How To Build Effective Social Media Strategy On A Complete
Autopilot For The Whole Year In Advance! (Definitive Guide)

Manual And Automated Social Media Strategy

In the first part of our article, we’ll go through all the MANUAL work required for running a successful social media strategy.

In the second part, we’ll introduce an AUTOMATIC solution that will put your strategy on a complete AUTOPILOT for the whole year with minimal work!

Contents:

Chapter #3:
How To Benefit From
Social SEO

PART 2:
Social Media Automation
Social Media Posts On Steroids

1.2. How To Increase Your Social Engagement

There is a lot of controversies online, but multiple ranking studies have shown that the higher number of social shares on a page show a positive correlation with search rankings.

Source: Cognitiveseo.com – Do Social Signals Influence SEO?

Having a strong social engagement strategy allows businesses to stay in contact with customers.

Engaging on social media with your customers when they have specific questions about your products increases brand loyalty and sparks the chance of a potential purchase.

So, now that we know what social engagement is, it’s important to know how to approach your customers. That’s why we’ll now go through 6 tips on how to improve your social media engagement. Let’s take a look.

Conversation Tip #1: Starting The Conversation

It’s really important to think about social media engagement as a long-term relationship.

if you have issues engaging through your content, try hosting:

• AMA (Ask Me Anything),
• Twitter Chats or
• Q&As.

Be active with asking and answering questions, and provide helpful industry knowledge to users.

When people see that there is a human behind your brand they will trust you more.

Don’t try to sell right away, because your engagement is very likely to have few interactions and participation.

Try to provide something of value, so you can gain your audience’s trust first.

Now, let us guide you step-by-step into starting a conversation:

• Start discussions about recent industry news.
• Respond to their comments.
• Ask, ask, ask (use conversation starter’ questions)
• Start a debate.
• Track Your Brand Engagement

Conversation Tip #2: Promote Your Brand Representatives

For example, on Instagram or Twitter, you can ask your customers to use a branded #hashtag or to @mention you, and show off your new product or service.

Source: twitter.com/mattwoodwarduk

Conversation Tip #3: Grasp Trending Events

When some events are trending or going viral, you can use them to bring more traffic to your social media networks. You can cater it to events, hashtag holidays or live shows near you.

However, you need to be very careful when using this marketing tactic. We have witnessed social media crises where some company used untimely information or an inappropriate event to promote their brand.

Conversation Tip #4: Respect Your Audience And Respond Quickly

A very common issue many businesses are facing with social media engagement is timely response.

You have to be alert to your current and potential customers. Going only a day without a response can harm your brand. So if you invest in social media engagement, you have to be active or people will think you don’t care.

One study from Lithium, revealed that when brands provide customers with timely responses:

• 34% are likely to buy more from that company;
• 43% are likely to encourage friends and family to buy their products;
• 38% are more receptive to their ads;
• 42% are willing to recommend the brand through social media.

You can also consider implementing chatbot for customer service and Facebook Messenger chatbots can be a great start. By using this chatbot you can automate the most common customer interactions and help your followers get answers to FAQs much easier.

Conversation Tip #5: Prepare Your Social Media Team

To ensure you’re fully engaging your audience you have to have a well-equipped social media team ready to handle incoming messages.

Now, to provide the most engagement, we’ll help you break out your team into categories and get the most out of social:

• Support
• Content Producers.
• Community Managers.
• Sales Representatives.

Source: How Organizations Structure Social Media Teams (FULL Infographics)

1.3. Getting Social Backlinks

There is a lot of attention on Social Media that’s just going upward. The truth is, like it or not, social signals play a big role when it comes to your website rankings.

According to one Search Metrics study, the correlation between social signals and ranking position is pretty high.

Source: SearchMetrics.com

In this section, we will outline over 20 new methods for building social media backlinks and boosting your social traffic.

Building Social Media Backlinks

1. Facebook Link Building

• Link #1: Your Personal Profile About Tab
• Link #2: All Your Personal Profile And Page Posts
• Link #3: Your Page’s About Tab
• Link #4: Page Buttons
• Link #5: Your Profile And Cover Photo Descriptions
• Link #6: Your Group Description
• Link #7: Facebook Group Pinned Posts

2. Twitter

• Link #8: Your Twitter Website Field
• Link #9: Your Twitter Bio
• Link #10: Your Photo And Video Tweets

3. Linkedin

• Link #11: Your Profile’s Contact Info
• Link #12: Your Profile’s Projects And Publications
• Link #13: Your Company’s Basic Information
• Link #14: Your Group’s Website
• Link #15: Group Announcements

4. Youtube

• Link #16: YouTube About Page
• Link #17: Video Descriptions

5. Pinterest

• Link #18: Your Profile Link
• Link #19: Rich Pins

6. Instagram

• Link #20: Your Profile Link
• Link #21: Instagram Stories

7. Reddit

• Link #22: Add Comments To Online Discussions

1.4. Prospecting For Influencers

If you’ve been hanging around social media marketers, you’ve surely heard the term social media influencers. Social media influencers are crucial for marketing strategies and help brands establish valuable relationships on social networks.

Here are a few more reasons why you should trust social media influencers:

• Influencers Build Relationships

One marketing study from Collective Bias including 14k US respondents, shows that 70% of consumers are influenced by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions.

Source: socialvignerons.com

• Influencers Reach Core Demographics

Social media influencers are great at reaching out to their core demographics.

Statistics show that YouTube is the second most influential social media platform for purchases. The marketing study reveals that 22.8% of men are influenced by YouTube in their buying decisions. Also YouTube influences 13.9% of women on their purchases.

• Influencers Increase SEO Value

Using social media influencers to increase your SEO value is an excellent way to increase your brand awareness.

Social media influencers can impact your SEO through:

• Increased brand mentions
• Increased relevant backlinks

According to Moz Ranking Study, some of the factors Google uses in its algorithm, are relevant domain and page-level links.

Source: moz.com

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a look at some steps for choosing the right social media influencers to work with:

• Find Relevant Influencers

There are many ways to find social media influencer. One of the ways is through tools such as:

• Influence.co and
• BuzzSumo.

• Ensure Your Influencers Are Engaging

Another important metric worth of considering when choosing influencers is a high engagement rate.

The common formula for calculating influencers’ engagement rate:

• Offer Your Influencers Some Fair Compensation

As per a study conducted by TapInfluence and Altimeter, the biggest mistake brands make when it comes to influencer marketing is not offering fair compensation.

Source: Altimeter Infographics

If you want to establish a strong relationship with your influencers right from the start, you need to offer them fair compensation.

Here are a few types of content that your influencers can use in their campaigns:

• Content Featuring Your Product
• Review content
• Offer Discounts (Use Coupons)
• Holiday content (Christmas, New Year, Black Friday)
• Promote Giveaway Contests

Today, is more important than ever to take an action for your content to become visible on your customer’s feeds. Your posts need to be meaningful and relevant to your audience. And, with influencers who have genuine relationships with their audience, you will be able to better reach your target market.

It goes way beyond writing content that is not spammy. What you really want is something that sparks engagement and has a virality effect. That translates with a lot of shares, likes, retweets, followers and all other social media metrics that your business need.

The whole point of social media marketing is to have a substantial return on your investments. And sorry to hear this but posting about your mood and what you had for breakfast isn’t really helpful for generating any kind of ROI.

In this section, we will show you how to produce content of a great value.

1. Use Lot Of Images

People love images. Especially if they are quality images with a nice appealing design. It’s a fact that images are shareable and the image-rich content has a great potential to become viral.

Source: neomam.com –13 Reasons Why Your Brain Craves Infographics

2. Use Infographics

Infographics are even a better way for increasing the value of your content. According to many researches, the most socially shared form of content are infographics because they are highly engaging.

3. List Posts Are Very Popular Also!

Besides images and infographics, people also love to share lists. There are several type of lists you can use in your content to increase its value.

• How-To Posts
• Why Posts
• What Posts
• List Posts

4. Emotion-Rich Posts That Evoke Strong Positive Emotion

One of the recipes for shareable content is its emotional value. If your social media content doesn’t trigger people’s emotions, then it probably won’t get a lot of shares.

Many researches have confirmed that “posts with a higher emotional value get more shares.”

There are many human emotions, but what we are looking for our social posts are the happy emotions that inspire people to share our content.

Source: Go-Gulf.com – What People Share On Social Networks – Statistics and Trends [Infographics]

If you want to add great value to your posts, focus on emotions. It applies to any niche you are in because emotions are the universal language that triggers similar responses everywhere.

Let’s see the types of emotions that you should leverage in your social media campaigns:

1. Happy Content Has More Shares.

• Be witty whenever possible.
• Amuse your fans.
• Share your inspirational achievements.

Source: SEOprofessor.com – The Science Of Emotion: 4 Keys To Effective Social Media Marketing

2. Trigger Feelings Of Awe

Many marketing agencies have found that most shared articles across the web have one popular emotion in common: awe!

Source: NeilPatel.com – How to Leverage The Power of Emotions to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Let’s see some examples of awe-inspiring content that gets a lot of social media attention.

• In-depth guides that offer great value (“On-Page SEO Tactics” – pillar content with a lot of “inside” information and relevant images)
• Elegant list posts (52 Places To Visit In 2018)
• On-time posts (related content with current trends or events)

3. Make Your Audience Angry Or Fearful (Use It With Caution!)

Anger and fear are high-arousal emotions that can activate the nervous system really fast.

Use these emotions ONLY when you want to share something that can provide some kind of closure or release from these emotions.

Source: OMO fuels social media addiction

Basically, we are emotional beings who usually make decisions with our emotions rather than pure logic. That’s why triggering the right emotion is crucial for your audience’s engagement.

Social Media is also a huge factor In local SEO. Your social media accounts already rank in the results and can give you enormous SEO benefits on a local level.

Source: How Your SEO Benefits from Social Media Strategies

3.1 Duplicate vs. Unique Content (How They Affect Your SEO & Social Media Efforts)

Providing unique, quality content for your audience is one of the main aspects of SEO.

And social media content is not any different. You still need to provide unique social media updates if you want to see positive results. Here are few Pro Tips for providing content that your social audience will love:

• Get Your Copy Right – even it requires a lot of time, your social media presence need to be properly managed.
• High-Quality Content Is A MUST! Social media and content marketing go together like wine and cheese. So in order to grow your audience like never before, make sure your content has top-notch, high-quality information.
• Build Momentum – You need to build a momentum by regularly providing valuable content to your audience. You cannot expect immediate results for sales and ROI, before implementing this organic approach.
• Boost Your Most Valuable Content – Once you’ll determine your most valuable content you can brute-force your social media growth by using sponsored posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter. But how can you determine which content is the most valuable? Stay with us until the end, we have reserved the answer in the Social Media Automation part.
• Create ‘Brand Affinity’ – the effect of establishing a connection of empathy between your audience and your brand. And the content has the power to make it so. This sounds great, but how can it be achieved?

Certainly Not With Duplicate Content!

Turning your content marketing strategy into a brand affinity strategy, can be done ONLY by providing unique and valuable content. For example, you can also create and share:

• Free Courses
• Case studies
• Quizzes

Once you’ve established a substantial level of brand affinity with proper content, you are about to convince the prospects to become customers in a more powerful way.

If you provide a valuable content to your audience, they will be glad to share it and help you gain a lot of publicity and engagement. It’s simple like that.

Download our FREE Excel-based spreadsheet template below.

This template will help you ease scheduling your social media posts. You’ll be able to keep your efforts organized in one place, on the most 5 important networks.

Spreadsheets are a good place to start building your social media calendar, but what will happen when you need more power and automation? Before we answer this question, let’s see how to use our free template, and later we ’ll take your social scheduling to the next level with our social SEO automation platform Populizr.

Building Your Workflow Around Your Social Media Calendar  

Let’s see how to use the calendar step-by-step:

Step #1: Determine what you’ll create, promote or share

We’ll begin with a hypothetical social media campaign. You may promote:

• A brand or product
• An article or blog
• A landing page
• A contest
• An event

Regardless of the case, knowing exactly what you’ll be creating, promoting or sharing is where your process starts from.

Step #2: Writing your post copy

You can use a word processor such as Google Docs, Word etc. if you don’t want to write directly into your spreadsheet. You can lay out your document as follows:

Step #3: Place All Content Into Your Calendar

By now, you have all of your campaign content ready and it’s time to place it on your calendar.

Now you just need to post your copy into the calendar and repeat all the steps for each day until all the content is pasted and follow the same process for every post you create. Notice that the Populizr Social Media Calendar is designed for scheduling 1 blog post per day. If you have multiple blog posts for scheduling on a specific day, you can just duplicate the row of that day multiple times (as shown on the image below).

Best Posting Time On Social Media Networks

There is a lot of discussion about what is the best time to post on each social media network and how often should we post. Fortunately, we gathered data from many different studies and this is our Populizr Case Study that we’ve put together:

The Best Time To Post On Your Social Media Networks – Populizr Study

Bear in mind that there is always an easier and cost-effective way to organize your efforts. Stay with us until the end and we will show you how to automate all steps required for making a successful social media campaign.

After some time, you need to make a few analysis and crunch couple numbers to see which social posts works the best for your industry.

Remember: Not all social updates you’ll share will be good for boosting with PAID traffic!

That’s why you need to be certain where to put your money in first, when it comes to advertising on social media. And the best way is to scale organically first! Once you’ll analyze which posts get the most organic engagement and traffic, you can boost them with PAID ADS.

For example, by using Facebook paid ads you will get more advanced targeting options than other advertising platforms. You can target by location, interests, job description, past activity, and many other valuable criteria.

Source: Source: BigCommerce.com – Facebook Ad Targeting

But what does it actually mean to scale organically first? And how to analyze the engagement?

We are glad you asked! Very soon you will get your answer, so stay with us…

Put Your Social Media Strategy On A Complete Autopilot For The Whole Year With Minimal Work! 

Download Our Definitive Guide With 65 Pages Of Practical Social Media Strategies – TODAY For Free!