Talk to any small business owner and they will tell you about the different ways they like to use social media to spread the word on their product and services. They’ll talk about how they’re taking advantage of different networks to guide their
More Than Meets the Eye
Here’s something else to consider when it comes to auto-posting from network to network: people have different reasons for connecting with you on different sites.
You’re just inviting problems regarding how your content is viewed if you distribute the exact same thing on multiple networks. You have to give people a unique reason or two to follow you on multiple networks.
You see, simply put, there’s little point to following a business on multiple networks when they don’t offer something unique and fresh. Why would I want to visit a business’s Facebook page, if I see the exact same content copied/pasted on Google plus?
Does that mean you choose one popular social media channel and stick to that only? Absolutely not.
Here’s How You Go About it
Every business should make it a high priority to build an audience across all popular social media channels; an audience that’s highly engaged and interested in the content you’re sharing. You need to give careful thought to how your audience interacts with you on different networks. Determine their needs.
You must also have a good grasp on the type of content best suited to each channel. Here’s a little overview:
- Twitter – Your message should be kept short. Keep Twitter’s 140-character limit in mind. Hashtags are a great way to get your content noticed in the Twitter stream.
- Facebook – Here, you want to be friendly and conversational, while using full sentences to grab your audience’s attention. Fact: Facebook users scanning their News Feeds are reading their friends’ thoughts and comments in a very similar way.
- LinkedIn – It’s good to be helpful while being conversational, though you should always keep your content professional; users are primarily on LinkedIn to establish field-related credibility and pass around expertise.
- Google plus – Again, being helpful and conversational pays, though you need to use keywords that will increase your chances of showing up in a user search. Google indexes all content shared on plus and references it each time someone uses the same keyword to look up your business.
- Pinterest – Using good, detailed descriptions (not too lengthy) will help as people get to learn more about the content that’s being pinned. There will also be a better chance of your pins showing up in search results.
- Instagram – The best way to get your photos noticed is by using hashtags in photo captions. Users are always on the lookout for photos that interest them using popular hashtags. Also good practice is to tag individuals or businesses that are in your photos; they’ll interact with your content at some point and talk about you more as a result.
- All other social networks – Images are a vital part of all social networks. Though every network displays them differently. Free tools like PicMonkey work well when uploading and resizing photos.
Bonus tip: If you’re a fanatic book reader, check out this post: 7 Books to Help You Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog or Business
Automating Social Media – The Right Tools
A superb tool for automating social media while saving time is Hootsuite.
The social media dashboard lets you manage all social networks from a central location. You get to track conversations revolving around your business and industry, and also schedule future posts.
Rather than post an update on one site and blast it out to different networks, you can simply create audience-specific posts and later use Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance.
Now you’re probably wondering how creating network-specific posts is going to be a rather tall order; keep in mind similar content can still be shared on each site if you’re willing to do it the right way.
For example, you post something (say, an article) on Facebook accompanied by an image, while keeping the text friendly and conversational. There’s a hashtag the audience is always encouraged to use – this lets you instantly track down their posts on any network.
Next, post it on Twitter using the same photo. However, you’re going to modify your text, abiding by Twitter’s 140-character limit. As before, include hashtags in order to attract attention to relevant keywords and topics, but cut down on the link length that’s going back to the article.
That’s a Wrap
To sum it all up, begin with an image, an article or link, any piece of content you wish to share, tweak it a bit so as to how you’re promoting it, and just make sure that it sits well with every social channel.
Give it a go, and let us know how it works out.
Images: “Social media on hand with blue background/Shutterstock.com“
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