Social Media Roundup: 65 Social Media Experts Share their Tips & Tricks

For many internet marketers and business owners, Social Media is a gold mine that brings brand exposure, traffic, connections, and ultimately, sales.

We asked 65 experts in Social Media what are their favorite networks and what tips and tricks they have for us.

Most of them manage accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers while others are driving heavy traffic to their sites using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media networks.

It will take some time but you should read all the contributions. There are many helpful tips you can implement right away and boost your social media presence.

Social Media Experts

Enter your email address below and download right away all the contributions plus another e-book with tips for each social network.

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Download now the all the tips in PDF format

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And now you here are the contributions, in not a particular order. I’ve highlighted some quotes from the authors that you can share right away on twitter.

Social Media Tips & Tricks

By leaps and bounds, it’s Twitter. It’s truly the only social media platform that gives you unlimited upside, with Instagram and Facebook you’re fighting algorithms every day. If you are not using Twitter, you are truly not taking full advantage of everything that’s out there.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Twitter is truly the only social media platform that gives you unlimited upside” by @mrscotteddy” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

I’ve found, particularly for B2B lead generation, that LinkedIn has had the great revenue impact for me and my clients. Twitter tends to be the top source for traffic, but LinkedIn converts at a higher rate. Facebook tends to serve as a place of engagement. It seems to be where people comment on what they like or don’t like about the brand, vs a top source of traffic or leads.

When I launched my business, one of my first clients found me via a LinkedIn search and contacted me through LinkedIn. That one client has been worth over a quarter of a million dollars in revenue and remains a client today. I’ve seen this same story over and over both in my business, and with my clients as well.

Having been an early adopter of LinkedIn, I’ve seen significant changes in the audience and how LinkedIn is used. It can seem like it’s moving more towards job seekers then business relationship platform. However, it’s still has value as a prospecting tool.

For that purpose, here are some tips:

1. Keep your profile clearly focused on what you and your business does for your clients, the value you bring and results.
2. Use the keywords people who are searching for your business would use.
3. Leverage the many tools available such as Pulse and Showcase.
4. Reach out to people to connect with a personal message that finds common ground and a reason for them to connect to you.
5. As with any social media platform, seek to help and educate first and foremost.
6. If you can afford the cost, leverage Sales Navigator to build a prospecting list.

Different social media platforms serve different purposes. Twitter is excellent for increase reach and driving traffic to your site. But, revenue matters and for that, LinkedIn rules the day for B2B businesses.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Twitter is excellent for increase reach and driving traffic to your site.” by @BSStoltz” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Twitter is insanely powerful for growth … And I strongly recommend it to ANYBODY, no matter your business model. It takes time to master, but once you do; You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve using this platform.

When I was focused intensely on growth, here is a snapshot of my follower count increases (per day):

Twitter is incredible for building: 

• Relationships with otherwise unreachable people
• Individual presence (Personal Branding)
• Content exposure

How?

• Share relevant, educational material and be a thought-leader
• Dedicate time to helping others
• Engage consistently
• Show appreciation
• Target your efforts
• Measure your impact (then tweak + repeat)

You will often find that Twitter also translates into growth across other platforms, too…

My Twitter profile drives nice traffic to my LinkedIn profile:

But wait! There’s even more…

You can also use Twitter for Link Building!

Do not underestimate the sheer force of this super-social network 😊

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Twitter is insanely powerful for growth and I strongly recommend it to ANYBODY” by @Sam___Hurley” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

SEMrush Eggs hunt case study

The challenge

SEMrush is a fast-growing toolkit for digital marketing professionals. As for now, our suite contains over 20 tools for SEO, PPC, SMM, content and PR specialists, and we keep adding new features.

With this huge volume of updates, our users often struggle to follow them all and to understand which options solve their needs the best way. We realized we needed to come up with a solution that will get across the core value of SEMrush features to our users in a concise yet entertaining way.

An evergreen choice would have been writing a post about it. But we were aiming to involve our users into the discovery process, so one-way communication was not going to be enough. This is why we decided to make this process interactive and, in addition, to connect the campaign to a newsworthy event in order to increase the viral effect.

The solution

With Easter approaching, we thought this was a great occasion to associate our campaign with. We decided to incorporate the educational process into an Easter egg hunt: the users were challenged to find 15 “Easter eggs” hidden inside different SEMrush tools. To get to the egg, a person had to complete a certain action: generate a report, set up a project, or read a user guide.

A landing page explaining the rules was developed, and a dedicated hashtag #semrushegghunt was created. After the campaign (which lasted 2 weeks) we wrote a detailed post in our SEMrush blog explaining where all the eggs were hidden.

As for social networks, our main focus was Twitter and it brought us fantastic results.

The result

In terms of audience reach, this was the most successful SEMrush campaign ever.

We got:

• 2,444 tweets with the campaign hashtag
• 1,525 participants
• 2,330,802 unique users who were shown at least one tweet with the campaign hashtag
• 8,575,612 times the tweets with the campaign hashtag were shown to the users

Along with the noticeable coverage, the quality of the audience involved in the campaign was excellent. We had both marketing experts and “amateurs” taking part in our campaign. Sixteen percent of the users who were tweeting about the hunt had over 1,000 followers.

What’s more, we had some amazing shoutouts from opinion leaders, which also contributed to raising our brand awareness.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Our main focus was Twitter and it brought us fantastic results” by @nadia_nenadia” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

The social network you pick should be the one that matches up most with your talents and interests (video, writing, speaking) and where your audience is hanging out. I get the most leverage from YouTube because I prefer making videos and there are lots of entrepreneurs (my audience) searching for content there.

I get almost all of my new brand deals and major opportunities through my YouTube channel but it’s because I’ve made over 4,000 videos and continue to make three new, high-quality videos each and every day of the year.

You have to pick the network that matches your talents and your audience but you also have to work it consistently if you want to get results. Most people try to do all the networks at the same time, do them all in a mediocre way, and get zero results.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””You have to pick the network that matches your talents and your audience…” by @evancarmichael” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Different social media networks bring different results, so “what’s best” depends on you-your goals and the outcomes you’re looking for. For me, Twitter and Facebook stand out as the most effective channels.

In Twitter, your potential reach is unlimited. With just a few tweets and retweets, I get exposed to new people who might not have found me otherwise. Back in 2011, it was a tweet that led to a writing gig for Crazy Egg and ultimately a stint as their managing editor.

Most recently, I was tagged in a tweet about women marketers that ended up going viral. That Twitter storm lasted 3+ days, and it led to new connections with power-house marketers (both men and women) on both Twitter and Facebook. I have no doubt those connections will lead to new partnerships, speaking gigs, and other opportunities.

While I love Twitter for its velocity and reach, it’s in Facebook that relationships go deep. There, I get to know people on a personal level–their interests, their activities, their passions. There, a mere connection becomes a friend.

For someone, like me, who isn’t naturally chatty or extroverted, that’s valuable. Especially since people like doing business with friends. In the last two years, most of my client projects were either with a Facebook friend or recommended by one.

Both networks have boosted my traffic and growth. And both have led to new connections and opportunities. The key, for me, is to find the channel(s) that let you be yourself. Because that’s really the point of social. You don’t “do” social. You just “are” social.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Find the channel(s) that let you be yourself. You don’t “do” social. You just “are” social.” by @KathrynAragon” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

When looking at the top social media networks today, I’m still a fan of both Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter because of the ability to quickly and easily schedule, retweet and share content from my own sites and others, but also Facebook because of the more natural and engaging atmosphere that is offered through live video, groups and private groups.

While Twitter is nice because of it’s mass reach and global appear, status updates and conversations instantly get lost if you are following a lot of people — this is often the complete opposite on Facebook if you are active in groups or know who most of your connections area.

Once you start throwing advertising and retargeting into the mix Facebook is the clear winner from a marketing standpoint.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Once you start throwing advertising and retargeting into the mix, Facebook is the clear winner” by @zacjohnson” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Each platform is designed to bring different results. The hottest platform right now is Instagram with over 700 million active users. Instagram Stories has taken off. It’s the platform to showcase your work, show your personality and connect.

The winners on social media tell stories through being authentic and transparent.

When utilizing Instagram, you want to be aware that it does run on Algorithms, like it’s owner Facebook. A post will get seen by more people if engagement is swift within the first hour of posting.

Always, look at your analytics to determine when best to post for your business & brand.Post quality over quantity. Try to offer value in your comments to your followers. The biggest mistake marketers make is treating social media like one big ad.

Utilize Influencers, pick the ones who’s following most represents your customer.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””The biggest mistake marketers make is treating social media like one big ad.” by @socialdiva” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

What Social Media Network brings me the best results totally depends upon what I am looking to accomplish when I am looking to accomplish it, and for whom. There is NO “one” best platform for me… unless there is a very directed KPI.

For me the best results are created by a wide syndication strategy, focused engagement, and daily relationship building. I syndicate my blog content repeatedly via my own blog, TedRubin.com, any sites I am engaged to write for, my Medium blog, my LinkedIn publishing, TheSocialCMO.com, and HuffPo. I then socialize every time I post via my various Twitter handles, LinkedIn, Facebook personal, business and author pages, and Google Plus.

In addition I share content regularly that is created strictly for social distribution via Twitter, Linked In, FB, G+, and Instagram.

Year-to-date, I’ve gotten the most traffic from StumbleUpon, followed by Twitter. All the other sites, like FaceBook and Pinterest, trail far behind with the dust bunnies. Given the ephemeral nature of StumbleUpon traffic, I would put Twitter as my top social media source of useful traffic.

Now, this comes with a big caveat. I have 35,000 Twitter followers. I have fewer than 2,000 connections on LinkedIn. That might be one reason Twitter works so much better for me.

Further, I would have to say that my most valuable connections, collaborators and potential collaborators, are multi-channel folks. That is to say, I connect with them across several platforms, and in most cases in less traditional environments, such as BizSugar, Skype and ViralContentBuzz.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””My most valuable connections, collaborators and potential collaborators, are multi-channel folks.” by @amabaie” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Although I receive the most traffic from self-promoting in Facebook groups, overall, I receive the most traffic, connections, and exposure from Twitter.

The following details my Twitter methods:

Twitter has become one of my top referrers of traffic. These are the methods I follow:

1. I follow people in my niche, blogging, and marketing tips. People like Neil Patel and Sam Hurley are in my niche, so I follow their followers.
2. I follow people who have retweeted my links. If they are interested enough in my content they want their readers to read my posts, they are like-minded so I follow them. Since the culture of Twitter is to “follow back” people who follow you in your niche, my followers have grown this way. You want to follow like-minded bloggers so they’ll be interested in your posts.
3. I return the follow of people in my niche who have followed me. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t tell me who all of them are, so I use Tweepi to discover all my new followers.
4. I make sure not to let my ratio get off of followers to who I follow. I heard you should have the number you follow be lower than the number that works for you. I use the following StatusBrew and Crowdfire to keep that ratio in check. In this way, my Twitter following has grown, and my Twitter traffic has grown.

For b2c I tend to get the best results from Facebook. For b2b I get the best results from LinkedIn. Keep in mind traffic isn’t the most important metric to track, focus on conversions.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Keep in mind traffic isn’t the most important metric to track, focus on conversions.” by @neilpatel” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

I’m an avid user of social media. You should set clear goals for your social media activity.

I use Facebook to network and build relationships with other bloggers. In FB groups, I connected with many experts that I feature in my roundups and also I got some great clients. I particularly like groups that don’t allow self-promotion because there is no spam and members can focus on helping each other.

To get traffic for my posts I rely on Twitter and Pinterest. To increase my reach on Twitter, I use different tools like Viral Content Bee and Flauntt. Thanks to these tools, I get lots of shares and my Klout score has increased a lot recently (Klout measures the influence you have on social media).

On Pinterest, you will see massive results if you join group boards. It takes time until you grow a large following on any social network but on Pinterest you can get your posts in front of thousands of people as soon as you join and optimize your profile. All you have to do is to contact bloggers from the same niche as you that have group boards and ask them to add you as a contributor. Remember to include vertical branded images in your posts.

There are a lot of benefits that you can get from Pinterest once you start seeing it as a search engine, not as a social channel. There are a lot of strategies that you can use to increase your traffic from Pinterest.

Facebook Groups, live and 360 pictures

Many people claim that Facebook is a dying platform and it purposely kills the organic reach it used to provide to businesses. I found out as a digital marketer there was still a room to generate leads from it.

Facebook Groups

Being an active and genuine member in SEO online communities via Facebook groups like White Hat SEO group got me on the radar of potential clients and fellow experts that are looking to outsource services like link building.

As a proof of what can happen when you produce useful and exclusive content for members of a FB groups, here is a little story.

I’ve recorded a little video showcasing a tool I’ve built to generate blog topics ideas from Quora straight into a google sheet. I’m not selling any service or tool with this video, just sharing a useful way to leverage quora with my fellow marketers.

This 14 minutes video led 11 people to email me to ask for access to my tool. After using it by themselves, 4 of them asked for a skype call regarding my services.

I’ve also got some exposure from Expert Round-Up opportunities that I found on those same groups.

Facebook Live

The newest feature, Facebook live is a very powerful tool. I’ve been interviewed on #DainesDialogues live (500+ views) by Gareth Daine & I’ve been active commenter on many other’s live.

This, I believe, helps me in terms of personal branding. Being In a Live Show with someone in your industry you have much respect for is definitely a good thing. Acknowledgment from peers helps to generate leads and gives a lot of credibilities.

Facebook 360

As a side project , I started a little Facebook Page Called Ubud 360, where I create 360 pictures for hospitality business in Bali. This is as for now a free service as I’m testing the idea and the traffic it can bring to those businesses’ website.

Even Though the page is not really active and I did not promote it much, it gathered 100 organic likes and publications get a lot of interactions.

I registered, during a one time experiment, 4 clicks to a booking page in 10 minutes after posting a 360 picture.

I believe that Facebook is pushing towards VR and Mass market will be soon demanding for this kind of content. Because of that, I think the facebook algorithm is pushing organic reach of 360 pictures. Now, it’s about how to market and promote such a method in industry like real estate or Hospitality.

Quora (it can be super social)

Lately, I decided to focus on Quora as I realised it could get you some free and very targeted traffic. It is in my opinion an untapped source of traffic as of now, opportunities are plenty over there.
I posted an answer about “bamboo fabrics” and linked to one of my clients ETSY shop. It generated 3 sales. Not bad, is it ?

Instagram

This year, the whole Instagram world got shaken up with new algorithm and features. What used to work, does not anymore. Automation tools like Massplanner were forced to close and Instagram seems to make a point of banning unusual behaviour user – Cf. Shadow Bans.

I personally always worked on organic reach and refused to use automation on my clients account. The Growth is slow but I felt no effect after Instagram evolved.
I follow the trends and upcoming tips thanks two 2 facebook groups – Instagram marketing Master Mind where Power Users share about their understanding of new way to make it on Instagram.

I was particularly interested in a discussion about Lumos, the Image recognition tool that Facebook is using to classy pictures. It is powered by an A.I. technology.

A member of a Facebook Group , suggested that one shall optimise its Instagram post for Lumos. Being an SEO with experience in Image Optimization, it made kind of total sense to me. This is why I started to edit my Pictures metadata to help lumos to classify my post.
Mid term, I believe this categorisation will replace hashtags.

TIP : You can add a chrome add on to check how lumos sees your post on Facebook. Share your Instagram post to your Facebook page and check what Lumos think your post is about.

Conclusion

I believe that we have to move forward and keep in the loop of this kind of Social Media Evolution. This is how we will keep at the top of our game.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””I believe that Facebook is pushing towards VR and Mass market will be soon demanding for this kind of content” by @DjahillBZwawi” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

I am going to go a little off-topic with my answer but hopefully, the insight gained will allow me a little leeway. Facebook has been good for retargeting visitors to my site, but the way I have gained the most connections and exposure is by using Skype to do personal demos of SEOJet.

I realize that Skype is not a social media network, but the networking that has come from doing personal demos with owners of SEO agencies has been invaluable. Not only has it meant a ton of referral traffic, but the strategic partnerships I have been able to form have caused my business to grow at an extremely fast pace.

I know conventional wisdom will say you hire someone to do the demos for you but there is real quantifiable value to the founder doing demos.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Doing personal demos on Skype, with owners of SEO agencies has been invaluable” by @realAdamWhite” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”] Social media isn’t just about getting in front of customers: it’s also a useful tool for sourcing link and PR opportunities. We regularly use Twitter to identify publishers in need of our clients’ expertise, and we’ve earned them valuable exposure on sites like The Guardian and Forbes as a result.

Keeping an eye on the #journorequests hashtag is a great way to identify opportunities. You should also follow industry influencers and join their conversations where relevant. Simply search for keywords like ‘fashion journalist’ in Twitter and filter for People. You can also filter by location.

Before pursuing an opportunity, ‘Like’ the tweet so you’re on their radar. You can also benefit from scanning the other replies to find out who you’re up against and see if any extra information has been shared.

After you’ve sent through your contribution, reply to their tweet letting them know, making sure to use a personal account rather than a faceless brand account.

The largest social media site that brings us consistent traffic each and every day is Twitter.

Each month, consistently, Twitter is responsible for sending us close to 30,000 visitors alone.We follow a simple 3 step strategy that works for any business:

1st Optimize your Twitter Profile

The first thing you want to do is optimize your Twitter profile with these 5 steps:

• Create a good Twitter cover that builds authority and in under 5 words or less, let’s someone know exactly what it is you do. If you can add any social proof in your Twitter cover, even better.
• Have a great Twitter profile picture. People are more likely to connect with people, so consider using your personal photo vs. a logo.
• Create a great Twitter bio that not only let’s people know exactly what it is you do, but also connects with people on a personal level. Remember, people do business with people, so try to connect personally. Humor always works well in a Twitter bio if possible. One last tip for your Twitter bio is don’t include any hashtags unless if it is unique to your brand. This will cost you Twitter followers (trust me).
• Have a link to your website or if for some reason you don’t have a website, use a link to another social profile.
• Create a pinned Tweet. A pinned Tweet will be your top clicked on Tweet when I go over the 2nd strategy, so take time to think about a pinned Tweet that really will connect with your typical type of customer. I find having guides, eBooks or something free to give-away in exchange for an email address, to convert the best.

Drive Eyeballs to your Optimized Twitter Profile

Now that you’ve optimized your Twitter profile, you want to drive potential Twitter followers to it. The best way to do this is by following those discussing actively topics around your niche.

You can do this easily by using Twitter advanced search and looking for those using keywords your type of customer would be tweeting. Follow those people who are relevant and a percentage will follow you back.

For example, if you sell vacuums online, search for those who are Tweeting about cleaning their house or office.

If you’ve optimized your Twitter profile, this strategy will get you more Twitter followers and also, drive you tremendous traffic back to your website. Typically, 10-20% of those people you follow will follow you back and a percentage will also immediately click on your pinned Tweet.

Share Content Frequently

Now that you’ve optimized your Twitter profile and are getting more Twitter followers, now you want to share content frequently, to get your existing Twitter followers to visit your website.

Studies have shown that those who Tweet 50 times a day compared to those that Tweet 10 times a day, get exponentially more traffic to their website from Twitter.

This 3 step strategy can drive you, consistent traffic and make Twitter a top 3 traffic source for your business.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Studies have shown that those who Tweet 50 times a day get exponentially more traffic” by @mikekawula” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

The social media channel which drives the most traffic, sign ups and sales for me and my clients has got to be Pinterest. This is an easy channel to overlook in favor of Instagram and Facebook.

But considering it’s the 3rd largest Search Engine (after Google & Youtube) it’s a goldmine of untapped traffic for store owners, to be ignored at your loss.

One of the initial insights I had about social media in 2009 was its ability to attract free organic traffic.

That was until Facebook changed the rules and changed its algorithm and the other networks piled in. But there are still some cool ways to win the battle of the algorithms.

One of those tactics involves Twitter.

Twitter has been my principal social network source of traffic, connections and list building. Today it still drives 15% of my total site traffic and inspired me to write a free ebook: 101+ Tips and Tactics to Grow Your Web Traffic Without Paying Google or Facebook a Cent.

One growth hack I used was to show people how to automate Twitter to drive traffic and attention. The process can be found here “How to Automate Twitter To Get Attention and Grow Your Followers”

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Twitter has been my principal social network source of traffic, connections and list building” by @jeffbullas” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Social media has always been sugarcane to provide both the sweetness with sugar and other products. In the past couple of years, I have discovered LinkedIn as one of the most effective social media platforms. If you’re a businessperson, you would love its habitat. People are more professional than any other platform. I get tons of traffic to my blog from LinkedIn.

What’s so special about this platform? How can you build your personal brand?

I have successfully gained 15K+ followers on this platform and this all happened because of the consistency.

“SUCCESS KISSES THOSE WHO VALUE CONSISTENCY”

The best advice to use the text instead of directly sharing your content. People like to talk on LinkedIn. They want to know about you, the skills you have, the service you provide and what not.The text content receives more exposure than anything else.

If you’re a blogger, you should use the LinkedIn publishing platform which is termed as “Pulse”.

Re-publish your blog articles on the Pulse platform with a little bit of twist. Don’t just copy and paste the whole blog post, change it a little bit and use only 300 words.

Make your readers curious and drive them to your blog. You can successfully build your personal brand. Keep sharing, stay connected.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””If you’re a blogger, you should use the LinkedIn publishing platform – Pulse.” by @ravichahar27″ theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Definitely Facebook. I try to build many personal accounts, join groups, and sometimes do facebook ads to draw traffic to my site and to my personal brand. My best case study can be found here: http://www.rafichowdhury.com/growth-hacking-personal-brand/

For social media site-specific, I would say that Twitter brings me the most traffic so far. I’ll refer a social traffic boost for my old website (digitalphilippines.net) where I was able to acquire 2000+ Twitter traffic within a few weeks because the post (content promotion strategies) got shared 2000+ times.

The best tip that I could give is to invest several hours creating a solid content piece – that itself is easier said but done, and will take you 20 or 30 hours of work to do that. However, the hard work pays off if you’ll be able to get more social shares that the normal traffic.

Facebook, for me, is by far the best network for building relationships, an audience, increasing exposure and driving traffic.

Personally, I’ve been having huge success with Facebook Live video.

I’ve only been broadcasting live on Facebook for a short while (just over 2 months as of June 2017).

But…

Out of the 27 live shows I’ve produced, I’ve managed to achieve a whopping 13,926 views (an average of 500 views per broadcast), with one video reaching 1,662 total views to date.

Not bad for a beginner.

I started out doing solo live broadcasts, which had fairly decent engagement, but it was new to me and not the most professional production.

Still, it wet my appetite.

I sometimes joke that I’m slightly addicted to it.

Over time, my videos became more focused, and I started doing live interviews with other Internet marketers, discussing their journeys into digital marketing, what they’re doing now and advice they had on various topics.

As things progressed, I got better and better at interviewing people and began to attract a regular audience.

The quality has steadily increased as I’ve upgraded my recording and lighting equipment and now I feel I’m producing some quality shows.

I’m even soon to create a weekly marketing show, called Keeping It Real LIVE, with two fellow marketers, Karen Richardson and Rob Reece, as co-hosts. It’s due to air every Wednesday, starting at 6:30 pm on June 7th, 2017.

I’m really looking forward to this, using BeLive.tv, and seeing where it leads. Should be great fun.This platform has helped me to grow my audience and influence massively.

I see far more engagement on Facebook than I do on any other platform.

I’ve gone from having a brand new account (January 2017) to over 1,350+ friends/followers, with upwards of 20+ people per time showing up on my live broadcasts and over 6,500+ likes on my Facebook page.

With so many social platforms around, it is virtually impossible for me to invest my time into using all of them. I tend to stick to the main three only – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

To determine which one brings me the most results is hard as I am a strategic person and as such, I target three different audiences across the social platforms.

• LinkedIn – I use LinkedIn as a lead generation platform as it allows me to connect and build a business relationship with key decision makers who has the potential to turn into business. I have secured over £1m worth of new business through LinkedIn so I would say this is one result not to be sniffed at.
• Twitter – I use Twitter as an information base. I share great articles I have read that provide real value. I also share latest SEO news as well as my own posts. My feed gets quite busy as I’m connected with the right audience instead of connecting with just anyone and everyone, just to make my followers count look good.
• Facebook – I decided to use Facebook as a platform to communicate with professionals in the SEO and digital marketing industry. It is like my research platform where I can openly talk to the industry for their thoughts.

With the above said, no one social media network brings me the most results as it is all about using each platform in a unique way so collectively, they all generate fantastic brand awareness, targeted traffic and real business.

Quora has been our primary social traffic driver. My advice for driving qualified traffic through Quora is to write long-form answers to relevant questions, with a large focus on scalability and imagery.

Take a look at the most recent Quora Digest in your inbox and you’ll likely see that every response has an image in it.

On top of that, very few people will take the time to read an extensive post word-for-word. Instead, focus on breaking up your posts with subsections (using bold text), italics, and short paragraphs to make it easier for people to scan your answer and absorb the high-level insights.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””My advice for driving qualified traffic through Quora is to write long-form answers to relevant questions” by @PatAhern1″ theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Social Media Conversions require finesse and authenticity to be able to produce measurable results. Targeting influencers who promote your products and services takes a solid strategy, from the pitch to the follow up, and it is really important to pay attention to what they are working on, in addition to your own goals.

Linked In is my preferred social platform. From a user perspective, the restrictions on connections are key. The linking requirements and degrees of separation to your connections validates you instantly, in addition to helping you choose your own associations. The referral system also is a public vetting ground.

Referrals are the single best generator of business. By reaching out to your contacts and requesting a recommendation, you not only reconnect with your contact, but achieve public credibility on your profile. Recommendations increase the likelihood of a referral. The Linked n endorsement feature is a snapshot of your value to your contacts as well.

Since endorsement requests appear regularly when a user logs in, endorsements are simple to give and receive. This is an excellent measure in terms of the return of your time on a particular skill set and a way to measure the perception of your talent. The more endorsements you have the higher the likelihood of your being seen as a viable referral for service by peers and competitors.

The B2B platform allows me to reach a new audience and make an authentic introduction that relates the ways we have common goals and connections. A shared connection is a point of entry, the recommendations and endorsements are a point of reference, and a personalized email that I send, whether business introduction or request for partnership, or pitch, create a dialogue that is more effective than a cold call.

Establishing a connection that is rooted in the credibility of your contacts makes converting them to a client, a matter of their needs. If they have a vendor or product that competes with your own, you can offer a trial or discount directly with a pitch why yours may suit their needs better. Alternatively, they can keep you in mind for further referrals or a partnership.

If new connections do not result in a direct sale, partnership, or referral, they broaden the audience for the unique content that I post on my Linkedin profile. The new connections may not require services at the time I make contact with them, but should I post a new update that interests them, they could return as a new prospect.

Twitter has sent me the most traffic simply because most of the audience for my niche are active on Twitter and it’s a really easy way for people to share content. By mostly focusing on content creation, promotion and audience building, social sharing will grow on its own.

However, if I were to focus on social media marketing for content, I would probably target Pinterest because pins tend to get more visibility as they are displayed to Pinterest users over a longer period of time. I’m actually going to experiment with that on my new blog at Web Developers Etc.

Facebook is the social media network that drives the most results for us here at Buffer – by far! Over the past year or so, we’ve shifted our strategy from posting several times per day to once or twice per day with a true focus on “quality” content.

Along with a renewed focus on quality, we also implement a $40/day Boosted post strategy. This helps us to drive additional traffic and awareness to many of our top performing posts. (Here’s an in-depth look at our strategy)

A great example of this in action is a recent piece of curated content we posted to the Buffer Facebook page:

• 750,000+ people reached
• 68,000+ post clicks
• 20,400+ engagements
• 33,700+ photo views
• 2,200+ shares

This is one great example of the impact that Facebook has on both brand awareness and reach for Buffer!

Because I run an agency focused on B2B clients, much of the quality attention I get and receive is through LinkedIn. That’s not to say it’s the “most”, but it is the highest quality and qualified traffic that can generate revenue for my agency.

Social media is an extremely effective tool for marketing and generating leads. Personally, I’m big fan of Youtube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Each are awesome in their own ways.

However, the story I’m going to share is about how I made $20,000 in one hour from Twitter. Many years ago, I was much more active on twitter and was using it to drive about a thousand visitors to my blog on a daily basis. However, at the time I wanted more. I wanted sales.

Part of my business strategy is to partner with other companies and act as a value add to their existing clients. Working with web design companies where they were strong on the design end and I would come in and help on the SEO and social media side.

My goal was to use Twitter to reach out to companies that could resell my services. The experiment began with me creating a landing page where I explained the virtues of partnering with me with a strong call to action. Then I set about the process of Tweeting out with a bit.ly link to my landing page. I used bit.ly in order to track real time how many people were clicking my link and engaging with me.

The first, I posted was pretty simple and straight forward: “I’m looking for web design companies to partner with” and the link. The message got 0 clicks. With Twitter the cool thing is you can Tweet out many times and people don’t seem to mind. So I tweeted again and again, each time honing the message.

Added hashtags and modified the message to see what would get a response. After many tweets I was able to craft the perfect message. The message was that I had clients that needed web design services and it got a lot of clicks.

The whole experiment took about 30 minutes and I discovered how to tap into potential customer’s sales triggers. I decided to try the perfect tweet message in the real world and tried to cold call a local web design company. On that first call using the message that Twitter helped to develop, I landed a deal for a $20,000 project.

There was some luck involved, in this case. However, Twitter gave me a means of testing what appeals to people and generate real sales.

Twitter is my favorite social media channel.

I organize post updates via Hootsuite, scheduling tweets in order to cover all the days of the week, considering my followers favorite time zones. I send out tweets for both my content and the best articles I find in the web (20/80 rule), tagging authors and influencers, including relevant hashtags.

There are many tools I use in connection to Twitter. I particularly suggest:

• JustRetweet
• ViralContentBee
• Triberr

An easy to implement tip?

Pin a special tweet on top of your Twitter profile, promoting your services or products.I had almost 100k impressions, so far, on mine:

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Tip:Pin a special tweet on top of your Twitter profile, promoting your services or products.” by @ErikEmanuelli” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

For me, Facebook is the best, I really love it. I share my posts there and tag my friends when I need to do, and I get a lot of shares.

I do tag my friends when they are mentioned in my post. That gives me great results, they show good engagement and be happy to share it too. When they share my post, usually I get some new connections on Facebook due to that action.

To maximize the result, I send emails (till now, I do it only with my roundup posts) to tell my friends about the post and send them the exact Facebook post link, to enable them to easily find the it.

I have two live samples where I have done it successfully:

I tagged all the participants (All are influencers of the field) in this roundup post on Facebook, and most of them came to share it there, and tweet it on Twitter too.

According to Ahrefs, the post got more than 1600+ shares, 130 comments, and a lot of backlinks. It also ranks at 2nd -3rd positions for the targeted keyword.

The other post sent to me by my friend Umesh Singh to be posted on my blog as a guest post: 10 Best Facebook Blogger Groups You Must Join

As I do always, I tagged all the group owners (They were only ten) on the Facebook post, and the post got 155 shares till this moment. The most important thing is the traffic that post got me, the post got 835 visits in the first 24hrs.

Of course there are a lot of effective social networks, but I just told the network that I’m active on.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool if you use it right. In fact, it is the only tool that has the power to make a common man a celebrity overnight.

But, here is the thing…

All social media platforms don’t work the same way, it depends on the market and industry. Fashion, food, and art are the good fit for Pinterest and Instagram. On the other hand, B2B markets show interest towards Linkedin.

Earlier, I posted an article on Linkedin “11 Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing Everyone Should Know.” The article has 57,422 views, 50 likes, and 12 comments till date.

If I would have posted this article on Pinterest or Instagram, I would never get this type of success. What you need to be successful in social media are the right social media strategy, effective campaign execution, and continuous social media marketing optimization.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Social media is a powerful marketing tool that has the power to make a common man a celebrity overnight.” by @Iamumeshsingh” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

No doubt that Facebook occupies the #1 position in the list, and next comes Google Plus and then Twitter and LinkdIn.

In the initial stage of my blogging, I had a bit inhibition towards Facebook and was more concentrating on Google plus. The reason for this is, I was very closely associated with Google’s Knol pages and most of the members at Knol were active members of G+ and I too spend much time there.

And on a later stage after the death of Knol I along with my fellow writers at knol shifted or migrated our resources to WordPress platform and there I notice that a good number of people were active participants at Facebook and I too joined the stream.

Later I found that it is a wonderful social media to get more exposure and engagement. I could experience this by regularly checking the Algorithm. So I continued and the result was fine.

On a later stage, I noticed that Google+ is taking the lead, this may be I believe that because of my vigorous promotions to that platform and different groups or forums there.

Anyways at present, this is in a fluctuating situation sometimes FB and sometimes G+.

Being said that, some of the IM platforms like Klinkk, Kingged, Bizsugar, Inbound and Growth hackers too are playing a good role in bringing good traffic to my site.

Twitter and LinkdIn too are playing a wonderful role in this aspect. Though I use several other social media for promoting my resources these are the major social media networks I use.

Tip: Closely follow your fellow bloggers and influencers through their social media and visit their page and drop value added comments. Do this on a daily basis and catch the attention of influencers.

Depending on the type of business you have, the social platform bringing in traffic will vary a lot. For my clients, the biggest success I have had is via Pinterest. Pinterest is a social media site, a bookmarking site and a visual search engine all rolled into one.

And the biggest advantage of Pinterest is that you get traffic from the site for a period much longer than any other social site as people use it as a search platform.

I get 30,000+ visitors to a client’s site PrettyHome.org per month via just Pinterest repinning of about 10 minutes per day. She earns in 4 figures from my promotion of her site on Pinterest.

Organically, Social Media is offering much lesser than its use to be in the past.

Regardless of social media platform, my advice would be to keep some budget if you want you to introduce your new content, service or product to the wider audience on social media.

Now, you are ready to invest, the best social media platform depends upon your target audience and the kind of content you are trying to promote.

If it’s just an ebook, blog post or anything that require people to subscribe and ultimately read the content, platforms like Twitter works better.

If it’s some sort of quiz where people shouldn’t have to spend too much time and still managed to engage with the content, I believe facebook will perform.

For videos and images, I think platforms like Instagram, youtube and more are getting more and more popular.

If your target audience is women and your product is either fashion or cooking, you should not forget Pinterest and Instagram.

The social network which brings me the most success (awareness, traffic and conversion) is by far Facebook. Everyone and their mother is on it (sometimes more mothers than you’d think) and their targeting capability is really unmatched.

I once started a business simply because I wanted to learn how to use Facebook Ads, and it turned out so well I had to sell it because I couldn’t keep up with the demand.

This was in the winter of 2015 and since then I’ve learned many more uses, including Instagram ads through the Fb ad manager. My classic setup on Facebook is to set up 2 campaigns right off the bat. The first one simply leverages the Facebook tracking pixel on your website to earn more fans; since they’ve been to your site before there is a good chance they’ll like you on Facebook.

This is typically very inexpensive and also builds you an audience for a very long time. The second campaign is to leverage the first one for conversion.

Once you have a significant number of fans (thousands) you can then run lower funnel ads for only that population. Sales, discounts, new product announcements, etc. work great because they’re already familiar with your brand or have even purchased from you already.

Bonus tip: Leverage your email lists to build super targeted custom Facebook audiences!

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Leverage your email lists to build super targeted custom Facebook audiences!” by @OptimizePrime” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

The social network that brings me my greatest results by far is Reddit.

Reddit is a curious community — upvotes are showered on you for the 50th repost of the cute cat video (because many people missed it the last 49 times), and great posts get downvoted to oblivion for the smallest of reasons.

But if you get the combination right, it could mean immortality on an “all time list” and constant traffic!

One example is the post I wrote about cold calling, which has generated my company tens of thousands of dollars and an equivalent amount of traffic to my website. Even today, I still get “thank you” messages and frequent requests to write a follow-up.

And I know how to do it again. First, here are quick tips for how to behave on Reddit:

1. Identify relevant sub-reddits that contain influencers or your customers.
2. Contribute in replies a few times a week, and make semi-frequent posts so people get used to seeing your name.
3. It is okay to “feed the trolls” sometimes, but don’t feed them a lot (aka it’s okay to tell someone they’re an idiot if they are, but do it kindly, and don’t carry on when they fire back).
4. Don’t ever post links to your blog or shameless self-promotions — Reddit users will sniff you out and downvote you into oblivion.
5. Be sure to actually *enjoy* Reddit, too! Contribute and read reddits you enjoy! Your account should look like a real person… Not a marketing account.
6. More of an FYI: People can see your upvote/downvote history, your shares, and your post history… and they will share it.

Once you get some history behind your account, you’re ready to make real ROI! Here are my two simple secrets to ROI with Reddit:

– Write a timely post about something relevant to users in a particular Subreddit. For example, I’ve written about Google updates and posted them in r/Startups that have earned me 200+/mo visitors and closed deals.
– Pour your heart and soul into explaining something useful with case study to back it up and steps for how to replicate your success. The above link to my cold calls post is the best example I have for this.

I’m managing social media for b2b enterprise software company and the best performing network for us is LinkedIn, followed by Twitter. We target IT manager, directors, CIO and execs and those are the best social network to find them online.

Facebook, Google+ and Youtube almost don’t bring us any leads and traffic. We use social media automation tool – Oktopost and schedule post there automatically so it doesn’t take any time.

With the main focus on Linkedin and Twitter we use following tactics to keep our followers engaged, grow our presence, and increase website traffic and conversions:

• Post autoplay videos as those usually get the most amount of likes and retweets
• Create compelling Twitter cards and Linkedin website preview for your links and posts.
• Follow influencers and active accounts in the industry, like and repost relevant content from authoritative profiles. This helped us increase followers growth rate.
• Setup remarketing campaign on Twitter to show ads to users who visited your website in the past
• Setup Quuu – curated content suggestion tool. It automatically publishes 2 relevant posts with hashtags and images to all social media profiles.

We’ve seen some good results just by using Facebook paid ads to promote various clients’ creative campaigns. Using Facebook ads this way, we don’t generally expect many conversions to happen directly from the ad but it’s a solid way of boosting the exposure of a creative project.

It also has the added benefit of increasing local awareness & brand exposure of the company (overall) alongside the traffic influx generated from the interest in the project at hand.

One tip to keep in mind while doing this, is to make sure you make it very easy to socially share before you start pushing traffic to your site/project. This will help snowball those paid clicks into additional organic social visits.

A while back, we did this for a local guide project around the holidays which took off quite well and with the little we invested into Facebook ads, we were able to get some very decent traffic from the natural sharing that occurred from those visitors that came via paid clicks:

At the moment, I don’t think any other social channel’s ability to dial in on demographics & behaviors compares to Facebook’s. It’s also worth noting that it’s worthwhile to spend some time nailing down the right messaging & imagery so your ad flows well with whatever you’re promoting as well as resonates with your audience.

If you get that right, have something interesting & worthy to promote and make it easy to share, you’ve got a good chance at succeeding beyond your ad budget’s original reach.

For us Facebook has been a great for driving traffic and building brand awareness. We usually sponsor our best blog content to increase engagement. We also sponsor guess posts we do for other sites to demonstrate our authority.

Surprisingly Pinterest has been another good source of traffic and brand awareness. We create a lot of infographics and one tip I can share is that and we’ve had success dividing sections of the infographic and posting them to Pinterest. It makes the content more digestible, this typically works best with list-type infographics.

We have dipped our toes into Instagram and have over 1000 followers, but we don’t see it as a huge driver of traffic yet given that you can only have one link in your bio, but it’s been great for adding a personal touch to the company and helping to show the world our company culture.

I know this might not be the most exciting answer and this will not apply to everyone, but we have found Facebook to still be the leading social media network when it comes to driving traffic, exposure etc… And we have seen this be the case for both B2B and B2C companies (Here is a link to podcast/blog we did on B2B marketing utilizing Facebook).

Now, there are certain demographics or generations that live on other platforms so this is definitely not a one size fits all answer. But the targeting capabilities on Facebook (and now Instagram since Facebook bought it a few years ago) are second to none and they only keep getting better.

And not only can you target unbelievably on Facebook, but the re-targeting and audience building capabilities offer you so many amazing options for putting the right message and content in front of the right people at the right time. For instance, you can tag a certain group of pages that contain “Awareness” stage content and once a user graduates past a certain score or number of page visits within this group of tagged pages, you then can serve them “Consideration” stage content.

You can then do the same and serve them “Buying” stage content once they graduate from the “Consideration” stage and therefore will be giving them what they are looking for at the correct time.

Not many other platforms can make this claim and none that I know of that come close to the options that FB allows.

Facebook is the source of the most of our referral traffic from social media. No big shocker there for us, as we also use Facebook for some of our customer experience outreach efforts – in addition to sharing blog posts, product updates, and much more with our fans from the MeetEdgar Facebook Page.

However, being a small company, we also make use of Facebook ads and boosted posts from time to time. This helps us get an edge over the bigger guys, and expands our reach among fans who aren’t Edgar customers (yet)!

But instead of just throwing cash at ads and hope we see some ROI, we take advantage of Facebook’s free suite of amazing demographic tools – including Page Insights and Audience Insights – which help us be extra strategic in our ad campaigns.

Page Insights let you see the demographics of the people who like your business Page – including when they’re online, so you can run ads at the exact times your fans are most likely to see them – and how well your posts are doing in general.

Audience Insights let you segment Facebook users by the information they share publicly on Facebook. You can use Audience Insights to create hyper-targeted audiences of, for example, people who live in Sacramento, own a restaurant, are rural parents, and like Vin Diesel’s official Page. That means you could run ads specifically for this target market — and time them around the new Fast & Furious movie release!

If you’re not digging deep into both your Page Insights and your Audience Insights, don’t wait another minute! You’re missing a huge opportunity to not only increase engagement on your Facebook page, but also help spend your advertising dollars more wisely – while serving up the exact kind of content your fans (and future fans) will like, comment on, and share!

I think that your preferred social network really depends on your goal. In my opinion, LinkedIn is by far the best social media network for gaining connections and showcasing expertise.

That being said, from my experience I can say that Facebook is the best social media network to get additional exposure and website traffic. I believe that this is because Facebook inherently has social media sharing built into the platform and things can quickly and easily go viral if others are willing to share them.

If I had to give advice to any entrepreneur out there, it would be to have a presence on both of these platforms. Linkedin is great for building credibility and having a professional presence, and Facebook is a great way to get more exposure and traffic to your businesses website.

The best social media platform is the one that is perfectly aligned (or almost) with the audience you want to reach. I believe any social platform can send you either junk or quality traffic.

For instance, let’s talk about Twitter. I believe this is one of the platforms that most entrepreneurs discuss on abandoning or they cannot get any results from it. But if we look at the numbers, on average 6,000 tweets are “published” by the second. This number has actually increased over the years.

So you have got to work with this. You churning one or two tweets can no longer cut it. First off, you need to tweet more everyday. Target 120 tweets to be the minimum you send from your account daily. It sounds insanely impossible, but you can do this with these tools.

First off, if you have a WordPress blog, you can schedule all your tweets to be in a loop. You do this by enabling the revive old post plugin (the free version works just as well as the paid version) link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/

Next, it has been a delight using Jooicer.

The way Jooicer works, it allows you to schedule tweets (their schedule works in the form of queues and can be looped, you can also have multiple queues), follow and unfollow, retweet and favorite all day everyday. And this is not randomly done per se. Their algorithm works with you choosing select hashtags that you keep an eye on.

Finally IFTTT recipes. Create recipes that will:

• Add people to lists
• Text you when someone is looking for your expertise (so as you are the first one to fix the solution)
• You can mix recipes with Zapier

To summarize, there are three tools you need to implement to make the most out of Twitter:

• Revive Old Post – schedule all your tweets in a loop as often as you want
• Jooicer – get more followers and create more engagement on your tweets
• IFTTT recipes – create multiple recipes to get jobs and create lists for more engagement

Once that is done, you can schedule an hour everyday to respond to replies and be part of conversations.

Facebook tends to bring me the most results, through a combination of organic content and very specific paid targeting / reach to my current and potential audience.

Tip: speak to your connections in the platform and manner within they speak to you. If someone reaches out to you on Facebook, answer on Facebook, if Linkedin, answer on Linkedin, if email, answer on email etc. Just because you favor a particular channel of communication doesn’t mean your connections share the same.

Don’t try to email someone back if they contact you on social media – they clearly are reaching out in the way that they want to connect with you, and will be expecting a response in the same platform. Trying to mix it up will only confuse them and potentially lose that connection or sale.

At CorpNet.com we see great benefit from all social platforms we are active on. The platform that works the best for us, however, tends to be Twitter. As a business, it’s hard to maintain an organic social following sharing content that is both genuine and also helps us market our business offerings.

Twitter lets us do that, and often throughout the day. The life of a tweet is so short that it really allows you to get a good mixture of content out there that resonates with your online community. We see a lot of clicks on our links shared and Twitter is one of the top traffic referrals for us.

Gaining Social Media exposure is not necessarily the difficult bit.

Knowing the ‘type’ of exposure you’re after is the part of the equation that I always find the most fascinating. Interestingly, this is often the part I see most frequently neglected.

What stage is your business at, and what does it really need?

We need to first look at the stage you or your business is at. Early stage startups, for example, will get a huge amount of value from a smaller number of high quality connections on social media. After all, at that stage, your focus is centred around validating your idea, or reaching your first 10 customers.

On the outer hand, a more mature business is probably going for out and out volume. Knowing the stage you are at and what type of social media interactions your business needs, is perhaps the most important question to ask.

The early stage, high quality, play

If you don’t know who your core market is (or are not yet sure whether your product meets enough of their needs) then you probably don’t want to be throwing everything at social media quite yet. Instead, a small number of high quality interactions is going to be absolute gold dust for you. Imagine if you could speak one-on-one with 10 people in your target market in order to test out your product or a pricing model.

To achieve a small number of high quality interactions, you just need to put a bit of time in and apply some common sense.

Search on Twitter for words that relate to your business / product and start engaging in conversations where you feel you can add value. The key word here is ‘add value’. If you can show up and add value, you’ll soon find a few valuable interactions are achieved. You can apply a similar approach on Facebook if needed.

The established business, focused & high volume play

If your business is established enough that you know who your core market is and that your product adequately meets their needs, then when it comes to your social media strategy you can afford to play a bit bigger.

At this level, it’s all about reaching the largest possible audience. Since we know who our core market is, the trick here is to reach as many people ‘within’ your core market as possible. For this reason, it’s often a good idea to start experimenting with advertising as this allows you to be a bit more precise with your targeting. Facebook is particularly good at letting you configure your advertising settings so that you precisely reach a subset of people.

For me, the social network that brings me most results is Twitter, and my tip would be not to follow any tips randomly, but create a strategy and invest some effort executing it.

This strategy would depend on the nature of your business, available resources and your target audience, of course.

I’m a solopreneur, so the following tips would be most helpful for solopreneurs and small business owners.

Just to show you what I’ve achieved so far with this Twitter strategy within 5 months:

• 4 new clients.
• Numerous subscribers to my blog, with at least 1 new subscriber daily.
• Like-minded peers and fans who amplify my message.
• Invaluable connections to influencers that got me exposure, new subscribers and exclusive insights.
• Engagement on every 3d tweet.

And this is just with 800+ followers.
My strategy on Twitter is a combination of two things: Content of insanely good quality (both mine and curated) to show my expertise + Talking to people to make connections.

My do’s:

• Impress with you Twitter profile.
• Make sure your Twitter feed is exceptional and feels alive: Get out of the echo chamber and share things that others don’t share, make sure all the articles are extremely useful to your audience, add your own thoughts, let your personality show, etc.
• Don’t bore your audience with the same tweets and share your posts with different images and messages.
• Don’t be shy to comment on people’s tweets if you have a question, something valuable to add or if you just want to compliment their work.
• Tweeting an article from another website, mention the author, not the website.
• Come up with something that stands out, make it “your thing” and stick to it. My “thing” is Business Tip of the Day – a custom-made image I create that communicates one short tip on running a business website. 4 of 5 tips I find in articles of others, so I also tweet the link and mention the author. Here’s an example of such tweet. I’m currently at business tip of the day #108.
• Constantly analyze your efforts and do more of what works.

My dont’s:

• Don’t automate things that will look automated at the end: Automatic messaging, “thank you my top influencers” tweets, autoscheduled tweets on weekends etc.
• Don’t post direct sales tweets. I think if your primary goal for being on social is to sell, you are wasting your time.
• Don’t use automatic follow/unfollow strategy. I won’t follow back anyone who I suspect is automatically following people just to get them to follow them back (their count of followers and users they follow will be roughly the same).

Rules I break:

• Despite the popular advice to share only 20% of your own content, I discovered that the ratio 50/50 works best for me.
• I don’t tweet during times that a tool like FollowerWonk or Buffer recommend. You can only determine the best time to tweet by observing the engagement on your tweets for a couple of weeks.

Although none of these tips is about driving sales and clients, I found that by following this strategy the rewards for you and your business follow automatically.

The social media channel that brings me the best results in terms of opportunities, connections, exposure, traffic and email subscribers is definitely Facebook.

In fact, according to Google Analytics, I get almost the same amount of traffic from social media (38.8%) as I get from the search engines (39.2%). From that social traffic, visitors coming from Facebook represent 76.67% of the total whereas Twitter visits are a mere 19.07% followed at a long distance by LinkedIn with just 3.45%.

The trick to getting these results from Mark Zuckerber’s social network is to join Facebook Groups related to your niche. In the first place, introduce yourself to those communities. Secondly, make sure you become an active and obedient member — one that follows the group’s rules and guidelines. Thirdly, offer your insight by engaging with other people’s posts and comments and starting your own threads. Adding and accepting other members’ friendship requests can also help in the process.

After you’ve built a strong enough reputation and in order to bring traffic to your website, leave your link where it makes sense (but only if you’re allowed and it’s helpful to other members). If you’re sharing something in your own threads, always ask the group administrators or moderators for approval to link to your website.

Within time, you’ll start to be known in those communities and become a respected member. If you keep contributing with your valuable insight and offering your help, great opportunities, connections and exposure will naturally end up happening.

Among the different social media sites, Pinterest drives the most referral traffic to my blog.

The key is the creation of useful visual content that answers the needs of your audience. Whether it’s an infographic, a cheat sheet, or simply a featured image set in a vertical orientation, you are sure to attract a number of visitors to your blog.

You need to find as many group boards as possible so you can maximize your reach. I suggest prospecting for boards to join using PinGroupie and find ways on how to enter those boards.

For me it has always been Facebook, primarily through free methods of marketing. I have dabbled in paid marketing but for me it has not been consistently profitable (although I continue to test new ads).

An example of the power of using a site like Facebook is how quickly something can go viral – I once put out a Facebook post offering a free training on how to use social media to generate leads for any business, and I generated 72 leads in 36 hours without any boosted posts or a marketing budget.

Some tips on how you can also do this are to not just post a link on Facebook, but instead ask people to comment to see what it is you’re offering and then send them the link via private message. This also opens up a dialogue with you and the lead – this strategy can also work really well with paid Facebook marketing.

Generally you want to keep people on Facebook while the relationship is being built, and once it is built, only then can you consider taking them away from the platform either via a website link to become a lead or a phone call.

I spend 70% of my businesses “social media time” on Instagram. That’s because it gives you the ability to share snippets of your brand informally, reach a new audience and drive relationships with industry influencers and customers like no other platform. Plus it’s gaining in popularity every day and I want to be part of that growth.

I prefer to focus on one or two channels only and do them well, and in my opinion there is far more benefit by being on Instagram than any other social platform. That’s why my digital agency only offers Instagram when it comes to social media as a service for other businesses.

Most people like to think of Social Media in terms of a direct return of investment, and end up being disappointed when they don’t see the numbers.

I like to use Instagram to increase our chances of converting leads from other sources into sales and establish new relationships. The new leads that come directly from Instagram are a bonus. That’s why I’m never disappointed.

To give you a real example, my digital marketing agency was recently referred to a potential customer who was looking for SEO and Content Marketing services. They happened to view my Instagram profile before our meeting, which happened to break the ice with them without even being there!

During the initial meeting, we talked about my Instagram profile and the strategy behind it. Now, when you talk to clients about Social Media, it tends to be an informal conversation due to the nature of the topic. That’s why as we transitioned to talking about their business and how I could help, it was just part of the conversation. I wasn’t selling to them.

Instagram is where you can give your existing and new customers an insight into your business and develop relationships with them at scale.

My preferred personal social media platform is Twitter, I am able to make all the connections and interactions I need. When it comes to generating traffic, engagement, exposure, awareness and all the other stuff you expect when doing social media marketing for a client, Facebook is by far the most successful platform.

A quick Facebook trick for maximising ROI on your advert spend is to create a number of posts for a campaign and see which one performed best attracting organic traffic, that is the one you should put your advert budget on.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool. The results even become more amazing if you know how to use it effectively.

But, here is the thing…

All social media platforms don’t perform the same way.

You may ask why?

Because it depends on the market and niche you are in.

If you’re in fashion, food, and art industry, Pinterest and Instagram will be the right platform.

On the other hand, if you’re in B2B markets, I would suggest you invest time on Linkedin and Twitter.

If you ask for my favorite social network, it is Twitter, both from the personal and professional point of view. I see that the quality of interaction on Twitter is really high and useful. LinkedIn comes to the second position. It is pretty useful, but personally, I still need to explore more about it to see what other value it can offer.

Whether your business goal is to increase exposure to your brand or sales, engaging consumers, increasing customer experience, etc. – social media can bring smile on your face.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Whether your business goal is, social media can bring smile on your face.” by @growwithweb” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

At Hope Spring Charity, Facebook is the social media network that brought us the best result. A recent case study to illustrate this follows: Facebook gave us £10 credit. We spent it on boosting one of our sanitation and hygiene campaigns. By the time the £10 credit was spent, we have had more than three hundred post like and other interactions. Our Facebook page received more than one hundred and fifty new Likes.

Another thing that works great is tagging right audience. For example from time to time we create posts and tag people from our industry. In this way we can get more likes, shares and comments.

Most people including me have underestimated the power of Facebook Private Group. However, one of my Shopify Checkout Tips articles got hundreds of share and thousand visitors to my brand new blog within a short period of time. Here are my steps:

1. Find related groups on Facebook. Most of the time, you will need an approval from the group owner. TIPS: Be aware of groups that allow everyone to join where you will see a lot of spammers and low-quality content.
2. Once you got the authorization from the group master, you can start to participate in the conversation so other people in the group get to know you.
3. Identify the issue/problem that mentioned again and again by the members.
4. Write an article about the pain point and suggest a solution.
5. Before sharing the post on a private Facebook group I suggest you send the owner a message to get the permission. It will show the respect to the group and build the relationship with the group owner.

The Social Media Network which brings me the most traffic is YouTube. Video will be the next big thing and ranking videos is relatively easy than ranking organically in Google.
I create short 1-2 mins videos on tips or actions that people can take after watching the videos. This gives me very targeted audience and more traffic and conversions.

Google+, Facebook and Triberr drive a lot of traffic to us. On social media, you should check which kind of posts get the most reactions from people. Try to know their interests and liking. Use videos, Gif and attractive images to increase the engagement. Be consistent; posting times also matter. Keep all these in mind and experiment continuously till you get the best results.

Social Media has evolved so much. Today big companies want to promote their products and services through social networking sites. For bloggers, Social media sites are the places to increase their networking and social branding.

Facebook and Twitter works great for me. From the starting of my blogging career I have started using these two Social networking sites. There are plenty of reasons that I have chosen them to build my social presence. Some of them are as follows:

• It helps me to connect with like-minded bloggers and peoples worldwide.
• It helps me to get targeted traffic for my offers and marketing campaigns.
• It helps me to make my email list bigger.
• It helps me to increase my conversions rates and leads.
• It helps to get targeted visitors.
• It helps me to increase my brand recognition.

Making most of these social networking is not a hefty job. If you use adequate and effective marketing strategies than these social networking sites can help you get a lot of visitors for your blog.

I have received a lot of emails from my readers that they want to increase their twitter followers and Facebook likes. Content will definitely plays an important role in it. If you want to increase your followers and likes than you must have to deliver quality and relevant content to your users. Keep your Facebook page updated regularly. Don’t shy to follow others in Twitter, it will help you increase your followers.

Share your contents regularly on these sites. Retweet others post in twitter and share others relevant post on Facebook can help you to build a good relationship with fellow bloggers and it will also help you to increase your Brand Loyalty.

With insights into your efforts from Facebook and Twitter, you can identify where your campaign is lacking by analyzing historical data and interpreting numbers. To avoid wasting advertising dollars, it is important that you understand how to do this. In most cases, I recommend hiring a social media advertising expert or company.

It depends on the objectives you have. For pure traffic, Facebook is probably still one of the best, especially if you learn how to leverage viral content, giveaways and contests.

YouTube probably cannot be considered a social network, but it is a social platform and it can also drives a lot of traffic your way if you learn how to produce and promote videos on hot topics.

If you are looking to expand your network or land new clients, on the other hand, LinkedIn can be a very good platform. Some friends of mine are regularly publishing content there and landing many consulting clients as a result.

Social media works great if you focus on one media channel at a time be it Facebook, twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. For me, I’ve been working hard to build my blog’s reputation on Facebook and it’s the #1 traffic generation from social media.

If you’re just starting out and looking for some quick traffic, Facebook is a great place to begin with.

Make sure to find and connect with the influencers and try add value to them by always asking yourself questions like “what’s in it for them?”. That’s how you can grab attention and build your own brand. Also figure out the best times to post on social media sites to get more out of them.

As always Facebook is the way to go in terms of traffic, connections and exposure, their ads are astounding and in a way very much powerful and CHEAPER too than adwords. And more importantly FLEXIBLE. What works for me and my client are video ads, as such in a weeks time we get at least 500+ join request per week and at least 50+ optins per day.

But of course because our niche is on self development which to be honest is a bit saturated already, still the amount of people who are ready to engage in facebook is just limitless.

For reasons of confidentiality I cannot disclose our ads and our products but nonetheless the ROI in fb ads is faster than all other networks combined. It is also easier to A/B test ads and choose the best converting one.

Mark Zuckerberg is really making a killing if you ask me.

I’ve done many experiments with social networks in order to find the one that brings me the most value with less time involved. So far, Linkedin and particularly its content publishing network – Pulse brings me the most traffic and leads.

For several days I’ve also started playing with Google+ Communities and got decent traffic by posting my articles in the right groups.

Facebook has been the most effective platform for helping us grow our business, primarily because it allows us to selectively target the audience most relevant to each piece of content we publish. Since Facebook users tend to scroll through their feeds very quickly and can’t pay attention to every single post they see, we’ve learned that using images helps catch their eye—particularly images with bright, warm colors.

When doing social media marketing is important to format your messages for people. Don’t try to sell, just be social and offer information in a nice and easy to get form.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Youtube. What is different is the way you format your message. If you do it on Twitter it needs to be short and appealing, If you’re on Youtube, obviously it should be a video, on Instagram and Pinterest it needs to be pictures etc.

As I’m mostly interested in making connections and getting traffic to my blog I find Twitter and Facebook working great for me.

On Twitter if you spend 30 mins every day following people from your industry, in several months you will have a 2-3k really targeted audience (followers) which is good one to start with.

I’m using a great tool, which is constantly updated, called MissingLettr to format, distribute and schedule all my social media messages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.

Connect with your folks on more networks (most of social users are multi-channel persons) and also get their email address, phone number or Skype id.

I know many website owners that invested a lot in creating a big fan base on their Facebook pages but with the algorithm change now they get only 1-3% organic reach of their posts. Having multiple ways to connect your audience is always good (and safe).

In a nutshell: Be nice, connect with your audience and format your message accordingly to the social network you target.

[novashare_tweet tweet=””Be nice, connect with your audience and format your message accordingly to the social network you target” by @monetizeinfo” theme=”simple-alt” cta_text=”Click to tweet” hide_hashtags=”true”]

Conclusion

So you read all the contributions. Perfect! I told you it will be worth it. So what’s next ?!

1. Check this great offer of MissingLetter: 4 months on a Personal Plan for only $15

2. I’d like to hear your thoughts on your favorite social media network. Feel free to share your answer in the comments form below.

3. Enter your name and email address in the form below to receive a PDF version with the conclusions of this roundup. It it’s a 3 pages checklist booklet that you can have in hand and do social media marketing as an expert.

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