5 Secret Truths of Social Media Marketing You Must Know

Each minute, 350,000 tweets are sent out. With the stiff competition out there, you require equally potent strategies to ensure that your business is seen, heard and your product or service bought. But social media isn't cheap. It requires a sizable investment of time and talent in content creation, marketing and analysis. So how do you double your social media marketing results without doubling your costs?

Increase efficiency and utilize valuable resources that you haven't considered.

Tips for Marketing on Social Media

Why Happy Customers are Great for Social Media

Word of mouth marketing. There's no contest on how effective it is. In fact, as per one of marketing insights firm Nielson's studies, 92 percent of the consumer population regards recommendations from friends and family over every other type of advertising. Vocal, happy customers create the belief that your business provides quality products and services in potential customers.

Encourage your customers to share their experiences. Post it, tweet it and update their status. There are a number of ways you could do this.

1. Offer a discount for check-ins and follows, if you own a retail outlet. You could also get creative and build a selfie corner in your shop.

2. Set up accounts on review sites in your niche or industry. For instance, if you're an app based company, you could have a G2Crowd or GetApp account.

3. Request customers give you Facebook reviews and LinkedIn recommendations (if you're a solo player).

You could also request for recommendations if you have employees connected to your LinkedIn profile.

Why Your Employees are Your Biggest Social Media Assets

561 percent. That's the estimate of how much further your brand message travels when shared by employees as compared to official company accounts as researched by the MSL group.

According to IBM, the leads generated via employee advocacy are also 7 times more likely to convert than leads generated otherwise.

Your employees also benefit from advocacy - with added exposure and opportunities to represent their brand and to develop authority on social media.

Step 1: Begin by simply selecting an enthusiastic employee representative to mediate and oversee your program.

Step 2: Choose an employee advocacy platform to manage and track your program. DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform provides a gamified leader board for engagement and engagement analytics to measure your success.

Brand Amper has an interesting app to collect your employees' experiences with your company for social media sharing.

Step 3: Run a pilot program. Share content with a few employees and explore which content types draw most engagement.

Step 4: Expand the program and introduce incentives to motivate your employees to share. Recognition is also an excellent motivator. Identify your best ambassador and let them know you appreciate their efforts.

Why You Don't Have to Exclusively Create All Your Content

The best content is crowd sourced, or rather fan sourced.

1. It cuts down time and effort that content creation demands and clears some part of your schedule.

2. It gets your current and potential clients involved and invested (great for generating more shares and improving reach).

3. It provides you with diverse creative options for engaging content formats.

4. It inherently builds up your social fan base.

5 Innovative Ways to Initiate Creation of Fan Content

1. Run a photograph based social media campaign around your product/service.

2. Create a contest for fan stories involving your product/service.

3. Initiate discussions with each blog post you create.

4. Kick-start a discussion about a trending topic and ask your followers for their opinions.

5. Implement a good old selfie contest with a unique hashtag associated with your brand.

When your fans create the content, they'll be more enthusiastic to share it.

Why Your Story Matters More than Descriptions of Your Services

As human beings we're drawn to stories. We tell them for a living when we connect with people around us, and we emotionally bond with sources of the stories, in this case, the brand.

Stories break the barriers between consumers and the brand and make the brand more human and something people can emotionally connect with. Stories are also great for:

1. Brand recall (People forget ads but remember compelling stories)

2. Brand identity (Coke is just a sugar-water formula, but the brand is so much more because it has been developed to be that)

3. USP (Your brand feel and experience could be a strong Unique Selling Proposition) - the app Storify has interesting ways of turning content into story formats for your viewers to enjoy.

How to Tell Your Brand Story Right

1. Your story must be unique, memorable and what people can relate to.

2. Your brand needn't necessarily be the hero of the story. Ideally, that's what your audience should be. And your brand should be the resource that helps them reach their goals.

3. Think of your brand story as an experience that you're selling to your audience.

Here's a great example of a successful brand story:

When marketing on social media, remember what truly matters: people. Not your brand message and not your promotions, the true owners of social media are the crowd. Orient your social media activity towards them and involve them in it, and you'll make real headway.

Social Marketing Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "5 Secret Truths of Social Media Marketing You Must Know" was first published on Small Business Trends