23 Social Media and Digital Marketing Tips For Your Business

Social media is a channel that can empower your digital marketing strategy, increase your exposure, help you sell more products or services and connect with fans, experts and like-minded people.

The possibilities are endless and with an active profile on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, you can reap the benefits that your competitors and others are realising.

Here are 23 tips for your social media and digital marketing campaigns:

1. Post daily

Few things are more important on social media sites than posting daily and connecting with your followers and connections. There are tools that can help you automate this like Buffer and Hootsuite.

2. Follow back

Use software to automate this process and follow back people and organisations that have followed, as long as they are not spammers. This encourages two-way communication and helps build stronger connections

3. Choose platforms carefully

Don’t try to be on all social media platforms because that will take up too much of your time and leave you with little time for anything else. Focus on one or two social media networks and put all your energies there to build a strong following.

4. Tweet varied content

Tweet your own posts and posts from other sites that you think will be of interest to your followers and could benefit them greatly. It will also help you to create new connections with the owners of the content that you post and retweet.

5. Use hashtags sparingly

Avoid cramming your tweets with loads of hashtags because that just looks spammy and makes your tweets unreadable. Two or three at most should be fine and ensure that they are relevant to the message you are sending.

6. Connect on other platforms

Use a tool like socialOomph to send direct messages to your followers and encourage them to connect with you on your other platforms like LinkedIn. This is an effective strategy that will help to connect more with target audiences and grow your followers and connections.

7. Set goals

Have clear marketing goals about what you want to achieve with your social media and digital marketing strategies. Then launch the tactics that will help you achieve your objectives, like connecting, sharing, posting and engaging to increase awareness for your brand, products, company and services.

8. Have a strategy

Create a social media and digital marketing strategy that includes your objectives, markets, competitors, promotional tools and budget details. With a strategy in place your online efforts will be more focused and you will boost your ROI.

9. Signup to Hootsuite

Hootsuite has a one month free trial and you can use this time to test the software and see if it is ideal for your social media strategy. With Hootsuite you can automate many tedious processes like tweeting, retweeting, responding to mentions and managing all your accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

10. Use socialOomph

Use socialOomph to send tailored direct messages to your followers like asking them to join you on other platforms, to visit your website or promote your book and services.you won’t get this feature on other Twitter tools.

11. Signup to slideshare

Upload your PowerPoint presentations, documents, videos to slideshare and use that to promote your website, products or services. Visitors are able to leave comments and download your documents and share them with others and this extends your reach.

12. Track with analytics

Use analytics event tracking to track shares and likes on your website. You can create events in the admin section of your analytics account and they will be available in the Reporting section of your account.

13. Check your score on Klout

Your Klout score reflects how influential you are on social media. Knowing your score helps you to focus your efforts and post only content that people will like, retweet, share and so on. The more you get of that, the higher your score will be.

14. Schedule posts with Hootsuite

Scheduling your posts on Hootsuite is easy and you can schedule them for the day, week or month and in whatever frequency you like. You can also bulk schedule your posts by creating them in a CSV file and then uploading it to Hootsuite – this will save you a lot of time.

15. Run Twitter paid ads

Twitter ads are effective at putting your messages in front of people you want to target. Cost per click rates are quite low compared to other platforms and you can create wide awareness for your business.

16. Create a video

Create a video and upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare and other video sites. Videos are high impact and they lead to greater customer loyalty and many return visits to people who signup to your channel on YouTube. Upload your video to your website too.

17. Find people

Use SocialOomph to easily find people to follow and keep up with the latest trends and updates. This will help to also grow your followers.

18. Create Facebook Ad campaigns

You can promote your products, services, website, business page, fan page with Facebook ads and you can send visitors to your website or your page. Facebook ads are precise at targeting and more effective than other PPC platforms because you can segment your target audience based on demographics, geographical, lifestyles and categories.

19. Create a video campaign in Google Adwords

Having created your video, you can now create a video campaign in Adwords to promote it on YouTube and other sites which are part of the Google Display Network and accept video ads. Your video will be promoted the first seconds someone clicks on a video and they can choose to continue watching your video to the end or stop it.

20. Create compelling blog content

The secret to creating loyal website visitors and a large following on social media is by creating great content that keeps people engaged. An example of a blogger that does this effectively is Darren Rowse who receives millions of visitors to his blogging and photography sites.

21. Design great social media covers

Hire a freelancer on fiver to create stunning covers for your social media profiles. Make sure you use the cover to convey a key message about your products or services and add any books you’ve written to encourage enquiries.

22. Join LinkedIn groups

There are many quality groups to join on LinkedIn in your sector and you can post links, articles and like and comment on other people’s posts. Use a tool like Hootsuite to post to each group you are joined to but avoid posting the same articles to multiple groups at the same time because members across groups are usually the same.

23. Self-publish an ebook

Publishing an ebook takes your profile to a higher level and can potentially set you apart as a thought leader if your book is very successful. You can promote it on your social profile and then submit it to Kindle KDP. If you choose Kindle Select, you will not be able to promote it anywhere else online for 90 days, but it will bring you more exposure on Kindle.