Have you ever felt that you’re posting on social media but nothing significant is happening?
A lot of people look at the influencers, brands, and entrepreneurs with a massive following and think that it’s not possible for them to replicate the same kind of success. It’s funny that how an average piece of content from a popular social media account does well in terms of responses and re-sharing than an excellent piece of content from a newcomer on social media. But this is how it works.
You might give up on your Facebook page because you don’t have enough followers or you may lose interest in your Instagram posting because nobody likes your posts. The untold truth about social media is that everyone is different, so is their progress. We all operate differently in the realm of social media. If something is working for you, the exact same thing might not work for someone else.
A big secret to success on social media is self-awareness. You can’t love working out just because you want work-out photos for Instagram. Instead, you could build an Instagram profile related to fitness if you’re obsessed with exercise and fitness.
You must understand the nuances of your brand persona, for example, if Nike posts an Instagram photo of a shoe on a white background, they might get lots of responses, but if you post the similar picture, you may not get any attention. Perhaps because their audience might expect from them to post new arrivals or up and coming shoe designs. And, it won’t make any sense to your furniture retail business.
Got it?
One of the pillars of social media success is the reach. The higher the number of your followers, the better your reach gets. However, the numbers don’t always provide a similar type of reach. Therefore, it opens up the discussion on how to maximize reach on social media. Chances are, you could improve your social media reach even with the smaller following if you know the tactics of social media management.
Before we dig deeper into social media management strategies that could maximize the reach on social media, we must clarify social media jargon that will help you along the way:
- Social Media Management: A process of creating awareness about the brand on social media and using the social media platforms to harbor fans and loyal audience.
- Reach: The reach is the attention your content gets on social media depending upon the engagement factors.
- Engagement: It’s a process of interaction between a brand or an individual with the audience through various communication tools such as comments, likes, shares, and mentions.
- Scheduling: Scheduling is a social media feature that allows users to set up their social media posts in advance to be published later on.
- Click-through Rate: Click-through rate (CTR) is a terminology that is used for analyzing the ratio of the clickability on a specific call-to-action button, link, or banner.
Now, let’s focus on the five steps that will help you maximize your reach through social media management:
-
Tapping on the right topics
To maximize the reach on social media, we must exercise every possible method available at our disposal. Tapping on the right topics indicates the appropriate selection of the areas to create content that drives more attention to our brand. You may also have to look at the options on and off the social media platforms.
It’s interesting to see that a ton of content is being published every minute across different platforms, but the majority of the content doesn’t perform the way it’s expected to perform. Here it becomes interesting because we’re going to see how choosing the right topics could turn things around for you. The right topics mean the areas of your niche that you can dominate.
The question, however, is how we can tap on the right topics. Here are three methods of finding the topics that you should be focusing on for creating content:
Relevant questions on Quora
Quora is one of the most underrated social media platforms. To maximize your social media reach and attention, you can go to Quora, search for the topics that you have been focusing or writing about, and then answer the questions related to those topics. What it would do is that it will help you gain more eyeballs on your profile as well as content you may refer to in your answers. Thus, you could make the most of your presence on Quora. However, don’t push so hard on adding your links to the answers; just mention your blog posts where necessary.
Finding discussions through Twitter search
Twitter is one of the top social media platforms, but a lot of people don’t utilize the search feature on Twitter to the fullest. What you need to do is that type in your niche, keyword, or topic to find out the discussions around those areas. Not only could you jump in and participate in the discussions, but you can also sense the trend in your niche. You can create content around that and tweet your content to maximize your social media reach.
Popular posts on Google Analytics
Go to your Google Analytics account and look at the popular blog posts that are getting the highest amount of search traffic or impressions in Google. What you can elicit from Google Analytics is that which topics are doing well so that you can write similar content for more traction.
These were three of many methods out there. Feel free to experiment with your own methods. Social media success doesn’t happen by sharing content, but instead, what you deliver through a combination of many things.
Scouting for the right topics is an integral part of the social media management. Therefore, it’s connected to your content creation process as well. If you want to grow your social media following and attract the new eyeballs, you’d have to capitalize various growth tactics to make that happen. And, tapping on the right topics is one of them.
-
Cashing in on the relevant hashtags
Social media management is incomplete without putting in the work. Hashtags are undoubtedly an important component of the social media game. They connect like-minded people and allow users to discover the type of content they’re looking for just by using the relevant hashtags.
The interesting thing is that hashtags work on many social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. What I mean by cashing in on the relevant hashtags is that we must know how to use the hashtags.
You’d often find new social media users using the common hashtags such as #fun #health #apple. The problem with such hashtags is that they are widely used, and the chance to get attention is low. Despite the popularity, we’ll never achieve the desired goals.
On the other hand, if we start to focus on the targeted hashtags that are specific to the industry, chances are, our content would be discovered by the lesser audience, but they might be relevant to the industry. In fact, when it comes to conversion, the low number of quality leads is always better than a bunch of irrelevant visitors.
Finding the Relevant Hashtags
So the next thing you might want to know about hashtags is that how you’d find the hashtags that would benefit you. There are three simple ways to find the relevant hashtags:
Use a Hashtag tool
You can utilize the tools such as Hashtagify, All-Hashtag, or Top-Hashtags to analyze the popularity of the certain hashtags. You may stumble upon the hottest hashtags if you swoop in and start using any of these tools.
Analyze the Industry leaders
If you can’t pick your hashtags to use to maximize your reach on social media, then study your competitors and influencers in your industry, and see what type of hashtags they’re using across social media. You can always find a little bit of hint by looking at others in your industry.
Do your research
If you still can’t choose your hashtags, then try finding those through your research. What you should do is that search for the relevant topics and observe the hashtags that are being used. If the new tweets or Facebook posts aren’t being published every minute using those hashtags, then look out for the better ones. You’d come across the hashtags that are not so common but relevant.
An Example of Hashtags Selection
Let’s take the example of a hashtag #socialmediatools:
If you just look at the given hashtag, you’d notice that you’d come up with a few more relevant hashtags if you know what social media tools are. Here are a few more like that:
#socialmedia #socialmediatips #socialmediamarketing #socialmediastrategy
The relevancy of your hashtags could help you gain eyeballs but only if people are paying attention to those hashtags. When the challenge is to maximize the reach on social media, using a few relevant hashtags is way better than not using the hashtags at all. However, it pretty much depends on the quality and relevancy of the hashtags you come up with as a result of your research. So always try to look out for the best ones.
We can also go to our favorite social media platform and type in the hashtag to see other hashtags that are being used along with the one we selected. It’s a fantastic strategy for picking up the best combination of hashtags. Take a look at the screenshot of a tweet that has multiple hashtags along with #socialmediatools:
If we type in the same hashtag #socialmediatools in any hashtag analysis tool, we may find a list of relevant hashtags as well. Here’s a quick example of hashtags that were generated using a hashtag tool:
So adding up the relevant hashtags could definitely help you reach more people unless you choose the hashtags that aren’t popular.
3. Adding stories to the marketing mix
If you aren’t aware of story feature across social media, it means you’re neglecting an essential tool to grab the followers’ attention. In case, you don’t know about stories, it’s a video or picture that goes away after 24 hours of publishing. Different people utilize this feature in different ways; some tell stories, many give updates, and some just share random stuff.
The point is that people are rapidly embracing this feature whether it’s on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or YouTube. So what you need to do is that understand how it works, and include it in your marketing mix.
Here’s the 3-step process for making perfect stories:
Step#1: Build a narrative for the day
It doesn’t have to be scary. What I mean by building a narrative for the day is simply plan your day. If you already have done it, then just translate that into your first few stories. And, then get on with the day, but don’t forget to make more stories after the first few.
Step#2: Shoot throughout the day
Once your day has started, make sure that you keep making the stories and updating the audience about whatever is going on. Share whatever you want to share with the world and censor whatever you think is private; it depends on you. The point is that you get to record your activities to share with the followers throughout the day and you’ll be able to convey a message through that.
Step#3: Conclude the story
Before you go to bed or leave for home, make sure that you conclude your story. It’s extremely important to finish what you started. Otherwise, it won’t look perfect. The problem is that the audience would start to feel the absence of plot in your stories, and that’s where their interest goes away. You might not want that to happen. So always try to conclude your story and thank everyone for watching or paying attention to you.
Bonus tip: When you make a story on Instagram or Snapchat, don’t directly post your stories. Instead, save them first, and then post them. This way, you’d have the story saved in your device and you could post the story elsewhere too, for example, Facebook.
The purpose of including story feature to this blog post is that it has become a vital social media tool across multiple platforms. When there is an option available and everyone else around us is utilizing it, then it’s understandable to check it out. Not only does it maximize your reach on social media, but it also develops a connection with your followers who don’t closely follow you.
Neil Patel is a popular content marketing expert who also thinks that stories are a great way to reach out to the audience. He uploaded a video about Instagram stories on his YouTube channel:
So if you’re wondering how you can improve your social media reach, story feature is right in front of you. Grab your smartphone and try it out.
-
Creating pinnable Images in the blog posts
Choosing a great topic and putting out a fantastic blog post isn’t enough if you’re looking at maximizing your reach through social media management. Creating pinnable images in the blog post means that you must have a 735 x 1102 pixels’ image in your blog post that could be pinned on Pinterest.
Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms. It has mostly vertical, long-form images that are often known as infographics, but the platform doesn’t force users to use any specific image size.
So what does creating a pinnable image in the blog post do? The answer to that question is that it allows you to put your content in front of a new audience through a giant social media platform. The audience can repin your pins, which is similar to retweeting a tweet. When others repin your pins, they get to add your pins to their boards. So by creating pinnable images in your blog posts, you provide readers with an opportunity to not just share something valuable with their audience but utilize the image for their Pinterest accounts.
You might have seen Pinterest button among other social networks buttons on the websites and blogs for sharing content to the social media. Here’s an example:
You can simply use the tools like Addthis or Sumo for putting up those sharing buttons on your blog or website. And, to make your in-content images shareable on Pinterest, you’d need to install a WordPress plugin such as:
- jQuery Pin It Button for Images
- AccessPress Pinterest
- Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post
When you install one of those plugins, your readers would easily see a pin it button while hovering over your blog post images. Here’s an example of that:
ContentStudio is a social media management tool for bloggers, entrepreneurs, and online marketers that solves the problem for sharing or scheduling your social media posts on various platforms including Pinterest. So feel free to get started with ContentStudio to share content on Pinterest.
You might have heard that images are essential to the SEO growth of any website. Similarly, they also help in driving traffic from social media to your website and increasing your social media reach. A lot of people neglect the Pinterest and the value it brings to the table. So make sure that you’re nailing down this opportunity.
-
Cross-promoting your social media channels
Cross-promoting your social media channels means that you should be highlighting your other social media accounts so that people follow you there too. Perhaps, it may sound the simplest tip to maximize your reach, but it does work if you continue doing it. The reason it’s so effective is that it gives awareness to the audience about your presence on other social media platforms. Some of your fans might want to hang out on a different platform and they could catch up with you over there instead of just one platform.
Plus, there are more benefits of cross-promoting. Not only you get more followers across all social networks, but you also strengthen your community when people come across your content more often.
Marie Forleo is the host of Marie TV. It’s a business show about entrepreneurship, passion, and creativity on YouTube. You’d notice somewhere in the video or at the end of the video, there’s an example of cross-promotion. Take a look at the screenshot below:
If you haven’t been paying attention to cross-promotion, then you may not have noticed that a lot of people are doing cross-promotion every day. And, we see it everywhere.
Charles Chu does that too on his Medium account. He is definitely among all those Medium users who have mentioned their Twitter handles on Medium. Take a look at the screenshot taken from Medium.com:
The science behind focusing on cross-promotion is that it’d give you or your content more reach. Social media management isn’t necessarily sharing your content on social media on a consistent basis; many believe that anyway. In reality, social media management is a combination of a million things that we need to do to put out our thoughts, ideas, and words in different shapes and forms across various networks to engage and attract the right type of the audience.
To maximize your reach on social media, cross-promotion is one of the best things you might want to do to make that happen. Who doesn’t want more attention, engagement, and conversion on social media? So you better get equipped with strategies like these to turn things around for you.
Final Words
You might come across people who want to dominate on 10 different social media networks, and that doesn’t happen. The reality is that you shouldn’t be worrying about hopping on every social media platform out there. Instead, you must be figuring out what’s right for you.
The purpose of discussing the power of social media reach was to educate you on this important aspect of digital marketing. The term “social media” is often gets wrapped up into tweeting about own products or sharing own articles on the Facebook page, and then we calculate the reach. You won’t get the reach you’re hoping for this way. Instead, create a reason why people should look at your content that you’re putting out; it’s called value.
We’ve shared five strategies that could help you gain attention on social media so that you could maximize your reach, but remember that it doesn’t happen on a whim. It’s a process so it always takes time, but don’t let that stop the daily grind to go one step further.
If you want to achieve social media success, then you better step up to make things happen. You may stumble upon a bunch of more techniques to maximize your reach on social media along the way.
What else would you do to improve your social media management?