6 Old School Marketing Tactics That Still Work on Social Media

It seems like everywhere we look there’s some new social media or marketing tactics being touted as the next big thing.

As marketers and businesses, we’re constantly looking for ways to reach our audience in creative ways and so we often jump around from strategy to strategy – often leaving what used to work in the past.

But what about those marketing tactics that once worked like a charm?

Today on The Science of Social Media we’re dusting off and breaking down 6 old school marketing tactics that still work like a charm on social media. Plus, we’re exploring exactly how your business can implement them in new, fun, and creative ways.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

What you’ll learn in this episode

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters. Short on time? No worries! Here are four quick takeaways:

• Why having real, authentic conversations with your audience is key
• How to focus on creating memorable social media and marketing content
• Why repurposing evergreen content is still a highly relevant marketing tactic
• Television advertising and social media: Why and how they’re related

Must-read resources from the episode

• 5 Old School Social Media Tactics That Are No Longer Effective (And What To Do Instead) – Buffer Blog
• Social Media Engagement is the New Social Media Marketing: How To Do It Well – Buffer Blog
• 6 Shortcuts to Speed Up Your Social Media Scheduling Process – Buffer Blog
• 10 Old-School Marketing Tactics that Still Work – GrowthHackers

6 Old school marketing tactics that still work on social media [complete podcast transcript]

Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Brian: Welcome to episode #105! I’m Brian Peters and this week we’re going old school marketing tactics. Well, not totally. We’re going new school with some old school flair. Remember all of the stuff that used to work on social media? Well, some of it still does, and quite effectively I might add.

Hailley: Yes, really excited for this one, Brian. I think we all get caught up in thinking about what’s next on social media and we forget that some of the tactics that helped us once are still very relevant today.

Let’s kick of the show!

Hailley: There are few greater joys in a marketer’s life than experimenting with a new technique—and having it work like a charm.

You feel like a cross between a scientist, an artist, and a magician, am I right?

Brian: Couldn’t agree more.

Hailley: And as many of us do (after a little celebrating of course), we officially add the new tactic to our marketing tactics repertoire and then start searching for the next thing to experiment with.

But because you’re always looking forward, you might not notice that the marketing tactics that worked so well in the beginning has now become, dare I say, obsolete.

Brian: With that in mind, we took a look back at the strategies and tactics that we used a few years ago to see if they still worked.

What follows are 8 old school social tactics that are still as relevant as ever in 2018.

Are you ready Hailley?

Hailley: Absolutely.

Marketing Tactic #1: Having real, meaningful interactions and conversations with your followers

Brian: Remember social media before there was a tool for every single one of your needs? Back when gaining just 100 followers on Twitter and having a single conversation was a huge milestone.

Well, believe it or not, real conversations and interactions are more important than ever on social today.

Hailley: Agreed, automation has made our lives so much easier and our marketing so much more effective, but that also means a personal touch goes a lot further these days!

As our colleague and blog editor Ash Read once said in an article, “It feels amazing to know that our favorite brands and personalities value our support. And sometimes all it takes to show that is a personal response.”

This strategy definitely requires more time, energy, and resources than setting up an automate message to new followers or fans, but it’s well worth it in the long run.

Brian: Couldn’t agree more – that’s been one of the cornerstones for us at Buffer on social media over the years and it has led to an incredible amount of word-of-mouth marketing.

Note: We’d love for you to check out Buffer Reply. One of the fastest-growing social media and customers service engagement tools on the market.

Marketing Tactic #2: Focusing on creating memorable and shareable content

Hailley: We talk about this a lot here on the show – and yes, it’s fairly obvious, but I think this one is what has always made social media so great.

You want people to engage with your content because, well, they want to. With that in mind, focus on making it as shareable as possible.

Brian: Yeah so get this.

A recent analysis of 65,000 articles found that a piece’s virality comes down to two main factors: arousal and dominance.

Which sounds a bit strange haha but in plain English, arousal means “riled up.” Feelings like anger and excitement are high-arousal emotions. Dominance, on the other hand, is the feeling of being in control.

When you’re inspired or joyful, you’re experiencing high dominance; when you’re scared, you’re experiencing low dominance.

Hailley: Articles that perform the best on social use a high-arousal, high-dominance combo.

And you’re probably wondering what that would look like!

Well, and here’s a throwback post for you, a photo of Vin Diesel with his daughter racked up 8.1 million interactions (making it the fifth most popular Facebook post of 2015), thanks to the strong, positive emotions it generated.

But strong, negative emotions can be powerful marketing tactics too—take the Dove “Choose Beautiful” campaign, for example. That social campaign put a spotlight on low self-esteem and it turned out extremely successful.

Brian: Yep!

Marketing Tactic # 3 – Use influencers and partnerships to expand your reach

Brian: Before influencer marketing was one of the hottest topics in social media, brands and marketers were partnering up to amplify their reach on social.

That tactic is still alive and thriving today and we actually use it all of the time here at Buffer.

Hailley: They key here is to think quality, not quantity when it comes to influencers and partnerships.

Before you team up on a social takeover, article, or research study, ask yourself, “Will this truly benefit my audience?”

If the answer is “yes,” you’re in good shape.

That means their content or expertise is an optimal fit for your audience—so you’ll benefit whether or not the influencer promotes it. And you also want to make sure that your content will benefit their audience as well.

Brian: Exactly! When both parties in the partnership are genuinely excited and passionate about the project, it will go so much further than if you were just forcing it for the sake of collaborating.

Your audiences will be able to see right through that as well.

Seek out potential partners that has an active, engaged audience as well as a great reputation in the industry. Both of those factors are key things to have going in.

Marketing Tactic #4: Repurposing top performing evergreen content

Hailley: We actually just had the pleasure of speaking with the team over at Ahrefs and they shared some great insights into how they’re doing social media strategy and this one was one of their top tips.

Sometime in March this year, they decided to run what they called a “re-circulation” experiment where they decided to dust off their underutilized social accounts and lightly repurpose their top performing content from over the years in quirky and fun posts.

Brian: What was interesting is they said to make things easier, they didn’t set any hard KPIs or goals. They just wanted to highlight cool stuff that they might have missed and see how things went from there.

Turns out, plenty of these posts were really well-received and performed really well.

Initially, they were simply aiming to see if there were any changes in the number of people who liked or shared their content. And guess what? You guessed it, the data instantly confirmed what they were hoping to see: a definite boost in overall engagement and link clicks.

Hailley: I love that.

This one is super important because as marketers and businesses we spend a ton of time, energy, and money on marketing tactics aimed at creating great content then it’s on to the next thing.

What we forget is that a lot of the content we create still has a ton of life in it. All it takes is a quick update to make sure everything is still relevant and some brainstorming on ways to repurpose and repackage the content.

Brian: Great point. And repurposing might involve experimenting with new headlines or creating a video to accompany the post or even creating a podcast episode from it. So many ways to get the most out of your content.

Marketing Tactic #5: Share for a benefit

Brian: As we chatted about last episode, giving your audience an incentive to interact with your content is an old school way of generating engagement that still works today in 2018.

Hailley: Going back to our friends over at Ahrefs, they wanted to figure out a way to get 1k re-tweets on Twitter and increase brand awareness around their product at the same time.

So what they did is they had their founder and CEO Tweet out something along the lines of, “hey, we’ll increase limits on the standard Ahrefs plan if this Tweet gets 1,000 Retweets.

And it was super sly because they were going to increase the limits either way, but they also wanted to figure out a fun way to draw some attention to that fact.

Brian: Yeah such a solid PR move. One of my favorite marketing tactics!

There’s an interesting part of that story as well…

The initial Tweet only collected about 100 re-tweets which is good given that Dmitry doesn’t really have a large following on Twitter.

To give it a little boost, they pushed it out to their users via an Intercom announcement and also shared it in their private Facebook Group. That ended up boosting the Retweet count to nearly 700.

Hailley: Funnily enough, at this point the Tweet jumped up another 500 re-tweets in no time at all to total almost 1.3k;

They were joking that they suspected that someone lost his or her patience and purchased re-tweets on a service like Fiverr or something.

Either way, they made good on their promise and it was a success on both social media and for their customers.

Brian: Great stuff. I didn’t even know you could buy retweets.

Marketing Tactic #6: Television advertising

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, but Brian! social media isn’t television. What in the world could you mean?

Hailley: We’re thinking it, Brian!

Avid listeners of our show might remember episode #101 where we talked about IGTV and how that’s becoming the new norm for television.

Well that’s still the case, but platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have long been a go-to place for people to go to catch up with the favorite influencers, mini series, and now shows.

Brian: Exactly, and so advertising in general is a one of the most old school marketing tactics on social media, but 1) it still works, and 2) brands now have the opportunity to sort of view social media as the modern day television.

That means they have the opportunity to create pre-roll ads on YouTube, ads on Instagram Stories, and eventually ads on IGTV because you better believe that those are going to be a huge part of Instagram moving forward.

Hailley: Yup and while many brands treat social media users and TV viewers as if they are two separate audiences, posting television content to YouTube is an excellent way to increase the reach of existing campaigns.

For example, Super Bowl commercials like Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby became a viral phenomena by hitting both platforms.

And I’m sure you’ve seen the great commercials that Grammarly runs on YouTube. Those have been wildly successful for them.

Brian: Love it. We’re all TV advertisers now haha!

One last takeaway here is to remember that while implementing these old school tactics, continue to test and refine your approach.

Define the criteria you want to measure at the outset of your new campaign. Whether the goal is brand awareness or increased sales, set KPIs to follow and measure your success against those numbers.

Then, get creative!

Hailley: Thank you for tuning in to The Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are available in either iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll include links to all of the marketing tactics resources we covered into today’s show.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Brian: As always, thank you so much for your iTunes reviews! It’s so awesome to read through all your kind comments there – and we actually do read through all of them so thank you.

Don’t miss next week’s episode where we’ll be diving into the psychology behind social media and what makes people take action on different social channels.

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 16,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/marketing-tactics

How Car Next Door Use Buffer to Build Trust on Social Media

752,626 Facebook Ads Analyzed, an eCommerce Growth Case Study, New Social Media Tools, and More!

There is always so much happening in the social media marketing industry that it can be a challenge to keep up with all of the latest news and insights.

From constant changes to the Facebook and Instagram algorithms to the silent growth of LinkedIn and the launch of Instagram’s IGTV, marketers and businesses have their hands full.

That’s why we’ve created what we call “Minisodes” on the Buffer Podcast – The Science of Social Media. Minisodes are 10-15 minute shows where we cover all of the latest social media marketing news that you need to know as a business. Join 16,000+ fellow marketers and business owners each week to stay up to date on the latest news, trends, and insights!

This week, we’re covering a massive study that analyzed more than 750,000 Facebook ads, how one eCommerce brand generated thousands of emails and followers, our favorite new social media tools, and more.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

What you’ll learn in this episode

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters. Short on time? No worries! Here are four quick takeaways:

• How social media contests can help give your brand the extra boost you’re looking for
• The top 5 actionable advertising takeaways from studying more than 750K Facebook ads
• New social media tools that you can try today in 2018

Must-read resources from the episode

• How One eCommerce Company Generated More Than 41K emails and 10K Social Media Followers – Viper
• Results and Insights from Studying More Than 75,000 Facebook Ads – AdEspresso
• 26 Tools and Apps for Social Media Marketers – Social Media Examiner

How to sell on Instagram [complete podcast transcript]

Brian: Hi everyone! I’m Brian Peters and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Hailley: Welcome to episode #104! I’m Hailley Griffis and today we’ve got a jam-packed show lined up for you. Really excited for this one. Lots of great articles published in the marketing industry this week and we’re sharing the most important takeaways from all of those.

Brian:  From Facebook Ads, to generating emails and social media followers, to our favorite social media tools on the market, this is one you won’t want to miss.

Let’s kick off the show!

Hailley: One marketing strategy that seems to thrive in so many different industries and is resilient to constant user behavior changes is…. email.

So naturally, one of the best ways to reach your target customers or audience on a consistent basis is to grow your email lists. Which is, of course, easier said than done.

However, we stumbled across a case study from Viper where they featured an eCommerce business that was able to generate more than 41,000 email signups and 10,000 social media followers in one campaign.

Brian: Yes and with a headline like that, how could we not read it!

In diving into this article I thought, alright here we go with another one of those spammy marketing tactics, but I was pleasantly surprise to to find that the case study and tactics used by this eCommerce company were actually very interesting.

And this is something we really haven’t talked about a lot here on the show and that’s contests as a marketing strategy.

Hailley: You’re right, we really haven’t talked about contest too much on the show.

One thing that I thought was interesting is that if you break down the available marketing channels out there for businesses, there’s really only so many things you can do. Content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing.

But there’s a fourth bucket that they mention and that’s growth and viral marketing, which contests would fit under.

Brian: Yeah and growth or viral marketing I think gets a bad rap because we’ve all had some sort of poor experience with a marketing campaign.

But when done right (and ethically), virality can really sky rocket a specific campaign across the board.

So this specific case study focused on the eCommerce company called Brevite. Which is a backpack company created specifically for photographers.

Hailley: What Brevite did is offered two prizes for folks who entered their contest.

The first prize was a Mavic Drone and the second prize was a backpack for photographers.

And we should stop for a second here to talk about the importance of quality prizes when you’re setting up a contest.

Brian: 100% agreed. Always remember, the closer aligned your prize is your target markets’ interests the more successful your contest will be.

You want people to really want to win your prize so they are willing to share the contest, refer others and complete tasks that the brand sets.

Hailley: In this case, a Mavic Drone and backpack are pretty incredible prizes.

Anyways, the eCommerce company asked for an email address, a follow on social media, and the contestants had to share the content – meaning a Retweet, Facebook share, re-gram, etc)

Which actually seems like a lot, particularly for a smaller eCommerce store!

Brian: It feels like a lot for any business!

But I think that goes back to offering a quality prize. So overall, Brevite invested about $3k in the contest for prizes and ads and what not and ran the campaign for 15 days.

In the end, they saw a sign up conversion rate of about ~65%. Which is just great stuff.

Hailley: Yeah, I’d love to have a 65% conversion rate on anything!

After the contest and scrubbing for quality, their email list went from 1,700 to 37,000, which is about 8 cents per email address. And they gained more than 10,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Brian: And of course we won’t leave you hanging. Here are the exact steps they took to promote the content.

Like we said before, they selected a really good prize that aligned with their target audience – and they didn’t go cheap.

They shared the contest constantly on social channels & in select social media groups.

They added the contest to their website – so each relevant landing page had this contest prominently featured – which I think was crucial to the success of this.

Hailley: Agreed – that led to hundreds of people seeing the content.

They emailed their list multiple times to remind them of the contest. So for example, they sent an email update on the contest at launch, in the first week showing the top 5 entrants so far, halfway through, then again if they added any bonuses or extras, and so on.

Then when the contest was almost over they sent out emails to create a sense of urgency with 48 hour and 24 hours to go. They saw some great number boosts from that.

Brian: Yeah and then number 5 is that they spent a lot of time and effort crafting great images for the contest to share across networks.

That helped 1) make the contest seem legit and then 2) make contestants feel good about sharing it with their friends.

Some other cool things I thought they did were get a few photographers that they knew to share the contest as sort of a mini influencer strategy. They also ran some social media ads on Facebook and Instagram targeted at photographers.

All really, really strategic and thoughtful promotion of what was a super successful contest.

Hailley: Speaking of a topic that is a bit more general marketing for business focused, rather than just social media, we actually had the chance to catch up with team behind the podcast Rocketship.fm.

They just launched their fifth season where they spent more than three months chatting with and profiling three super successful entrepreneurs.

So if you’re looking for a stellar podcast with some great insights from entrepreneurs that have been through a lot of what we talk about on this show, definitely check out Rocketship.fm.

Brian: I actually just had a chance to check out a few episodes from the new season and was really impressed with how much solid information they get into each episode.

You’ll get the real, first-hand story behind how successful products are built. And the cool thing it they don’t just share the ups, they also talk about business struggles, personal struggles and everything in-between.

Anyways, just a little love for some people doing great things in podcasting.

Hailley: Next up is an interesting study from our friends over at AdEspresso.

In 2015, they analyzed the text from 37,259 Facebook ads from to find out exactly how the best Facebook advertisers are piecing together their ads.

Today – nearly three years later — the study has grown more than 20 times bigger. Today, we’re breaking down the findings from 752,626 ads!

And while some of their original results have remained the same, a LOT has changed.

Brian: Cutting to the chase. Their top 5 findings are as follows:

1. The length of ad text has increased.
2. Link descriptions are shorter.
3. There has been an uptick in brands that link to specific landing pages.
4. The top five CTAs in 2018 and how brands’ usage of CTAs have increased.
5. Companies are using a greater variety of Ad types.

Hailley: So for the first one – the length of ad text increasing. What they found was that (and I quote):

A clear, no-nonsense, five-word headline, paired with 20 words of ad text is the recipe for a perfect Sponsored Post.

Yup, there is a science to it. 5 word headline and 20 words of actual ad text or caption as you might know it

Brian: Looking at their second finding that link descriptions have become shorter.

In 2015, the average link description was a whopping 18 words. Three years later, it has been whittled down to 13.

This proves that less is really more when describing your articles. Try to create a sense of urgency in as few of words as possible and be super clear about your offer.

Hailley: Their 3rd finding is that more ads are using specific landing pages is a big one not only for Facebook but for other channels like Instagram and Google Adwords as well.

Including landing pages makes a post more direct and removes the effort of additional research for the viewer.

Brian: Yeah, it’s super frustrating to click on an ad and be led to a generic landing page. It’s a really easy fix for businesses as well.

Hailley: Their fourth finding is a really actionable one, which I love. It’s that the top 5 CTAs are: Learn More, None (so no button), Shop Now, Sign Up, Book Travel.

Brian: So what this one is referring to are the pre-populated buttons that you can choose with each Facebook.

And Facebook created these because choosing the perfect CTA is more difficult than you’d imagine, which is a major reason why this category has seen so many changes over the years.

Marketers have experimented with several different kinds of CTAs (including none at all). At the same time, Facebook constantly rolls out new options to test.

Hailley: What AdEspresso recommends here is to venture out from the generic ones we listed above and try something new.

Facebook also offers CTAs like:

• Listen Now
• Get Directions
• Donate Now
• and Send Message
• As we always say, you won’t know what works unless you experiment.

Brian: Last but not least, they found that companies are using a greater variety of ad types.

Links and photos still dominate the advertising types, but video ads have soared in popularity.

Of course, this means an opportunity in video ads since their still the minority. When it comes to video ads, many pros suggest to put all of the good stuff into the first 5–10 seconds, work in primary colors (red, blue, yellow), and incorporate scrolling text.

Hailley: Alright , before you go, we’re just over half way through 2018 and so we thought we’d share some awesome social media tools that we’ve come across since our last episode on social tools way back in episode #88.

We’ll go quick fire style on this one and then let you go check them out for yourself.

And Brian, I thought it would be fun to go back and forth and we’ll each name 1 tool plus a quick description. We can even make this a regular segment on our show!

Brian: Love it. Alright I’ll go first!

My first tool is called Handlescout.

Handlescout regularly checks Twitter username availability and notifies you by email when a desired handle becomes available.

Hailley: That sounds awesome. Alright mine is the new Grammarly Keyboard

With Grammarly Keyboard, you can add a native keyboard to your smartphone that helps you check spelling and grammar while you’re on the go.

Brian: Such a good one. I’m going to check that out right after this.

Alright my next one is called SparkScore a new tool from Rand Fishkin’s new company.

SparkScore determines the influence of a Twitter account using a broad range of metrics, like the average engagement with each tweet.

Hailley: So good. What’s your score, Brian, do you know?

Brian: 19.

Hailley: That was quick.

Brian: I just ran it as you were saying your last tool! What’s your score Hailley?

Hailley: 24. I tried it yesterday. Alright, all of our listeners, go check your score now and see if you can beat me or Brian!

My last tool is Let’s Enhance.

Let’s Enhance is a free online tool that scales images up to 4x without visibly degrading the image quality. Which I’ve definitely experienced before!

Brian: Nice – love it!

Thank you for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are available in either iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll include links to all of the resources we covered into today’s show.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Hailley: As always, thank you so much for your iTunes reviews! It’s so awesome to read through all your kind comments there – and we actually do read through all of them so thank you.

Don’t miss next week’s episode where we talk about old school social media tactics that still work!

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 16,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-news-episode-104

How to Get over Perfectionism (and Execute on Your Ideas)

As marketers, we’re all too familiar with putting off executing on an idea.

There’s always a perfectly good reason for this: the end goal hasn’t quite crystallized yet. The resources and budget need to be better thought through. The analytics systems in place don’t seem up to par. …you know how the rest goes.

The underlying problem?

We badly want to “do it right” so much that we end up not doing it at all. Perfectionism paralysis at its finest – and ironically, the higher the stakes are, the harder it hits.

At Ahrefs, we’re definitely no stranger to this. But when your marketing and content strategies trend towards conducting multiple experiments, you pick up certain ways to trick your mind into letting go a little.

We do a ton of experiments. Some succeed and some fail. What’s important is that they get done.

We’ve learned lots along the way, through trial and even more error – and now, we’d love to share some key points of our journey with you.

Ready? Let’s go.

3 social media experiments and their results

Our CMO, Tim Soulo, believes that a huge chunk of marketing ROI simply cannot be measured. And things get done a lot faster when the people up top aren’t pressuring you to predict ROI, set specific numbers to hit and track data for every step of every process.

In fact, we often do things because our gut feeling tells us it’s the right thing to do, rather than because the numbers say so. In short, we believe that it’s better to do something than not do anything at all – simply because it doesn’t seem perfect. If we have a cool idea and some spare resources, we take action…and quickly.

Let’s dive into some examples that illustrate this. We’ll be exploring the thought processes behind three Twitter marketing experiments that have varying degrees of polish to them.

1. The 1k retweet growth hacking experiment

Starting off quick and easy: in February, we attempted to get 1k re-tweets on Twitter in order to loosen up a data limitation on one of our paid subscription plans.

Here’s a little secret: we were going to loosen up the limit either way, but we also wanted to draw some attention to that fact. Hey, no harm having extra toppings on our ice cream.

In terms of measuring success? We didn’t even bother.

This is a fantastic example of doing something because it feels right, not because we expected or were aiming for a specific outcome. It could just have easily turned into a monster of an experiment – calculating the rate of visibility spread, analyzing data on the users who retweeted, attempting to measure the value of publicity generated…so on and so forth.

Instead, we decided to simply jump into it, then collectively nodded when the experiment succeeded and called it a day.

The story: Our initial, “raw” tweet collected about 100 re-tweets (Dmitry doesn’t have a large following on Twitter.) To give it a little boost, we pushed it to our users via Intercom announcement and also shared it in our private Facebook Group. This boosted the retweet count to nearly 700.

Funnily enough, at this point our counter leaped another 500 re-tweets in no time at all to total almost 1.3k; we suspect that someone lost his or her patience and purchased re-tweets on a service like Fiverr. So we gave up on our goal of 1k re-tweets and rolled out the update – we’d reached our goal of more publicity for this plan upgrade, and that’s all we needed.

(Looking at the tweet now, we’re back to 800. It looks like Twitter deleted the bot accounts and removed all retweets from these bots.)

2. The recirculation experiment

Sometime in March this year, we decided to run another experiment. Granted, this one’s actually more of a best practice, or highly-adopted technique, in social media marketing: content recirculation.

We have tons of well-researched, in-depth blog posts that we go to great lengths to create. Most remain highly relevant months after their initial publish date, but traffic soon starts to dwindle when compared with newer posts – mostly due to an increasing lack of visibility as they get pushed further down our archives.

Solution? We decided to dust off our previously underutilized Twitter account (due to lack of resources on our end) and kick off a more regular content schedule. This included lightly repurposing our existing content into catchy tweets.

We love to make things easier, so we didn’t set any hard KPIs or goals. Our followers on Twitter are a cool bunch; engaged, receptive and fun. We just wanted to highlight cool stuff that they might have missed and see how things went from there.

Turns out, plenty of these tweets were really well-received:

Initially, we were simply aiming to see if there were any changes in the number of people who liked, retweeted or replied to our tweets. Then a peek at our Twitter analytics a week later showed these trends:

Above: red lines mark when we began the experiment. Engagement rate, link clicks, retweets and likes all showed a noticeable upward trend.

Pretty cool, we thought! The charts instantly confirmed what we were hoping to see: a definite boost in overall engagement and link clicks.

We’ll probably pop into Google Analytics in a couple of months’ time to confirm that our blog is indeed seeing increased traffic from Twitter. But in the meantime – success, and on to other things!

The custom Twitter header experiment

Now for a more complicated example – we went into this one with more planning in place.

A header image is the first thing you see at the top of any Twitter profile: 1500 x 500 pixels’ worth of it, to be exact.

Given their prime position and reach potential, we were seeing companies invest efforts into making custom twitter backgrounds for every occasion, from event announcements to highlighting important news, to more targeted offers and call-to-actions.

Here are a couple of examples:

It got us wondering – just how effective are these header images? Do many people see them? And if they do, do they actually act on them? Most of all: since creating cool images can be costly in terms of resources, does it make sense to start investing in them?

Experiment time!

The concept was simple: use our Twitter header image to announce a flash giveaway, then monitor responses and engagement levels. We kept the mechanics easy. The first 10 people to send in an email with the message we specified would be granted a free month’s worth of access to Ahrefs.

We had ~19.3k followers at the time and were excited to see how this would translate into entries for our giveaway. Before we began, we checked where the Twitter header could be seen from:

1. Results page upon searching for “ahrefs” in Twitter’s search bar;
2. Ahrefs’ Twitter profile page;
3. On hover of a direct mention (@ahrefs) or on Ahrefs’ name on Twitter timeline (not applicable on mobile devices)

Pretty promising, right? We also came up with a couple of potential cons to the experiment:

1. A single person could abuse this pretty easily by sending in multiple entries to get many accounts;
2. Or, a person could spread the word to others through other (non-Twitter header) channels, effectively defeating the purpose of the experiment.

What we learned

We ran the header image on January 16th and reached our 10th entry on January 24th, over a week later.

Here’s the breakdown:

Overall, the response was curiously slow for an instant win giveaway like the one we were running. In fact, although we were hitting an average of ~45k impressions per day, we only saw our very first entry two full days after launching.

The lukewarm response continued until there was a spike in entries on the 24th. After some digging, we discovered two big occurrences on that day:

1. We experienced a power outage for a period of time. People were coming to our Twitter profile to send us direct messages and tweets asking about the downtime. Presumably, many spotted our header image along the way – one existing user sent in an entry;

2. Ahrefs picked up a direct mention and article plug from the @growthhackers Twitter account with 187k+ followers. We can assume that some of their followers decided to follow Ahrefs on Twitter (or visit our profile to learn more about us) after reading the article. These people would have been exposed to our Twitter header and we suspect this is the main reason why we had an influx of entries.

Going by the trend seen in the final spike in entries, we can conclude that new leads are probably generated from our content marketing efforts: Twitter users enjoy an article, decide to follow us on Twitter, see our header and decide to write in for a free account.

On the other hand, entries from existing Ahrefs users are likely a result of users visiting our profile to either tweet at us or send us direct messages – whether to lodge a complaint or ask a question. While on our profile, they may have come across the header and had a “why not?” moment.

In other words, without big external factors, our presence on Twitter seems to do an equally good job of engaging both new leads and existing users.

The conclusion

Overall, the response to our giveaway was poor until some ‘special circumstances’ occurred.

Our takeaway: customizing multiple high-quality header images and expecting huge results is out of the question. But considering that header images can be designed pretty quickly or outsourced for cheap, even a really low conversion rate might justify the cost of creation in order to complement an existing marketing strategy.

In short, we decided that investing our efforts in customized banners is a pretty low-priority effort. It may produce some results, but they aren’t likely to be exceptional. Experiment concluded!

Over to You

I hope the contrast in these stories help to highlight what we’ve learned:

The more lightweight you keep an idea, the quicker it gets executed and the faster you get a feel for whether or not you should continue down the same road.

Remember:

1. Keep things simple! Run experiments for the sake of learning, even if you haven’t quite nailed down how to best track results.
2. The more effort you put into the planning and analytics stages, the more resources you’ll need to execute. It will always be “cheaper” to just throw things at the wall.
3. Put cool ideas on hold if you don’t have the resources available at the time. You never know when you can work on them, or if an alternative execution method will spring to mind.

I’d love to hear your thoughts – how do you strike a balance between shipping experiments while avoiding getting mired down by the technicalities involved? How long do you keep tracking your results, and how do you use this information moving forward? Are there any other tips, tricks or hacks you’d like to share?

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/twitter-marketing-experiments

How to Sell on Instagram Like the Pros [Proven Tips & Strategies]

By now, you’ve most likely heard that the Instagram platform has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users worldwide and that 400 million+ people are using Instagram Stories on a daily basis.

But, did you know that Instagram now makes up more than one-third (36%) of Facebook’s total ad revenue? A revenue number that is expected to grow to $5.4 billion in the U.S. alone in 2018 and $9 billion globally by 2020.

Needless to say, Instagram advertising is becoming a huge deal  for Facebook and an even greater opportunity for business looking to diversify their advertising channels and reach new customers.

In our latest episode of The Science of Social Media, we’re exploring tons of detailed tips, strategies, and best-practices for how businesses can sell on Instagram like the pros.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

What you’ll learn in this episode

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters. Short on time? No worries! Here are four quick takeaways:

• Instagram Shoppable Posts: How they work, how to set them up, and how to get started
• Our top dos and don’ts when it comes to how to sell on Instagram
• Why UGC (user generated content) and influencer marketing are a few of our go-to Instagram marketing strategies
• How to create an Instagram business profile that doubles as your business’ home page
• Measuring the ROI of your Instagram advertising efforts

Must-read resources on how to sell on Instagram

• How We Optimized Facebook Ads To Generate An Extra $102,580.47 In Sales… For Free! [CASE STUDY] – Digital Spotlight on Instagram Collection Ads
• The Complete Guide to Instagram Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Instagram – Buffer Blog
• Selling on Instagram: How to Use Instagram’s Shoppable Posts – HubSpot Blog
• Optimal Timing, Videos, and More: 10 Easy Ways to Boost Your Instagram Reach – Buffer Blog
• How to Sell With Instagram Shoppable Posts: Shopping on Instagram – Social Media Examiner Blog

How to sell on Instagram [complete podcast transcript]

Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Brian: Welcome to episode #103! I’m Brian Peters and this week we’re exploring the exciting world of Instagram advertising. There are many opportunities for brands, businesses, and entrepreneurs to sell on Instagram – and all they need is a solid place and guide to get started.

Hailley: And what do you know – we’ve got that (and more) in store for you today. Let’s kick off the show!

Brian: In September of last year, Instagram announced their business community has grown to 2 million advertisers, up from one million advertisers back in March of 2017.

Now in 2018, that number is rapidly growing, which means 1) it’s a perfect opportunity for your business to jump on this exciting advertising trend and 2) two million advertisers might seem like a lot, but in reality, competition is still fairly low and return on investment remains high compared to other platforms such as Google and Facebook.

Hailley: Instagram is a very promising platform in terms of both organic posting AND advertising in 2018 and beyond.

Learning how to promote your products on Instagram without seeming sales-y offers businesses of all shapes, sizes, products, and services some incredible opportunities to reach their target audience and drive sales.

Get this, KeyBank analyst Andy Hargreaves recently estimated that Instagram could generate nearly $9 billion in revenue this year – and one The Street analyst believes that Instagram could hit 1.1 billion monthly active users by the end of 2018.

Meaning, your target audience is likely on the Instagram platform… or will be very, very soon.

Brian: Very soon!

However, being that Instagram is a visual platform first and foremost, the rules of the game are a bit different than you might be used to with other forms of social network advertising and posting.

Businesses and advertisers need to take a different mindset going in. Instagram is all about inspiration, discovery, branding, and what AdWeek calls the “continuation of customer journeys”

Hailley: Exactly. And, of course, the tradeoff with ads focusing on inspiration, discovery and branding is that there tends to be less drive for users to click directly on the ads, since their engagement is more likely to be about simply viewing what ads are offering to them than, say, purchasing a product.

But! this doesn’t mean that Instagram posts and ads aren’t valuable—in fact, it can be quite the opposite.

Instagram is one of the best platforms for brands to engage with customers who may not have intended to purchase a specific product.

Brian: So with that. What we have for you in today’s episode is a list of best-practices, tools, and key data points that you’ll need to know to be successful with Instagram posting and advertising, and ultimately, selling your product or service on the platform.

And remember, every successful content marketing and advertising strategy contains a willingness to experiment a TON, analyze results, and learn quickly.

The best top-level advice we can give you right off the bat is to take a growth marketing approach to your Instagram sales efforts.

Hailley: Alright, right off the bat lets cover Instagram Shoppable Posts.

You might have seen these in your feed over the last few months, but essentially Shoppable Posts allow eCommerce and others businesses to tag and add products directly to an image.

Users can then click on a specific product within an image and purchase the item directly on Instagram. So from discovery to checkout, users never have to leave the Instagram app which is pretty incredible.

Brian: Yeah I’ll admit that I’ve been hooked by several Shoppable Posts over the last few weeks. The experience is pretty seamless and fun actually.

However there are a few eligibility requirements you’ll need to check off before you can get started with Instagram shoppable posts:

1. You must be located in one of the following countries: United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, or Australis
2. You need an Instagram business account
3. You must be on the latest version of the Instagram app on either iOS or Android.

Hailley: Yeah, all pretty easy to that point. But there are two more steps to get started which can be a little tricky.

The first is that your business must sell physical goods that comply with Instagram’s merchant agreement and commerce policies. You can find these on Facebook’s website by searching “Facebook commerce policies” in Google.

And then second, your business profile must be connected to a Facebook catalog. This can be created and managed on Business Manager, directly on your business’s Page on Facebook, or through a 3rd party tool like Shopify.

Brian: I know it’s a bit hard to demonstrate how to complete the steps that Hailley just mentioned, however, be sure to check out this episode’s description in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts and we’ll include a great resource that HubSpot recently created on getting all of this stuff set up.

Anyhow, as soon as you’ve completed those steps, your account will be reviewed by Instagram before you can access their shoppable posts feature. And once you’ve been approved, you will receive a notification letting you know you’re ready to start selling on Instagram. Boom!

Hailley: And that’s where the fun begins!

Whether you have access to Shoppable posts or not, there are some must-dos (and donts) when it comes to selling your product. And these apply to both organic posting and advertising on Instagram.

The first is that while selling on Instagram is easier than ever, it’s important to remember your audience shouldn’t feel like they are being sold to.

One way to think about it is that you as a business should aim to maintain your current content strategy, and only incorporating shoppable tags on photos that are a natural fit for your profile. The same goes for organic content as well.

Brian: Great point, Hailley. In other words, you’re going to have a lot more success by doing what’s already working for you rather than completely changing your strategy to try and sell products.

For example, a great way to organically sell your products through your posts is by leveraging high-quality user-generated content in your content and ads.

Here’s a fun fact, Millennials trust UGC 50% more than other types of media, so it makes sense that these images would work well for selling your product as well.

One of my favorite brands on Instagram is a outdoor retailer called Huckberry. They do a great job of incorporating UGC into their content naturally. Definitely go check them out for inspiration.

Hailley: Yeah and somewhat in the same realm of UGC is that you can also optimize your Instagram sales strategy by using influencer posts.

According to HubSpot, Instagram influencer collaborations and sponsorships have nearly replaced traditional ads and are a huge part of a social media strategies today.

One cool example of this is when Herschel Supply (a brand many of you might have heard of) featured a popular fashion model (Michelle Dee) using one of their suitcases on their profile. They of course tagged the suitcase allowing users to instantly purchase it.

Brian: Such a good example, Hailley, and so easily replicated as well.

You can quickly identify several influencers in your space and offer them some sort of compensation for capturing themselves using your product or talking about your product in some way.

Then, you can feature that post on your profile. And for a double win, you can also have them post it to their profile as well.

Lots of fun and creative ways to go about it.

Hailley: Switching over to some quick-fire tips and strategies for selling on Instagram like the pros.

First and foremost, and we’ve chatted about this before, is to treat your business profile as if it were your website’s homepage.

Think about this, there are currently about 3.2 billion internet users in the world.

1.1 billion of those people use Instagram. Meaning that more than one-third of the earth’s population of internet users are on Instagram searching, exploring, and connecting with brands and influencers.

It’s time we start treating social media profiles as more than just a means to an end. They are becoming the end!

Brian: Perfectly said, Hailley. Love that.

So what does this mean for you, you might ask?

Well, this massive shift in behavior means you should be spending as much time and effort curating a beautifully-designed Instagram feed as you would creating your website.

Yup, I said it!

Your Instagram Business profile is your first opportunity to make a great impression and entice people to follow your business. By creating a consistent brand story and aesthetic, you can turn new customers into devoted followers – taking one giant leap closer to making a sale.

Hailley: Another quick tip, along with doing what already works, is to use one of the most effective strategies out there for Instagram advertising and that’s promoting posts you’ve shared on Instagram.

Once you have a Business profile set up on Instagram, you can decide how much you want spend, where you’d like the ad to be seen, and how long you want to run it for.

What we do to decide which posts to advertise with is focus on engagement rate, rather than guessing or randomly picking posts. You can quickly calculate engagement rate for posts by going to your Business profile analytics and dividing the total engagement by total reach.

We also offer many of those same Instagram analytics and data points within the Buffer product for marketers managing Instagram from our dashboard.

Brian: Yeah, I love using Buffer to quickly figure out which posts to boost on Facebook and Instagram. Super easy.

One pro tip is to make sure that you’re using Facebook Ads Manager to manager (instead of just using the Promote button. This will give you a lot more options when it comes to audience targeting, creative, budgeting, and placements. So just a quick heads-up there.

Hailley: Yeah and, this is material for a separate episode entirely because there’s a ton to cover, but a lot of what we’re talking about today applies to Instagram Stories as well.

So, the basics like making sure you have a complete business profile, not totally changing your strategy just to sell, experimenting a ton, and promoting what works instead of guessing are all applicable to Stories.

However, I know I glossed over that part a bit, so stay tuned for another episode in the near future about using Stories, videos, and multimedia to continue to sell your products on Instagram.

Brian: Good call, Hailley. We could easily turn this episode into a 4-hour deep dive into Instagram advertising. Which we might have to do at one point!

But one more thing that I wanted to mention before you go is measuring the success of your Instagram content and Ads.

Be sure, be sure you have some sort of attribution model or tracking set up for your Instagram content, particularly with ads.

Hailley: Yeah, one of the biggest frustrations we hear from businesses is that they aren’t able to track the success and ROI of their advertising content.

Ensuring that your Instagram ads get credit for their role in any conversion is paramount to painting a clear picture of the full customer purchase journey.

And it has other benefits like making you look like a genius as well as justification for increasing your advertising budget in the future.

Brian: Yeah so first and foremost, use some sort of doc or spreadsheet to keep track of the links you’re using, the copy and image that was used with those links, and how they performed.

It’s important to keep experimenting with images, copy, shopping tags per post, or any other factors that may contribute to your Instagram sales success and have a system in place to track all of that will only make your job easier.

Hailley: No matter what type of products you sell, delving into your Instagram analytics allows you to understand your audience’s wants, improves your content, and ultimately helps you drive more traffic and sales.

Brian: Thank you for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are available in either iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll include links to all of the resources we covered into today’s show.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Brian, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com.

Hailley: As always, thank you so much for your iTunes reviews! We see more and more pouring in every week and we can’t tell you how much they mean to us.

Our goal is to get to 200 reviews by the end of the year and we’d love for you to help us make it happen!

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter
• Brian on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 15,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/sell-on-instagram

How to Discover Irresistible Content Ideas Using Reddit

We’ve all been there.

Staring at that dreaded blinking line on a blank page.

Every marketer knows the pain of struggling to come up with a topic for their next article, email or social media post.

And while there are lots of ways to come up with great content ideas, I’d like to show you one that doesn’t get talked about much.

It’s a simple strategy that I’ve used to source content ideas for blog posts, workshops, online courses and more.

And all it takes is a site that many of us already visit every day: Reddit.

But first, why Reddit? 3 reasons you need to pay attention

There are plenty of websites and communities online that you can use for your content research.

And you should poke around to find those corners of the internet where your audience is lurking.

Some other places you’d do well to look are:

• Facebook Groups
• Quora
• LinkedIn Groups
• Slack Channels (here are 1,000 of them!)

But here’s why Reddit is a can’t-miss resource, especially when you’re just starting to look:

It’s massive: Reddit is the 6th most popular website on the planet

According to Alexa.com, Reddit is the sixth most popular website on the planet.

And Google Trends data shows no sign of this growth slowing down.

2. Users find it really engaging: 43% more engaging than Facebook

It’s not just traffic that makes Reddit so valuable. It’s how engaged that traffic is.

According to statistics published in The Next Web, the average Reddit user spends 15 minutes, 47 seconds on Reddit.com each day, compared to just over 11 minutes for Facebook.com visitors and 6 minutes 23 seconds on Twitter.com.

And the platform is growing at an incredible rate: Reddit had more than 330 million monthly active users as of April 2018, which is up from 250 million in November 2017.

Since the platform was launched, its users have posted nearly two billion comments and cast more than 16 billion votes.

Conversations on Reddit can get impressively active, and it’s not uncommon for conversations around hot topics to grow to hundreds of comments.

3. It’s unbelievably deep: more than 1.2 million subreddits

No matter what topic you’re trying to research, there’s almost certainly a subreddit (Reddit’s name for topic-specific forums) for it.

Statista suggests that there are nearly 1.2 million subreddits.

Given its size, engagement and depth, Reddit is certain to have something valuable for you to use to come up with a content ideas.

The key is knowing how to navigate this massive site, and how to extract the most powerful, specific insights from its users.

5 steps to mine Reddit for content idea inspiration

1. Find the most relevant subreddits

Let’s start by finding the subreddits that are already hosting discussions about our general topic.

The superstar content team at Buffer needs no help from me coming up with ideas, but we’ll use the theme of this blog — social media marketing — as an example.

Use the search box at the top right of any page on Reddit to search for communities where your theme is discussed:

To keep this process from becoming a messy 50-browser-tabs-open monster, I recommend saving the links for all of the relevant subreddits you find in one place, and tackling the next step one subreddit at a time.

2. Look for people sharing their struggles

Next, we’ll dive into the subreddits we’ve found and look for problems that we can solve for users with our content.

Using the search function again, look for phrases that indicate that someone is struggling with something.

Here are 15 of my favorites:

• “How do you”
• “How can I”
• “I can’t stand”
• “I’m struggling with”
• “Can someone help”
• “Figure out”
• “Help me”
• “Tips”
• “Suggestions”
• “Suggest”
• “Biggest challenge”
• “Biggest challenges”
• “Hardest part”
• “Biggest struggle”
• “Struggle with”

Make sure to include the quotes, especially for the multi-word phrases, as that will ensure an exact phrase match.

Here’s a search on the r/socialmedia subreddit for “how do you”:

Sort your results by “comments”, as I did above, to find the most active conversations.

As you can see, in just my first few minutes of searching, I’ve come across 6 possible ideas for my next piece of content!

• Tools and tips for running multiple social media accounts for clients.
• How to overcome burnout as a solo Social Media Manager.
• How Community Managers can stay organized.
• Managing Instagram accounts for clients.
• Dealing with the most difficult parts of being a Social Media Manager.
• Getting your first 1,000 followers on social media.

You can repeat this process across all of the subreddits you’ve identified to come up with a list of dozens (or more) potential content topics.

Next, let’s dig in to get all of the information we need to ensure our content thoroughly solves the reader’s problem.

3. Go deeper

Once you’ve chosen a topic for your content, it’s time to dig deeper into the conversation so we can learn more about:

• What other problems do Redditors have that are related to the core problem?
• What solutions have worked for other Redditors?
• What solutions have failed?

Understanding this information will help you create a richer, more thorough article.

Following the example above, let’s take a look at the thread for the first search result:

“I started my first ever job in Social Media last month for an agency. What tools/tips do you have for running multiple client accounts?”

In the thread, we find everything from tips for staying afloat…

…to follow-up questions from other posters…

…to tool recommendations, one of which I couldn’t resist sharing:

Armed with your Reddit-mined article idea and the research to build your post around, it’s time to write.

4. Create your content

If you’ve completed each step, then you have everything you need for your next valuable piece of content.

But don’t stop there!

Once you have a blog post written, think about how you can repurpose each idea to drive the most ROI for your business.

For example, you could use that blog post as a foundation for:

• An Instagram post
• A YouTube video about the topic
• A Facebook Live session sharing your advice
• A Tweetstorm

5. Come back to share

Your content should, of course, be shared in the usual channels that you use to promote your content.

But don’t forgot to also go back to the Reddit thread that inspired you and share your article with the community.

Because old threads might be forgotten about, you’d also do well to send a private message to the original poster letting them know about your post.

This is a process you can reuse over and over again.

And with more than two billion comments to search through, it’s unlikely you’ll run out of ideas anytime soon.

Have you used Reddit to source content ideas? What was your experience like? Leave a comment and let me know.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/reddit-content-ideas