At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas, the SEJ team had the opportunity to catch up with two social media experts: Cynthia Johnson of RankLab, and Dennis Yu of Portage.
Cynthia and Dennis share two very unique perspectives on how to be a more effective at social media marketing. Cynthia takes a more holistic approach in providing tips to grow your audience, while Dennis takes a more scientific approach in discussing the sophisticated ways in which you can market to your audience on Facebook.
Find out how to improve your social media marketing tactics in 2015 in the videos below:
Making Social Media Interesting: An Interview with Cynthia Johnson
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- There are so many people doing social media and getting little out of it because they’re not making it interesting for their followers. How can you make social media interesting no matter what niche you’re in? Cynthia says to start by listening to your followers and finding out what they want to get out of following you.
- When it comes to finding good content to share with your followers, Cynthia recommends the tool FollowerWonk by Moz. Whether you’re using it for social PR, or for looking for interesting topics in the news, FollowerWonk lets you search for those topics within people’s Twitter bios. From there you can find people who follow related topics, as well as who is following them and discussing those kinds of topics.
- With FollowerWonk you can not only expand on the amount of content to share related to a certain topic, but it can also help you reach out into the community and find more people interested in that topic.
- Cynthia’s top tip for businesses who use social media is to “stop trying to be famous.” It’s not all about you, go out there and follow other people. Following someone is your first opportunity to put your brand in front of them.
- If your goal is to have a ton of followers while hardly following anyone else (like celebrities and other famous social media users), then you’re not doing your job. Your job is to reach as many targeted followers as possible and grow your business.
What’s Changing In Social Media: An Interview with Dennis Yu
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- The biggest change with Facebook lately is the marketing automation integration. If you don’t have everything in place like your marketing automation, tag management, content marketing, and all of your paid search integrated then you’re not even in the game when it comes to being able to drive conversions on Facebook.
- When people started building their audience on Facebook three or four years ago it was just about engagement, reach, and playing with a new platform. Now it’s more sophisticated with things like the ads API and Atlas.
- It’s not as simple as just using the ‘Boost’ button anymore, which is the equivalent of sending out an email blast because everyone gets the same message. With Facebook you have to be super targeted, which means you have to have your audience segmentation and custom audiences in place.
- Just as an SEO has hundreds of different keywords to work with, a Facebook marketer has to have hundreds of different pieces of content based on different audience segments.
- Think of Facebook as an amplification of other things you already have. You already have an email list and a big web audience elsewhere, Facebook just helps you reach them in a different way.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Photo Credit for Dennis Yu: Promodo.com
Category
Social Media
