Social media marketing is the art of promoting your content to people who might be interested. To successfully engage an audience you must understand the type of content they are likely to consume and then tailor your strategies around such contents. This will not only increase engagements but also help you build loyal followers.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and blogs such as Linda Ikeji and Pulse all have different audiences. Furthermore Pulse’s audience on Twitter is different from their audience on Facebook. So creating one type of content for every of their audience will not work. Which is why you need to know who your target audience is.
You can use these simple steps to find out who are your key target audience, and the sort of content they are interested in.
Their Demography: Who are they? What do they do? Where do they stay? What is the primary gender? How do they consume content? What are their ages? What is their relationship status? Are they parents?
Study the Data: Use analytic tools like Google Analytics or Twitter Analytics. Take notes of your most engaging tweets/posts. Ask yourself why they performed well or badly. Was it the caption, the headline, was it because it was off a trending topic, did someone popular/influencer retweet your post, was it on a celebrity, was it the image used or the video? The more you understand your audience the easier it becomes to engage them by creating content they can relate with.
Online video now makes up more than 74% of all online traffic. People now spend over 2.6 more time on pages with video than they do on pages that do not have video. This is a huge traffic stream that can be tapped into by Bloggers. Take the advantages of making video as part of your content strategy.
Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – adding a video to your website increases the chance of the article appearing on the front page of Google search result by 53 times.
Higher engagement – audiences are about 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts.
Higher Retention Rates – 65% of viewers watch more than ¾ of a video, which is more than we can say about text-based content. So if you have a message to get across (and why wouldn’t you, if you’re creating content?), a video might be the way to go.
Ways to drive free traffic to your blog
- Social sharing buttons: This should be visible on your homepage and blog posts.
- Call to Actions (CTAs): invite your audience to like, share or comment on your post.
- Jump on trends: Creating content around trending topics promotes your blog for free, as people searching for this trending topics will find your posts.
- Host a contest: Contests such as sweepstakes are a good way of promoting your blog for free.
- Blog about a celebrity: Celebrities already have huge followings a blogger can tap into by creating content their fans want to read.
- Guest blogging: Guest bloggers not only create content but also share the content they create with their followers.
- YouTube: You can use YouTube videos to drive traffic to your site.
- Social media: You can share your content on social media
- Newsletters: Sending out newsletters to your subscribers is another source of free traffic. Work on building your mailing lists
- Online forums: Nairaland is a great place to get free promotion
- SEO: Optimizing your blog post for search is also a great way to get free promotion.
Conclusion
Social Media Marketing should be an important part of your marketing strategy. Understand what works best for your audience and build on it. Use the various channels available to you to reach your target audience and grow your following.