UW-Madison’s campaign built an animated online community among their existing, offline university community. Although the call to action was “soft” (engagement rather than sales or lead generation), it still contributed to the university’s ultimate brand goals by growing their Twitter following and promoting togetherness among the school’s community. And social media is all about developing brand awareness and community.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is not about selling and posting random content. Brands need to engage with their fans and followers in a number of different formats. As a result, they’ll build relationships, brand reputation and community over time.
What do you think? What kinds of social media posts would you add to the list? What has worked well for your business?
Nike’s post is subtle and the text is minimal. Yet the overall impact is extremely powerful. That’s because Nike was able to successfully combine a timely event already at the forefront of everyone’s minds with their brand image of empowerment, athletics and reaching personal goals.
Look for things to post that connect your brand to news and current events, without jumping too far out of the box. That means if there’s not a natural connection, wait for the next thing to come around.
#7: Make Calls to Action
In a nutshell calls-to-action posts ask your audience to do something. That can be anything from liking a post and entering a contest to sharing a photo or making a purchase.
The goals of a call-to-action post are to increase engagement (like, retweet or share a photo) or enhance your business goals (make a purchase, join a list for lead generation or attend an event).
For example, this hashtag campaign from the University of Wisconsin-Madison invited students and faculty to share photos of the campus’s fall colors under the hashtag.
Repost and retweet articles that performed well historically, as well as good content you want amplified as much as possible.
#5: Share Curated Content
For brands to be successful on social media, they need to offer value to their audience. In other words, no-one is going to pay attention to you on social media if you do nothing but advertise yourself.
Be an ongoing source of timely and relevant information in your area of expertise, regardless of whether you’re the original source.
A great example, and on a channel not often associated with content curation, is Chobani’s Pinterest account. A yogurt brand associated with healthy living, Chobani caters to its audience with tips and tricks for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. They use their Pinterest account to share recipes, workouts, inspirational quotes, ideas for setting up your kitchen and more; and most of these are repins or pins from other sites.
Customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that’s engaged with them in memorable discussion than one that’s solely advertising.
#4: Share Blog Content
Don’t struggle to constantly come up with new content for your social media updates. It’s not only okay to repost and reshare your best blog content, it’s encouraged
While you may not see an immediate ROI (return on investment) for these posts, over time they’ll enhance brand awareness and position your company as an industry leader. That means when the time comes to ask your audience to take action, they’ll trust you enough to do so.
#3: Invite Conversation
Posts that invite conversation have a clear and friendly ask: “Talk to us.”
This is one of the most streamlined and effective ways to open up your social media platforms for two-way communication, which is a surefire way to solidify your social media relationships.
Create posts that ask your audience for their ideas, opinions or even advice.
This fun post from eHarmony, which included a photo, asked the question: “Who is more stubborn? Women or men? And why?”
This query was something lots of people have an opinion about. It received nearly 300 likes, almost 100 shares and more than 200 comments.
These images create a sense of camaraderie for the wine lovers. Even though they don’t promote the Daily Sip publication directly, they establish Facebook as a lively community and welcoming hub for like-minded wine enthusiasts. Most importantly, they amount to vast exposure for Bottlenotes.
Construct engaging posts that forge a relationship between your brand and your audience.
#2: Boost Credibility
As with relationship development, credibility posts don’t directly ask your audience for anything. These updates may not get as many retweets, likes and shares, but that’s okay.
Instead of engagement, posts that boost credibility have a different goal: they aim to establish the brand as thought, service or product leaders in their geographic and professional communities.
Share company news and press releases, media bits, other interviews and appearances at industry events. The tweet below from Accenture is from a conference.
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9 Best Social Media and Content Marketing Tips
Leo WidrichLeo Widrich is the co-founder of Buffer, a simple and powerful social media management tool. Leo and the Buffer team write more posts on social media, efficiency, and customer happiness over on the Buffer blog. Hit him up on Twitter @LeoWid anytime; he is a super nice guy.
badge-guest-post-FLATTERWe’ve experimented with lots of different content marketing methods at Buffer, so I wanted to share with you 9 of the best ways we’ve found to increase engagement and improve your content strategy.
Especially after launching Buffer for Business recently, a lot of business approached us, asking which practical tips we had for them to improve their social media and content marketing.
So here are our best and most practical ways to see a big impact from your actions on social media:
1. Share Images on Twitter: Increase Retweets by 150%3
Since Twitter announced inline images, we’ve been experimenting with this change by adding images to a lot of the tweets from our @buffer Twitter account and have noticed a big difference in the engagement we’re getting. To get a better idea of what a difference inline images has made, I took the last 100 Tweets including a link from our @buffer account (not including any Retweets) and compared the averages of the tweets with and without images included.
Using Buffer’s built-in analytics, I was able to look at the number of clicks, favorites and Retweets each of our Tweets received.
The first data point we looked at was clicks:
Our click-through rate did grow, but not by very much. My theory on this is that with an inline image, there’s more content for the user to consume without leaving Twitter (which is probably what Twitter wants), so they’re not much more likely to click-through. Of course, that’s just a theory so it’ll be interesting to see what the data says over a longer time period as we keep experimenting with this.
Favorites increased quite a lot. Along with Retweets in the graph below, this shows a lot more engagement with the Tweets themselves. Clicks, on the other hand, show engagement with the original content.
2. Share Content More Than Once1
We often share our blog posts multiple times on social networks, for a few difference reasons. Some of the biggest benefits we get are more traffic, reaching people in different time zones and sharing our content with people who’ve followed us since we last posted it.
1. More Traffic
The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason to share your content more than once is to drive more traffic that the initial share.
Tom Tunguz did an experiment on his own blog to show how reposting the same content helped him to boost traffic.
To get an idea of how many people were seeing and sharing his posts, Tom looked at the number of Retweets he got when Tweeting a link to one of his blog posts. We can assume from this that actual visits to his posts increased with each Retweet, as well.
With each subsequent Tweet of an existing blog post, Tom noticed that he got around 75% as many Retweets as the time before.
We’ve also noticed that Tweeting posts from the Buffer blog more than once gives us more traffic and more engagement (favorites, Retweets).
Here’s an example where we’ve done this:
2. Hit multiple time zones
Guy Kawasaki is known for posting the same content multiple times, and one reason he