By Chemory Gunko
5 ways to boost your social media reach (MS Word)
Social Media platforms, when utilised effectively, can return amazing marketing results for minimal effort and costs.
What’s more, the traction and reach you gain are not limited to a single campaign, as the fans you win over are expecting to hear from you again and again.
Relevant, topical content
By paying attention to what’s going on around you and aligning your posts to relevant and topical trends, you’re much more likely to achieve virality.
A key thing to remember here is to post about things that are generally topical and applicable to everyone, or to post about issues and trends that are specifically aligned to your industry.
So, while every South African page can celebrate National Braai Day, posting about dolphin fishing is only relevant if you’re animal rights page, or your CSI ties into dolphin or animal rights.
Remember, people have followed you because they respect your opinions and thoughts, and they want to know what is going on in your industry. Giving them animal rights information on your homewares page is kind of like handing a Sports Illustrated to a woman just paid for a Cosmo.
Shake That Ass Tootsie!
Ideas don’t happen in isolation, and the key to being the person that picks up the virality around a topic is often being the first to post about it.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t post about things that have already been posted about, especially if they are relevant to your industry and audience, but you should aim to get the posts out there as quickly – and professionally – as possible.
Keep It Short & Sweet
As much as we’d all like to think otherwise, people don’t really read posts – or even much of anything – online. They do scan though, and briefly flit over bits of information from here and there, and they only really delve further if something has really attracted their interest.
Even here though, you’ll lose them if your post is too long, as can be evidenced by the abbreviation TL;DR – too long; didn’t read.
The art of great copywriting is really about being able to seamlessly mesh a whole bunch of different information, with clarity and brevity. Great social media posts are all about great copywriting.
Add imagery whenever possible
This one is really a no-brainer: you simply have to look at any of your social media feeds to see that the posts that jump up and shout, “Read Me! Read Me!” are usually the ones with images.
If at all possible, try and have branded images made up.That way, when the post is shared your marketing reach is extended, and people who are seeing a share of a share of a share, know who you are and where to find you.
Something else to think carefully about is on-sharing other companies’ posts all the time.
In the case of partners and clients, this is great, because they will get additional reach from it, but once those shares have moved on, they lose any link back to you, which is a killer when you’re trying to achieve viralityand marketing reach with a post or campaign.
Plan your posting time
Not everyone has access to social media during the day, and not everyone goes online at night.
Be aware of your audience, and the times that they are most likely to engage with their social media – because a random post at ten in the morning won’t reach kids in school or people busy in meetings.
Chemory Gunko is the managing director and creative director of Dsignhaus, a B2B marketing services agency with in-depth and specialist knowledge in the field of digital marketing. Contact Chemory on chemory@dsignhaus.co.za, visit www.dsignhaus.co.za, follow @dsignhaus on Twitter or join the Facebook page on www.facebook.com/Dsignhaus.
Submission & Enquiries
Chemory Gunko
MD & Creative Director
Dsignhaus (Pty) Ltd
Tel: 011 025 4165
Cell: 082 224 2357
Email: chemory@dsignhaus.co.za
Web: www.dsignhaus.co.za
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