matthewwoodward.co.uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tips/social-media-marketing-tips/

43 Experts Reveal Their #1 Social Media Marketing Hacks

If you are looking to make social media work for you and you are not sure which methods work best, thenwhy not learn from the best.

People who have been there, anddone it. Men and women who canteach you shortcuts to reduce yourlearning curve and which sillymistakes to avoid along the way.

Social media is not a tough game ifyou know the rules and how to play itfor the win.

For this reason alone, you needexpert guidance. That’s why I’ve gotmy partner (Codrut Turcanu) to digthe web and interview some of thebest minds on the topic.

We wanted to learn their #1 socialmedia tip.

Some of these specialists have left alink back to their web site of choicewhere you can further yourknowledge about the topic or thestrategy mentioned within the response.

Now, I want to THANK all participants as well as each and everybody who help spread the word about thiscollection of proven social media tips.

Enjoy and take these golden nuggets to the bank!

Robbie Richards –RobbieRichards.com – Twitter

I’m going to cheat a little on this one and list 3 slightly out-of-the-box social media tips.

First, create a website custom audience (WCA) with Facebook’s Power Editor tool. This willallow you to re-target people that have visited your website (or specific pages of your site)directly in their news feeds

I like to use WCAs to collect email subscribers and business leads for clients. Because this traffic is warm (they’vealready expressed an interest in you by visiting your site) you’ll see higher CTRs, lower CPCs/CPMs and moreconversions.

Second, use a tool like Sniply to leverage other people’s content to drive traffic to your site. I provide a completestep-by-step Sniply tutorial inthis post.

Third, use the Facebook ID Scraper to extract all the user IDs from your competitor’s facebook page, or a relevantfacebook group. Use the tool’s ID converter to convert the user IDs into email addresses and build an emailcustom audience in the Power Editor.

Then you’ll be able to steal your competitor’s fans and target your ad campaigns to ultra-targeted audiences.

These social media tips can be applied to any niche.

Charlotte Waller – Vis-e-bility.com –Twitter

Utilise every post as much as you can. For example if you’re promoting a blog on Twitter,@mention those you’ve mentioned in the post, hashtag it, add a photo, shorten your link tomake room for more characters… And on that note:

Use visuals wherever possible (Twitter in particular, tweets with pictures attached standout so much more when trawling through your feed).

Chris Dyson –TripleSeo.com –Twitter

Pinterest is still a great platform to work with if you are trying to get more traffic to your site.

Less than 1% of people spend their time commenting on Pinterest so if you want to get theattention of a power user then commenting on their pins will definitely let you stand out fromthe crowd.

Another great Pinterest tip I have is that you can easily find who is pinning images from yoursite and then contact them, you can find some useful bookmarklets for that here.

Dave Schneider –SelfMadeBusinessman.com –Twitter

I like using Twitterfeed to auto tweet the RSS feeds of respected bloggers in my niche.

This helps me provide fresh content to my followers, as well build relationships withinfluencers by sharing their geat content.

Joseph Ho –Joseph-Ho.com – Twitter

The best kind of blog post that people will share it on social media are the “ List Post” kind ofcontent based on my testing.

Make sure your web server can take the traffic once your content went viral.

My highest record is getting 25k visitors per day with one list post and most web server almost went down. Youcan’t predict social media traffic because when it start to went viral it had his life on his own and will slowly stop.

Marko Saric –HowToMakeMyBlog.com –Twitter

Best tip to start growing your social media profile is to follow relevant and related users tothe field you are in.

Following them puts you in their spotlight, in many cases makes them check out your profileand if they find you interesting enough gets you a follow back.

Obviously do this within reason and target people well as you don’t want to spam-followrandom people.

Nick Loper–SideHustleNation.com – Twitter

One of my most effective methods to get content to “go viral” on social media is to get the ballrolling myself by asking a few friends and colleagues to tweet something.

I find Twitter is easier to do this with than Facebook, as people are generally more protectiveof their Facebook feeds.

Using this strategy, I’ve landed content on the homepage of Slideshare several times, whichdrives exposure and traffic back to my site.

Sean Si –Seo-Hacker.com – Twitter

First and foremost: Make sure you have social sharing buttons in your blog that work. It’sfunny how people expect to have a good number of social media shares when they don’thave social sharing buttons in their web pages.

Second, if you’re into email marketing, use a pre-populated ‘Tweet this’ link in your emailnewsletter. It helps a lot because email touches base on a more personal level so a requestto share via email is much more compelling.

Third, optimize your meta OG tags. There are so many blogs out there that has a sucky sharing snippet inFacebook, Twitter and Google+ – validate your Twitter cards, and if you’re using WordPress, invest in NGFB pro –that does most of the work with your meta OG tags.

Stuart Walker –NicheHacks.com –Twitter

Don’t spend too much time on it. Automate where possible. It can be a huge time waster fornominal gains and isn’t high on my priority list.

Focus on building your email list not your social media followers.

Use tools like SNAP Plugin, Buffer and Twitterfeed to automate sharing of your own contentand others and just check it every few days to respond to comments.

Sue Anne Dunlevie –SuccessfulBlogging.com –Twitter

Post social updates to your older, evergreen content. It solves two problems – what to poston social media and how to get new eyeballs on your older content.

And if you create evergreen social updates about your older content, you can reuse thembecause each update you share is seen by only a small part of your audience and you arealways getting new readers who haven’t seen your older posts.

Tom Demers –CornerStoneContent.com –Twitter

A big relationship-building mistake I see people make (and have made myself) on social media issharing content without alerting the person whose content you’re sharing that you’re doingthem a favor.

By consistently finding and sharing great content that’s helpful for folks following you, but you’realso helping the folks whose content you’re sharing, and by not adding @ and their Twitter handle,for instance, you’re not getting credit with those thought leaders for helping them out!

Here is a good, specific example:

Listen to a great podcast? Tweet your favorite quote from it and make sure to @ the interviewer and the personbeing interviewed. You just created an interesting tweet, and gave two people some exposure they’ll likelyappreciate.

If you’re looking for a good process for actually finding great content to share, Greg Ciotti has an excellent outlineof a process that I think a lot of smart folks engage in a variation of here: http://www.gregoryciotti.com/reading-organization/.

Jane Sheeba – ProBloggingSuccess.com/blog –Twitter

Share others’ post in social media. I maintain a 70-30 ratio – 70% of others’ content and 30%of my own content.

Just like linking out and getting links back, when I promote others’ content, they promote mycontent.

This helps maintain the quality of my social media profiles – if I only post my own promotional stuff, I could annoymy followers.

Kevin Duncan –BeABetterBlogger.com – Twitter

One of my favorite social media strategies involves shining the spotlight on my readers.

When someone leaves me a great comment, I will express my appreciation by quoting themon Twitter.

In the Tweet I’ll include their Twitter handle (which earns them new followers) and a link backto the post (which promotes my blog). It’s win-win.

Felix Tarcomnicu –ProOptimization.com –Twitter

I always advice people to check what their competitors are doing.

For instance, in my article from KissMetrics, I showed how you can steal your competitorsfollowers, simply by analysing the most authoritative social media channels in your niche.

You can learn more about their followers activity and get to know what posts they like themost or even discover their customer’s frustrations.

Note that the number of followers is not as relevant as the applause rate.

Ivana Taylor –DiyMarketers.com –Twitter

Create content categories. I have 3 content categories; call to action, engagement, goodwill.

Goodwill content might include #FF (Follow Friday on Twitter) or business quotes orsomething personal (These are all scheduled or automated).

Engagement content would include questions and conversations that I get into with people.This is a mix of automation and real time. Conversation.

And finally, call to action posts are posts that are crafted to focus on reader benefit and that require an action suchas a click to a download, hangout or opportunity.

These categories are important because they make it possible to keep a ration of 4 contribution posts for everycall to action post.

Adam Connell –BloggingWizard.com –Twitter

If you want to get ahead on social media, you need to go visual.

Just spending an extra few minutes creating an eye-catching image in a tool like Canva (it’sfree to use) will have a sizable impact.

And here’s why.

Andrea Loubier –GetMailBird.com –Twitter

It doesn’t matter what channel you use. In my opinion the following applies to all of them:

Keep users engaged all the time, but don’t annoy them.

Don’t tell them constantly about your product and why they should like or buy it. They like italready that’s why they follow you.

Give them inside of what is happening behind the scenes, show them its “just” people behind the product andshare knowledge and content related to your industry. Establish yourself as an authority.

Leigh Louey-Gung – VisionSyste.ms

Focus on what people are sharing.

Find what’s getting shared (http://topsy.com or http://buzzsumo.com are excellent for this),improve it by 200%, and then share it with everyone who you think would be interested.

If you’re having issues getting traction on social media, you can always pay people to shareyour content through http://fiverr.com.

Dave Evangelisti – StartGrowProfit.com –Twitter

Share your content multiple times. Repost your popular content (with minor changes) severaltimes.

Reposting your content can help: reach newer followers, reach audiences in different timezones and drive more traffic.

David Leonhardt – Seo-Writer.com –Twitter

Cross post! In other words, drive traffic from one platform to the other, so that you bestsupporters support you and follow you across multiple platforms.

An example is a post I made on Tsu, a profile of an active member (Erik Emanuelliofhttp://nopassiveincome.com/ ).

The original post is at https://www.tsu.co/Amabaie/11255414.

But Pinterest users will find a link to it at http://www.pinterest.com/pin/31032684908573329/ and Google Plususers will find a link to it at https://plus.google.com/112928640804164819202/posts/isy5zcqN9cu.

If you do this often enough, you will increase your user base on all social media platforms and you will increasethe engagement level from those who connect with you on several platforms.

Jamie Spencer –SetupABlogToday.com –Twitter

My biggest social media tip would be related to Instagram, a lot of people shun Instagram asit is a closed network and hard to track but there are 200million users on there and a hugeamount of photos are uploaded every day.

I love running contests on Instagram to get more followers and boost my engagement. Thekey to running an Instagram contest is to have a unique hashtag and set out clearinstructions for your followers to follow, a lot of people are vague with their social media competitions and theystruggle to take off… of course a really cool prize can help get things going by promoting your contest oncompetition sites.

Mike Wallagher –StartBloggingOnline.com –Twitter

Social media channels are important, but more important is to be in touch with yourfollowers.

Don’t leave any unanswered questions on your channels, get them answered ASAP. Thiswould actually improve your TRUST in your potential customer eyes.http://www.bentley.edu/offices/agency/tips-social-media-managers

Andrew Fortune –GreatColoradoHomes.com –Twitter

It’s easy to spot new users on Social Media because they post all of their own content andrarely interact with others, or share anyone else’s content.

Don’t be that person!

Genuine interaction is the key to a good social media strategy. Find influential people whoyou can relate to and interact with them without an agenda. When you do it right, it’s reallyfun!

Tim Bourquin –AfterOffers.com –Twitter

We’ve found the sweet spot for Twitter is to post about every six hours.

This is not an absolute rule but any less and we find that the re-tweets and favoriting of thetweets goes down if less and not worth the extra work if a lot more.

The more your tweets are shared, but more people click on the links.

In the social media realm we focus more on the direct traffic lift than we do on any search engine juice it gives us.If there is any, we consider it gravy. We’re looking for direct traffic.

Cody McLain –MindHack.com –Twitter

Track your Social Media. This is widely underutilized with Google Analytics ability to create aSocial Media dashboard.

Understanding where and how your social media users are visiting your website will give youa new awareness on just how big or small social media impacts your business.

Carol Amato –CarolAmato.com –Twitter

Publish your content on your OWN domain first, sharing the link to your authority blog onsocial media versus uploading your best images, pictures quotes, etc. directly to Facebook,Twitter, Google Plus.

So first publish on your own real estate where you own the content, and control every aspectof monetization, then make sure to track social media traffic and measure results.

James Norquay – http://ProsperityMedia.com.au –Twitter

I have two social media tips.

Tip 1 – Get your social media followers involved in your content marketing efforts, we did thiswith a campaign where we crowd sourced an Infographic.

Use a poll to collect data and then push it out to your followers once it is complete you have aninstant fan base of people who have assisted with the content marketing piece who are eager to share it.

It is also advisable to syndicate the content with paid social ads for additional reach as well.

Example below from a past campaign –

Tip 2 – Leverage Mobile apps for affiliate marketing, this is a cool idea I saw someone doing with Tinder wherethey leverage their affiliate code.

This is worth testing yet you would be sure to have the profile deleted this is why people scale the campaigns.

Benjamin Beck –BenjaminBeck.com –Twitter

It is easy for your most important tweets to get lost among everything else you are saying.

I’ve found pinning my most important tweets to the top of my feed helps me put my mostimportant content in front of visitors to my profile.

Pinning a tweet to your profile is very simple, you can follow this simple guide.

Bill Sebald – GreenlaneSeo.com –Twitter

Social may not bring much in the way of direct SEO value, but it brings indirect value if you reallyspend time crafting a good piece. When you create something, use those social channels topromote.

True – the social links, likes, shares, etc., won’t improve your rankings, but they give you theattention of those that can write about you. That can improve your rankings.

Send challenging, inspiring, revolutionary, controversial, content that people can’t help but comment on. You know– bigger picture marketing! Some of our best links came from nothing more than sharing on Twitter.

Rajesh Namase –TechLila.com –Twitter

Try to use social media tools to reach the right audience.

Sometimes I use Facebook ads to capture the right audience. BuzzBundle, HootSuite and Bufferare my favorite apps which I use on daily basis.

Daniel Cuttridge – Auditalyze.com –Twitter

With social media I feel like it pays to know where to put yourself in front of your audience (foryour niche). You may remember Copyblogger killing their Facebook page.

This was the right thing to do, if one social platform isn’t working for you or doesn’t justify theresources you put into it then you shouldn’t be on that platform.

We tend to focus on the bigger sites, but your ideal audience may not be there, or they may just not feelcomfortable talking, engaging or ‘converting’ via that particular platform.

It pays to do your research ahead of time, otherwise as Copyblogger found out, it can just be a big waste of time.

Sophie Lizard –LizardCreativeChaos.com –Twitter

Be sociable. It’s as simple as that. Share things the people following you will appreciate,reply when someone talks to you, start conversations with people who look interesting. Don’tthink too hard about it!

If you’re already doing all of that, get your social posts and shares looking their best. UseTwitter cards, Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and so on to control how your content lookswhen it’s shared on social networks.

This post shows you how: http://boostblogtraffic.com/social-metadata

Ken Lyons – Measuredsem.com –Twitter

Any time you create a curated or sourced asset (like a group interview, a big resource list or anindustry round up):

Create a Twitter list as a companion piece (name it something flattering like “[X topic]Experts”).

Include the handles of all the sources/sites/bloggers/influencers you’ve cited

Promote the custom Twitter list in the piece; include a link to it in the intro section of your content andencourage users to follow the list.

When doing outreach to sources cited in your asset (which I’d recommend as a means of amplifyingdistribution, sharing, etc) let them know about the custom Twitter list.

A custom list is another layer of ego stroking and it makes an impression, which enhances relationship building.

What’s more, other users follow these lists and you can target those users on Twitter with targeted contentoutreach in the future.

Henneke Duistermaat –EnchantingMarketing.com –Twitter

Don’t focus solely on getting more shares, more tweets, more likes.

How does traffic convert? Which social traffic is truly valuable?

No one-size-fits-all approach exists—when I recently compared traffic from SlideShare andTwitter, I was blown away by how many email subscribers SlideShare generated.

Erika Madden –Olyvia.co –Twitter

You will be successful on social media if you can remember to be as human as possible whileusing it.

Forget the whitewashed messaging and sales promos; freely share candid shots of you/youremployees/your customers, ask people’s opinions, and — above all — be ready and willing tohelp.

For more ideas on what to share on different social media platforms, see this post on how to get your businessnoticed online.

Matthew Capala –SearchDecoder.com –Twitter

Start using SlideShare, it’s the largest B2B social network for decks and presentation afterLinkedin, and it offers a huge traffic upside for creative marketers.

SlideShare has a homepage you can get your content on with smart optimization focused ongetting high sharibility and engagement. I got nearly $500K views on SlideShare with 14 decksover two years, which generated revenue and leads for my business.

Here is an example of a deck I recently published on SlideShare: I Will Teach You SEO

Gurwinder Singh –JustBlogTips.com –Twitter

Try to share your content more than once in different forms. You can share your same piece ofcontent in many forms and increase your visitors to your website or blog.

The other ways apart from the traditional link sharing can be via image posts, question posts,funny posts, tweaking headlines etc.

It not only helps you reach different people at different time-zones but also helps you determine what type of postdoes your audience engage the most with?

Perform A/B testing and continuously monitor your results on what is working for you to make the full use of socialmedia.

Rick Ramos –RickRamos.com –Twitter

If you really want to grow your social channel, remember to share other people’s content aswell as your own.

Make a list of the top 25 people in your vertical start to share their content and remember tomention their user name. After a few times, they will notice you!

You’ll find them sharing your content as well and you’ll both begin to grow together.

David Arrington –ProfitPursuits.com –Twitter

If your goal is to build a very large following, then don’t be greedy about following back.

You may seem like more of an authority with a high followers/following ratio. However, you arealso hampering your total reach.

Personally, I follow people back as long as they are in a similar niche or have similar interests.

ALERT: Increase Social Media Traffic & Engagement Instantly With My Case Studys!

Venchito Tampon –DigitalPhilippines.net –Twitter

Consistently follow/unfollow niche-targeted and engaged social participants (like this).

This will take time in the making. But you can scale this activity using social automated toolslike ManageFlitter. You can do so many things with a $12/month social media tool, including:

Following potential social followers with industry-relevant tweets (by simply using thetweet search feature, you are rest assured that the follower will likely to engage with you).

Unfollowing inactive social participants or those that have spam/fake profiles.

Scheduling posts at the best day and time your followers are most active (so you’ll get better results with #of favorites or retweets every week).

Performing this process regularly would give significant results to your social media campaign and can help youdrive social traffic back to your website.

Neil Patel –NeilPatel.com –Twitter

The simplest social media tip that is effective is to engage. Most people just shareinformation on these social sites and never engage.

Comment, like, retweet and do whatever you can to participate within the community. Itmakes a 2 to 3x difference.

Zac Johnson –ZacJohnson.com –Twitter

Social media is all about engagement and getting the attention of people who mightcomment, share and link to your posts.

No matter what niche you are in, creating content around what people are actually searchingfor, while also using examples and mentioning high authority sites or figures is a great way tograb this attention.

You can see a perfect example in a post I wrote for SearchEngineJournal, which was shared over 3,600 times!

Tobias Megathor – GrowthHackking.com –Twitter

I approach social media the same way I approach real life, being a good and helpful human.

Growth hack your followers by providing them with awesome content and being helpful whenthey are looking to growth hack their business or their life skills.

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it the experts have spoken!

Whatever you do make sure you pick out your favourite tips & create a plan of action to implement them into yourcurrent social media campaigns.

If you want to see fast results then focus on the ones with the least amount of time/money investment vs thebiggest reward.

Have you got any extra tips? Let us know in the comments!