Ryan Gravatt

Social media is alive and well, and only growing in influence. Keeping up with the ever changing and updating trends can seem overwhelming and even a lost cause but there are strategies that will offer peace of mind.

Schedule your posts ahead of time.

Block out some time on a weekend or whenever there’s a gap in your weekday madness to schedule your posts for the week. There are even some free online tools to help you accomplish this. Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts in advance and choose the times they will be posted in the future. Scheduling regular posts can help show your customers that you’re active and working and ready to help be a champion for them.

Observe companies who you aspire to be.

Learning from the best is always a good strategy when starting something new. Take notes. Be observant of what types of posts get the most attention. Observing your competitors’ practices and what helps and doesn’t help them can allow you to learn from other experts in the field.

Hire a consultant.

Hiring someone to manage the headache for you is a viable strategy for anyone with a schedule too packed to even begin thinking about a social media strategy. Don’t know what to post? A consultant will help you decide this as well. Thinking of running for office but don’t know how to navigate the social media waters? Raconteur Media has the team who understands your goals and will work with you to be your guide in your campaign.

In January, Twitter said its users launched more than 500 million Tweets daily. With so many Tweets flying around daily, is it still an effective tool for companies and brands to stay connected with their customers, employees, and business partners?

I think the answer is Yes – but only if you’re focusing on your goals and measuring outcomes.

Ultimately, we help our clients answer this question:

“How can we leverage Twitter to help you?”

Build a Community

Tweeting consistently about relevant topics allows you to get to know your customers and build a stronger relationship with them. Find a topic that connects with your followers.  Start answering these key questions based upon your audience interaction:

• How often should you Tweet?
• What kinds of content get the most engagement?
• Which hashtags increase your impressions?
• Who are the most influential people in your audience?

Answering these questions will bring recognition to you in your brand and will enhance your in-bound marketing strategy.

According to U.S News, 85 percent of followers feel more connected with businesses after following them. And 72 percent of followers are more likely to buy something from a business they follow.

Most people feel flattered when a brand acknowledges them and shares their content.

Keep Up on News and Trends

Twitter is a great way to keep up with the latest news and trends. You can also measure trending topics relevant to your audience. When you Tweet during an emerging trend that’s important to your audience, people who are interested in your content are on Twitter and ready to engage.

Examples of trends for business typically happen around news about brands, conferences and products. But you can get into the conversation about locations or your industry. Just make sure you stay true to your brand and that you’re providing engagement to deepen conversations and relationships.

Curate user-generated content

Twitter is ideal for content curation. Develop a goal for content creation and curation. Are you becoming a source of breaking news or do you want to be a resource for your customers and potential customers? Either way, you’ll need a strategy to find, create and publish the content.

We recommend using tools to schedule your publishing and an editorial calendar for planning your schedule.

Keeping your audience active and engaged means producing personal content on a daily basis (or curating content).

Use Hashtags

Hashtags give tweets context and longevity. Context is important because you put your message in front of the right audience at the right time.  

Using hashtags also puts your message in front of people who may not be following you. When they’re following a hashtag conversation, they’ll see your message. Hopefully, they engage and take a beneficial action for you, like retweeting or responding to you.  Testing hashtags is also the key to finding the right conversations for you on Twitter. Try using the same message  with a variety of hashtags which are related.

If you’re a digital marketing agency like us, you might try #marketing, #digitalmarketing or #emailmarketing.  Try using Twitter’s search to find hashtags that work for you.

Check Your Analytics

Twitter offers analytics for your account. Login and visit, https://analytics.twitter.com. Here you’ll find statistics for your top tweet, your top followers and your top mention. The statistics are organized for the current month and the previous month. So check regularly and compare months before Twitter archives the data.

Here’s what you’ll see:

• Your Top Tweet is your tweet that got the most impressions that month. Study what you posted and whose engagement helped spread your post.
• Your Top Mention is the tweet mentioning you that got the most views in the month.
• Your Top Follower is the new follower that month with the largest following. Tweeting to this person and building a relationship will help you.
• Your Top Media Tweet is  your tweet with the photo, video, or Vine that received the highest number of impressions.

These are the highlights, there’s more here https://analytics.twitter.com. If you have a strategy with the right tools to execute it, then you want to check your Twitter analytics to make sure your efforts are paying off.

Your Website needs to have a clear, strong call to action. Inviting people into an engagement step with you is the most necessary part of marketing. And the most important part of digital marketing is having a clear call to action on your Website.

What’s a call to action? It’s the words or phrase that call people to take a step into engagement with your product or brand. If you’re an author, Buy the Book is the perfect call to action on your Website.

What should your call to action be? If you’re asking this question, that probably means you don’t have a call to action on your Website or you’re unsure whether you have a clear call to action. That’s okay. Lots of companies and people launch Websites without a clear strong call to action. And it’s never too late to fix this.

Your best call to action is going to be whatever helps get you into a one-to-one relationship with a customer or potential customer. Every industry has different standards and different ways to build a relationship. On an e-commerce Website with one product, the call to action is Buy. If you’re an e-commerce Website with multiple products, the call to action is Shop. For example, https://www.easton.com/, uses Shop because they have multiple products and many different types of shoppers coming to their site.

A word of caution about constructing your strong clear call to action: Think of your customer journey and how they decide to buy your product or hire you. The Call to Actions I provided above are simple and easy to visualize, but think about a more complicated purchase, like a car. Look at Mercedes Benz of Austin, https://www.mercedesbenzofaustin.com/. Their calls to action are smaller and more subtle. They also have several, which is okay for their purposes because a car is a major purchase. People do a lot of research before they even step into a dealership. You will not see a Buy the Car call to action on the homepage of a good auto dealer Website because that just won’t work. It could even backfire and scare customers away. Instead, you’ll see Call Us or Chat With Us, and you’ll see more simple ways for people to start their shopping journey, like looking up cars by make, model and year. They are letting people immerse themselves in the site to help them convince themselves whether to buy a car eventually. Even the virtual car dealership Carvana, https://www.carvana.com/, stays away from aggressive calls to action – and it spends $4.26 million annually on advertising that tells people to shop and buy their car online.

The point of talking about car dealerships, and those trying to disrupt them, is all of them have studied their customers. They know how their customers are shopping and buying products and services. Do you? Think about what your customers did before they hired you or bought your product. Then what did they do? And then what? How much information did they have before you closed the deal?

Start with this thinking and make your strong, clear call to action match what gets your customers to buy from you. You’ll increase your success. I promise.