20 More of the Best Social Media Marketing Guides and Tips of 2013
Tom Pick
Social media marketing has become an integral part of strategies for maximizing the overall web visibility of an organization. To be effective, it must be integrated with SEO and PR efforts, and even executed to enhance online advertising efforts.
Back in October, the post here 21 of the Best Social Media Marketing Guides of 2013 (So Far) noted that as social media marketing practices mature, the questions about it have evolved from simple “how do I do x” queries to more complex investigation into how to optimize social marketing strategies and tactics.
How can you make your blog content stand out amid the increasing online noise? What are the key platforms to utilize beyond the “big four”? What key trends in 2014 should social media marketers to be aware of? What are the best practices for promoting events through social media?
Find the answers to those questions and many others here in 20 more of the best social media marketing guides of the past year.
The insightful and prolific Heidi Cohen collects 101 top social media tips and tactics in this bookmark-worthy tip sheet, from knowing your target audience and their hot buttons and writing regular features responding to your audience’s needs to answering questions on forums and sites like Quora, and incorporating social media calls to action.
Berrie Pelser shares an infographic covering “21 unwritten (well, they were unwritten) rules of social media marketing” for social marketing success, which include: quality > quantity, mind your manners, patience is crucial, and—one easily misunderstood—access doesn’t equal entitlement (“Making connections may give you access, but it doesn’t mean fans and followers owe you anything”).
Mark Trueman walks through a multi-step process for finding content similar to yours that has broad reach, determining who is sharing these posts, and then getting these people to share your posts. He even provides sample outreach email text that’s been proven to drive significant response.
The brilliant Mark Fidelman reports on seven top social media trends for the coming year identified by IBM, including taking social beyond collaboration; increased traction for brand journalism; and “the true convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud.”
The English is bit rough, but the concepts are spot on in this post. Moneka Khurana compiles b2b best practices and tips from Dell and Cisco, demonstrating how different types of information (e.g., brand information vs. market trends) lend themselves to different content formats, and a six-step approach to building a robust social media presence.
If you feel like your social media marketing efforts are hitting a wall, Peg Fitzpatrick prescribes more than two dozen “easy, actionable items that you can do to put the social media magic back into your brand,” among them: creating a weekly Google+ Hangout series, adding “a board with links to your other social networks and blog so people can find you everywhere,” and using third party apps to help grow your Twitter following.
Jeff Bullas lists 20 things to share on social media “that can assist your business to be viewed as a leader in its industry and drive inquiry and sales and help you get found online,” including Slideshare presentations, infographics, company news releases, and “Share your humour…mix up your serious content with some humourous photo’s, articles and even cartoons.”
Guy Kawasaki provides 14 tips to make it “possible to ensure that an event is covered in social media—even trending as a hot topic with an event with only 100 attendees,” such as choosing an evergreen hashtag and promoting it everywhere, produce livestream video coverage and real-time updates, and require executives to be available for photos.
Shelly Kramer outlines three methods for “discovering the optimal posting time on a social media platform,” including the use of third party data; for example, an infographic she includes which illustrates, in general, the best and worst times to post updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
Courtney Seiter lists “20 quick-win tactics for building a new social media presence on any network,” like filling out your profile as completely as possible; using professional, high-resolution images; analyzing similar accounts to determine what’s working (and what’s not); and cross-promoting the new account through your other social media points of presence.
Describing Quora as “the mature, authoritative big brother of Yahoo Answers,” Joanna Xu shares eight tips for getting the most out of the platform, from proper editing, formatting and use of photos through linking Quora to your other social accounts and backing up all of your answers.
Takeshi Young says that Tumblr is an often overlooked platform with great potential for SEO and social media marketing, and so in this post covers “1) What Tumblr is and how it works, 2) The benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks, and 3) Actionable advice on how you can use Tumblr for online marketing, including specific content ideas.”
While every company wants lots of Twitter followers and Facebook “Likes,” Shelly Kramer (again) provides a helpful reminder that it matters who is doing that following and liking. Fake followers, ill-advising activities or connections on Facebook or Instagram, purchased or otherwise illegitimate reviews–all can harm a company’s online reputation. Fortunately, she also explains tools and strategies to help keep a firm’s social presence respectable.
Making the case that YouTube is much more than “the world’s foremost provider of cute kitten videos, guest author Courtney Gordner explains how the video sharing site fits into overall social media marketing strategy and how to optimize YouTube videos for search.
Sam Swiech explains how to add your company website as an “associated site” on your YouTube channel (and notes that “It’s important to keep in mind that you can associate more than one site to your YouTube account at once,”) and “tastefully” apply annotations to videos.
Mike Johansson shares an infographic showing how to optimize a business YouTube channel, from creating an attractive channel design and developing a video strategy through utilizing annotations, calls to action, keywords, playlists, and social promotion.
In this brief but bookmark-worthy social media sizes design chart post, Jason Fox lays out the design specs and image size requirements for graphically optimizing profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.
For those who want a more richly illustrated of the social network profile image size chart called out above, Sam Zastrow shares a photo-rich infographic which “includes everything you want to know about visuals sizing for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn (and probably a lot you didn’t care to know, too).”
Rebecca Omastiak reports on a free guide created by Minneapolis law firm Gray Plant & Mooty that “informs businesses about the legal ramifications of using social media websites—including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, among others—to connect with clients, advertisers, and customers” to help companies understand how to write social media policies that are both effective and legally compliant.
Although, as David Sims notes, “There’s no question whether manufacturers should establish rules governing if and how employees may use social media,” it’s vital for employers to understand the rules governing such policies. For example, a blanket prohibition on criticizing the company on social media sites is likely to run afoul of the law.
