By Gini Dietrich
Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at a company’s strategic planning session.
I was the last docket on the agenda and my job was to rally the troops around using social media for the business.
There were 30 people who were held captive and I got to spend two hours showing them some of the social media tactics they’re doing really well already, highlighting some of their colleagues, and then providing recommendations.
Because the recommendations I made are not atypical of this organization, I thought I would repeat them here. Some of these are things every organization (my own included, in some cases!) can implement immediately.
Social Media Tactics Everyone Should Use
- Make Sharing Ridiculously Easy. Your social media share buttons on the blog and/or website should already include your own social profiles (aka Here is the Tweet; here is the link; via @spinsucks). It’s always really surprising to me how many organizations don’t have their Twitter handle in the tweets. Add it! You can even go as far as Danny Brown and customize every tweet. His title is “More Blog Subscribers and Comments? Better Use Postmatic!” This is where most organizations leave off, but you can see his tweet is customized. This makes it ridiculously easy for his readers to share.
- Get Alerts Directly to Your Email. I spend a lot (I mean, a lot) of time speaking at conferences and trade shows and sales meetings and the common theme always is, “I can get an alert when someone mentions me online?” I recommend Talkwalker Alerts (though Google has them, too) because they return more timely information, more quickly. The reason this is important is you may not be on a social network, but someone has mentioned you there because they just met you or attended your webinar or saw you speak. If you have an alert set up for your name, you’ll know they’ve mentioned you and can respond.
- Retweet Your Organization and Its Influencers. How many of you do this? I’m willing to bet not many of you (again, my own organization included!). Follow your organization on Twitter and retweet what they’re sharing. Have a list of influencers? Share what they’re sharing. It’s an easy way to do something small and simple that leads to big results, particularly if everyone is doing it.
- Fill Out Your LinkedIn Profile with Content. What I mean by this is most people have their profiles complete, but it’s just text. Booooring. Add LinkedIn Pulse articles. Add your presentations (assuming they’re not proprietary) to your summary. You can see by mine below that it’s visual and interesting. It leads a person’s eye down through my entire profile.
- Like and Comment On Updates. This one created some really good conversation yesterday because some people in the room are very savvy with social media, but feel odd liking and commenting on the company updates. One woman said, “Of course I like it! I work here!” Yes, I agree. But I also think it’s only weird if you are the admin for the company page and you like the update; i.e. Arment Dietrich shouldn’t like the update, but I can like it and comment on it. Heck, my last name is the same as the company name and I try to comment on nearly everything. This is the only way you’re going to build organic reach and engagement. Everyone should do this.
- Engage More Frequently in LinkedIn Groups. The example I used yesterday is there is a young lady who was hanging out in a LinkedIn group, saw a question about company culture and answered it. From there, the person emailed her because she was writing a story (unbeknownst to this young lady at the time) for one of the organization’s top targeted trade publications. She interviewed her, got some photos, and the story ran a couple of months ago. All from answering one question in a LinkedIn group.
- Figure Out Your Top Keywords. For this organization which I spoke to yesterday, one of their top keywords is “business model.” By a long stretch. They should write more on this topic. For you, go into Google Analytics and do two things. First, go to the calendar at the top and change the dates so it covers the full year-to-date. The go to the right-hand sidebar and click Acquisition, Search Engine Optimization, and Queries. This will give you a list of keywords people have used to find your site. Take note of those. The second thing you should do is go to Behavior, Site Content, and All Pages. Now look at the top pages viewed for the year. You can click on each of those and drill down further to find the keywords people have used to find those particular pages.
- Complete Yoast SEO. I see this all the time. You have Yoast installed, but you don’t use it. USE IT! At the very least, it will teach you how to optimize your content. At the most, you’ll get ridiculously good at search engine rankings. Do not leave it blank. Ever.
There are, of course, going to be some social media tactics you need to do that are unique to your organization. But I promise if you get everyone who works with you to do all of eight of these things consistently, you’ll have big return with little effort.
Now it’s your turn. What other social media efforts can organizations do to create big return?
image credit: Pixabay