9 Social Media Growth Hacks Your Business Needs in 2019

9 Social Media Growth Hacks Your Business Needs in 2019

Here are 9 growth hacks that any business can implement in order to gain the maximum engagement over social media.

1- Get Viral On YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine of this world after Google and it makes sense to promote your business on YouTube. The future is of videos and getting viral on YouTube requires some good skills. Here are some tips that you can use to make your videos get viral on YouTube:

• Research your target keywords before you start creating a video because not all videos can go viral. The keywords should have the potential to earn a lot of views. You can use tools like Rank Tracker to find the best keywords to target on YouTube.
• After you post your video on YouTube, make sure to cross promote it on other channels like LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit, Hacker News etc. Also, tweet your video to relevant influencers and email bloggers. This will help your video to capture as many video views as possible.
• Create short videos and leverage the power of storytelling. The recommended length for your videos is between 5-10 minutes. People prefer watching shorter videos as per a study done by Wistia.
• Analyze the top viral videos related to your niche and find the common patterns. You can use those ideas for creating your next video.
• Use the power of emotions to make your video stronger. People are more likely to watch and share the video if it has excitement, amusement, anger or anxiety.

2- Follow an Optimized Social Sharing Schedule

You need to follow a timeline to regularly post your content on each of your social media profiles. As per a research done, the best time to post content on Facebook is Thursday at 1PM and 2PM. You need to identify the best times to post content on each of your social media channels where your business is active.

Besides, it has been proven that posting the same content more than once increases the chances of generating more traffic from existing content.

Coschedule followed the below schedule and increased its share of traffic from social by over 3000%.

3- Team Up With Influencers

Influencers are people who have a large number of followers. You can tie up with micro influencers and ask them to promote your products or services. As Mercato suggests in this blog post, “sending free samples of your products to Instagram “influencers” can help bring your specialty product to the attention of a vast audience of interested consumers”.

Collaborating with a micro influencer is easy and won’t cost a fortune. You can even publish a roundup of micro influencers in your blog. Have a look at this blog post where 11 fashion bloggers share their number 1 fashion tip. Amazingly, your business will receive a positive response from the audiences when it will get shared and recommended by a number of social media micro influencers.

There are several influencer marketing platforms available where you can find the best micro influencer of your choice. These tools displays the contact information of every influencer or lets you send a direct message to the influencer and help you collaborate with him/her. Your task your teaming up with the influencers becomes easier when you make use of an influencer marketing tool.

4- Leverage The Power of Your Employees

Your employees are your greatest assets who can advocate your brand across social media. Encouraging your employees to become brand advocates is one of the easiest and fastest way to increase your business presence over social media. Follow the below tips to leverage the power of your employees in boosting your brands social presence:

• Identify the employees who have a good social media following.
• Identify which employees regularly share content over social media.
• Launch a contest for your employees and persuade them to share company’s content on their social profiles. Reward employees who are able to generate the maximum engagement from their posts.

• Obtain feedback from your employees to boost brand awareness of the company.

You can make use tools like Smarp to drive employee engagement and advocacy. With the help of this tool, you can streamline information sharing and distribute important pieces of content to relevant employees in a content stream. Below is an example of the Smarp dashboard in action:

The content feed can be personalized as per the choice of the concerned employee which provides a unique experience to every employee. When you create and distribute content among your employees, you are able to create an informed workforce that takes initiative in sharing a word about your brand on their individual social profiles. It’s a great advantage to the company when the employees become content creators. It’s possible to use your brand on things as obscure as grocery bags with logo elements. 

5- Embed Social Media Posts In Your Blog

Embedding social media posts in your blog lets visitors directly engage with your visitors via social media. Content is an important SEO factor and social media shares help the content gain trust in the eyes of Google which in turn helps in organic SEO. Have a look at the below image from Facebook post where you can find the embed code.

Like Facebook, you can embed posts from your Twitter timeline or your Instagram account into your blog posts. No matter whatever social media account you chose, embedding social media posts into your blog posts is bound to give you better engagement.

6- Use Psychology To Your Advantage

You need to understand psychology if you wish to become a good marketer. Most of the humans react in a specific manner and you need to understand the science behind the likes and shares.

Both Dopamine and Oxytocin play a huge role in social media behaviors. This was discussed in this post by Courtney Seiter. Dopamine is a chemical that is released when we want something and by achieving that we sense the feeling of pleasure. This is the reason why people can’t resist tweeting or logging into Facebook to see their timeline. Similarly, Oxytocin is a chemical that is released when we kiss of hug someone. People who are on social media are more likely to trust other because of the presence of this chemical.

People share stuff on social media because they want their friends and family to remain educated, entertained and informed. It helps to strengthen their relationships.

Besides, people like posts of their friends and family because they value that relationship. This proves why influencer backed posts does so well on social media.

Key takeaway here is that there are 2 ways for you to make the people love your brand. Number one, hire an influencer. Number two, take up a social cause and persuade people to share the post because might be a representation of the society they are living. Unique content that can amaze people has the maximum chances of getting viral.

7- Be Seen As A Leader

Angel investor, Brian D. Evans was able to increase social engagement by around 2500% utilizing a simple strategy – “be seen as a leader”. He calls this, “the simplest social media growth hack of all times”.

Under this hack, he tells people exactly what to do like “Type YES if you agree” or “tag someone that you would like to see this” etc. By structuring people what they need to do, he is gaining a lot of engagement on social media on almost all the major platforms.

8- Use The Power of Growth Hacking Tools

Imagine if there was a way to find out the real identity of the people visiting your website from social media. There is a better way to identify the real identity of prospects who are visiting your website with the help of a tool named Leadfeeder. This is an amazing growth hacking tool that lets you convert your site visitors into sales. Here is how you can use Leadfeeder:

Step 1: Integrate Your CRM With Leadfeeder

The first step is the integration of Leadfeeder with your favorite sales and marketing tools that you are currently using.

How to do it?

• Login to the leadfeeder: app.leadfeeder.com
• Visit https://integrations.leadfeeder.com.
• Follow the instructions on the screen.

Tip: You can ask the Leadfeeder support team to do this integration for you.

Step 2: Visit Your Leadfeeder HomePage

Once you have completed the integration process, you will see your own personalized homepage every time you login to Leadfeeder.

In the Leadfeeder home page, you can see the following items:

On the left of the screen, you will see the companies that visited your website in the last X number of days as chosen by you.

On the right side of the screen, you will see your custom feeds that lets you filter your leads by:

• Pages they visit
• Traffic source
• Campaign source
• Quality of the visit
• Custom tags
• Sales status from CRM etc.

Step 3: Create a Custom Sales Feed Depending On Your Requirements

Now, it’s time to extract the real information out of the available data. To do so, you will need to create a custom feed. Here is how to do that:

• Click on “Create new feed”.
• Set a filter based on acquisition medium, user behavior, geographical location etc.
• Give a name to your feed and you’re done.

Here are some sample feeds that you can set up to filter the most relevant leads:

• Companies who have visited your site from Los Angeles and have viewed at least 5 pages of your site.
• Companies who have visited pages related to a particular service.
• Companies that have visited your site using Adwords.

Now, it’s time to sit back and wait for the email alerts to flow in. You will start receiving email alerts as soon as your custom feed criteria gets fulfilled.

You can create separate custom feed for separate users and a personalized dashboard listing relevant companies based on the custom feed created for every user.

When you click on a specific company in your dashboard, you can see all of the details of that particular company like:

• Company size
• Phone number
• Website
• Contact information of potential decision makers of the company. [You can contact the decision makers right from the tool. Isn’t it great?]

Information on what the lead has looked out on your website.

This information is really useful as it reveals the exact needs of your prospects.

9- Use The Power of Interactive Content

Interactive content is a type of content that requires the target audiences active engagement. If you share interactive content on your social profiles then the chances of engagement increases drastically. It is a better way to educate and entertain your audiences.

The following types of interactive content can be shared via social media:

• Quizzes
• Tools
• Contests
• Assessments
• Interactive videos
• Ebooks
• Games

Facebook live videos is a great example of interactive content in action that helps to engage the user in real time. Starbucks posted a live video from Rufus King Park in Jamaica to celebrate National Voter Registration Day. The video was informative and it allowed people to witness the event virtually. Starbucks in return gained a lot of social popularity and brand recognition.

Similarly, the ROI calculator from Symantec is a great example of interactive content in action. It educates the users about the benefits of having a strong and smarter user authentication in order to save the organization.

You can create any type of the interactive content depending on the needs of your audience.

Final Thoughts

You need to work smartly for your next social media marketing campaign. Make use of the above 9 social media hacks to give a winning edge to your campaigns in 2019. Do you know about any other hacks that has given you success recently? Please share with me in the comments below.