Your Secret Social Media Marketing Weapon: Content Curation

 

Your secret Social Media Marketing Weapon: Content Curation

Now that you have picked the specific sub-niche that you're going to be targeting as well as finished doing advanced research on where your sub-niche or niche segment audiences are located on social media platforms, the next step is to find content.

I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you stand to save a lot of money.

The bad news is that you need to put in a lot more time and pay attention to details. There are no two ways about it. You cannot drop the ball when it comes to the quality of the content that you are going to be sharing on your social media accounts.

Each and every piece of content you share must build your brand. This is non negotiable. You can't just pick random pieces of content that somehow, some way, has something to do with your niche.

That's not going to help you get the right eyeballs. That's not going to help you establish the kind of credibility and authority you need to eventually convert highly specific and qualified traffic from social media into cold, hard cash.

 What is Content Curation?

As I've mentioned above, you stand to save a lot of money with content curation. This should be obvious.

After all, you're not going to be using the content that you yourself created. Content curation is all about picking other people's content and sharing those materials on your social media accounts. This creates a win-win situation.

Since you're sharing links and descriptions of such content, the creator of that content gets free traffic. You, on the other hand, get to build up your credibility because people are rewarded for following your accounts with highly targeted, highly specific, value-added content.

Everybody wins. The user wins, you win, and of course, the original content creator comes out ahead. This is how it's supposed to work. You win big time because you save a tremendous amount of money not having to create a huge amount of original content.

If you've ever tried to write your own stuff or outsourced content creation, whether in the US or to other parts of the world, it can get quite expensive very quickly.

Content curation enables you to build credibility with your audience in a very inexpensive way. You use other people's content. You get to entertain them, build credibility, and gain their trust. The downside here is the time. Sure, you're not spending greenbacks, but you're definitely going to be spending time.

As I've mentioned above, you cannot be indiscriminate when you are trying to do content curation. Whatever goodwill you have built up for your brand will go up in smoke if people catch on to the fact that you are just randomly curating and spreading low quality content that may have something to do with your niche. That's not going to cut it. Not by a long shot.

 

Pick Your Niche Market

 

Pick Your Niche Market 

You have to remember that every business can be positioned in at least one of two ways. The bigger your niche, the more angles you would have at your disposal. You can look at different sub-segments of your niche.

You need to understand how this works because you might think you have a clear niche, but it may well turn out that there are many different layers or tiers to that niche. There might be different subsegments there.

You should have a clear understanding of what your niche is generally, and what subsegments exist within that larger niche. Again, you can reverse engineer your competitors to take a stab at this. Regardless, you need to do this. You need to get this information.

Now that you have an idea of what your target niche is, go to the different platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Now, look at whether these places have sizable content areas or messaging areas like Facebook pages, groups, Google Plus communities, Twitter hashtags, Pinterest Pinboards, and existing YouTube channels.

Pay attention to these places and see if your niche is big enough on those different platforms. If you notice that a particular platform doesn't really feature that much content for your specific niche, this is a red flag. The demand may not be there. The audience size might not be worth your while.

On the other hand, if you see there's a lot of videos regarding the topics that you're going to be hitting, this may be a good sign. But you need to do another level of analysis. Pay attention to the number of competitors you have.

If there seems to be a huge number of competitors fighting over the same niche, then this is going to be a problem. But if it turns out that there's a lot of content targeting your niche, but they're only produced by a handful of people or organizations, this is an encouraging sign.

Also, pay attention to how active your target audience members are. Look at the content that's being shared regarding your niche. Do you see a lot of engagement? Do people share this stuff? Is the hashtag quite prevalent?

Look for these and other objective indicators of activity. When you wrap your mind around these indicators, then you should have a clear idea of whether you should target your niche at a particular platform or whether you should ignore a platform altogether.

 List Out Your Niche Indicators

While you're doing reverse engineering, pay attention to how your niche is indicated on platforms. These involve hashtags, categories, keyword targets, labelling patterns, and tags. Use these to do the analysis I described above. Again, in any niche, there are sub- niches, so your goal here is to find a sub-niche or a way of positioning your content so you don't run into a ridiculous amount of competition.

You're still tapping into a sizable pool of demand, but you're not making things impossible for yourself by running headlong into well entrenched professional competition. You will probably need to keep experimenting with different sub-niches until you find one that is promising enough.

Niche Research and Targeting it the Right Way

 

Niche Research and Targeting it the Right Way

Many social media marketers first concern is to automatically want to know about traffic generation. Forget about niche research, forget about consumer intelligence, don't worry about setting up the right site to get in front of the right target audience eyeballs.

Let's just skip straight to the "good stuff." That's the kind of mindset that happens many time, and that's why a lot of people struggle in this game.

You have to understand that until and unless you find yourself barking up the right tree, you're just going to be chasing your tail. I know I'm using a lot of dog analogies, but these are the most appropriate. Most people are simply just chasing their tails and wasting a whole lot of time doing stuff that doesn't really add to their bottom line.

 A lot of these, and I would guess all of them, can be quickly dispensed with if people only did niche targeting ahead of time. In other words, know your audience. Since you have a clear profile of who your target audience is, the next step is to go to these different social media platforms and find them there.

Believe it or not, whatever it is you are promoting, regardless of how esoteric, obscure or weird it may be, there are already people on social media platforms talking about or showing interest in whatever, you are promoting, I know, it sounds crazy, it sounds weird, but it's absolutely true. Your job as a marketer is to find those audiences on these social media platforms.

The way to do this, of course, is to identify your business' target audience. Sadly, most marketers don't even bother with this. Instead, they just look at social media marketing as a simple task of finding traffic. That's it. That's the name of the game. That's all there is to it. If you want to be successful, you need to be clear about who your target audience is.

And believe me, this is not always easy. You're going to run into the temptation of making "educated guesses" about who your target audience members are. Most of the time, that doesn't work. Thankfully, there is an easier way. The more you take random shots in the dark, making all sorts of wild guesses, the more money and time you will lose.

There is a shortcut here: Find your competitors. Seriously. Just find them. And, let me tell you, regardless of how weird, esoteric, or seemingly "unknown" your niche is, there will at least be one competitor on social media.

Find that organization or business and let them do your niche and target audience research for you. Since they've already started and they are already speaking to your audience, find out who your competitors are and look at their social media profiles.

Reverse engineer who they're following. Pay attention to who they're targeting. Look at how they categorize themselves. In the simplest terms, pay attention to the hashtags they use with their content.

These clues should be enough to give you an idea of where to start. This way, you get a head start. You're not completely stuck in the dark and absolutely clueless as to what to do. Instead, you have some objective tried and proven information you could work with.

 

Steps to Quicker and Easier Social Media Marketing

 

Steps to Quicker and Easier Social Media        Marketing                                         

In this chapter, I'm going to give you an overview of the 10 Steps I'm going to teach you in this training. This training is a product of many failed experiments. Believe me, if you've been exposed to some type of "hot" or "ground-breaking" social media marketing technique or strategy, I've been there. I've done that.

This training is a product of many experiences.

I also understand that people have different skill levels, time horizons, and project resources. I understand the limitations. I understand most people's concerns regarding social media marketing. Accordingly, I've come up with a 10-Step Program that appeals to most social media marketers, regardless of how small or how big their budget is, and regardless of their skill levels.

If you're looking for a truly effective social media marketing game plan that you can set up to pretty much work on autopilot, this is it. Please understand that these steps that I'm going to lay out are exactly that. Steps. You need to follow them. You can't skip a step. You can't assume that since I mentioned certain keywords or I'm talking about certain themes and topics that you have mastered this already.

I need you to look at all this information with an open mind and pretend you are learning social media marketing all over again. If you don't have that mindset and you are all too eager to skip steps, don't be surprised if the plan that I'm teaching you will not work for you. How can it? You zipped through it. You rushed. You skipped through certain key parts.

You need to be patient with this program by going through each step. Don't go to the next step until you've mastered the step you're on. I know you're busy, I know you don't have the time, but you need to do this right. Otherwise, you only have yourself to blame if things don't work out. Are we clear? Okay.

 Here are the 10 Steps to Faster and Easier Modern Social Media Marketing:

 ·      Niche research and targeting

 ·      Content curation

 ·      Reverse engineer your competition's top content

 ·      Create fine-tuned payload content

 ·      Market your mailing list right

 ·      Unlock the power of repurposed multi-platform content

 ·      Automate content sharing

 ·      Scale up your targeting

 ·      Sell to your list differently

 ·      Reinvest your profits the right way

Those are the 10 Steps. I know they sound pretty simple. They definitely appear pretty straightforward, but the devil, as always, is in the details.

Digital Marketing Course Part - 1 🔥| Digital Marketing Tutorial For Beginners | Simplilearn

 

The Classic Way to Do Social Media Marketing and Why it is Challenging Part 2

 

The Reality 

Even if the "follow, get followed, spam, and unfollow" technique still works for some people, the rules have changed. Social media platforms will reward or punish you based on engagement. If you want an extreme example of this, just look at Facebook. Facebook used to be a traffic goldmine. Not anymore.

 

You need a really high level of engagement to preserve your reach on Facebook. If you get normal levels of engagement, good luck. That's how bad things are, and that's why I need to take this time to spell out why this "classic social media marketing" no longer works.

 

Other Failed Methods

 

I would be remiss in my duty to educate you on failed social media marketing strategies if I don't also mention other failed techniques. First, hashtag hunting no longer works. This technique involves marketers finding hashtags that are trending. They basically would publish niche-specific content but use unrelated or irrelevant hashtags and pair them with their content.

 

They do this because they want to "hitch a ride" on the upward trend of those hashtags. They know people are searching for those hashtags. They know that these hashtag trends are hot, so they want to poach as many eyeballs as possible.

 

Unfortunately, the traffic that you get is not going to be any good. People are looking for specific types of information, and when they see that your content is so obviously unrelated, they're not going to click through. You might even get reported.

 

Another failed method you should stay away from is influencer spamming. There are many influencers in almost all niches. If you want to see this in action, go to Facebook or Twitter. There are many specialized pages and specialized Twitter accounts.

 

Now, constantly mentioning those influencers on your content is not going to help if your content doesn't really add any value. There has to be a reason why you are engaging with these influencers. And drawing their attention is not enough. Getting them to look at your content because you think your content is hot is a lousy idea.

 

Instead, you should focus your engagement tagging based on what they did. For example, if an influencer was talking about recent trends in athletic shoes, then that person would be fair game for an article I post regarding the latest trends in athletic shoes and what they mean in terms of the bottom line of large footwear apparel companies.

 

That influencer would be directly interested in what I have to say because I am sharing content that is not only high quality but is directly related to stuff he or she is already talking about. Do you see the specificity here? Do you see the direct link? Now, compare this with an influencer who talks only about forex, and I tag that influencer when I'm talking about bitcoin.

 

That person is going to be annoyed. Do you see the difference? Finally, automated publishing with no outreach is not going to work. Basically, what you're doing is you're throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping something sticks. If you're just publishing content on an automated basis on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other platforms, it's anybody's guess whether people would actually engage.

 

You have to do some outreach. You have to draw eyeballs to your content. You have to find existing pools of highly qualified audiences and get your social media account in front of their eyeballs.

 

Use your very best content. If you do this right, your automated publishing on social media will be greatly rewarded. Use a shotgun approach and you're probably going to get the same results as other failed social media marketers.

 

The Classic Way to Do Social Media Marketing and Why it is Challenging Part 1

 

The Classic Way to Do Social Media Marketing and Why it is Challenging

Before I jump into the actual background of this training, I need to devote some real estate to how other people are doing social media marketing. I need to do this because it's very tempting for people to engage in the same practices.

 

I can see where they're coming from. It is easy. It's like seeing some chump change in front of you and it's almost irresistible to fight the urge of bending over and picking up that change.

 

But when you do that, it will throw you off. It will give you a false sense of incentive or reward and don't be surprised if you end up giving into your worst instincts only to walk away with less than nothing.

 

This happens all the time because human beings, being the way they are, would always take the path of least resistance. Who can blame them? But by warning you about how this works out, it is my hope that you stay away from this and focus instead on investing your time, effort, and energy on the right way to do things.

 

The Classic Approach to Social Media Marketing

 

So, what is the classic approach to social media marketing? Well, it's actually quite simple. Whether we're talking about Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you need to only "follow," "like" or "friend" people who are interested in your niche.

 

You connect with all these people, and then after you have followed them, a lot of them would actually follow you back. For example, on Twitter, for every 100 follows, don't be surprised if maybe 20 to 30 people follow you back.

 

Now, this is where it gets really bad. Classic social media marketers would then spam their followers. They would just send all sorts of unrelated garbage, and then they would unfollow. Do you see the pattern? Follow, get followed, spam, unfollow. And I wish I could tell you that they do this sporadically, but instead, these self-professed "professional marketers" use all sorts of sophisticated software to do this.

 

Up until a few years ago, this worked like a charm. This was a great way to get a lot of Twitter traffic. But not anymore. This pattern, instead, can get you banned.

 

More importantly, whatever traffic you do manage to get using this tactic is not going to be any good. Why? There's no targeting. You're not pre-qualifying these people who would follow you.

 

The only reason why they followed you in the first place is because you followed them first. Where's the selection there? Where is the targeting there? Now, you can make wild guesses, but ultimately, it's a volume game and it leads nowhere. The return on effort is not there.

 

I'm not saying that you can't make any sales doing this technique. I'm not claiming that. But what I am saying is that whatever rewards you get are not offset by the wasted time, effort, and energy as well as opportunity costs involved. You're better off using a quality-based approach.

 

Audiences are Looking for Quality

 

The bottom line to Social Media Marketing Revolution is to use quality content. Your content will speak for you. Your content will do the pre-sales job regarding your brand.

 

In other words, your content is your representative. It speaks to the values you want your brand to be associated with.