So how do you generate great social media posts? The writing thereof is of the utmost importance and should not be neglected or understated. If writing is not quite your niche, employing writing services is an excellent idea. However for the hopeful writers, here are 10 writing tips for social media posts:

1. Craft posts that are worth sharing. This means your posts should be well-written and interesting enough for your followers to share the posts. It is also important that your posts are mobile friendly. Most people access the internet from their phones and if they cannot comfortably read your posts, it will be a futile post.

2. You have to post with purpose. It is vital you keep your audience in mind and avoid straying from the most fundamental message/s you would like to convey.

3. Headlines are imperative. Without a fantastic headline you will not be able to entice traffic to read your social media posts. Compelling headlines will result in more traffic, shares and building of your brand.

4. Content is second to none. The amount of content you have will determine the amount of times the site is indexed which ultimately ranks you higher in search results.

5. Long-tail keywords are useful. It allows for improved performance in search queries which is not based on exact keywords but also allows for related words.

6. Create greater backlinks and get shared more by posting longer content. There is a connection between increased backlinks due to higher word counts. This increases SEO and therefore conversions.

7. Give your posts due time. Longer posts should be given a day or two to age. Editing will in the end, fine tune your post.

8. Use high-quality images. It is a huge visual contributor to your posts and should grab the attention of your audience.

9. Repetition should be avoided. This is the reason why editing is crucial. You do not want to annoy your readers by repeating words, ideas and concepts.

10. Don’t forget to add share social media buttons at the bottom of every post. The main idea is to reach as much online traffic as possible. So don’t forget to add all the necessary icons.

These writing tips can dramatically increase the quality of your social media posts and are worth keeping in mind when crafting your next exciting, social media post.

Call on WSIOMS for Great Social Media today

Contact WSIOMS for all your social media related queries and requirements.

If you’re running a non-profit organisation or a charity, here are a few ways you can use social media to make a difference:

Consider your reach on each platform

LinkedIn is the professional networking tool, while 80% of 18 to 24-year-olds and 73% of 25 to 34-year-olds are using Facebook and Twitter. When crafting a social media plan, make sure you’re engaging on the social networking sites your target audience uses on a daily basis.

Create sharable content

Social media posts with pictures and videos are more sharable, so always consider how you can include great imagery in your posts. When your social updates get shared, your message will become visible in the news feeds of your online networks, which is the key to gaining traction online.

Engage with social media followers

Your organisation needs to be relatable and human, so don’t simply focus on pushing out one-way communication. Acknowledge members who are donating time or money, answer questions and reach out to interested parties on social media.

Do you need help crafting a successful social media strategy or managing daily content and interactions? WSI OMS can help. Contact us to find out more about our digital marketing consultants.

Many people, including small business owners, understand the need to measure their marketing initiatives online. Are you making any money from your campaign? Are you generating any leads from all the money you are spending with your advertising online? Are you increasing your awareness online? If you are new to social media marketing, how are you going to measure the effectiveness of your campaign?

If you are only looking at how much traffic you generate from social media, how many new “likes” you are getting to your Facebook business page or the amount of new followers you have on Twitter, you are basically not measuring the effectiveness of your campaign, but chasing vanity metrics. Anyone can buy followers and likes online. Does this make your campaign successful? Not at all. The same goes when you are getting a new retweet or share on one of your messages. You may be increasing your reach, but is it actually useful to you and what you want to achieve? When it comes to the bottom line, are you actually making any money from your campaign? If not, it’s time to pull up your socks and focus on what matters.

If you are a small business owner and you have limited resources and time to measure what you are doing online, I suggest that you focus only on two tools you can use to measure your campaigns — Facebook insights and Google Analytics.

Facebook insights

While your owned media like your website and blog are the two most important channels you should use to promote your brand, the social networking behemoth Facebook is a great channel you should use to engage with your audience. Facebook is bigger than big and I’m pretty sure your target audience is also using it.

With Facebook insights, you can measure and view the number of people in your audience currently engaging with your brand and also what the reach of your posts are. In both instances, the higher the number, the better for your overall campaign.

This all gets calculated through Facebook’s very own algorithm called EdgeRank. This algorithm calculates how often your community views and engages with your updates and it determines whether or not your updates appear on their global news feed. The more you interact and engage with them, regardless of how big your community is, the higher your EdgeRank and visibility on Facebook.

Over the last couple of years Facebook has made tremendous changes to their overall algorithm so that they can also get a piece of the pie. Instead of being a free for all marketing platform, they have made it a bit more difficult in generating organic engagement on your updates, but it’s still possible. Maybe not to the full extent of what you could’ve gained a couple of years ago, but following this organic method can still yield positive results for your campaign.

Google analytics

While Google Analytics is still the overall norm in measuring the results of any digital marketing campaign, many people are not using it to it’s full potential. Whilst there are many other metrics you can measure with Google Analytics, one of the easiest things you can determine if your social media campaign is effective is to measure conversion rates. This is by far one of the most important metrics you can use to check if your digital marketing campaign is actually working.

By setting up realistic goals (I will dig deeper into this with a follow up blog post), you can basically track and measure how many visitors from social media channels are coming to your website and completes an action. It’s great if you are getting lots of traffic to your website, but if they are not converting into sales, leads or being added to your email list, what is the point.

There are literally hundreds of metrics you can use to measure your online marketing campaigns, but money and time plays a big role. If you are a small business owner and you need to measure what is working for you, use Facebook insights and Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The post memeburn: Small business owner? Focus on these two metrics to measure with social media appeared first on Anton Koekemoer.

The people you are trying to reach online with your social media marketing campaign should constantly be reminded of your social media presence to encourage them to visit your network more often or for longer periods of time. When you have built your social media community on any of the popular social media channels including your blog and the novelty wears off, your community members may become tired and leave if everything that you do always stays the same. You always need to stay active, create, share and engage with them using magnetic content to keep everything interesting. Always focus on content that pulls people in rather than just pushing it out.

Integrating social media into your business is not a one time event and it’s important that you continue building your social media following/community by diversifying your strategy. If you are already have a social media marketing campaign in place and you want to keep your approach fresh and innovative, find a couple of tips below that can help you with this.

Building your community

Create magnetic content

Provide engaging and useful content that your targeted audience will enjoy. It is very important to keep distributing this content on a schedule so that your audience will expect it and return to find more. Using magnetic content also has a much better chance of being shared again increasing your reach online.

Engage with your network

It is vital that you engage with your network on the social media channels that they are using. If you are unsure, ask them. Go beyond traditional marketing methods with social media and let your employees interact with your customers and visitors to expand your social media reach. This can help you humanize your business. By engaging with your network you can build relationships with them and this will encourage your network to return.

Go mobile

Make sure to research your mobile reach because many people are now using tablets and smartphones to find information and to access their favorite social media channel. By utilizing mobile technologies, you can ensure that interested people looking for anything that you offer can find you with ease. Before posting or creating anything that you are going to share on social media check how it’s going to look on a mobile.

Run a promotion

This is really easy if you think about it. Offer your community a free incentive such as a discount coupon or a free ebook to sign into your newsletter which you can use at a later stage to market to. This can also be great food for your content sharing strategy if you make the promotion quirky.

Make sharing easy

With your “magnetic content”, make it easy for your readers to share your content to their own communities, friends and family. Social sharing is really powerful if integrated correctly with your message. To make it easy to share your “magnetic content”, include a call to action in your message to remind your readers to share it along.

Use other networks

Write a great author blog post on industry related blogs to increase your reach. Also, participate in Google+, and Twitter chats to draw people in.

Use advertising

Where appropriate, use targeted social media advertisements to drive interested people that have shown an interest in what you offer back to the “magnetic” content you have created.

Share content with your email list

Offer your email list small bits from your social media campaign such as your latest blog posts and news items. The goal with this method is to encourage them to visit and join your social media community.

Use your website

Use visual elements such as banners and buttons on your website and blog with links to your social media profiles. This is an easy way to encourage your visitors to check what you are doing on the social web.

Use social media with customer services

Encourage your existing customer base to use social media to contact you on the social web when they have a query or a problem. When using this method, it is vital that you NEVER ever leave a query or complaint unanswered where it’s publicly viewable.

Use traditional marketing

Announce and promote your social media channels in your traditional offline marketing initiatives. An easy way to do this is by including your social media presence on your signage and any printed materials that you have.

This isn’t a quick push a button and get instant new followers blog post, but it is definitely worth it in the end. I’m sure you can buy social media followers, but does 10 000 untargeted followers really mean anything?

The post memeburn: 10 things you need to know about getting more likes and followers on social media appeared first on Anton Koekemoer.

Brand advocates — another buzz term making the rounds online. You’ll find plenty of articles, blog posts, white papers and ebooks explaining that social media is all about the soft sell approach and that you should focus on engagement with your target audience.

Most of the content about this will explain that if you want to see real success with social media, you need to become part of the conversation online and invest quite a chunk of time and effort to see results.

Even though this is true to a certain extent, what I have seen over the last few years is that you should become a brand advocate to see awesome results with social media.

Many believe social media is a numbers game and only focus on vanity metrics, but in fact it’s all about connecting with real people and supporting them.

The online world is noisy

There are way too many people adding to the noise online by liking, sharing and retweeting with absolutely no intent and purpose. Many are also getting way too engaging and personal with their social media campaign, which can exhaust all of their time and produce little to no results. The online world is noisy and separating all the junk to the stuff that really matters to you can be a challenging task.

This is what I do when someone leaves a comment on one of my blog posts or engages with me on the social media channels that I am using:

• Find out who they are by looking at their profiles online. I usually start by doing a search for their name online.
• If they have a website I look at how they present themselves and if it really fits their online persona.
• Mention them by either replying on the comment or mention.

Go the extra mile with your connections

By being an advocate by setting an example yourself genuinely shows that you really care and willing to take the extra mile in getting to know the people you are connecting with. Another great way to make the connection stronger is by mentioning them or commenting on one of their blog posts or social media updates.

If your network of connections is truly supportive of your brand and yourself, they can really be of great help and support to spread the message about your brand and what you do. They might not purchase your service or products all the time, but they are advocates and respected by their own network. Because of this, you might see a huge return.

Be different with your social media strategy and be the advocate in your industry that stands out. Always provide value to your network and become active with your campaign. Review the people in your network and determine which of those people can be labeled as your own advocates. Engage with them and show them that you value their connection. Focus on becoming the advocate with your social media campaign instead of chasing numbers.

The post memeburn: What you need to know about becoming an industry brand advocate on social media appeared first on Anton Koekemoer.

Engagement. This word is so overused in regards to social media. By now, I’m sure you have heard and seen articles, blog posts, tweets, and comments that a successful social media strategy is all about engaging with your target audience and not about hard selling. I’ve heard it a million times before and starting to get sick of seeing it. Even though it’s true that social media shouldn’t be used for hard selling, it should be used to strengthen your current marketing campaigns and can add a huge amount of value when integrated into your business processes.

Engagement on the social web isn’t everything, but it’s still important. Do people really go on their favourite social media channel just to engage with others and have a good time? They might be if they are connecting with friends and family on Facebook or part of a group discussion on LinkedIn. In that case, engagement works wonders, but do people really want to engage with brands all the time when they are visiting their favourite social media channel? This might seem like a barrier to many that are advertising on Facebook and it is. How do you get your audience to notice you when you are practically invading their space when they are in a different mindset?

It’s getting harder by the day to get the attention of the people you are marketing to. People have adopted the means to ignore marketing content. The same applies with traditional advertising such as TV ads. With on demand video and PVR decoders, you can skip pesky advertisements and only watch what you want to watch. You don’t have to sit through all the advertising going on while watching television.

To get your target audience to notice you via social media and to keep their attention is more about creating an awesome user experience which invites new people in and keeping them interested than engagement. How can you keep them interested so that you can accomplish your business and marketing goals? These are some of my digital goals:

Social media goals

1. Contact me directly
2. Share my content
3. Newsletter registrations
4. Purchase a service
5. Leave a comment

These goals are quite different depending on which website the visitor is on. It will also be different for your target audience, but the rules are the same. Always focus on goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, time-bound, and realistic (SMART).

To enhance the whole digital user experience for your target audience, put processes in place to make this possible. It’s important that the team in charge with your social media campaign can start the campaign and the support staff is in a position to support the message being communicated. When you use social media within your business, you create much more engagement and fun with an experience. You create a good experience that will excite people to be part of it because everyone can see the results. Afterall, you are all part of the campaign.

Are you focusing on the whole experience with your social media marketing strategy or just engagement?

The post memeburn: Engagement shouldn’t always be the main goal with social media appeared first on Anton Koekemoer.