21 Things You Must Do to Get Amazing Results from Your Social Media Marketing (Part 1)

If you are using social media to promote your business, or you are thinking about using social media to promote your business, then the first step to being successful in your social media marketing efforts is to put a plan in place.  Create a social media marketing plan that will outline what you want to achieve on social media and how you plan to do it.  It is important to include in your plan the strategies and tactics to grow your social networks and keep them engaged.  In this blog post series, I will go over some tips on creating engaging content and growing your social networks.

Here are 7 tips for creating engaging content on social media:

1. Know your target market– when you are very specific about your target market, you will be able to know the best social networks to be on to reach your target market, and you will also be able to identify the problems your target market may be encountering and be able to use the appropriate information that talks about the solution to their problems.  Knowing exactly what to say to your target market keeps them engaged.
2. Create a content strategy and calendar– be sure to keep your overall content 80% Entertaining/Educating and only 20% promotional.  Create a content calendar so you can plan what topic you want to concentrate your conversations around each month, and make it relevant for your target audience and for your business.  Your content calendar could be for the next 90 days, 6 months, or 12 months.
3. Know what type of content you want to share– will your content be humorous, educational, inspirational, motivational, etc.?   It is good to have a good mix of various forms of content.
4. Automate the publishing of your content– there are some great tools available to help you to automate the publishing of your content on your social networks.  Some popular tools are HootSuite, Sprout Social, etc.  Planning out your content and then automating the publishing of it saves you a lot of time!
5. Include content that naturally creates more engagement this includes content like pictures, videos, questions, fill in the blank statements, polls/opinions, and inspirational quotes.
6. Ask people to like, comment, share, repin, retweet, etc. (whatever the appropriate terminology is for that particular social network you are on, ask people to do it).  You will be surprised, when you ask people to do something, a lot of times they will actually do it.
7. Consistently post good content– as the saying goes, content is king.  If you have good content, this will naturally encourage engagement.

What techniques and ways do you use to create engaging content on your social networks?

Just as equally important as creating engaging content is growing your social networks.  The next blog post in this series will discuss how to grow your social networks organically (without paying for it).  Stay tuned for the next blog post or click here to download the complete checklist of 21 Things You Must Do in Order to Get Amazing Results from Your Social Media Marketing!