When you venture into the world of social media marketing to start with it can be very you and your business centric. You set up your profiles and pages to reflect you, your brand, your areas of expertise and your products and services. People connect and follow because the information you are sharing is of use to them either on a personal level or adds value to their business, i.e. Tips, articles, resources or shared interesting content. Our hope is that they will find something so interesting that they in turn will share with their connections who then become a new connection for you.
This is organic growth and should naturally happen if you have a sound content marketing strategy and have a constant, consistent flow of content. Your potential followers may also be searching for you so a good scattering of keywords and hashtags will attract searches.
But how do you force the issue and push yourself in front of your target audience? Take a book launch for example.
There are a number of people involved in a launch, you, the publisher, the distributor, the PR company. Everyone involved will have their own contacts followers, fans either as individuals or as companies. Part of the launch plan should be to agree how this extended network can be best utilised. Some considerations
- Who is your target audience and which social platforms do they use?
- Retention of your brand image – it maybe someone else talking on your behalf but you are the author and that should shine through
- What is going to be said and when (part of your strategy)?
- Where will the content be stored, blogs, websites?
- Ensuring consistency – one voice
- Agree the social flow i.e. Originator, tweet, retweet, share
- Who will press the buttons?
So now you have extended your reach to the people who have a common interest in promoting the book but then you need to cold contact others who as yet do not know about you. This is called strategic contact building and requires someone to search linkedin, Facebook and twitter for your target audience and connect, follow or like in the hope that they return the favour, if not they have been touched. Expect only a 25% follow back on twitter and a 50 % acceptance on linkedin.
This should then increase your reach, but always be on the look out for influential hubs, these are individuals or organisations that have a concentration of followers that you need to contact, don’t be just leave exposure to chance, speak to their marketing people and get agreement for mutually sharing of content.
If you are worried about trying to pull a strategy together or get buy in from colleagues and influencers then get some help!
