Why You Should Spend More Than 10 Minutes a Day on Social Media

Why You Should Spend More Than 10 Minutes a Day on Social Media

Rock your presence and build your reach

Why You Should Spend More Than 10 Minutes on SMIt’s true that you can do social media marketing in just 10 minutes a day. In our last blog post, we concluded that in those 10 minutes, you can schedule interesting content to be distributed over the week, respond to people who mentioned you directly, interact with industry leaders and super fans and add helpful comments to discussions in your feed. You can build up a pretty decent presence on Facebook and Twitter with this strategy and reach new audiences as well as nurture relationships with your current audience.

On the other hand, social media marketing has exploded in recent years and there is a lot more you can be doing to interact with customers and potential customers. If you take your social media seriously, you can go way beyond what you can accomplish in 10 minutes a day. Depending on the availability of resources you can use some or all of these strategies to increase conversions through social:

Be active on numerous social networks

Facebook and Twitter may be the first two networks you think of when you hear the word social, but other networks are important too. LinkedIn is excellent for B2B marketing and for reaching extremely targeted and interested audiences through posting on groups. Google Plus has active audiences in certain niches and is used by Google as its primary social signal, so it is an excellent SEO tool. If your niche lends itself to attractive images, update regularly on Pinterest (especially if your target audience is middle-aged women) and Instagram (for teens and twenty year olds). Do some research to find out where your target audience is hanging out and where your competition is succeeding. If your industry has niche social media networks you definitely want to make your presence known there as well.

Create stellar content

The linchpin of any successful social media campaign is the content you share online. Sharing others’ content will only get you so far. In order to establish yourself and your brand as thought leaders and experts in the industry, produce excellent content that educates, entertains and draws people in. Create a blog where you share updated content on a regular basis and share it on social media as soon as it is published, a few days later and then again a month later etc. Show your potential and current customers that you care about their concerns by addressing them in your blog posts and disseminating the information widely. When you consistently update your blog you also reap considerable SEO benefits, which is another way to improve your bottom line.

Get involved in video marketing

Video marketing has gone through the roof and if you provide compelling and visually pleasing educational content via Youtube, you will reach new marketing heights. Videos can be embedded on your website and social media channels and repurposed as slideshows for Slideshare. Don’t forget to include a transcript of the video for search engines, title the video with keywords and link from Youtube to your website.

Respond quickly to feedback and comments

If you limit your social media time to 10 minutes a day, people who mention you, ask a question or make a general comment will have to wait a long time for your response. Spending more time on social media, in small increments throughout the day, allows you to be more responsive. Customers in the digital age have come to expect that brands will react quickly. A study by Convince & Convert demonstrates that 42% of customers who complain expect a response within an hour! A study from Lithium shows that 65% of customers who comment on Twitter expect a response within 2 hours, 53% within an hour and 72% say they want a response within an hour if the tweet was negative. If you’re not providing immediate customer service, you risk losing consumer loyalty.

Turn lead nurturing into an art

People who express interest in your brand via your website or social media are important leads. They are likely not ready to purchase a product but they are paying attention to what you have to say and may become customers in the future. You don’t want to lose these leads because you have ignored them. Instead, use a CRM to gather demographic and other data about your leads and create marketing segmentations so you can send targeted messages to each group via newsletter autoresponders.

For instance, you can send new Facebook fans an email inviting them to download a free e-book. Once they have downloaded the e-book, you may want to email them with a link to a video. If they watch it, you can send them a thank you coupon for the product they have shown interest in. Stay in touch with your prospects and lead them down the conversion funnel in order to turn leads into sales.

Social media marketing in a lot more than 10 minutes a day

Obviously, all these strategies will require quite a bit more than 10 minutes a day. You don’t have to do them all, of course. Determine how much you can invest in social media and decide what to focus on during that time. Make sure you are using social media effectively so you are not wasting valuable resources. Track the results of your social media marketing efforts so you know what your ROI is and can tweak or totally change your strategy if necessary.

And if you really don’t have the time to devote more than 10 minutes a day, check out our post about what you CAN accomplish in that time.

hadassah-125Submitted by Hadassah