The Best Ways to Promote Your Work On Social Media

Article by Caroline Black @ Culture Coverage
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Social media is undoubtedly a fantastic tool for online marketing and one that only looks set to grow in the near future. The potential it has to increase your reach worldwide and create genuine, long-lasting relationships with potential customers is infinite. However, it isn't enough to log on and just start posting.

What many businesses fail to understand is that social media only gives out and much as you put in. To properly promote your products and services, you need to be tactical and stay active. These five pointers are a great place to start in creating a successful social media campaign.

1. Think Visual

It’s been shown countless times in marketing that people respond best to visual stimulus, and this translates directly to social media. While short text updates do still have their place, it’s becoming common knowledge that posts with images get much more engagement.

It’s also important to consider the overall aesthetic of your page. Some platforms allow you to customize color schemes and backgrounds, and getting these just right to support your brand and goals is essential to engage the right kinds of customers.

Similarly, creating a featured image to share with every post is also an extremely useful tool to help build familiarity with your company. The more people see and recognize the logo, the more likely they'll be to think of you when they require the services you provide.

2. Run Competitions

One of the strongest promotional features of social media platforms is the ability for users to like and share posts. Not only does this increase your visibility on the primary website, but it also has a direct effect on your ranking in Google. Because of this, encouraging customers and fans of your page to share your posts as often as possible is the key to success.

One way to do this is to run a competition. You've probably seen campaigns of this nature before, particularly on Facebook, and they most definitely work. Simply share a picture offering a prize—it could be a free consultation, merchandise, concert ticket or use of your services, depending on the business—for a winner who will be chosen at random from those who have liked and shared the picture.

Not only does doing this create an immediate buzz and draw many potential new fans to your page, but it also allows you to interact directly with users and create an active online personality, to which people are far more likely to return than a page that lays dormant for most of the time.

3. Re-post Content

Visibility and activity are both keywords to remember when marketing on social media. In other words, you want as many people to see you post as many times as possible. Due to the algorithms used on networks such as Facebook, more often than not, your promotional posts will only be shown to a handful of followers.

Because of this, there is no shame in posting the same thing more than once. This can be a literally share or re-tweet of previous material, or you can switch it up by changing the image and headlines, so fans don’t know you’re recycling content!


4. Keep Your Page Clean

Just like your parents wouldn’t let you play with the kid down the street with the criminal record, potential customers will never trust a page that has been obviously compromised in some way. Due to the intimate nature of social media and the many calls for a greater focus on privacy, people need to know they’re interacting with a page they can trust, so keeping a clean online reputation is an essential practice.

This is a two-fold step. First, it's about appropriately vetting what your post yourself. Second, it's about protecting yourself from hackers. While the first is self-explanatory and boils down to not posting when angry and not making personal comments or digs at rival companies, the second is a little more complicated.

In short, it’s easy to contract malware on your page via sloppy security practices, particularly when updating on-the-go. These simple code injections may seem harmless, but could end up sending spammy links to all your followers and infecting them with similar viruses. As these infections are most commonly picked up from unsecure public WiFi networks, it’s worth using a Virtual Private Network, such as the well-reviewed IPVanish, whenever you update to encrypt your data and protect you and your followers from disaster.

5. Make An Investment

Finally, most social media platforms allow you to pay to increase your visibility. This could be in the form of creating an advert that will target users interested in similar topics to your business; it could also simply increase the number of followers that can see your posts. It's becoming an essential step for all businesses that are serious about their social media promotion, and therefore is important for anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind.

A recent survey investigated just which platforms experienced marketers were most likely to invest their money in, and an astounding 90 percent agreed that Facebook adverts were the most worthwhile, with Twitter and LinkedIn next on the list, at a much less impressive 17 percent and 20 percent respectively.

These tips are just a few ways that you can transform your social media marketing campaign. However, they're no replacement for professional advice. If you're serious about promoting yourself in social media, then hire an expert today and make the most out of working on these sorts of platforms!


About the Author: Caroline is a successful blogger and expert in internet marketing. She loves sharing everything she's learned with fellow companies and hopes these tips will improve your marketing campaigns.