Whether you are a solopreneur or run a multi-million dollar corporation, one of the most important assets your business can build today is your social media tribe.
Your tribe drives your business, tells more people why they need to join the fun with you and let’s you know what you’re doing well and what you need to improve.
In short, your tribe becomes the reason you remain in business, your raison d’être.
Your tribe pays your mortgage, puts shoes on your kids feet and helping them do better and be better is part of what gives your life meaning.
Here are my top 10 tips for building your tribe through social media:
- Don’t just do something, research. Many people make the mistake of thinking that all they have to do is set up a Facebook account or other social media network site and start talking. Begin at the beginning. Research the keywords that your fans will use when they go to the search engines to find your business, products, books and services. This is a major mistake that many people make. They never really build an audience because they don’t know what their audience is actually looking for.
- Once you know your keywords, create hashtags. Your hashtags become searchable terms that people will use in social media to find you.
- Use a dashboard. Having used both Social Ally and Hootsuite I recommend Hootsuite. A social media dashboard is a single location where you can connect all your social media accounts. From this place, you can schedule your social media posts to be sent out multiple times throughout the day, set up systems to monitor your top hashtags, follow back people who follow you, research your followers and much more. In short, for $10 a month, you can automate, simplify and educate yourself.
- Find future tribe members by researching your hashtags. You can use your dashboard to find other people who are obsessed with the same topics that you are. Many people focus on Influencers, who are simply people who have a lot of followers who can sway many other folks to make decisions. But recognize that literally anybody in social media can have influence – either in your favor or against you. Make friends with your influencers. Follow them. Retweet them, share their information, engage them in conversations, offer to cross blog with them.
- Blog once a week using your keywords. You can definitely blog more than once a week, but our Search Engine Optimization guru Scott D. Smith argues that once a week gives you 80 percent of the impact you need. Put the keyword in the title and first paragraph. Realize that the most important part of your blog is the title, so learn how to create killer headlines that grab people’s attention. The second most important part of your blog is the first paragraph. If you don’t grab their attention with your headline and first paragraph, you’ve lost them. Realize that people today scan more than they read, which is why blogs based on lists (such as this one) are the most successful these days.
- Use a Jetpack on your WordPress website to automate publishing your articles all over the social media. When you set up your Jetpack plugin, every time you hit “Publish” on your blog, your article gets automatically sent out to all the social media networks connected to your website. This saves you a tremendous amount of time.
- Be a friend to have a friend. Share more than you sell. Retweet, share, engage with content that your raving fans create. Don’t just be a boring monologue ranting on “buy my stuff.” You create good karma in social media every time you share the meaningful content that other people create. They will be more likely to share your information once you have shared first. Give first receive later.
- Tell your story in a visual way. Recognize that Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google. You can create one to three minute videos using your smart phone or video conference services like Zoom.us. Use your smart phone to photograph your customers engaging with your products and services. Use services like Canva to create graphics that grab people’s attention. Realize that if your social media post does not have an image, a video or a GIF, it’s less likely to be noticed or shared. Colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80 percent.
- Ultimately, your goal through the social media is to drive people to your home website where they will buy your products, sign up for your services and become paying customers. Create giveaways to lure people to sign up for your email newsletter. A good way to do this is create autoresponders through services like Constant Contact and market the material you are giving away for free through your social media.
- Use the Google analytics information on your website to identify what kinds of content your fans are responding to. This analytic information is free and available to anyone who has a website. You can see which articles people have been reading the most. Then give your fans more information about the most popular topics. Often you think you know what people are coming to you for but you won’t really know until you see the analytical information Google provides for you. Focus on these topics and share freely to your social media tribe.
Want to learn more about how you can Win the Game of Social Media?
Putting all this together takes time and is part of creating a successful social media strategy.
Join Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com and we will show you how! Call Catherine Carrigan today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com or contact Ramajon Cogan at (928) 821-4553 or email wheresramajon@gmail.com.
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