It’s tough to get noticed on a crowded platform, especially when your rivals are given access to the same tools as you. Such is the case on social media, where anyone can set-up an account and share content for free.
Experts forecast a 4300% increase in data production per yer by 2020! Even if you do create the best, most compelling content out there, a lot of people see it unless you put extra effort into extending the reach of that content. To beat the data explosion, you must find ways to amplify your shares on social media. Your content needs to get picked up by scores of people and get shared across multiple platforms in order to truly have impact in terms of conversion to leads.
The following are 5 cool methods to help you amplify your reach on social media.
1. Employee Advocacy
A lot of brands spend large amounts of money on advocates to create elements of “real” and “human” in the hope that their audience will associate that with the brand’s products and services. Advocacy has been proven as an effective means of connecting with audiences and convincing them to buy into brands and their ideas.
What most brands don’t realize, however, is that they could find their best advocates in their employees.
On social media, your employees combined have multiple times the number of connections your brand pages have. Plus, people trust people more than they do brand pages. That’s why employee advocacy is a great way of amplifying the reach and potency of your brand messages on social media. If you’re worried about the time and effort to be invested on employee advocacy, you could use an employee advocacy platform like DrumUp – Employee Advocacy. DrumUp provides relevant content suggestions, ways to add your custom posts, a common employee advocacy stream that you can manage, and a leader board that gamifies the employee advocacy to keep your employees excited about it.
2. Influencer marketing
Influencers spend many hours building their presence and developing valuable relationships on social. Any influencer you see with a huge following has probably invested and continues to invest substantial time and effort in maintaining that presence, which is why it’s not okay to simply approach them to leverage their networks.
To work with influencers, you need to invest your own time and effort to build meaningful relationships with them. To start off with, identify the top 50 influential people in your niche’ and follow them on social media. To identify influencers on social, try FollowerWonk by Moz. It helps you search by keyword and discover people who have the most reach.
Read some of the influencers’ work, genuinely compliment them on what you like, and attempt to engage them in conversations. Share content of theirs that you like; people love to have their content shared. Truly follow them and get to know them before you ask them to do something. And when you do ask, attempt to involve them in activities that add value on their end as well. For instance, you could do interviews or request them for expert quotes for your blogs, which will help them further boost their own authority.
In summary, this content strategy needs a varied approach. Respect and genuine conversations are what drives shares on social media, just as much with influencers as it would with everyone else you connect with on social.
3. Community outreach
View social as a community, because, after all, that’s pretty much what it is. It is important to remember why people use social media—to connect with friends, be entertained, and find valuable information. Keeping this in mind is vital to creating a good strategy for outreach on social.
If you want to locate and engage as many people as possible in your high-potential audience, a good place to start would be on social media and online communities. Much like offline communities, online communities are formed with shared common passions or purposes. So if you locate communities dedicated to discussing information related to your industry, you have found your target audience.
Engage with the community, share relevant blog posts that helps people, and give away information for free. The idea is position yourself as an industry expert and to be present at the top of your audience’s mind when they are ready to make the buy.
You can find relevant communities on a number of networks, including Quora, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even industry-specific sites.
4. User-Generated Content
Content creation is an indispensable part of social media marketing, but you don’t have to do it all by yourself. Creating high-quality content is time consuming, but the good news is that there is a lot of great content already out there that you could share with your audience. Alternatively, you could encourage your audience to create content for you.
User Generated Content (UGC) is one of the most compelling forms of content and is relatively easier to put together than your own content. The only real challenges are pushing your audience to participate, and managing the content that you receive.
A well-executed hashtag campaign or social media contest can generate a lot of buzz for your brand. You could use an online software like Hashtagify to manage and analyze your hashtag Twitter campaigns.
UGC is great for sales. If you create a campaign that showcases your product and people using it, your social credibility would shoot up, providing a compelling source of word-of-mouth marketing.
5. Interactive images and infographics
The most powerful aspect of social is that your audience has the ability to pick up a piece of information from one channel and then share it via other channels. There is a lot of activity that reaches beyond your own content creation and marketing efforts. The goal is to tap into it.
One way of facilitating this is by making your content sharable by:
- Enabling social plug ins in the body of your posts so people can tweet a quote as they are reading.
- Making images and infographics pin-able.
- Adding notes to indicate that your visuals are up for shares . Upload them on free, online resources to make it easy for your audience to discover and share your content. Flickr, SlideShare, Pinterest and are examples of good online image resources to be on.
- Creating infographics and images to make your posts more visually appealing and compelling to share. There are free and easy to use tools to help you create such images.
Ultimately, the your content’s social sharing potential depends on how useful it is, how well it’s written, how easy it is to discover and how interactive it is. Split the time you spend on content accordingly to cover all four bases will help you achieve a nice boost in your content reach.