7 Simple Yet Effective Social Media Tactics You Should Leverage Today

The social media landscape has changed over the years, so if you’re starting to leverage social media today, you might be late to the game. That means you can’t leverage some of the tactics I used to boost my social media accounts because I did them when sites like Twitter and Facebook first came out.
But don’t worry, you can still get a lot out of the social web; you just have to be a bit more creative by leveraging new strategies that others aren’t using yet. Here are 7 simple, yet effective, social media strategies you should start using today:

Tactic #1: Pinterest loves infographics

I’ve already written about the exact steps you need to follow to create and promote infographics, so I won’t bore you by repeating that information. The one thing I haven’t talked about, however, is the simple trick we use at KISSmetrics to maximize our infographic traffic from Pinterest.
Whether your target audience is male or female, it doesn’t matter. Infographics do extremely well on Pinterest.
When we release infographics on KISSmetrics, we also try to get people to share it via the social web. We do so by adding social sharing buttons on the infographic page.

If you look at the image above, you’ll notice one thing in particular. We don’t add the Pinterest sharing button to our sidebar; instead, we place it above the graphic. We’ve found that this helps us get a lot more pins.
When you go into the full-screen mode to see a bigger version of the infographic, you will see we only promote the Pinterest button, and not any other.

Why do we do this? We’ve found that Pinterest drives more consistent traffic to infographics than other social sites do. Just look at how much traffic it drove in 30 days:

Although most of our customers are male, Pinterest is still an effective channel to leverage. If you follow KISSmetrics’s strategy, you should get more traffic to your infographics too.

Tactic #2: Build up your fan base

I used to be a big believer that programs like TweetAdder were the best way to boost Twitter following and that buying fake friends from Fiverr would really help boost Facebook traffic.
Sure, it still works somewhat, but it’s a short-term strategy. You have to think long term and get a bit creative. One strategy that WetPaint introduced me to that you can use is asking your readers to follow you on Twitter and Facebook in order to read the rest of your content:

If the readers don’t want to follow you, they can click “no thanks” and easily get back to reading your content. You also want to cookie your readers to make sure that after they see the invitation once, they never see it again.
This strategy alone should help you double your social media traffic in 30 days. Over a course of a year, you can expect this strategy to account for 30% to 40% of your overall traffic.

Tactic #3: Collect emails on Facebook, the smart way

Do you know how most companies are spending their money on Facebook? The answer is through ads that either take people back to their site or to their fan page, right?
And although you are correct, I bet you didn’t know that most of these companies are losing money from their Facebook campaigns. So what’s the best strategy to leverage Facebook?
It is to create a page within your Facebook fan page that you can drive traffic to. By using a tool like 5 Minute Fan Page, you can set up email collection within your Facebook fan page.

The reason you want to collect emails within Facebook is because it converts a lot higher than a landing page that isn’t located on the Facebook.com URL.
If you really want to get creative, an even better way to collect emails is to use Facebook Connect. Instead of putting an email field within your landing page on Facebook, use Facebook Connect to get users’ email addresses. That way you don’t have to make them enter the information. All they have to do is to click the “register” or “join” button.

You’re going to spend anywhere from twenty-five cents to a dollar per email address. If you have a good email drip sequence, you should be able to make your money back within thirty days by promoting your products and services to those users.
Plus, every time you have an announcement or a new blog post, you can promote it to that email list, which should help you drive a lot of traffic back to your site.
You can also use a similar strategy with your wall posts. Through SplashPost, you can collect emails from wall posts on your fan page.

Typically 2% to 5% of the people that see your wall post will subscribe via email if you use SplashPost.

Tactic #4: Timing is everything

Do you know when the ideal time to post on your Facebook wall is? Or when to put out a tweet?
Simply Measured has a few free social media tools that can answer these questions for you. Here is what their reports look like:

and

If you look at both screenshots above, you’ll find that this free tool will tell you when your users are on social sites and what the ideal time for you to post is.
You can also do something similar with Buffe’s social sharing buttons to maximize your social traffic.

When your users click on the Buffer button, they can either share your content right away or automatically schedule it for a more optimized time.

Tactic #5: StumbleUpon may be boring, but its traffic is sexy

I know StumbleUpon isn’t that sexy, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. It can actually drive thousands of visitors to your site and, more importantly, generate a lot of good backlinks.
So, how do you leverage StumbleUpon? There’s one tactic that I’ve found to work for almost any industry.
First, you need to create a blog post on your site that breaks down the top 100 blogs in your industry. If I were to do this on Quick Sprout, I would create a blog post called “The Top 100 Online Marketing Blogs”.
I would do a few searches on Google Blog Search and Technorati to find good blogs in my space, and then I would compile a big list.
Once you have your list, you can create a blog post that looks like this, this or this. While you are creating the post, hire someone on oDesk to find the email addresses and contact names of the sites’ owners.
In addition to compiling the list, go to Fiverr and ask someone to create a badge that says “Top 100 [category name] Blog by [your blog name]”. For Quick Sprout, for example, I would have a badge that says “Top 100 Marketing Blog by Quick Sprout”. Here is a sample badge design:

Now that you have a badge designed and a list of 100 email addresses, you should start firing off 100 personal emails. The email could look something like this:

Subject: [Insert their blog name] is a top 100 blog, congrats!
Hey [Insert their name],
I just wanted to let you know that [insert their blog name] is awesome. It’s so awesome that I’ve listed it as a top 100 blog in [insert category name].
I’ve mentioned your blog here [link to your post], and I’ve created a badge that you could showcase on your site if you like.
[Insert badge code, with a link back to your site]
Thanks for creating such a great blog! Keep up the good work.
[Insert your name]

The last step is to set up a StumbleUpon advertising campaign. For $200 you can bring 2,000 visitors to your site. Many of those visitors will bounce off, but some will click through to the websites listed in your blog post. This will cause the blog sites to see your site as a referrer in their analytics account, which will help increase the odds of them linking back to your website.

Tactic #6: Rank your social profiles

I was searching the other day for the term “motivational speaker”, and I saw this listing.

What was interesting about this Twitter profile is that the user named his profile “Motivational Speaker”, which is why he started to rank for that term.

The mistake he is making, however, is that although he has a lot of tweets, not very many of them are engaging. If he had participated in real conversations with other users and shared more relevant content, his profile would have been a lot more popular.
So, if you follow the steps in this blog post and change the name of your Twitter account to a popular keyword you are trying to rank for, you can do extremely well. This strategy works well, however, only if your Twitter profile is popular and the keyword is related to the content you tweet about. So, make sure you focus on providing a lot of value to the Twitter community.

Tactic #7: End your YouTube videos with another video

One of the best ways to get more video views is to end your video with another video. If you aren’t sure what I am talking about, check out the image below:

You will have to get a video editor to do this because it requires some production work, but it is well worth it.
Social media is alive, well and growing fast. There is a lot of traffic to be had from social sites, but you have to get creative. You can’t just rely on the old tactics people used three years ago; you need to start thinking outside the box.