Many of us love social media and are addicted to it. But, how many of us are good at it? Most people publish unattractive photos, dumb articles, and make useless comments. One social media lover calls this, “Twitter litter.” I have been using social media a lot for the last year and a half and have learned some interesting truths.
Social Media is great for SEO
I run an outsourcing directory. To promote my SEO for my directory, I use a lot of social media. Google rewards people who use social media effectively. What constitutes the most effective use includes having meaningful dialogues with people on Twitter, getting lots of shares, and interactions, but your total number of followers means very little even though that is what we think we want most! So, I created a few Twitter accounts, a Facebook account, Google Plus, Stumbleupon, and will soon do Pinterest and others too. But, what does really well on my Google Plus account?
It is hard getting followers on a business G+ account
I have been using Google+ for a few months. It is hard to get followers on a business account. My personal account is much easier as I am allowed to follow about 200 people per day which is about 6000 per month. About 12% follow me back which makes it easy to gain some fast growth. Growing the personal account is easy, but growing the business account takes real skill. You can’t gain followers by following others with a limit of five follows per day. So, the only way to gain followers is by posting really good content and commenting on other people’s posts.
Interacting, Plussing and Posting, which is better?
So, every day, I plus around 100 interesting posts on other accounts. I also make comments, especially on the posts of people in the VIP circle who are generally interesting. I gain a few followers from my interactions, but that is slow too. Interacting is not enough, so I post interesting content, but you would be surprised which content does the best.
Most of the outsourcing content out there on Google+ is just not interesting. Most is self-promoting nonsenses that isn’t well written and is not informative. Then, there are some boring articles to supplement the “advertising” articles. The outsourcing articles on Googleplus’ feed generally do not get a single plus, and hardly ever get more than one or two plusses or shares. I try to select only the best outsourcing articles, but my articles don’t do much better than the trash out there. So, I turned to other sources. The truth is that there aren’t that many good outsourcing articles out there. Google’s regular search engine search results sometimes have a few really interesting outsourcing articles. I have learned that outsourcing articles written by highly professional entities such as the New York Times are much better written than the other articles out there. However, some of the smaller bloggers have good content too. It is a question of sifting through a lot of content to find the good stuff.
My findings:
Outsourcing Articles
If I choose the top 1% of outsourcing articles out there, I might get a handful of shares.
General Business Articles
For some reason, I get more shares for articles originally posted by Wall Street Journal. I feel that knowing what to share is less than half as important as finding a good source for articles or photos to share. If you have a source that is popular with your users, you would get much more reliable results. General business is semi-related to my main theme of outsourcing, so it is worth posting in moderation.
International Business Articles
The closest thing to an outsourcing article is one about international business since outsourcing is generally thought of as being done offshore. Some international business articles do okay on my profile.
Success Articles
Success is a theme that typically does well on social media. There are success quotes on Twitter, and success articles. Which success article will be the most successful on your profile? You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. Some articles are more business oriented while others are lighter in nature. Try to figure out what type of crowd you have.
Spiritual Articles
I am working on finding out more about this, but I had very good luck with a post about the benefits of meditation.
General News
It is best to publish general news that has some relevance to your main theme, or that might appeal to your audience. I have had mediocre success with general news. I even tried publishing hot news like the Charlie Hebdo disaster and that didn’t do too well either.
Coffee
Coffee has absolutely nothing to do with business. But, since I learn a lot from watching, I learned that some of the top marketing professionals out there integrate coffee, snacks, and pet themes into their marketing articles. I posted some really good articles about coffee with stunning photos and they did really well on my G+ profile! Posting about coffee will really “perk” up your social media campaigns!
Animals
The most popular photos I’ve posted so far were of animals. Cute cats taking naps, or looking in the mirror, kangaroos, meercats, doggies, and other animals are a crowd pleaser. Most people love animals, and marketing experts understand this.
Travel Photos
In general, people like photos of beautiful places. If you want to attract a large crowd fast, find some viral travel photos and post one per day on your social media account of choice. Boring travel photos don’t work well, and photos that include humans generally don’t win a prize, but stunning scenery wins the game time after time with almost any crowd.
Articles that mean something to you
As a general rule, if something fascinates you, your enthusiasm can influence how the post does on your profile through the metaphysical rule of attraction. Additionally, your profile is about you, so publishing a few articles about what you think is interesting do in fact belong on your profile even if they are off-topic.
Summary
Unfortunately, I am very sad to say this, but my serious posts about relevant business topics have not done that well. Although I try to pick the most interesting articles out there to post on my account, at best, they only get a few likes. At first I was worried about relevancy — whether general business would be appropriate on my account vs. purely outsourcing posts. Unfortunately, I learned that articles about coffee, pictures of beautiful animals and photos of stunning natural scenery are more than ten times as applealing to my business oriented audience than practical business posts. So, I don’t fight it. I publish a mixture of outsourcing, international business, general business, and other types of posts. I get tons of likes every day, and hopefully my accounts will continue to grow!