The Social Media Beast

[CCarter]

The Social Media Beast

I want to keep this discussion as an open discussion so people can share their own tips on social media.

Social Media is a great source of traffic - but let's get serious, it's not the end all of traffic leaks. What's happen lately is people are under the impression when I state non-SEO traffic, the first idea that comes to mind is social media, that's literally their only answer - unfortunately you are still limiting yourself to a handful of sites, albeit sites with the most traffic, but not necessarily sites which are targeted if you want leads that close.

Here is an tweet of a click bait that got me the other day:

I'm not going to lie, I clicked it - then I got this instead:

Looks like Instant Checkmate fucked up... monies down the drain... But I still took the risk, but I never found that girl. In the end I might remember "Instant Checkmate" for some reason in the future for background checks - so the branding is there, but realistically I'm not in the target audience at the moment at least. Not going to lie, I didn't even read the whatever tagline was posted. Was this successful, I dunno, but that's what I see companies doing in social media, just there for the clicks and traffic, completely unfocused.

I'm not a big social media person, but I'll utilize it as a source of communication TO my audience. There are more superior individuals then I at social media, but what I do know is, you have to study everything which you are about to attack, learn the platform in and out before engaging then start lightly. Here is some nice data for you Facebookers:

^^ 9am and 1pm EST seem to be the best times to post content for maximum reach, which makes sense, when people are logging into their work computer for the first time and right after lunch time.

Here are some resources to help you guys as with your social media posts - pre-written tweets which you just have to adjust for your own marketing - things like "happy holidays" for Winter time, and thanksgiving tweets, as well as ideas for mondays (has tabs):

Social Updates Excel File

^^ that should get you along further then what most of you guys are running off of.

My personal preference is to stay the authority figure, so not flooding people with hourly links over and over of self-promotion, but when I do tweet every other day or two days, it's something insightful, funny, or will add real value. I try to keep to my 1:20 ratio for self-promotion, but my brand's twitter accounts can go to almost 1:1 or 1:5 ratio - cause that's what the audience expects. Again from an authority perspective it's hard to go wrong by delivering fresh news within your industry especially if it's something that will effect your audience's lives - directly or indirectly. Those ideas that do touch your audience's lives should also become blogposts on your main site so it shows you are up to date with what's going on within your industry.

One thing I will say is #hashtags are critical to reaching New audiences, and knowing what hashtags are popular within your niche is crucial, that's where proper keyword research comes into play (we'll go in this in-depth in an upcoming lesson), then using the following tools to start experimenting with different hashtags:

1. https://www.hashtags.org/analytics/SEO/
2. http://hashtagify.me/hashtag/SEO (Table Mode)
3. What's trending by location (http://trendsmap.com/)
4. Tags For Likes http://www.tagsforlikes.com/ **New**

 

[MetaData]

I've said this before but when it comes to social media, a lot of people just go through the motions but they don't really put a lot of thought into their strategy and they never really experience any results. You'll see people who are like "Welp, I filled up my buffer with new posts so I'm good to go, I can mark that off my to-do list..." Nah man, not quite. I'm going to be focusing on Facebook in particular in this post, but it applies to other networks too, for the most part. This is all first-hand stuff, but what works for me might not work for your pages.

*insert cliche marketing stock photo here*

Building your page
Let's start with creating the page. If you have a website about athlete's foot remedies or dandruff cures or the side effects of smoking crack (Smaller niche sites), or even like "John's Car Insurance Shop" (Business pages), then think again before you brand the page you plan on building for traffic after your site because people aren't going to be FANS of those things. You'll still get some people clicking "like" when you setup your initial campaigns, but you'll be paying a LOT more for those likes and your reach will always suffer. Who wants to share posts from pages with names like that? Almost nobody, that's who. You want stuff to go viral when you post it on Facebook which means people need to want to share it. Usually, that means you need to entertain them, but at the very least you need to absolutely not EMBARRASS them for sharing it. For some sites, this is easy because you're building a brand that people will actually be fans of (Works great for magazine style sites, trickier for micro-niche or resource/info style sites because they're inherently not as entertaining or shareable. More on that in a moment or two...)

So instead of naming your page X, try Z...
John's Car Insurance Shop = "Car Selfie Club"
Athlete' Foot Remedy HQ = "Stop Fit Shaming"
The Side Effects of Smoking Crack = "Strength Through Motivation"
Cheap Dandruff Cure Guide At Home = "Is it snowing in here or is it just your dandruff?"
*Some things just won't work very well on FB at all unless you go more broad, and really tailor the content on your site that you'll be sharing on the page, to fit on the page. Nobody wants to like a FB page about being addicted to crack. For the dandruff thing we turn it around, but even that is IFFY... I wanted to show how you can take a humorous approach, but you still might be alienating your audience there. YMMV.

Basically there's no rule that says the FB page you focus on building up and using for traffic has to have the same name as your website... This one thing alone trips up SO many people and prevents them from EVER getting anything out of their FB pages so they end up just buying a bunch of fake likes and submitting all of their posts to it and just going through the motions, using it as a way to falsely boost some "authority" metric that can't even be quantified instead of taking advantage of one of the most massive and consistent traffic source that has ever existed.

As for your like campaigns to get the ball rolling on your new page, what I do is I start a bunch of them with a wide range of different pictures, different copy, targeting different interest groups from all different countries. I like to use penny likes to get the ball rolling, because you can get 1000 for about $10-$20 which really isn't all that much more expensive than fake likes and these people will actually interact with your page. Granted, you might not want a lot of 3rd world traffic if your site is targeting a US (or w/e) audience, so you'll want to switch that over to target wherever your target audience lives eventually. I start broad, and I keep narrowing it down and testing how to get cheaper and cheaper likes. If your site is in English, make sure you're at least targeting people who speak English. This will probabaly be the most controversial part of this post, but I'd rather start off with 5k - 10k likes for around a penny each and THEN start my campaigns that are actually going after my target audiences.

Really eye catching image, simple copy.. I've found that asking a question helps a lot to get people engaged, and testing different targeting and you'll be down to 0.01 - 0.02 likes in no time.

Posting to your page
Carter posted a screenshot showing two times of day that got the best reach and he's definitely on to something there in terms of there being a best time, but I'll go a step further. Don't just start using those times and thinking you're set "Cos that's when Carter said to post...", all that tells you is the best times for HIM to post to HIS page. TEST like a mofo because every page is different. In my experience, different times work better for different pages. Use the Insights that Facebook gives you, see where your audience is from. If you're posting at 9am but your audience is still asleep because it's 6am local for them, then you aren't unlocking the full power of your page and probably not even realizing it. If your page attracts folks who probably drive an hour to work, you're going to want to post maybe at their lunch breaks VS during the morning commute as you would if your page had people who ride the subway or the bus in the morning. Some pages will do better with evening posts, some will do terrible. If your fans all live in Thailand, you can pretty much flip the clock around so if you're posting at 3pm from North American, it's the middle of the night in Thailand.

So what about when you have fans from all over the world? You can target your posts based on gender, location, etc... So if you have a significant amount of your audience that's in another location, you can have your post go up for them at a different time.

You need to connect with your audience
For example, I've had posts completely flop that were sent out to one page with xxx,xxx followers, and had them go massively viral sent to another page with a similar follower count and both pages are in exactly the same niche but they perform very differently. Different audiences are DIFFERENT, so if I can have such different results from two pages that most on-lookers would consider fairly similar audiences in the same niche, imagine the difference you'll experience from pages in different niches - so that's why any advice about how to manage a FB page has to be taken with a grain of salt. It's not that the people giving the advice don't know what they're talking about, it's that they know what works for THEIR pages.

The difference between the two pages I just mentioned and the reason they'll get such different results with the same content is because one of them is BRANDED after the site itself which has a ravenous following, and the other is named after the niche that the site covers. The audience of the site itself is so specific in what they like, whereas the other page is more broad. So broad type content for that niche works great on the one page, but it really has to fit a certain mold to work on the branded page and they'll tear you to pieces if you miss the mark - whereas the other page will eat it up.

So think of your FB page now. What if you've been missing the mark this entire time, without even realizing it? You won't know until you've tested things out.

How your posts show up
Think about how things LOOK to the people who are seeing your posts. Are you using dumb little blurry images, or are you using big images to take advantage of every single pixel FB is willing to give you (In regards to image posts.)

And for article posts, don't forget about your featured image. If it's always showing up as a little thumbnail, you need to change that. (Here's some information from the horse's mouth: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#images)

Here's what you DON'T want your Facebook posts to look like...

(We'll give Mr. Dean a break since we can't expect every SEO to have their social game on point too.)

As for straight up image posts, I think of image posts like Tracy Mcgrady, and article posts like Vince Carter. T-Mac sets up Vinsanity for the slam dunk.

What makes content go viral?
A big part of it is the page itself, having the right platform to make something go viral. It's so rare for anything to go viral "by accident", which seems to be what a lot of people are hoping for. Load up buffer with their 10 latest posts and crossing their fingers. In reality, unless you're specifically running a site to cater to your FB audience, a lot of your content WILL NOT have that viral potential if you're writing "seo articles" and content to inform people about such and such in your niche.
People go on Facebook to waste time, to be entertained, and to showoff.
If you have a FB page for a business or for an MFA type site or anything that doesn't consistently put out content with viral potential, DON'T post every single blog update to your Facebook. This is a huge mistake that just about everybody who's testing the waters with FB makes and it screws them up because they're killing their reach. When you post some boring shit to your Facebook, and nobody likes or interacts with it, it's going to have a negative impact on your future posts because you're telling Facebook that you aren't putting good stuff out there so they're going to throttle back how many people see your future posts. The flipside, obviously, is if you're putting out content that gets liked and shared a bunch then Facebook is going to turn up the dial and you'll have an easier time reaching a larger audience moving forward.

Things to keep in mind

• You can't just throw up a "Like this on FB!" button and expect to have your content get likes and shares that way, because the VAST majority if your likes are going to come from the FB side of things, not from on-page. People are way more likely to click like and share when they see shit in their timelines, not when they're on your page. Granted, if they end up on your article via FB and they like it and there's a share button on the bottom, that's gravy... But putting up social share buttons on an article that's getting primarily SEO traffic, you're trying to mix water and oil.
• You can definitely come up with "seo articles" that also have viral potential, it doesn't have to be one or the other.
• There's no point in debating anymore whether REAL social is going to be better than fake social for seo, or whether social has an impact at all. Blackhatters and gonna blackhat, whitehatters and gonna whitehat, and the guys somewhere in the middle are going to enjoy long-term traffic sources that benefit from the best of both worlds.
• Just turning something into a top 10 list doesn't mean it has viral potential.
• Using Facebook's boost feature is a good way to get some initial exposure. Again, TEST. Don't just take their recommended settings and dump money at it.

 

[Capital]

^This is probably one of the most important social media posts I've ever read.

Think about the implications, people:

• You can create broadly focused entertainment pages with the sole purpose of... (you guessed it) entertaining people. (this means rarely link out externally, but keep the content ON THE PAGE). Look at "God's" facebook page to see how this works.
• When you're creating money websites that are tangentially related to your FB entertainment page, you can easily siphon off a percentage of your "Entertainment" followers for traffic. This translates into more likes and interaction for your money site's FB page, thus increasing your reach for free.
• You can duplicate this process for as many loosely related money sites as you'd like.

This is a crucial part of how you flip $xx,xxx sites in 8-12 months.

Thanks MetaData, that was brilliant.

 

[MetaData]

@Capital Thanks for the kind words. I can't take much of the credit because a lot of this was either taught to me or things I picked up thanks to the opportunity to play with other people's pages. Until then, I hadn't been able to place all of the pieces together on my own.

I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is just to try different things until you dial into exactly what works for your page, your audience, your niche, your goals for that traffic... Small details can make a big difference like what time of day you post, what your picture looks like, who you target your posts to, but ultimately you need good content that people want to share or it's all moot. Not trying to go all "content is king" on you, because I'm just defining "good" as whatever it takes to get your audience interacting with it while accomplishing whatever other goals that content may have.

The CC9 are working on some homework now, to come up with polarizing ideas for content. That can work really well on FB because people that like it and agree with it will share it, and people who dislike it and disagree with it will also share it to talk about how they disagree with it. You can boost it to show up in the feeds of people that will get their jimmies russled by it, and you can boost it to show up on the feeds of people who will agree with it and you can sitback with popcorn as the comments section pops off while you collect your sweet, sweet organic reach.

 

[CCarter]

This might help some people as well: How To Steal Your Competitor’s Social Media Followers

 

[vinnypolston]

Alright. Seriously awesome stuff here guys. I just came across this and... it's so genius and simple at the same time. On beardbrand.com at the bottom. You see those social media links? These.

Hover over the YouTube button. What URL does it go to? See that extra bit at the end?

?sub_confirmation=1

Click and you get this right when visiting their YouTube page.

Obviously if someone is going out of the way to find your social links and click it... they are at least somewhat interested in your stuff. This is just giving a nudge in the right direction. Simple. Probably effective. :thumbsup:

 

[vinnypolston]

Dropping this in the thread from @Kevin. Great Instagram overview

Some cool stuff for Instagram, essentially a free fully outsourceable way to build your *real* follower count.

First off, focus your account. What's it going to be about? Decide and stick to it.

Then:

1. Go to Iconosquare
2. Use top 5 popular hashtags in the SECOND comment, not your caption.
3. Use the top hashtag for your photo subject + 3 more in that same comment.
4. See photos for top hashtag for your photo (e.g. if you posted a buddha picture, #buddha is the go-to hashtag)
5. Have an outsourcer like as many photos as you want them to, comment #love, and follow.
6. Have them put that follower in a specific group so you can unfollow later.

You will see ~10% followback if you just follow, and up to 33% if you like, comment, and follow.

 

[Kevin]

Thanks boss. If only Instagram allowed you to do this at rapid scale, you could build a great following. But they rate limit 3rd party access, so do this a bit a day, not too fast. @vinnypolston

 

[RomesFall]

Thanks boss. If only Instagram allowed you to do this at rapid scale, you could build a great following. But they rate limit 3rd party access, so do this a bit a day, not too fast. @vinnypolston

I do this with Tumblr... I follow 200 people every day, get around a 10% followback rate. I use iMacro to automate, know this could be a drawback on a mobile app though.

This equates roughly to 70-140 new followers a week, not including any random follows or posts that start to pick up traction. In reality on a brand new account, with really minimal effort you can easily average 200+ followers a week... Over time this really adds up.

Edit: Here's the iMacro for those interested.

1. Login to Tumblr
2. Head to your niche e.g. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/NICHEHERE
3. Find an image with a lot of notes and take a mental note of its position top image is POS=1
4. Open iMacro for Firefox
5. Create a new macro with the below code:

VERSION BUILD=8810214 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
SET !ERRORIGNORE YES
WAIT SECONDS=1
TAG POS=1 TYPE=SPAN ATTR=CLASS:note_link_current
WAIT SECONDS=1
TAG POS={{!LOOP}} TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Follow

6. Be sure to replace the first line of code with your current version of iMacro which you can do by finding any other script and doing 'right click' and 'edit'.
7. In the code TAG POS=1 corresponds to which image you want to target followers of on the notes.
8. Set the bot to loop 200 times and no more as Tumblr will only let you follow 200 max per day (last time I checked).

Enjoy.

RF

 

[CCarter]

Might be worth checking out: https://followerwonk.com/

 

[RomesFall]

Might be worth checking out: https://followerwonk.com/

Excellent suggestion, also these two are pretty handy;

https://app.buzzsumo.com/top-content
http://socialmention.com/

 

[Kevin]

@RomesFall Would love to see results of your Tumblr efforts past the follower growth (traffic to site, etc)

 

[RomesFall]

@RomesFall Would love to see results of your Tumblr efforts past the follower growth (traffic to site, etc)

On the old Tumblr account I stopped purposely growing followers around 7-8 months ago... My girlfriend keeps the profile alive, but she's not really all that understanding that re-blogs don't count as original pieces of content... Really I let her do it because she's addicted, likes the idea that 'she' has thousands of followers and it at least retains some of those...

The site it is still linked to by the blogs homepage in the header, the actual site has nothing on there anymore, it got hacked and I hadn't backed it up, which is unfortunate because it was making money.

So here's the monthly referrals in December - Now from 0 original posts, no links on re-blogged content & of course no real strategy in place.

If I revived that profile and site, I'm sure that I could be getting closer to 1000-2000 a month just by posting and growing. Right now my plans are set firmly on what I'm doing in my Journey thread, so there's not going to be time for this until maybe the end of the year!

It's an asset though that's for sure