Tag Archives: social media marketing

Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy

October 29, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

We’ve shared many times that social media is a powerful tool to promote your business. Companies large and small are turning away from more traditional marketing channels and towards social media. This is great, because it further demonstrates that social media is a smart place for you to be, but it also shows that social media is becoming a crowded place, where it’s getting more difficult to get your message seen. To deal with these issues, you need to take a strategic approach to social media marketing to ensure that your efforts are worth their time. Read on for guidelines to build the right social media strategy for you.

Networks

Being strategic with your time and planning means not being on every single network. Identify which social media networks make sense for you to market on. One way to do this is to identify who you are trying to reach and match them with a market. Are you trying to reach domain savvy, younger individuals? Twitter may be the right network for you. Are you trying to reach stay at home parents and middle aged users? Facebook may be the right match. It’s important to follow specific network guidelines and best practices to better identify what networks you should be marketing on.

Skills

Are you an experienced videographer or do you absolutely hate seeing and hearing yourself on screen? That’s an easy question you can ask yourself tied to skills. Your answer will decide whether video should be part of your social media strategy or not. Identify what things you excel at, maybe it’s writing. That would mean blogging should be part of your strategy. Outside of simply using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, what special skills do you have? Find a way to work them into a strategy. For example, maybe you’re a whiz in photoshop–use powerful images to help your social media marketing strategy.

Goals

Goals can be the biggest part of your strategy decisions. You need to know what you want to accomplish before you can build a winning strategy. Do you want more followers? That’s great, but why? Many people get caught up in the popularity of social media–trying to gain friends and followers–but don’t go farther than that to ask themselves what they hope to get from these friends and followers. Rather than having such a general goal, consider setting more specific goals tied to your business. For example, set the goal of having a certain number of people clicking the link to your website or set the goal of have x number of followers from your home town, which means they could actually go to your brick and mortar business.

Tools

Free tools can help make your social media marketing a bit easier. Many of us don’t have time to be on Facebook or Twitter all day, but it’s necessary to be aware of what’s going on on these networks to do your best marketing. To combat this, use free services like TweetDeck or HootSuite. These allow you to schedule content on multiple social networks as well as monitor your profiles for you when you’re not around so you can see who is talking about you or posting about you at all hours.

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How to Use Instagram for Marketing

August 13, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Social media is a powerful and most often used free tool for marketing. Social networks allow you to connect with new people and build on relationships with those you already know. Some social networks are better for marketing than others. One social network that offers some unique marketing opportunities that you may not have thought of is Instagram. Instagram is a visual medium that lets you quickly connect with people you know and others you don’t. Like open social networks such as Twitter, Instagram is a discoverable network, which means you don’t have to be connected with someone to see their posts.

Here are a few ways to use successfully use Instagram for marketing:

Show Proof

How can you prove that your product works, or that you’re as successful in your affiliate program as you say you are? A photo. Photos offer great proof or a sort of testament for your business. Proof can be a photo of a meeting with excited new members of your team. Proof can be a photo of the pizza special you’re offering at your restaurant. Proof can be a shot of your commission check (with all personal information blacked out) to show you’re earning income. All this proof demonstrates the legitimacy of your business and the opportunities for others. What else could you use for proof?

Use Relevant Quotes

Quotes are very popular on Instagram. How often have you scrolled through your Instagram feed and liked a photo of a powerful, inspirational quote? Quotes get likes and shares. You can easily find quotes to share online by searching or just make your own. One tip to make sure your quote gets you the right attention? Spell check! Go one step farther to encourage engagement on your quote photos by adding text such as “Double tap if you agree.” The double tap is a shortcut to liking the photo, and when someone likes your photos, others can see this under the “Following Activity.” Many users click on “Following Activity” to see what posts their friends have liked, giving your content more reach.

Inspire People

Inspiration and motivation are great for business. Instagram is an easy way to share inspiration for your business and your team. Inspiration you share on Instagram might be a post of what you’d like your office or future business to look like. It can also be from other succeeding in an affiliate program and showing what they have achieved as a way to inspire yourself and your team.

Make Use of Hashtags

We explained in the introduction that Instagram is a highly discoverable social network. One thing that makes it discoverable is hashtags. Much like Twitter, users on Instagram use hashtags to identify their photos as well as find new ones. When posting, use lots of hashtags to ensure people find your content. Use hashtags relevant to your image as well as to your business. While hashtags often appear in the main text of the tweet on Twitter, hashtags should always come after your caption on Instagram. Follow this format: Here is my photo. #hashtag #business #affiliate #income.

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Social Media, Uncategorized

6 “Don’ts” and 1 “Do” of Social Media Promotion

July 16, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Social media marketing has become one of the most effective tactics for businesses to reach, educate, and engage with their target market. The strategy behind social media efforts for businesses is extremely important in getting the ROI and bottom line results you are looking for from this marketing method. The following list indicates some “dos” and “don’ts” of social media promotion in order to increase your success rate.

Don’t Link Bait.

What is link baiting? It’s using a misleading title or information to get someone to click on a link. An example of this might be someone saying “Become a millionaire” and linking to their GDI site. This information is false and used to get someone to click. Be truthful in all the links you share and try to be descriptive and concise with the text you use surrounding a link.

Don’t Promote at the Wrong Time.

Where in the country are your customers, downline, team members? Try to time posts to when they might be awake, online ready to click. You can also use trial and error to identify the best time to post your content. If your post isn’t getting any traction, keep trying new time slots until you find you get the most clicks. Try to keep your posts to that time of day to ensure the most people see your content. If you manage your Facebook presence using a page, you can look in your Insights to see when your fans are online. You can also use Twitter Analytics, which is available to all users, to see what time your tweets get the most interaction.

Don’t Post Too Often.

You’ve seen this before: one user who fills up your Twitter or Facebook feed with a series of posts. Often times, this is a sure way for that person to get you to unfollow or unlike their page. Don’t do this. While posting multiple times in a day is OK for most networks, try not to post back to back. People may unfollow you if you clog up their feed or just assume you’re a bot.

Don’t Post Too Infrequently.

While you shouldn’t post too often, not posting enough is also an issue. People may find your Facebook or Twitter profile while searching for information on you or your business, if they click on your profile and see that you’ve haven’t posted in a few weeks, they may think you are no longer active. Try to post at least once a week so it’s obvious to those who find your page that your are active and responsive.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin.

There are many social networks out there. In fact, it seems like there is a new network debuting each day. You don’t have to be on all of these networks. Find which networks you like the best and where your customers spend their time. These are the networks that will give you the best return on your time.

Do Be Yourself.

While you want to put your best self forward while promoting on social media, you do not need to create a whole new persona. People can hide behind fake profile photos and names, don’t do this if you want to build your team and you want customers to trust you. Be genuine online and present your real self when possible. Social media is about relationships and it’s hard to build strong ones when you are pretending to be someone else.

There is seemingly endless opportunity to generate new business via social media promotion efforts for B2B businesses, B2C businesses, and entrepreneurs alike. Make sure you don’t miss out on success by following the social media promotion tips listed above.