Do you want to improve social media productivity?
Are you interested in finding ways to energize your marketing?
Daily activities separate successful social media marketers from their peers.
But what are those activities – and better yet – how can you emulate them?
In this article, I’ll share six social media habits to improve your marketing.
6 Social Media Habits of Today’s Top Marketers
#1: Build Meaningful Relationships
A recent Gallup study found that most business owners inherently understand that,
“Running a successful company is a collective effort that requires interaction with a range of people: suppliers and potential investors, employees and customers, peers, competitors, public officials, and members of the media.”
How You Can Establish This Habit
Most business professionals have built a gold mine of relationships over the years but haven’t mastered how to turn them into mutually beneficial connections.
Your goal is to compile a list of relationships that will allow you to connect consistently with people vital to your success.
Here’s how to create that list:
- Define your perfect client and referral partner. What qualities make them ideal?
- Make a list of your top 100 contacts based on the qualities you’ve defined above. This list should include prospects and potential referral sources.
- Schedule one hour each week to connect with everyone on your list. This contact could be through social networks, social media groups or a handwritten note.
Believe me, handwritten notes go a long way! I love this one that I received from my friends at Buffer.
#2: Merge Passion With Social Purpose
To get out of the heads and into the hearts of your target audience, you must incorporate a purpose beyond profit. When you merge the two, customers become your biggest advocates.
Take a look at Blake Mycoskie to see how this simple act has built a business. Blake, the founder of Toms Shoes, combined his passion for helping others with his social purpose—to offer shoes to those less fortunate.
Since its inception, Toms Shoes has committed to donating a pair of shoes for every pair purchased. To date, they’ve given away 35M pairs of shoes.
How You Can Establish This Habit
Create a “giving calendar” that incorporates a culture of giving throughout the year.
Begin by identifying how you’re already giving back to your customers and the local community. Whether it’s through events, volunteer opportunities, or fundraisers, brainstorm how and where you’ll spend your time giving.
Now think about unique opportunities available to your company. How can you highlight your customers and business partners throughout the year?
Your next step is determining how social media will support your giving campaign. Where will you share, and how often?
For example, choose a “giving day” of the week. Post to your social media channels as follows:
- Facebook, Twitter, Google+: Post once per week.
- Pinterest and Instagram: Create unique graphics and share them twice throughout the week.
- Blog: Write one article per week highlighting your giving campaign and the week’s events.
- YouTube: Record a quick video explaining your giving day and what it entails. Give your fans and followers a reason to care about your “why.”
#3: Understand What Customers Crave
You need to be in the information business to be a successful marketer.
You have to pay close attention to the ever-changing needs of your consumer.
You must be forward-thinking and stay on the cutting edge of science and technology by incorporating a field taking the marketing world by storm: neuromarketing.
This next generation of market research provides insight into why consumers choose one product over another and what impacts that decision. While this insight can prove to be invaluable, it’s not necessarily new.
Businesses have been testing and tweaking their version of neuromarketing long before studies revealed results.
For example, before neuromarketing Better Homes and Gardens knew that beautiful images connected with their audience.
View this post on Instagram
These attractive images increase awareness, improve interaction and drive purchase decisions.
How You Can Establish This Habit
Use a tool like DataHero to regularly pull together important consumer data.
From social media to Google Analytics, email marketing, and customer management, DataHero can help you make sense of how, when, and why customers interact with your company and your content.
Once you’ve compiled this information, take that data and analyze what’s working and what’s not, and then establish a daily protocol for delivering the exact content your customers want every time.
Use a tool like Post Planner to find the exact content your audience is craving. With Post Planner, you can stop guessing and find ALL the content you need for social media in ONE place!
Images, articles, status ideas (anything you need!) from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and your favorite blogs.
#4: Connect and Collaborate
Top marketers are in a perpetual state of learning. You need to be an education sponge regarding your niche or industry, poring through case studies, data, and trends.
Work tirelessly to identify what matters most to your market and be eager to share your experiences, ideas, and expertise with other like-minded business professionals.
How You Can Establish This Habit
To make better connections that generate trust and establish credibility, you must make personalized interactions.
Use a tool like Sprout Social to actively engage in conversations with people who share your same purpose.
Here’s how to get started:
Research your keywords. What are the terms or phrases other industry professionals are using? Ian Cleary suggests using SEMrush to identify your peers’ top keywords.
Add this information to Sprout Social. Through Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox, you can monitor your keywords (hashtags), gaining access to valuable conversations happening around your area of expertise.
Use Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox to monitor your keywords.
Find your audience. Stephanie Shkolnik suggests using Followerwonk or Traackr to find influencers within your field or niche.
Now add your audience to a list within Sprout Social so you can quickly and easily connect without fail.
#5: Keep Money-Making Activities in Sight
Successful marketers know that being busy doesn’t equal success.
Success comes from productively working on money-making activities daily.
Focus on money-making activities each day.
William Patterson, CEO of the Baron Solution Group, says there’s a lot you can learn from millionaires:
“The wealthiest individuals have a different mindset and make different choices about their time and associations than others. Adopt these success habits to help you better plan, make wiser decisions, and to hold you accountable for taking the most important actions every day that will have the greatest impact on your financial and business success.”
How You Can Establish This Habit
The key is to set your intention every day. What actions can you take that will make the greatest impact on the health of your business?
Here are a few ideas:
- Call five prospects to set up a face-to-face meeting.
- Attend a local networking event.
- Send an email with a request to speak at an upcoming event.
- Record a video tip highlighting your expertise. For example, tech reporter Rich DeMuro posted a YouTube video on how to scan business cards with Evernote’s Android app.
- Record a video tip to share your expertise on social media.
- Create a new product that solves one problem of your target market.
- Establish a mastermind group with four referral sources.
#6: Track, Measure, and Adjust Your Efforts
Smart marketers know that an effective social media campaign is only as good as the people tracking and measuring its effectiveness.
You have to test what works and what doesn’t and understand what it takes to gain your audience’s attention, response and receptivity.
How You Can Establish This Habit
Paying attention to the effectiveness of your online efforts is the mainstay of your marketing strategy.
Whether you’re researching data from Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Vine, Simply Measured provides the insights you need to measure your engagement, conversions, shares, fans, and followers.
Carefully reviewing your performance over time gives you a competitive edge, helping you craft content and posts specifically designed with your target market in mind.
Final Thoughts
If you want to succeed in business and online, you must plan for it.
As Stephen Covey said,
“We are what we repeatedly do.” Therefore, we know that success is not an accident. It’s a commitment to daily habits that allows for sustainable business growth.”
What do you think? What habits do you incorporate to empower your business?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Great post. As a freelance social media marketer, I realise that often clients were unaware of the expectations they should have of their campaign. A lot of time is usually needed just to debunk myths and define realistic goals. In fact, I came up with a system just to make my life easier. It’s called ROAAARS that stands for:
RESPOND
We will monitor your account for an hour a day and respond quickly to queries or comments.
OPTIMISE
We ensure your content tick all the boxes that will trigger maximum engagement and results.
ACTIONS
We can guarantee actions on your account that are proven to influence audience growth.
ADVISE
We will keep you in the loop with social media best practices so you know calibre of work to expect.
AUDIT
Each month we assess your account and look for ways of improving your campaign strategy.
REPORT
We provide you with an easy to understand analysis of the activity on your account.
SHARING
We share your content at the right times and frequency according to your audience and unique campaign.
It helped to close the sale and build trust but there’s still along way to go as most still don’t have an allocated budget.
Another great read!
Just like with any type of business creating relationships is key and a lot of these habits link to that. Making sure your efforts are consistent, precise to their liking, and is tracked is key to marketing today as how competitive its growing.
Brian from Zeeblu
Good read. Thanks Rebecca. Yes, in today’s media saturated world it is important to clearly define our goals and use our time wisely or else we will quickly become overwhelmed. Focus on how we can best spend 5-10 hours a week on social media to achieve the greatest impact. Thanks for sharing!
Hey Rebekah
Thanks for sharing these six tips, I really enoyed reading them, especially number 3! I try to understand what my customers want and will certainly be using Post Planner to help me out.
Just one thought, do you think some social media users don’t understand that ‘habits’ need to be developed over a long period of time? I really get what Steven Covey says about us being what we repeatedly do, but I know some people who wish they could repeat 3 times and that’t their habit formed!
Thanks again and I can;t wait for the next post.
Best wishes, Mike
Really great post, i agree that forming a strong, genuine relationship is essential in social media marketing
I really enjoyed this post. I think a lot of good points were made. I definitely think that being passionate about what you are promoting or talking about plays a huge role in the success of your social media marketing. If you are genuinely excited, it’s easier to draw others in.
Hey Rebekah,
Good to know about Toms Shoes, while it seems like a huge number – 35M donated pairs of shoes, but it also means that they have sold that many! What can be better than this, creating a sustainable business by the power of giving.
I love the concept of giving and supporting people online – a big fan of #givingtuesday, however, I haven’t set any particular day for my own giving activities. Perhaps it is time to set one and start promoting it.
I haven’t tried post planner yet, that is another thing on top of my To-Do list, will get around it soon.
I agree with #5 – a business needs to make money to keep going – we need to focus on earning money and devote some serious amount of time everyday on Money Making efforts,
thanks,
Uttoran Sen,
Hey Rebekah,
Numbers 1 and 2 are tips I’ve put into overdrive this year. I’ve been connecting with a lot of people through twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ via their blog. I’m always sharing, complimenting, and just see how’s everything going with them. With that said, I get the same in return.
With that said, for the past 3 months I’ve been doing roundup post with blogs I found interesting and included the blog posts of those I’ve connected with. It goes with your tip of starting a “Giving Day” where they’re blog posts are shared with my audience as well as each other’s audience. It makes it a win/win/win for everyone.
Thanks for sharing Rebekah! Have a great upcoming weekend!
Thank you, it was very enlightening and beautifully written. I learned a few things totally new to me, and now is the time to try it all out. Thanks again, ilana.
Hi Ilana! I’m glad to hear you learned something new. Enjoy trying it out!
Understanding customer’s needs is an essential aspect of your marketing success. I love these examples and find them so inspirational. I always try to analyze the current marketing environment before putting my ideas into action.
It really is essential Vanessa, but so often overlooked. I see too many people rush ahead without a real understanding into their customer needs and how they can help solve them.
Such an insightful piece. Thanks for sharing this!
Relationship building and staying connected has definitely boosted many of my social media marketing strategies.
It’s been the key to the success of my business Viktoria. Relationships we build online are invaluable.
This is just what I’m looking for. Very informative and easy to understand. New marketers will definitely benefit from this post. Worth sharing to others. Thanks..
Glad to hear it Marian! Thank you for sharing with others.
Great article Rebekah thanks for sharing, I’m going to be implementing tip #1 right away.
Awesome Kudzai!
I was just saying to someone yesterday that helping others is the way to go. Helping them without the expectation of ever getting ‘paid back’. In this way, the original giver tends to get ‘paid back’ many times over. I think Blake over at Toms Shoes understands this better than most people. Give and others will tend to give back.
Thank you for this article. Some good tips and eye openers for sure.
There is definitely something to the whole idea of give and you will receive Troy. I’m a firm believer in that.
Really appreciate the work you’ve done to write this useful article.
Thanks! 🙂
Loved reading this article. Its practical, implementable and written in a simplistic manner. Appreciate it Rebekah… Thanks.
Hello Rebekah maam,
This was a post truly crafted with all the love you have for social media. I personally and professionally admire you for all you do at the social media front.
The beauty of your work is you are genuine and share all the tips and tricks that work for you and you have done exactly same here.
handwritten notes could be the best way to make someone feel appreciated and buffer team knows this well.
This is one post of yours which I have to bookmark in order to come over the post and utilize each step. 🙂
Thanks for this 🙂
Actionable tips as always, Rebekah, thank you!
I especially like Tip #5 about money making activities. Social media activity is absorbing and enchanting that many of us often forget the core purpose of making real connections that can lead to business and less busy time.
I was admiring your energy, insights, motivatation, and thankfull.Im still in stage of getting the business aspect off the ground.the major hold up, was my health, end stage Liver desease.getting back on my feet took much effort.However, I’m being Faithful w/a god given gift, ability to produce artwork, on a different scale of significance.
Wow, really, really love this post! Very clear and actionable tips that are anything but the run of the mill, meh advice I think we’ve all probably become accustomed to. Thanks for sharing!
I think we’re all pretty tired of that run of the mill advice David. That’s a huge compliment – thank you!
Hey Rebekah,
I completely devoured this post! As a freelancer and working social media marketer, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my craft and enhance my knowledge.
In this post you mention several ways one can measure and analyze the data from social media using a few different tools. Between Post Planner, Simply Measured, Sprout Social, DataHero, etc… are there any tools that you recommend over the others. It seems quite overwhelming and almost easier for me to track and measure results manually (as I have been doing).
I appreciate your time and love reading and sharing your content.
Best Wishes,
Andréa
I tracked and measured manually in a plain ol’ spreadsheet for many years Andrea and it’s still very effective. It’s also the most cost effective way to see what’s actually happening.
I would stick with that if you don’t want to manage multiple tools. Unfortunately, there’s still not a one-tool solution that gives you every bit of data you’re looking for.
Hi Rebekah,
I agree with your tips. I have found building relationships with people to be paramount to success when it comes to expanding readership for content creators. Thanks for the article.
Janice
Love love love this article. Will be implementing a lot of what I read. I do a few of these already, but this is such a great reminder. Thanks!
Great article, bookmarking for later and sharing, thanks Rebekah! 🙂
Hi, Rebekah!
Thank you for this useful post. I have bookmarked it for easy reference because I know I am going to put the tools listed to use. I am new to planning a marketing campaign for our business so tools that save time and help me organize are exciting for me.
I am especially interested in Post Planner for audience content. It would save time to have choices delivered right to my screen.
I am sharing your content on our site and with friends. I hope it helps them as much as it is helping me.
Warm regards,
Mary Lou