7 Untapped Social Media Tactics For Smart Bloggers

This is a guest post by Abrar Mohi Shafee, the AhaGEMS leaderboard topper of March. He is a teen blogger with innovative ideas for blogging and marketing. In this post, he highlights the social media marketing strategy that bloggers should use to be successful. ~ Editor.

Are you one of those die-hard marketers who spend hours after hours on social media? Take my advice; give it a break and rehash your approach.

One lesson I learned about social media is “work smarter, not harder”.

I came to this conclusion after realizing that ½ hour of smart work can pay off far better than a full 1 hour’s hard work.

Yes, you heard it right, and that is what I’ll discuss here.

Smart work doesn’t refer to the influential. You don’t have to be an influencer to be smart. But you can be the real S.M.A.R.T. person from day one of your journey.

How? Simply because S.M.A.R.T. means being:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Attainable

R – Relevant

T – Time-bound

Here in this post, I will share 7 untapped social media tactics that I tried, and you too can adopt this “S.M.A.R.T. approach”.

Social Media Marketing Strategy For Smart Bloggers

You need to be smart to be successful as a blogger. Social media is a great tool and you need a plan of action to make the best of it.

I present the social media tactics that should be a part of your blogging strategy.

1. Post Timing

Are you posting day and night on social media expecting higher conversion, higher engagement, and higher traffic? Unfortunately, that will not happen the way you think.

A big factor in social media is post timing. It’s scientifically proved that there are some specific days and times, where posts get better engagement.

Your social fans and followers would have a specific time table to use those social media sites. By delivering content on the right time, there would be an increase both in traffic and click through rate.

According to Quick Sprout, the best timetable of social media posting is:

Platform Name	Best Days to Post	Best Time of The Day to Post
Facebook	Thursday, Friday	1pm, 3pm, 9am – 7pm
Twitter	Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday	12pm, 5pm, 6pm
LinkedIn	Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday	10am – 11am, 7am – 8am, 5pm – 6pm
Pinterest	Saturday	8pm – 11pm
Google+	Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday	9am – 11am

 

P.S.: There is doubt that it may vary from location to location, business to business. Though the suggested timetable is standard, for all businesses and websites.

2. Platform Wise Content Selection

Content selection is another important factor for higher social media engagement. Before I proceed, let me explain why.

Every popular social media platform has people from all different industries, but there are variations in the majority.

Some have majority in business people, some in celebrities, and some other in ordinaries.

By posting the most relevant content to the relevant people, you can make an increment in traffic and engagement.

All we need to determine is, who is the audience and what are the most relevant materials for them.

According to Add This, following are the high performing materials based on different platforms:

Platform Name	Content Types
Facebook	Quizzes, Heartwarming Stories, Entertainment News
Twitter	Business, Breaking News
LinkedIn	Industry News
Pinterest	Recipes, Fashion, DIY Projects
Google+	Deals, Coupons, Celebrity News, Sport Articles

3. Hashtag Researching

Are you done with just adding one or two hashtags randomly in each of your social media posts?

Nope. That is identical but not smart marketing.

Hashtags have huge potential, and adding them without researching is like throwing a bunch of stones without targeting.

I’m sure you will not want to lose your energy in untargeted marketing.

By hashtag researching, you can expand your reach, gain more exposures and drive more people to your website.

So now you could ask, how to research hashtags and pick the best one?

Ritetag is my favorite researching tool when it comes to hashtags.

You can learn about a hashtag’s frequency, popularity, reach, and most importantly, it will suggest which hashtag is best to use distinguishing them with green marks.Alternatively,  there are more handy tools you can use for hashtag researching:

• Tagboard
• Hashtagify.me
• Hashtags.org

4. Reciprocal Interaction

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. We all know this is the third law of Motion by Sir Isaac Newton.

It is applicable to all actions, so why not in social media.

Reciprocal relationship in social media is very practical and believe me, this is the one aspect that can drive some insane traffic to your blog.

You share mine, and I probably share yours. This is how it works.

News can spread to hundreds of people, from mine and your audiences, and those audience’s audiences.

Perhaps, you doubt if it does work? The answer is apparently “yes”. Because you shared someone’s articles, he or she would more likely show appreciation by sharing yours.

You can see that it happens all the time. Though there are some exceptions.

If I share Bill Gates post, I am pretty sure I will not get any interaction from him. Why? Maybe because of his time limitation or he is too popular.

However, if I do it for my dearest friends, I can expect returns and some good interactions.Here is my sample of interaction with Carol Amato:

5. Visualizing Post

Social media is going visual.People love to see images more than text. Why? Because the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than the text.

I think, the following statistics will convince you:

• Photos on Facebook can get 53% more likes and 104% more comments than an ordinary Facebook post. (Source: HubSpot)
• Images in Twitter can get 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets than an average non-image tweet. (Source: BufferBlog)

Looks like images are a must in social media, isn’t it?

You should visualize your social media posts with appealing images that serve the purpose visually.

If you create featured images for your blog, you may attach it when sharing. That can increase the conversion.

You may also create a separate one or grab one from someone else with their permission and proper attribution.

Visual content not only mean images, but also anything what visually serves information. Such as:

• Videos
• Presentations
• Infographics
• Memes

I wrote an in-depth article on distinctive visual marketing. Maybe you should check the post to learn some advanced ways to visualize content.

6. Adding Social Meta Tags

Did you ever wonder how to increase social sharing effectiveness? If not, then I’d advise you to go for social meta tags.

Social meta tags will enable rich snippets on sharing. Whenever your website URL will be shared on social media, the crawler bots will import meta tags to give it a rich, semantic look.

I am sure you’ve seen it when posting links on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

Rich social shares can make solid eye-stops. As a result, people feel more attracted, and the click through rate (CTR) gets a significant increase.

So, social meta tags can prove very helpful in case of generating more clicks.

Unfortunately, each social media site has their own style of meta tags. So, we have to add it separately to make it work on different platforms.

The thing is there is a ton of social media sites. So we should pick the platforms that are relatively popular.

The following four types of meta tags are recommended by the industry experts:

• Facebook Open Graph
• Twitter Cards
• Pinterest Rich Pins
• Google+ Rich Snippet

They will require some coding skill.

Moz has a beautiful guide on adding social metadata to a template. I would advise you to see it. Alternatively, you could use the following plugins if you are on WordPress:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• WordPress Social Sharing Optimization

7. Leveraging Platforms That You Didn’t

When I got into the blogging profession, I thought nothing else but Facebook is the only one that can drive me massive traffic.

The oversight was gone as soon as I joined Twitter. My mind expanded more when I joined Google+. Thereafter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so forth.

One thing I learned by upgrading to new platforms is that each of them has its own qualities and styles. Each of them has something to serve you.

So smart social media marketing is not picking 1-2 handy platforms but picking all potential platforms.

It is not right to blame a platform for not generating traffic, instead blame the strategy and look for fields of improvement.

You already know which are the popular social networks. However, here I want to mention a few platforms that will present a next-gen social networking experience for bloggers:

• The ABC: A blog community that has turned into an active social network of bloggers.
• Triberr: A beautiful networking site to share and connect with bloggers and their contents.
• BizSugar: A site for connecting with small business bloggers and their curated materials.
• Kingged: An internet marketing community sharing and connecting with each other.

“Content-based marketing gets repeated in social media and increases word-of-mouth mentions; it’s the best way to gather buzz about a product.” ~ Marsha Collier

Wrapping Up

Social media websites are bound with great potential.We are just one step behind to earn the keys.

There are two types of people in on the social media platforms. One, who work with strength while the other, who work with talent.

Both are necessary as a person, but in case of social media marketing, I would suggest you to use your talent.

Why? Because social media can cost you a lot of your time. Being smart, you can save the majority of it and the result could be far better than the average.

By having a social media marketing strategy you make more out of less.

So why be late; it is time to be the real S.M.A.R.T. guy or gal on social media!

Over To You –

What do you do to work smartly as a blogger? How do you use the social media and what are your social media tactics? Share in the comments.