pulse is also a great channel for reaching a business client. From my own experience, I can see that really reaching the awareness of such clients usually happens through the LinkedIn Pulse platform or a similar one, like Medium. Amplifying through Viral Content Bee http://viralcontentbee.com/ Price: $19.95 / $49.95 per month ViralContentBee.com is a unique tool which, although designed for the English-speaking market, is worth a mention due to its unique approach. Previously, I have spoken about using LinkedIn Pulse. Now, more than ever, we all need a tool that will enable us to increase the chances of reaching a potential new reader. Viral Content Bee is a platform grouping people who wish to share their content or promote the content of others. The platforms participating are Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and StumbleUpon. Actions, preparation and campaign configuration are quite easy. You need to provide the URL to the article (while promoting articles located on our blog or company website, it is a good idea to use UTM tags for better analysis of the generated traffic). Next, a title and a short description. Afterwards, you choose the categories the post fits into. The last step is to assign points to the project. In the Pro version (with a price of $49 per month), we receive 500. Appropriate distribution of the points should display which projects are the most important and which ones we wish to promote more than others. Afterwards, what we have waited for the longest: the links to our content start appearing on the profiles of other users of Viral Content Buzz. Below are two two examples, one of them from Facebook and the other from Twitter. The most important benefits of using the platform are: Reaching the users that do not follow us and often are not aware of the existence of our profile Reaching the users that follow the people that share our content Increasing traffic through promoting content with links to articles A rather low price of the platform Tweepi and Twitter – how to group users https://tweepi.com Price: $12.99 / $24.99 per month By promoting content through LinkedIn Pulse and amplifying it through Viral Content Bee, you can get the impression that even more can be done in terms of finding the right receivers for your articles. Here, Tweepi can prove to be helpful. It is a tool which enables the segmenting of followers of certain profiles. Let’s assume that, in the near future, a conference regarding social media will take place in Warsaw. And so, I would like to reach the people who handle social media in this particular town. In this example, I will choose a Polish-made tool for analysis of social media profile called SoTrender, with a Twitter profile of @SoTrender. Why this tool? Because I can safely assume beforehand that the people following SoTrender have much in common with broadly defined social media. As of the time of writing this article, SoTrender was followed by a little over 6,000 people. Now, all you need to do is construct the right filter. And so: Followers of: SoTrender Location: Warsaw Will return people who follow SoTrender and typed ‘Warsaw’ in their address bar You can also construct more advanced filters, such as: Followers of: SoTrender Location: Poland Last tweet: is newer than: 3 days Profile Image: users with avatar This filter will grant you a list of people who follow SoTrender, live in Poland, have tweeted at least once in the last 72 hours (3 days) and changed the default avatar (an egg) into another one (the last two are to assure us that the profile is active). In the next step, you can: Tag them in a public message Follow the chosen users Expect the people that you have followed to follow you back …and then Crowdfire – sending automatic DMs https://web.crowdfireapp.com/ Price: 0, $9.99 / $19.99 / $59.99 / $199.99 per month A long time ago, a friend from Israel told me that marketing should not be pretty, but effective. And so, if direct messages on Twitter give you any benefits, you should exploit them. In a message, you can shortly describe an event to take place in the near future, your product or the website you manage. In my case, it is the information that I am, apart from Twitter, also available on LinkedIn. The simpler and shorter the information, the better the responses. Thanks to such a solution, every person that starts following you on Twitter can do the same thing on LinkedIn. Accordingly, by increasing my number of Twitter followers, I indirectly increase the number of my LinkedIn followers. In summary The world of social media is not only Facebook. LinkedIn and Twitter can prove to be powerful tools that will enable you to reach potential clients faster than you think. By using external tools, you can do it all better, more effectively and, most importantly, more quickly. All this so that, out of the 24 hours that you happen to be granted, you also find time for the cinema, theatre or a walk in the park. Learn how Europe’s top search marketing innovators are shaking things up at their own brands at Benchmark Search Conference 2017 – this year it’s even bigger and better than ever! Benchmark takes place this year on Thursday, 21st September at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. Places are free, but limited. Apply for your place today.