8 Social Media Tips You Wish You Knew

Social media feels like a labyrinth sometimes.

As the CMO at cloudHQ, I use a variety of social media channels on a daily basis. To keep on the forefront of innovating marketing strategies, I’m always looking for new ways to promote our service.

Here's a few of my favorite social media tips that I've discovered and love to use. Any business owner or marketing manager could implement today to improve your business’ social media presence.

Tip #8: Content Curation Tools

Curating content is the process of finding and sharing amazing content. Done right, it’s one of the quickest ways to establish a reputation as someone worth following.

The trouble is it can be overwhelming. Many who try to curate content quickly find themselves losing hours a day trying to find content worth sharing.

Tools such as tools like Feedly, Storify, Contently, and Klout can make this process much easier. Instead of flipping through individual blogs, you can see everything from a variety of websites in a single category, all in one place.

Whatever tool you choose, the most important thing is to be consistent. My general rule is to share:

• 70% content related to my field
• 10% content that’s funny or inspiring
• 20% content that’s directly related to me or my agenda

Tip #7: Claim Your Domain Name (Even if You Aren’t Ready to Build a Site)

Have a business idea with a name you absolutely love? Make sure you claim the website domain as soon as possible. There’s nothing worse than sitting on an idea and then finding out later that someone else registered the URL for it.

Even if you aren’t ready to completely build a site, you can go ahead and register the domain name to keep someone else from getting it.

Pro Tip: Do you have a competitor? You can buy their domains if they expire. What could they do if you suddenly owned their websites? For example, guess who owns jebbush.com right now?

Tip #6: Use SEMRush to Easily Find Good Keywords

Keyword research is the backbone of any good SEO strategy. But keywords can (and should) also be used to inform the language you use any time you create content for your audience, including social media, public speaking, or even during 1-on-1 sales conversations.

The more you know about how your audience thinks about a certain problem, the better you’ll be at creating content for that audience.

SEMRush is a keyword research tool that can help you do just that. At a glance, you can check the trending keywords for a number of categories, and you can also research search data over time.

Tip #5: Use Custom Short Links for Your Tagline

When you think short links, you probably think about bitly or Google’s link shortener. Both work fine, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. But there’s another option that will make your short links look far more professional.

YOURLS is a free, open source software that allows you to own your data and personalize your URLs. You don’t have to depend on the same third-party sites that everyone else is using for your shortened links.

Instead of being assigned a bunch of random letters that mean nothing to you, your shortened URLs can be unique and easily identified.

Tip #4: Create Your Own Professional Pictures Using Instagram

Using Instagram, you can save money on hiring a professional photographer by creating your own pro images. Here’s how:

1. Take a picture
2. Use filters: warmth, saturation, contrast, shadows
3. Before posting, put your phone in airplane mode. (This will allow you to save the picture to your camera roll without actually posting it.)
4. Post photo (it will fail and not actually post)
5. Delete the failed post
6. Choose the altered picture from your camera roll
7. Re-filter again and again as necessary

You can repeat this process as many times as you need in order to get the most vivid, eye-popping images possible.

Take this photo for example, I filtered it not just once, but twice to bring out the vibrant colors in the sunset. Imagine what these filters could do to help you showcase your products!

Tip #3: Use Instagram to Involve Your Audience

Another way to use Instagram is to feature personalized pictures. Doing this will make your services seem more approachable.

For example, if you were a real estate agent, you could use your newfound professional editing skills to post a picture of your clients once they successfully sell or buy a home using a hashtag like #Homeowner.

Tip #2: Boolean Search

Technically, Boolean search isn’t a social media tip. But it’s so useful I had to include it for you.

Don’t let the term “Boolean” scare you. What I’m about to show you isn’t difficult. All you need is the following five shortcuts. Master these and you’ll dramatically improve the quality of your search results.

Boolean Operator 1: Quote Marks

Putting quote marks around a phrase tells Google you’re interested in seeing results for that exact phrase, not results with alternate combinations of the words.

To search someone’s name, for example, don’t just enter the name in the search field, enter the name with quote marks around it. Doing so will give you a better chance of finding results related to the exact person you’re interested in.

Boolean Operator 2: AND

Placing “AND” between two search terms will tell Google to look for websites or articles that include BOTH terms.

Boolean Operator 3: OR

Placing “OR” between two search terms will tell Google to look for websites or articles that include either of the two terms.

Boolean Operator 4: NOT

Placing a “NOT” in your search will tell Google to ignore any web page that includes the term after the “NOT” operator.

Boolean Operator 5: Parenthesis

Parenthesis in search are similar to parenthesis in your 9th-grade algebra class. They let you construct complex searches and tell Google the order it should use as it searches.

These techniques work in almost all search engines, including Twitter, Bing, Yahoo!, and many others.

Tip #1: Headquarter Your Cloud

I know it can become overwhelming to manage all of your business’ different social media accounts. So, I want to help you make it as simple as possible.

cloudHQ is a service that can help you sync different cloud platforms together, making it much easier for you to access data from different applications.*

cloudHQ allows free email label sharing as a Chrome extension, allowing you to easily sync emails, documents, and attachments from Gmail to a variety of other services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, or even Microsoft Office 365 Mail.

This can save you and the people you work with a lot of time and frustration by helping to better organize and share important information.

Social Media Works Best When Paired with Other Strategies

Finally, social media campaigns work best when paired with live events, SEO, or ad campaigns.

And don’t forget to prop up any online activity with a solid workflow using services such as Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, and Evernote.

*Disclaimer: As noted in the introduction, Naomi Assaraf is the CMO of cloudHQ.