3 Powerful Social Media Marketing Tactics That You’re Ignoring

Marketers have to work hard to promote visibility on social media but without using the right strategies and tools, their attempts may be in vain. They also have to keep up with trends because social media changes all the time and what worked in the past may no longer offer effective results. 

Any social media presence needs to be as meaningful as possible and deliver content that provides value and has a positive, memorable impact on an audience. Here are three tactics you may be ignoring that will help propel your engagement to new heights.

Harness the voices of your employees

Did you know that 64% of companies say that employee advocacy helped them to attract new business? This is why more companies are leveraging employee advocacy today for authenticity and social reach. The best brand advocates will always be the people who believe in the product they are promoting and this could be your employees.

If you have 500 employees and they all have social media accounts, think about how many people you will reach if you encourage them to share brand communications. If each of them has 100 followers, you could reach 5,000 people instantaneously.

Employees of a company often tend to have more followers than the company itself and more people trust a regular employee or a company’s technical expert than a company CEO.

A study by Cisco showed that employee posts can generate eight times more engagement than when the same content is shared through a brand handle. 

An employee advocacy program requires guidelines, resources and rewards. You need to make it easy to share brand content and standardize how it’s done. Hootsuite offers a free employee advocacy guide that will teach you how to plan, launch and grow an employee advocacy program. 

Creating an employee advocacy program starts with creating a fulfilling work environment so employees will want to post on social media. Claude Simmons, a marketer at a dissertation writing service, suggests first testing a program with a few selected employees and only implementing it once you’ve identified a working formula that’s successful. 

You can create hashtags to promote a specific employee advocacy campaign, a leaderboard to show who is getting the most engagement for a hashtag and organize a prize for the leader. 

Starbucks is one of the most well-known brands with a strong brand advocacy strategy. It even refers to its employees as “partners,” immediately giving them a sense of belonging and accountability.

Employees need to get something out of such a program, whether it’s positioning themselves as industry experts, enhancing their credibility or receiving recognition or rewards. When Cisco encouraged summer interns in 2019 to share using the #WeAreCisco hashtag, they offered the prize of an Apple Watch. 

An advocacy campaign should promote the company’s business goals and it is important to track the social media metrics. This may include which individuals or teams share the most, how many people are seeing the content, clicking links and leaving comments as well as how much traffic shared by employees generates. 

There are various employee advocacy apps, such as LinkedIn Elevate, that can help you to manage an employee advocacy program. Many of these apps have built-in gamified leaderboards to encourage participation, accessibility to content steams and analytics to measure results. 

Build social media communities around your content

Many brands appear to have large social media followings but look more closely at their individual posts and you are likely to see that engagement levels are virtually non-existent. The brands that see more engagement build communities around their content. 

Social communities are not a new concept but the way brands are using them is changing. They realize that there is no guarantee that creating a group and having people join it means people will engage. Brands have to create content that encourages conversations, gets people talking and cultivates that feeling of community. 

If you want to create this type of content, you must make sure each post contains valuable takeaways, such as knowledge, actionable tips or inspiration. You also need to provide a mix of content in varying formats, including blogs, infographics, videos, graphs, quotes and more. 

As a content marketer, you must give your audiences everything they want, so they don’t have to look for it elsewhere. To understand what your audiences are talking about, it helps to use a social listening app, such as Social Mention, that searches user-generated content to find out what people are saying about an industry, brand or topic. 

If you are studying and trying to build social media communities and extend the reach of your online business at the same time, it may be helpful to use online writing services. You can choose from a number of different services, such as bestessay, custom papers or essay help. 

A social media suite can provide you with a way to see everything in a central place, from creating posts to distribution, monitoring and analytics. This helps you to see what is working and what isn’t so you can pivot if necessary and try something new. 

One brand that has a flourishing online community is Sephora. Beauty Talk is its huge forum where users can share ideas and ask questions about their beauty issues. Sephora also has a Beauty Board where users can upload pictures of them wearing Sephora products. The products link from the photos to a product page. 

Lego Ideas is another inspired online community where anyone of any age who loves lego can vote on favorites, check proposals, submit ideas and leave feedback. 

Xbox Ambassadors is another example of a brand with a highly engaged brand community. It has a forum with many devotees who provide a support network for the brand. 

Tell stories on social media

Social media storytelling is the use of text, videos, photos, and other elements to craft a narrative, rather than just presenting facts about a product. This is so effective because humans connect with stories that resonate emotionally with them. And emotions can influence what they purchase. 

Stories on Instagram are visual, highly engaging and designed to be created and consumed in the moment. As of January 2019, Instagram had 500 million daily active Stories users across the world. Big brands appear to favor Instagram Stories for marketing purposes. 

Why are Instagram Stories so popular? They are seen as more authentic than other posts that can be edited and altered. The content is only available for 24 hours so it is current. This up-to-date content satisfies the desires of consumers for live, real-time content. Sharing other people’s Instagram posts through Instagram Stories is a function that helps people to connect easily with other businesses or accounts. 

Lululemon used brand storytelling effectively on social media with its #justmymat campaign. It began with an Instagram video of a woman doing yoga in different settings and inspired followers to upload photos or videos with the hashtag showing them practicing yoga all over the world. 

Gillette worked with Shaquem Griffin, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, who doesn’t have a left hand. They didn’t use him to sell their razors but told his story in a campaign called “Your best never comes easy” to send a message about having the courage to overcome obstacles. 

A final word

Whether it is inspiring your employees to become brand ambassadors, building engaged communities around content or telling stories that humanize your brand and tug at people’s heartstrings, you need to find new, more creative ways to make more of an impact on social media.

If you want your company to survive and thrive in a more organic social media context, you need to work on adding that human, personalized element to keep consumers engaged and coming back for more. 

Justin Osborne is a writer at best essay writing service and college paper reviews, he loves to share his thoughts and opinions about education, writing and blogging with other people on different blogs and forums. Currently, he is working as a content marketer at high school research paper and do my assignment.