26 Tips to Create Social Media Magic for Your Business

26 tips to create social media magic for your business

Have you found your brand’s social media is hitting a wall? Social media marketing takes time, talent, and a lot of creative brain power and it’s possible to get burned out. I’m going to share some easy, actionable items that you can do to put the social media magic back into your brand.

My colleague Rebekah Radice and I teamed up on this together to create a total of 52 tips and here is part one from her blog: How to Create Social Media Magic. Add in my 26 here and voila! You’re in business, baby!

I’m going to break down the tips by social media platform but many tips will work on any platform. Each platform has its own nuances for posting but many of the “common sense” guidelines for social media apply everywhere.


Google+

1. Create a weekly Google+ Hangout series to highlight your brand’s services, talk about industry updates, or to connect with customers. These will live on YouTube and be sharable on your blog and throughout all your social media platforms.

2. Use your super size cover photo to make an impact. At 2120 x 1192, you have no excuse for lacking visual impact. If you are design challenged, hire someone to create something memorable for you.

3. Use Friends + Meto connect your Google+ to other social channels. Use this for thoughtful sharing from Google+ to other social platforms.

4. Highlight your business’s accomplishments on your About page. There’s a lot of rich territory on Google+ so utilize it to boost your social SMO throughout the web.

5. Get your Google+ authorship set up. As Mark Traphagen says, “Google wants to pump you up in search.” Connect your Google+ account and receive a boost in Google search.
Pinterest

6. Tell your brand story with Pinterest boards.

7. Use secret boards to work with a team and build marketing campaigns.

8. Add a board with links to your other social networks and blog so people can find you everywhere.

9. Brand your images for Pinterest with your company watermark.

10. Use the #PinofTheDay hashtag to connect your content with other pinners and work across social media platforms.

More tips on my All Things Pinterest Board
Facebook Page

11. Host a Facebook Q & A on your Facebook page.

12. Make sure your Facebook page is attractive and optimized. You should change your cover photo occasionally for the seasons or for different marketing campaigns to keep your page fresh.

13. Customize your Facebook tabs.

14. Use square images for regular posts with a 1:1 ratio aspect or size them at 500 x 500 pixels. This is easy to do in PicMonkey or Photoshop.

15. Analyze your Facebook page on LikeAlyzer and keep making tweaks in your content to improve your page.

More resources on my Facebook Tips and Tricks board
Twitter

16. Set your profile up properly using all your visual assets and adding industry keywords with a link to your website.

Twitter Size Cheat Sheet

17. Participant or host Twitter chats to meet people in your industry or potential clients.

18. Use Social Bro or another third-party app to help grow your Twitter follow base the right way.

7 ways your business can gain more followers

19. Twitter is about interesting conversations. Make sure you say hello and talk with people. No broadcasting allowed.

20. Etiquette counts on Twitter. Tweet others the way that you want to be tweeted.

More resources on my Social Media Savoir Faire board
LinkedIn

21. Connect with influencers through the LinkedIn Influencer program. They are creating original content on LinkedIn and this is a rich resource of relevant LinkedIn content share for your updates.

22. Need to scope out the competition? Go stealth by becoming anonymous to do your research, then switch back to public for networking.

23. Customize the links to your websites for a more professional look.

24. Create great updates for more engagement. Link dropping isn’t effective.

25. Make sure that you add a custom message to each invitation to connect on LinkedIn. Remember that you can’t do this from the apps.

More resources on my A Little Love for LinkedIn board.
Biggest tip for last!

26. Be consistent in all your social media efforts. Pick one platform and learn to use it well before branching out to other platforms. Being really great on one platform is preferable to sucking on many platforms. Make sure that you are having fun and enjoying the social interaction. There is a trend in hiring agencies to handle social media for brands but I urge you to have people who are connected with your brand doing your social media. Farmed out social media can end up looking like farmed out social media. Bleck. If you feel like you don’t have time or the skills, please do hire someone to help you with your social media but make sure they know what they are doing and have active, solid social media platforms of their own. If they don’t have an active and vibrant social media platform themselves, how will they create one for you?

I hope that these tips will spark some new ideas and get your brain fired up for creating some social media magic of your own!

Disclosure: Social Bro provides me with a free pro version but I only use social media tools that I love and are helpful. It things don’t work, I don’t recommend them.

Photo credit: Big Stock Photos

Pinterest Introduces New Article Pinning Feature

Pinterest is already being used as a great tool to discover and collect articles in the form of an online scrapbook, with more than 5 million articles being pinned every day. Pinterest has recently decided to expand on this use, creating a new look for article pins, which allows them to have more information – including the headline, author, story description and link all on the pin. This allows articles to be pinned, saved and organised more efficiently.

Image - Pinterest blog

This follows a similar move which Pinterest introduced back in May with its ‘Rich pins’. This development allowed pins to feature a greater amount of detail on them, particularly useful for pins that feature recipes, films or products purchasable online as they could enrich the pins with updated details like ingredients, movie reviews or the availability of goods and prices. This was a valuable move making Pinterest more useful for business and not just for personal use. The article pinning feature will also help aid Pinterest for business because it provides "a great way for writers and publications to reach new and existing audiences" according to Sarah Bush, the newly appointed UK country manager for Pinterest. These latest developments therefore seem to suggest that Pinterest is trying to make its platform more useful to business users as well as to those who use the site for personal reasons.

The new feature for pinning articles better will help to make the pinned articles look more relevant at a first glance. Pinterest users will now be able to see the headline, author, story description and link when they come across an article that has been pinned on the site. The Pinterest blog has also commented that this feature will soon be rolling out to mobile phone users as well as those on computers. In addition to showing similarities to the new ‘Rich pins’ which Pinterest introduced, it is also shows a likeness to Twitter’s introduction of “expanded Tweets” which they introduced last year. This offers a similar feature, showing an article preview with a headline, image thumbnail and article introduction.

The new feature also helps people to take a ‘pin now, read later’ approach, as they can save articles which they have come across online and choose to read them at a later date when it is more convenient to them. This allows users to create their own reading room on Pinterest by adding the Pin It button to their own browser so that they can start creating a collection of articles that they want to read. The Pinterest reading room also helps you to find interesting new content to read as there are a number of high-profile names who are already using the feature. For instance, Arianna Huffington who has an article board to give an insight into what she is reading at the moment.

This new feature can be particularly useful for publishers who are trying to reach a target audience composed mainly of women, as women are the most common user of the site, making up around 72% of the total users. Pinterest has already proved to be a major referral source of traffic and a study by Yieldbot, has found that Pinterest dominated referral traffic across leading publisher websites, representing 85.2% of referral traffic compared to just 8.3% for Facebook.

A number of sites have already signed up for the service including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable and the Guardian to name a few. For now, it looks like Pinterest Article pins will be a successful new addition to the site, adding a new dimension to the website which has until now been known mainly for its visual content.

What do you think?

Do you think that the addition of Pinterest article pins will benefit the site and increase its use?

4 Cool Tools To Drive Huge Traffic From Pinterest

Do you use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website?

Pinterest has grown tremendously in the last few years and have become one of the best marketing platform for millions of businesses across the globe, so, if you are not using Pinterest yet, you should consider it right way.

If you are already using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website, the tools listed below will definitely increase the amount of traffic you are getting from Pinterest.

Also Read: The best wordpress plugins for social sharing

 4 Useful Pinterest Tools

1. Pinstamatic:

If you want to make the best use of Pinterest than this tool can do a great job for you. Pinstamatic is a very easy to use effective tool, with Pinstamatic you do much more than just posting images on Pinterest.

For example you can post your Twitter profile as a great looking pin on Pinterest, just write your Twitter username in Pinstamatic it will provide a simple visual representation of the profile and their last tweet which your followers can click on to take them to the corresponding Twitter page.

You can create colorful sticky notes with short message and share with your followers, you can share your favorite music and let your friends play songs directly from your board.

You can post lots of other stuff which using this tool which will help you to drive huge traffic from Pinterest.

2. PinAlerts:

PinAlerts notifies you  whenever someone pins something from your website, which will help you to track users who are interested in your content and increase your followers.

3. Pinpuff:

Pinpuff is a free-to-use tool, aiming to accurately measure Pinterest user’s influence, reach and virality on Pinterest, assign a Pinfluence score and monetary values of their pins.

To get started with your analytics on Pinpuff, go to the website and fill in your email and your Pinterest username, then click on the button ‘Calculate your Pinfluence’.

4. Share As Image:

Share As Image lets you highlight text anywhere on the web and easily convert it into an image. With the PRO version you can choose fonts, colors and text size! Once you’ve created your quote image, you can share it on Pinterest

If you know any other Pinterest Tool which will help to drive huge traffic from Pinterest, do share with us using the comment form below.