social media profitsWho said you can’t profit from social media?

I thought it was all about engagement…..

I can show you many graphs that show that more people are creating content than ever before and that more people are engaging in social media channels.

So, social media is growing… and yes, it’s a very important part of your business. But… that doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to get a return on investment for the time you put in.

So, what do you need to be doing consistently to get a return from all your time investment?

Here’s 7 things to start with:

1. Create insanely useful content or step it up with ‘Youtility’

Imagine you are a financial advisor and you start blogging.  The reason you are blogging is because you are told that you have to blog!  So you create a 300-word post that is not particularly valuable and check that task off your list.  Someone is searching for financial advice and searches Google.  They come across your article, which they are totally unimpressed with, so they go back to Google.

Do you think they’ll ever do business with you in the future?  Maybe… but only if they don’t remember who created the article!

If you want to generate ROI from social media, the starting point is great content.  Your content has to be amazingly useful.

Insanely useful content

Foundrmag is a digital magazine for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.  Earlier this year, they did a big launch and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of a training course.  They then wrote a blog post that’s over 4,000 words long and stepped through exactly how they did it.  The content is so useful that any entrepreneur reading it will want to follow them.  Here’s the table of contents in the blog post:

toc
The table of contents for the blog post

Creating a Youtulity

Jay Baer is one of the smartest marketing professionals I know and, a couple of years ago, he wrote about companies standing out with their content by providing Youtilities.

This is providing something that is extremely useful for their customers and, a lot of the time, this is through delivering a free product.

Here’s an example of great content which is an app which projects your finance into the future.

nestegg
Do some financial analysis

So that’s the other extreme, where you provide something so valuable people that want to pay for it. What about providing something that is better than just an article but not as comprehensive as an app?  For example, providing an assessment tool for your finances.

Financial assessment
Financial assessment tool

These assessment tools can easily be created with apps that are already on the market place.

So create create quality blog posts but also think about other types of content that your competitors are not producing.  This will attract and impress your ideal audience, which leads to more opportunity for sales.

2. Sharing is caring and caring is sharing great content… often!

Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date.  Maybe you wrote a great piece of content a year ago that’s still valid today… but you’re not sharing it regularly.

The problem with social media channels is that the vast majority of your audience does not see your content.  Twitter shows all content to everyone, which means there’s too much content so people don’t see most of it.  Facebook filters out content and only shows your content to a small percentage of fans and there are similar problems on other channels.

Also, your audience should be growing all the time so you have new people following you who have never seen your great content.

Create less content but make it higher quality and promote it more.

You will attract more of the audience you want with content that is relevant to your target audience and that impresses them.

3. Not tracking your results?  How to undo your bad habit

When you share your content, do you track what traffic you get to your website from the content you share?

This is not always trackable but you really should track those platforms that you can track!  You want to see what traffic is generated and the results of this traffic.  Curata found that their long-form content was producing three times the number of shares, eight times the number of page views and five times the revenue generated!

curata
Stats on blog posts

If you’re not tracking the results of the content you create, you’re wasting time.

The free approach to tracking information like this is setting up goals in Google Analytics.  You can also use tools such as SEOmonitor or Scoopit Content Director.

4. Your strategic approach to driving more traffic from your content is not working… oh wait… where’s that strategy doc gone!

When you set a goal, are you more or less likely to achieve it?

Goal Dream

When you do some analysis of your content, you’ll want to see what content is driving traffic and what’s driving results.  You then need to figure out how to generate more of this traffic:

a) Reshare that content more often on social media channels

b) Create more of that type of content

c) Focus on getting more links to that content to help it rank organically in Google.

Action: Read this post on setting goals on your content.

5. You don’t have an end-to-end process

You don't sell on social media but you sell because of social mediaClick To Tweet

Social media is great for building awareness and building relationships with relevant people but the sales don’t happen on social media channels. You need to build an end-to-end process that starts with a message shared on social channels.

How does someone go from an update all the way through to a sale?  When you have that process mapped out, it’s going to be easier to improve it.

Action: Read our article on PRISM.

6. You’re avoiding influencers

There are many influencers in your industry.  They could be thought leaders, journalists, top bloggers or many more.  These are people who have access to an audience that you want to get access to.

Without an strategy, you will not get the benefit of working with these influencers.  You need to identify the influencers, build a list and start building relationships.

Action: Read our process on the 6 steps for influencer engagement.

7. Not allocating time to learning!

If you’re not learning, you’re not growing.

Everything is changing.

Standing still is moving backwards.

Summary

By committing time and energy to creating a great framework, your ROI and success will improve.

Avoid the bad habits and build a system that works for you.

It will be worth it!


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