Growth hacking is all the rage these days. And it’s not really surprising. In a world where we’re constantly pressured to achieve better results with a lower budget, and get more done with less time; who wouldn’t relish a shortcut (or two) to success?
With the ever-growing plethora of media, platforms, and methods to engage your audience, any marketer worth their salt knows that social media marketing is vital to their business’s present and future success.
Your company’s focus should be firmly placed on user experience (UX) and providing engaging and useful content that encourages viral distribution, likes, and shares (and more traffic to your site). But how do you get so far with so little time? These simple social media hacks will help:
Social Media Hacks to Improve Your Campaigns
1. Hashtags
If you think hashtags belong in the domain of Twitter, think again. Hashtags are now cropping up like a plague across all social media platforms – from Facebook to Instagram, Pinterest to Tumblr… hashtags have exploded all over social media.
Why? Because hashtags are an excellent hack to help you find things more easily in the infinite ocean of the Internet. Designed to help you browse topics, trends, people, and issues of the day quicker and easier, you can also attract followers, increase clicks, get more likes and even start discussions with the help of the humble hashtag.
Make the most of them in your social media posts, as a lot of internet users will look for hashtags manually, as they help them to see what subjects and important, what news is going on and what is trending the web on any given day.
Try checking out Trendsmap to help you stay on top of the trends of the day and see which hashtags are big on Twitter. See if you can contribute to the discussions and if there are any hashtags relevant to certain pages of your website or blog.
When you write your status, be sure to include a hashtag or two to increase your visibility. You can also do this when commenting on articles, forums and so on.
2. Timing
Ever wondered why the best marriage proposals don’t happen when the future bride is out of town, fast asleep, or with somebody else? Because the timing in life is everything. Many a business deal has been closed, matrimony started and even wars declared due to bad or good timing.
So make sure you choose yours well and learn the best times to post across your social platforms. There are a bunch of studies on this, but until you try it out for your particular company, you won’t be able to find the best time that works for you and your audience.
Since every business, if different, there’s no hard and fast rule for all, beyond the fact that obviously, you’ll want to post at a time when you can get your viewer’s full attention. Sometimes that means posting on the weekend or in the evening when they’re out of work. Sometimes it doesn’t. Test this out and see what works best for you.
Thanks to tools, such as Facebook Insights, Pinterest Analytics, and LinkedIn Analytics, you can now get all the information you need to see when engagement for your posts is higher.
If you have customers and followers in different time zones or even countries, then be sure to schedule your posts to reach each target market at the right time, so your posts aren’t published at 3 am when only 3% of your audience is awake.
3. Images
Images are absolutely vital when it comes to social media, which is why Twitter allowed its users to add an image to their posts. In fact, according to Twitter, using images when posting sees an average of 35% more retweets than plain text alone. Almost three-quarters of all Facebook posts that are shared are images. And let’s not even get started on Instagram, which generates the highest engagement out of all the social media platforms.
The better the image the better the results. Infographics are great for getting a lot of content across in an image, but if you don’t have a designer to rely on, then why not try creating your own images and moving GIFs with programs like Pablo and Canva? Let your imagination run wild and come up with all kinds of entertaining and thought-provoking images with little effort and cost.
You can also try using well-designed infographics, like this one from Day Translations. Infographics are an excellent way of getting across a lot of information in an image that people will want to like and share. You can kill two birds with one stone with an infographic and save yourself the time of writing a longer article.
Don’t let yourself get disappointed if you don’t get good results the first time around. Learning to experiment and try out all these simple hacks (and adding news ones) is the key to growing your social media presence and your company.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on Aug 22, 2016, and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
