At Fusion Media, We’ve experimented with lots of different content marketing methods, so we wanted to share with you some of the best ways we’ve found to increase engagement and improve your content strategy when using social media.
A lot of businesses approach us, asking which practical tips we could improve their social media and content marketing.
So here are our best and most practical ways to see a big impact from your actions on social media:
1. Share Images on Twitter: Increase Retweets by 150%
Since Twitter announced inline images, we’ve been experimenting with this change by adding images to a lot of the tweets from our @FusionMediaEU Twitter account and also our clients accounts and have noticed a big difference in the engagement we’re getting.
Using our analytics software, we were able to look at the number of clicks, favorites and Retweets each of our Tweets received.
Tweets with images received 18% more clicks than those without. Our click-through rate did grow, but not by very much. |Our theory on this is that with an inline image, there’s more content for the user to consume without leaving Twitter (which is probably what Twitter wants), so they’re less likely to click-through. Of course, that’s just a theory so it’ll be interesting to see what the data says over a longer time period as we keep experimenting with this.
Tweets with images received 89% more favourites. Favourites increased a lot. Along with Retweets, which received 150% more retweets, this shows a lot more engagement with the Tweets themselves. Clicks, on the other hand, show engagement with the original content.
2. Share Content More Than Once
We often share our blog posts multiple times on social networks, for a few difference reasons. Some of the biggest benefits we get are more traffic, reaching people in different time zones and sharing our content with people who’ve followed us since we last posted it.
More Traffic
The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason to share your content more than once is to drive more traffic than the initial share.
We recently conducted an experiment on our own blog to show how reposting the same content helped to boost traffic.
To get an idea of how many people were seeing and sharing our posts, we looked at the number of Retweets we got when Tweeting a link to one of our blog posts. We can assume from this that actual visits to our posts increased with each Retweet, as well.
With each subsequent Tweet of an existing blog post, we noticed that we got around 75% as many Retweets as the time before.
We’ve also noticed that Tweeting posts from the blog more than once gives us more traffic and more engagement (favorites, Retweets).
2. Hit multiple time zones
Many bloggers are known for posting the same content multiple times, and one reason doing this is to reach your followers in different time zones. We found that this increases the traffic to content, particularly when Tweeting the same link several times:
3. Reach your new followers
Something we’ve noticed at Fusion Media is that a lot of our posts are still relevant months after we publish them. The other thing that changes after we publish a post is that more people follow us on social networks, so if we repost content from our blog that’s six months old, many of our followers will be seeing it for the first time, so they’ll get value out of it even though it’s old content.
You can use a tool like Twitter Counter to track your follower growth, so you know when it’s a good time to repost some of your older content.
3. A/B Test on Social Networks
Since we usually post the same content to Twitter multiple times, we take advantage of this opportunity to test out what headline works best for the blog post.
Here’s how we usually run that kind of experiment:
- Find 2 headlines for an article that you think will perform well.
- Tweet both of these headlines at roughly the same time, at least 1 hour apart. We’ve found that posting the two Tweets both in the morning or both in the afternoon works best.
- Compare the data for each Tweet to find the best headline for your blog post.
4. Reframe Content to Suit Your Audience
Something we try to do each time we post a piece of content is to slightly reframe it so we’re not just repeating ourselves.
This way we can sometimes get double or even triple the amount of engagement by highlighting different elements of the content each time we post it. We often do this on Twitter as well.
Then, taking advantage of Twitter’s new expanded images feature, we publish it as an image and reframe it.
You can simply right click any image on the web to share a new image post on Twitter or Facebook, that according to the latest social media statistics, will garner significant more clicks, Retweets and favorites.
We also try slightly different wording each time we post the same thing.
5. Keep on Top of Your Brand and Find Great Content
Mention is a great tool to help you keep on top of your brand all over the web. It lets you monitor mentions of your brand specifically, as well as industry keywords, competitors and more. When you sign up for an account, the first thing you’ll want to do is create a new alert.
6. Use Followerwonk or Grin to Tweet at Optimal Times
Followerwonk and Grin are tools that we love using at Fusion Media to work out when is the best time for us to tweet.
To get started, head over to Followerwonk or Grin and take a look around.
With regard to Followerwonk, pop your Twitter username into the box and select “analyze their followers” from the drop-down.
When your report is done, you’ll see a graph that shows when your followers are most active.
7. Transparency
Something we’ve found that’s really helped us to bond with our readers and build up a community is to be really open about how we run the company. We share details about Fusion Media and our clients on our news page, as well as in interviews on other sites.
8. Set Up Google Authorship
Google Authorship is not just the photo and byline that appears on search results pages, thought that’s a large part of it.
In addition to the byline, there is a strategic layer to Google authorship. The tie-in with Google+ profiles creates verified connections between content on the web and the creators of the content. This gives Google the ability to identify quality, human-created content.
There are several benefits of setting up Google authorship for your content:
1. Your authorship byline will get you noticed.
As you might expect, the top results on the page get a lot of looks, but so too do the results with rich snippets (and not so much for the results in between).
2. Entries with rich snippets have higher click-through rates.
A study performed by search marketing firm Catalyst found that clicks improved 150% with Google authorship.
3. Authorship is an advantage to the little guy.
Authorship offers a competitive advantage. A recent study found that only 3.5% of Fortune 500 companies are actively using authorship. Until they do, they are giving a big opportunity to the rest of us.
Authorship may be the future of search.
Don’t take it from us. Take it from Google’s Eric Schmidt. He sees a future where identity plays a big part in search results.
Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results.
That’s it for this month! We hope some of these tips might be useful for you.
If you want a marketing partner that is passionate about helping you grow your business then get in touch. It’s what we’re best at.
