The value of social media posting
I'm Phil Mershon with Return on Initiative and today we are going to talk about social media posting.
Social media posting is a great way to help customers discover your business, learn more about your business, and connect with your business.
And, done properly by the right people, it ought to be inexpensive. In fact, it ought to be downright cheap.
What we do here at Return On Initiative is to merge the power of daily social media posting with SEO, a Google-friendlification process known as Search Engine OPtimization. In short, we harness the potential of social platforms and reinforce that energy with backlinks and indexing. By doing each of these things in concert with one another, you will maximize your presence not only on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, but more to the point, you will develop a more prominent position on Google as well as the other search engines.
All of this presupposes a couple very important matters that sometimes get overlooked. First, by saying you are in business, you must in fact have something for sale that other people could conceivably want to buy. What you sell might be either a product or service. What you create can be tangible or intangible, long-lasting or ephemeral. And your store may be real or virtual, a multi-national or based in your home.
You'll need to figure out how much to charge for what you're selling and you'll need a way to process your payments because everyone with any money will want to pay you with either credit or debit.
The other thing you will need is a website--a website dedicated to promoting and selling what you sell.
Once you have those things in place, you can concern yourself with social media posting.
A social media post intended to promote your business ought to include several things, not necessarily in this order: a link to your website; relevant text of an informational nature rather than a blatant appeal to buy something; three or four wel-considered hashtags; and a compelling image--either static in natire, a collage, a special design, or a short video.
I want to emphasize the difference between a social media post and a social media ad. The differences are three: One, a post gives us information about why we might be interested in the business, whereas a social ad tries to sell us something. Two, a post costs nothing but your time, whereas an ad will cost a lot. And three, a post is effective and an ad will be resisted.
How often do you need to post in order to be effective? Keeping in mind that the optimum approach is to post on your own social media business pages to feed the needs of your existing audience, but also post elsewhere as a means of growing and increasing the breadth of your base, and also keeping in mind that your posts ought to appear on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram (alternatives to these do exist and experimenting with TikTok, Tumblr, Pinterest and other Asian-based platforms may have value as well), you should post every day and the number of times you post should be eighteen.
You do not need eighteen different posts; just one post that appears in eighteen different places.
We have tried it a lot of ways and our experience here at Return On Initiative shows that seventeen is not enough and that nineteen is too many. So one post in eighteen places is right. That is what works.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that eighteen sounds to you like it will take a rather long stretch of time and that probably the only way you could justify all this would be to utilize a posting service such as Hootsuite and you have tried either that or something similar with results that landed something short of spectacular.
That is why here at Return On Initiative we have spent the last fourteen years doing all this posting manually. And when I say we, I mean people here in North America, rather than a sad and unfortunate collection of anonymous entities from developing nations.
So. . . eighteen posts everyday. That is the number.
As you may recall, way back in the early days of this essay, we talked about the need to support the postings with something called backlinks and indexing.
Backlinks are links from other websites back to yours. The value in backlinks is two-fold. Fold number one is the fact that someone may see your link elsewhere, click on it, be wow'd by your website and decide to do business with you. Fold number two is the fact that the existence of backlinks from other websites to yours is the single greatest influence on how relevant Google decides your business is. And so if you have been chasing that ever-elusive goal of being on the first page of Google, the best things you can do are to post daily and to have a lot of backlinks. We start our clients out with three hundred the first month and then add at least one hundred new backlinks eavch and every subsequent month.
The final supporting action that needs to happen is called indexing and all that really means is sending an online request to Google and the other search engines to crawl through all the information on your business website.
Keep in mind that Google alone has more than 180 versions of itslf, one per country and that a lot of things we don't necessarily think of as having search engines actually do. YouTube and Amazon are two that come to mind. At ROI, every month we submit for indexing and inclusion your website to 776 different search engines and internet directories--just to make sure that you can be discovered anywhere in the world.
So those are some of the things we do here at Return On Initiative. You may have tome to do all of these yourself. Or you may decide that our fee of $129 per month is the greatest value in the world and if you do decide that, we would love to here from you. So call us at 740.497.2651.