Guest Post: Fix Your Social Media Thinking

Today’s guest post is by Jill Kurtz, who provides online marketing strategies for small businesses through Kurtz Digital Strategy. She uses more than 30 years of marketing and communication experience to help each client reach customers and prospects using websites, social media, and other online tools.

Social media is not a new marketing tool. You may think you have got it figured out, but best practices change over time. If you are seeing declines in engagement and impact on social media, it may be time to reassess your approach.

Ditch Outdated Social Media Marketing Approaches

These outdated tactics work against success:

Counting followers. Followers and on-platform engagement alone will not help grow your business. Marketers who are tracking the number of followers and/or the amount of likes they get on a post are making a huge mistake. Metrics such as impressions, website visits, time on site, conversions, and bounce rate are more insightful. These show you how social media activity helps you meet your business goals.
Post quantity over quality. Posting x times a day or week isn’t enough. The content needs to be meaningful to your audience. It you don’t have anything engaging to share, no post is better than a meaningless post.

Get Your Social Media Marketing on Track

There is no one way to find success on social. Your brand, your goals, your audience and your story all add up to define a unique path to success. Look at your data to learn about what works, what doesn’t, and to find opportunities.

Here are five ideas to consider:

Share follower content. Take time to see what your active followers are posting on their channels. Share the things that represent a good intersection of their interests and yours. In a relationship, both parties should have the opportunity to initiate discussion.
Say thanks. Appreciate your network by taking time to say thanks. Thanking your network for input or simply for being connected is easy to do and can help strengthen connection.
Turn comments into content. Getting comments and feedback? Use them on your social channels as content! Make a post about a review or comment. Create a meme that uses a follower’s quote.
Let followers set the agenda. Give your followers a vote in what you do. Be sure to ask people what they want from you online. Point out what you do to deliver.
Offer exclusives. Share thoughts and inside information with your followers that add benefits to their relationship with you.

Develop your social media outreach in a way that is natural for you and your brand. Those connections will really help you tap into the value of social media in creating relationships that build your brand, now and into the future.

Keep Social Media in Context

A mistake that a lot of brands make is thinking that social media alone makes a great marketing plan. You need a complete online presence: a high-quality website, email marketing, and a solid search engine marketing approach. All of these elements need to work in concert to create effective online marketing.