Learnings about Social Media Marketing

Published: Oct 15, 2014 by C.S. Rhymes

I’m a web developer by day for a large business. Luckily, they are already very well established and they get lots of visits each day. But starting from scratch with promoting my own website has been very daunting, but also very rewarding.

I started off really excited about making my own website to help me promote my books and my blog. All I thought about was the technical side of the website, the hosting, the framework, the coding, the webdesign, but then once it was live I realised the hard work had only just begun.

Website Launch and SEO

When I was happy with my website and ready to ‘Go Live’ I launched it. To help get things going I thought I just had to tell my friends and then the visits would come flooding in. Unfortunately this was not the case. This made me realise I needed to be a bit more proactive with my website promotion.

I knew a lot about search engine optimisation so I started to enhance my site with a sitemap and improved meta tags, but this is a long term benefit so I wanted to do something with an immediate impact.

Social Media Marketing

I already had twitter and facebook accounts so I thought all I need to do is share links to my sites pages and blog posts. Again, things weren’t quite this simple. If anything, the daily social updates asking people to buy my books and read my blog ended up with me losing followers, rather than gaining visits.

This made me rethink my strategy.

How to use Social Media

I thought about how I used social media when talking to my friends and how I could apply that to promoting my website. I like to mention my friends in posts and send them links to sites that I think would interest them or help them out.

I thought about what kind of people and organisations have the same interests as me and started following them and retweeting the interesting posts as well as posting links to sites and pages I found interesting.

Next I thought about my blog posts more carefully and how to target them better. I realised that the posts I like to read are the helpful posts, such as tutorials, so I started writing posts I thought would be helpful to others. This also agrees with my books which are also written to help people out.

Mentions and Retweets

I then thought about the way I shared the posts and realised that, as I did with my friends, I needed to mention the people and organisations that were in the article. Mentions really increase the visibility and there is a good chance that the person mentioned would retweet the post, further increasing the visibility.

A mention isn’t a guarantee of a retweet, so use this along with other tools like hash tags and joining in on conversations online.