Today I want to talk about something I haven’t talked about before: growth hacking, or specifically hacking your social media growth. Growth hacking is basically how to quickly create a robust social presence on a newly launched effort in a short amount of time. I’ve had a few companies reach out to me for advice on this subject, and I was recently asked what my first steps to start building a big presence would be. The ten tips I’m talking about today are great not only for social media newbies, but also for folks who maybe need to take a step back and make sure they haven’t missed these important steps.

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In This Episode:

• 1. Create a social media strategy that defines the objectives that you want to use social media for: you should be using social media mainly to help you achieve your business objectives. This is the beginning of hacking your social media growth.
• 2. Determine who your target audience is for your social media presence and what platforms they use: Not everyone uses social media equally – there are some people who have a profile on Facebook but spend most of their time on Linkedin – so you have to figure out where your people are. Then you have to have a strategy for each of those platforms.
• 3. Determine what your primary content you’ll be creating to share: You need to have a content strategy and decide what mediums you’re going to use. It comes down to the way you think you can cut through the noise to be seen or heard. You also need to figure out what hashtags you’re going to use to best share and spread your content.
• 4. Prepare an editorial calendar and have enough original content to last you at last a month: You can’t make as much of a splash on social media without original content, and it’s important to plan ahead.
• 5. Create a branded presence on the selected social networks: This means both visually and verbally!
• 6. Publish a week’s worth of content: Before you go out and start engaging with others, have a branded, active profile. You want someone who goes to your profile to be able to tell who you are and what you’re about.
• 7. Start to engage with other targeted users on the selected social networks using a combination of following/follow back, sharing their content, and commenting on their posts.
• 8. Engage on a daily basis, and make sure to engage in return when people engage with you.
• 9. Try doing a sprint where you focus on one aspect of your social media where you experiment, get data, and tweak your strategy.
• 10. Tweak your content: look at what has been successful and try to create more of that content.
• Don’t be afraid to try paid social – it can help foster and accelerate organic engagement

Resources & Links:

• Read about ten types of must have social media tools.
• Haven’t read Maximize Your Social yet? Now’s the time.
• Listen to last week’s episode about creating processes for your social media program.
• Learn the 11 must-have content curation best practices.
• Read my 9 step process to boost engagement on your Facebook page.

Check Out All of My Podcasts!

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