Social Media Marketing Tips for 2017

With the season wrapping up, it is time to start thinking about the lessons of the last year and how we can adjust and grow our marketing strategy for 2017.

Staying on top of the rapid changes in Website optimization, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing and off-line integration can be the competitive advantage you are looking for.

Let us take break it down over the next few posts here, starting with the changes in

• Social Media Marketing
• Structured Data
• Mobile Content Consumption

With respect to Social Media Marketing, two major developments have emerged recently; mobile phone usage, and a growth in the number of marketing channels specific to demographics.

Mobile continues to be huge, and there is still high growth in the use of mobile devices for research, comparison and shopping. Certainly, social media has a big play on mobile, and large changes are in the works.

There is the growth on the consumer side - unlimited data plans, bigger phones, cheaper tablets, more comprehensive cell phone networks, intuitive search, device trust and familiarity.

There is growth on the producer side - mobile optimized websites, intuitive search and structured data search results, in particular.
We are seeing rapid adoption of an array of social media applications, with early adoption by younger demographics. We are also seeing the socialization of what have been content distribution channels, like youtube and pinterest, for example.

With the near exponential growth in the number of social media channels that are actually being used by our potential clients, moving foward, I suggest these three strategies:

1) have the biggest play on the social channel(s) that best match your target demographics, and the channel(s) that are most likely to drive either brand awareness or direct sales. I would also have a play on every social channel you see becoming popular, in case one grows unexpectedly - you want to stake out your claim early in the game.

2) Prepare marketing properties such as website, blogs, pieces of content, and social media posts so they are easily shared cross-platform - easily and effectively 'postable' to any number of social outlets.

3) Drive the creation of third-party content: reviews, press, social mentions and links that index (can be found on the internet through a search engine of any kind)

We are now seeing the emergence of engagement the main ranking factor for the value of social media content, and with the social engagement on what have traditionally been content sharing services, has opened the door to having a conversation with your clients on many different platforms across the web.

It is very important to create and drive engagement, and an effective content marketing strategy should have a clear process of creation, dissemination and promotion in the framework of creating interaction.

Because engagement is so important to SERP (search engine results page) position, social media is now a place you have to attend to on a daily basis, for customer service, sales, business development, growth of brand awareness, as well as growth of you social networks themselves.

You can and should set up a system of notification when important actions happen on your social media channels in order to respond and engage in a timely fashion. But there is nothing like participating in the community of a specific platform to drive engagement and sales. Its a matter of being proactive, or reactionary.. it depends on what you can afford, and what lends the best ROI.

There is also high growth in the delivery of information directly from Google, without navigating to a website, piece of content or social media site. Socially Optimizing snipits and structured data; Optimizing both social and business listings (ie knowledge graph) to reach a searcher directly with your social links. This will become more important as time goes on.

Finally, the consumption and use of content is changing, and adjustments should be made to the Content creation, delivery, and promotional activities through your social channels to match these changes in consumer behavior.

Easily shareable content is more important than ever, with the largest change being how quickly people share information that they do not actually consume themselves. A long blog post, for example, may never be read but is simply shared because of a good image or title, creating brand awareness and/or direct conversion (creating sales directly.)

Understanding the psychology of sharing is important. In general, people share for the following reasons:

• To gain admiration from their peers
• To support a cause they care about
• To inform others about something they think they might need or want
• To feel engaged in the world 

More important than ever, it is important to create content that is accurately shareable, quickly communicates the value of your brand, provides contact information and satisfies one of the above needs.

This is a nice segue to the discussion of the changes in Content Marketing for 2017, the next post in this series.

Hope that helps, and hope we all have a prosperous 2017.

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054