How to Keep Your Social Media Base Growing
Many marketers put a lot of resources and effort into building a social media following. Once they start seeing results, they declare victory. The problem is that social media, like more established platforms, requires continual marketing to maintain your participant base. (Mike Stelzner of SocialMediaExaminer.com makes this point about bloggers.)
Visitors constantly need to be reminded about your presence on social media to encourage them to return more frequently and/or for longer periods of time. Further, attrition occurs. When the novelty wears off, people may tire of your site and/or find other more engaging options.
Since social media isn’t a one time, execute it and move on campaign, as a marketer, you must continue to build your social media following by diversifying your traffic streams. Think in terms of social media, owned and third party media options to grow your base.
Here are twelve marketing tips to grow your social media base.
- Create alluring content. Provide useful and engaging information your target audience wants on a regular basis. It’s important to keep distributing this information on a schedule so visitors expect it and come back for more.
- Follow your customers to social media networks. It’s important to be engaged on the social media platforms where your customers are. To this end, ask your prospects and customers which social media networks they use. Is there somewhere they are and you aren’t?
- Engage with participants on social media. Go beyond traditional marketing. Instead have employees interact with visitors and others on your social media presence. By doing so, you put a face with your firm. Remember, people want to get to know you and your brand. By engaging with them, you build a relationship that encourages them to return.
- Integrate search optimization. Make your content easy-to-find. Understand that at least a proportion of your audience participates on social media via a smartphone or tablet. Therefore it’s critical to ensure they can locate your information with limited navigation regardless of device they’re using. This means focus on one or two keyword phrases or associating multiple tags for images.
- Entice new visitors with a give-away or promotion. Offer new visitors a free e-book or a discount to encourage them to engage with you on social media. (Note this doesn’t mean that you should just promote your site.)
- Incorporate social sharing. Get visitors to share your content with their family, friends and social media contacts. Understand the power of social sharing. Include a tailored call-to-action to remind participants to invite their colleagues.
- Leverage other people’s social media audiences. Write an enticing guest post on other blogs to expand your reach. Alternatively participate in Twitter Chats and other forms of collective exchanges.
- Advertise on social media sites. Where appropriate, use targeted social media ads to drive prospects who have shown an interest in your product, to go to your social media execution. You can send these visitors to your social media profiles to keep your spend targeted and effective.
- Share social media content with your email list. Offer members tidbits from your social media site such as status updates, blog posts or photographs. The goal is to encourage them to stop by your social media presence.
- Promote your social media presence on your website. Place a banner on your website as well as relevant links in your content to encourage visitors to check out your social media execution. Think in terms of using specific links from targeted content to social media content.
- Include social media links in your customer service communications. Place links to answers to customer service questions from your social media platforms in your customer service emailings. This only requires minimal programming effort to drive prospects to your social media sites.
- Promote your social media presence in your offline establishments. Use your retail outlets to let visitors know about your social media executions. Include this information in your store signage and at the checkout.
To continue to grow your social media base, it’s important to keep driving traffic to your presence on social media platforms and to engage with people there to build relationships so they keep coming back.
What other suggestions do you have for building your social media base?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/john_lustig/2611387174/
