Creating the perfect social media strategy for your business

From a purely SEO perspective, social media is a fantastic tool for any online business to help create backlinks and  get more traffic to your business, moving your site higher and higher up the search engine rankings.

A recent study found that the more posts you have, the more shares you are going to get, which isn't rocket science as the more options in terms of content you give an audience, the more chance the audience will find some of it interesting. However, while placing as much content you can, across as many places as possible is going to help your website grow, to get the best possibly results you need to analyse what you post and when you post it to help generate as many likes, shares and reads as possible.  

Statistically, the more prominent types of posts placed across social media are picture and text based as they are much easier to create than say, a video. As I highlighted in a post two weeks ago (Boost your brand identity with Instrgram), it's not about how many pictures you can post across social media, but more what these images contain. One imaginative and entertaining image is going to get a ton more shares and clicks than a whole host of generic photos. Now when it comes to having text based posts, the balance between quantity and quality is much more tricky depending on what your posts are and what type of business you run. If the posts you regularly place on social media are regarding offers, sales and products on your online store then the more posts you place on social media, the better, as this is all content that people are definitely going to be interested in. If the text based content you post is more SEO orientated, consisting of articles and blog posts, you need to be more selective. While you can post as many blog posts and articles are you like, as there will be different people who are interested in reading different articles, users may become increasingly annoyed with a constant barrage of article posts appearing on their feeds. If the aim of your social media content is to purely create as many shares and possible, helping to increase customer's awareness of your business, then you need to focus primarily on pictures and videos. Videos are a much trickier form of social media than text or pictures, but if done correctly it can be the most rewarding. When you create a video for your social media site, it can be something to do with your business i.e. a promotional advert, or it could be nothing to do with your business whatsoever. The more original the idea, the more chance you have of that video becoming viral, meaning literally thousands of people will see it and become aware of your brand identity. While I have broken down each of the various types of social media posts, the best social media accounts are those which use all of these in equal proportion to produce unique and appealing content.  

Right, now we've looked at what to post and how often to post it, the next stage is to figure out when to post it. You could have a fantastic article, picture or video, but if you post it at the wrong time, then not many people are going to see it and it is not going to achieve its potential. What I mean by this is, there's no point posting content in the middle of the night when pretty much no one is going to see it. To achieve the most number of likes and shares as you possibly can, you should look to post your content any time between 6pm and 8pm in the evening. This is the time when people have come home from a busy day at work and are catching up on all the activity on their social media account. Although the evening is the most profitable time to post, you will find that you have more success during this period from Monday to Wednesday as opposed to Thursday and Friday. 

If you are willing to put in the hard work to make the social commerce section of your business as successful as possible, you should look to post content during the weekend. The weekend is the most popular time for social media activity, with pretty much everyone checking their social media accounts numerous times over this period. Take advantage of this and get your content out there for people to see. If you run an online or eBay store that sells goods, then perking someone's interest with a social media post could be the best way to encourage them to visit your site and make a weekend purchase.

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Unconventional Marketing Breeds Inspirational Growth

Like most aspects of life, when setting up an online ecommerce store there are many conventions which people tend to follow. This could involve selling your product a certain way, targeting a specific customer demographic or increasing your businesses branding.

When it comes to marketing, there are methods that have proven track record of providing a business with great brand awareness, social media following and customer growth. These marketing techniques involve producing blog articles (like I'm doing right now), placing banners or ads on websites and producing email marketing campaigns to attract new customers.

The fact that these strategies have stood the test of time proves their effectiveness and should definitely be incorporated into any marketing strategy. However, relying solely on these conventional marketing methods is going to limit the real growth and awareness that your business could achieve.

The fact that these forms of marketing have a proven success rate means that every single company out there is going to be doing exactly the same thing. With so many business all following the same marketing pattern, you are going to find that you are just one head in a very large crowd, all looking to get to the same place. This will result in slow movement forward as other businesses are moving exactly at exactly the same rate with you.

Now it's time to think out of the box! We've looked at the conventional and although it works, it isn't going to give you the dramatic growth that you could potentially achieve, so now we need to look at the unconventional. There are people out there who believe that the tried and tested conventional methods are the only way to go, but in a modern era when videos and other viral content are achieving worldwide notoriety, maybe it's time for you to look at helping your business take advantage of this growth.

Probably the most well known type of unconventional marketing is viral marketing. While this can be one of the most successful forms of unconventional marketing, it is also one of the hardest to achieve.

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing basically involves creating video content that is both appealing to an extremely large audience and increases your brand's awareness. The viral marketing could simply be a an advert explaining what your product or service is and how it can help people. However, the most popular viral marketing videos are those which have absolutely nothing to do with what the company offers. It is simply an entertaining and memorable video that provides some sort of brand identity. For example, Cardbury's created a popular advert a few years ago which consisted of a gorilla playing the drums to the Phil Collins song "In The Air Tonight". This advert was different and entertaining, but had no mention of chocolate at all apart from the Cardburys Dairy Milk logo at the end. The video proved to be a massive hit both on television and across the Internet, with well over 10 million YouTube views. While Cardburys is already an established brand identity, I use this video as an example of how your viral marketing concept doesn't have to tell the customer anything about your product, it simply has to make audiences aware of your brand. 

Once they are aware of your brand they will then be interested in finding out what it is exactly that your business does. This will result in them typing your name into a search engine and visiting your website or social media pages.

The beauty of viral marketing campaigns is that, with social media sites like Facebook and YouTube, people who find a video that they consider entertaining, then share it with their friends. This means that your video could be sent across the world in a matter of seconds, achieving literally millions of views within a matter of weeks.

While only the most successful of viral marketing campaigns achieve viewer counts in the millions, this extreme gives you an idea of the potential audience that unconventional marketing can achieve as opposed to the usual conventions.

I'm not saying abandon usual marketing strategies. Creating articles, banners and adverts are all incredibly important in helping increase not only your businesses exposure, but also your search engine ranking and thus should be carried out on a daily basis. What I am saying is that rather than just relying solely on these methods, look to come up with some innovative and original ideas to target a whole new audience. Some of these "out of the box" ideas might work, others might fail, but giving them a go and seeing what they can achieve is only going to help your business. The more marketing tools you have at your disposal, the quicker you are going to achieve greater brand awareness for your business, it is as simple as that.

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The Power of Viral Marketing

Every day millions on people search through video sites such as YouTube looking at entertaining videos they have been sent by their friends and colleagues. Rather than just using the site as an entertainment source, have you ever thought about how these types of videos can help promote your online business?

Viral marketing allows you to create an entertaining or innovative promotional video for your business which is then placed on one of your store’s social media sites. The video is then sent to various people through word of mouth, increasing the brand awareness of your business.

There is a fine line between success and failure of viral marketing, a good idea can create a marketing buzz, whereas a bad video could simply be a waste of time with no coverage whatsoever. 

With over 48 hours worth of videos being placed on social media sites every minute of every day, you need to come up with an original and innovative idea that will help your promotion stand out from the crowd! 

Although this figure may seem a little daunting, the fact that YouTube gets over 2 billion video views every single day proves that video promotions can have a large impact on your businesses brand recognition. 

eSellution's social commerce dashboard can help you promote and manage your various viral promotions across a number of social media sites all with one click of a button.  

Take a look at eSellution’s YouTube channel and check out some of our promotional material: YouTube: eSellution

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