Some of these trends have evolved more rapidly or have become more mainstream than others.
Either way, there’s always room for improvement with optimization. Therefore, let me get started with my list of nine things you should focus your social media efforts on.
No. 1: Content. Content, content, content.
You can’t talk about marketing these days without talking about content marketing. You almost can’t talk about content marketing without talking about social media marketing, and you certainly can’t talk about social media marketing without talking about content marketing as well.
With the convergence of information and communication, brands and companies need to have content to engage with social media users. That’s just a fact. At a minimum, therefore, content gives companies something to talk about on social.
We all know about the central role that content plays in social, but I believe with most companies, whether it’s social media strategy alignment, choice of platform, establishing a voice, curating and creating the content itself, the frequency and timing of publishing content, or even the mere existence of a blog or not, there is always going to be room for improvement, and for some companies it will be a lot of room.
No. 2: The visual
When we talk about content, we must talk about the visual. When we talk about visuals, there are a few different things we can talk about.
You need to have a visual voice, a visual strategy, and visual content. You also need visuals to spruce up whatever content you post on social because it’s going to help you get more visibility in the social media news feeds. You also have social networks that are purely based on visuals, primarily Pinterest and Instagram, but also Snapchat and let’s not forget about YouTube or even Vine. Are you on these platforms? Is there potential for you to leverage them and maximize your social?
No. 3: Mobile
Snapchat and Instagram are purely mobile social networks. In some communities, or some target user audiences or demographics, people spend more time on mobile than on the web itself. Being active in social, considering that a lot of people do social from a mobile device, is actually the beginning of having a mobile social strategy. Obviously, any link you put on your website or landing page has to be mobile responsive as well: The more active you become on social, the more mobile-ready your website, or whatever digital assets there are, have to be.
Just spending more time on social is going to help your mobile indirectly, but also spending more time on purely mobile platforms is going to help you even more. The purely mobile platforms are primarily Instagram, but also for some, depending on your target demographic, Snapchat.
No. 4: Process
Not only are you going to be splicing and dicing your content for the different platforms, but you will end up doing the same for the visuals you’re going to be using: You’re going to have to recreate and reformat your visual content for each of the platforms, including mobile.
It’s going to get really complicated really fast.
What I am stressing is the same whether you are already implementing social media marketing for your company, on behalf of your clients, or for yourself: We all need to scale. The only way to scale is if you have a process.
After all, if you don’t have a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
You need to have a process around your social media so you can scale. You need to teach others in your organization to be able to fill in for each other to prepare for emergencies. If the person you have doing social on your behalf were to leave and go to another company, how are you going to manage and implement all of this? Your social media program has to be defined by process and always optimized.
Social media scheduling is a great way to scale without sacrificing on quality. Also creating your custom social media conversion funnel using tools like Linktree is a great way to make the most of your social media traffic.
No. 5: Advocacy
The other thing that’s driving the need for managing your social media marketing operations and creating processes is the growth of internal and external advocacy programs.
Whether it’s engaging influencers who you hope will advocate for your brand, whether it is your present fans acting as brand advocates, or whether it’s employee advocacy, the whole idea is that advocacy is going to allow your organization to scale, gain access to, and generate brand awareness from networks and communities that might know little to nothing about you.
We’ve been talking about influencer marketing now for some time. These days, the conversation seems to have shifted more and more from influencer marketing to brand advocacy. Reddit marketing should be your priority because Reddit generates a lot of organic visibility.
No. 6: Ownership
Something that we don’t talk enough about in corporate social media is the concept of ownership: Ownership by the brand or business of your content, strategy, and social media process. If you don’t have ownership of your own social media content and engagement, your social media simply is not going to be as effective. You’re going to lack internal processes because you’ve completely outsourced them. When you get to advocacy, especially employee advocacy, it’s going to be a lot harder to have an authentic effort unless a great deal of your program was created in-house.
If you do a lot of work with agencies, it’s time to ensure that you have enough ownership of your program, beginning with your strategy. I’m not saying to stop outsourcing work, but to strive to get more ownership.
If you’re doing 100% of your social media internally, you need to have more ownership throughout the company, not just in one department or one person. It has to be by group because this is social media. It involves everyone out there in the public. It also involves every single department you have in your company.
No. 7: Education
When we talk about advocacy and ownership, the need for internal education becomes even stronger. With every employee advocacy or social selling program that companies want to launch, there is a need to educate employees.
It’s all about education. It’s what fuels my passion, passion about empowering others, and I hope that you will take it to heart that you will need to focus more on social media education and raising the social media literacy of your employees, especially if you haven’t done so before.
No. 8: Paid Social
You need to be putting more of your budget in paid social and leveraging it to amplify your content, invest in brand marketing, bring users into your social media funnel, and to augment all of your other social media efforts. Remember: People can’t scale. Paid social allows you to scale.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a spend of $5, $500, $5,000, or $5,000,000 a day. Paid social helps your social media efforts become a lot more targeted and ensures that you’re getting your content in front of and clicks from the people you want to be engaging with.
No. 9: Automation
We all know about the benefits of marketing automation. On the other hand, there are new marketing platforms emerging that are purely based on automating things you do in social media. I think we’re going to see a lot more of these platforms emerge in the not-so-distant future because, similar to paid social, automation allows you to scale your social media.
Automation is not evil if it’s done right. It’s very easy to do it wrong, but there are savvy ways of doing it, and with the technology, and with the platforms I’m seeing, I think it’s a really great way to scale because we all know with social media marketing, there’s too much to do, too little time, and everybody is looking for results. That’s where these tools are going to come in handy.
