Most new founders turn to social media to help generate their first few users, readers or visitors to their site – whether it’s for feedback or to actually drum up business. Most of these efforts don’t result in much traction at all. But occasionally, this sort of strategy can snowball into something massive.
Emerson Spartz was 12 years old when he convinced his parents to let him drop out of school. Shortly after, Spartz started the world’s largest Harry Potter fan site, MuggleNet.com.
Is this the most conventional path to success?
Certainly not, but it worked.
Today, Spartz Media owns nearly 70 websites, employs over 50 people, and has tens of millions of loyal fans and followers on social media.
One of the more analytical and matter-of-fact individuals you’ll ever encounter, Spartz quickly became one of the world’s foremost authorities on viral content.
Taking things a step further from what Emerson talks about in the video above, here are 3 ways to squeeze more juice out of your social media posts – and get ahead of the competition in the process.
1. Include A Photo To Every Single Post
Most people opt to include the photo that Facebook grabs from your page automatically. More savvy webmaster instead go a step further and use Facebook’s Open Graph functionality to optimize the content they automatically grab from your page to make it a bit more user-friendly when posted on Facebook.
However, Spartz advises you to go a step further and actually upload a photo to go along with your post – not because of the way your post LOOKS when a user sees it, but because of the number of IMPRESSIONS you’ll get as a result of actually uploading a photo along with it. Facebook has their own internal algorithm that decides what makes a post more worthy of being shown, and an uploaded photo adds a bit more clout.
After all, what good is a well-optimized and well-crafted post if only a fraction of users see it in comparison?
2. Tweet Important Things Multiple Times Per Day
Spartz’s company owns some of the largest twitter accounts in the world – and their collective network of websites boasts nearly 20 million followers. Needless to say, they have a vested interest in research and optimizing their posting strategy, so here’s a simple hack:
Most of the Twitter users get on for a few minutes, scroll through their feed and check out some of the most recent tweets from the folks they’re following. If they’re following more than just a few users, they won’t scroll through even close to everything posted since they last logged in – so they’ll miss the vast majority of what’s posted each day.
What if one of the hundreds of tweets they miss each day is the one you want them to see?
In all likelihood only a fraction of a percent of your followers see each tweet you post – BUT if you instead post your important tweets multiple times each day, and even multiple days in a row, you’ll get more eyeballs on the content you want your followers to see – and the vast majority of them will never know you posted more than once.
Spartz found the magic number here is tweeting the same thing three times, with each being eight hours since the last post – and you’ll still get nearly the same number of clicks from the third past as you do on the first post.
(NOTE: This strategy should NOT be used on other networks such as Facebook.)
3. Forget Much of What You Already Know About Writing
If you’re a novelist or a journalist, chances are you fancy yourself a pretty good writer. However, you don’t have to be incredibly social media savvy to realize that many of the more viral posts on social networks don’t use correct grammar, syntax or punctuation. The web has developed its own lexicon, and if you want results, it’s better to adapt than to fight an uphill battle.
Here are two ways to adapt:
- First, change every comma to a period. Shorter sentences are more readable and skimmable. The more users read, the more action they’ll take.
- Hit return after each 1-2 sentences. Users are less likely to consume as much content if it’s in a big block of text than if it’s spaced out with white space in between it.
These may make your English teacher cringe, but Spartz advises doing what helps you achieve your goal more easily – regardless of Ms. Bicklesby’s opinion of you.
In Summary
So, how to get more from Social Media? By taking a few extra minutes per day to go the extra mile and craft your posts in these very specific ways, you’ll likely soon notice you get a bit more bang for your buck, and more users will both see and act on what you post.
While these aren’t the only secrets to Emerson Spartz’s success, they can certainly work to help further your own social media efforts.
[Image: iStockPhoto, Karen Mower]
Travis Steffen is a viral growth expert who has started, scaled and sold 6 tech companies, and is currently the co-founder of both upshare.co and mentormojo.com. You can find him on twitter – @TravisSteffen