I can't even begin to tell you how many
times I've run into social media
marketers and they automatically want
to know about traffic generation. Forget
about niche research, forget about
consumer intelligence, don't worry
about setting up the right site
to get in front of the right target audience eyeballs.
Let's just skip straight to the "good stuff." That's the kind of mindset that I run into all the time, and that's why a lot of people struggle in this game.
You have to understand that until and unless you find yourself barking up the right tree, you're just going to be chasing your tail. I know I'm using a lot of dog analogies, but these are the most appropriate. Most people are simply just chasing their tails and wasting a whole lot of time doing stuff that doesn't really add to their bottom line.
A lot of these, and I would guess all of them, can be quickly dispensed with if people only did niche targeting ahead of time. In other words, know your audience. Since you have a clear profile of who your target audience is, the next step is to go to these different social media platforms and find them there.
Believe it or not, whatever it is you are promoting, regardless of how esoteric, obscure or weird it may be, there are already people on social media platforms talking about or showing interest in whatever you are promoting, I know, it sounds crazy, it sounds weird, but it's absolutely true. Your job as a marketer is to find those audiences on these social media platforms.
The way to do this, of course, is to identify your business' target audience. Sadly, most marketers don't even bother with this. Instead, they just look at social 34
media marketing as a simple task of finding traffic. That's it. That's the name of the game. That's all there is to it. If you want to be successful, you need to be clear about who your target audience is.
And believe me, this is not always easy. You're going to run into the temptation of making "educated guesses" about who your target audience members are. Most of the time, that doesn't work. Thankfully, there is an easier way. The more you take random shots in the dark, making all sorts of wild guesses, the more money and time you will lose.
There is a shortcut here: Find your competitors. Seriously. Just find them. And, let me tell you, regardless of how weird, esoteric or seemingly "unknown" your niche is, there will at least be one competitor on social media.
Find that organization or business and let them do your niche and target audience research for you. Since they've already started and they are already speaking to your audience, find out who your competitors are and look at their social media profiles.
Reverse engineer who they're following. Pay attention to who they're targeting.
Look at how they categorize themselves. In the most simplest terms, pay attention to the hashtags they use with their content.
These clues should be enough to give you an idea of where to start. This way, you get a head start. You're not completely stuck in the dark and absolutely clueless as to what to do. Instead, you have some objective tried and proven information you could work with.
Pick Your Target Niche
You have to remember that every
business can be positioned in at
least one of two ways. The bigger
your niche, the more angles you
would have at your disposal. You
can look at different sub-segments
of your niche.
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You need to understand how this works because you might think you have a clear niche, but it may well turn out that there are many different layers or tiers to that niche. There might be different subsegments there.
You should have a clear understanding of what your niche is generally, and what subsegments exist within that larger niche. Again, you can reverse engineer your competitors to take a stab at this. Regardless, you need to do this. You need to get this information.
Now that you have an idea of what your target niche is, go to the different platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Now, look at whether these places have sizable content areas or messaging areas like Facebook pages, groups, Google Plus communities, Twitter hashtags, Pinterest Pinboards, and existing YouTube channels.
Pay attention to these places and see if your niche is big enough on those different platforms. If you notice that a particular platform doesn't really feature that much content for your specific niche, this is a red flag. The demand may not be there. The audience size might not be worth your while.
On the other hand, if you see there's a lot of videos regarding the topics that you're going to be hitting, this may be a good sign. But you need to do another level of analysis. Pay attention to the number of competitors you have.
If there seems to be a huge number of competitors fighting over the same niche, then this is going to be a problem. But if it turns out that there's a lot of content targeting your niche, but they're only produced by a handful of people or organizations, this is an encouraging sign.
Also, pay attention to how active your target audience members are. Look at the content that's being shared regarding your niche. Do you see a lot of engagement? Do people share this stuff? Is the hashtag quite prevalent?
Look for these and other objective indicators of activity. When you wrap your mind around these indicators, then you should have a clear idea of whether you should target your niche at a particular platform or whether you should ignore a platform altogether.
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List Out Your Niche Indicators
While you're doing reverse engineering,
pay attention to how your niche is
indicated on platforms. These involve
hashtags, categories, keyword targets,
labeling patterns, and tags. Use these to
do the analysis I described above. Again,
in any niche, there are sub-
niches, so your goal here is to find a sub-niche or a way of positioning your content so you don't run into a ridiculous amount of competition.
You're still tapping into a sizable pool of demand, but you're not making things impossible for yourself by running headlong into well entrenched professional competition. You will probably need to keep experimenting with different sub-niches until you find one that is promising enough.
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Chapter 07 - Your secret Social Media
Marketing Weapon: Content Curation
Now that you have picked the specific
sub-niche that you're going to be
targeting as well as finished doing
advanced research on where your
sub-niche or niche segment
audiences are located on social media
platforms, the next step is to find
content.
I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you stand to save a lot of money.
The bad news is that you need to put in a lot more time and pay attention to details. There are no two ways about it. You cannot drop the ball when it comes to the quality of the content that you are going to be sharing on your social media accounts.
Each and every piece of content you share must build your brand. This is non negotiable. You can't just pick random pieces of content that somehow, some way, has something to do with your niche.
That's not going to help you get the right eyeballs. That's not going to help you establish the kind of credibility and authority you need to eventually convert highly specific and qualified traffic from social media into cold, hard cash.
What is Content Curation?
As I've mentioned above, you stand to
save a lot of money with content
curation. This should be obvious.
After all, you're not going to be using
the content that you yourself created.
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Content curation is all about picking
other people's content and sharing
those materials
on your social media accounts. This creates a win-win situation.
Since you're sharing links and descriptions of such content, the creator of that content gets free traffic. You, on the other hand, get to build up your credibility because people are rewarded for following your accounts with highly targeted, highly specific, value added content.
Everybody wins. The user wins, you win, and of course, the original content creator comes out ahead. This is how it's supposed to work. You win big time because you save a tremendous amount of money not having to create a huge amount of original content.
If you've ever tried to write your own stuff or outsourced content creation, whether in the US or to other parts of the world, it can get quite expensive very quickly.
Content curation enables you to build credibility with your audience in a very inexpensive way. You use other people's content. You get to entertain them, build credibility, and gain their trust. The downside here is the time. Sure, you're not spending greenbacks, but you're definitely going to be spending time.
As I've mentioned above, you cannot be indiscriminate when you are trying to do content curation. Whatever goodwill you have built up for your brand will go up in smoke if people catch on to the fact that you are just randomly curating and spreading low quality content that may have something to do with your niche.
That's not going to cut it. Not by a long shot.
Adopt the Right Content
Curation Strategy
Now that you know where your
target audience members are on
social media platforms, you build
credibility by populating your
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social media accounts with highly credible, high authority third party content.
This is called curation.
In between those materials, you are going to be sharing your own original content. From time to time, you're going to call people to action to take a look at the incentives you're giving away for them to join your mailing list. This is how you play the game.
When people follow you, they are rewarded with top notch content. It doesn't really matter whether you produced that material or it was written by somebody else, your followers get rewarded for following your account.
They get niche-specific material. Eventually, you build trust with them because you only send them the very best materials. They start paying attention to your own materials. More importantly, they start noticing the content you share, which actively encourages them to sign up to your mailing list.
This is the key. You intersperse your own original content. You create an impression of quality in their minds because you're sending only the very best third party content. You then mix in your own original content which is of the same quality as the other stuff you're sending. Eventually, they warm up to your brand, and this is where your call to action content comes in.
You call them to action regarding the freebies you're giving away. Maybe you're giving away software, a booklet, discount codes, or even a full blown book, it doesn't matter. You are ethically bribing them to enter their email addresses so they can download the incentive. That's how you build up your mailing list.
On top of all of this, when people join your mailing list, you call them to action to share the emails that you're sending them. Maybe you should ask them to forward that email to their friends. Maybe you would want them to copy and paste the material and post it on their Facebook wall.
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The Best Part
The best part to content curation is
that it's very easy to automate.
Seriously. This is one way of content
promotion that is very automation-
friendly. You only need to get the
URLs of the third party content that
you're curating and plug them into an
Excel sheet. You then convert the
file into a CSV file, which is then imported by social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph.
You don't have to manually enter everything. You don't have to schedule everything by hand. You can do all of this through software. Isn't that awesome?
You get to build credibility while at the same time minimizing work.
Now, with that said, you need to pay special attention to content quality.
High Attention to Detail is the Key
You have to resist the temptation of
running basic keyword searches on
Google or on social media platforms and
grabbing anything that is somewhat
related to your niche. That is a one way
ticket to brand destruction. You worked
hard to build your social
media brand, it really would be a shame to see all of that go up in smoke because the content you're curating is very unpredictable when it comes to quality.
There may be several days where you're sending the very best, cutting edge reports on your niche, followed by a few days of just completely worthless 41
content. What do you think prospective fans would think? Either they would think that your brand is unreliable or you're unprofessional. Whatever the case may be, you're not going to be convincing people that your brand focuses on the very best in your niche.
You need to be very discriminating when you select your content. You have to read through the materials. Make sure that the content is alive, updated and well-written. This, of course, takes time. The trade-off, obviously, is that you don't have to spend money.
Regardless, you need to pay close attention to the content that you're sharing because it represents your brand. The quality it contains either makes your brand look good or erodes your brand. It's your choice.
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