This is our first podcast for our monthly Q&A series. In this podcast, we will go over – Why is it so important to do a social media audit and get rid of old accounts? – Does blogging help your SEO and how can you find keywords/phrases to blog about? – Why is it important to mix up your social media content? – What are a few tools we use to make our digital marketing life a bit easier? – Why should you be running Facebook ads, even if you feel they haven’t been successful before.
Today we are going to talk about growing followers organically on social media. This is something that our clients ask all the time: “How do I increase my followers? How do I increase my followers?” And you can do it organically. We’re gonna talk about Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn company pages today, okay so we have a lot to cover.
With your Twitter account, you need to make sure you are tweeting consistently. So whatever that schedule is, make sure you’re sticking to it. Maybe it’s one time a day, two times a day, three times a day. Optimize your posting time, so try different times. Thinking of your ideal client or patient, when are they home? Usually, Twitter’s always done by your mobile device, so most likely they’re on Twitter from their phone, so think of lunches, break times, maybe if your patients are parents, maybe later in the evening. Get creative with that posting time. It doesn’t always have to be 9:00 to 5:00. It could be at 6:00 AM, it could be 9:00 PM. So playing around with those posting times and seeing where, what times, and what days you’re getting the most engagement. You may be thinking, okay because you’re open Monday through Friday that that’s when you need to post, but maybe doing weekend posts is a great idea as well.
Post visual content. So Twitter used to be just all text. It doesn’t have to be now. Upload images, upload videos, make it eye-appealing, and utilize hashtags. We will put in the description below different hashtag tools to help you, but Twitter and Instagram, even LinkedIn, they thrive off of those hashtags, and you can follow different hashtags. People are always searching certain hashtags, and those are the people they follow. So look for those hashtags, follow the people that are utilizing those hashtags, make sure that you are Retweeting. So have a list of people in your industry that are like-minded. Not necessarily competition, but maybe it’s news articles. So if you are a OB-GYN, you may wanna look at the Women’s Health Magazine and Retweet stories that they’re posting. Look at those resources and make sure that you are utilizing those Retweets because then their audience will start to see you as well.
One great thing with all social media is that famous little search button on every single social media platform, whether it’s in the right-hand corner or in the middle, up top. Usually, it’s always up top. With Instagram, there’s a search icon when you open up the mobile app and search for certain people. If you are looking for… If your office is only within a 25-mile radius in that location, search for people in that location. Start following more people, and set a goal to maybe follow 20 people per week. One thing with all platforms and this is just a personal preference, but when you’re following people, don’t go follower happy, okay, and what I mean by that is you’ll look at some accounts and they’ll say they’re following 1000 people, but they only have 60 followers. Well, that ratio, it just seems kind of spammy, so when you start growing your followers, follow people, but do ’em in low numbers. So follow maybe five a day, 20 per week. Figure out what that looks like and make sure that those people are following you back. The more people that you follow that are in your niche, in your target market, they’re more likely to follow you back. Okay. So those are just a few tips for Twitter.
Let’s go into Instagram. So again, you’ll see these… The same tips are, again, staying consistent, making sure that you’re posting at least once a day on Instagram, utilizing different content, trying live videos, doing Instagram stories, doing Instagram TV, along with just your regular posts. Share content from other users. So it’s user-generated content, so mentioning them, “This is a great article or a great story from so-and-so,” and make sure that you are collaborating with others. So thinking of your referral partners, is there a way where you guys can share a post every week or a couple of posts per month? How can you work with your referral partners on a much bigger scale to be able to help grow each other’s social media? Look at your analytics. Find out… Instagram does a great job with letting you know who’s looking at your posts, what days are your best days and what times, and then also your demographics. So where are they at, are they male, female, what stories are getting the most engagement? So paying attention to your analytics so you can make sure you’re giving that content back to them and that they are engaging with it.
Engage with your fans. Every follower you have… And again, you can search for your target market and follow them, engage with them, take the time to like their posts, to comment on them. Also look at those resources, those same people that you are gonna be retweeting on Twitter or sharing stories on Facebook, look at what they’re posting and start commenting on it because if they are a resource that you like, again, if it’s Women’s Health Magazine, and you start commenting on their stuff on Instagram, their followers are gonna see those comments as well. So being active and engaging with these platforms is a great way to be able to increase your followers. Again, it takes time. It’s not gonna be an overnight success by any means, but to have somebody that’s dedicated to your social media to make sure that they are reaching those correct people, that is key.
Facebook, you can always invite your friends to like your page. So that’s always a great starting point. And then really with Facebook having your icon on, and all your social media icons and your email signature, having a sign at the front desk, follow us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, you know, because each person is gonna have that social media platform that they like, and they trust, and that’s kind of their go-to. So giving them the option of where they wanna follow you and engage with you as great.
So being able to put those signs up there, you know, on your marketing materials, but then with Facebook, working on having a little bit of ad spend, and you’ll see with especially with LinkedIn, as we get into that, you know, running those targeted ads, and having like campaigns following, follow our campaigns running, that’s where we’ve been able to see the most growth with our clients. And again, this is a paid feature, this isn’t an organic feature.
Start by inviting your friends and family to like your page. You’re always gonna have more friends because that’s where you most likely started doing Facebook was having a personal profile, and then you created your business page. So you could also have your employees of your company, also invite people to like the Facebook page. So consistency, inviting and then working on some of the paid options of boosting and running a paid like campaign to reach your target market.
Going into LinkedIn, so you have your LinkedIn profile, and LinkedIn company pages are really growing. LinkedIn, what they’re doing with their platform I mean, it’s huge. And it’s a great b2b tool. So again, thinking of those referral partners, and inviting them to like the page, inviting your contacts to like your page, adding your employees to your page. And so they can say, “Okay, but it’s not just this one person, but they have a whole team and what their roles are.
Then for them to share the page to their personal profile, and for them to invite their contacts to like that page. So that process is really important too, is really to get your employees involved with your LinkedIn company page. And so that’s a great way to grow your followers organically with LinkedIn, you know, utilizing LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups as well, finding those targeted groups, being able to… Now with Facebook, you can share your content from your business page into a group, which is awesome. With LinkedIn, you can’t, but you can still post and be able to mention the company page.
Utilizing those LinkedIn groups, inviting your connections to like, following the page, and sharing your content from the company page to your personal profile, as well, is a great way to grow those followers organically.
So last but not least, is YouTube. YouTube is a little bit different. It’s not so much of a social media platform, as it is more of a search engine. And really, that’s what it is. It is a video search engine. Google owns YouTube. So having videos on there is great for your SEO as well.
A few things to help your channel be found and to increase those subscribers to your channel is making sure you’re utilizing playlists and that they’re clear. So when people go there, they can see what type, what categories, and that’s really what the playlists are, they are categories that you have of different videos. Publishing longer videos, so having a mix between short tips, you know those three to five-minute videos, and then the longer ones that are 10 plus minutes that are really educating your audience on certain topics.
You know, maybe again, I always like to use the OB-GYN’s example, you know, maybe you’re talking about a eating plan for a pregnant woman or a birth plan or certain tips. These videos can be longer because they’re going to be educational. Maybe you’ll put together a PowerPoint presentation, and you’re walking through that as you’re talking. So publishing 10-plus minute videos is a great way to increase your subscribers.
Promoting your videos on an end-screen. Using those options that YouTube gives you, it will say end screen, you can say subscribe to our channel there, it will also allow you to promote your… Like another playlist, or if you’re doing a video that’s specific to that playlist, you want them to stay in that loop of that playlist. And so utilizing those tools to be able to do that.
Reply to every comment, if you get comments, and a lot of them, not a lot of them, but some of them can be spam. And just, you know, like it, but reply to the comments that need to be… That need to have a reply because those are gonna be the people that are gonna subscribe to your channel. Another one is just making sure your channel’s optimized completely. So having a tagline with your channel, making sure you have your channel app up top, and it’s clear and that they can… YouTube does this where it will show you what it’s gonna look like on a computer, on a TV because smart TVs people are watching YouTube all the time from their TV, and then what it’s gonna look like on their mobile device.
So you wanna make sure that that header is clear so when they come to it, it’s not cut off on every device that they are watching your videos from. They know exactly who it is. Making sure that you have a clear description, that your contact information, your website is in there, so they can reach you if they need to from your channel, but then also each video making sure you have that clear description, that keyword friendly title, the tag words, you know, making sure you have a YouTube thumbnail.
Just going through that little checklist to make sure everything is filled out correctly with your channel and your videos. Then also when you’re doing these videos, we always take our video and we put it onto YouTube and then we take the code from YouTube and we embed our videos into our blog post, which is a great way to get viewers to watch your videos, promote them on social media, have a video within your email signature, use them in your newsletters, people love listening and watching videos. So being able to utilize them in multiple places and having them link back to YouTube is a great way to be able to grow your subscribers.
I know we covered a lot today, if you need help putting together this strategy, this… And again, what we talked about today was really looking at that organic growth. You can run ads on all of these platforms to increase your followers and that we do help our clients with both the organic growth and the paid growth to make sure that you’re reaching your target market. If you need help with that and would like to talk more about the increasing your followers on all these platforms, head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and click on free consultation.
In today’s blog, we’ll be covering six tips to create your healthcare social media plan for 2021. Yes, 2021! We are entering the fourth quarter already of 2020, and it’s really important to be proactive when it comes to your social media strategy. Because the more that you plan, the easier it is.
You’ve heard of us talking about this a little bit throughout the year. We always like to do a quarterly check-in and just see what’s working and what’s not working.
So if you haven’t done your review yet, take the time this fourth quarter to really look at each of your social media platforms, (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube), you need to look at their Analytics. Look at each quarter, look at the whole year, look to see what posts have gotten the most engagement, and also look at your Google Analytics to see where that social traffic is coming from.
Are you getting a lot of website traffic from Pinterest or Facebook? Are you getting a little website traffic from Instagram, but you’re getting a lot of engagement? So really looking at each platform, what is working, and what’s not working on each one. Why? It’s because each platform has its own purpose.
Like with Instagram, you may get a lot more engagement, but you’re not gonna get a lot of traffic to your website; whereas Facebook and Pinterest, maybe you get less engagement, but more traffic to your website, so looking at those and looking at them individually and seeing what’s working. So that was number one, doing your social media review.
So after you do your review, make sure you write down what content works the best, and figure out new ways to implement new content for 2021.
According to Tubular, by 2021, 80% of Internet traffic will be from videos, that’s huge, 80%. And a lot of that is done by the phones.
So you have to think of what types of posts you’re putting up. Are you doing more personal posts of you and your staff, patient testimonials, and short little videos? Are you doing doctor interviews, patient interviews, educational videos where you are talking, maybe you have a weekly FAQ section?
What are the types of content that you have put out over 2020 and what’s work the best? And then make a list of the content that you want to do more of in 2021 and things you wanna try.
So maybe you’ve just been posting, repurposing content from outside sources, which is great. It’s always good to share articles from your industry, Facebook loves that. But maybe you want to have original content. Maybe you should start blogging in 2021 and have that content go out to social media and drive that traffic back to the website. Think of different types of content that you want to implement into your social media plan for 2021.
I know sometimes it sounds so like, “Oh, it’s just social media, we don’t need to have goals.” But you do. You need to really look at how many followers and likes do you have right now, and what’s that number you wanna get to. Sometimes, it’s not always the quantity, it’s more quality.
So you may have 1500 likes, but your engagement with them is amazing. So you may say, “Okay, I’m not really worried about growing my likes on my Facebook page, but I wanna reach even more people.” And so looking at those goals, maybe you tapped into Facebook ads a little bit in 2020, but your goal is to really master Facebook ads where you can see that return on investment, “I wanna grow my email list by 200 people in 2021.”
Well, you’re gonna grow that email list by creating really successful Facebook ads, you’re not gonna grow that email list by just posting. So setting those goals and looking at how you can utilize Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and making sure, looking at the kind of, if you’re new to the Facebook ad world, okay, you may be tapped into it or you boosted a post, but you really didn’t get anything from it.
Let’s dive into that a little bit more. What post did you boost, did you create a specific audience? Sometimes we have clients that say, “Oh, I tried the ad thing, it didn’t work for me.” But they have a brick and mortar practice in one city, but their ad is going out to everyone. So if you have a brick and mortar practice, you wanna make sure that you’re only doing a 25-mile radius and you wanna utilize the tools that Facebook provides you to set that target audience, that’s really important to make sure your ad is going to the right people. So setting those goals for your social media is a really important step.
Make sure you’re reaching your target market
So there’s a couple of ways you can do this. Obviously, a lot by trial and error of what platforms you’re posting to and where that engagement is coming from. You can also do a survey. You should have a patient database or an email list, and you can ask them what social media platforms are they a part of, even if you have, like your sign-in sheet at the front desk, add a couple of columns.
Where are you most active on social media? And just have Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn or Twitter, and then ask them. If you have a good relationship with your patients, they already know, like, and trust you, and they want to help you be successful because they’re coming to you for a reason, and hopefully they’re so happy about the results that they have seen with you, that they wanna be able to share your posts and tell their friends and families.
So if you are connecting to them on social media, that’s a great way to create those posts to talk to that target audience. You could also go a step further if you already have a large client database. When you’re looking at those Facebook ads, you could upload a lookalike audience, so it will target people that have the same similarities as that list already.
If you’re putting all this time into Twitter and you’re putting up three or four tweets a day, and you’re following all these people, but you’re not getting any engagement, that may be a platform that you say, “You know what, this isn’t something that is going to work for us, we need to let Twitter go,” or “We’re only gonna post once per week, and we’re gonna focus our time on these platforms.” So just knowing where your audience is at.
If your audience is women and mothers, you need to be on Pinterest. You need to start creating those Pins, especially if you are an OB/GYN or an Endovascular Center that focuses on uterine fibroid embolization, you need to be on there because that’s where women are going.
Pinterest is a visual search engine, just like Google. The demographics on there are about equal, but women have a little bit higher presence on Pinterest, so if women are your target market, you gotta get on Pinterest and Instagram because that’s really where you’re going to reach them.
So you wanna see what are they doing. Facebook came out with page transparency about two years ago.
So if you go to a Facebook page on the right-hand side, it will say page transparency. That allows you to see what ads they have running and how they’ve been doing. You can kind of, in a way, spy on what they’re doing. This really gives you a good foundation of what’s working and what’s not working.
If you are an individual healthcare practice, like a Family Medicine Practice, you may wanna look at the larger hospitals of what they’re doing because that would help give you an idea of the content that they’re putting together, the ads they’re running, and then how you can tailor your own ads to reach your target audience.
So it’s really important that you’re always looking at those competitors, both in-state and out-of-state, nationwide, just so you can see, “Okay, well, we did a similar post, but they had a thousand likes and 15 shares and we didn’t have anything, why is that?” And so it allows you to see how things can be done as well. So that’s number five, looking at competitors.
Once you have done all of these steps, you are now at the place, you have your notes, you’ve looked through everything, you have a good idea of what you wanna do, what you wanna implement, now it’s time to go back to that content calendar and create your social media content calendar for at least, at least the first quarter of 2021.
You are gonna create that, we will put a link to a social media content calendar that we use that you can make a copy of, and you’re going to in there put what networks you’re gonna work on, what resources you’re going to share from, what content ideas that you are going to implement, what videos you need to record, what goals you have? You wanna be able to run this many Facebook ads and put everything together.
So come January 1st, and hopefully, before that, you already have your social media posts written for January. You’ve already looked at what those national observance days are for the health and wellness industries so you know what topics you’re gonna talk about. You’ve already spoken to your doctors, your staff, your patients, and you have set up those times to interview them.
Using Zoom to do an interview call is awesome because you’re allowed to talk, they’re allowed to talk, and you can record that and then upload that directly into YouTube and use it as a social media post or as a blog post. So looking at what videos you want to implement and just having everything in that content calendar.
So come 2021, you are ready to hit the ground running and you are organized, so now, if you just do the first quarter of 2021, come February, you wanna start planning the second quarter, so you’re always about six weeks ahead.
And it’s important too because the industries are always changing, there are always new things coming up, and new news stories, so on your content calendar, you may have a place holder for an article or industry tip, and those are things that are gonna be more in the moment post. You may just schedule those a week in advance. But you wanna know your foundation, you’re gonna be able to know the National Observance days, again, the interviews, you can schedule those out, you can talk about, you put together the topics you wanna talk about, create those images in Canva, find that content that you wanna put with it. So you’re just making sure that you are ready for 2021.
If you need help putting this social media strategy together, we are here to help you. Head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com, and schedule a free consultation today and we can help walk you through what’s the best steps for your business to start and how we can implement a plan for you. So we are here to help you and we look forward to seeing your social media strategy.
When Instagram was launched in 2010, its primary focus was to feature photos that were specifically taken on mobile devices. The platform quickly became known for selfies and food pictures. Later on, it became a marketing platform for businesses and professionals to tell stories, deliver meaningful messages, and engage with their followers. If you play your cards right, Instagram can help you build a huge and loyal community and eventually grow your brand or business.
Unfortunately, Instagram is not the easiest platform to master. Knowing what mistakes to avoid is important to help you succeed on the platform.
Let’s take a look at six common Instagram mistakes that can keep your brand from growing. If you’ve fallen prey to any of these mistakes, be sure to fix them immediately.
Building a huge following can be a tedious, time-consuming process. But there’s a shortcut. You can buy instagram followers. Yes, you can instantly grow your followers from 100 to 10,000. It can be tempting, I know, but please resist the urge to do so.
You see, bought Instragram followers are not the same as the followers you genuinely acquire through your posts. Why? Because they have zero interest in you. Some of them aren’t even real people. That means they will not engage with you nor buy your products or use your services. What’s the point of having lots of followers when no one seems to be interested in what you have to offer.
Also, Instagram will purge your account once they spot that you have fake followers. Not only will it be a waste of money, but your fake followers will also be removed from the platform one-by-one.
Most people are drawn to beautiful things. The same principle applies to social media, especially on Instagram. If you want to capture your audience’s attention, make sure that your posts are visually appealing. Remember, Instagram is a visual medium.
You don’t need to invest in a topnotch camera to take great photos. These days, your smartphones can take some pretty incredible shots. For best results, use natural light when taking pictures. If you’re taking pictures inside, take them in front of a window.
If you’ve only been using Instagram to post photos to your feed, you’re missing out on many valuable features the platform has to offer.
Instagram stories allow you to share “moments” of your day quickly and easily. It enables you to show your fun and creative side without affecting your Instagram feed. It’s a fantastic opportunity to experiment and engage your followers in a unique way. It’s fun, colorful, human, and different.
With Instagram stories, you can post as many photos and videos as you want without annoying your audience.
While photo and video quality is essential, you should also consider the value of the content you’re publishing.
When Instagram users follow you, that means they’re interested in you. They want to benefit from your content. Create quality content that will provide value to your audience and something to engage with. Share industry news. Ask questions. Use quizzes and polls. Get your audience involved.
Don’t just post for the sake of posting. Give people a reason to start following and keep coming back for more. Take time to create posts that your followers actually care about.
Instagram users want to be entertained. And users follow you because they want to get to know you better. And one of the best ways to do so is by telling stories, sharing updates about your practice, or your recent offers.
Instagram users will be quick to unfollow you if you’re continually posting duplicate photos and videos. Come to think of it. Why should they bother following you if you’re not sharing anything fresh, new, and exciting?
Traffic is the lifeline of all businesses, be it online or offline. After all, you can’t generate sales when there is no one to sell to.
Your Instagram bio provides a small window of opportunity to tell prospective clients and patients everything they need to know about you and your practice. So make sure you have a link in your bio at all times. Used correctly, it can help drive traffic to your website and convert leads to patients.
Today, I am going to be talking to you about using Search Engine Optimization strategies in Pinterest marketing. 2020 has created a very interesting landscape for business owners, and this is because we no longer have to stay focused on reaching clients in our local geographic area. Because of telehealth and platforms like Zoom, we can really look and start expanding and reaching people nationwide. Pinterest is a fantastic way to go about doing that because you aren’t necessarily going to reach people within your geographic location. Because of the use of Zoom, clients are used to working with people who really could be anywhere. They’re used to getting information from online, rather than going and sitting down with an individual. So 2020 has really created this landscape where even as a small business who really works with individuals locally, you now can really extend that net a lot wider, and Pinterest creates the perfect opportunity to do search engine optimization and reach the folks who are specifically looking for your product, your services, and your expertise. How Pinterest search algorithm works is it looks at four different top things:
Let’s dive into these individually. The first item is domain quality, this is really to ensure that the websites that have pins coming from it are highly ranked in terms of Pinterest, so if you have never pinned before, if you’ve never claimed the website before, anything like that, Pinterest is less likely to show your pins to other users in Pinterest.
So how do you improve your domain quality in the eyes of Pinterest?
Well, the first thing to do is to convert your Pinterest account to a business account. This provides a lot more tools and resources such as the analytics and things like that, so there’s a lot more reason to do this. However, doing this well really just allow you to be more legitimate in the eyes of Pinterest as well. Once you convert your Pinterest account to a business account, you then need to claim your website, so this basically is like adding a verification emblem almost to your website to make sure that Pinterest knows that you are the one who’s actually creating the content on the site and then pinning it. And it’s pretty easy to do, typically, it’s just that HTML file that you load up through your file manager on your website, so you can do this via FTP or just logging into the C-panel of your hosting account, clicking File Manager and then uploading it to the root directory. Click a button on Pinterest, it’ll automatically verify your site.
The next item is, once you claim your website, you then have the opportunity to create Rich Pins, so when you are pinning, make sure that you are creating rich pins. We’ve talked about this in other episodes before, and the process for doing it, but let’s say you’re a dietician or nutritionist and you have posted a recipe on your website. The rich pin, then actually grabs the information from that recipe and showcases it directly on Pinterest. This helps having rich pins and information like this helps your pin to stand apart against others, it also it makes it so that that pin has more engagement in interactions. To increase your domain quality, we also recommend pinning often, so this helps you just create more engaged users, and then also Pinterest does reward people who spend time on their platform.
And then the last thing to increase the domain quality is to pin high quality content. So you want to pin content that will drive people to your website and get more interaction, the more interaction you get, the more Pinterest will recognize your domain. So the second item is the pin quality, so you want to make sure that the quality of your pins is high. The pin quality is really determined by the popularity of your pins and the engagement level of your pins, so you want to make sure when you’re pinning something that you have a nice title, for example, a title that somebody is going to want to click on to learn more, so you can try a lot of different types of titles on there, a lot of different types of image structure on there, but you want to make it so that when somebody sees your pin, they’re probably going to recognize that to you and click the pin because they know that they’re going to find the high quality content on the other side.
We recommend for these pins to use a high resolution photo to make sure it’s either square or tall, so a two to three ratio is typically good, then use text overlays so that you have the title of the blog post or more compelling the information for why somebody should click it or save it. Then we recommend putting either just text on there that says your website URL or that has your logo on there, and that’s for that brand recognition. And then if you do have some sort of freebie or give away on your site, I also put a little snippet of text about that as well. And so when you do that, you can use variety of different tools. We often use Canva, but there are others out there to create different versions of this pin, and so as you’re pinning all of them, you’ll be able to see which ones are getting more engagement, then start making more that are similar to that.
The next thing is the Pinner quality. Pinterest, again, likes people and accounts that are active on Pinterest, so you wanna make sure that you are active on Pinterest, so we utilize tailwind as a way to make sure that we are pinning and re-pinning other popular pins, and then you also need to create fresh content. On most networks, there’s a variety of different types of users, there are some users that just sit back and launch, there are other users who are creating content, and then there are other users who both create and share content. So that’s the type of user you want to be on Pinterest, and so when you are pinning, you need to make sure that you pin things to correctly categorize boards, and this just shows your audience as well as Pinterest, that you have some sort of strategy and rationale behind the things that you are pinning.
Use Pinterest analytics to determine which pins are trending, then you can create more pins for that blog post, for example, or pin similar pins to it. And so this is something that we highly, highly recommend doing on Pinterest. The next thing is the topic relevance, and so your goal when you are creating a pin should be to have pins that relate to other pins that are being searched for and re-pinned, and then one way to do this is to do a search on Pinterest and see what specific keywords and phrases are coming up, then you can look at pins that are coming up for that. If you find that some of them aren’t really related, that might be a great opportunity to create a blog post and a pin that does directly relate to there.
Now, one thing that we recommend doing is having either a similar image, which graphically Pinterest will recognize as being similar, but then also making sure that you’re utilizing the right keywords in your description as well as in the link and the text and everything surrounding the pin, so that Pinterest really sees that your pin is related to that other pin. To find these keywords, again, just make sure that you are utilizing Pinterest search feature and just start typing in items and it will, just like Google’s, it will come up with recommended searches that other people have done and that are popular on the network. Another place to optimize for these keywords is in your business name, your profile, bio, and then also the specific boards and descriptions that you have on Pinterest.
All of these things working together can help you to increase your Pinterest search engine optimization. And because Pinterest is really a visual search engine that we’ve talked about in the past, it can be one of the top, it can quickly turn into one of the top traffic sources for your business as well. So as we close out, I wanted to give just a couple of more ways that you can make your website a little bit more Pinterest-friendly. So after you have claimed your website and enable the Rich Pins on there, make sure every blog post that you write has a variety of different pins loaded into the content and pinnable content, you can then also add a plug and if you’re using WordPress to enable share buttons, so somebody can quickly easily click the Pinterest share button and pin the image.
You can also even add text near different parts of your content that say something along the lines of “Pin it now for later”, and this is a great way to get other people to pin it because maybe they don’t have time to read a 10,000 word blog post, so by adding these pins within the content, or pictures within the content with “Pin it, save it for later” text report, you’re just reminding people that they can, in fact, click to pin and save the blog post so that they can come back to it later. Additionally, the last thing that I want to also say is, if you have something like an e-commerce store, typically, we always recommend having the product images, the square. Sounds good, right?
If you think in the lens of Pinterest, you might want to actually play around with having those vertical images, so the 2 x 3 ratio, and so these vertical images of your products might potentially help you rank higher on Pinterest, so you have the picture gallery of all the pictures, just try loading them in different size and see if more people start pinning them. This is something that we are starting to play with for our clients who are utilizing Pinterest and have something like a Woo Commerce or Shopify shop.
Thank you so much to tuning in, and I hope that this gives you some insights into how Pinterest can help you drive more traffic to your website, now that 2020 has really opened up the geographic landscape for the people that you can help. I look forward to seeing you next time on The Social Speak Network podcast.
On today’s blog, we are going to be talking about Instagram Stories. We’ve done a few videos in the past on Instagram Stories, but Instagram is always adding new features to the Instagram Stories, different options you have when you do a new story, and I wanted to just walk through those today so you can see why it’s so important to do Instagram Stories.
So, let me jump on out of here real quick, and let me go into our Instagram account. And as you can see our screen, the circle icons up top are the Instagram Stories. These are what people see right away when they get on to Instagram, and people tend to scroll through Instagram Stories before they scroll through their Instagram feed. With that being said, you can see the importance of having Instagram Stories a part of your Instagram strategy. Instagram Stories only stay up for 24 hours, unless you highlight them to one of your boards, and I’ll show you how to do that.
Let’s go back to our home page and we wanna create an Instagram story. So you’re gonna go up to the top where you see your circle icon with the blue plus sign, you’re gonna click onto that, and this is gonna bring up the different options.
So I’m gonna put this in the background instead of my computer, so this what’s called normal option. Instagram has added a few different options for you, so this one is breezy.
If you want this effect again, you can save it here, you can send that post to somebody. This is also where you’re gonna get the twinkle. So you’ll see when people take selfies or pictures of things, that you’re gonna see these twinkles, this is underneath this normal option.
You can still do a live video, which would be just like this us talking. It will automatically cut it the correct way, and this is gonna tell you right now that you have six active followers that have the potential of watching your Instagram Live and being able to engage.
So, you would hit record here on this button and being able to start that process. So that is the live option.
The next option is Create. This is where you saw in the beginning slide, the welcome to Social Speak Network. Now, I can go to create and I can click onto this happy face up here, and this is all the options that Instagram gives you, so you can add a location, you can mention somebody, you can add hashtags, you can add cute little images which are called stickers. What I love this feature is really the data that you’re able to collect from an Instagram story.
So if you have an event, you can do a register link here, but if you’re wanting to find out what your audience is looking for, where do they need help?
This is really good for your content strategy if you’re trying to figure out where people are needing help at. So you can do a poll and I can say, “Do you need more help with your social media?” You say social media marketing or your SEO website marketing. Okay, they’re two different things, but just so… And you put the answers here, social media and SEO website. So this is gonna be my question.
Now, I can change that text that I want, and I can say, “Do you need help with your social media marketing or your SEO website?”
If you’re a fitness coach and you’re wanting to do a new Zoom class, this can be something along the lines of, Would you rather do a morning class or an afternoon class? And then you can add another poll, so you would add another question here on the next slide.
So this is just a really great feature. You can also do a quiz where… True or false.
If you’re a health coach and you’re wanting to see what your audience knows about their nutritional facts of their food, that’s a great option. Also, you can ask questions. Rather than doing a poll, you can just ask a question to your audience as well, and you can do a countdown.
So, there’s a lot of different options here on this area under Create that I really like, and so we’re just gonna exit out of this real quick, we don’t need that.
Boomerang is those fun videos where it takes a two-second video. Again, this is great for the Monday morning coffee cup, cheers to Monday morning. This could be a happy Friday, this can be different quick little snippet videos.
Then the one new thing that they have come out with is this layout. This is an awesome feature for product, so you can have a four-picture grid up to a six-picture grid. So this is great if you wanna take a picture of new products that have come in or if you’re highlighting staff members, you can just keep taking those and then being able to have that as a story.
Then Super Zoom this is good if you can go in here, and this usually has options like hearts or flame. You’ll see it as you hold your thumb on that button, and it’s gonna just slowly but surely go deeper to an object. So this is just something if you wanted to have maybe like a quote of the day or just different features that Instagram Stories has to offer.
Let’s go back to Create, and I wanna show you how to highlight a story. I’m gonna go on here, and you can change your colors if you want to as well, down here on the left, or the right-hand corner.
So, I’m gonna go back to this bluish-purple, and I’m gonna click onto the icon and I’m gonna do a poll. And my question is going to be, Would you rather have a company manage your social media marketing or your SEO and website marketing?
There’s a certain character count here, so we may have to think of that question. Let’s say, “Do you need more help with your social media or SEO website?” So let’s keep it short and simple. And then in this option here, you can say website and SEO.
So, now that I have this complete, now I just want to hit… You can change this to close friends if you have a list already made. Otherwise, I just like the stories going out to everyone, and what you can do is then just click on your stories.
Now, this can link to your Facebook as well. So if you click on to your Send to, it can go to your Facebook stories or just Instagram Stories. So what I always do is I just click on the bottom here and it’s shared. So now when we click onto that icon again up top, our story’s uploading, and it’s right here.
Now, if we want to highlight that we’re gonna click on to highlight, and if you already have these boards created, you can go into tips for you, whatever board you have that you want this in particular slide to go to, you could click right on to that and then it would say it’s added to those tips.
So, this is a way that you can go from having that Instagram story only show up here for 24 hours, to now showing up here at the end. So they’ve got through, they’ll say, “Oh, this is so great.” And then they’re gonna be able to then see that story right there.
So this is just, again, another way to help you get in front of your audience stay top of mind, and this is what people are going to be seeing, as they get on to Instagram, they’re going to see the stories and click on those before they go on to the feed.
So really thinking of behind the scenes photos that you can put into the Instagram story, Instagram Exclusives for just your Instagram followers, promoting webinars, new blog posts. Those are things that Instagram Stories work really well for.
If you have any questions about your Instagram strategy, please let us know.
Building a bigger network on LinkedIn won’t happen overnight. These strategies will help make the idea of growing your connections more realistic and less intimidating.
We all know that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But let’s face it. If the cover isn’t inviting, people won’t be interested to open the book and read its content.
In today’s digital world, a profile photo represents your sole opportunity to make a strong visual first impression.
Humans are innately wired to make a snap judgment based on appearance. You can’t control how everyone will perceive you. But you can do something to ensure that your picture will portray you in a positive manner.
A fully optimized LinkedIn profile can ensure your profile is fully discoverable on the platform and even on search engines like Google.
Keywords can make the difference between your profile attracting the views you want or being lost in the digital space, so it is important to understand which keywords matter to attract the right views.
If you work in an industry that has career-specific terms, use those keywords. You can add them everywhere in your profile, but there are 3 main areas that are most important – header, summary, and experience section.
While building a bigger network is your primary goal, you also want to use LinkedIn to build your relationship with your followers. One way to do this is by sharing valuable, educational content.
Publishing articles is one of the best ways to establish your personal brand and share your expertise in your industry.
It’s common practice to share blogs that you think will resonate well with your audience, but it would be better if those insights are your own. Plus, it creates additional opportunities for engagement since your network will be notified every time you post an article.
Make sure your content mix includes eye-catching visuals. We found that posts with video and visual content heightened the level of engagement on the platform.
Don’t just hit “connect” when you want to send a connection request. Always go to the person’s profile, hit the “connect” button, and briefly explain why you want to connect with them.
Personalization is the key to getting strangers to connect with you on LinkedIn. Spend a few thoughtful moments to compose a personalized connection request. If you can find a topic to bring up or if you have a mutual connection, that makes all the difference.
There are lots of activities that happen on LinkedIn – article mentions, new job titles, birthdays, and more.
Interacting with your connections when they have new things happening is a great way to develop a relationship. So go ahead. Comment on a status update. Say “congratulations” when someone gets a new job. Like new profile pictures. Thank people for their recommendations and endorsements. You never know where a single meaningful connection with another person can take both of you.
Joining groups is one of the fastest ways to make hundreds of connections. Please note, though, that there is a difference between simply joining a group and being efficiently engaged.
If you are serious about using LinkedIn to your advantage, then make sure that you join the right groups. Look for 5 to 10 groups you can be active in.
Engaging in group discussions puts you in front of people who are already actively engaged with a particular topic. Spend a bit of time liking and commenting on other’s posts. Once you’ve been in the group for a bit, you can start posting your own content.
By providing valuable information, you’re showcasing your expertise around that subject and build relationships.
One “set it and forget it” tip is to add a follow button to your company’s website. This simple addition can help turn your website visitors into LinkedIn page followers.
Before you hit the publish button on your next blog post, make sure that you include a CTA that would lead your readers to take action after they finish reading your posts.
Fresh, quality content is important to attract your target audience and keep them informed. But let’s face it. It can be challenging to find fresh social media ideas, especially when you have to post something daily on different platforms.
Next time you think there’s nothing for you to post, think again. Here are 11 content ideas to fill your social media calendar.
If you find yourself at a loss when it comes to making updates on social media, sharing industry news is a great idea. Regularly posting informative articles will help turn your page into a trusted resource for relevant information.
Think about what your target audience would find helpful and relevant. Share links to relevant news and blogs.
Do you spend countless hours writing killer, quality content for your blog? Don’t let it go to waste Share your blog posts across your social media accounts.
In addition to giving you something new to post, sharing your blog posts on social media will help deliver a steady stream of visitors to your site. Make sure, though, that you tailor your message to fit each platform and audience.
People love answering questions, and polls provide the perfect avenue for this.
Polls are easy to make, encourage interactivity, and get people talking. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of who your customers are. By reading their responses, you can learn from them directly and better understand their needs.
Video is the undeniable king of content marketing. In fact, they get exponentially more shares than texts and images combined. Not only are they convenient and efficient for the consumer, but they can also help you create an emotional connection with your audience.
If you aren’t creating video content for your brand or business, now is the time to get in front of the camera. I challenge you to do one this week. You can start by doing a Facebook Live or Instagram story. The first video is usually the hardest, but you’ll get better as you go.
Sharing behind the scenes content gives people an inside look into who you are and what your brand represents. People want to do business with people, not from a company that hides behind a logo. They want to know the people behind your products and services.
Behind the scenes, content humanizes your company and helps you build rapport with your target audience. Trust doesn’t come easily for businesses, but transparency is a great place to start.
Share tips that your audience might find useful. You may also consider turning it into a weekly post. For instance, “Tip Tuesday” or “Fun Fact Friday”. This way, your audience will have something to look forward to.
User-generated content is any content that has been published by fans. Nine out of ten consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional advertising. That means, they’d rather hear from your clients and customers instead of you.
UGCs work well because they’re authentic. Plus, it puts customers front and center. It encourages engagement and helps you grow your audience.
When sharing user-generated content, always give credit where credit is due. Make sure that you tag the original poster in the post.
People love information, but most people lean heavily toward visual content. Infographics are easily read, understood, and remembered. Your audience can easily scan the document and understand the message you’re trying to get across. Not only will they appreciate the new-found knowledge, but they’ll also find your information more credible and compelling.
Posting photos of your employees help humanize your brand. It allows them to have a sneak peek of the people behind your products and services.
Go ahead and share photos of people who make your business possible. Without them, you won’t be able to operate.
Studies suggest that 74% of consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before they can trust a business. Sharing customer testimonials on social media is one of the best ways to build trust with your audience and add credibility to your brand.
Let your customer’s voices be heard on social media. Create an image with their testimonial or retweet their kind words. Don’t forget to include their name or handle.
Have you noticed more and more brands are incorporating humor into their social media marketing strategy? It’s because humor sells.
People love humorous content. Infusing humor into your social media content helps show your brand’s personality and get more people to engage with your content. Besides, posting only business-related content is simply boring.
Social media has become an integral part of many businesses’ marketing strategy. It helps you connect with your audience, increase awareness about your brand, and generate more business.
With so many social media platforms to manage and publish in, it’s important to have a plan and stay organized for what and when you’re going to share on each platform. Having a social media content calendar will make things a lot easier.
A social media calendar is a document that is used to plan out and organize future content. It allows you to visualize how your marketing looks like in the coming weeks or months and tweak any scheduled posts as necessary.
Content calendars can come in several forms. It can be a spreadsheet, hand-written calendar or a software. The purpose of a social media calendar is to provide a framework for scheduling out when and which content will be published across different social media channels.
A content calendar do wonders for your business. Here are 5 reasons why you need a social media content calendar.
You need to post regularly for your business to benefit from social media. But we all know that managing multiple social media accounts can be challenging, not to mention time consuming.
The purpose of using a content calendar is to help you plan out content ahead of time and schedule posts across multiple channels at once. With an effective calendar, you can schedule content weeks or months ahead of time. You no longer have to worry about falling behind if you become too busy or if something comes up.
A content calendar will not only help alleviate some of the day-to-day stressors, but it can also help you reach your long-term business goals. Freeing up more time, you can now focus on more important aspects of the business.
Holidays and other important events offer excellent opportunities to create engaging content. With a hectic schedule, it can be easy for important dates to slip your mind. Missing important dates can represent a lost opportunity.
An organized calendar helps reduce the chaos of scrambling to post it on time. Taking note of future events, you’ll have enough time to create the best possible content for the occasion instead of just churning out content at the last minute.
Having a content calendar alleviates the fear of forgetting important dates. Plus, it ensures that your content is being published when your audience is active.
Providing your audience with relevant, informative, and entertaining content is the key to keep your audience engaged.
When posting on social media, you want it to be a mix of industry news, inspiring content, content from others, and your own content. Using a content calendar allows you to visualize your content strategy over time. You’ll have plenty of time to fill it with relevant topics that resonate with your audience.
Without effective planning, you may run the risk of posting a topic that you have already discussed a few weeks ago. A social media content calendar will help you keep things in check, so you can avoid such blunders.
Instead of making last-minute decisions about what types of content to publish, you’ll have the advantage of getting feedback from your team members.
Every piece of content start with ideas, and you’ll need a lot of them to fill your calendar. When you plan out your social media content in advance, teams from different departments can contribute ideas, make edits, and plan future content.
They can use their knowledge to fill the space with relevant content that is valuable to your audience. Hence, you can be sure that you’re putting out the best and most relevant content.
Collaboration with team members often lead to fresh ideas and greater return on investment. However, it can also be tricky to pull off efficiently. It can be further complicated by remote work.
A social media content calendar is a great way to collaborate. It can serve as a communication tool for the whole team. This is where topics, ideas, contents, and dates are placed. It helps keep every member of the team on the same page and stay on track of publishing.
Having a central place for different teams across your organization to manage social media content allows for a much smoother implantation of your social media marketing agenda.
Pinterest is one of those tools to build that website traffic, and a lot of people think of it as maybe not a tool that’s right for their business. Often, they think it’s just for recipes or interior design, which yes, it is used for that, but think of Pinterest as a visual search engine.
If your target audience is mostly women 35 to 65, Pinterest’s demographics are your target market! It’s time to see how you can use Pinterest to grow your business!
Pinterest is a great tool to use to get people to your website. And you think about when they go to Google what are they typing in? Especially moms, they’re going to Pinterest and they’re searching for different things.
I want to show you what a Pinterest business account looks like, and a tool that we use to manage our Pinterest. It’s really important to have that consistency and that strategy behind, “What are you pinning?” And so, this is where that digital marketing strategy that we’re always talking about comes into play.
Looking at what blogs are you writing. If you’re writing one blog per week or maybe two blogs per month, and they are the longer cornerstone blogs, each blog can have four to six images for that one blog, and you can pin those to Pinterest with links back to your website.
Let me just dive in and show you a little bit about Pinterest. If you go sign up and create a Pinterest account, it will ask you if you’re business or personal.
Here we have our Social Speak Pinterest account, and this is the business account. I wanted to show you our profile.
How you know that it’s a business account is because it will have analytics here. We have a little over 170,000 monthly viewers, which is pretty good for us. We really have worked hard on building our Pinterest account probably about the last year and a half.
We didn’t really take it too seriously before and now we’re seeing that traffic to the website really increase from what we’re putting on Pinterest. That’s a really good thing.
With a business account, you can set up your account with your business name. Here, we also have our logo. You can change your header images to a different static image. I always have the latest pins for our Social Speak board.
You could have in here a link to your website, a little bit about who you are and what you guys do, and then the most important thing is your boards.
You want to think of your boards as those keyword phrases. When you’re putting together your boards, it’s important to look at what are those key topics that you want to be talking about? So, you can have as many boards as you want. I always recommend starting with between five and seven, because you don’t want to be so overwhelmed. But as you continue to grow you’ll always be adding a new board, and so that’s okay, too.
We have different boards for different things, and these can be very specific. Obviously, content marketing strategy is our number one board with almost 800 pins. That and the health care digital marketing tips, those are our two main focuses.
It’s important to make sure that when you are creating a board that you are filling out the description. You want to make sure that you have the title of the board, the description of the board – fill out those blanks that Pinterest provides you. If people search for content marketing tips, then you are more likely to be able to show up here. That’s how that works.
Now what I like to do is I like to follow certain brands and companies. For example, I really like CoSchedule. They put out some great content. We also utilize Sprout Social. They put out great content.
You can go-to activity and see what pins they have, the latest pins they’ve had. And then, you can either save them to the board that you want, or you can go into Tailwind, which I will get to in just a second.
I like to make sure that you know which brands you want to follow so you can re-pin from them. I love the image, and I think the content’s great. I’ll just click onto that image and look at the website, make sure that it’s something that I want our audience to click through to.
The most important thing is going to your Analytics. And again, this is just something to look at on a monthly basis. I always go to the overview, and then I look at the impressions, the total audience, the engagement. Any time this number is up, that’s a good thing.
In the past 30 days, we’ve had over 200,000 impressions which is up 36% from last month. We had 178,000 total audience engagement.
The number of engagements on your pins includes saves, close-ups. People that had either clicked onto one of the pins we put up, re-pinned them or liked them. And then your engaged audience is the number of people who had engaged with your pin directly. Meaning that they had liked it, or they had re-pinned it.
You can go down here and look at your top boards, and then you can also look at your top pins. So, we’re seeing that people looking for YouTube sizes and “Seven easiest ways to create Instagram content.” These are our top two pins that we had re-pinned, and people are finding them on our account and re-pinning them.
It’s good to really look at what content is working, so then you can make sure that you are utilizing that data to put more of that content out.
Pinterest can be sometimes a little bit of a time consumer. What we’ve used is this app called Tailwind.
Tailwind actually connects to your Pinterest and your Instagram. This is a paid program. It’s only $14.99 a month, I highly recommend it because this allows you to schedule pins out.
What this allows me to do is schedule all of my Pinterest posts for the month if I want to. I’ll just click on a pin, then hit Add to Queue, and it’s going to automatically put it into my queue where it feels it needs to go.
What’s really cool about this, when you are on Pinterest and you click just onto the Home button, it doesn’t tell you how many times this pin had been re-pinned, but on Tailwind it does. So this has been re-pinned 115 times. And again, sometimes things will come up that are not aligned with your business, and that’s okay. You just scroll past them, but you can look to see which ones are getting more pins.
For example, I click on Instagram Strategy. Tailwind shows that this was re-pinned 341 times, and it’ll tell you that it’s 299 times on Pinterest and 42 times on Facebook.
With Tailwind, it organizes your posts based on when your audience is on Pinterest, and when you are getting the most engagement. That’s the one thing I love about Tailwind is it’s easy to be able to find that content. You can see the source right here. You can pick as many boards as you want, and then if you don’t like the content, if you don’t like those posts, you would just click More Suggestions, and more suggestions will come up.
Tailwind just helps keep everything organized. And that’s what I really like because it saves you time and it gives you the post that you’re looking for, it gives you the data on what the popularity is, and it also just helps with the Auto-Schedule.
The other thing you can do with Tailwind is what’s called a smart loop. Now, this is great for your blog posts that are your cornerstone blogs, meaning those are 2000 plus blogs.
We’ve already used our 250 smart loops and what that means is it will pull all of these blogs that we’ve done from a year, two years, three years ago, and it’s going to keep populating them. So it will automatically schedule those out into our plan, and because I’ve said I want these blogs to be scheduled to these certain boards, it will do that.
I highly recommend utilizing Pinterest and Tailwind together, you can get the most benefit out of your Pinterest account. You could also publish videos on here as well, that’s a great tool because videos are awesome on Pinterest, and it’s just a great way to really monitor what’s working.
On your Google Analytics, you would be able to tell how many people have come to your website from Pinterest. That’s a great way to monitor those analytics.
If you need help with creating this strategy for your Pinterest account and utilizing Tailwind and just elevating your digital marketing strategy as a whole, we do offer a free 30-minute consultation. That allows us to get to know what your goals are, what are you struggling with, and what are you wanting to accomplish with your digital marketing. And then we can put up a plan together moving forward from there.
We also just launched our online VIP community, and that’s a monthly membership that allows you to see different handouts, tutorials, trainings on all different things in digital marketing. It’s a great starting point if you are wanting to do things on your own. If you really need help with that next step with your digital marketing strategy, go to socialspeaknetwork.com and click on the “Contact Us” button for a free 30-minute consultation. If you have any questions, please let us know.
