Category: Social Media

While you may have heard about the importance of social media how do you actually go around improving your influence in this area? There are some very simple things you can do to improve your area of influence as we will demonstrate in this article.

The first step is very basic and that is to actually start using your social media sites on a regular basis. This can be done by posting content daily to your accounts. If finding the time to post is an issue then you can schedule your content for posting using sites like Hootsuite, or you could hire a virtual assistant to do this for you.

The type of content you can share includes news items, special offers, and related content to your industry, and of course lots and lots of images.

Post content that is informative and fun and don’t always post about your own products or services. Get into the habit of sharing news items that you like. If you start doing this people will begin to recognize your name and this helps you build authority online.

You may also be trying to get on someone’s radar and you can do this by using your social media accounts. For example maybe you run a health related site and you want to get mentioned by a top fitness trainer. This is what you would do to get their attention.

1. Start commenting on their sites including leaving helpful comments on their blog.
2. Reference this person when you share their content on your social sites.
3. Incorporate Google+ Authorship so people can discover who you are and who you know.

Other ways to increase your social media influence is by publishing a book. Self publishing is huge right now and is the perfect way to get yourself and your company into the spotlight. Becoming a published author can quickly help brand you as an expert and can also be a huge influence in your local area. Wouldn’t you love to tell your customers that you have just published a book? Their reactions may just surprise you.

So while using social media accounts may seem like a hassle to you, it is time to start incorporating them into your business. Just view it as a marketing method and a way to brand your company. Sites like Facebook could easily become your daily newsletter to your target audience where you share happenings in your industry and let your customers know about upcoming special offers.

The majority of businesses use some form of social media site today. Using these sites on a regular basis takes time and effort, so how do you know if you are actually profiting by using them?

There are a few different ways you can tell if what you are doing on social media is working. The following are some of the most common ways you can track your results:

1. Using Facebook Insights to see how far your influence spreads
2. By using Google+ Ripples to see your influencers as well as other people’s
3. Registering an account with Klout and working on improving your score
4. Using PeerIndex which covers long term use of social media and categorizes your posts
5. By using Kred with incorporates a higher scoring base than Klout

Plus of course if you are tracking your website with Google Analytics you can also tell how much of your traffic is coming from social media sites.

Social media influence is important and can be a measure of how well known you are across all the social media sites. This is also a good way of getting your brand name recognized.

As well as using the above sites to track your own influence level you can discover vital information about the top competitors in your own industry. You can see how they are using social media and who their influencers are. Then you can take this information and use it to your advantage.

It may be a little difficult to understand the differences between some of these tracking accounts. From a business owner’s point of view Klout will measure your campaign and will track how effective it is. Peerindex will show you how you stand in your particular community. They use eight different categories for every post that you make. So your goal would be to end up in one category all the time to get a higher ranking. By using Kred you can track what your peers are doing when it comes to social media.

All of this information can help you improve your marketing plan and show you ways to become more active on social media. If your current campaign is not helping you improve your Klout score then it might be a good idea to start a new campaign or go in a slightly different direction.