Are you reaching the right prospects? Are you spreading the news about your business? If so, congratulations! You have a well-functioning social media marketing strategy. If the answer is negative, chances are that you haven’t mastered the science of social media content creation yet.

Building a social media content strategy is the key to reaching the right people and making the most of your online presence. The task may seem intimidating at first but if you learn from the experience of the pros in the field, you’ll soon get good results.

So, what does it take to build a solid strategy that’s professional and adequate for your respective field? Keep on reading to discover some of the biggest secrets that social media marketing experts keep to themselves.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!

We can’t stress the important of knowing your audience enough. Once again – learn about your audience before attempting to do anything else.

Social media marketing is all about addressing a specific group of people. The more niche and relatable your content is, the better your online reputation will become. When you have a good idea about your audience’s profile, you’ll know how to choose the right channels and how to put together a solid content plan.

Social media audience research is a task that requires time and effort. For a start, you may want to determine your market position. Are you addressing a current need or creating a brand new desire in buyers? What types of people will benefit from the products and services you have to sell? Where are these people located? Are they employed? How much money do they earn?

Doing competition research will give you some idea about the types of people you should be addressing. The same applies to doing paid social media promotion and setting the right demographic criteria. In fact, this is one of the simplest options for populating your communities with the right people and seeing a high return on investment.

BASE THE CONTENT STRATEGY ON EACH INDIVIDUAL CHANNEL

Here’s another essential to keep in mind – you can’t use the same content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other social media profiles that you maintain. Each of these platforms has its specific audience and communication tools. Thus, you should have a separate content strategy for each of the channels that you’re on.

Multiple social media profiles require constant monitoring. You may start with a few of those but sooner or later, you’ll find out that your efforts should be focused on only a couple of channels that deliver the highest level of engagement for your brand.

You’ll learn a bit more about the content that’s best for each channel through experience. In the beginning, however, you may rely on the following tips to boost the relevance of your content strategies:

• Facebook posts: short texts, videos and images tend to benefit from the highest level of engagement. This social network offers quite a lot of versatility when it comes to the content that delivers the best results.
• Twitter: very brief sentences, slogans and images are ideal for the purpose of Twitter promotion. You can also post links to your website with brief captions.
• LinkedIn: opt for longer texts, as well as longer captions that lead to relevant links. When using LinkedIn, keep in mind that you’ll usually get best results by engaging in B2B promotion.
• Instagram: obviously, this channel is the one to use for the publication of photo and video content. Keep the captions short and look for good hashtags.
• Google+: images and links to your website accompanied by brief captions tend to see the highest level of engagement.

MAKE THE CONTENT ITSELF GOOD

This tip may seem like an obvious one but many companies ignore the importance of professionally created social media content.

If you don’t have the needed experience and the skills to push out consistent, good content on a regular basis, you should get professionals to do it. TopAussieWriters is just one example of a possibility that you can rely on.

Good posts have a hook, something that gets the audience eager to undertake a certain course of action. You may want to promise an answer to a pressing question, something funny or something that few people know.

When making such promises, you have to deliver. Clickbaiting is a bad strategy because it fools people into believing that you’ll give them something you simply can’t. It may work the first time around but sooner or later, you’ll start losing some of your audience.

Good content is also about regular scheduling. A good social media content strategy schedules updates for regular publication. There’s no need to make multiple updates across channels several times per day. If you only update your profiles once per month, however, it will simply be impossible to keep the audience engaged and coming back for more.

The final thing to remember is that you should constantly keep on checking the performance of your content strategy. Social media provides a lot of analytical information about your top posts, their reach and their engagement level. Find out which types of content gets the best response and which ones miss the mark. You can adjust the strategy on the basis of this information. Social media marketing is a real-time approach. If you’re not getting the return on investment that you desire, you can always modify the campaign to boost its relevance and see better results in the future.

This article was originally written by Alice Clarke for the Heyo Blog. 

It’s been a busy week here at Votigo, and we’re excited to share two new live sweepstakes examples with you! These promotions from A+E Networks and Cub Cadet demonstrate the value of sweepstakes when it comes to generating leads for your brand and engaging your audience, so take a look and get inspired to plan your next campaign!

A+E Networks “Married at First Sight – Journey to Love” Sweepstakes

A+E Networks has launched an Enter-to-Win Sweepstakes in order to capture and engage fans of their popular Lifetime TV series, “Married at First Sight”. In order to keep engagement and momentum consistent, new prizes are available throughout the season. This keeps people coming back to the sweepstakes week over week, giving the brand additional opportunities to drive awareness for upcoming “Married at First Sight” episodes. The result is a holistic marketing campaign with touch-points both online and on-screen! Built on Votigo’s Enterprise Platform, this sweepstakes also features newsletter opt-in functionality, social sharing and mobile responsive design.

Cub Cadet’s #LawnGoals Sweepstakes

In this photo sweepstakes, Cub Cadet is inviting their fans to showcase what the brand means to them by sharing photos of their springtime #LawnGoals. Participants can enter via Direct Upload on Desktop, Smartphone or Tablet, or with the campaign hashtag #LawnGoals on Twitter or Instagram. Allowing users to choose their preferred entry method is great for engagement rates, and it also gives the brand a great opportunity to engage multiple social platforms. This campaign was also built on Votigo’s Enterprise Platform and features content moderation, viral “share” functionality, and mobile responsive design.

Want to learn more about Votigo’s sweepstakes solutions, or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

While it might seem like Spring just got here, Summertime is right around the corner – and so is your chance to run a fun and engaging summer contest or sweepstakes!

The good news is, Votigo has everything you need to plan, produce and manage your campaign so you can be live in no time! And if you’re struggling to think of an idea for your promotion, check out some of these examples for inspiration!

Father’s Day Giveaway

Father’s Day is a great opportunity to run a UGC Contest or Gallery. And, a brand doesn’t have to be directly associated with fatherhood or parenting in general in order to be able to capitalize on the buzz surrounding the holiday. Chances are your audience already participates in Father’s Day anyway, so why not engage them by tapping into behavior they’re already doing, for a chance to win something that IS relevant to your brand? Consider inviting people to submit photos of how your brand or product is helping them celebrate their fathers. Or, run a simple Enter-to-Win Sweepstakes for a chance to win a prize bundle to help them throw a festive Father’s Day celebration!

The same rules can apply if you want to run a Fourth of July Promotion! 

There is so much buzz and activity surrounding the 4th of July holiday that you can easily run a contest or sweepstakes that allows your customers to share what the holiday means to them for a chance to win a brand-relevant prize.

And finally, there’s always a great opportunity to invite your audience to celebrate SUMMER in general! Have people share photos or videos of how they are enjoying their summers in the context of a UGC Contest or Sweepstakes!  And then have people vote on their favorites in order to drive engagement and awareness of the promotion!Ready to start planning your summertime promotion, or learn about any of Votigo’s other promotion types? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

Every year, SEO (search engine optimization) presents different and better opportunities for businesses compared to the previous one. There are almost always algorithm changes being implemented for better results. Similarly, the strategies for better ranking are ever dynamic. If you are not privy to the latest SEO trends and therefore fail to take advantage of the existing opportunities, your website could be rendered useless within a short time.

Many small business owners are investing less in SEO, according to a survey by Manta Wellness Index. This is interesting because the SEO arena has several opportunities that businesses could utilize in order to have a competitive advantage. Below, we will highlight 3 Major SEO Opportunities in 2017 that we believe could have the biggest influence on business success.

First Opportunity: Organic Traffic

The survey mentioned above revealed that few business owners are planning to use SEO, content marketing, and pay-per-click advertising this year. What they do not know is that they are losing an excellent opportunity to beat out the competition. It seems a majority of businesses are planning to rely on ads. The benefit of organic search is that it is long-term and it draws visitors from natural searches on search engines. The question that arises then is this: How does a website win this organic traffic?

The secret lies in the kind of content posted on their website and blog. Even if building this kind of traffic requires time input, the returns are worth the wait. SEO Chicago experts advise business owners to give SEO and organic traffic at least six months before making their analyses.

Second Opportunity: Other Search Engines

Many people assume that Google is the Alpha and Omega of online search. But did you know that Bing controls about 30% of total search engine traffic? If you ask me, this is an audience to be taken seriously. It becomes even more exciting when you consider that a bulk of Bing’s traffic is voice-centered (voice is covered in my next point).

In 2017, you want to optimize for other search engines. Optimizing for Google and Bing could vary here and there but for the most part, they are similar. You will reap bigger rewards if you find a way of optimizing for the two sites concurrently. For example, consider publishing content and follow up with a powerful social media promotion.

Third Opportunity: Voice Search

Data shows that voice search is increasing in 2017. This has been the trend since 2010, so chances are that this will continue for several years. There are two reasons why every business needs to take this opportunity seriously.

First, technology is improving, hence making voice recognition seamless. Second, more adults and teenagers are joining the voice community. Recently, Google representatives revealed that voice now accounts for around 20% of mobile queries. This data suggests that voice search optimization is critical because it guarantees a competitive advantage in 2017 and beyond.

Conclusion

Has your SEO strategy been effective so far in 2017? History shows that SEO rules are always changing and on the move. Whatever worked in 2016 may not necessarily have the same impact this year.

Organic search and voice search are already on top and those in the know have devised strategies to address these trends. Google is still the mother of all search engines, but it does not hurt to optimize for other ones as well. If you want to win the SEO game, then you need to use these three opportunities and others available here before it is too late.

This piece was written by contributing blogger Keith Randolph. Keith is a veteran blogger who makes it a point to always make irresistible headlines for his posts.