Social media strategy tips

Demographics

Analyzing and testing your blog’s demographics is critical to determining with platforms you should invest your time on. You have to know your audience and be certain that the social media site you use has a high number of individuals you wish to target with your advertising campaign. For example, Pinterest has a large percentage of female members. If you specialize in men’s products, advertising on Pinterest may not be ideal.

However, if you are insistent on leveraging Pinterest, then publishing Pins that angle your product as something women can buy for the men in their lives might increase interaction and sharing. The demographics of the most popular social media websites should be known before starting any advertising campaign online.

Timing

Good timing is everything in life, and this has become especially true for a good social media strategy. As social websites have matured, dozens of research studies have been conducted to better understand this powerful traffic source.

For example, companies now know which days and times people are more active. For Twitter, we learned that a few hashtags is ideal; a dozen is overkill. For Pinterest, case studies show that users increase in the late hours of the evening, meaning B2C brands can post during the day on Twitter and LinkedIn, update Facebook after work hours, and finish the day with Pins.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

The largest organizations in the world spend millions of dollars testing and tracking their marketing activities. Monitor the activities of these organizations and you will soon find out what currently works and doesn’t. If there are large organizations operating in your niche, what you learn from them will be even more valuable when you implement your social media strategy.

The simplest way to achieve this is by targeting the larger brands fans and followers. If users are interested in a brand and you are confident they should be interested in yours, try to lure them to your social properties as well. Afterwards, review the other brands’ updates and see what types of posts earned the most shares, and try to take the next step in creating something even better than their content. If your competitor posted the “10 Best Gifts For Your Wife This Christmas”, push yourself to develop the “50 Best Gifts…”.

Number of Updates per Day

Deciding how many updates to publish each day is a dilemma for many website owners and social media managers. Although most studies show that Facebook users can endure about 3 updates per day before getting tired of a brand, the main thing is to provide high quality content when social media websites are at their busiest. If you’re in an evergreen niche, you can also schedule your updates for the busiest times on the main social media websites, many days or weeks in advance, but always remember to take advantage of hot trends when they come up. This can go a long way to a great social media strategy.

Targeting Specific Groups

A lot of time and effort can be wasted focusing on social media tasks that don’t engage with your target audience. Becoming more specific and locating social media users who are interested in what you have to offer avoids a lot of this wasted time and effort. It also increases your conversion rates because you’re interacting with less people, but those people are more interested in what you have to offer.

This tactic really requires a brand to hone in on the ideal consumer. For example, when I used to run a torrent/file-sharing website, a majority of our users would visit the site to download movies for free. While some of my team members wanted to try and build an affiliate relationship with Netflix or Amazon, it was obvious that visitors who want free stuff are not interested in paying for a streaming subscription. Instead, we focused on giveaways, coupons, and other products or services offering ways to get stuff for free or at a discounted rate.