Most people know that social media is the future of business, but not many have the time to actually use social media to it’s full potential. It doesn’t matter whether you own a start-up business or you simply need more website visitors, social media marketing is vitally important to your success. So how much time do you need to market your business on social media? If you want to truly reap the rewards, you need to make sure that you develop a solid social media marketing plan. This involves analysing where your ideal clients or customers are. Twitter is often one of the best places to start. Your Twitter accounts will give you some great analytics to find out where your highest traffic is coming from, as well as finding the best time to post each day. This will not only increase your conversion rate, but it will also allow you to post less tweets each day, while still getting top results, effectively cutting down on the time it takes to build your social media presence.
Time Effective Solutions
Regardless of which social media platforms you choose to use, using content scheduling platforms such as Hootsuite is potentially the biggest time saver you can invest in. Scheduling your content once a week or month instead of multiple times per day is a great first step.
You may think that hiring a social media marketing assistant is the way to go when you start up your social media accounts, and for some, this is the best option. If you don’t really have the budget to hire one however, you may think that you have no chance of success on social media because you simply don’t have the time to monitor and track your activity effectively. Many social media sites have made it easier than ever to monitor your traffic. For example, Twitter has a feature which allows you to see your top tweets. This is normally emailed to you; however it allows you to see how many favourites and re-tweets you have on earlier posts without having to scroll through your entire news feed.
Most scheduling software such as Hootsuite also give you real time insights and analytics, so you can see which tweets had the best response from your viewers. By making your other tweets somewhat related to your successful posts, you can build your presence by posting just a few tweets each day, getting the same results as someone who posts hundreds with minimal feedback on each tweet.
The Psychology behind Re-tweeting
By finding your top tweets, you can then begin to create your own marketing plan. You should also take into account the time you posted these tweets, as this will help you to reach out to your viewers when they are most active. So now you know your most successful tweets, ones that really hit home with your users as well as getting you plenty of feedback. The next step is to understand the psychology of re-tweeting. Many people search for hashtags when they want some interesting content to re-tweet, however casual users are much more likely to re-tweet something that has a couple of hundred re-tweets when compared to a post which only has between 5-10. For example, if a news post surfaced and it only had 1 re-tweet, many would consider it as spam. If the post had thousands of re-tweets however, the user is more likely to think of it as reliable and trustworthy information. This same concept applies to business tweets, especially if your user doesn’t know you or your company. The trick to getting lot’s of re-tweets is to focus on getting the first few, so you really don’t need to invest hours on end to get your business that little exposure it needs to boost sales. Go back through your quality posts and look at your feedback. Construct other tweets like this, and post them at the same time of day. Encourage re-tweets by giving shout-outs to say thank you, or re-tweet other peoples to put your name on the map. Remember that every person that re-tweets you is giving your post exposure to potentially thousands more users.
A small amount of time spent each week improving your engagement in this way is a sure way to rocket your social media presence. Once you gain some traction and following your on-going results will grow and grow.