Social media marketing: how to use it

It was a conference.

The presentation on a multi-million dollar production that had won multiple awards at Cannes was revealed.

The project? A fascinating and creative video.

The result?

Millions of views and tens of millions of shares. The concept was a work of art and the execution a piece of genius. Drums rolled and angels sang. A survey was taken and 45% said they would be more likely to buy the product.

But there is an unanswered question begging to be asked.

How many bought the product?

My musing? They would not be able to tell you. Because this is mass media at its best and worst. Beautiful and tempting but not measured.

Sure it was on social but it was just doing old media on new media. No meaningful metrics that mattered were captured. Numbers were hinted at and the real ROI was just guessed or suggested.

That’s not digital marketing. It’s art.

But the sharing was off the charts. And we all love attention. The CEO would have shared that story at dinner party or two.

Table of Contents

Sharing is dropping like a stone

Just last year Buffer decided to compare its social sharing with the previous comparable period and this is what they discovered.

Twitter down 43 percent.
Facebook down by 53 percent.
LinkedIn was down 45 percent.
Google+ down by 72 percent.

That was a total drop in social sharing was nearly 50%. And they are not alone.

For any marketer these sort of numbers start to get you worried. You question your tactics and your strategy. What are we doing wrong? What have we missed?

As Andy Grove said…..”Only the paranoid survive”

Sharing is just the start of the conversation

Sharing online is still new but it has been with us for over a decade. But maybe we are just getting jaded with social. Is the party over?

The short answer. No.

The race is on to maximise organic social before the music stops. So let’s look at optimizing Twitter for leads and sales. Not just for the sharing, vanity and brand awareness metrics

We know that Twitter is great for getting your content shared. But many people who share it don’t visit or even read your content. But there is one tactic that social media marketers often forget.

Growing an email list using social media marketing.

A simple social media marketing automation tactic

Combining some apps and content driven by social can be a powerful tactic that minimizes your time and resources once they are set up.

Below are the 5 easy steps that show how I used Twitter to increase my leads by over 10,000 on “autopilot” in less than 12 months. That’s the old term for marketing automation.

Even though this is only 10% of my annual email growth, this little tweak has been vital in continuing to optimize my list building. The majority of my email acquisition is via the SumoMe “Welcome Mat”. Which I outlined in this post “How to Double Your Traffic Without Paying Google or Facebook a Cent“.

But below is maybe the simplest form of marketing automation to just get you started.

Step 1: Create a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a compelling piece of content that helps solve a pain point or paints a path to success.

My two favourites are an ebook and a tools PDF. Free ebooks are the still the best enticement for people to opt-in to your email list. But the quickest to create are the PDF’s that can just be one or two pages.
Why do these work so well?

The best way to illustrate their pulling power is to use a golfing analogy. Nike sponsors Tiger Woods because they know that the weekend hacker will want the equipment that Tiger uses. That’s the clubs, shoes, golf balls, shirts and even the shoes.

The amateurs thought process goes something like this.

If they have the same tools then it is the first step to success. So……look good and maybe play great.

Here is one of the the PDF tools lead magnets I use.

Other inducements are webinars, free video tutorials. It’s all about adding value to people’s business and lives.

Step 2: Setup a landing page

Landing pages are about converting traffic and attention into prospects and then customers. My favourite tool for this is Leadpages. I use it for webinars, ebooks and sales landing pages.

If you aren’t using Leadpages then go and join up now. It’s free for the first 30 days.

Landing pages do not need to be complex. In fact data shows that simple works best. You are trying to get them to do one thing. Don’t distract them.

Here is the landing page for the 101+ Tips Traffic book.

Step 3: Integrate your email software

If you are serious about growing your email list then you will need the right software.

I used Aweber for many years but as marketing automation software became cheaper and also smarter I upped the game and moved to Infusionsoft. But MailChimp is also a good place to start.

So integrate the landing page software to you digital marketing automation platform. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that then use your web developer or tech contractor to help you. Stick to what you are good at and get the experts to do their thing.
Here are some of the different email platforms that integrate with LeadPages.

My recommendation. Start simple and cheap and then get funky later.

Step 4: Setup the marketing automation

So…..you have created the lead magnet, setup the landing page and integrated it with your email platform

Now you are ready to start the machine that will grow your email list.

To get that going I fire up recurring tweets on Twitter using a simple automation with a tool called SocialOomph. It allows you to load tweets that will be sent out on a recurring basis. This can be every one, two and three hours etc.

This tweet is sent every 8 hours with a link to a landing page and it is a call to action to download a free ebook. “101+ Tips to Grow Your Web Traffic – Without Paying Google or Facebook a Cent“.

I use Socialoomph for this. You can use other software but I have been using this for years. It’s not sexy and the interface is a bit old school but it works.

Here are the 2 tweets and the two lead magnets that are sent out in 8 hour cycles. I do this so that we don’t repeat each tweet for 8 hours. This means that there is a tweet happening every 4 hours.

Why do this?

We do this so that we are not repeating the same tweet too often. Otherwise Twitter won’t allow you to post it as it is seen as a “duplicate” by the controlling algorithm.

Below are the two tweets that are sent out with simple marketing automation tool.

Tweet One

This offer is for people who want more traffic. And who doesn’t want more traffic!

You can grab this FREE ebook >>> HERE

Tweet Two

This is for visitors that want to start a blog or get better at blogging. So this is more a niche ebook.

You can grab this ebook >>> HERE

Step 5: Measure and optimize

So you are now tweeting on autopilot and starting to get some leads. But you need to measure how many people are clicking on the 2 different lead magnets. So here is the thing.

Not all lead magnets are equal.

You may find offer A gets more leads than offer B. Also you will find that over time they will not work as well as they did in the past.

So you need to keep testing and tweaking.

Wrapping it up

Digital marketing is not just about set and forget but is very much about ongoing measurement and optimization.

That’s the beauty of not just the art of marketing but the science. You need to test, measure and keep fine tuning. It’s a new discipline that requires a different mindset to traditional mass media marketing.

Digital marketing has brought accountability to the table. You can see in real time what works and what doesn’t.

This simple tactic is just the start of marketing automation.

The next steps include personalised content that is delivered at the right time depending on where the prospect is in the buying journey. Here is how HubSpot sees part of that picture.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and creative humans will take the science of marketing a lot further.

It’ will be fascinating to watch it unfold.

About the author: Jeff Bullas

Jeff is an entrepreneur, blogger, author, marketer and speaker and works with personal brands and business to optimize online personal and company brands with emerging technologies, content, social media technologies and digital marketing. He has spent most of his career involved with information technologies, telecommunications and the web.