How the hell do they do it?
You know who I mean…
Those niche marketers with the epic social media profiles.
Full of likes, comments, retweets, shares and glowing praise. It looks almost effortless for them.
And you’re sat here, sharing and tweeting and coming up with really funny updates that people just don’t seem to care about. What gives?
Well, the truth is that they do know something that you don’t.
Because while you’re trying to hustle away at social media marketing, they’re taking little shortcuts that miss out all the hard work, and give them an audience that converts.
Luckily for you, I’ve exposed all of those secrets right here, just for you…
What You’ll Learn
- Why Using Multiple Platforms Is Killing Your Progress
- What Having A Personality Can Do To Your Following
- How To Double Your Followers Today
To discover 200+ profitable niche markets click the image below now…
Choose 1 Platform For Maximum Growth
There are just so many damn social media channels nowadays. And, it’s tempting for you to try and join them all.
Because, they all have their own ways of driving traffic back to your niche site.
But here’s the thing…
People who focus on every social media platform suck. They do.
Yes, there are people who have big followings across all platforms, like Jeff Goins, who has 35,000+ likes on Facebook and 67.5k followers on Twitter.
But that’s still a huge leap in engagement across platforms. And, he’s also a famous blogger and author.
The problem for people like you and me though, is that it’s hard to devote time to all of these different platforms. Try to balance Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat while trying to run a site and keep up appearances on forums is exhausting.
Which means you give crappy, low value content across the board (more on that in the next point) and you become wildly inconsistent at doing it to too. So you create low quality content, less frequently.
That’s not how you’d treat your blog or your site, so don’t treat your social media feeds that way, either. Instead, let’s learn from one of my favourite people in the fitness niche, John Romaniello.
John has a presence on Twitter, but it’s nothing like his presence on Facebook. In fact, he’s got over 141,000 likes on Facebook:
And his audience is super highly engaged.
If you treat Social Shares as a way of building traffic – which you should – Facebook drives far more traffic back to his site than any other platform:
By giving yourself this focus, you give yourself more opportunity to grow your following on one specific platform, leaving you more chance of converting when people come back to your site.
Once you’ve got one of them nailed, you can move onto building more platforms up.
“When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
Create Outward Facing Content For 2x More Engagement
I’ve spoken about this concept before in my 9 Scientific Ways To Boost Your Traffic, Social Shares And Sales article. But, I’m going to talk about it again here, because it’s absolutely essential for building a social media following.
As Rutgers University researchers found people who provide valuable, informative content have double the followers of those who just post about themselves. These people are split into two different camps:
- Informers: People who share outward facing content that people care about, like articles and links and infographics:
- Meformers: People who post inward facing content, like talking about the gym or their severe hatred of Saturday mornings:
People are part of social media because they want to interact and engage with what’s happening around them.
And, to hopefully get a response from their favorite celebrity (If Emma Watson doesn’t reply to my next tweet, I’m seriously considering not asking her out for a McDonald’s date again).
Which means it’s dead important that you give them something tangible that they can interact with. Because, let’s be honest, nobody really gives a crap about what you had for your lunch.
That’s not just a statistic that works for people, either. Creating these outward facing updates can also help you reach more people, too.
For example, in this SocialBakers Social Media Minute, they discuss how media – celebrities, authorities, guru’s – always trump brands for organic reach on Facebook. And, how they rarely pay for reach (unless they want to).
That’s because their style of update – the stories they tell, the content they share, and how they combine all of this with their personal brand – are always outward facing, or emotionally charged, so people are more likely to share and promote naturally.
Where a brand looks at it as, “Hey, we have a product, you should really check it out!” like this…
A branded media promoter looks at it as, “So, dude, the other day I was doing this and something amazing happened…”
Now you might think the above is a personal update, but if you know how Tim Ferriss’s branded products are moving toward the 80/20 principle, and his obsessions with it (video here), you’d see that he’s just promoted his brand even further, without anyone actually realising it.
And research from Twitter – although organic reach is nowhere near the same problem there – showed that by adding more value to your tweets by the way of images, videos, quotes or links can increase your engagement and Retweets up to 35%.
So focus outward, add value, and stop sharing pictures of your goddamn lunch.
Find Your Updating Sweet Spot
As I mentioned earlier, when you try and run multiple feeds, you create content for them less often. But you can also be guilty of that one just one feed, too. A lot of us niche marketers – myself included at times – update randomly and at odd times. But why?
Well, it’s usually because:
- You have so much to do
- You don’t want to annoy people
- There is so much to do
- You can’t think of what to write
- My word, there is just so much to do
All of which are legitimate problems, but they shouldn’t be enough to get in the way of building a following. And once you know how, you can work your way around them pretty easily.
The frequency of your update is directly tied to having more followers, engagements and conversions. So, it’s important that you always keep your presence fresh and updated.
Let’s break down those problems together…
You Don’t Want To Annoy People…
You can relate to this, right? You don’t want to keep updating people because you think you’ll be bugging people. And if you’re doing six, useless updates back to back, then you probably will be.
However if you space them out, reframe them, and give them a different context, you can still reap a lot of great results.
For example, if you post the same post twice to Facebook, you’ll only see a drop off up to 57% likes and 78% comments. But, a lot more people will still see the post. And, the chances are that with their new algorithm, no two people will see the same update twice.
On Twitter, you can tweet up to 30 times a day to get the absolute most out of your feed. Because the lifespan of your tweet is around the 18 minute mark, again no two people are going to see the same tweet if you’re tweeting 40-60 minutes apart.
If you really want to make sure you’re not annoying people, try taking this approach from Buffer, by reframing it every time, by starting as a link, and then progressing to an image and an update with a different headline:
You Can’t Think Of What To Write…
Boo-freaking-hoo.
That’s trademark English sympathy for you right there. Because, if you’re in a niche, you should always have an idea of what it is that you want to write or share. If not, you’re probably in the wrong niche.
There are endless supplies of:
- Links: People writing and sharing articles in your niche.
- Images: From memes to infographics, someone is creating them – if not, you should start.
- Questions: Ask people what’s going on in your niche, and what their struggles are
- Quotes: From people in our niche, saying cool stuff about it
And that’s just scratching the surface of it all. One of the best ways I’ve found to find endless content is to head to Digg, search your niche, and look for all the content that pops up, like in this search for Coffee:
Or head out into forums, search hashtags, and take quotes from people that you can find. Find anything worthwhile sharing and share it with people.
There’s So Damn Much To Do…
Yep. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done. But, there’s a simple way around this – schedule the updates beforehand.
Tools like Buffer let you write and plan updates up to a week in advance. While Edgar lets you run a cycle of updates for up to three months. So, give yourself an hour a week to plan all of these updates and just forget about them. You can always update ad-hoc when you get the feeling along the way.
By using these three simple barrier-breakers, you’ve run out of excuses to not build a social media following.
“Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.” – Simon Mainwaring
Find The Sweet Spot Of Entertaining, Informative And Engaging
This final point translates roughly to this:
Don’t forget to have a personality.
If there’s one thing that all people with a large social media following share in common, it’s that they have a personality, they’re fun, they provide value, and they’re thoroughly engaging.
Whether it’s updating about things that are relevant to their niche:
Or just wittering away to their followers:
As much as personality and tone of voice are important in your blog posts, they’re equally important in your social media updates.
You can use it to bring people together on a topic, or argue about another.
You can use it to establish yourself as a guru, or just a friendly face.
But by having a tone of voice (and brand) that people can get behind, you give yourself the ultimate chance of growing.
To discover 200+ profitable niche markets click the image below now…
The Time To Grow Is Now
The best time to get into social media marketing was about three years ago.
The second best time? Right now.
Here’s how you can get involved, and grow a following that converts, all in one neat little place for you (so you don’t have to read the article all over again):
- Focus On One Platform: Give your all to one platform and grow it as much as you can. There’s nothing to be gained by spreading yourself too thin across all channels.
- Create Outward Facing Content: Don’t talk about yourself all the time, add value and share relevant content with your audience.
- Find Your Sweet Spot: Do you research and find out when is best to share for your audience. And, don’t worry about annoying people, not knowing what to say, or being too busy, there are ways around all of that.
- Have A Personality: People come for your content, they stay because they like you. Be a personality and entertain people, too.
Okay, that just about does it, so where are you going to start?
