Is Your Social Media Content Boring? Here’s the Only Way to Fix It for Good

Social media marketing. Three words that every marketer utters when backed into a corner for answers and results. But here’s the hard truth about social media marketing. Not all marketers see an ROI. In fact, even though 77% marketers claim to be using social media for marketing, only 48% of them seem to have any ROI whatsoever. Why? Not all marketers invest enough to create fresh and effective content.

Is your content boring and overdone? Let’s think realistically. It’s hard to put out fresh, intellectually stimulating, humorous and compelling content every single day. Or is it? Maybe you haven’t discovered a creative process that allows you to perform that way yet.

1. Tickle your tastebuds with flavors that make you want to sing

“Successful creators don’t just like knowledge, they thirst for it,” says Keith Sawyer, author of “Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity”. Serial entrepreneur and tech revolutionary Elon Musk and IT veteran Bill Gates have both confessed to being avid readers. To be a successful creator, you have to develop a desire to consume a lot of content yourself. But what content should you ideally consume?

Every exceptional artist has a muse, just as every talented content creator has go-to sources for inspiration. What are yours? Here are a few ways to find inspiration.

• Inspiration can come from anywhere – books, movies or even conversations with interesting people. Any piece of information that’s new can break you out of old thinking patterns that are holding you back. Ensure that you have time for good books, movies and conversations every week.
• Long walks, rides or meditation can do a lot for your creative imagination. Sometimes, your mind is full of ideas, but you are not in the right mind space to access them. During such times, you could indulge in meditative or refreshing activities to clear your mind and let ideas flow.
• Today, there are tons of apps and platforms serving content. But not all content is good content. Instead of letting these apps take over your life, why not control your content consumption and make it actually beneficial?
• Additionally, you could also use a content curation app like DrumUp to curate fresh content for daily inspiration.

The idea is to build daily habits that enable your creative imagination, helping you generate ideas easily so you can keep your social media content fresh. If you’re still stuck, you could try one of the following:

• Watch TEDTalks. They usually have new ideas and great language – two great precursors for fresh content ideas.
• Begin curating an inspiration file with pieces of ideas, writing, design or stories that intrigue you. They’ll come to your rescue during tough times.
• Watch interviews of your favorite personalities. You might find their lives and experiences inspiring.
• Listen to new music. If you are visually receptive, new sounds may prompt the flow of new ideas.
• Try remote association exercises. For instance, you can take the first line of one song and try to connect it to the last line of another song by writing the lines in between. You could also consider three completely random ideas and spin them into a story. Such activities generally get your creative juices flowing.
• Make a collage or build a lego house. You could also do something simpler if you lack resources. Arrange your desk or doodle random ideas in your head.

2. Diversify your social media content with videos, infographics, quotes, GIFs, memes and storytelling

Facebook mobile users spend no more than 1.7 seconds on each piece of content. That’s the time you have to grab their attention. Doing that by sharing the same kind of social media content repeatedly is impossible because people who lose interest easily will switch to another page. However, you can keep audience attention by diversifying your social media content.

It’s the purple cow principle. Remember Seth Godin’s infamous TED Talk “How to get your ideas to spread”? People won’t stop for a cow, but show them a purple cow or a cow with golden locks and…

• It’s hard to keep surprising your social media audience when you have to post content everyday. But you can easily “keep it fresh” by using different content formats such as videos, infographics, GIFs, memes and quotes.

Each of these content formats can be easily designed even if you don’t have designing experience. There are tons of Saas (Software As a Service) tools that offer ready templates which you can design these types of content. 

For instance, Venngage has several infographic templates that you can work with and Giphy makes GIF making easy.

• Use storytelling on every social media post. People are drawn to stories because they evoke strong emotions rooted in their earliest years of life. How do you use storytelling? Create characters, narrate scenes and take people through the experience that you want them to have.
• Work with all the special features on different social media platform. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat Stories, Instagram Boomerang and Twitter Moments are all creative opportunities to change the way social media users perceive your brand. Not only do “Stories” appear prominently on top of social feeds, but they also disappear 24 hrs after publishing, giving you the freedom to share more freely.
• Save your posts and ideas in online content libraries such as the ones on DrumUp, so you can work with them just before publishing. You could also save great posts to inspire future posts or inspire the start of a series.

If you still don’t have enough to embellish your page with vibrant and original social media content, here are a few things that you can consider.

• Curate content from other brands, personalities who are in your space but don’t compete with you. DrumUp’s keyword based content curation will help you find articles written by journalists, whom you can also @mention when sharing posts through the tool.
• Share simple questions, quizzes or contests that can engage your social media audience.

 3. Invest in empathy; understand customer intent and feelings

Every social media marketer reads hundreds of blog and social media posts for social media marketing inspiration. However, few of them can actually drive results for brands using social if marketers lose sight of the most important part of having a social media presence – being human. Companies who anchor their social media marketing strategy around this fact are more likely to have larger and more loyal social media followings and better sales.

The beauty of social media is that it allows for two way communication, wherein current and prospective customers can respond to brands and share opinions. Use that fact to build real connections with your social media fans.

• The first mistake that many brands make on social media is that they overdo professionalism and end up being boring. People don’t want more “corporate talk”. They want to know who you are. So, be as genuine and authentic as you can on social media. Give your brand a personality that people can relate to.
• One of the biggest mistakes that brands make on social media is focusing too much on their brand, products and services. In marketing expert Guy Alvarez’s words, “Social Media is Not a Bullhorn”, and you should stop writing about why your products are amazing. People today can’t be bothered by what you have to sell. They’re interested in how you can change their lives. Show them that by sharing more customer-oriented content.
• Make people smile. Want to stay on top of customers’ minds? Tell them something that will make them smile. Create content that will come back to them when they’re driving or shopping or being bored on the internet.
• Give more than you get. Think about this. Would you rather spend time with a friend who’s there for you or someone who’s always asking you for money? Limit your social media sales pitches. Instead, try and befriend your social media audience.

The easiest way to build a rapport with your audience is by understanding how they feel. Here are a few ways to do that.

• Look carefully at support queries. What emotions have customers expressed towards your products and services? That can tell you a lot about how to approach them. For instance, if customers have displayed signs of uncertainty and anxiousness, you should invest in understanding what their concerns about your products are.
• Talk to customers face to face or on the phone when you can and ask for feedback related to your products and content. Pay attention to their tone of voice and emotions instead of focusing only on what they say.

 4. Work hard on that sense of humor, every single day

Being humorous is a great way to catch the attention of your social media audience. By appealing to them emotionally, you stand a better chance than others at generating curiosity about who you are and what you sell. It also stands that humor is great for brand awareness and brand recall, two things that can help you stay etched in your target audience’s memory longer.

However, writing jokes is hard. The activity requires a rare combination of creative intelligence and an understanding of customer psychology. Here’s a list of tips that can help.

• According to Dr. Peter McGraw and Dr. Caleb Warren, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, humor occurs when two events coincide –

i) Someone threatens a person’s worldview (his or her) sense of how the world should be, and ii) The threat is amiable but potent. Try and satisfy these criteria with the jokes that you write for social media.

• Practise writing humor everyday, because only 10% of what you write maybe usable material. Just as any other skill, writing humor takes practise and you’ll get better at it over time.
• Follow a bunch of comedians and novelists you consider raconteurs, so you can breakdown their work and study their style of writing. When breaking down their writing, try and pay attention to the details – the words they use, the tone they use, the visuals that they try to paint with words. Some good examples of novelists to study are PG Wodehouse and Caitlin Moran.
• Curate humorous content for your social media fans. There are tons of great social media pages already posting funny content. You could simply repost some of that content (with tags and proper credit) for your audience’s benefit. The admins of the pages you help promote will definitely thank you for it.

If you’re still unable to find enough inspiration to add humor to your social media content, you could try one of the following.

• Wit is underrated. Use witty quips (crediting them to the author) or create your own. Try and give new endings to old sayings or come-up with new “terms” that have funny definitions.
• Poke fun at your brand. That’s a great way to endear your social media fans. Ellen DeGeneres tells a lot of jokes targeted at herself (click here for link to video below).

5. Strike the pinata at its heart by vanquishing customers’ pet peeves

When people don’t convert, it’s usually because they have a very specific issue stopping them from doing so. When customers leave, they usually have very specific problems that haven’t be addressed. Strategic content can bridge these gaps and boost both your conversion rates and customer retention rates. That’s why you should focus on creating social media content that relates to customer and prospect issues.

Here’s what you need to know when creating content to solve issues that customers and prospects face.

• Before you begin solving issues, it’s important to know if they actually exist and what they are. Many social media managers make the mistake of assuming likes, dislikes and concerns of target groups, leading to the incorrect investment of time and money on creating content that’s not really relevant.
• Once you’re sure of what concerns customers and prospects have, it’s time to understand exactly how to address them. The content format and script that you use matter to a great extent. You conversion and retention depend on how well you address issues using content.
• Use simple resolutions in content that your target groups can follow easily. Avoid using terms that can confuse people and don’t unnecessarily complicate your content.
• Invest in content formats that you know your target groups consume. For instance, if your target groups include people who read a lot, you can focus on blog posts. Else, it’s important to complement blog posts with videos, infographics, GIFs and memes. The videos you create should ideally be short and easy to consume – 60s or less if you plan to share them on social media platforms.
• You could use success stories, case-studies and testimonials to illustrate to your target groups how you can solve important issues. In fact, doing so will add social proof and credibility to the equation and make your brand appear more trustworthy.

Here are a few extra tips to ensure that you aim right and successfully eliminate the issues that your target groups have using social media content.

• Google keyword planner (and other keyword research tools) are excellent ways to understand customer intent. If you create blog posts using data drawn from such tools, you can attract attention on social media and drive SEO traffic to your website.
• You can also use a tool such as FAQFox to search for queries on forums such as Quora, so you can identify important questions that your audience is asking.

Wrap

Social media marketing is an important part of every marketer’s $0 marketing plan, but few of these marketers ever see the results that they desire. Why? They’re using the wrong content or targeting the wrong channels. This post suggests the only way you can take boring social media content and turn it interesting.

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What a Profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy Looks Like (with 4 Real Examples)

We’ve come a long way in the last few years. Back in 2011, the biggest question that people were asking was if social was profitable. Since then, industry conversation has moved from ‘will I see an ROI’ to ‘how to measure social ROI’ and the tools that can help.

Yet, only 15% marketers have proven the impact of social media quantitatively. If you aren’t part of that 15% there could be two potential hitches – you aren’t working with a sound strategy, or you aren’t measuring the right metrics.

[ A sound strategy = targeted content + the right channels]

To eliminate the first possibility, let us study profitable social media content marketing strategies and compare them to our own.

1. ShipServ

Who’d have thought that a maritime e-commerce company would seize the social media opportunity and win at it? Shipping companies seem unlikely to be seeking information on social media, but ShipServ saw this differently. Since no one in their industry had conquered the social space, they moved in full force and established thought leadership in it.

ShipServ supplies software to support shipping companies and connects the industry’s vendors to buyers. In 2008, they were struggling with a host of marketing problems. They were selling technology to people who didn’t consider it necessary and on a limited budget. Creating that change in perception would be a huge task.

They began by studying their audience’s content consumption. They identified keyword themes to work with and planned a quarterly content and SEO strategy. A series of original content was promoted through a host of social media channels, driving traffic back to the main site. The channels they used included their blog, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and podcasts. They also ran a white-paper series and created a LinkedIn group.

The result?

400% more leads

150% more contact to lead conversions

3 month break even on the social media investment

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Study your audience. One thing that people forget to do is to study how an audience consumes content, where exactly the look for it and what they look for.

2) Consider your content competition when building out a social strategy. One of the social media marketing mistakes that people make is blind-sighting content competition. ShipServ boomed on social because none of its competitors were on it yet. You need to identify a platform that has your audience and isn’t already monopolized by your competition. You need to share content with a unique value proposition.

2. Lyfe Kitchen

For a food industry product, social media marketing may seem like the clear-cut solution. But Lyfe Kitchen is B2B, a restaurant and grocery product line. A few years ago, this company wanted to increase word of mouth on social media and rapidly expand into new supermarkets. What should their approach have been?

The company ran influencer marketing programs, but with a slightly unconventional approach. They chose influencers who belonged to their high-potential target audience across industries – health and fitness, sports, the fashion world, and moms. In addition to this effort, the company also did tastings for a national sports company and magazine editors. The sports management company loved the product so much that they convinced their clients (sports celebs) to get on board. The editors wrote articles and talked about the product on social media.

The result?

Their product distribution grew from 400 to 1400 stores within a few months of the effort. The expansion was a result of direct requests to stock the product.

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Tap into every vertical of your target audience. Don’t restrict yourself to one target demographic or group. Consider all possible consumers when creating your social media content or planning a marketing strategy.

This company considered influencers across so many verticals, from health and fitness to the fashion industry. They even included influential moms, who may have been instrumental in getting distribution to local supermarkets.

2) Look beyond the conventional. Don’t tunnel vision your marketing strategy. If you think laterally you may be able to accomplish more than just your major objective.

For instance, Lyfe Kitchen could have sent free samples to influencers or interacted with them separately. Turning the activity into an event provided a unique PR opportunity, and to make the Lyfe Kitchen experience more memorable and exciting for potential influencers.

3. Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel is a chain of American retail stores that sell home furnishings. Wait, so why did they create the ultimate wedding contest? Well, they did it to drive gift registry creation and engage new consumers in the process of it.

Participants were required to create a gift registry with Crate and Barrel to enter the contest (Note: A requirement like this one to enter a contest often introduces legal complexities). After verification of the registry, the participants could move on to the next stage – submission of a photograph and some answers to questions. The contest was then judged by public voting and a panel to pick the winner of a $100,000 fantasy wedding.

The contest was promoted on the company’s website, on-site in their stores and by advertisement.

The result?

Over 17,000 applicants, each with a minimum registry value of $2,000 (a net value of $34 million)

Direct access and engagement with the participants wedding guests, potential new customers

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Craft marketing strategies that target both current customers, and new customers through them.

Crate and Barrel could have simply worked with the contest applicants, but the registry angle increased their reach exponentially (Please consider legal complexities before creating a campaign of this sort).

The simplest version of this tactic is to share the contest post to enter (which will give you access to your audience’s connections).

2) Make your unique value proposition exciting. A dream wedding of that value was certain to attract large application numbers. It was also compelling enough to make applicants want to get through stage one – the registry.

4. IBM

The popularity of ad blockers tells us this – people are growing immune to advertisement. In this market scenario, how do you reach your target audience? How do make someone willing to consume your content?

At IBM, it is all about people. The focus isn’t on the corporate blog or Twitter id, but the people who make the company. IBM has over 17,000 internal blogs, and a 100,000 active bloggers running that community. People are more likely to listen to other people than they are to a faceless brand.

IBM trains its social champions. They call themselves IBMers, and they are given the tools necessary to build a powerful social media presence. Thousands of people identify themselves as IBMers on Twitter and LinkedIn. I was surprised to see that the company culture remains with employees even when they leave IBM.

The result?

Over $100 million in crowdfunding

Over 40% in gross profit revenues

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Invest in people. Employees, partners, well-wishers. There are over 40 studies to prove that they are more influential than official brand accounts on social media.

2) Use an employee advocacy platform to help your employees share your content on social. Build a powerful employee advocacy program that can achieve incredible reach and drive impact for your brand.

How to Be Profitable While Marketing on Social Media

So far, we have broken down profitable social media marketing strategies for insights. Now let us explore the basic framework that a social strategy requires to be profitable. Here five tips to help you implement a solid and returning social media marketing strategy.

1. Create awareness

2, Blog

3. Focus on the right platform

4. Collect and use audience data

5. Engage with your audience

1. Create awareness

Irrespective of your industry, brand awareness should be on your plan. Your target audience should be aware of the need for your product/service, what concerns of theirs it addresses and why they should choose your brand over others. Ensure that your business is known for something.

Begin by building a solid social media presence.

Organize your blog

Optimize your social media accounts

Participate in the relevant social media communities

Social media success depends on the value you create. You have to give away substantial value to succeed in a market where so much of it is already free. Do it HubSpot style, help potential clients achieve results by sharing free insights from your experience. Several companies see returns from their credibility and reputation on social media.

2. Blog

People seek help on the internet, and social media. It is no surprise that ‘How to’ is a heavily searched term. Your blog could be a powerful platform to field and answer queries that your target audience has. Like we discussed in the ShipServ case study, it is good to know exactly what they are asking first.

Share your expertise (make it unique)

Partner with bloggers and industry experts to create more value

Spend 20% of your time creating blog content, and 80% of it distributing it (on social, in email newsletters)

Your blog is an anchor to pull and hold your social media traffic. Ensure that the loop is complete though. Write blog posts that drive people to purchase your product/services. You don’t have to be promotional about it, you only have to show readers its use cases.

3. Focus on the right platform

Every platform you build a presence on is an investment of your time and money. Look at your budgeting as a mathematical equation. The variables (spends on each platform) on the left add up to the maximum budget that you have on the right.

Prioritize your platforms by their ROI

Accordingly allocate resources to your prioritized platforms

Track your progress and optimize your spends each month/quarter

Sometimes, the cost of work on a platform doesn’t justify what you earn out of it. In such a scenario, you could de-prioritize that platform and push something else up the priority list. Optimizing your effort and spends in this manner can help increase your overall social media ROI.

4. Collect and use audience data

Google Analytics has a module called ‘audience insights’. Based on visitor data, the module helps you understand more about who you are targeting and helps you identify the groups that you aren’t targeting yet. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also give you demographics and user interests so you can build an informed content strategy.

Pull audience insights from Google and social media platforms

Keep the insights in mind when creating your content marketing strategy

Tailor content on each social media platform based on its audience demographics

Your audience will make a move only when encouraged by exactly the right content. The more you know about them and the more you consciously use that information, the better your conversions are likely to be.

5. Engage with your audience

There are many ways in which you can engage your social media audience. While you should engage them on your platforms, you should also go beyond them to target your potential audience. They don’t have to be consumers, they can be partners or simply enthusiasts.

Target communities, forums, websites and blogs that are popular in your industry

Don’t sell before your audience is ready. Begin by being useful to them regardless

Engage with your target market and people who have access to them

Consistency is key in a community. You have to establish yourself as an expert and really become part of your community. Becoming a thought-leader us even more effective, but that requires staying ahead of trends and covering the evolution of your niche.

It is possible to generate ample revenue from your social media pages alone, but you require clarity in terms of your goals and plan of implementation. With the right tactics, partners and tools, you can surprise yourself with your social media results.

Image credit: Pixabay.com

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How to Run Social Media Marketing Experiments (with 73 Ideas)

Running social media marketing can be hard when you have no idea where to begin. Social media is vast and the abundance of social media marketing options leaves social media managers undecided on which is the best strategy to follow. Fortunately, there exists a way to identify top performing social media strategies. You can identify top performing strategies with maximum ROI by running social media marketing experiments.

So, how do you run a social media marketing experiment?

Here’s a clean, 6-step process.

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize goals
3. Design the experiment
4. Test ideas
5. Analyze tests & glean insights
6. Automate top-performing ideas

Before we proceed with details on every step, here are a few characteristics of social media that you should consider before designing social media marketing experiments.

1. On social media, there are controllable (content quality, target audience and impact) and uncontrollable factors (organic reach).

2. Every experiment can have different outcomes based on different inputs. For instance, the experiment when boosted by say employee advocacy will show different results when not.

The 6-step process to setting-up, running and measuring a social media marketing experiment

1. Set goals

Social media needn’t be only a marketing tool. Social media can be used to impact every aspect of a business, from its inception to revenue-generation and customer support. In 2018, social media managers are aware of this fact, which is why it’s important to question ourselves how much value we’re getting from the time and resources spent on social media.

Goal-setting is one way to answer this question. In fact, goal-setting may also have a direct impact on an individual’s performance and happiness, according to a Harvard study.

The following is a list of social media goals that you can consider when planning your social media marketing experiments.

13 social media goals you could consider chasing

1. Product/company branding

2. Increasing brand awareness

3. Driving social media traffic

4. Lead generation

5. Revenue generation

6. Increasing brand engagement

7. Building communities

8. Providing customer support

9. Multiplying press mentions

10. Growing co-marketing opportunities

11. Acquiring brand advocates

12. Collecting UGC, reviews and testimonials

13. Launching products

Broad or narrow, these goals provide context to your social media marketing activities and help you measure them accurately. It’s best to create experiments that have no more than one goal, so your efforts are focused and easier to measure.

Consider, for instance, that you have created two social media posts – Post A and Post B. Post A has performed better in terms of social media engagement but Post B has performed better in terms of social media traffic. Which post would you consider a success?

Having goals in place prevents this kind of ambiguity.

2. Prioritize goals

Every business has multiple goals that can be reached via social media marketing. But every business also has to deal with limited resources and budgets. That’s where priorities become important. Priorities help you decide where and what to focus your resources on.

There are tons of systems that you can use to effectively prioritize goals. The trick is prioritizing what will give you most important results. How do you identify those goals?

At DrumUp, we use the Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort system. Here’s how it works.

1. List all of your goals on sheets.

2. Score every goal on Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 implying most and 1 implying least.

3. Calculate an average rounded off score that you can refer to for decision-making.

4. Work on the easiest goals first and make your way up to the harder goals, or prioritize but whatever is most necessary.

This process may eat-up your time in the beginning, but once you get used to it, using this process will save you tons of invaluable time.

3. Design the experiment

Once you have prioritized goals, it’s time to design an experiment. Doing this is simple. You need a bucket of ideas and hypotheses on how those ideas will help you achieve your goal. When connecting the idea-hypothesis-outcome, ask yourself what you’ll do and how it’ll lead to achieving your goal and why that will be the outcome.

For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, you can accomplish this outcome in so many different ways. You can create a social media contest or you can run social media ads. It’s best to conceptualize the experiment in detail at this stage so you can set expectations and predict the outcome accordingly.

Here are different ways in which you can get inspiration to conceptualize experiments –

1. Follow top social media marketers and read their blogs for ideas

2. Identify prevailing social media trends and follow them

3. Conduct competitive research and see what industry leaders are doing

Once you have a concrete idea, decide on what the task will entail and how you’ll measure the results with respect to the goal. If website traffic or conversions are the goal, you’ll need to create custom URLs using URL builders to ensure conversion-tracking.

4. Test the experiment

Now you’re ready to test your social media experiments. When testing social media experiments, you need to bear some basics in mind.

1. Never test more than one thing at a time. If you want to be sure of what’s moving the needle for a particular goal, it’s critical to ensure that you don’t have conflicting readings. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your website, any social media posts that is clickable can contribute to the effort. That’s why it’s essential to know which posts/theme of posts you want to focus on.

2. Refer to the right metrics to measure posts. Typically, goals decide which metrics you should monitor. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness on social media you would choose impressions as the key metric instead of choosing clicks or something that’s less representative.

3. Run each experiment for a sufficient period of time. If the experiment is minor, you can run it for shorter time intervals such as a week or two weeks. If the experiment is major, for instance, if it involves a re-haul of your entire social media marketing strategy, then it’s best to run it at least for a month or two months.

4. Use A/B testing on every set of posts. The content you create for your social media experiment should ideally be A/B tested for the best results. That’s because you won’t know the full potential of your social media posts unless they are in their best forms. For A/B testing, you need to be able to track each version of a post, so you’ll need custom URLs.

5. Ensure that the experiments are all closed-loop. You don’t need any loose ends or blind spots in an experiment. If you have any, try and fill them in. For instance, if you want to measure the effect of your content on revenue, you need to be able to see the actual purchase and that might need some development effort on your website. Don’t shy away from collaborating with developers when needed.

5. Analyze tests & glean insights

After an experiment is run, you’ll need to analyze results and learn from what you’ve done. While you’ll want to know if the experiment worked, you’ll also want to know to what extent it worked and what exactly made it work. It’s also useful to know what didn’t work and why, so you can apply those learnings to future social media campaigns.

Social media experiment tracking is an exact science, with numbers. When running experiments it’s important to process the statistical significance of the results. You’ll want to ensure that the results aren’t because of chance factors and don’t include false positives and exclude false negatives.

One way to ensure that your data is clean and that your experiments are actually worth investing in, you could repeat the experiment a couple of times and see if the results stay consistent. You can also repeat experiments by changing factors and understanding how you can future amplify results.

6. Automate top-performing ideas

Once you have consistent results stemming from particular experiments, you can make the most of those ideas by automating them. For instance, if you know that your blog posts bring a ton of traffic to your website and convert new users, you can set-up your blog on an RSS feed and set it on an auto-posting schedule.

When automating top-performing ideas, you’ll need the help of automation tools. Even if you can’t automate entire processes, you can definitely automate large portions of the process. Once the process is automated, you can save a ton of time and be more productive.

Here are different ways in which you can automate your social media marketing –

1. Save social media posts of different campaigns in different libraries on a social media management tool such as DrumUp, from where you can set-up an extensive publishing schedule.

2. Add RSS feeds of your blog and top news agencies or blogs and set them up on an automatic publishing schedule, so you never have to publish a post manually.

3. Follow influencers on Twitter and add them to Twitter lists, from where you can follow their work and retweet/engage with posts when required.

73 social media marketing experiments to try today

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find potential clients
• Try social media ads and native content promotion
• Try employee advocacy for social media
• Activate social media follow and social media share plugins on your webpages
• Test different positions for social media plugins (consider mobile placement)
• Publish content when your followers are online and active
• Publish content when your followers and offline and inactive
• Publish content during lunch break, on the weekends, during commute times and on public holidays
• Publish content late nights and early mornings
• Publish more frequently
• Publish less frequently
• Craft short and punchy post content
• Craft long and descriptive post content
• Use popular hashtags
• Use less popular or similar to popular hashtags
• Include testimonials or social proof in social media posts
• Add emojis to social posts
• Create the same post for all social media platforms (cross-post)
• Create custom posts for each social media platform
• Post questions and quizzes
• Run contests
• Conduct QnAs and AMAs
• Create interview sessions on text and video
• Publish and curate infographics
• Share GIFs and short videos

  

• Post behind the scenes content
• Work with disappearing content (statuses and stories)
• Run promotional campaigns (discount campaigns)
• Host live giveaways clubbed with planned rant sessions
• Create Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories
• Share SlideShares via social media posts
• Post audio clippings and podcasts
• Livestream events
• Experiments with music on videos and podcasts
• Leverage social media analytics dashboards to gain insights
• Create short and long social media videos
• Use photographs of your team, clients and partners
• Conduct events to collect UGC

 

• Co-host live events
• Run co-marketing activities on social media
• Try Twitter chats
• Join and work within LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Build a presence in LinkedIn communities
• Get C-suite executives involved on social media
• Run campaigns for brand advocacy on social media
• Pin important posts
• Comment on active social media posts and conversations
• Use Facebook for remarketing
• Build a Facebook Messenger bot
• Use LinkedIn inMail for marketing
• Follow top customers’ Life Events
• Add CTAs to all links and content you share
• Add Click-to-tweets within blog posts
• Experiment with graphic design to pull attention to parts of posts
• Use social media tools to find the right times to share content
• Work with evergreen content to get more social media referrals
• A/B test types of social media content
• Play around with colors and typography
• Test images with people vs objects
• Optimize landing pages to convert social media referrals
• Build an email list with gated social media contests
• Use humorous social media content
• Create a band persona/character to endear customers
• Connect with customers on social media and activate them to be advocates
• Experiment with tone
• Try different types of copy
• Target different groups of people
• Work with different time zones

Wrap

There are infinite possibilities in social media marketing if you consider all the variables in content, publishing and advertising. To develop the best formula for your brand, you need to run social media experiments. Remember social media trends are always changing and it’s always a good idea to test new ideas every year or so. Keep an eye on your social media analytics and be open to making changes when required, this mindset will help you make the most of your social media efforts.



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