Social media has become an inevitable and ubiquitous part of marketing today. Any product or service, needs that Facebook account, that Twitter following to be taken seriously by the general public.

The main challenge for marketers, however, is to provide a uniform experience for followers across multiple social media platforms, at least the big ones: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. An added difficulty is to create a sense of continuity from your one-on-one email campaigns to your social campaigns, which are a form of mass communication.

This e-book is an attempt to provide a solution to this challenge by listing down the different ways you can use our Social Campaigns features and engage your followers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Post Campaigns for Social Media

Let’s take a look at what features Zoho Campaigns offers that makes every marketer’s job easier:

• You can post your status on multiple social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) with a single click. This saves you from having to manually post your campaign on each site.
• You can extend your reach to various social pages in Facebook (linked to a particular account) through a single status.
• You can schedule the content to be published at the time when engagement is likely to be high among your followers.

Posting Status/Tweet

This is one of the most popular ways to engage your followers. Here is a checklist of general guidelines your status/tweet should follow before you start posting

• Should be thought-provoking and insightful
• Ask open-ended questions
• Be Relevant to your business
• Appealing in nature

Now, let’s take a look at the benefits his checklist provides both for your business and your follower/base.

Create an Instant Fan Base

You can create a large network of customers, fans and followers who can receive regular updates on your product/service and they in turn help your post go viral.

Receive Instant Feedback

This is the best part of social media: whatever you post will receive an instant feedback, criticism or complaint that can be addressed immediately.

Measuring Interaction with Followers

The purpose of posting a status or tweeting is to measure the level of brand awareness and involvement with its fans: the number of likes, comments, retweets and shares on the social page.

Links

You can use this feature to share blogs, articles or any content-rich websites from your Zoho Campaigns account.

Before you start posting links, remember adhering to these thumb

• Avoid using a URL shortener on Facebook. When a full length URL is used, the engagement rate is three times higher for wall posts.
• On the other hand, always use shortened URLs on Twitter so you can let users know exactly where they’re going when they click your link.

Images

“A picture is worth thousand words”.

If we look at the trend, there has been a surge in image-centric marketing rather than plain old text-based marketing on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Keeping that in mind you have the ability to post images to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn directly from Zoho Campaigns.

While uploading keep in mind certain conditions for the image format:

• Supported image formats - jpg, jpeg, png and bmp.
• Size limit must be less than 1 MB (approximately 1024 x 1024 pixels).

Make sure the image you post accomplishes the following criteria:

• Compelling
• Arouses Curiosity
• Thought provoking
• Relevant to business

When you post the right image, you can expect to generate the following advantages:

Catches Audience Attention

Images are more visually appealing than text alone.

Quick to Understand

With images, your message is communicated faster compared to the time it takes to read the status on social media.

Increases the Response Rate

It’s a fact that no matter what image you use, it generally generates more response in the form of likes, comments and shares.

Ultimately, captivating audience with images, setting up the topic for conversation can establish your brand on social media. Look into topics users crave for information and post relevant blogs and articles on regular basis. This builds trust among the followers and indeed! They can turn out to be your loyal customers in future.