30 Brilliant Social Media Marketing Tips From 2011

Via Hubspot Blog

With so many great social media marketing tips getting shared in the blogosphere, we wanted to pass along some of the best tips and ideas that came up in 2011. These are tips that, if you haven't benefitted from them yet, are evergreen enough that you can continue to leverage them well into 2012 to make your social media marketing rock.

1. Write blog content for your target audience, which is not necessarily yourself. 

2. If you’re going to use social media for customer service, mirror your hours of operation on Twitter to the hours of operation you have for your support team. 

3. Measure social media ROI by analyzing how it performs compared to more established channels or advertising methods. 

4. Mobile check-in deals aren’t just for restaurants and bars. 

5. How frequently you blog does count. 

6. Hashtag-stuffing tweets doesn’t work. 

7. If you follow more people than are following you, you could harm your Twitter account’s SEO potential. 

8. Building an online community? Show your power users that you appreciate their contributions. 

9. Blog about the problems your product or service solves – not about the product or service. 

10. Think of marketing as storytelling, and think of your customers as the characters. 

11. Depressing tweets, vague tweets, tweets about your weight loss – and of course, our favorite, the humblebrag - these are all messages that are better kept to yourself. 

12. What does your social media strategy really need? It needs to answer simple questions.

13. Publishing a blog post on your company blog? Post several tweets of that post and track the success of different times and keywords for your followers. 

14. Stop talking about yourself if you want more retweets. 

15. The medium isn’t the message. 

16. Choose to measure social media metrics that tell you how you’re doing based on why you’re doing social media in the first place.

17. Use geo-location Twitter searches to identify local prospects to connect with. 

18. Use social media data to find your key influencers, outline your media plan, and develop your messaging. 

19. Create a Facebook group to stay connected with those you meet at conferences months after the last panel. 

20. Consider the timing of your social media posts – time of day, time of week, and time of year. 

21. You don’t need the voice of influencers – you need your brand advocates. 

22. Have a common name? Use checkusernames.com to test personal brand monikers that will work for your social media handles and domain. 

23. Plan your editorial calendar for what ebooks can result from your blog posts. 

24. If you’re going to tell people to “like” your company on Facebook, have something of value waiting there for them. 

25. If your company makes a mistake on social media – think rogue tweets – step out and own up to the mistake. 

26. Use social media contests as an opportunity to learn more about your customers. 

27. Here are three universal content blueprints to include in your company’s blogs: offer a new opinion, create a killer list, or teach your customers how to do something. 

28. Leverage social search and boost your rankings for target keywords by offering content (ebooks, webinars, etc.) and having community members pay with a tweet. 

29. Include social sharing and follow buttons on your site, your blog, and in your emails. 

30. It seems obvious, but an often disregarded quality of great community and social media managers is great social skills.