Your Social Media Quick Fix: Ten Tips!

Transcript for Your Social Media Quick Fix: Ten Tips!

To learn more about MeetEdgar’s webinar schedule and to catch us streaming live, visit MeetEdgar Live Webinars.[00:05] Hey guys. Megan from MeetEdgar coming at you now. I am so sorry the original version of this webinar did have some audio issues, and we really appreciate you guys taking the time to let us know. We didn't want to at all make sure you missed out on any of these tips, so we're re-recording it and sending it out now. Take a peek, make sure you get all the audio here. And again, so sorry about that original one. As we go on here making sure that you guys are ready to rock once this webinar ends, we want to make sure if you don't have an Edgar account yet that you're able to snag one. You can get a free month here if you go and sign up from meetedgar.com with the coupon code octopuswebinar18. This will get you a free month so you can take the motivation after learning all of these tips, and get it out. Making sure that you're staying motivated is one of the best ways to consistently posts and grow your social media following.[00:56] Remember, you're not going to get to your first million followers overnight, but getting started using a tool like Edgar really gives you a huge advantage. Because you're never going to have to worry about keeping that momentum because Edgar is going to do that automatically for you. So, let us know if you do have any questions. If you are a Edgar user already, make sure that you're letting us know any feedback on our newest feature, stuff like that, we'd love to hear from you at support@metedgar.com.[01:21] We're going to jump on in here and go over 10 social media tips to really help make sure that your marketing is getting out there in the best most effective way to connect authentically with your followers. Tip number one is to consider the intention behind a post and write multiple ways of expressing that intent. So, what this is really going for is making sure that every status update you're putting out there is sparking curiosity and getting out to your followers. One of the greatest ways of doing this is to have goals behind your updates. Think first, if you're on social media to increase brand awareness, generate leads, inform and educate your followers, or drive traffic to your site. No matter what your goals are, big or small, set realistic deadlines for reaching them so that you can always be able to measure and readjust.[02:10] Next, it's time to start thinking, and it's time to start writing all of your great content marketing to support these goals. This is going to start with your headlines. An article's headline isn't just the first thing that a reader notices. Sometimes it's the only thing they're going to notice before sharing. Statistics have actually shown that people don't always read an article before they share it on social media. Because the headline alone is enough to convince them. I'll admit, I've done this on my own social media once or twice. When it's compelling enough, they feel confident in sharing it before they even take time to read the rest. So, this is why we recommend becoming a master headline writer. Taking the time to practice generating multiple headlines for one article is one of the smartest ways to spend your free time on your business.[02:55] Writing a great headline isn't going to take a ton of time. It's about sitting down and thinking about all of the great tips that you can pull out from your article to spark curiosity and give people a realistic understanding of the information they're going to get from you. When I say curiosity, too, I want you to think how you can get your status updates and headlines, to spark curiosity to get people to click on your links. This comes from the fact that studies have shown that curiosity is actually a cognitive form of realizing that, hey, we have a gap in our knowledge. So, we try really hard to reverse this gap by clicking on links to learn more about that information. Our brains are actually programmed to do this, and people are really curious about the information that they think they should know in life.[03:40] So, before you post something on social media, think about what will encourage someone to click on that link. First, how can you phrase the tweet to appeal to someone's curiosity? Second, what word choice is really going to nudge a person's desire for self-improvement and to close that knowledge gap that we chatted about? Remember to also get creative with this. You can see in this exercise here, when you're crafting a status update, you could just share something as simple as, "Hey, read my new blog post." Or you could take it even further and think, "Hey, how many people aren't going to want to find out how to handle 22 tabby cats at once? Make sure you're thinking of creative and fun ways that you can share and spark curiosity with your headlines.[04:23] As you're doing this, remember, everyone's audience is a little bit different. So, you want to make sure to recycle your best status updates. Edgar can actually help you do this if you go ahead and make a hottest tips or a greatest hits category within Edgar. This will allow you to rotate the posts that are generating the most engagement and generating the most value and getting them out to your new followers as well as your old followers who didn't see them the first time. If you have any questions about this setup or workflow within Edgar, let us know and we're more than happy to offer advice on that.[04:57] Next, number two. Use the topics and issues that spark the most comments on social media to inform your content creation. So, what this is going for is just listening to your market and listening to your community and they'll do a ton of the work for you on what content provides value. What this is, is one of our founder, Laura, has actually asked this question on social media, her own profile. This is because we at MeetEdgar are a remote company, so we want to chat with our community, employees, as well as our Edgar pages about what issues or what things that you also relate to in the remote workspace. This topic is something we could talk about for days. So, ask questions about your community, make sure that you're really getting the army of your social media out there to connect with your community.[05:47] You can see from this small question that we asked, we were able to generate a blog posts on this topic. This is something that we have already again, tested in the market. We got a ton of comments when we asked this question, letting us know our followers are interested in this. From this, we're able to then generate our content and share it out on social media with a awesome value added post. So, this is a great cycle on how you can really engage to get that great communication with your followers, as well as get your status updates out there.[06:20] Number three. Instagram. We are so excited to start chatting about Instagram in these webinars, because Edgar's actually getting ready to add Instagram in as a network in the next few months here. Let us know what goals you're working on on Instagram to make sure that we're getting this ramped up so you guys are ready to go when we released that feature. Instagram is a great opportunity to give that awesome behind the scenes content out to your followers. This is the content that really helps to humanize your brand and really helps to add value to your followers. It's also a great place to drive traffic.[06:53] A lot of the times, we think of Instagram as just a visual platform. However, Instagram is a great place to get those leads over to your site as well. What we can do here is doing something as simple as updating this link in your bio. You can see here that we have our normal meetedgar.com link, letting people know who we are and what our website is. But if we release the new blog post, a cool tip that you can try is to go ahead and take out a poll quote from that blog post, and maybe go ahead and overlay it on a nice background. Or pull out your camera, get on Instagram stories and shoot a short video of you explaining the main points from this blog post. From there, let people know in the actual video and in the actual post that the link to learn more on this topic is in your bio. This way, people can scroll up to your bio, visit your Instagram page, and direct more traffic to your site. So, don't lose out on people who want to connect with you on Instagram.[07:54] Next here is participate in news jacking on LinkedIn to curate awesome content for your community. Guys, LinkedIn is social media these days. And with Microsoft just having acquired it, the organic reach on LinkedIn is huge. So, make sure all the status updates in your library are really optimized for LinkedIn in MeetEdgar, and ready to send out to your followers. Customers definitely feel more of an affinity with a brand that when it's relevant, or when it's on time with things that are going on in their life. That's kind of what news jacking is all about. Think about the trends and topics and things that are going on in your sphere, in your industry, and try to add that voice into all of your LinkedIn posts.[08:38] When crafting these updates, remember that more than two thirds of LinkedIn's users consider themselves news junkies. So, make sure that your tone and the headlines of your LinkedIn boasts here match what they're looking for, and give that informational tone that you might find in an actual headline of a newspaper. Guys, remember, when you're crafting these updates for LinkedIn, you can really bolster your credibility and position yourself as an authority. So, if you're not super active on LinkedIn now, it's a great time to start. You can actually start to add in status updates, building up maybe 5 to 10 of your original thought leadership pieces, curating 5 to 10 industry specific articles to let people know that when they do follow you on LinkedIn, it's going to be worth their while. And then you can start cross promoting your company page on Twitter and on Facebook to start to build that following.[09:32] Awesome. Moving on. Halfway there. Number five. We want to make sure you guys are really getting social integration up and running. What social integration is on your site is making sure you have these little social share buttons over on the left. Social integration will allow someone to come on into your blog post, say, "Hey, I want my community, I want my followers to see those great information." They're then able to click on the button that they want to share. For this example, specifically, you can click on that little Twitter icon there, it'll pop up a box where you can place the headline and you can place the link right in there for them. So, eliminating any roadblocks there. And they're able to add in any commentary if they want and tweet it out to their own network. Essentially, creating some awesome brand loyal advocates for you.[10:20] Really, guys, we want to make sure that when people are chatting with you, when they're using the social integration, and they're chatting all of this awesome content and telling you what they want to hear, that you log in and engage with these too. Don't leave these people hanging, they are doing some awesome marketing and brand loyalty for you. So, log in, thank them or retweet them, whatever it takes to make sure that you're showing your followers that they are the most important to you. That human to human connection is going to be huge.[10:48] Cool. Moving on to six, guys. Let's go back to the basics of our posts here. What this is really referring to is that the posts people fall in love with are going to be what would really help to increase your know, like, and trust factor on social media, moving people through that buying process. People use networks like Facebook and Twitter to have fun and not to read up on corporate bulletins and press releases. Make sure that every update you're putting out there has a conversational tone. Maybe even add in a bit of cheeky humor to generate some laughter along the way. Out of everything you write for your business, all of this great content of your blogs and videos and infographics, take all of this and make sure that it's going to a conversational tone. Make sure that you're doing things like writing status updates and then reading them out loud. Seeing if they make sense if you were explaining something to your friends and family. This will get that conversational tone that will help you connect with your followers.[11:48] All right guys, moving on to number seven here. Giving away great content positions you as a solution to your followers' problems. This is going to be huge when you're trying to think about how you can get promotional content out there, but still add value. Make sure that you're thinking about all of your eBooks, all of your blogs, your infographics, your humorous updates, your informational updates, and making sure that you're giving this away and showing people the value your company will provide them. Getting that out to your followers, let us know if you need any help thinking about ideas. Edgar loves to hear about what you guys are working on. So, email support@meetedgar.com. Number eight. Making sure that you guys are also following along with this Instagram trend here. If you're not sure what Instagram carousel feature is, it's a great way to add multiple images to one Instagram update. So, being able to share multiple images and videos in a single post actually makes them a lot more interactive, which is perfect if you want to share some hot tips and some facts that don't necessarily fit in one photo. You can see here it's great for product businesses. If you do have a product, you can share multiple images to get this great all around view of this mug specifically here. If you don't have a product-based business, what I'd love for you to think about doing also is hopping on again like a Canva or something that help you generate a bunch of quotes.[13:16] You can see here if you jump into Canva, you can get some awesome quotes, pull out things and tips from your blog posts, and get multiple images up on Instagram's carousel feature. What this will allow you to do is to tell more of a story in your Instagram posts themselves. If you get 10 quotes in there, you can get people to start to really connect with your brand storyline quite a bit better and still get that awesome visual imagery that people are craving on Instagram.[13:48] Staying on the topic of images here, we want to make sure you're also optimizing your images for your social media profiles. This feature is really, really going to make sure that you're shining out with how visual not only the static images you're posting are, but also your link previews. If you guys aren't sure how this is generated, when you're sharing something on social media, it shares the image title and description with something called OG tags, which as referred to as Open Graph tags. If you're not sure how to set this up, let us know. We have a great webinar on it and we have some great tips. Email support@meetedgar.com to get those.[14:26] But essentially, you have full control over the photo that's going to be chosen as this main photo, the title and the description. So, go ahead and log into your WordPress, log into your Wix, whatever blog you're using and get the Yoast plugin that will allow you to do this easily. Again, if you need help finding this, let us know. You can also do this to make sure that the links you're sharing on Twitter are really optimized to share with images with what we call Twitter cards. Twitter cards will allow you to share a link that will generate a preview, will generate a title, and will generate a description right there. So, you have full control again, on how to size this and how you want them to show up on social media. Let us know if you need help with that. Always happy to offer advice.[15:11] And we've made it to the end now, guys. Tip number 10. While you're not necessarily creating every single update, and post on mobile, your audience is definitely consuming it there. And they can show up differently. Whether you're posting it on your desktop, or whether you're posting it on your mobile phone. So, when you're doing this, make sure you're kind of thinking of this statistic that 6 out of 10 people who use Facebook at least once a month are actually only using it on mobile. While you're not necessarily creating on mobile, your audience is definitely consuming there.[15:44] Some subtle differences here, if you can see. The update on the left is actually taken from a desktop. This uses the meta description for the link where you can see you have the image, the title, and the description there. If you look to the post over on the right, you'll notice the description is not there. Again, super subtle. But if you're not thinking about your mobile audience here and you're just sharing this link, you might forget that hey, there's no description to get that tantalizing curiosity bit out and to get that value out in the post itself. So, maybe you want to add in an actual status update with some text as well, explaining it so your mobile audience still gets that great value and still has that great compelling reason to click and get the information you're sharing there.[16:28] Awesome, guys. Make sure that you are letting us know how this webinar went. Again, thanks for sticking around for the second recording. We love our community here. Go ahead and email support@meetedgar.com. Go ahead and connect with us on Twitter, and subscribe to this YouTube channel so you never miss an update from us. We love hearing from the community. Support@meetedgar.com to let us know what you're interested in learning about as we go along through this webinar series. Thanks for joining again today, guys, and have an awesome day. Happy posting out there.