By Sean Johnson
We provide a lot of advice when it comes to succeeding in social media. Whether it’s working with clients, or providing general advice in our blog, we always try to provide our best insights into the latest details of account optimization to the nature of tweets to the latest tools to help you do things better.
All great information, and often times pretty technical.
But success with your social media marketing goes well beyond the technical details. Success comes from continually building your audience – your social media reach – so that you are sharing your content with an ever-widening base of customers and prospects. If you are not growing your social reach, then you won’t have the traction you need to succeed in your social media marketing.
So, how do you grow that reach?
It takes a little time and dedication, but not all that complicated. In fact, there are 6 simple things you can do today that will help grow your reach and improve your social media marketing. Those steps include:
1. Completing your profile and using it regularly
Make sure you fill out all of the information in your profile and include a picture. Incomplete profiles or profiles without pictures signal a dead account or a spammer. If you only use your account sporadically, people will ignore it.
2. Including keywords
When you complete your profiles, you should include relevant keywords that you want to be known for where appropriate in both the profiles and your posts. Keywords make it easier for relevant prospects to find you when they conduct a search.
3. Promoting your social media accounts
Use your non-social outlets to tell customers and prospects where you can be found on social media. Include social media icons and addresses in your e-mail signatures, on your web pages and even on printed materials your company may distribute.
4. Making it easy to share
Add sharing buttons to all of your content and encourage your followers, customers and prospects to share your content across their networks. This further increases your reach and establishes you as a thought leader in your industry or niche.
5. Connecting and growing
Identify the key players in your industry and like, follow and share their content when its relevant to your message or brand. Connect with friends and colleagues.
6. Having a conversation
The whole point of social media is to engage and interact with others. When someone shares your content or comments on a post, thank them. See a post you like? Make a comment. Show there is a person behind the brand.
The great things about these six steps is that they apply to any social media channel, from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, and the smaller emerging networks dedicated to specific industries. Applying these tips and spending some dedicated time will help you grow your network and produce positive results, regardless of which social media channel you chose for your business.
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Sean Johnson is a Public Relations and Social Media Specialist for Weidert Group, a full-service marketing agency based in Appleton, Wisconsin. Sean has more than 20 years of experience in media as a journalist, writer, editor and new media advocate with newspapers and magazines in the Midwest. He specializes in helping clients tell their story by leveraging multiple platforms to reach their targets, as well as helping them plan and execute their content development.
