With more customers shopping online than ever before, and ever-increasing competition for attention, online businesses will only be able to maximize their success if they learn how to build on organic engagement in social media.
Don’t get me wrong, gaining organic traffic through search, and even conversions from paid ads, are still great ways to build a business. However, leveraging a community to build sales from organic engagement costs nothing more than your time. And besides that, there are plenty of tools available to help you along the way.
Here are five practical strategies you can implement straight away which will help boost traffic and sales through your social channels.
1. Create, Curate, and Share Awesome Content
If all you do through your social channels is promote your products, your audience is going to burn out on your pages and posts pretty fast. The more the engagement drops on your posts, the less often your new posts will be seen by your followers – after all, channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest want to display only the most interesting content to keep users engaged (and there are a lot of brands competing for the limited space in a user’s social feed).
Ramp up engagement by finding awesome repurposed content. I’m not just talking about reposting old articles or sharing cool stuff you found on other websites. Instead, take the Skyscraper approach or create something similar to Buzzfeed’s listicles.
Find an interesting topic and mold it into something much better than the original. That’s what the guys at Shopify did when they were tasked with launching a profitable business in just three days.
Using BuzzSumo, they searched for pieces of highly-shared content that was relevant to their audience. Using the original video created by someone else, they took the tips and created a targeted list post, then shared that to a relevant community online.
It didn’t take long for the new content to start driving traffic to the online store where the article was hosted.
While this surge of new traffic usually won’t result in immediate sales, well-optimized content like this will continuously send traffic and generate sales over the long run.
2. Embrace Micro-Content
One of the problems faced by many marketers today – not just those in eCommerce – is that the web is in a constant state of information overload. Audiences are bombarded with updates from their favorite brands, publishers, and media outlets, both directly and through the shares of people in their network.
With limited time and shrinking patience, consumers just aren’t willing to spend a lot of time digesting content anymore, you can’t expect them to be willing to watch a 10-minute video or read a 5,000-word article when they’re on the go.
This is why micro-content comes in handy. Short, 10-second Snapchats or brief videos posted to Instagram and Facebook – or even a video converted to GIF format for Twitter – can bump up your engagement.
With micro-content, you get the same benefits of video, and your audience is more likely to watch when they know it won’t cost them more than 10-20 seconds of their time.
Major brands have been leveraging this since Vine took off, including Lowe’s, Doritos, Taco Bell, and even NASCAR.
3. Blogs Are Social, Too
It’s not uncommon for marketers and online store owners to have tunnel vision and get stuck on the idea that social media is all about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. But blogs are absolutely forms of social media – they’re platforms where content is posted, and that content sees shares and comments, just like the more popular social platforms.
When you’re marketing an eCommerce business, be sure to include regular blog outreach in your social media strategy. It can drive a LOT of traffic back to your store if you do it right.
That’s what Richard Lazazzera from A Better Lemonade Stand learned when he challenged himself to launch a t-shirt business in just 24 hours. After creating his store on Shopify and listing his products, he reached out to a local blogger to ask if he would be interested in covering the products since they related to an article the blogger had recently published.
When Richard woke up the next morning, he found a stream of notifications from new customers that came from that blogger publishing a post about the shirts. That post not only led to sales but other people interested in collaborating with Richard.
Don’t just create your content, reach out to influencers and bloggers who align with your audience and work with them to get your business or products featured on other sites and social channels.
4. Create More Engaging Content
Whenever you post content on your social channels, it should have a purpose, whether that’s to generate comments, and shares, drive traffic to your store, etc. The best way to do that is to always create content with a focus on maximizing engagement.
Some of the best ways to do this include: asking questions, crafting strong call-to-action specific to engagement, and targeting your audience’s emotions with a little controversy from time to time.
This is particularly effective if you center your content around a product or your brand like Ahole Gear has done.
Doritos recently combined another one of the above approaches by creating a short video clip that leverages its product and adds a touch of political controversy to get people talking.
The more engaging your content is, the farther it will reach beyond your immediate followers as they comment, like, and share the content. This will lead to repeat customers as well as the acquisition of new customers who weren’t previously aware of your brand.
5. Use Social Reviews
Customer product reviews are great ways to build social proof on your product pages and let new customers know what they can expect when purchasing from you. A lot of eCommerce platforms use apps like Yotpo to develop more engaging reviews in their online stores, but you can also leverage reviews from your social media.
Not only does Yotpo enable you to connect your social accounts to post user-generated content on your pages, but Facebook also has its own native reviews that you should activate. This way, when prospective customers discover you in social media they can see right from the channel, without ever going to your site, that people are raving about your products and service.
For example, Coval Vapes is a brick-and-mortar store that also sells its products worldwide on its online store, and it has amassed a nice run of highly-rated reviews on its Facebook page.
Be sure to consistently encourage your fans to leave reviews. Rather than ask for reviews through your social channels, send follow-up emails after purchases and include a highly visible call-to-action note. Ask them to please come back and review their purchase on your social channels, or within your store, so you can later benefit from greater social proof generated by satisfied customers.
Social media marketing can help you build engaged audiences where your customers and target audience already spend their time.
Or, it can be a time-consuming obligation that spreads you thin, resulting in a drain on time and money rather than the asset you’ve seen it become for many established brands.
The difference is having a social media marketing planthat keeps your actions focused, along with a process that enables you to execute without taking too much attention away from running your business.
But starting from scratch can be a daunting task, especially with so many different channels to build a presence on and the commitment that comes with it.
That’s why we’ve put together this guide to walk you through how to approach your social media marketing strategy, along with tools and tips to help you pull it off.
A social media marketing strategy gives you a big-picture view of your social media marketing goals and how you can best achieve those outcomes. Brands continue to ride the wave of social media marketing, with 73% of marketers believing their efforts have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.
Whether it’s TikTok ads or influencer marketing, social media lets brands access cost-effective marketing. Like a Swiss Army knife, a social media marketing plan can serve all kinds of marketing functions from:
Driving traffic and sales;
Tapping into influencer networks;
Building brand awareness;
Amassing an engaged audience;
Connecting with customers and prospects;
Providing customer support.
This is because you have a wide range of channels to incorporate, each with its strengths and weaknesses to consider.
For the sake of simplicity and making it easy to get started, we’ll split your social media strategy into seven parts:
Goals: The outcomes you want from your efforts and how you’ll measure them.
Target audiences: Researching and defining your easiest customers.
Metrics: Creating a data-driven marketing strategy.
Content mix: Recurring ideas or post types to include in your social media programming.
Channels: The social networks you want to dedicate your time to and what you’ll use them for.
Infrastructure: Setting up the process and tools to execute your strategy efficiently.
Improvements: Adapt and innovate on your progress during the year.
This isn’t a prescription for digital marketing success, of course, only a framework to help you lay the foundation. By the end, you’ll be better equipped to understand how all of these pillars are connected and inform each other, helping you to make smarter decisions and revise your social media strategy over time.
How to create a social media marketing strategy
Analysis from Kepios shows that there are 4.65 billion social media users around the world in April 2022, equating to 58.7 percent of the total global population.
A good strategy will help your brand find the right customers in this growing space. It will also help you determine which social media platforms you should focus on. Whether you’re new to social media or revisiting your strategy for 2022, follow these steps to create your strategy.
Set social media goals that are relevant to your business;
Identify your target audiences on social media;
Decide your metrics and KPIs;
Create your social media content mix.
Set goals that are relevant to your business
Everything you post or do should be tied back to one of your goals as a business owner. To start, write your goals down and think about how you’ll measure the success of your efforts.
Social media marketing requires a lot of testing and trying things out. You can’t improve any particular aspect of it without knowing what signals to pay attention to. You can even use these signals to define targets for your social media marketing plan to help you stay motivated and on track.
Beyond branding, you need all the social handles. People need to find you. They need to be able to find you on social and on your website and have it all be clear and consistent.
Here are just some of the goals you should consider for your social media marketing:
Drive brand awareness. Reach more people to increase the likelihood of your brand getting seen by the right people. You can measure this using impressions/reach, likes, shares, mentions, or any other signal that shows a real person has seen your post(s).
Create demand for your products. Get people interested in your products with relevant inspiration or education, which you can gauge by clicks to your site, products added to a shopping cart, or comments/messages from interested customers.
Acquire leads and customers. These are paying customers, or at least their emails, which you can nurture into sales. A large amount in itself, won’t help you drive sales!
Network to form partnerships. Engage with influencers or like-minded brands for influencer marketing or co-marketing campaigns.
Build a loyal following. Grow an engaged audience that wants to hear from you; don’t inflate your follower count with fake or bought followers. You want to build an authentic community of people who are interested in your products and who will promote your content or products to others. You can measure this by followers you’ve added or lost in a certain time frame, or your engagement rate (total engagement divided by the number of followers).
Establish social proof. Sourcepositive testimonials or content generated by customers/influencers that cast your products in a positive light and can potentially be used in other marketing efforts. Sharing testimonials is an incredibly effective social media marketing tactic and can generate increased awareness and sales.
Provide customer service. A social media presence opens you up to customer questions, complaints, and inquiries. So one of your goals will be to provide this support to customers or direct it to another preferred, private channel. One way to measure this is through your response time for direct messages. (This is displayed as a badge on your Facebook page, for example.)
Become a thought leader in your target market. Social media gives you a voice that you can use to not only participate in conversations but shift them in the direction you think they should go in and build credibility around your products or services.
Everything you do should tick one or more of these boxes, and ideas and new tactics you plan to test out should be evaluated on their potential to achieve these goals.
Keep these broad objectives in mind as we get into the next step: figuring out who you’ll be trying to reach.
Identifying your target audiences
An effective social media marketing strategy starts with understanding your ideal customer. Building rich context on your target audience takes time, but there are steps you can take immediately that will provide lasting value.
Spend some time researching your target audience, looking for demographic and psychographic data or observable patterns that help you form a mental image of who is likely to buy from you. This exercise won’t just inform your initial strategy but also help you develop a voice and tone for your brand that resonates with them.
If your business naturally focuses on a specific niche market (like cat owners, for example), your job will be easier than if you’re trying to appeal to a more general audience (like telecom and airline brands). Check out places your audiences often hang out, such as in subreddits or blogs, to see what they’re interested in.
Facebook, being one of the largest social media platforms and, thus, a database of 2.89 billion monthly active users, is also a great place to do some audience research. Check out your competitors’ pages, clicking through on the profiles of some of their engaged followers to get a better sense of who they are.
Once you’ve done some digging, you can put it all together to create an ideal customer, or buyer persona, who is likely to buy your product.
You don’t have to fill out every trait, but describe what you can to paint an image of this person as it is relevant to your business. The more effort and detail you put into this section, the more impactful your findings will be for your social media marketing strategy.
The point here isn’t to be 100% accurate but to outline your best guess at the kind of person who would be the easiest to convert into a customer.
As an example, let’s say I’ve started up my apparel brand that sells t-shirts catering to potential customers in the Toronto area:
Location: Toronto, Canada
Age: 22 to 34 years old
Gender: Male and female
Interests: Foodie, hip hop, bars, basketball
Career/Industry: Business or tech
Income level: $30,000 to $70,000
Relationship status: Single
Favorite websites to visit: BlogTO, Toronto Life, Instagram, Facebook
Motivation to buy: Show off their pride as native Torontonians
Buying concerns: Prefer to buy from an established competitor or avoid brands that don’t seem authentic or truly familiar with Toronto
Most of these traits can be targeted directly or indirectly through social media ads, but having them written down also helps inform the kind of content I can share to resonate with them.
Keep these buyers’ personas detailed. This is all subject to change or evolves as you begin getting feedback when you start to execute your strategy, pursuing the marketing goals we identified earlier.
Maybe one of your assumptions was wrong or your customers share another trait you didn’t expect at all. Either way, social media marketing is one of the best ways to find out who your customers are, and what you learn can even be incorporated into your larger business roadmap, such as what products you’ll come out with next.
You can go further and develop several audiences or “target segments” to speak to, such as a significant other looking for a gift (not the customer themself), shoppers who already buy from one of your competitors, and people or companies you want to build connections with.
But for now, you’ll be in a better position to consider the next part of your social media strategy: what you’re going to post.
Determine important metrics and KPIs for your social media marketing plan
When tracking your social media marketing performance, it can often like there are a million numbers to look at for your social media analytics. There’s a number for almost everything.
Each social media platform has a different analytics tool. What you decide to track on each one will depend on your goals above.
However, there are a few numbers you’ll want to keep an eye on to grow your social media accounts.
Engagement
Social media marketing engagement involves tracking the number of different metrics. It’s used to understand if your audience actively interacts with your content and how effective campaigns are. High engagement rates indicate audience health (i.e., how responsive they are) and that your content is interesting.
You’ll look at different engagement metrics such as:
Likes, comments, and retweets. Engagement rates like shares or retweets are different on every platform. But likes and comments are universal across all.
Post engagement. This number takes the amount of post engagements divided by impressions for each.
Clicks. Closely tied with your click-through, this metric shows the number of times someone clicks on your content.
Awareness
Awareness metrics can tell you about your brand’s visibility on a platform and are critical to track for your social media marketing efforts. If you have goals for increasing brand awareness, look at:
Account mentions. The number of times someone mentions your brand on social media. These can be positive or negative and give you the chance to respond to people and shape your brand’s perception.
Impressions. The total number of times a post showed up in a browser’s timeline.
Reach. The total number of unique people who see your content.
Sentiment. Your brand’s share of voice. It shows how many people are talking about your brand compared to competitors.
Return on investment (ROI)
One of the most important social media analytics for any social media campaign is your ROI. You can track sales if you’re using an in-app store like Facebook Shops. You see how many people purchased something on your website from a social channel in your Shopify Analytics under Sales by social source.
Create your social media marketing strategy content mix
Managing a social media marketing channel is a bit like running your TV network. You can produce social media campaigns with new “weekly episodes.” You can syndicate your content to other channels. You can have reruns of fan favorites or #ThrowBackThursdays to fill in for empty time-slots and commercial breaks to sell your products.
Defining your content mix—recurring formats and post types—makes it easier to think up and produce social content while adding a rhythm to your posting schedule to offer your audience both variety and consistency at the same time. Otherwise, you’ll wind up scrambling for something to publish every day.
Most social media accounts worth following make an implied promise to their audience that they consistently fulfill. For business owners, it often starts with a question:
Beyond your products, how can you consistently provide value to your target audience?
It’s not only about what you post, but how you allocate your resources (time, money, creativity) to maintain your social media presence. Some ideas will warrant a greater investment because they help achieve a number of your goals at once.
Within your content mix, you want to have ideas you can plan for in advance, reproduce, and schedule to go out regularly. For example, you might feature a customer testimonial every Tuesday and share a quote graphic every Wednesday and Friday.
These pieces that are relatively easy to turn around can keep your social media calendar full while you build out more elaborate assets, such as a promotional video or a blog post.
The content mix you develop can incorporate:
News. Information about what’s happening in your industry or posts that are based on what’s trending at the moment.
Inspiration. Motivation to use your products or pursue a certain lifestyle, such as quote graphics or photos from around the world.
Education. Share fun stats and facts or how-to posts from your blog or YouTube channel.
Product/promotional posts. High-quality product shots of your products being used, demo videos, testimonials, or feature explanations can help you achieve your ultimate goal of getting sales. You can often run these as ads after you create them.
Contests and giveaways. A contest or free download in exchange for an email is a great way to promote something of value to both you and your audience other than your products.
Customer/influencer features. Shots or videos featuring your customers or the people they follow.
Community events. Share meetups, fundraisers, or learning opportunities, especially if you’re a local business.
Q&A. Ask your audience a question or request to elicit responses, such as ‘“Tag a friend who’s always late,” or answer a common question that you get from customers.
Tips and tricks. Share useful information and tutorials about your products.
Behind the scenes. Share how your product is made or what you’re doing to grow your business to offer some transparency that your audience can relate to. Giving your audience a look into the humans behind your business can go a long way in creating a trust or building your brand as a founder.
And more. Get creative and try to come up with a content mix that differentiates you from your competitors. Only through publishing content on social media regularly can you get an idea of what works best.
Aim for about five to seven content archetypes to start off with, balancing your content mix with post formats that you can quickly create with a couple that might take some time to produce, like a product demonstration video, as well as posts that aim for sales and posts that just seek to delight and grow your audience.
Based on my hypothetical business selling t-shirts to Torontonians, I might start with the following content archetypes, tying each one to a different goal:
Share a link to a popular product in my store. (Sales)
Create and publish an original meme about life in Toronto. (Awareness and reach)
Share a post from BlogTO or another Toronto-focused publication. (Engagement)
Share a high-quality photo of a popular hangout spot in Toronto or a local event. (Audience building and engagement)
Ask the audience for feedback on potential t-shirt design ideas. (Engagement)
Share a photo featuring a model wearing my shirt and tag them. (Create demand and attract influencers)
Try to vary your programming throughout the week. When new social media followers land on your account, their perception of your brand will be your last three to six posts. If they’re all explicitly selling your products or services, it will turn them off.
Note: Keep in mind that anything you create can potentially be promoted again and again to your audience over time, or on other channels. Don’t shy away from eventual “re-runs,” especially if a certain post has proven to drive traffic, engagement, or sales.
To get you inspired to come up with your content mix, here are some ideas you can borrow from brands that are doing well on social media.
User-generated content
Fashion Nova relies on style education via its blog and YouTube channel to market its clothing, which no doubt takes time to produce.
But on its website and in its marketing communications, it lets shoppers browse looks from its Instagram account. These photos are then shared on Fashion Nova’s own Instagram account or store using one of the available Shoppable Instagram apps.
If your products beg to be shared on social media, you can harness that and source social content that you can use for your own social media posts.
Shots of your product being used
While it’s great to have several content formats to add variety to your social media marketing mix, even one proven content format, published consistently, can do wonders for growing your audience.
Letterfolk’s Instagram is a great example of how developing a theme through what you post can make social media publishing less work in the long run, without sacrificing engagement. Nearly all of its posts feature the same premise: a shot of its bestselling products being used in people’s lives.
It can succeed with this strategy because each post helps it achieve several of its goals at once, namely:
Create high-level engagement with relatable quotes.
Grow a following through an account with a clear and consistent premise.
Drive sales by showing off the product in action.
Think about how you can develop your content formats to chase several of your goals with a single post.
Video
The introduction of smartphone cameras and video editing apps has made it easy to hit Record. A Biteable survey revealed that 60% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 94% of marketers who use video plan to continue in the coming years.
YouTube is the most popular social channel for videos, with 88% of marketers using it, followed by Facebook, with 76%.
Taking videos is easy and convenient. You don’t need an entire production studio to create engaging videos. Video tours, product updates, how-to guides, and general entertainment videos make great content that attracts followers and drives them to your website.
While it’s clear YouTube is the king of video content, there are other video channels to take advantage of:
TikTok;
Instagram Reels;
Instagram Stories;
IGTV;
Snapchat;
Facebook Stories.
Good video content normally falls under two categories: helpful or entertaining. Fashion designer Justine Leconte, for example, runs a YouTube channel focused on ethical fashion, lifestyle, and trends. She teaches women how to create a wardrobe for their body type, work with colors, and more.
Justine’s video content sees millions of views per video, attracting the right audience to her brand.
The above video from Justine has over 7.8 million views and over 3,600 comments, which shows just how engaging video content is. She also links to her Shopify store, where viewers can shop her product lines, helping prove the ROI of her video marketing efforts.
Livestreams
Livestreaming went from zero to hero over the past few years. From 2019 to 2020 alone, the online live streaming industry has grown by 99%, according to the latest data from StreamElements. Conviva’s latest State of the Streaming report reveals that live content also earns 27% more minutes of watch time per viewing compared to on-demand video.
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn all have live videos on their platforms. Social media live streaming is authentic and engaging. And the best part? You don’t need any fancy video equipment to start a broadcast, just your smartphone.
Some fun Livestream ideas:
Organize a Q&A session where fans can send questions about your brand and have them answered.
Create tutorials of tools you use.
Share your thoughts on a relevant industry topic.
Show behind-the-scenes of you creating products and services.
Run a flash sale.
Host a giveaway contest or fundraiser.
Try one or two of the ideas above for your brand. Test what resonates with your audience the most, and expand on more ideas over time.
Additional tips and resources
Be visual. Even if you’re not a designer or video editor, you can use free tools like Canva (social graphics), Adobe Spark or Lumen5 (videos), Meme Generator, and more to produce shareable content.
Be purposeful. Tie each part of your content mix back to your target audience and one or more of the goals you established in the previous two stages. Knowing what to measure will help you evaluate the success of a particular idea and inform your strategy over time.
Curate and create. To avoid becoming overwhelmed with creating original content, try to curate and remix content as well. Be sure to tag and credit your sources.
Choosing your social media channels
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat—there’s no shortage of social media networks for you to build a presence for your brand.
But two mistakes are easy to make when you’re just starting on social media:
Building your presence on more channels than you can maintain.
Treating every channel the same and not playing to the strengths of each.
We’re always testing new platforms. I would say that Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have been huge drivers from the social media standpoint.
Each channel you choose is another you have to potentially manage. You need to prioritize what you’ll be focusing on in the beginning and that starts by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each channel.
For the sake of this post, we’ll cover some of the most popular social media channels. But this is by no means an exhaustive list. Look at similar brands and competitors to get a sense of where your audience lives and where you could be building your presence.
Instagram
As a marketing channel, Instagram lets you focus on building a following through a variety of visual mediums.
Unlike Facebook, you can get pretty good results without necessarily paying to play, although if you have the budget available, there’s the option of pursuing Instagram advertising and influencer marketing. But also, unlike Facebook, almost half of its users are millennials and Gen Z between the ages of 18 and 34.
Instagram lets you post images and videos, which are discoverable through hashtags. But there are also Instagram Stories and Instagram Live, which let you put out photos and videos with a 24-hour lifespan. This gives you the unique option of keeping your Instagram feed consistent and clean, while using Stories to test out ideas and share behind the scenes that have a more casual and personal production quality to them.
People are prepared to spend a premium amount for a fashionable product. You need to focus on what looks visually good, because being able to sell on Instagram has been a really big game changer for us.
You can also add product tags and stickers to your business profile. These tags let users tap on a product in your post and story, get more information, then head to your site to purchase it.
Genuine content leads the way for brands on TikTok. More than other social networks, viewers prefer engaging, raw videos over highly edited content. It’s this difference that gives TikTok creators a chance to connect with their audience authentically.
If you’re targeting a younger crowd, TikTok is a useful social media channel for your brand. 62% of its audiences are between the ages of 10 and 29 years old.
TikTok is often used for building brand awareness, but it can also be a sales driver thanks to its “link in bio” feature, which allows you to showcase a range of content and products from a single link. Shopify merchant SendAFriend was able to scale to $5 million in sales in two years driven by its TikTok marketing strategy.
Few social channels are built for businesses quite like Facebook. On top of a Facebook shop, the ability to add customer reviews, and a popular Messaging feature that can be used to provide customer service, Facebook is also one of the most widely used social media apps worldwide.
But its biggest downside is that, unless you pay to promote your posts, you won’t be able to reach many people, even if they’ve opted in by liking your page.
That said, Facebook can be an incredibly powerful way to use social media for advertising. It’s a database of information that you can use to deliver targeted ads to your ideal customers. If you amplify content that’s set up to produce engagement (likes, shares, comments), such as a viral video, you can generally lower the cost of your advertising, so keep that in mind.
You can learn more about Facebook Advertising in our guide and by checking out these 7 common mistakes to avoid when planning your campaigns.
YouTube
YouTube is another popular way to reach your audience as an online business. It’s the second most-visited website in the world and has a global viewer base, with 42.9% of web users accessing YouTube each month.
You may think that YouTube is only for big brands getting millions of video viewers. However, the number of small businesses advertising on YouTube doubled over the past two years.
You can produce many different types of videos for YouTube, including:
Customer testimonials;
Product demos;
Explainers and tutorials;
Reviews and case studies;
Vlogs;
Education videos.
Whether you’re a creator or an eCommerce brand, you can create video content for YouTube that attracts potential customers. It’s a tactic that the Jeremy Fragrance channel uses to gain visibility for its online store, Fragrance. One.
The channel creates a mix of reviews, tutorials, and curated lists around the topic of fragrances. His videos see millions of views each month. Each video links directly to the Fragrance.One store so people can purchase products directly from YouTube.
Twitter’s greatest strength is that it lets you listen to and engage with other voices in the world. That said, it might not be as strong as a sales channel for many brands but can be used to showcase your brand’s personality (see the Wendy’s or Moon Pie accounts for examples).
What you can use Twitter marketing for instead if you choose to, is networking with other brands and journalists, and connecting with potential and existing customers on a smaller scale. Many Twitter users also rely on the platform for news, if that’s a part of your content mix.
Pinterest
While Pinterest isn’t exactly a “social media site,” it often finds itself in a company’s social media marketing mix, especially among eCommerce brands. That’s because users come to Pinterest with more intent to buy something than they do when visiting any other social platform.
Unlike the channels above, Pinterest has a clearly defined user base consisting mostly (71%) of women with disposable income. So it’s not for everyone. But if you’re in the apparel, home decor, or food industry, you’d be missing out on an opportunity to get traffic and sales through both organic and paid Pinterest marketing tactics.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s greatest strength is its position as a social network for professionals. If your target audience can be identified by a particular profession or some businesses need your products or service, then it might be worth building your presence here.
LinkedIn is also a great platform for networking, hiring talent, and pursuing business development opportunities by reaching out to brands or people of interest you would like to partner with. LinkedIn continues to invest in helping users distribute their content through the likes LinkedIn newsletter as well.
At the very least, it’s worth having your own personal LinkedIn profile set up for networking and a company page so others can learn more about your business and its employees.
Plan your social media content
With an understanding of your goals, your target audience, and how you’ll be using different channels, it’s time to create the framework you need to manage and schedule your social media calendar.
There are a wide variety of social media management tools you can use for this purpose, but I recommend using Trello for planning content, and Later, Hootsuite, or Buffer for scheduling, because they all have free plans to get you started.
Collecting ideas and planning content
Ideas often seem to strike at random. So you need a place to collect and develop them as inspiration comes. Trello has worked wonders for me because I can not only save ideas to a Trello board, but attach links, files, and notes to each idea as it comes to life. It gives you the flexibility to be as meticulous or as barebones as you want with your planning.
The content archetypes you developed earlier are good to fall back on as you plan out what you’ll be posting, but you can also stray from them with new ideas and experiments. There are always going to be aspects of your social media marketing that are reactive, organic, and experimental.
Regardless, you want to create a process that lets you keep a backlog of ideas and develop them until they’re ready to schedule.
I’ve mocked up a template in Trello that you can copy and adapt to suit your purposes.
If you’re planning to post quality content to multiple channels, make sure the content and copy are optimized for that channel. You can attach channel-specific variations to each card for easy access when you start to the schedule.
Scheduling content: when, where, and how often
With posts in the pipeline of your social media content calendar, it’s time to schedule them. Once you’ve prepared the copy, images, and whatever else you need for your posts (don’t forget to get team approval!), you can start adding them to a queue using the scheduling tool mentioned above.
But how often should you be posting on each of your chosen channels?
While some answers can be prescriptive, the real answer is to start slow and then ramp up to a higher frequency as you develop your routine and figure out what works.
You don’t want to spread yourself too thin or spam your audience’s feeds. It’s fine if you only have time to post once every few days in the beginning. You can build up to one post a day and then test to see if a higher frequency nets you better results on specific platforms.
Ultimately, you want to focus your attention on where it will have the most impact and when your audience will be scrolling through their feeds. If you need a good place to start, think about when people check their feeds: in the morning, at lunch, during their commute, and before bed. The “best posting times” for your particular audience are something you’ll only discover through trial and error. Popular posting times will also vary depending on seasons and other variables.
What’s more important is that you schedule your posts in batches, at least a week in advance. Do it in one sitting, dedicating a few hours at a time so you can focus on other things while your social media publishing runs in the background.
Automate what you can to make time for the tasks you can’t
The reality of social media marketing is there are activities that you won’t be able to simply schedule and forget if you want them to be effective. In-the-moment posts such as Instagram Stories or real-time tweets will need to happen at the moment, and you can only plan so far in advance for them.
Social media marketing, especially early on when you’re doing it yourself, demands that you are deliberate about how you spend your time. Think about how you can be more effective with your time by republishing old posts or allocating some money to paid promotions to get a better return on the time you spent creating content.
Additional tips and resources
Create templates. Wherever possible, create design and copy templates based on what works to make it easier to turn around new content on an ongoing basis, especially for recurring content series. For example, you can save your most used Instagram hashtags so you always have them handy when you post, or apply the same filter to your photos to achieve a consistent look.
Keep an eye on the calendar. Holidays are a great opportunity to be topical and timely with what you post. Pay special attention to what’s coming up so you can brainstorm social media marketing ideas in advance. Sprout Social has a great calendar that includes hashtag holidays too, if you want something handy to reference.
Tailoring your post for each channel. You can share the same post or image to different social channels, but make sure to take the time to optimize copy, images, or videos for the channel you’re posting to—no Instagram posts shared directly to Twitter or tweets that automatically share to Facebook.
Track performance
As a marketer, you expect your social media efforts to grow company revenue. One way you can do that is by tracking what’s working and what’s not. Otherwise, it’s hard to know whether you’re delivering on expectations.
Monitoring your metrics lets you make small changes to your strategy, rather than huge overhauls. You can be proactive in the short term and use those learnings to inform future campaigns.
Use a social media tool like Sprout Social to measure performance across channels. You can deep dive into one channel, or quickly compare multiple channels at once. Sprout Social also gives you access to:
With this data, you can learn what KPIs still align with your business goals and see if they need any adjustments. Analytics tools like Sprout Social also make data easy to access and share, so you can distribute to marketing teams and make smarter decisions, faster.
Improving your social media content strategy
It sounds obvious, but it needs to be said: Social media is a lot different for a business owner or marketer than for a casual user.
Your aim now is to get a positive return on the time, money, and effort you spend. That requires deliberate action.
Your social media strategy is your plan of attack. But in a space like social media that changes by the day, with newsfeed algorithm updates and audiences, always ready for something new, you need to remain flexible and remember to keep your finger on its pulse and constantly improve.
Above all else, remember three things: be authentic, find ways to provide value, and when in doubt, guess, test, measure, and learn.
Does anxiety creep in when you think about the upcoming week? Do those thoughts get you to feel a little blue on Sundays? The anticipation of what the next week has to bring can leave you feeling stressed and depressed. Often people can get worried about unfinished tasks at work or home that need to be tackled come Monday morning. Creating a work-life balance can be challenging with the demands of our jobs and our children’s school and activity schedules. Some simple shifts can be done to help manage overwhelming feelings and take the dread out of the approaching week. Practice these ideas to start your week on a positive note and gain joy back in your Sundays.
1. Be Proactive with your Tasks
Many people save Sundays as their weekend task day. Try switching things up. See if you can tackle your chores, shopping, and meal prepping on Friday night and early Saturday morning. If you can tackle your task list early in the weekend, then you can spend the rest of your days off doing leisure activities.
2. Spend some Time on Yourself
Make sure that you take some time for yourself during the weekend before the hustle and bustle begin. Doing this on Sunday is a great way to relax and unwind as you enter the week ahead. Weekend self-care doesn’t need to be something big like going to the spa. It can be something simple like reading a good book, going for a walk out in nature, resting, taking a bath, journaling or spending time with friends and family. Whatever activity brings you joy and peace is what you want to seek. It could be as simple as 20 minutes of quiet alone time.
3. Put Down Your Phone
Don’t waste your few days off with your face on your phone. Take a break from social media, emails, and text messages. We tend to compare ourselves to others when we scroll on social media. There’s nothing worse than lying on the couch on a Sunday and seeing people on your social media feed appearing to have the perfect life while you feel buried in a never-ending to-do list. We waste so much of our precious time looking at our phones. Use your free time wisely. Spend actual face time with the ones you love instead of looking at what your acquaintances are up to. Your emails will wait till Monday. Focus on activities that make you feel good.
4. Be in the Moment
When we are anxious about the future week, we can get the Sunday Scaries. During the weekend, focus on shifting your thought process and be more present in the current moment instead of letting your mind worry about the week to come. Be mindful of the fun and relaxing activities you are partaking in with loved ones or the peaceful time alone. Simple habits like these can foster a sense of calmness and reduce the anxious thoughts that come with the Sunday blues.
5. Practice Gratitude
Staying in a state of gratitude can help to make your body feel more relaxed. As you move through your weekend, focus on the things that bring you gratitude. If your mind starts to worry about work on Monday, try to change that thought to be thankful for your job. Start and end each day with a short list of things that you are grateful for.
6. Make the Most of Mondays
Mondays don’t have to be dreaded. They can be a great way to reset and refresh. Set a positive intention for the week to come by listening to a motivational playlist or podcast on your way to work. Then, make sure to create some space in your Monday for something you enjoy, such as a weekly lunch date with a coworker or taking the kids for an after-school treat. Planning something you enjoy will keep the positive weekend vibes going and help kick off your week on an upbeat note.
It’s one of the worst words in the dictionary to define.
The reason is understandable; it refers to an internal human experience, all of which to some extent are subjective.
It may be preferential, therefore, to use the word ‘happiness’ as an umbrella term. In doing so we can use it as a reference point, rather than a simple noun.
We could agree that to be happy is essential to feel ‘well’; that is, the sense of living through a ‘good’ experience, or a ‘good’ life.
So, what constitutes a feeling of ‘wellness’? There are four key elements I suggest are not only essential but primary in a life that can be described as happy.
1. Exhilaration
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The smiling face. There’s no doubt that laughter, liveliness, passion, zest, and ecstasy are all feelings associated with happiness.
However, it’s vitally important to know this is the very tip of the iceberg. Experiences like this are wonderful but they are not all we are capable of knowing.
Feelings of exhalation are brilliant and of course, should always be welcomed, but by nature are temporary and fleeing.
And that’s good.
True happiness is not always feeling positive. It encompasses innate characteristics such as empathy, compassion, sacrifice, and service. All of which, at times, would not be described as ‘positive’ experiences. But I’m sure we can agree they are elements of a life well lived.
2. Resilience
I would go as far as to suggest every single person would have a richer, more productive, and enjoyable life if they developed the skill of resilience.
We all are presented with enormous challenges at one time or another. Our ability to face these obstacles with enduring psychological strength has unfathomable importance in our lives.
This is where the deep concern of covering one’s problems with temporary highs and attractive objects plays a part, and another reason it’s important to have perspective on the ‘smiling face’ notion of happiness.
Grit and determination give us the ability to navigate through the toughest of days with hope and the desire to see ourselves through to a better life.
3. Meaning
This is where we begin to experience real happiness. Knowing your day has been spent productively – towards goals that are meaningful to you – this is a happy life.
Often this comes in the form of service to something of personal importance or the expression of creativity within your specific skill sets or passions, later being a source of joy to others.
Meaningful activities are ones we are fully enthralled with. Activities that we lose ourselves in can only speak about how enjoyable it was in the past tense. Activities where time and self are not in existence.
To partake in meaningful activities also brings a sense of fulfillment. Expressing one’s natural capacities and strengths in the pursuit of excellence feel worthwhile and fruitful, almost as if we are partaking on a mission, completely oblivious to the notion of attainment or successfully committed to the process, the journey, the labor.
Living with meaning – that is; to create meaningful things or experiences, or to spend time helping a cause deemed meaningful to us, allows the fullness of the human experience to unfold. It’s the sun to the flower, the fuel to the engine.
4. Transcendence
And the crux of it all. A risky word for many, but desirable for all. Transcendence can be otherwise described as the sense of internal freedom or inner peace.
This is the knowledge that there is simply more to life than work, things, experiences, achievement, and fulfillment.
It’s a deep understanding that the course of our history had a beginning and will surely have an end. Our lives on Earth are to be enjoyed, explored, and endured, but not to be obsessed with.
It could be said, transcendence is the feeling of carelessness. The ability to approach all things in life with playful negation and unidentified, unattached exuberance.
In this state, we are less affected by the lows of life, less sensationalized by the high-spirited attractions of our creations – simply at peace.
Arguably it’s more than an aspect of a happy life. It’s to have won.
Positive experiences happen to us every day, yet we don’t always take full advantage of them. Have you ever noticed that it could be a great day (you had eight hours of sleep, it’s the weekend, had a great conversation with a friend, etc.), but that it takes just one harsh word from someone or one piece of bad news to ruin the day? Research by Shelley Gable and Jonathan Haidt suggests that we have three times more positive experiences than negative ones. What keeps us from fully capitalizing on all the good in our lives, making us a slave to the bad?
Researchers have identified two main tendencies that keep us from experiencing, extending, and expanding our joy: negativity bias and habituation. The negativity bias refers to our mind’s innate tendency to give more weight to the negative; Roy Baumeister has shown that we tend to remember and focus more on negative experiences. Habituation, discussed in research on the hedonic treadmill, refers to the fact that while we receive boosts of happiness from new positive experiences, over time, we get used to these experiences and they no longer have the same effect.
How can we counter this tendency to assign greater weight to the negative experiences in our life? A recent study by Nathaniel Lambert and colleagues at Brigham Young University gives us a clue. Their research shows that discussing positive experiences lead to heightened well-being, increased overall life satisfaction, and even more energy.
This research may seem surprising because we are often reluctant to talk about our good fortune. We don’t want to show off. Sometimes we don’t want to “jinx” ourselves. Or we may feel guilty that good things are happening to us in the face of the suffering that exists in other people’s lives. Bonding over complaints, commiseration or even gossip somehow feels more proper, realistic, and grounded. However, Lambert and colleagues’ research suggests that describing our happy experiences to close friends and romantic partners is a better idea.
Several studies have shown that making daily lists of the things you feel grateful for—which helps draw our attention to the positive experiences in our lives—improves our psychological and physical health and well-being. For example, gratitude improves our ability to connect with others, boosts our altruistic tendencies, makes us optimistic and happier, decreases envy and materialism, and even improves health for people with physical ailments (neuromuscular disorder, in one study). Lambert’s new study, however, extends research on gratitude to show that verbally expressing the gratitude we feel to people close to us helps increase and sustain our well-being above and beyond simply feeling or writing down gratitude. Great literary figures have long known that happiness grows in sharing. In one of her letters, Charlotte Brontë observes “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.” In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf writes “Pleasure has no relish unless we share it.” Lambert’s research provides empirical validation of their wisdom.
The researchers found that people who habitually tend to talk to people they are close with about the good things that are happening to them also tend to feel happier and more satisfied with life. They also found that the more these people shared their happiness with someone on a given day, the happier and more satisfied they were on that particular day. To determine whether sharing happiness caused this boost in well-being, the researchers then invited participants into a laboratory with a romantic partner or friend. Participants were asked to write down a positive experience or a neutral experience like a fact they had learned in class and either share it with their partner or not. Those that shared a positive experience with their partner experienced a greater boost in well-being than those who did not share their experience with their partner or who shared a neutral experience with their partner. These findings suggest that it is the act of sharing happiness (and not of just thinking about happiness but not sharing it, or of sharing neutral information) that boosts well-being.
Next, the researchers investigated the effects of regularly sharing happiness over a longer period (four weeks in this case). New participants were asked to write daily in a journal about experiences they felt grateful for, or about neutral subjects they had learned in class. They were then either given no further instructions or were instructed to share these with a partner twice a week. Those who shared their grateful experiences with a partner reported greater satisfaction with life, happiness, and vitality (level of energy and zest for life).
One reason that the study asked participants to share their experiences with close friends or romantic partners may come from the fact that these people may be more likely to support us. In the study’s last experiment, the researchers noticed that participants that received constructive, encouraging, enthusiastic, and positive messages after a successful experience (a high achievement on a test) showed greater signs of happiness, love, and appreciation. We’ve all experienced sharing an exciting event or plan with someone who did not respond in kind or, worse, criticized our idea and left us deflated. When sharing a positive experience, it is important to select a supportive listener.
The bottom line: sharing our joy increases joy. Telling people about our happiness has far greater benefits than just remembering it or writing it down for ourselves. This research may also help partially explain research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler has shown that our well-being influences that of those around us, up to three levels of separation. To try and be happy may seem like a selfish endeavor but it is a worthwhile goal to pursue not just for oneself but for our community. In turn, we can help support others’ joy by encouraging them to share their most positive experiences, and the things they feel grateful for. Supporting a friend or acquaintance’s well-being in turn may impact not only ourselves but the well-being of all the people connected to that friend. Albert Schweitzer, a German physician and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was right when he said “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.”
