Growth Hacks From Top 30 Social Media Influencers

• Updated on: 2018-10-12
• Read original article here

An influencer is quite simply someone who carries influence over others. Social media influencers are someone who wields that influence through social media. The form of influence can vary and no two influencers are the same. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are great places to engage with your family, friends, and favorite celebrities, but where should you go to connect with influencers in your industry? LinkedIn of course!

One of the great things about LinkedIn is it isn’t the same kind of networking that happens at conventions, where you’re wearing a name tag, trying to meet strangers, and awkwardly attempting to make small talk. LinkedIn is networking without the pressure. Here’s how to get the most out of it.

Influencer marketing is the best way for brands to spread the word about their product, but whom a brand chooses to represent their product is often the key to a successful influencer campaign. Influencers come in all shapes, sizes, and industries, and one of the niche verticals includes “social media influencers“.This term is often confusing because, depending on the context, a social media influencer might include any influencer who falls into one of the influencer verticals. Other times, “social media influencer” refers to influencers who make their mark in social media due to their business, tech, and social media expertise.

Social media is always exciting and playing a vital role in everybody’s life this era no matter you are an entrepreneur,celebrity,tech geek, social media evangelist & the list goes on. New social media channels are budding every day along with the new features for the existing one. Keeping up with the pace to track all the latest updates across the giant of networks is humanly impossible.

2017 is slated to be a big year for influencer marketing, and it’s important to know the who-what-where of the industry. Today’s article lists the top 30 social media influencers you need to know in 2017.

1. Become a Triple Threat with your Facebook Fan Page

First, create a custom landing tab, otherwise known as a welcome page. This is the #1 mistake I see most people making with their Facebook presence. Either they do not have a fan page or they have no opt-in gateway on their fan page. You can give your potential follower a free gift in exchange for their email address. This provides you an opportunity to introduce the amazing benefits they’ll receive in liking your page and you can continue to share your content with them through your newsletter.

Second, use the photo slider at the top of your page for picture advertising. For instance, one picture could read, “Click here for a free ___.” The picture then takes the follower to a link on your website with the free offer.

Third, use the @mention option when you reply to comments. Not only does this promote specific dialogue and engagement, but it also, allows you to reach a wider audience. When you @mention a follower in a post, your comment also appears on their page or wall. The way you mention someone is simple, type the “@” symbol and start typing the name of the person that you wish to mention. Facebook will start to give you choices as you type in the name. Select the one that is the correct one and that will ‘tag’ them in your comment.

If your target market isn’t finding you on facebook, be sure to get involved on twitter. You can use sites like www.twellow.com, www.listorious.com, www.triberr.com and www.twitterfeed.com to find and connect with key people in your niche.Likewise, creating and saving searches is a great way to take focused action on twitter. Each time you visit, you can get involved in the latest conversation on your topic, and share the love with @mentions or retweets.As you build a community on twitter, host an hour long twitter party. This can be especially useful if you have a product launch, or if your audience has a lot of questions. To set up a twitter party, decide upon a short and relative #hashtag that “partiers” can use to communicate with you. Then, have fun answer questions, giving away prizes, offering discounts, and promoting your products.

Because LinkedIn is not as fast paced as Facebook or Twitter, entrepreneurs tend to put it to the back burner. This is a mistake.

You want to utilize LinkedIn for its group opportunities and recommendations feature.

Overall, testimonials are still one of the most influential selling points. If you don’t already have 3 recommendations (the required amount to have a complete profile), then ask clients, colleagues and joint venture partners to submit one. Or, simply write recommendations for others. linkedIn will automatically ask the recipient to reciprocate.

Don’t forget the groups! Groups are NOT for selling or promoting your products. But, they can create amazing networking and joint venture opportunities. Imagine if you could reach your audience through an interview, webinar or podcast that someone else put on?

4. If a Picture Says 1000 Words, Imagine the Power of YouTube…

If you haven’t started to create videos that showcase your expert knowledge, or help you launch a product, then you are missing out.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a camera, or feel overwhelmed by the recording process, you can now record and edit right on youtube itself.

After you upload your video, supercharge it by adding keywords to your title, description and tags. Be very specific, here. Think about the phrases your target market will type into the search box. Likewise, put your website link in the description box FIRST. Then, describe the video. Most viewers won’t read past the first 3 lines of text. So, if you’re website is NOT in those first 2-3 lines, you’re missing out on potential customers.

Once you’ve created a video, be sure to use it on all of your social media platforms.

Use a tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to schedule your posts. Consistency is key with social media, and scheduling your posts can be a huge help.

Stand out from the competition by being honest, real and transparent.

7. Always use a call to action (CTA)

Regardless of which platform you are using, it is important to always use a clear CTA. Let your fans and followers know what you want them to do next!

Spend some time nurturing relationships with your “super fans” and they will continue to sing your praises and help you grow your online presence!

Tweeting, pinning and posting aren’t enough. Read and respond to comments and questions in a timely and professional manner.

10. Think about how social media fits into your marketing funnel

How will all your efforts on social media help you accomplish your marketing and sales goals? Spend some time figuring out how social media fits into the bigger picture.

Rethink is the keyword here. Rethink your posting strategy on social media – Less is actually more!

2. Live video is the flavor of the day

Live video is currently the flavor of the day with algorithms and so figure out a way to do it. We have nearly 13 sessions on live video at Social Media Marketing World 2017. We’ve got some preliminary research that marketers are all in on live video and so it’s time to do it – do not delay.

Refocus on the reason why you have a social community in the first place. There’s a community there and so it’s important to refocus on community development. Stop worrying about the numbers and stop worrying about the traffic. Start focusing on cultivating the right people to build a strong affinity and relationship with your business so that they become evangelists.

Before embarking on your marketing mission, Stelzner advised that you should be clear with your vision, develop SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals, and set your business course trajectory. You should also look for role models to emulate. Ask around you to see if you’ve got any knowledgeable peers and industry experts. Alternatively, study how big brands do it or seek insights from your community of followers.

To augment your knowledge, you could set up “idea vaults” and create a discovery system. This would allow you to find influential people and experts, discern industry trends, and locate interesting content. Sources of information to populate your idea vault include Google Alerts, bookmark services like Delicious.com, Twitter Search, conferences, Amazon’s Hot New Releases list, and other online repositories of knowledge.

5. Three Groups of People to Work With

There are three groups of people whom you should work with to launch your business online.

True gifts engage people and build relationships. In the social media world, your content must be genuinely helpful and valuable.

Don’t wrap them up in sales or marketing messages. Such cloak and dagger practices are anathema to your community!

Beyond free content that helps people solve their problems, you should publicly recognise the outstanding efforts of other industry players, promote other people’s content, and provide social proof (eg Facebook Fans, Tweet numbers, Email subscribers, etc) to show how popular your content is.

A Call To Action (CTA) is a “suggested activity that guides people toward an outcome”. Often, the use of pop-up subscription boxes and integration of a CTA button in your navigation bar helps.

In the book, strong CTAs include action-oriented phrases such as the following:

Most people are repelled by marketing messages. They don’t like to be marketed to, and I think anybody who is listening or reading what I’m saying right now can understand that we are attacked by marketing messages in our car, airports, bathroom stalls — and literally everywhere. The problem is that people tune out and they don’t pay attention to those ads. So that creates a real quandary for us who are business owners and marketers. How can we get in front of people when they’re not paying attention?

People don’t trust us anymore. Edelman did a study that showed that only one in three people trust businesses. Those are two serious quandaries. So what do you do? Well, we should focus on the needs of people, and if you can figure out how to provide what people want for free and can figure out how to scale that by hundreds or thousands or millions of people, then you can rapidly grow a following upon which you can grow a business, and you do that with content.

Content provides the ultimate scalability because a single article can work for you in a way that a human being on the phone never could. And it’s something that if done right, people will end up sharing the content with their peers, which will drive more traffic back to it, and it creates this awesome feeder mechanism. So that’s the great content you need. You also have to bring in people outside of your organization if you want to grow — these experts that we refer to earlier. And the last thing is put away the marketing messages.

When you do all three of those, you end up creating content that is highly valuable and not perceived as bait designed to convert. And when I receive a gift that I know has no strings attached, I’m going to love you as a result of it. I’m going to want to keep reading your stuff and tell my friends about it. And what that does is create a big, big following upon which you can ultimately begin the process of selling, and that’s the elevation principal. You first need to own the audience so that you’re not reliant on middlemen anymore who cost you a ton of money.

There are two kinds of content that can bring people to your business. Primary fuel is the content you produce regularly (e.g., your average blog posts). Nuclear fuel is the kind of stuff that’s really complicated but is stuff that people go crazy over (e.g., reports that they normally would have to pay for but are free).

And the upside to nuclear fuel is mass exposure. You’ve given a gift to people. You know what I mean? And it empowers them to make decisions about what they’re going to be doing in the future. And that builds stronger relationships between your readers and your brand. But it’s also something that demonstrates the value of your website.

You could argue that it’s a form of marketing. Yes, it costs a lot of money actually — a lot of time to analyze and produce a survey, hire a graphics designer to create a nice cover, etc. But at the end of the day, I would probably have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the equivalent number of press mentions about the report. You know what I mean? Just think about all the advertising I would have to buy and all these different mediums just to get the word out about that report. It’s free because now I’ve got thousands and thousands of people who are sharing this thing everywhere.

9. The power of social media giants will increase

It’s no secret that the giants of social media world want people to spend more time on their networks and not your own website. As user numbers grow and internet users spend an increasing amount of time on social, it’s time for social media marketers to work out how this will affect their strategy in 2017.

“Algorithms, bots, artificial intelligence and people working for very big companies will destroy the business models of people who produce content by disrupting the free flow of information. In the very near future, information flow will be filtered and measured and censored in the name of “reducing clutter” and revealing “only what’s important.” Facebook will decide what you see. Google will serve up only that content that complies with its rules and is housed on its servers. Email solutions like Gmail and Yahoo will tighten their own algorithms so even reaching the inbox is at risk.

The information distribution highway will have toll stations that must be paid for by the those who create content. If you want your content seen, you’ll need to house it inside the companies that control the toll stations. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more will incentivize content creators to not link to off-site content. These large businesses will become the equivalent of the 1990s America Online–a type of “Hotel California,” where you can enter but never leave. Traffic to websites will decline and blogs will shut down. Gone will be the days of information flow and true information freedom. The future will only be more controlled, more filtered and less open. Are you ready for the change?”

Finally, to monetize all the followers and fans you’ve built up over the years – you are running a business after all – you should tactically weave your marketing in through the following approaches:

Through the Velocity Launch approach, you can market your products and services to your subscribers and reader base by “building anticipation and momentum that excites (your) reader base about (your) products or services while also moving them closer to a purchase decision”. This can be considered a type of Drip Marketing approach. Such tactics are commonly used in digital marketing efforts involving information rich products and services. The key here is to infuse your content with subtle marketing messages while guiding readers towards your offerings.

These are self-promotional messages: “Check out our product!” and “Here are five reasons our product is great!” If you don’t put yourself in the shoes of your prospect or customer, then you neglect their point of view and how they’d be receptive to your messages. Your customer doesn’t want to know 10 reasons why your product is better than everyone else’s. They’d rather have an ebook on ten ways they can do their own job better.

50 to 80% of the content that you provide through your social networks should not be about your company at all. Find relevant, credible websites and blogs and share their content more frequently than your own. This demonstrates that you’re helpful, builds relationships and proves that you’re doing more than trying to sell.

Social selling is about building relationships, offering good content, engaging, and providing yourself as the resource. In doing so, when someone is ready to purchase, you’ll be the first person they turn to.

You want to put your content out there, not necessarily promotional content, but content that you create that helps your audience boost their own job performance. This approach promotes you and your company as thought leaders in your industry.

In addition to your LinkedIn company page, create a group around your product or products as well. If you have something to sell, you want customers to have a place to talk about it. Product groups enable your product users to engage with each other and share best practices. As long as you have the resources to manage it, consider creating a LinkedIn group for each product so you can be more focused.

LinkedIn is great for B2B companies because it’s a common space for business buyers and influencers to congregate. It’s often easier to reach this audience on LinkedIn versus Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn is also one of the better platforms for targeting your audience with paid ads because you can segment by direct contacts, locations, job titles, company name, etc. There are many options from a B2B perspective that enable you to hone in and get really targeted.

Today, you can’t be at a conference and not be on Twitter because there are conversations happening all around you. Twitter is like background buzz where you can talk about your products, share best practices, or put content out there. Whether you’re at a conference or not, it’s a place to always find a conversation around any products and topics.

Graphics and visuals stand out on social media, and custom design is a great way to drive engagement around your social posts. On certain social platforms, such as Twitter, visuals automatically expand and will show your audience a lot more about your content versus just sharing text or a link.

8. Engage at the point of need

My good friend, Mike O’Connor, used to call it, “Engaging at the point of need.” If there is an opportunity on social media, such as a request for a product or service similar to yours, you can jump in and help them. This is an opportunity to guide the user toward purchasing your product or service. Do this carefully and slowly. You don’t want to scare them away.

With Facebook focusing more on company pages vs individual pages when it comes to selling, event pages are a great way to stand out. Create an event to bridge the gap between personal and professional lines by inviting friends to your event. They can do so without liking your company page, if they choose.

With all the social channels out there, be mindful of your time and resources. It’s hard to keep up with ten different social networks at a same time. Therefore, it’s important to focus where it counts. Start by taking your sales cycle, whether it’s four to eight or more steps from opportunity to sale. Then, matrix that information with your different personas. For instance, if your audience is in IT, you might target a user, an IT manager, a CIO or a CEO. Draw your sales cycle across the top, and put your personas across the side. Now you have a matrix of every single person that might be involved in the purchasing decision for your organization and also each step of the sales process.

Marie Forleo‘s weekly videos preach this simple (much needed) motto. If you focus too much on perfectionism you’ll stall your progress. “Perfect” is like “normal.” There is no such thing.

Give up the impossible ideal of “being perfect.” While maintaining professionalism and high standards allow for progress to happen with an attitude of moving forward as a work in progress that can evolve.

Cranking out a bunch of junk isn’t going to help your blog or bring business to your company.

Short, unfocused fluff will provide no value to your readers or clients. Strive to become the resource in your industry and provide information to inspire people to consume, comment on, and share your work.

The other side of this coin is creating content that reaches your social media goals.

Focus on developing a social media marketing plan to provide high quality materials that help reach your SMART marketing goals.

More isn’t better for social media content. Take the time to develop your goals and designing specific pieces of content [blog articles, live videos, produced videos, webinars, etc.] to create winning marketing to help your clients and attract people to your website.

Google rewards original content by bubbling it to the top of relevant searches. This must be earned by creating stellar work.

Stories make your content interesting and unique. Each person or brand has their own story and distinctive way to tell it.

I have certain parts of my social media journey that I talk about which are mine alone. The short version is that Twitter was my first social media love, I was super excited to tweet and converse with authors which lead to my starting a Twitter chat called #MyBookClub. I love to read so this brought me particular joy.

This story is specific to me and people love to hear about it.

Find pieces of your story that you can share with writing, visuals, or video. My friend Brian Scott is a farmer in Indiana and he creates really great media of his activities on his family farm.

Brian shot with his son has SIX MILLION views on Facebook. Brian takes photos, shoots video, and does some great stuff with drones. He’s a fantastic ambassador for the modern farmer. Who knew they used so much high tech equipment? Not me! By the way, I met Brian on Twitter years ago in a blogging chat.

Visual content is more than 40x more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

It’s important to create something unique and not copy the style of another blog, brand, or social media personal brand that you love. You will not stand out and you will look like a jerk.

Need help with design? Find a professional designer to help you build your brand’s style. Don’t be a copycat.

Create unique social imagery to share. According to Twitter, tweets that contain images receive an average 35 percent boost in retweets.

HOW TO ADD VALUE WITH VISUALS:

Remember the stellar content in point #2? This needs to be done on a regular basis. Can you commit to post bi-weekly on your blog and once a week on your YouTube channel? When you’re making your plan be realistic with your goals and follow through with actions.

When people know that you’re posting something new every Monday at 9 am or going Live on your Facebook Page for a Friday video, they’ll anticipate and appreciate your efforts.

I know this is scary but social media marketing moves quickly. Create smaller content plans by the quarter and be ready to reevaluate based on changes on the social marketing platforms. We’re held at the whim of the changes that are made on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. Pay attention to the platforms that you’re investing time and money into and adjust accordingly.

Thinking of your social media and blog as a publication and creating an editorial calendar for your content will help keep you on track. Being organized with overall themes, post ideas, and using your analytics to keep your followers happy can make your life easier.

You won’t reach your business goals if you don’t have a plan. Start by creating a solid editorial calendar so you can keep the ideas flowing and always have things planned ahead.

It seems overwhelming but my most consistent social media is planned and prepped ahead of time.

This allows for more time to engage with people and respond to comments which is the true success of your social media. Just posting and never checking doesn’t work.

Only 33% of buyers believe what a brand says about itself. In contrast, the same study showed that 92% believe what their peers have to say about a brand. —Nielsen Survey on trust in advertising

HOW TO ADD VALUE WITH TESTIMONIALS:

Publishing to social media is an important part of any social marketing strategy. Sharing social content helps boost reach, increase following and establish your brand as a thought-leader. If you have no process in place, check out this webinar on building a social content calendar. When filling up a social media calendar, make sure your team satisfies the content needs of each individual network. Since no two social media audiences are the same, there are no hard-and-fast rules about how often to post. However, there are guidelines out there to use as a jumping off point:

Being interested in other people to help you maintain your connection online. Remember people’s names and read their content.

Sprout Social has a great feature that you can see all the interactions with a person when you click on their profile. This is super helpful when you haven’t had a conversation with someone for a very long time.

There’s always a shiny new toy or tool popping up but you don’t have to spend a lot of time testing things – don’t pull your focus from getting real work done. It’s more important to be consistent and engaging on your social media than it is to spend too much time testing tools unless that’s the focus of your job or blog. If not, read reviews and fill in the holes in your social media plan as needed.

Figure out the exact type of engagement you want from the content you are creating (Hint: The answer is NOT ‘whatever’s easiest to measure’).

After you have figured out the type of engagement you want, focus on creating content that’s valuable to your audience, and that moves them toward the type of engagement you want with them.

3. Make it easier to get the type of engagement you want.

If you’ve done the first two, this step will be easy. Think about how you can not only motivate your audience to engage in the way you want them to, but make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Also, remember that every social media tool does better or worse at facilitating certain types of engagement, so consider the tools as well.

4. Start tracking which of your customers are using social media.

There’s several different ways you could do this, but the main thing is that you want to create a way to start interacting with your customers online, plus you want to be able to follow them as well. You especially want to do this for your satisfied customers. Whenever someone is communicating to you that they are happy with your business, that’s a great time to ask them what their Twitter handle is! Or if they bring up social media, ask them if they are on Twitter or Facebook. 5. Post coupon codes to each social media channel you are using.

And you want to make sure these codes are specific to each site. For example, one code for Twitter, one code for Facebook. This helps you track which channel works best for driving sales. Run a separate code for each site at the same time on Monday. Then by 5 pm Friday if you had 15 redemption’s of the Twitter code for the week, and 3 for the Facebook code, that’s a possible indicator that your Twitter audience is more receptive to coupon codes than your customers on Facebook are.

Many small businesses offer punch cards, especially restaurants. They give you a card, and each time you make a particular purchase, your card is punched. After your card is ‘full’ (typically 5-10 punches), you get a free item. For example, the Pizza Hut here has a lunch buffet punch card. After 10 punches, you get a free lunch buffet. But what if you gave your customers a way to earn punches besides just purchasing a meal or product? For example, let’s say you are a hairstylist that offers customers a punch card for haircuts, and they get a punch for each haircut. After 10 punches, they get a free punch. What you could do is offer them an additional punch if they would take a picture of their haircut and then post it on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram! Or maybe if they RT your tweet about this week’s promotions, that earns them a punch. You can play around with it and figure out what works best for your business, but you may find that a picture posted on Facebook might drive in more business than you’d ‘lose’ by giving up a punch on a card.

7. Use Twitter to do ‘real-time’ local marketing.

If you are a small business that’s active on Twitter, one of your best friends is a site called Monitter.com. What I love about Monitter.com is that it not only lets you search Twitter for specific search terms, it then lets you target those terms based on geographic location. So if you own a pizzeria in downtown Nashville, you can set Monitter.com to tell you whenever anyone tweets ‘pizza’ within X kilometers of any zip code you set, down to 10 km. So when I tweet ‘Lunch time! Hungry for pizza, where should I go?’, you can reply and tell me about your specials you are running on pizzas for lunch, and that if I’ll tweet you the pizza I want, you’ll have it ready for me when I arrive! 8. Reward your fans and best customers.

This ties back to the first point about tracking which of your customers are using social media. Let’s say you have built a list of 50 of your customers that are using social media. You can then go in and segment these users and then give them unique offers based on their activity.

For example, let’s say that 10 of those 50 customers are promoting your business on a weekly basis. These could be your ‘fans’. So you might want to create a special sale or event just for them. And when they arrive, make sure you communicate to them that they were chosen because they were helping to promote you and that you wanted to thank them for being your fans!

Often when I talk to someone about or speak on Think Like a Rock Star, they will say ‘I love the concept, but we’re not Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. They are actual rock stars, we’re just a brand. We can’t have fans like they do.’

When I started writing the book, I set out to answer that question. Do actual rock stars simply have some natural advantage that brands do not? Are actual rock stars able to create fans, passionate customers that literally love them in a way that most brands cannot?

What I discovered, to my delight, was that rock stars do certain things to create fans that are easily replicated by brands. It’s not that brands can’t do the things that rock stars do to create fans, it’s that most brands aren’t willing to do the things they need to create fans.

Here’s your primer to becoming a rock star brand:

10. The Two Most Important Words

Don’t make this stuff harder than it needs to be. Want to instantly get more comments on your blog? Get in the habit of saying ‘thank you!’ when someone comments. Want more people to share your content on Twitter? Get in the habit of saying ‘thank you!’ when someone RTs you. Reward the type of behavior that you want others to engage in. In other words, appreciate and thank the people that are helping you, and they will probably keep doing so.

On any platform, when you are looking for what you should be posting and what will resonate with your audience, look at your audience and see what they are posting, what they are sharing. People are not on social media (for the most part) to buy your stuff. They are on Facebook to hang out with friends and be entertained. They are on Instagram to share moments in life… whatever the platform, take a step back and look at what native content your fans are posting. Then stop posting like a marketer, and start posting like a fan.

2. Use Tools that help you Create Visual Content Quickly and Easily.

We have access to so many great tools now that anyone can be creative, and quickly and easily create content that catches attention and drives traffic on any platform. I recommend starting with Canva and Relayon a desktop. On mobile, some great tools for iOS and Android are Over, Studio, and Typorama.

Particularly, you notice visuals are always more effective than the thousand valuable content. And the world’s most successful brands enhance their popularity through stunning visual content strategy. Using this way you can connect your audience and offer them instantly recognizable content and propel them to your business.

You can also link a short video from your YouTube Account or Instagram profile link to increase shares and generate more visits to your blog or other landing content. This not only help you to create a series of more valuable content, but also reduce the cost and time in hiring a designer. It’s a must-follow tactic for anyone who’s ready to put their visual content strategy into action.

When I think of evergreen marketing and advice that never goes out of style, I immediately draw upon what has worked in my “offline” brick and mortar businesses over the past 20 years. It all comes down to one thing – providing massive value to your clients. Strip away all the bells and whistles and “tools” and think about how you can help or inspire your clients.

According to Forbes, it takes 5 x more effort to attract a new client than to keep an existing customer, and 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. What does this mean? Love your customers, get to know their values, provide massive value and empower them to share.

Word of mouth hasn’t changed…it’s just supercharged by the power of social media. A customer that loves you and wants to rave about you to his friends is worth more than any Twitter, Facebook or Google+ following. Think of your customers as being on your marketing team and it will change your perspective.

If you have someone come to you online with a complaint, it can be an opportunity to show exceptional customer service and build your business. Huh?, I hear you say! Sure, a complaint online for the world to see can be daunting, and perhaps your initial response would be to run and hide, not respond or even react defensively (not always a great idea, by the way). But imagine if you took the opportunity to show that you care? Just by showing that you have “heard” the complaint can make a huge difference to the customer (Hi Sarah – we are sorry that you have had a bad experience at our showroom), but then taking it further can really win you some brownie points. Ask for their input ”˜(Do you have any suggestions for how we can make it better?” and even offer them an experience to replace the initial one (Can we offer you the chance to come down for a free lunch and chat with us at our next client day because it’s people like you that help us to make our business better). Imagine if you did that in front of hundreds of “followers”. What message would that send?

By short video, I am referring to video of 1-2 minutes in length – short, snappy, engaging and not the full, edited, professional quality longer-form video you might see on YouTube. There’s nothing wrong with the fancy schmancy YouTube videos – they are still a hugely important strategy if you are savvy with video, but this post is all about getting you started. It’s about getting you out of your comfort zone and not about you embarking on setting up a video production studio.Short is short for a reason it catches attention, takes advantage of short attention spans and encourages engagement.

I often say that it is important to focus less on attracting new customers and focus more on romancing the ones that you have. A satisfied customer will refer their friends, so never underestimate the power of giving your current customers a lot of attention and value. If you do this right they will bring in new customers for you!

8. Empower your team to market your business.

Educate them about how to talk to clients, educate them on how to use and post on social media and empower them to advocate for your brand. They are your most powerful marketers next to your happy customers.

9. Delegate what you can even if it is the smallest of jobs.

The sooner you can focus your time on doing the things that really matter in your business the faster your business will grow. Think about what you would pay yourself to do the task you are doing – if is a task you can pay someone else less to do, consider handing it off. This is hard to do in the beginning if you have low cash flow but it could be as simple as asking a team member to work one more hour per week or to have an intern or work experience student on a project basis. Freeing up just 1 or 2 hours per week to let you work on the business rather than being in it can be a huge boost to your confidence and productivity. Think laterally!

This tip was going to be ‘post at the best time for your audience’ but honestly, it’s worthwhile experimenting, especially if you’re new to automating. Even though there are great tools out there to help you work out when the majority of your audience are online; you never know when your super fans might pop up and make your day.

Branding is all about being consistent across channels. This means that the same naming, color scheme, and imagery that is part of your branding guidelines needs to be applied to social media.

The challenge, though, is that most branding guidelines don’t include “voice,” perhaps the most important part of your social media branding.

Here’s another perspective on social media “voice”: Nearly 84 percent of employees surveyed believe that CEO social media engagement is an effective tool to increase brand loyalty, while 68 percent think that C-suite social media use enhances the perception that a company is honest and trustworthy.

With that in mind, who represent (or represents) the voice of your company in your social media branding guidelines? And what will their tone(s) be?

If social media users are communicating and sharing information in social media, what is your company going to talk about? Content provides the medium to help you engage in conversation – and creating content that is truly resourceful and shareable can have many long-term benefits to your company’s social media presence.

Content isn’t just about blog posts, photos, and videos: Think outside of the box! Presentations, infographics, memes, and even discussions (such as in a LinkedIn Group) are all types of content that should be considered for your social media strategy.

That being said, 62% of marketers blog or plan to in 2013 – and I’ve been blogging since 2010 as to why a blog should be a part of your social media strategy.

Has your company started blogging – and is it completely integrated in your social media strategy?

If you’re just talking about yourself in social media, no one wants to listen. It’s only when you begin to curate content that is of interest to your followers and promote it together with your own content that your social media accounts begin to breathe new life. In addition, did you know that 85% of marketers surveyed stated that content curation is an important tool for establishing thought leadership?

Does your social media strategy include which sources you plan to curate from – as well in which ways you plan to leverage your content curation activities? Don’t forget that crowdsourcing content is also a great way of curating – especially if it is from your own fans’ tweets about and photos of your products. 4. Channels

There are more than 50 social networks having at least 10 million members. Which of these social media “channels” will your company include as part of your social media strategy?

You can’t – and shouldn’t – have a presence on every social media channel, but deciding which social networks to engage in – and creating internal best practices and tactical plans for each of these networks – will form a sizable part of your social media strategy.

While most companies concentrate on the more established social networks, depending on your industry the new emerging social networks of Google Plus, Pinterest and Instagram, or even more niche social networks, might be equally important.

No two social networks are alike, and with limited resources you need to decide how much time you are going to spend doing what on each platform. This will also help you measure how well you are doing as well as maximize your ROI for time and resources spent on each platform.

More frequent posting doesn’t necessarily make your social media more effective. Post strategically. For instance, one data point shows that when a brand posts on Facebook twice a day, those posts only receive 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post that a single post receives.

Are you using data to properly tweak your frequency strategy for each social network so as to maximize the effectiveness of your posting?

Engagement should be considered in both its proactive and reactive forms. While most companies do well at proactive engagement with their own content, proactively engaging with new social media users and reactively engaging with those who engage with your updates are equally important to create an effective social media presence.

One thing to keep in mind about engagement, though, is that engagement should be a tactic to help you achieve your objective, not the objective itself.

It’s interesting to note that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

Is the engagement with your fans on each of your social media profiles worthy of being followed?

Listening has more meaning than merely being on the lookout for complaints. Every engagement with a social media user is a golden opportunity, and being a good listener can also help you reap the benefits of utilizing big social data to help understand potential future trends for your products and services.

Here’s two stats that indicate the importance of implementing a listening strategy as part of your comprehensive social media strategy plan.

Does your company have a listening strategy in place?

Readers of Maximize Your Social will get a fresh look into how I redefine what a “campaign” is in the age of mainstream social media. Think of it less as a promotional marketing campaign and more of an experiment to better understand  and more effectively engage with your social media followers.

That’s why I believe, as part of a comprehensive social media strategy plan, that it’s important to create campaigns on a regular basis – and remember to make them platform and/or content-specific to help give you more precise data for your future planning. We all know the many potential benefits of campaigns. One stat that I like is that 39% of Facebook users who click on a “pick your favorites” ad campaign post go on to share it with friends. Is your company experimenting not only with different campaigns on different social channels, but different types of campaigns that are best suitable for each channel?

Amplification of your message via influencers can help make your social media more effective – if you are engaging with the right influencers for the right reasons in the right way. The task of determining who an “influencer” is is not a trivial one: The social scoring service Klout has scored 400 million users and analyzes 12 billion social signals on a given day.

Are you targeting the right influencers – for the right objectives?

Whether they are the long-forgotten brand ambassadors that are your current employees, alumni of your company, or loyal fans to your brand, your social media strategy should always be looking for ways to engage – and reward – brand loyalty and amplification in social media. Brand ambassadors are critical because we all know of the famous stat that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than all forms of marketing. I believe one of the biggest untapped opportunities for businesses is to leverage their own internal employees as brand ambassadors.

1. Build a small stage – your platform – that you’re going to stand on and get people to come to your. Pick one place where you want people to find you and play your best ‘show’ there for as long as it takes to build a solid following.

2. Twitter is a current chat. You don’t have to catch up; you don’t have to read everything from everybody. You pop on, look around, and jump in…There is no ‘right amount’ to tweet. No one can tweet too much or too little because it’s your account. When you have something to say, tweet it. When you see something of interest, reply to it.

3. Social media isn’t media at all – it is simply a conversation with two or more people. It’s an action. Not a site. Social media isn’t Twitter. Or Facebook. It isn’t the new web site flavour of the week. It’s the ability to have conversations online with others, whether it is your market, customers, colleagues, or anyone who happens to come across your conversation.

4. You’ve got to invest in something before withdrawing. investing your social currency means giving your time, your knowledge, and your efforts to that channel before trying to withdraw monetary currency.

5. Once I’ve gotten to know someone on Twitter, we can go to the next level on either of those two sites (Facebook and LinkedIn) because I now “know” them.

6. Storytelling is important in marketing, but it can’t be the brand telling the story. The brand should give the tools and ingredients to customers and let them tell the story. Branding is the message the customer or client says you are; it’s not what you say you are.

7. Change their attitude by listening to feedback and comments on social media, and then responding quickly. “If somebody complains about something on Twitter … we have to realize it’s a pivot point. They are vulnerable, no matter how petty it might seem, “When people complain they are actually saying, ‘I want you to fix this.’ Because if they didn’t care, they wouldn’t say anything.”

8. You can’t stop mistakes from happening, but you can affect the outcome by how you respond. When it hits the fan, it’s not time to hide behind the fan. It’s time to be awesome.

9. For content to go viral, it has to create emotion, whether that’s excitement, anger, humor, or sadness. “Nobody shares mediocre. We share extremes. If you want to have word of mouth, you have to do something worth talking about.

10. Marketing is every employee’s job. Marketing likes to keep tight control over a brand’s messaging, but every employee is a representation of the brand. Instead of muzzling employees on social media, for example: show them how much of an impact they have on the brand. Show them how their social activity matters.

As I’ve argued in the past, it’s much better to be really active in a meaningful way on just two or three social channels than to be semi-active on all of them in a lackluster fashion.

Nobody will notice if you’re not there, but they will notice if you are there and do it poorly.

Think about people you admire and would like to emulate in your industry. Do they all seem to congregate on certain channels?

Chances are they do, and that’s where you should focus your efforts.

Also, think seriously about choosing a platform that allows you to publish directly. A personal blog/site is no longer an absolute necessity to self-publish.

LinkedIn (a very natural choice for most professionals) has an incredible publishing tool that’s easy to use and allows for distribution of your content once published.

In addition, Twitter plays very nicely with Medium (Ev Williams founded both), which is another way to focus on creating interesting content related to your career and ensure it is easy to promote.

Take your time with this choice in the beginning, but you can always change your mind and approach again in the future to abandon a channel that isn’t working or experiment on a new one.

Any industry, no matter how niche, will likely have a few established voices that garner respect.

After deciding on your industry, platforms and topics, find the people with clout in your vertical and actively interact with them.

Connecting with like-minded professionals in your field will provide you with opportunities to learn more about your craft, build rapport with luminaries in the industry, showcase your skills and passion for the sector by helping others and increase the visibility of your personal brand overtime.

To start, browse Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere to find people that consistently share interesting content related to your career interests and aspirations.

Reach out to some of the professionals you’ve found on social media to spur meaningful conversation with them about the field by commenting on your shared interests, as well as expressing your genuine willingness to help them succeed in advancing their own career.

Simply saying you appreciate their work isn’t going to get you far as it’s unoriginal, while asking them for something is too selfish.

Instead, review their book, quote one of these experts in your article, interview them for your video series and more to network with them more deeply through content and leave a memorable impression.

Although an active social presence is very important for building and honing your personal brand, if you don’t approach the project intelligently it can begin to become an outsized investment of time and energy.

Ideally, throughout this process, you also want to be making contacts and find promising leads for new jobs or business opportunities.

Repurposing is absolutely necessary if you hope to make the most of your content efforts.

This way you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you’re ready to share content on social media.

Again, it is important to stress that this entire process is time consuming as a brand isn’t built quickly.

No two audiences are the same, which means the preferences of your customer base are unique to your company alone. Therefore, it’s important to not get caught up in the hype associated with joining the latest and greatest social networks for the sake of joining. Some social networks aren’t for everyone.

Even though your competitors are active on certain social networks, doesn’t mean your business should be too. It is important to monitor your competitors activities across social media, but don’t simply follow their lead. Instead, watch what they are doing on social media and react accordingly with your own unique approach to the channel.

It’s important that you’re on a social channel to reach your audience online, not just because you’re obligated to by common trends in your industry. Your audience might be extremely active on Facebook, but not YouTube or Tumblr. It’s all about being where your audience is active.

You’ll learn where your customer base is active online over time by listening in on some of the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, to see if your audience is there and communicating their interests in your type of offerings. This is where having an accurate customer profile comes into play to ensure you’re monitoring the right types of users that are most likely to be interested in your organization’s products or services.

Start by creating a concise plan that is structured around the goals of your organization when it comes to actively communicating with your audience across channels. It becomes easiest to continue to grow your existing efforts on social media when you’ve identified some key processes that your organization can rely on and your audience can come to expect.

Begin by creating a consistent schedule based on an editorial calendar of when you’ll be creating, optimizing, and then sharing certain types of content and on what channels.

Once you’ve developed a baseline for your content with this calendar, it’ll be much easier to understand what sharing more content will involve in the future since you’ll have a clear vision of what you’re doing now and what resources, staff and time it takes to produce results at the current quality and quantity.

6. Use Appropriate Tools to Scale:

With a concise plan in place backed by a strong bank of topics to cover in the form of series, it’s now important to match your business with the right toolkit to execute against these ideas as you continue to scale.

Selecting the right tools is important for your business to be able increase how much content you’re producing and publishing on a regular basis, since there are limits to how much your team can do in a day.

Automating some of the more repetitive processes that are involved with publishing on social is the first step to saving time and resources to spend on growing your efforts.

7. Focus on Adding Paid Advertising to the Mix:

In a sense, paid advertising is a tool to help scale your social media content to the next level as well but with a goal of reaching a new and much larger audience than you’d typically be able to organically.

With the major changes to the Facebook’s news feed and the constant increase of messaging on all other social platforms, it’s difficult to scale to your social content to a larger audience without also continually applying your budget to pay for reach on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other social platform that make sense for your business.

Used paid advertising as one approach to your social media marketing mix to help scale your best organic content, while also creating paid specific content to be shared with a healthy balance of your existing fans, customer base, and potential customers.

8. Hold contests, giveaways and sweepstakes on social media to drive your followers and non-followers to sign-up to your email list in order to enter the promotion. This is one way of converting people interacting with you on social media into long-term subscribers interested in viewing your future content, if they opted in when they initially signed up for your contest.

9. Provide world-class customer service across your social media channels to help nurture your relationship with your social following and existing customers. Reacting to the concerns, comments and complaints of your customers across social media in a friendly and timely manner will go a long way towards building trust with potential leads and existing customers.

Moments of delightful customer service often help fuel word of mouth marketing for your business from existing customers. According to Forrester Analyst, Zachary Reiss-Davis, “people you know and respect online are the most important sources of discovery when you’re looking for new things to buy.”

Use social media to help turn existing customers into your most vocal advocates, generating more leads for your business.

10. Host a Twitter chat, a Facebook chat or a Google+ Hangout on Air to create a real-time interactive experience with your audiences online. Create an engaging session on a valuable topic for your target customers; invite industry leaders and customers alike to join in on a moderated discussion. Showcasing a human face during these sessions can help your business better foster trust amongst your audience, which will likely help you gather more leads from your social community.

The human race is a population of people watchers. We learn from watching other people. We learn from doing for ourselves, but it doesn’t hurt to ask questions both online and offline. Stop and think about what you want to ask or say though. Be open to new ideas, because no idea is a bad idea unless in contradicts what you are trying to accomplish. But even those that contradict are opportunities for gained knowledge. Keep in mind to always be respectful of others ideas and thoughts.

2. What do you want to accomplish:

First figure out why you want to utilize social media as a marketing plan. Second, understand that once implemented, there must be a planned for updating the content or your site will grow stale. Nothing spells epic fail like failure to have fresh new content on your site. Lastly, determine if you are going to measure response to the social marketing campaign. Some of the most popular reasons for creating a social media strategy is to humanize your company, increase awareness, be more responsive, and incorporating public opinion.

Social media does not need a technology guru to work or run it. Most laymen are adept at using the social media network. Keep in mind that in order to market in social media, these networks cannot be hidden behind firewalls and that opening your company to the social media also allows access to these forums by your employees. Compromises can be made by implementing a “social media” break.

4. What do your employees want:

Employee interest is a big consideration. Be aware of the level of understanding and determine if additional training is needed. A good idea is to have approved messages for your employees to utilize. Use keyword rich content that allows the replier to respond to a specific post. A clear understanding of when and how to participate in social media is needed. Develop job aides to help your employees in this endeavor.

Always make it about the other person..what’s in it for them.? If you offer great value and nothing about yourself, people will be drawn towards you and want to help you out..works every time. Also, don’t be cheesy and pour on the fake adoration…people can see through that..be yourself and natural and let them know why you are contacting them. We find most influencers are pretty willing to share content, but it has to be GREAT…don’t expect people to share average content….that’s everywhere!

Awareness is the cornerstone of social media. You can’t take a sales order from social media sites, but you can definitely get the word out, get some attention, and provide direct access to your website from them. The main goal here is to let people know that you are available. You can converse and interact with potential clients and customers and let them know you are available to help them with their needs.

So, you’ve got them hooked, now what do you do with them? You need to let them know that you are better than your competition. Give them examples of your work. Provide samples of your product. You need to keep their interest.

You’ve made your potential customers aware; you know they are interested, now you’ve got to stoke their desire. Once the customer is at your website, make sure its user friendly. How many of us have gone to a website only to leave because it was too difficult to navigate? No matter how many discounts you give or how great your product is, if your website is difficult to use, people will simply give up and go. Create a testimonial area so people can review you and your products or services. Remember, your site is a reflection of you and your business; make it as accessible as possible.

This is where your website is your best ally. You can influence the customers to a certain extent with the use of social media through the previous levels, but here you need to make it an easy and painless transition for the customer. Here is where you are going to be able to see the bottom line of how much your marketing has actually impacted your bottom-line.

With the advent of social media the marketing funnel has changed; loyalty and advocacy are the new levels in the traditional marketing funnel. You want your new customers to buy from you again, so provide a follow up message to your customers via the original contact method. If someone contacted you via Facebook or Twitter send them a message or a tweet thanking them for their business. You can also provide a discount code for their next purchase to help promote loyalty.

10. The future is here:

Where once cafés, bars, restaurants, etc., were the main hubs of communication, social media is fast taking their place. As the public becomes more technically advance, companies are adjusting their strategies to meet the rapidly progressing public. More and more companies are turning to social media for their advertising and marketing needs. Complete planning, execution and integration are key to creating a successful social media strategy.

If you can’t understand the people you are hoping to serve, then you won’t be able to deliver what they really want and need, in the way they want it. You need to be able to solve real problems, you need to get to the root causes, and communicate in language people understand.

You need to be able to communicate (as mentioned in the previous item), especially written, but speaking too. It doesn’t matter if you are an entry-level employee, a solo entrepreneur, or a CEO of a large corporation, clear and compelling communication is vital. The days of having a room full of typists is gone. Nobody will be able to escape email, but of course there are all the social networking tools too.

So I mentioned networking in the previous point. I mean actual networking, not spamming Facebook and Twitter with your links! Human interaction. Building relationships. Getting to know people, and having them get to know you. It’s difficult to get anywhere without other people around to help you. People who can build and grow teams will have an advantage over people who burn out relationships almost as soon as they connect. I realised you don’t need technical or craft skills yourself if you can partner and communicate effectively. Let me know if you disagree …

The willingness and ability to fail repeatedly is an odd one but I really believe it. I was talking to Ben last night and he was telling us about a talk he gave at a school where he said it was one of the most important things to learn. Ben is an engineer and inventor but I think it applies to everything. See projects as experiments, not pass or fail, and you will have a much better time.

A lot of people give up too soon. Seth Godin calls it “The Dip”. When it gets difficult is often right before you succeed. Of course, you also need to know when to give up. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, as the song goes.

What are you aiming for? What is your goal?

If you want to get yourself known, social media is a great way to build visibility and a platform. Getting known might be your goal or it might be a means to an end. Again, social media can help you build connections that pay off in terms of opportunities and offers.

At the very least, when you do the right things in social media, you’re building a profile that represents you in the best possible light when anyone wants to look you up. It is a rare potential employer who will not do a quick Google search, and apparently even potential dates now do this routinely!

Social media grew out of real-world social rules and therefore what works in real life works well in social media, but with wider distribution and accelerated cause and effect.

Often people say to me that social media does not work, but what they really mean is they tried to extract value before they put any in. In fact, at the time of this writing I almost got into a protracted debate on Twitter about this very thing. Because this one person didn’t see any results, he believed social media “didn’t work.” The problem is, social media does not work for people who just want to take and be selfish, so he is setting himself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can’t withdraw very long from an empty social capital account. Essentially, if you want to get out value, then you need to start putting value in.

Another aspect of social media engagement is that your basic interactions are communicating more than the 140-character status updates. People also read between the lines. Again, this can work for or against you.

Brands are built through experience just as much as what you say and any image you create. The brands you love and hate are much more about how they have treated you than their logos and corporate mission statements!

The same is true on a personal brand level. It’s about treating people well and giving them a positive experience with you. It really helps if you like people because you are going to need to be consistently a good person to know. Using light humor, being kind, sharing about more than just your work—including your interests allow people to connect with you on a human level as well as a business and technical level.

Tactically this is about sharing good stuff. If you want to position yourself as an expert, then share what you know.

The more you share good stuff, the more people will want to listen to you. Even better, if you share your expertise with good stuff from other people mixed in, it shows you’re generous and have your followers’ best interests at heart rather than pure self-promotion.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame invented the futuristic reputation, or social capital–based currency, of Whuffie. Some days I wish Whuffie really existed and that just by looking someone up we could see what