5 Counter-intuitive Social Media Marketing Hacks for Businesses
Social Media has become a game changer for businesses these days. Be it Face book, Stockroom or Twitter, social media channels are taking businesses to the next level by helping them generate significant traffic, leads, and conversions.
However, businesses tend to follow specific rules of thumb when it comes to posting messages on social media. And some of these rules include posting original content, including as many hash tags as possible, avoiding posting the same tweet over and over again, among many others.
This post of mine is an attempt to turn these baked-in assumptions on its head. Simply put, I’ve catalogued some counterintuitive social media hacks to attract business success.
Here they go!
Counterintuitive Hack #1. Fake it, ‘til you make it
In other words, steal your competitor’s ideas, until you find your voice. As renowned author Austin Kleon says in his book “Steal like an Artist,” fake it until you are successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to.
So, go ahead and copy, copy and copy from your competitors. The only thing you need to bear in mind while copying is that you need to copy ideas from many competitors, and not from a single competitor. If you are copying from a single competitor, be rest assured, you’ll be caught red handed by your customers, given that they, in all likelihood, would be following your competitors as well. On the other hand, copying from several great players would make your post look original.
The best part? As you keep copying and imitating your competitors, you will realize with time, that everything is not worth copying and this will prompt you to play with your posts and produce original stuff over time.
Remember: “Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.” Salvador Dali
Counterintuitive Hack #2. Post the same Tweet Over and Over again
I know this could be a controversial topic because people generally don’t prefer retweeting the same thing over and over again. However, marketing experts like Guy Kawasaki have a different take on it.
Guy is known to repeat tweets. As he says: “I repeat my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365. And when I examined the click-through patterns on repeat tweets, each one gets the same amount of traffic. If I tweeted stories only once, I would lose 75% of the traffic that I could get.”
Here’s an example of the traffic from one of Guy’s tweets:
First Tweet: 739 clicks
Second Tweet: 718 clicks
Third Tweet: 565 clicks
Remember: “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” ANDRÉ GIDE
Counterintuitive Hack #3. Less is More in terms of Messages
Squeezing in a campaign message within 140 character-limits may seem to be a daunting task for businesses on Twitter. However, the fact remains, shorter posts attract more engagement. For instance, tweets with less than 100 character receive 17% more engagement, while tweets, with links, 120–130 characters is considered ideal.
In the case of Facebook, posts below 250 characters can get you 60% more engagement and
66% more engagement if you cut it down to less than 80 characters.
Remember: “Less explanation is more convincing than more explanation.” Alan Cohen
Counterintuitive Hack #4. Less is More in terms of Hashtags
If anything, it’s not easy to get your hashtags right. And, if at all you get it right, the best part is that it lets you find tweets or messages revolving around the same idea or event, thereby gain a quick view as to what people are talking about.
Using correct Twitter hashtags could lead to 2X engagement for your tweets. So keep 1 or 2 hashtags, and you could attract far more user engagement than using 3 or more. So keep your hashtags to the minimum. GoodFirms research reports reveals the latest social media tips, tricks and trends to take your social media marketing to the next level.
Counterintuitive Hack #5. Schedule Content for Social Media Sharing
Content creation demands a lot of sweat equity. So, once it's done, you feel relieved and more relieved when you share it with the world. But then, sharing content without scheduling isn't right.
There are special days and special time to post content on different social media platforms. For instance, on Facebook, you need to post on Thursdays and Fridays, for Instagram it's Thursday. Random sharing of content is a big no, no on social media.
Wrapping up
Follow the conventional wisdom, they say. There’s nothing wrong with it as it makes our already stressed lives somewhat easier. But then, sometimes it helps to take a U turn and see things from the opposite side. Who knows, you may even end up coining new best practices for the industry.