Home > Blog > Marketing > Get the Biggest Bang for Your Social Media Buck

Get the Biggest Bang for Your Social Media Buck

by | Feb 18, 2014

Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest. G+. Your people don’t hang out on just one of these social media platforms, so you must infiltrate them all!

But balancing a full-time job, writing for your blog, and pitching guest posts takes time. And now you have to update statuses, tweet to connect, take impressive pictures and come up with witty hashtags?

Before you begin with the hair-pulling, consider this: you should focus your biz-building effort on whichever platform your audience prefers. (Click to tweet this idea.)

Let’s take a look at a few online A-Listers to see how this works.

The Write Life has teamed up with Self-Publishing School to create this presentation, “How to Write & Publish Your Book in 90 Days.” In it, you’ll learn how to finish your book in just 30 minutes per day. To sign up for this free training, click here.

Noah Kagan

He has over 13,000 followers on Twitter. Let’s see what happened when he tweeted to sell his latest course:

Pitiful.

Lewis Howes

He built his business on the art of connecting on LinkedIn. What kind of engagement does he get? He’s shown as having 500+ connections and is likely to have more than double that.

Take a look:

Yikes.

Ramit Sethi

Ramit is known for his fanatical testing. He asked the same question on Facebook and on Twitter. Let’s compare the engagement of his audience:

Twitter:

 Facebook:

Facebook is a winner for him, right? Perhaps that’s why he can be found liking and replying to comments there, and rarely on Twitter.

He’s focusing on what gets results and using his social media platforms in a way that works for his business.

Back to Noah Kagan

Let’s see what happens when he sends the same Twitter blast out to his email list instead — a list that is a quarter the size of his Twitter following.

Yeah, baby! There’s gold in that list (for Noah, at least).

What can you learn from this?

1.    Stats do the talking

Take a look at your statistics from your social media efforts, email open/click through rates and discussion on your site. What works? What can you see that’s getting results?

Focus more on this. Build this up before moving onto anything else.

2.    Know your audience

This one’s a given, right? And how exactly do you get to know them? You could ask them where they hang out. That’d be one way. The other way is to experiment. Get to at least 1000 followers and then start experimenting with one of the social media platforms.

Start with the obvious choice for your audience. If your business is design-based or visual, Pinterest would work. If your audience enjoys industry news, then tweet those links.

Over time, if the engagement doesn’t happen, tone it down on the first platform and start with another.

3.    Social media is long term

Overnight success takes time.

First you announce the start of your new social media account to your existing audience, and they sign up. Then you make sure the links are all over your website. Next, you mention it in guest posts and add it to every online signature you have. And over time, it builds.

Noah didn’t start his Twitter account with the followers he has today. It took years to build.

Over to you. What industry are you in and what gets the most engagement from your audience?
no
1
links
no
1
links