My friends and I are actually setting up a small online magazine lately, and what makes me concern is how to use Social media to acquire more followers.
Our online mag is a small local one, very infant The Saigonese.
We are all students, so the budget is very limited, and the online sense of the mag makes us think Social media marketing must be the choice to promote us further. However, doing this is a lot harder than thinking about it.
We have Facebook fan page, Facebook group, twitter, YouTube, Flickr and of course the mag itself. We are now focusing more on Facebook since majority of our target customers is not twitter users. Even each of the admins for the Facebook fan page have actively promotes the page to their friends, the number of likes does not increase rapidly like what we imagine, given the credit of each of us and the vast number of our friends totally.
So, that alone alarms us! Despite the hard work we are putting in, this can fail badly!!! So, I use what I learn. And things turn a bit brighter!
First of all, do not invite all of your friends, it’s not likely they will respond to the invitations, people are naturally that ignorant. So, what I recommend is to choose from your friends list about 10 of the most influencers, send personal message to them, introduce the page, ask for their opinions. Also, send personal message to your besties, asking them to help spreading the page. The key is to address them as individuals, make them feel like involving and grab the attentions.
Apart from keep updating your page with relevant and interesting news updates and pictures, share them back to your personal home page. This is, in my opinion, more powerful than sending out invitation, sharing back the news to your page makes it appear on News feeds, and people can go to the page by clicking the post link. Being one of the admins doesn’t mean you need to agree with every post from other admins. You can generate conversations by speaking your opinion, referring back to the post on the fan page, get your friends involved.
I’m still figuring out what else to do, since this is a very small non-profit mag, the most irritating thing is the work contributed by volunteers is very unstable and unorganized. Nevertheless, we are seeing growth in the monthly visits, pageviews and likes, a positive sight!
Do you guys have any recommendation to promote my page? J give them to me please!
Hi Nia - great to see you launching this project, and using SM to build a following. Some good advice you provided, too, focusing on opinion leaders.
ReplyDeleteWhere else on Facebook do your target audience "hang out"? Are there specific groups/pages with a user profile that closely matches your audience? If so, maybe consider posting there. But be careful not to "spam" the pages. Instead, ad some value to conversations on those pages.
Good luck, and I look forward to hearing how you go. I'm also looking forward to reading advice from others here!
Good work. I liked your page, even though I don't understand it, but hopefully my like will create a like down the track that would help.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't agree with your fellow admins, my view is rather than generate conversation on something you don't agree on, take the differences offline an decide how to approach this comment made by another admin that may not be the best. Be careful with this, don't just generate content for the sake of it and thereby showing a disagreement between admins (to me at least that would look unprofessional).
have a look at other SM sites too when looking for something similar. Although your target may not use twitter, if something similar exists on there, post there (again as with @wags, just don't spam) and you may find that some people from there could move to your group. You may also find a new twitter market.
Good luck! Keep us posted.
Ross
Much appreciations Wag and Ross.
ReplyDeleteI've been busy with assignments lately so the reply is a bit late.
@Wag: We haven't actively involve with other pages a lot, so we'll try on that point, thank you, I'll let you know if it's working or not! :)
@Ross: You've got a point, I'll discuss with my groupmates about that. :) thank you for looking at our page, :) I would love to use English, but it's not really appropriate for our target group, but thanks a lot for the like!!!!