Using Social Media Tools to cut through the digital noise

Use these less well-known Social Media tools and Hacks to Get Things Done

The world of social media is a busy place. A very busy place. And this means that it can often feel like you're shouting into the wind with your social media campaigns. Indeed, if you approach social media without a strategy and without the right tools, your social media activity may amount to exactly this.

The good news, however, is that, as social media has grown, more and more tools have become available that can help the shrewd social media marketer do their job more effectively. These include tools for scheduling posts, tracking follower/fan demographics, refining content, creating social media calendars, and much, much more.

It’s hard to imagine running a decent social media marketing campaign without using at least some of these tools. And the very best social media marketers often use a variety of tools and make sure that they get the absolute maximum from them. More than that, the best social media marketers use plenty of little tricks and hacks to put them ahead of the competition…

In this article, I’ll run you through two of the essentials for cutting through the digital noise – reaching the right people and creating the right content – and list a few simple hacks that may just give your campaign just the kick it needs.

Reaching the Right People

Social media marketing works best when you know who you’re talking to. It’s no use thoughtlessly spraying out content with a vague hope that people will see it and start to engage with it.

Social media feeds are highly competitive, and only by figuring out exactly who it is your trying to reach with a particular campaign can you expect people to start listening. This is why you need to know who your target audience is. If you have no idea which types of people you should be targeting, this article should put you on the right track.

Analytics tools can help you gain an understanding of the types of people that are currently engaging with your posts as well as what sorts of content your target audience likes most. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have built in analytics tools, and there are a wide range of third-party tools that offer more in-depth or tailored analytics capabilities, too.

Find a tool that works well for you, and use it to, firstly, see whether the people who are currently engaging with you are the same as your target audience. If they’re not, look at what your most successful competitors are doing to engage their audience (since it is almost certainly the same as yours) and modify your campaign accordingly.

Hacks for Reaching the Right People

There are a few neat tricks you can use to make sure your content ends up in front of the right pair of eyes. Both of these tips involve influencers, or people who have a lot of “sway” in the industry you operate in. Get influencers to share you content, and you’re likely to see a huge increase of the right type of traffic to your site.

The first of these involves Pinterest – so is only appropriate if that platform plays a role in your social media strategy. Interestingly, less than one percent of people comment on Pinterest. So, if you want to get the attention of a Pinterest influencer, commenting on their pins will certainly make you stick out from the crowd. This simple action can make it much more likely that that influencer will take notice of you and possibly – hopefully – even share some of your own content. Nice.

The second hack works on the idea of finding influencers within your existing following/fan base. If you already have a fairly large social following/fan base, you may, completely unbeknownst to you, be being followed by an influencer. Engaging with such influential followers/fans can be an easy, cost-effective way to bolster your campaign. To do so, you need to figure out which of your followers/fans have the loudest voices. AgoraPulse, a relatively new social media tool which I’ve written about before, lets you see who your most influential followers are and tag them so you can see what they’re up to and engage with them.

Creating the Right Content

Content can be used for all sorts of reasons. You may want to increase traffic, revenue, brand awareness, or sales. So, before you start creating anything, you need first to know what you want it to achieve – else you’ll simply be wasting time and money on content that’s not likely to provide you with any significant advantage.

Different types of content – photographs, graphics, blogs, whitepapers, etc. – are more appealing to particular demographics than others. And your audience will also have a preference about how you present content once you’ve decided what type of content to produce, as well as where you post it.

If, say, you want to engage millennials, then using a platform such as Instagram, which many millennials enjoy using, could be the way to go. Further, if you’re targeting millennial males interested in cars, then your images should conform to some aesthetic requirements – perhaps, apologies for the stereotype, by using “macho” imagery and colours. On the other hand, if you’re looking to engage business people, then posting interesting whitepapers and reports on LinkedIn may serve you much better.

You get the gist. And really it’s up to you to find out what sorts of content will serve your brand best. Of course, getting ideas from competitors and other well-known brands can get you so far, but it’s far better to consult your own data and refine your content using that. So look at the performance of previous campaigns, see what worked, and what didn’t, and go from there.

Hacks for Creating the Right Content

The first hack for creating the right content requires Post Planner, a great tool when it comes to refining content. This is because Post Planner has a viral content engine. This shows you the images, links, and videos that have generated the most engagement in your industry, so you can see exactly what your audience is into in real time.

The second hack depends on creating evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that’s always interesting to you target audience. If you have good evergreen content, then you always have high-quality content to post. Such content can be reused, updated, and turned into other content, saving you much time and effort.

Of course, you can control this process manually. But Edgar, a neat social media publishing tool, allows you to automate it. (And you probably should; automating where possible saves you time and allows you to focus on other things.) By adding all of your content to Edgar’s library, categorising it, and scheduling it for publishing on each of your social media accounts, the tool takes over the process for you. And all of the content that’s published gets placed at the bottom of your queue to be republished later.

Conclusion

Getting the right content in front of the right people is key to social media marketing success. Whilst it’s true that there is a lot of activity in the social media space, you’d be surprised how a few simple changes can turn your campaign from a mediocre one to a high-performing one.

I hope this article has given you some ideas about how to take your campaign to the next level.

Do you have any hacks you’d like to share? Or would you like to know more about anything I’ve touched on in this article? Leave a comment or a question and I’ll get back to you.

Thanks to Lilach Bullock for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Lilach is Co-Founder of  Comms Axis, a digital marketing and content agency.Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach Bullock has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street with her presence! In a nutshell, she’s a hugely connected and highly influential serial entrepreneur.Lilach is consulted by journalists and regularly quoted in newspapers, business publications and marketing magazines (including Forbes, The Telegraph, Wired, Prima Magazine, The Sunday Times, Social Media Today and BBC Radio 5 Live). You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.