Back when I first started, Social Media Marketing seems like a simple thing. I mean, what’s so hard about it?

You create a Facebook page for your company, share things like promotions and handle enquiries. Maybe organize some contests or blast ads once in a while.

Easy peasy.

But as I delve deeper into Social Media Marketing, I realize how huge the potential and opportunities offered by the entire social media ecosystem.

The more I worked into it, the more I realize that it’s more than just handling a Facebook page and there’s actually a lot of creative ways to use other social media platforms.

This even include the widely ridiculed Google Plus which increased my organic traffic by 655%!

The Social Media Marketing Core Principle

Before we get to the list, I’d like to share the core principle that I believe can make Social Media Marketing much more effective and benefit both business and consumers.

How? Make it less about you/your brand, and more towards a common interest. On top of the essentials like having your brand or product page, build a followership based on your target customer.

Crafting the right buyer persona can help us think of what kind of interest group and content they can relate to.

Crafting a buyer persona basically means doing a deep research on your target customer – who they are, what do they do, what are their pain points and even what do they do on their free time.

When you have a buyer persona, you can to tap into their interests that crosses with your brand and start there.

Here’s how:

1. Create Niche Pages

Instead of just creating pages about your organization, create group and pages catering to the niche you’re serving.

Contrary to Company or Brand pages, niche pages are about certain topic of interest.

Take example for SEOPressor. Our main product deals with SEO but we serve mostly internet marketers and website owners who does a lot of other stuff than just SEO.

In this case, we would create a Facebook Group focused on Internet Marketing to share and discuss everything to do with Internet Marketing.

Of course, once every often SEO would make a good topic and we can then share our product and services or articles from our blog.

Why Niche Pages?

Brand pages mostly will be followed by people already using your product and services so you can’t grow your market that way.

Creating a page about Internet Marketing for example will help us gather all internet marketers, most of whom are probably not using our product yet or might not even heard of us in the first place.

These are all potential customers who can be converted into purchasing clients.

The benefits of creating niche pages includes:

• Growing your customer base wider
• Position your brand on the same level as established players by alternating sharing contents from you and others
• The page will appear less sales-y and neutral, attracting more followers

This is a highly proven tactic clearly demonstrated by Neil Patel in his $100k challenge.

Creating a niche page is the cornerstone of Neil’s success in completing the $100k challenge.

One of the first thing Neil does when starting the challenge is to build a followship in Facebook even before his website have any written content.

For his health supplement website, he created a page centered on nutrition tips sharing anything from recipes, health infographics and busting nutrition-related myths.

In the early stages Neil grow the page with only sharing tips and contents from established dietary sites.

Slowly, he replaces them with his self-written contents, driving traffic from the page to his website.

He does a lot of things to help him accomplish the challenge to earn $100k per month from the website but in my opinion, creating this niche page is the cornerstone of his success.

You can create niche pages in several social media platform:

• Facebook Pages
• Facebook Groups
• Google Plus Communities
• LinkedIn Groups

2. Create Google Plus Collections

Ah yes, Google Plus. The ghost town of social media. Except that this isn’t true and Google Plus actually have the biggest and most active communities around.

Boasting 540 million active monthly users in 2016, Google Plus keeps improving their social media site and one of the new features they introduce is Google Plus Collections.

Similar to niche pages, but on Google+. Collections is as the name implies, is a collection of related items.

You can create collections of topic of interests related to your business and populate them with related posts, preferably a mix of your own content and occasionally others.

Popular interests are easier to grow for example Animal Lovers.

Why Google Plus Collections?

Similar to Pinterest, Collections are another simple approach to find items related to any particular topic of interest.

Compared to group or community features, collections focuses more on simple contents such as images solely curated by the owner of the Collection.

This is also the reason why collections is highly personalized and you won’t be distracted by community posting and discussions.

With Collections you can also benefit from:

• Increased exposure and traffic from active Google Plus userbase
• Opportunity to repurpose and reshare your older contents
• Create following based on different aspects of your business
• A mobile-friendly way to reach your audience

BuzzFeed is one of the major users of Google Plus Collections with millions of following.

BuzzFeed is a great example of brands utilizing Collections. Each of their collections have more than 1 million followers.

3. (Properly) Utilize Hashtags

Riding on top of evergreen hashtags is one of the many ways to creatively use hashtags in your Social Media Marketing campaigns.

Hashtag is not a new thing but there are quite a lot of marketers still under-utilizing them.

Many marketers regard hashtags just as a method to get your content discovered while there are many other creative ways on using hashtags:

• Use hashtag monitoring to track campaign effectiveness
• Use hashtag monitoring to do popularity research
• Ride on trending topic hashtag for increased exposure
• Using popular hashtags (#love, #instagood, #tbt) to grow new follower
• Use local/geographic hashtags to get local business
• Using hashtag as a social media contest component

Other than Twitter, hashtags are also popular on Instagram and usable on Facebook and Google Plus.

Twitter recently also notifies your followers when you and other people they are following are Tweeting about the same hashtag.

4. Social Media Publishing

Guest posting is a well-known SEO practice because you can publish contents outside of your own website and link back to it, driving traffic and increasing exposure.

Social Media Publishing allows you to “guest post” on social media platforms that also include a publishing feature.

Such platforms includes:

• LinkedIn Pulse
• Medium
• Quora Blog
• Facebook Notes

In the online marketing niche, places like Inbound.org also provides a place to publish original contents.

Why Social Media Publishing?

Like what I’ve mentioned earlier, Social Media Publishing have the same benefits of guest posting, only with an added bonus that you have full control of it.

With that being said, let’s have a recap anyways. Publishing contents on social media gives you:

• Additional traffic and exposure from each platform’s traffic and content discovery/search feature
• Some platforms like LinkedIn Pulse is set as dofollow links, passing link juice
• A great way to repurpose and republish your old contents
• Build authority by getting your published contents featured

Publishing contents in many platforms can take quite some effort but you don’t have to do it all the time.

You can also republish the same idea and slightly tweak them to address the different crowd in different platforms.

5. Content Curation

A fancy word for finding nice stuff and sharing it. But being consistently good at content curation is not as easy as it sounds.

User’s social media feed is limited and there are many contents competing for visibility.

This is why more and more social media platform like Facebook implement algorithm to filter which content gets to be shown and which gets buried.

Profile activity and post interactivity are few of the metrics that decides if your page is important enough to be shown on your follower’s feed.

You know what this means? If you’re not actively posting and engaging, you might not be seen at all and end up as a “Dead profile”.

But if you only share things exclusively from your own site, you will be limited as you won’t be publishing frequently enough to populate your feed on a daily, or in some platforms, hourly basis.

What do you do then? Content Curation of course. At the very basic, content curation sounds easy:

1. Content Aggregation/Discovery – Search for new contents related to your niche
2. Value-adding – Adding a personalized message and opinion to your share
3. Sharing – Posting them on your page(s)

But doing it in a consistent scale can be really tiring. Searching and selecting fresh and new posts daily for your niche is hard to do in Google alone and they take precious time need for thousand other more important tasks.

Content curation platform like Scoop It lets you find relevant and reliable contents easier. Sharing can also be done effortlessly across different social media platforms at once.

That’s why I use content curation tools such as Scoop.it to help automate the process and you can search, comment and share in multiple social platforms at once.

Why Content Curation?

Content curation is important to keep your social media profiles alive and buzzing. It can also benefit you with:

1. Building reputation and authority on your field of expertise by sharing the latest groundbreaking developments in the niche.
2. Fills out content sharing gaps between creation of your own content.
3. Position yourself along with other established figures by alternating your content and those from established parties.

6. Pin It!

Pinterest is another highly underrated social media when it comes to Social Media Marketing. Most people ignore them just because of their relatively low userbase count which is a shame!

Pinterest is the second largest driver of referral traffic after Facebook

What not many people know is the fact that Pinterest is the second biggest driver of referral traffic by a large margin. How cool is that?

Another probable reason why people are not that keen to get into Pinterest is because of its visual nature.

Designing images and infographics takes a little bit more effort than plain copywriting and not many people would want to invest time for it.

But with tools like Piktochart and Canva, creating infograph can be a task anybody can do quickly, easily and for free.

You already have all the points from your content. The only thing left is to arrange them and make it look decent.

Why Pinterest?

Despite having less userbase compared to top social media giants, Pinterest is highly focused and engaging.

Pinterest is designed for sharing quality posts, and not so much for daily rants.

This is a result of Pinterest’s unique core design:

• Pinterest is designed for sharing – Each image in Pinterest is shared with value in mind – be it stunningly captured photographs or helpful infographics. You won’t find status updates of people complaining about their day.
• Pins last waaaay longer – If you share your contents on other social medias, the traffic will die down within days. Pinterest main dashboard design are visually and thus, highly engaging. Good Pins typically gets hundreds, even thousand repins over their lifetime. The Boards and search design also contributes to this.

7. Automation

Apart of planning long term strategies, Social Media Marketing usually involves simple, but repetitive and at times, tedious tasks.

The more social media accounts you manage (for each product, event or organizations) , more time will be consumed just running them. Soon you will be overwhelmed with no time to work on other important stuff.

IFTTT allows you to automate a wide range of tasks related to your social media marketing execution.

This is where automation will come in handy. You see, a lot of these menial tasks like greeting your followers every morning or sharing news daily can be automated.

Most others can be scheduled so that you can set up an entire week’s worth of social media updates within one day.

Why Automate?

Automation shouldn’t be done on all Social Media Marketing activities. Things that involve human interaction like replying for example, should be done in-person.

Any tasks that doesn’t require too much creativity can be automated and it’s a good idea to vary the automated messages so that they aren’t too obvious.

Automation can help:

• Manage multiple social media accounts effectively
• Help post updates even on holidays or the weekends
• Making your active page prioritized to be shown on user’s feed.

8. Shout-out For Shout-out

Another great technique taught by Neil Patel during his $100k Challenge, trading shout-outs ia a great way to start a new page or fanbase.

What is does is basically similar to how you do influencer outreach – you contact similar pages to the niche you’re targeting.

When both parties agrees, post a few updates recommending each other to the respective fans.

Trading shout-outs will benefit both parties in additional exposure from each other’s followerbase.

Make sure you have at least a decent amount of followers yourself for the other party to benefit from trading shout-outs and being interested.

Not everyone will cooperate but according to Neil, roughly 1 out of 10 will.

Why Trade Shout-outs?

Such cooperation can help two rising pages to get double the exposure they get from just their own followers.

• Build relationship with others in similar industry
• Benefit from exposure of each other’s fanbase
• Cross-sale to complement each other’s product offering

Why Stop There?

These are just some of the things I picked up along my journey managing business social media accounts.

The most important points is, as a Social Media Marketer, we shouldn’t limit ourselves just to the common practices and keep finding more ways to utilize and exploit the vastness of the entire social media ecosystem.

I don’t need to emphasize the importance of social media in driving traffic to your website and converting them into paying customers. It’s a crucial tool in anyone doing marketing online.

So what are some of the tip and tricks you pick up while doing social media marketing? I’d love to hear about them so do share in the comments!

Platform Analysis: Breaking Down The Big 6 Of Social Media

We did the research on the 6 most popular social media platforms so you don’t have to!
• Read the detailed overview.
• Match it to the type of business you’re running.
• Discover which fits best!

Updated: 12 December 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.