Social Media strategy and growth hacking

1. Define your audience

Once you have defined your audience you should be able to follow the following questions:

    • What are they looking for? How can I help them with my domain of expertise?
    • On which platform does my target audience spend time? Where can I reach them?
    • What content should I share with them?

2. Define your goals

To define your goals, ask yourself:

  • What is your goal for using Social Media?
  • What can I gain from using Social Media?

At Elearnhero, our goals are:

  1. Engage with people so that people check and try out our courses .
  2. Engage with e-learning enthusiasts and get top course recommendations.

Although Social Media is a long term investment, you should monitor your work, and change your strategy if it isn’t working out.  Therefore decide on your KPI’s and monitor your progress.

3. Google Analytics

Beneath, you can check out our analytics from last week.  As you can see, Facebook seems to be our most successful channel till now. It has the highest traffic but also one of the lowest bounce rates.

eLearnHero social media Google analytics

Eearnhero Mocial Media Google Analytics

4. Free tools

IFTTT
IFTTT automate your social media

IFTTT automates your Social Media

IFTTT is there “to put the internet to work for you”. It’s a tool to automate your work! At eLearnHero as soon as someone post #entrepreneur #onlinecourse we automatically add that person to a  list. It helps us create a list of interesting people and hopefully target people that are interested in us!

Using IFTT is simple, you choose your recipes, you connect your Social Media accounts, and then you’re ready to automate.

Buffer

Buffer is a simple tool that allows you to share many social networks at once. It’s such an intuitive tool that even a 5-year-old can find outhow to use it in less than a minute.

Buffer - Distribute your campaign in one place

Buffer – Distribute your campaign in one place

5. Twitter

I follow you, you follow me

Your first step on Twitter is to get a minimum number of followers to increase your credibility. How do you do that? The principle is: “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” or  “I follow you, you follow me!” It’s always best to have relevant followers. This is how you find them:

# hashtag

Capture d'écran 2015-03-11 16.36.50

Search for a hashtag that best defines your target market and what you have to offer. Then start following people that interest you!

#Competitors

Find relevant people is easy if you just start following your competitor’s followers.  Logic is simple, if they followed your competitors, why then not follow you?

#Lists

These are lists of people gathered around on subject. For example, on the e-learning Twitter expert list, you are likely to find lots people relevant to the e-learning industry.

Get in contact with Influencers

“The true power of Twitter is not to reach your own followers, but to reach the followers of influencers in your market.”

This says it all. You want to use Twitter as a way to determine and reach Twitter influencers. It’s an easier approach than trying to be an influencer yourself. This is how you can reach influencers:

  • @Mention them and interact with them directly.
  • ReTweet // Share what they care about which is in your domain of expertise.
  • Propose them to guest post for their blog if they have one.
  • Answer a problem they might have when you see that they tweet about an issue you can answer.
  • Write about their tweet.

Trending topic

Oreo twitter buzz

Oreo Twitter buzz

Using trending topic to your advantage can show itself rewarding. Trending topic are  topic that are hot in the moment. They can potentially create lots of traction!

The Oreo example is a classic. During an NFL Superbowl match,there was a power outage. Oreo quick response was “Power out? No problem you can still dunk in the dark” with a funny picture featuring their product. Read more about this case study on business insider . This campaign got 15k+ retweet.

Heineken and Pulco cleverly used the bending Iphone 6to their advantage. This is how:

Heineken bendgate buzz

Heineken bendgate buzz

Pulco twitter buzz

Pulco twitter buzz

Twitter cards

Twitter example card code you need to put on your site

Twitter example card code you need to put on your site

Twitter cards allows you to communicate better your brand. It’s why it’s called a rich Tweet:  Etsy managed to get people to download their app directly by using a rich Tweet. Read more about Twitter cards

Read more about Twitter cards here .

Twitter etsy card example

Twitter etsy card example

Facebook

There are lots of small tricks people don’t know about on how to use Facebook to your advantage.

Facebook Video

Facebook is currently massively competing against Youtube for videos. This is how you can use that to your advantage.

If you make the effort of uploading every video directly to Facebook, the video will be promoted many times more than with a Youtube link. From my own experience, it has been over 100 times more effective till now. With a friend, we posted our Speedriding videos . The difference, he shared the a Youtube video link, at I uploaded the video directly to Facebook. The numbers talk for themselves:

Youtube Link shared on Facebook Video uploaded straight on Facebook
Views 56 views from Facebook 5000+
Shares No shares 36 and counting!
Likes 8 115 on my wall around 200 in total.

Facebook video

My friend sharing Youtube link (we got 56 views from Facebook to the Youtube video)

Facebook video

Me uploading video on Facebook

Facebook groups

Facebook groups are great to promote your company. For elearnhero I’ve managed to access to entrepreneurship groups that have more than 2000 members and even from prestigious universities such as MIT.

Facebook group

Facebook group I’ve integrated (including MIT !!!)

When posting in a group, my recommendations are as follow:

Write a nice two sentence paragraph about what your value proposition is, and make sure to have a link to your Facebook page. The last part is important is you want people to like your Facebook page!

Facebook group post

Recommendation: Share your Facebook page first so the “like” button appears. People will then like you faster! Notice here that I’ve also posted a link to my website. When creating your post, first add your FB link and then add your other links.

Facebook power editor

Use Facebook’s power editor. The power editor is made to design ads, but you can also use it for free by creating a post with specific buttons.

This tiny difference will make your post more successful. People are not used to the button and are more likely to click it.

Post without Facebook power editor

Post without Facebook power editor

Post with Facebook power editor

Post with Facebook power editor. You can see the Learn more button bottom right.. Engagement increased by 54% for this post compare to others..

Have you tried these techniques?  Share your experience with us below!