The new year is a great time to reflect on your business goals and say goodbye to those outdated social media and advocacy marketing tactics you relied on in 2018. Say hello to a better way of doing business in 2019 with our top five social media and advocacy marketing resolutions for the new year.

Top 5 Social Media and Advocacy Marketing Resolutions

1) Say No to Buying Followers or Engagements From Third-Party Platforms  

To be clear, there isn’t anything wrong with paying to increase your post’s visibility using the provided native advertising formats like sponsored posts and tweets. In 2019 using sponsored posts will still be an effective marketing tactic for reaching your audiences.

What we’re talking about here is purchasing followers or engagements (likes, comments, shares) directly from a third-party site. You know, the ones that claim that they’ll give you 1,000 new Instagram followers for $100.

Not only does Facebook and Instagram regularly look for (and scrub off) purchased followers and comments, but more importantly, these purchased followers are almost never “real” people. Which means they’ll never, EVER, turn into paying customers. No matter how much you invest in content and your social media strategy.

Instead of buying followers and engagement, this year resolve to focus on building your community organically by:

• Engaging With Your Followers – Comment on customer photos that feature your products or photos that have tagged your store.
• Having Fun – Social media is a part of your business but it’s also a place to have fun. When you’re having fun, that means your followers are having fun too.
• Show Off Your Brand Personality – Yes, you’re a brand first. But you’re also comprised of some awesome people. Let your walls down and show what makes your company great

2) No More Ignoring “Small” Influencers and Advocates

Prior to 2019, most brands forged their influencer and advocacy marketing partnerships with large-audience influencers and advocates. The ones with followers of 100K or even 1M+.

Why? Because they (wrongly) believe that a large following on social media would equate to more impressions (low cost per 1,000), which would then lead to a spike in sales and revenue.

However, brands quickly discovered that the size of an influencer’s audience didn’t necessarily equate to greater engagement, post visibility, or sales (especially when you consider the accounts that have purchased their audience – see Resolution Number 1).

Instead, brands realized that individuals with a smaller following were more likely to have stronger engagement and a better relationship with their fans.

Why Micro is Mighty

As we’ve discussed previously, micro-influencers typically have between 10k-90k followers made up of a variety of individuals that enjoy the micro-influencer’s topic content. Micro-influencers have a 60% higher engagement and 22% more weekly conversations than the average consumer. Here are a couple of reasons why you should put micro-influencers on your resolution list.

More Cost Effective than Macro-Influencers

Micro-influencers charge $1,000 or less for a post. Nearly 87% charge $500 or less per post.

Additionally, micro-influencers are able to generate 60% greater engagement than other campaigns.

They Drive Social Engagement and Sales

82% of consumers are “highly likely” to follow the product or service recommendation of a micro-influencer. They’re seen as at least 10% more credible and knowledgeable about products than others. Sales from micro-influencer campaigns yielded a roughly 2.8 times return.

In 2019, resolve to create opportunities that leverage the sharing power of your Everyday Fans (the average Joes and Janes that follow you on social media) as well as your favorite micro-influencers (individuals with a following over 10K but under 100K).

3) Focus on Quality, Not Quantity

In 2019, bad content won’t be seen. It’ll still be on social media, it just won’t be shown in a user’s newsfeed. Even mediocre content will have a hard time making it through the visibility algorithms.  At least, not to a level that make it worthwhile to produce. As content product costs continue to rise, brands need to focus their efforts not on sheer volume, but on quality.

So, what is “good” quality content?

It’s content that makes a reader stop. Stop their scrolling, their conversations, their daily lives.  to engage with, watch, or read the content piece they’ve stumbled upon.

The longer a user engages with a piece of content, they more likely they are to share that content with their social networks. Likewise, they’re more likely to engage with the brand through comments and two-sided conversations.

While there’s no magic formula for creating great content, there are certain factors that all great content has in common:

• Provide Value: The reader is enriched by their exposure to the content.
• Relevant: The content is relevant to the reader.
• Extra Effort: The content has just a bit more pizazz to it than similar content pieces. That pizazz could be humor, better design, more information, really anything that denotes that the author of the piece cared about producing the best content possible.

4) Stretch Your Platform Publishing Muscle

Gone are the days when Instagram was simply a photo publishing platform. Now brands must decide whether their published content will be a traditional post, an Instagram story, a live video experience, or even an IGTV update. Facebook as well has upped its portfolio of publishing opportunities, leaving many brands scratching their heads on how best to use this new opportunity to drive engagement.

As one of your 2019 marketing resolutions, we encourage you to embrace these new content publishing opportunities! Start small by determining which one new social publishing content type works best for your brand and give it a try.

Weave these new post types within your existing social media content calendar and watch your engagement and audience numbers grow.

Learn more about all of the new Instagram publishing opportunities by checking out our 2018 Instagram white paper here.

5) Don’t Blaze the Advocacy Trail Alone

Take back your time in 2019! Brands big and small are ditching their spreadsheets and bulky BCC emails and are instead using 3rd party platforms (like SocialToaster) to help them manage their advocacy marketing efforts.  

With SocialToaster, your brand can create a powerful advocacy program through which they can distribute content to interested fans, advocates, and influencers.

How does it work? With SocialToaster your fans join your advocacy program, link their preferred social account to the SocialToaster platform, and then share your content directly from the program.

They can even earn points, contest entries, and rewards each time they share! If you’re marketing team spent too much of their time in 2018 tallying contest entries and telling micro-influencers when you had new content to share, make 2019 the year you invest in a tool specially designed to improve your advocacy marketing performance.

New Year, New You

Ready to shine in  2019? SocialToaster can help you create an advocacy marketing program that dazzles you and your fans! If you’re curious about what SocialToaster can do for you, contact us at 855.62.TOAST or request a free demo!