The influence of social media is far-reaching and continues to expand. Social media marketing is no longer optional. All types of companies can benefit from maintaining a stellar social media 
presence on at least the big four social networks—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Ignore social media at your own risk; you can be quite certain that your top competitors have thrown their hats into the social media arena. Top-notch social media marketing requires a firm commitment to social listening, highly shareable content creation and genuine engagement.
Captivating, relevant and information-rich content creation is the basis for strategic social media marketing. Without excellent content, social media success will elude you. Reaching a broad captive audience on social media can significantly boost website traffic and lead generation and conversion. According to HubSpot, social lead conversion rates are 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate. Achieving higher-than-average social lead generation requires active listening, combined with highly shareable content creation and genuine social engagement.
A Social Listening Game Plan
Monitoring relevant conversations on social media is critical. You should know when clients and prospects mention your company, your competitors or your industry. In order to keep track of relevant dialogue in real time, you must have a social listening game plan to track social mentions of the following:
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Your company name
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Any acronyms related to your brand
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Specific product and/or service references
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Names and acronyms associated with your competitors
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Hashtags related to industry events or used by your target audience
Social conversations happen constantly. However, most social networks do not let you reference these conversations very far back into the past, which necessitates doing social record keeping in-house. Having a system in place for cataloging and saving social data for future analysis is vital, as it allows you to see the big picture about your social presence in relation to your industry and hardest competition.
Highly Shareable Content Creation
Highly shareable content is captivating, relevant and information-rich—striking the right chord with your social audience. Numerous content types—tweets, blog posts, webinars, SlideShare presentations, infographics and premium content, such as whitepapers and ebooks—can be used to promote your company on social media. Whether it is a tweet, a Google+ update or a blog post shared on Facebook, attention to detail and quality are essential.
Analyze your social media marketing and content creation history to identify which content types and topics performed best on each of your social channels, and then use your findings to create a strategic social content creation guide.
Genuine Engagement
Genuine social engagement is a necessity. When your content is curated—shared on social media—always thank people personally. When there are questions, answer them with deep insight and authority—always showcasing your industry thought leadership. Become a prolific publisher of highly shareable content, and others will promote your content for you. Without highly shareable content creation, you will be unable to increase your social capital, and your company will face the consequences. Help yourself by actively participating in industry discourse and engaging your social following.
Boosting the exposure and influence of your content could help you attain status as an industry thought leader, enhance the authority and credibility of your company, increase your reach and greatly magnify lead generation and conversion. Make social media success a reality. Trigger greater engagement, expand your social influence and become widely recognized as a top industry thought leader. Social influence is within your reach. Elevate your content and social media marketing to a higher level. Social media success is realized, when highly shareable content creation converges with active social listening and genuine engagement.
