Social Media

What Makes An M.V.P. Social Media Post

November 16, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Ever view social media as a giant maze? Maybe you wonder what types of posts get more attention or the small changes you can make to give your posts an edge. Yes, there are specific changes you can make such as crafting 70-100 character tweets and creating a call-to-action at the end of your posts. I discuss specific ways to strengthen your tweets in this free eBook.

But how do you write an awesome post every single time? I’m not just talking about a post that gets engagement. I am talking about a post that is so powerful and attention grabbing that people crave your content. I am talking about a post that makes your audience beg for more.

I am talking about the M.V.Ps—Most Valuable Posts—of social media. Those are the posts that we desperately want more of. We know them when we see them, but how can we craft M.V.Ps of our own?

True to the acronym M.V.P., the first method starts with an M, the second method starts with a V, and the third method starts with a P.

Message

The message of your post all comes down to the purpose of that social media post. Are you trying to make your audience laugh? @MLBMemes does a great job at that (if you are a baseball fan) Are you trying to provide them with information? That’s my aim with social media.

Your desired message must be tailored to your audience. Knowing your audience allows you to realize what type of reaction is a good one. If @MLBMemes started to tweet social media articles, people would get thrown off. If I tweeted MLB memes too much, then sure enough my followers would get thrown off too.

So once you know what type of message to craft, how do you craft it?

The answer depends on the social network you are utilizing. On Twitter, brevity wins in large part because you can only use a maximum of 140 characters.

For the most part, brevity wins. Have a short intro to the article or picture you are sharing and then let the article or picture tell the story. For other social networks like YouTube, you have to tell the story within the post.

The best way to understand how to craft your message is by examining how other people within your niche craft your message. When I needed to learn how to use Twitter, I looked at how Jeff Bullas and Kim Garst used the platform. I tweeted in my own style and combined that style with how they sent their tweets.

Combining my style with their styles is the reason I tweet the way I do.

Sure enough, there are plenty of blog posts you can read that let you know more of the specifics. However, the best way to learn how to do something is to see an example and then implement based on that example. Observing results in learning. Then it’s just a matter of doing.

Value

I love this word. I could have used quality but value does more justice (and it allows me to stay consistent with the acronym).

First off, let’s start by defining value from a social media strategy perspective. Valuable content is NOT awesome content. Valuable content is awesome content that resonates with your audience. That is an important distinction.

I come across many blog posts that I believe are valuable. The blog posts that I believe are valuable could easily be defined as meaningless in the eyes of someone else. Since I am learning how to play the piano, I am learning about the different symbols and their meanings.

I’ll Google something like “piano symbols and their meanings.” If I find an article that does a good job at explaining several of those symbols, I continue reading it for a while. It’s something I want to learn more about.

However, if I were to tweet that article to my Twitter followers, I wouldn’t get much of a reaction. If I branded myself as a pianist and singer in the making, then I would get more attention. However, I brand myself as a digital marketing expert. People who follow me want digital marketing advice.

While the piano article is valuable to me, it wouldn’t be valuable to my audience.

Understanding that distinction allows you to put more of your time and effort into the right direction. It also allows you to create M.V.Ps.

The truth about M.V.P.s is that only a certain audience sees a certain social media post as an M.V.P. If you don’t know anything about baseball, then you won’t find any of @MLBMemes’ tweets as entertaining. I don’t know much about basketball which is why I am indifferent to the NBA memes that dominate the web.

Now comes the point when you define value in your niche. A valuable video or blog post within your niche is something that triggers the desired reaction. If you want your audience to laugh, then that’s the reaction you are looking for. If you want your audience to acquire more knowledge by thoroughly reading the blog post you promoted, then that’s the reaction you are looking for.

The best way to identify value in your niche is by seeing what works. Look at what the highly regarded experts post. Better yet, see which posts get the most attention from the people within your audience. Just search for some keywords relating to your niche and look through the posts that get the most engagement.

That’s what your audience likes. Mimic it while adding your own style.

Picture

With a sea of tips that specifically apply to certain social networks, it is difficult to come across tips that apply to all of them. Social media is constantly changing and more options become available as the days go by.

In a constantly changing atmosphere, it is difficult to find the constants (had to do it). One constant that will always remain is the impact of pictures. Social media posts with pictures get more than twice as much engagement as social media posts without pictures.

All of the social networks have adapted over the years based on this fact. It’s the reason why we don’t see those pic.twitter links anymore and why you can’t be a player on Instagram and Pinterest unless you post pictures.

When you promote one of your articles on your social networks, the picture you use in your article is just as important as the content as itself. The human mind registers a picture 60,000 times faster than plain text. The picture matters.

The best free tool to create awesome pictures without any help is by using Canva. Canva is a free tool with an arsenal of options to improve your pictures. I used to use Canva until I hired someone with more expertise to create the pictures for me.

For some of the pictures I created with Canva, you can tell that some of them were rushed. I didn’t have much time to begin with because of my school schedule. To make matters worse, I was in my junior year. So I handed that responsibility over to a freelancer who creates awesome pictures. I didn’t create the picture in this blog post. My freelancer did.

Pictures are essential to getting and keeping attention. If you don’t create good pictures, then don’t give yourself that task. Pay someone else to get the job done right. You save time and get an awesome picture. Some freelancers charge $1 per picture.

When you share one of your articles on social media, make sure you include that picture within your social media post. In my experience, my tweets with pictures get more engagement than my tweets without pictures.

In Conclusion

At first glance, any goal you go after will look impossible. That includes the M.V.P. status. When you stare straight into your goal and observe the examples around you, that goal becomes easier. In some cases, that goal even becomes child’s play.

I love using sports analogies of some of the best athletes, so I’ll do that again here. At some point in his life, it was difficult for LeBron James to make a shot in basketball. Now he makes the shots that most of us would never even attempt.

All writers start off struggling to write the 250 word essay. Some of these same writers became bestselling authors.

You may struggle with crafting awesome social media posts now. You may be intimidated because you only took the first glance. However, when you stare this goal straight in the eye and take action, this goal will soon become easy for you. Soon enough, you’ll be crafting and publishing M.V.Ps left and right.

What are your thoughts on the M.V.P. method? Do you have any suggestions for crafting better social media posts? Sound off in the comments section below.

What To Do On The Day You Create A Social Media Account

November 13, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Just a few years ago, this blog post would have been unnecessary. I am talking about the time when MySpace fell to Facebook. Social media wasn’t a buzzword yet. In those days, it was just Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Those were the three top social networks.

Less than a decade ago, comparing those top three social networks with any other social network was like comparing a boulder to a pebble.

Now we’ve got Pinterest, Instagram, Blab, and Periscope, just to name a few. Each of these social networks is #1 at something. In one blog post, you can discover how much better Pinterest is than Facebook. In another blog post, you can discover how much better Facebook is than Pinterest. They have different qualities and millions of users.

For us, this means three things:

Brace yourselves. More social networks are on the way!
New opportunities
You have to create accounts for those social networks

The third thing is what this blog post is about. How many times have you heard that you need to start using Instagram? How many times have you heard that you need to start using Pinterest? If you haven’t heard it yet, how many times do you think you will get told to start using Periscope?

Whether you use these social networks or not is up to you. What isn’t up to you is that if you want to use a social network, you must create an account for that social network. After you verify your email address and have your account set up, here’s what you need to do:

Make Your Account Look Nice Right From The Start

There are few Twitter avatars worse than the egg. There are few Pinterest avatars worse than the white pin in the red background. There are few Facebook avatars worse than the faceless person in the blue-gray background. These are all default pictures that make your account look bad.

The avatar is the first thing you must change when you create a social media account. But what you choose for your avatar is just as important as changing the default.

The best avatar to use is the avatar that you have been using for your other social networks. All of my social media profiles have the same avatar picture, and that is by design. People remember a face easier than they remember a name.

Since I use the same avatar on all of my social networks, it is easier for my Twitter followers to make the connection when they see my YouTube channel. If my Twitter avatar pictures was of a rainforest and my YouTube avatar was of a volcano, it would be difficult for people to identify the two accounts with the same person.

That’s why I use the same avatar for my social networks. However, I don’t just use any avatar. I use an avatar that shows me. I don’t get a cool picture of nature from Google and make that my picture. I want people to see a face behind the content. When people see a face and associate that face with your content, those people will have an easier time remembering you and your content.

Some social networks also allow you to provide a background picture. Your background picture should let people know more about you from a personal or professional standpoint. In my background pictures, I lean towards the professional side.

While it is possible for you to use Google and get a picture, virtually none of those pictures will be the one that perfectly defines you. There are two ways to get a picture that perfectly defines you (okay fine. Close to perfect):

Create the picture yourself using Canva (a free tool on the internet that I’d recommend to anyone)
Hire a freelancer to create the picture for you (you can get a freelancer to do the job for $5 on Fiverr)

Before you create the picture or hire a freelancer, make sure you know the dimensions of a background picture. The social networks are not uniform. The dimensions for a background picture on Facebook are completely different from the dimensions for a background picture on Twitter.

Not all social networks utilize a background picture. However, if the social network you create an account for includes a background picture on your profile, make sure the background picture is nice. Since you just created the social media account, you would be fine if it took you 1-7 days to come up with an awesome background picture. Even beyond the seven days, it isn’t the end of the world if you don’t have an awesome background picture.

But the avatar is paramount. Changing the avatar must be one of the first steps you take after you create a new social media account.

Writing The Bio

An effective social media bio lists all of your accomplishments and workload that you fit into that bio. The best social media bios are typically sentence fragments—a bunch of words separated by commas. No conjugations (and, or, but) and definitely no period at the end of your bio.

This blog post explores more methods to crafting an effective social media bio.

Send Out A Massive Amount Of Posts

When you have no audience, you won’t annoy anyone if you post five times per minute. For some social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, you can easily send valuable posts. All you do is post a relevant, valuable article, and then you’re done. Publishing 20 of those types of posts in one day would give your new followers content to look at when they go to your profile.

Think about it this way. Would a Twitter account be more attractive if it had 0 tweets or if it had 1,000 tweets?

Create A Strategy

Once you get more comfortable with the social network you are on, the next step is to create a strategy. How will you achieve growth? What type of growth are you looking for? What type of experience will you provide for your audience? How will you build relationships on that social network?

Those four questions form a strategy. Getting better answers to those questions requires that you learn more about the social network you are using. Social media experts like to write blog posts about the newer social networks since they’re hot.

I wrote a few about Periscope right when it came out. I wasn’t alone. I have read numerous blog posts about Periscope (FYI: if you want to learn about Periscope, then Kim Garst is your gal).

To learn more about the social network you are using, you must read numerous blog posts about it. The more knowledge you absorb, the stronger your strategy will be.

In Conclusion

Creating an account on a social network can be an exciting experience. The powers of socializing and opportunities increase with every social network that gets created. Periscope defied the rules by giving anyone the power to live stream. I like to think of a Periscope account as your own TV channel.

It’s exciting to think about the opportunities, but to fully utilize those opportunities, you must learn from the experts and experiment on your own. The experts become experts by experimenting and then discovering what works.

Remember when it was just Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? The party’s gotten a lot bigger since then.

What do you advise we do when we create new social media accounts? Did one of these tips resonate with you the most? Which social network did you most recently create an account on? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To ACTUALLY Make Money On Social Media

October 2, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

The answer is that there are plenty of ways to make money on social media. You can promote sponsored posts and tweet affiliate links. However, those aren’t long-term methods to make money on social media.

So how do you make a good profit from your social media efforts? The answer is to view social media as an indirect way of generating a massive amount of sales.

This is the three step formula to using social media to indirectly boost your sales:

#1: Promote Your Landing Page To Grow Your Email List

Grow your email list on social media consists of two basic steps:

Build the relationship
Create the call to action

Most people only focus on building the relationship. The reason some people don’t see themselves growing their email lists is because they don’t create the call to action.

Every day, I promote my landing page several times per day. I promote one of my landing pages on Facebook every day. On Twitter, I tweet about my landing page every hour. Each social media post that promotes your landing page is a call to action.

If you don’t have a landing page yet, they are easy to create with Optimize Press. Optimize Press is the best WordPress plugin known to man because it lets you create landing pages, membership sites, and just about everything else.

#2: Use Your Email List To Strengthen The Relationship

Now you have people on your email list. What happens next? Relationship building.

While social media is great for building relationships, nothing beats email. Conversations get longer and more meaningful. People are used to seeing your content often and get to know you better.

As you continue growing and communicating with your email list, you will start to become an authority within your niche.

To make a full-time income as an entrepreneur, you need a massive email list. That way, you have your own audience. As you continue to grow your audience, you will continue gaining momentum. A constantly growing audience allows each of your product launches to be more successful than the last.

Speaking of products…

#3: Promote Products To Your Email List

The popular saying on the web is that “The Money Is In The List.” However, if you don’t promote any products to your subscribers, then you won’t make any money.

While you provide your subscribers with free value, you must send the occasional promotional email. Every 6-12 weeks, let your subscribers know about the product you recently launched. If you don’t create products, you can promote someone else’s product through an affiliate link.

Bonus Tip: Feed The Beast

Each time I accomplish a major goal, I always ask myself, “What’s Next?” I celebrate the goal for a day and then look at new horizons. When you make the revenue from your email list, you should set your eyes on new horizons as well.

One thing you should consider doing with your extra revenue is to invest it into online advertising (newspaper ads are just about dead). Social media advertising makes it possible to turbocharge your landing page’s exposure which results in more people on your email list.

If you know how to make a profit following a certain blueprint, it only makes sense to feed the beast. If you can spend $1 to make $5, why not spend $1,000 to make $5,000?

Once you master the three step formula, I recommend you take a look at social media advertising. Social media advertising is a way for you to scale up your results and success.

In Conclusion

To make a full-time income on social media, you can’t think of it as direct income. You can’t use social media to directly promote affiliate links and sales pages. People aren’t going on social media thinking about buying things.

They go on social media to socialize with friends and catch up with the latest news. Some social media users are on the search for valuable information, but when on social media, they don’t have their wallets out.

But they do have an email address ready to go. If you create a landing page with an irresistible offer, people will enter their email addresses and join your list. Then, you can build the relationship with a series of emails.

While people aren’t looking to buy stuff on social media, they are more open to buying products that show up in the inbox. Chances are at some point, an email you opened inspired you to buy something. You may have recently bought something you saw in your inbox a few weeks ago.

The reason emails lead to sales is because the way we communicate builds a sense of trust. If we authentically show up in someone’s inbox long enough those people will trust us. They will believe in the value our products provide. Then they will buy those products and tell their friends about them.

How do you use social media to generate revenue? Do you have experience with social media advertising? Sound off in the comments section below!

Five Social Networks That People Give Up On Too Quickly

September 30, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Facebook and Twitter dominate most conversations about social media. People are looking for ways to get more Twitter followers, more comments on Facebook posts, and turning all of that into a profit.

It’s great that we focus on these social networks. However, as we tunnel vision our focus on 1-2 social networks, we forget about the other social networks that surround us.

The key to my success on social media was focusing on Twitter. However, that wasn’t enough. Focusing on Twitter and thriving on the platform only gave me a strong base, not a skyscraper. I got the skyscraper by addressing other social networks that are often forgotten about.

The reason certain social networks get neglected from a business standpoint is because we want quick results. How do you spend $1 today so you make $2 tomorrow? How do we add some extra zeroes to those numbers? That’s how entrepreneurs think.

While it’s good to focus on the profit, not all profits come in the short-term. The profits people dream of come in the long-term. Growing your audience on multiple social networks (and outsourcing the work) is a great way to grow in the long-term.

The long-term growth on any social network can lead to better results. However, five social networks often find themselves pushed to the side. Either we ignore them or don’t focus enough time on them. Here’s the complete list:

#1: Pinterest

Pinterest boasts over 70 million users and over 50 billion pins. These users are very active, and some of these users spend hours of their time on the site every day. Pinterest makes it possible to organize your social media posts (pins) into different categories (boards). That makes it easier for your followers to find specific content they are looking for.

Other than effective organization, Pinterest has another factor that separates it from most social networks. 80% of pins are repins. That means it’s easier to go viral. One of the pins I sent to my 500 followers ended up getting over 1,000 repins. The pin reached beyond my audience. Just to give you a comparison of Pinterest’s viral power, only 1% of tweets are retweets.

I eventually grew my audience to 22,000 followers. Then I neglected my Pinterest account. It took too much time. The solution to the problem was outsourcing the work to someone from UpWork. Pinterest is a powerful but also time consuming social network. Consider delegating pins and your account’s growth to someone else.

#2: SlideShare

SlideShare has been praised by many marketers and some of the world’s most successful blogs, including Mashable.

So what’s all of the hype about? SlideShare is a social network that lets you upload KeyNote and PowerPoint presentations. The best part about SlideShare is that you don’t need a large audience for your presentation to go viral. Some viral SlideShare presentations were created by people with a few dozen followers. You don’t even need millions of followers on your other social networks.

Perhaps the most powerful use of SlideShare is growing your email list. My friend Steve Scott wrote a blog post discussing SlideShare’s dramatic impact on his email list.

The reason most people don’t invest their time into SlideShare is because it takes a long time to create a presentation. Let alone creating multiple presentations every week. The best way to utilize SlideShare is by outsourcing the work to someone else. Steve Scott outsources his SlideShare presentations to an assistant. It’s a time efficient way to take advantage of a big opportunity.

#3: Periscope

Periscope is the new social network in town. New social networks create two groups of people—the highly skeptical people and the people in search of the next opportunity. I joined Periscope early and ended up getting over 2,000 followers in my first week.

Mastering any social network takes time, but the reason people shy away from Periscope are a bit different:

It’s new
People are afraid of messing up live (no redoing a broadcast)
Real-time engagement looks scary the first time

For some people, using Periscope challenges them to conquer the fear of live recording. And conquering that fear can be quite profitable. Periscope expert Kim Garst has made thousands of dollars promoting her products on Periscope. One of her Periscope broadcasts resulted in an extra 180 subscribers overnight.

And she got those results with a little over 10,000 Periscope followers. It’s not incredibly difficult or time consuming to reach 10,000 Periscope followers. You can even get significant results with your first 1,000 Periscope followers.

The social network presents new opportunities for business owners. However, since it’s still new, most people make the mistake of pushing it to the side. Don’t be one of those people.

#4: YouTube

Shocked to find one of the largest social networks on this list? YouTube has proven itself as a worthy social network again and again. We hear the stories about the people who make six figure incomes from their videos.

As awesome as those stories are, there is a disappointing reality. Most of the people who use YouTube aren’t taking it seriously. Maybe they upload a decent video every month (or worse, every other month). I know some people succeed by uploading one YouTube video every other month, but those people are the exceptions, not the rule.

For some marketers, YouTube is the sleeping giant. Wake up the giant by being active and growing your channel, and that giant will bring in the results.

#5: Instagram

Instagram is more than a social network for teens. It’s emerging as one of the top players. With just as many users as Twitter, Instagram needs to be taken seriously.

For a long time, it has been challenging for marketers to take Instagram seriously. Anyone like me with an active blog typically spends more time on the desktop than on mobile devices. While Instagram is mobile savvy, you can’t exactly call it desktop savvy.

Then the tools caught up. HootSuite now makes it possible for us to schedule Instagram pictures from our desktops. This makes it possible to do the following:

Schedule pictures you create on your desktop (i.e. pictures created with Canva that are optimized for Instagram’s dimension size)
Outsource the work (assign it to someone on your organization’s HootSuite team)

These two possibilities have changed the Instagram landscape. It’s now possible to schedule Instagram photos in a free and easy manner. Scheduling Instagram photos is now as easy as scheduling tweets.

Instagram is continuing to grow. Don’t miss the boat.

In Conclusion

Billions of people are on the web. Many of these people have social media accounts. With all of the social networks on the web, some fall under the cracks. Businesses forget to utilize certain social networks that can turbocharge their growth.

The best way to utilize a social network is by mastering it and then outsourcing the work. That way, you get to spend your time doing other things for your business.

Which social networks are you underutilizing? Have any tips for us so we don’t underutilize these social networks as much? Sound off in the comments section below!

3 Simple Tactics To Keep Your Social Media Followers

September 23, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

When people think about a large social media audience, they think about getting more followers or likes. They will type in phrases like the classic “How To Get More Twitter Followers” and hope to find the secret ingredients to Twitter success.

In the beginning, you must learn how to grow your audience. That way, you can start seeing results. However, there will be a point when your audience is growing at a consistent rate.

What happens then? How does the audience get bigger? Do you search “How To Get More Twitter Followers” so you can discover how to gain 501 Twitter followers every day instead of 500 Twitter followers every day?

The next significant way to grow your audience is to keep the individuals within your current audience. If you gain 500 Twitter followers in one day, but you also get unfollowed by 500 people on the same day, then your Twitter audience didn’t grow at all. If you had 10,000 Twitter followers yesterday, then you’ll have the same number by the end of the day.

On social media, the art of growing your audience consists of two factor:

Getting more followers/likes per day
Getting less unfollows/unlikes per day

Since most people cover the first factor in great detail, I’ll choose to talk about the second factor in greater detail. When it comes to keeping the people in your audience, these three tips come in handy:

#1: Be Active

Being active on social media is critical for building trust, getting more followers, and keeping your followers. Some of my friends who forgot to tweet for a day ended up getting unfollowed by 20 extra people on that day. Harsh, but nevertheless, the reality of a social media audience.

More than a billion people use social media. While it highlights social media’s rapid success as a whole, it also indicates we have options. There are countless social media experts. If the average social media expert stops blogging, then no big deal. There are millions of other social media experts to choose from.

Being active on your social networks lets you gradually build a name for yourself. The people in your audience will begin seeing your social media posts more often. These people will engage with your posts and share your content.

If you put in so much time to building your social media platform, then you must utilize that platform. At one point, I didn’t send anymore pins for my Pinterest account with over 22,000 Pinterest followers (I now hired someone for that).

I got less blog traffic at that time than when I had 500 Pinterest followers and sent a few pins per day. In other words, I got more traffic from 500 Pinterest followers than I got from 22,000 Pinterest followers, and it was my fault.

The moment you find yourself stretching your boundaries, stop. Before expanding into new horizons, discover methods that allow you to save a significant amount of time or outsource some of your social media activities to someone else.

#2: Post Valuable Content

No matter how active you are on social media, you must always post valuable content. Bloggers praise valuable content to their audiences as often as parents praise veggies to their children.

Out of curiosity, I wondered what would happen if someone posted on social media so often but didn’t provide much value. Would someone, say, with over one million tweets have a large audience.

It turns out posting lots of bad content doesn’t help grow a large audience. Three Twitter accounts with over 1 million tweets each prove the assertion very well. Take a look:

@Aviongoo: 1.68 million tweets later, the account has a little over 300 Twitter followers.
@Market_JP: 1.56 million tweets later, the account has under 400 Twitter followers.
@ATNews: 1.19 million tweets later, the account has a little over 200 Twitter followers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to discover these accounts are posting low value content. Just because you are sending more social media posts than your competitors does not mean you are doing any better.

The value you provide with your social media posts determines the overall impact of your platform…and the number of people who decide to stick around.

#3: Engage With Your Audience

Each time someone tweets one of my blog posts, I make it a point to thank the person or favorite the tweet. Doing this lets the person know I care and appreciate the support.

Your audience helps you become more successful. While building relationships helps you reach new audiences, the people who share/read your content and/or buy your products help make you successful.

When you engage with your audience, you are engaging with the same people who help you become more successful. It’s the least we can do to support our audiences.

There are people in your audience who have been following your journey for a while. These people would feel honored if they got a response from you. Other people in your audience are looking for answers to some of their problems. Answer those questions, and the people in your audience will be grateful.

Engaging with your audience will effectively humanize your social media efforts. The entire point of automating social media posts is to open up more time to engage with your audience. When the term “social media” was coined, it included the word “social” for a reason.

The most meaningful relationships I have had with individuals within my audience started from conversations on social media. You never know where one conversation can take you and your brand.

In Conclusion

Many people focus on growing their social media audiences. Although an admirable approach, it becomes easy to forget the importance of keeping the audience you have already built. If you gain 100 Twitter followers on the day you lose 100 Twitter followers, then your audience size will remain the same.

Once you master growing your social media audience rapidly and keeping most of the people within your audience, you will find it much easier to grow a large social media audience.

What are your thoughts about growing a social media audience VS keeping the one you have? Which of the two do you think is more important? Do you have any other methods for keeping social media followers? Sound off in the comments section below.

4 Ways To Turn Social Media From ROI Nightmare To ROI Sensation

September 16, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Social Media ROI — The one thing every business on social media wants.

One of my pet peeves is when people say social media doesn’t generate ROI. There is a comic on the web that encapsulates my pet peeve very well. It’s a hit on social media “gurus”—only few people are actually experts.

Just because most people don’t get an ROI from social media doesn’t mean social media can’t generate an ROI. Without social media, I would not have an audience. Take a look at one of most recent days of blog traffic:

Most of my blog’s visitors are coming from Twitter. As these people continue visiting my blog, the relationship between me and those people will continue to grow. Some of these people will decide to subscribe to your blog while others will decide to buy products.

In other words, social media alone can’t give you an ROI. I’m not going to act as if social media is the magical, stand-alone medicine that makes you go from zero to millionaire. I know what it means to be on both sides of the coin.

Now I have over 250,000 social media followers, and I am very happy with my ROI. When I had my first 100,000 Twitter followers, my income stayed the same. I wondered if I could ever make money from my social media strategy. It was a BIG wake up call.

In less than a year, I turned my social media strategy from an ROI nightmare to an ROI sensation. It was helpful to have over 100,000 Twitter followers and a lot of engagement. But the large audience isn’t necessary to turn your social media activity into an ROI sensation.

To start turning your social media activity into an ROI sensation, follow these methods:

#1: Promote Your Landing Page More Often

Your landing page is the most valuable page on your blog for growing your email list. Landing pages are dedicated to getting more subscribers because they only let a visitor perform one action: enter the email address.

I have created several landing pages like this one.

The landing page does not have any tabs or navigation. While you can just click the “x” in a pop-up, there is no “x” button for a landing page. However, just because you create a landing page doesn’t mean you are going to get more subscribers.

You get more subscribers from your landing page by promoting that landing page. I promote my landing page in my guest posts and on social media. All of this promotion leads to dozens of daily subscribers.

So where does the money come in? You use social media to get more people to your landing page. That results in more subscribers. Then, you communicate to your subscribers with an autoresponder and email blasts.

At the end of all of my autoresponders is a promotional email of one of my products or a consultation session. For some services, I charge well over $100 in the autoresponder, and I make sales. I can tell that social media is responsible because most of my customers tell me that they found me on Twitter (or another social network).

#2: Engage With Your Audience

If you are not engaging with your audience on social media, then you are not using social media properly. It’s the equivalent of wanting to be a faster runner but not running. The reason few interactions occur is because most people focus more on the media part than on the social part of social media.

Engaging with your audience lets you know the individuals within your audience. Knowing individuals in your audience better will allow you to know what your entire audience wants. Knowing what your audience wants will help you create better products.

When I say engaging with your audience, I am referring to having actual conversations with several people in your audience. Scheduling tweets and pins isn’t engaging. That’s providing value. Say hi, thank your followers for sharing your content, and ask them questions. That’s how real engagement works.

#3: Reach Out To The Right People On Social Media

Did you know that some people with less than 5,000 Twitter followers get more opportunities than people with over 100,000 Twitter followers? That’s the same for the other social networks. Some people with 5,000 Pinterest followers get more opportunities than the people with 100,000 Pinterest followers.

There are two components that determine how many opportunities from social media

Your audience (size and engagement)
How you use social media (posting and interacting with the right people)

The “right people” consists of the people in your audience and people who can present you with an opportunity. Contact the people who have podcasts, can get you into the big media outlets, or can help you reach out to a new audience.

You can use social media to tap into these types of opportunities and get involved with several joint ventures. Tapping into other people’s audiences with the help of social media is great for you to expand your own audience while providing someone else’s audience with additional value.

Don’t immediately go for the people with hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Practice with people who have smaller audiences and are more likely to notice you.

Ideally, you want to be the big fish in the small pond. That way, you will get noticed. If you have a few thousand social media followers, you may not be the big fish in the small pond for Pat Flynn’s podcast. He’s getting people like Tim Ferris on his podcast. However, you may appear as the big fish in the small pond on a new podcaster’s show.

Guest blogging is a different animal. To some guest bloggers, all that matters is valuable content. To other guest bloggers, highly regarded bloggers are the only ones with entry.

Before you contact someone on social media to ask for an opportunity, do some quick research on the person. You want to see whether this person is likely to give you an opportunity or not.

After you get the opportunity, continue to build upon the relationship. Continuing the relationship may open the door to more opportunities, but it’s more important for character. You don’t want to be someone who takes an opportunity and then disappears from the person who gave you the opportunity.

#4: Leverage Your Credentials Whenever You Can

As you continue growing on social media, you will eventually reach a point where you can use your social media audience as a credential.

If I tell people who don’t know me that I want to become successful on social media, they may look at me funny. I am a 17 year old who can be mistaken as naive. When I mention the size of my social media audience, the conversation takes an entirely new direction.

The way you articulate your social media audience’s impact and your expertise will determine how seriously people take you.

Not only does a large social media audience help at networking events, but it has a significant impact on how people view your online presence. We tend to gravitate towards the people with large social media audiences because of social proof.

Social proof is the reason why we skip the restaurant with the empty parking lot and head over to the restaurant with the crowded parking lot. Since so many people are a part of something, it must be phenomenal.

In the same way, if you have so many social media followers, what you are doing must be phenomenal. Of course, that isn’t always the case. Some people with large social media audiences don’t do phenomenal things. However, if you do phenomenal things, the social media audience will help a first-time visitor understand that and appreciate what you do.

Every time I promote one of my products about social media, I always mention that I have over 250,000 social media followers. It is a valuable credential that lets people know they are learning from someone with a large social media audience.

You don’t get a dollar each time you mention the credential. But you can get someone to buy one of your books or training course if you properly include the social proof. You get that social proof by growing your social media audience and interacting.

In Conclusion

Social media won’t help you make direct money. However, social media is the best platform for generating indirect sales. If you are not leveraging social media now, then it’s time to get started.

Just think of social media as a platform to build the relationship with your audience. The relationship is what results in sales.

How do you use social media to generate ROI? Does your business use or dodge social media? Do you need help with social media? Sound off in the comments section below.