Transcript

Hi there! I’m Jason Crabtree, Director of Search Engine Optimization, for Agent Branding System. In this video, we’re going to discuss three great ways that you can maximize the impact of social media marketing. The first question you will probably ask yourself is “do I really need social media marketing?” The answer is yes, but in this video specifically, we’re going to discuss ways that you can use social media marketing to maximize the impact of content that you already have published online. The use of social media to promote online content as a strategy is often overlooked. Far too often we see a business create content and then publish it, but fail to draw traffic to it. If you spend your time and resources researching, creating, and publishing new content, don’t just shoot it out into cyberspace and hope for the best. Social media is a great way to promote this new content and build awareness for the material that you’ve published. It’s also a good indicator to the search engines that there’s new content out there that needs to be indexed. What do we mean by promoting content through social media? Well, this practice refers to creating and publishing offers through social media channels. These offers may just be an offer to learn more about a product or service that your business provides, or it could be an offer to download information or a discount on services and products. Regardless of the offer, the goal is to promote client engagement between social media and your business. Here are three great ways to maximize the visits to your content using social media. One: you can promote website content. Two: you can promote blog posts and videos. Three: we’re going to talk about the best way to use hashtags and links in your social media promotional content. No matter if the content is new or existing; it is a great way to build awareness and draw traffic and attention to products and services that your business offers. A good example of this would be the State Farm agent who in addition to insurance offers banking and financial services. Most consumers aren’t aware that their State Farm agent can even do this. So, using social media to promote this part of your website or content a certain service is a great idea for your State Farm agency. If the agent uses social media and promotes these goods and services through this platform, it gives consumers the opportunity to click through and learn more about the offering. When you create content that’s hosted outside of your website content, like videos, blogs articles, press releases, white papers, anything outside of your website that’s hosted elsewhere, publishing it is not the end of the task. Once it’s live, you want to promote that new content to the World Wide Web. A great way to do it would be through social media channels. Our second tip is about how to link your social media posts and status updates to your off-page content. When you’re posting on social media, you’re working within a regulated space and you’ve got to be compliant with the rules and regulations of each social media platform. Twitter is the most tightly regulated of the social media platforms in that it only allows a hundred and forty characters per tweet. This doesn’t give you a lot of room to write an in-depth description, so what you want to do is figure out what it’s going to take to spark the interest of your ideal client that you want to click through and learn more about your offering. Facebook and Google+ don’t have the same character limits; however, keep in mind that consumers don’t want to read a big long description about what they’re going to go read about once they click through, so keep the description brief. Make sure that you use plenty of action words and things that would inspire the consumer to click through. When you use words like this it’s called “clickbait.” Clickbait is something that motivates the consumer to click through and learn more. Our third bullet point is about the use of hashtags and links in your social posts. We know that we want to provide links, and this is the way that the consumers will get from your social post over to the content that you actually want them to read. There are character limits, like I mentioned earlier with Twitter, and we don’t want the big, long URL that they’re going to link to take up most of our tweet. Facebook and Google+ are going to have a lot more options for you, but my advice would be to use the software to shorten the URL, so you’re taking up less space in your actual social post and the link goes to the same place. Now, hashtags are important because you’re going to want to use keywords in hashtags. Keywords and buzzwords are things that the consumer may search for and also things that search engines can index. This allows the social posts, the social platforms, and the search engines to index the social tweet or status update that you just pushed out. When it comes to using hashtags, we want to use them strategically. Hashtags are the keywords with the pound sign in front of it, and this is what people can use to search for particular social posts. It’s also what the social platforms use to categorize and index different posts. There you have it! Three great ways to maximize your results in getting traffic to your content using social media. If you found this information useful and informative please share it with your friends. Also, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. I’m Jason Crabtree, thank you for your time.