New #MarketingNerds Podcast: Examining Organic Promotion and Influencer Networking

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

In this week’s episode of the Marketing Nerds podcast, SEJ’s Social Producer, Caitlin Rulien, sits down with Chief Social Media Strategist Brent Csutoras to talk about best practices for pumping up your organic promotion and capitalizing on permission based marketing.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from the discussion, but make sure to listen to the Podcast to hear everything:

Pumping up Your Organic Promotion

Organic promotion is pretty straight forward in its concept. It’s essentially a series of actions meant to increase your content or your initiative, depending on what you’re actually updating. It’s just a series of actions to increase the visibility throughout the social media sites. It’s not really much more complicated than that, although to be honest, when it comes to anything that’s organic, it tends to be a little bit more complicated.

Think about SEO in general. Getting your rankings to improve on search engines takes a lot of energy and time where you can go pay for a PPC, and you can jump right up. In that same scenario, organic social media takes a lot more work, and it takes a little bit more effort, but I think that it tends to provide more of a natural experience for your audience.

Understanding What Social Media Campaign Works

There was definitely a time when people felt very adverse to advertising. It still exists, and that’s a great selling point for the benefits of organic promotion, but people are quite used to the idea of promotion.

What they don’t want is they don’t want lazy promotion. What really makes organic promotion valuable is it teaches you what people want. It gives you an opportunity to identify what resonates with your audience, what performs with your audience. Then when you go to do any kind of paid amplification or paid ads, you’re actually presenting it in a way that applies.

There’s not a better example out there than Reddit in this. If you run an ad on Reddit that doesn’t speak to the community and really resonate with them, it’s a waste of your time. But if you create an ad campaign that really speaks to the community you’re targeting, then they are extremely successful.

Curating Quality Content Across Social Media Channels

When you’re looking at the content side, a lot of people get very hung up on quantity, which was very important early on. When it comes to curating content for social, the most important thing that you can do is focus on quality and really emphasize on getting the most out of a few updates and not just updating constantly. This whole belief that you have to update five times a day or anything like that is just wrong. You need to update as much as you can to make sure that the updates you make are extremely high quality.

Understand trends and stuff. One of the key things in any social strategy is, “You need to research what’s going on.” Because all the answers to your questions exist. You can go to sites like Reddit. You can go to Facebook and find other pages. You can set up all kinds of channels for monitoring what similar sites are doing. If you take the time to learn what works, then you eliminate a lot of the guess work. You’re going to say, “Okay, well, I want to create high quality content.”

Then you start fine tuning that based on how your particular audience receives that once you start sharing it.

Stepping up Your Engagement Game

Start off strong by doing the research. There’s a lot of efforts when you first launch your page or when you first launch your accounts, or there are efforts that you’re making to kind of continue to grow them. Whenever you’re in a space of growing an account, whether it be growing reach or growing an audience, you’re taking efforts to market that page.

One of the things some people really don’t spend enough time focused on is how does their page or account actually look? Because users will never follow an account without looking at that account first. If you open up an account page, and you’re like, “Man, they’ve got a coupon code, coupon code, coupon code, coupon code, some story that I don’t really care about, twelve more coupon codes.” You think to yourself, “This is what’s going to come into my feed, and is this what I want?”

Just because you’re following the best practices on an individual update level, take a moment to actually look at your page as a user would look at it. And prepare yourself for when you’re going to do campaigns to improve reach. Prepare yourself to have a page that looks good and set yourself up to be something that people want to follow, but also realize that there’s a ton of content out there, and people are getting tired of content that doesn’t matter to them.

You need to do less updates and higher quality updates.

Finding Influencers and Engaging With Them

The whole concept of identifying influencers is something that is almost problematic in a way. It’s extremely valuable, but very few people really go through the effort to do things in the right way. Not approaching an influencer and not understanding what you want from that relationship and not having anything to bring to that relationship can be extremely damaging to you.

You get multiple attempts to try to market on Facebook or reach to various different sources for writing, if you were doing blog or outreach or something like that, but when it comes to reaching out to an influencer, they’re going to remember that engagement. They’re going to remember you, and you don’t have a lot of opportunities to make that work.

When you’re looking at identifying influencers always make sure that you understand what influence means. People say, “I want to go in network with influencers.” Well, what does that mean? What is that person influential to you for? Are you hoping that they’re going to share your updates so that you end up getting a larger audience? That changes how you approach who you are going to approach, because if they’re really, really influential in one regard, but they don’t really update as much, or they don’t really have a lot of reach, or they don’t have a lot of engagement on their accounts, then having them share on their accounts might not be that important.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Caitlin Rulien and Brent Csutoras:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the bottom of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Lenka Horavova/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: Image by Search Engine Journal