It is easy to get stuck in a social media rut and develop tunnel vision on your current campaign. But social media doesn’t stand still, so your tactics and strategies have to keep pace if you want to squeeze the most revenue out of a constantly evolving platform. Here are a few actionable, real-life steps that you can take today to boost your social media revenue.
Develop a Social Media Editorial Calendar
A social media editorial calendar does four things:
- Measures the performance of content.
- Keeps track of important dates and events that need special social promotion.
- Assigns responsibility, creates accountability, provides transparency and fosters a sense of ownership.
- Gives every member of the team an overall snapshot of the strategy for the upcoming weeks and months.
It is absolutely necessary to work off of a calendar, but there is no right way or wrong way to build one. Here is a good tutorial that explains the central elements every calendar should contain.
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Develop Reusable Templates
Success on social media requires consistent, repetitive engagement. Save time and resources by automating anything you can. Create templates that can be used over and over for tasks on both the editorial side and the administrative side. Create infographic templates and photo cover templates on the creative side, but also build purchase order templates and billing templates to reduce errors and improve customer service on the back end.
You only have to create boilerplate templates once, but that original investment will save you time and money with every task you don’t have to start from scratch after that.
Track Content Using Alternate Analytics
It takes money and know-how to track metrics and run in-depth analytics campaigns. Boost your returns by spending less in the first place. Consider Bit.ly — you know it as the service that turns long, annoying URLs into short, manageable URLs. Bit.ly attaches a tracking code to every one of those newly shortened URLs. Follow your content on its journey through social media and see which users are more likely to amplify which content more frequently. Here are some free webinars on how to use this service to track and analyze your social content.
Use Social Media Posts as Testimonials
Testimonials are like personal references on job applications — they don’t carry as much weight as they used to because lots of people fabricate them and everybody knows it. But when someone says something nice about your product on social media after a purchase, they’ve become an ambassador for your brand. Not only did they convert, but they went even farther down the funnel and given you free word-mouth-advertising to all their followers.
But you can get even more out of that gift. Take a screenshot of that glowing tweet and display it on your blog or website. A social testimonials page tells your visitors that real people are actually talking about you online, unlike a quote on a webpage attributed to “Bill from Denver.”
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Automate whatever you can, squeeze even more out of post-sale mentions from brand ambassadors, simplify your content tracking and start with a good foundation built on a strong social editorial calendar.