How to Win at Social Media

Awesome Hacks Across 4

Major Platforms

How to Win at Social Media

Social media marketing is a fun, challenging,

and demanding task—one that saavy marketers

are always looking to scale and hack. With so

many platforms and so many different ways to

try (and fail!) at effectively promoting your

business across social media, who wouldn’t

want a simple list of proven ways to maximize

your efforts without overexerting yourself or

your team?

Well, we’ve created such a list, and we’re

sharing it here so you can benefit, too. Check

out our awesome social media marketing hacks

that will help you win on Twitter, Facebook,

Pinterest, and LinkedIn:

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Twitter Hacks to Try

Twitter Hacks

Twitter is a social media network that keeps marketers constantly on their toes. From

Twitter Polls to the platform’s recently proposed 10,000-character count tweets, the people

at Twitter are always coming out with new features that marketers can take advantage of to

entice audience engagement and convert viewers into leads. Stay creative with your Twitter

campaigns, and try these hacks:

Add Twitter Cards to Your Site. Twitter Cards are an underutilized hack that allow you to

turn shares of your content links into rich media posts. We’ve used them ourselves since last

year and have seen our number of tweet engagements and shares soar.

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Here’s an example Card:

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Twitter Hacks

You can add Twitter Cards that drive traffic and clicks to your intended website, app, or

content offer simply by adding a few lines of HTML to your webpage. There are also a

variety of different Card options available—including Summary Card, App Card, and Player

Card—each designed with a specific goal in mind. Our previous blog post includes a total

breakdown of these Card types, including how to add Twitter Cards to your site.

Find and Engage Influencers. Many marketers feel that the power of Twitter lies not in your

ability to engage your own followers but in the potential of reaching the followers of your

industry influencers. It’s important to find and engage these influencers so that you can

ultimately reach their vast audience.

But who are they? Industry influencers are usually very active on social media themselves,

and have an active blog with lots of reader engagement in the form of comments and shares.

If their followers are so engaged with their insight on topics you’re already an expert on,

there’s no reason they wouldn’t be as engaged with yours. The Keeper has a great guide on

targeting Twitter influencers and getting them to share your content.

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Twitter Hacks

If their followers are so engaged with their insight on topics you’re already an expert on,

there’s no reason they wouldn’t be as engaged with yours. The Keeper has a great guide on

targeting Twitter influencers and getting them to share your content.

Use a Link Shortener. This is a best practice that, if you’re not using it already, you’ve likely

been exposed to and subconsciously responded to. Across most social media sites, users

engage more with posts including links that have been shortened rather than those that are

copied and pasted as is. It could be the aesthetically unappealing ellipses that accompany

unshortened links that users dislike, or perhaps they’re responding well to the fun link

names you can customize using shortening tools—whatever it is, it works.

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Twitter Hacks

Below are two tweets of ours promoting blog posts on similar topics, both PPC-related, that

also include almost the same hashtags:

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Twitter Hacks

As you can see, the tweet with the shortened link received a lot more likes and retweets

than the one without. Frankly, if improved audience engagement is as simple as shortening a

link, why not give it a try?

We recommend and use owl.y ourselves, as Hootsuite is our social media calendar and bulk

scheduling tool of choice, but bitly is another great tried-and-true option.

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Facebook Hacks

Facebook Hacks

Facebook boasts a massive 400 million global users and counting, and over 100 million of

those users are from the United States. The sheer amount of potential customers alone is

compelling enough for most businesses to create an account, but few take it to the next

level and optimize their strategies to drive conversions and sales. Use the following

Facebook hacks to maximize your use of the site:

Leverage Native Video. Marketers are constantly looking for engaging formats and new ways

through which to interact with their audience and develop relationships with potential

customers. Native video content—videos that are uploaded to or created on social

networks—is an excellent way to drive brand awareness, boost social shares, and extend the

reach of your content. Why? Because videos are compelling and engage a viewer both

visually and aurally. It’s easy to see why marketing professionals around the world name

video as the content type with the biggest ROI.

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Facebook Hacks

Short video content is perfect for social media sites—in fact, Facebook native video receives

more than double the interactions that YouTube or other videos do. You can even add a CTA

to the end of your Facebook video—such as Learn More, Watch More (featured above), or

Shop Now—providing followers with the very “next step” that could convert them into your

customer. Check out our previous blog post to discover how to successfully leverage native

video content across Facebook.

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Facebook Hacks

Crowdsource your content marketing. One Facebook hack that many businesses fail to take

advantage of is actually very simple—let your followers tell you the topics they want to see

on their newsfeeds. This will not only engage your current followers but will also lead to

improved audience interaction with your posts down the road, as you’ll accumulate new (but

similarly interested) followers who will appreciate that you’re creating content for their

benefit.

Not only does crowdsourcing content topics help ensure improved audience engagement, it

also makes your job easier! No longer will you and your team have to spend the time and

effort scouring analytics to determine quality topics, and the best part is that this is an

effective strategy across all social media networks. Effective ways to crowdsource topics

across top platforms include:

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Facebook Hacks

Facebook/LinkedIn: Ask via update that followers comment with a problem that they’re

experiencing (related to your services) that they want solved in your next post. To entice

more people to engage, let your followers know that you’ll be rewarding the top 3 comments

with a free consultation or a small prize.

Twitter: Use a Twitter Poll to ask followers which topic they’d prefer to read a post about.

The only set-back with this crowdsourcing strategy is you can include just two options for

followers to choose from in your poll—so choose wisely. For more tips, check out our

previous post on using Twitter Polls.

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Pinterest Hacks

Pinterest Hacks

Pinterest is a relatively newer social network making a huge name for themselves. A visual

pinboard, Pinterest has over 100 million monthly active users who use the site to become

inspired, source new trends, and plan their purchases. Pinterest provides an especially large

opportunity for ecommerce businesses who can use the site to promote their products in a

compelling and visually-appealing way. Read on to learn how you can hack Pinterest:

Optimize for search engines: Most marketers have at least a secret goal of getting their

content pieces ranked on the first page of search engine results, and Pinterest can help you

get there. However, to optimize your content for search, you can’t just stuff keywords into

your pins. Instead, add them naturally to your profile and product descriptions, and cleverly

insert them into the names of your boards. In our previous blog post, we share even more

tips on improving your Pinterest search visibility.

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Pinterest Hacks

Highlight text to use as your pin description: For this hack, you’ll first need to install the Pin

It button from Pinterest (which is, perhaps, it’s own hack). If you’re a frequent pinner looking

to expedite the pinning process, this trick allows you to automatically input a pin description.

The Pin it button on a Chrome browser

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Pinterest Hacks

The hack works as follows: Highlight the title of the post or the descriptive text that you

would like to use for your pin’s description (you can use up to 500 characters) before

clicking the Pin It button. Then, click the button and the highlighted text will become your

description! This is a simple hack, but one that can vastly improve the productivity of

marketers using Pinterest.

Use Your Competitors to Gain Followers. If you’re looking to grow your account and

accumulate more followers, you know by now (from the Twitter section above) that engaging

influencers is a great strategy. On Pinterest, finding these influencers is easy—you just have

to know who your competitors are.

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Pinterest Hacks

To get started, just input your competitor’s website into the following URL:

pinterest.com/source/[competitor’swebsite.com]. There, you’ll find the most recent pins

from your competitor’s site and can begin to assess who the most powerful Pinners are.

Once you’ve determined the influential Pinners whom you want to target, connect with

them and begin letting them know how awesome your business is.

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LinkedIn Hacks

LinkedIn Hacks

LinkedIn is a widely-used professional network that is an

essential social marketing channel for B2B companies

looking to promote their products and services. From your

company profile to LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, many

aspects of the site can be customized and optimized to

facilitate audience engagement and lead generation. We

share our LinkedIn-specific hacks, below:

Create a Showcase Page. LinkedIn Showcase Pages are

extensions of your company page designed to highlight

your specific products and services. You can create up to

10 Showcase Pages, and big brands like Microsoft and

Adobe are already using them successfully to generate

interest in their many offerings.

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LinkedIn Hacks

If you decide to create Showcase Pages on LinkedIn, make sure that you also commit to

optimizing it to drive results. Spend time developing unique page content, as you don’t want

to be hit with any search engine penalties. For best practices and a walk-through, check out

our previous blog post on creating a stellar Showcase Page for your business.

Leverage Thought Leadership

In 2015, we saw the rise of thought leadership content, and audiences loved it. Publishing

via Pulse—LinkedIn’s long-form content publishing platform—became increasingly popular,

and now over 130,000 unique pieces of content are posted there each week.

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LinkedIn Hacks

In 2015, we saw the rise of thought leadership content, and audiences loved it. Publishing

via Pulse—LinkedIn’s long-form content publishing platform—became increasingly popular,

and now over 130,000 unique pieces of content are posted there each week.

To hack your LinkedIn content marketing, get high-level employees within your organization

involved. A whopping 60 percent of LinkedIn’s members state that they are most interested

in reading about industry insights, so take advantage of the expertise you have within your

own network and ask executives to create a post or contribute to one you’re working on.

Convince those who claim they don’t have the time by reminding them of the 380 million

members who use the platform—those users are also Pulse readers who could turn into

potential customers for your company.

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