How to Increase Your Online Presence in 30 Minutes a Day

Working on your online presence has much in common with training your body–a short, daily workout brings more results than a long training session once every two weeks.

The secret of success is consistency, so try to devote at least 30 minutes every day to working on your online presence. In this article, I will also share plenty of tools that can save you a lot of time.

So, let’s take a look at the daily workout:

1. Track Brand Mentions

Spend some time with social media monitoring by tracking who mentions your brand and where. Be sure to:

• Set up alerts in multiple tools. This is so you can check everything right in your inbox. BuzzSumo is a great tool for this purpose, though the free version has limited functionality. If you do not have a budget for tools, you can use Talkwalker Alerts, which is free.
• Thank people for their mentions. Reach out to bloggers that have helped you spread the word about your business. The people who mention you are your potential brand loyalists and advocates. In the end, it’s simply good manners to respond and thank someone for their referral.

• Here are three pre-made templates for saying thank you:

  

  You can also find more templates in my “Ultimate Guide To Building Your Twitter Presence.”

• Respond to negative mentions. If you stumble upon negative feedback or complaints, this is a chance to turn a negative impression about your company into a positive one. By promptly and appropriately reacting to negative mentions, offering solutions or at least apologizing, you can gain more trust and respect.

2. Analyze Your Competitors

You can quickly and easily analyze your competitors with the free report by SimilarWeb. Type in any domain, and the tool will provide you with loads of insights about its traffic, including main sources, geo-parameters and a lot more.

The next step is to see how your competitors are doing on social media. With the SEMrush Social Media tool, you can compare the size of your audience with your competitors and also see their levels of activity and social media engagement.

Here, I’ve analyzed airplane companies, and whereas British Airways has the biggest audience, a company I should really follow is Lufthansa, because this company engages their audience a lot more.

The report I really love in this tool is the Activity report. It allows you to filter social media posts by comments and track messages that resonated with your audience the most. In my opinion, comments are a lot more telling than a “like” or a “share’ in terms of engagement.

3. Analyze Your Current Online Presence

After analyzing your competitors, it’s time to look at your own online presence.

• Check your content’s performance. With Google Analytics, you can find out the most effective channels with the Acquisition report and determine your most popular content with the Behavior report. Obviously, this content is worth further sharing.
• Check the site speed. If your website takes too much time to load, your bounce rates will skyrocket. So check your website speed from time to time.
• Check you social media activity. For general analysis, we use Sprout Social’s Group Report, which provides awesome insights in a very detailed and visually appealing format. As for Twitter, it is very easy to keep track of your activity with SumAll’s Daily Email report. And to track your Facebook page, you can use LikeAlyzer (this tool is also good for competitor analysis). Along with analysis of your page, it provides actionable tips and advice.

4. Grow Your Audience

After you’ve tracked your brand mentions and analyzed your and your competitors’ performance, it’s time to work on growing your audience.

The easiest way to do this is to use Twitter lists. For example, I could just open the Social Media list compiled by Lee Odden and subscribe to the whole list with one click or select specific members manually.

Let’s take a look at some tools that might help you as well.

• Crowdfire is an awesome free tool for use with Twitter and Instagram. It allows you to follow and unfollow up to 100 people daily. You can also copy followers from similar accounts or your competitors’. Another option is to search for relevant keywords and add new followers who mention them in their bio.
• Sprout Social’s Discovery tool is what we use for Twitter. I follow people we’ve had conversations with and who have mentioned us in their Tweets.
• Followerwonk allows you to analyze profiles, search for relevant people by keyword, and follow or unfollow people you’ve found. My favorite feature is the ability to export into Excel, but this is only available with a paid subscription. This feature allows you to export a list of all of your followers into a spreadsheet and filter by last Tweet, or the amount of followers or keywords in their bio. This is incredibly useful for inviting your followers to your upcoming marketing events, such as webinars. You can also see who hasn’t followed you and try to engage with them.
• Klear and BuzzSumo are really great for finding and connecting with influencers. LinkedIn search really helps as well. Once you’ve connected with the person on LinkedIn, check the Contact Info tab and take the conversation to your mailbox. People are more likely to check their email than LinkedIn.

Here are some quick templates for connecting with bloggers, speakers or with anyone who is going to attend to the same conference as you.

5. Share Useful & Relevant Content

After completing the previous steps, now it’s time to share some content with your audience.

Pick Out Content to Share

Check out what is trending and relevant in your niche. You can use the Trending tab in BuzzSumo, or create alerts for the most popular keywords to see any new articles that your audience might like.

Use your branded keyword alerts to share the content where you were mentioned. You can also share posts from your blog, news and online events announcements.

Compose a Great Tweet

In this example, I decided to share a recent post by my colleague Anastasia. I used her pre-made tweet, added an image, tagged people who were mentioned in the post and included a few hashtags. Why is this Tweet just good and not great? How can we make it better?

Always add your own opinions. Share your thoughts, what you liked or disliked about the content and what you’ve tried or will try after reading this post. Add your personal experience because in the end, that’s what makes a social media social.

Schedule Your Content

If you want to share content multiple times, it’s super easy with Sprout Social and its handy Publishing Calendar, which allows you to schedule your sharing.

Not every post comes with a catchy image, but you can create a quick image yourself using Canva, Snappa.io or Pixabay images. If the content is good, but you don’t really like the headline, enter the main keyword into Portent’s Content Idea Generator and hit the “Refresh” button until you get what you like.

You can also take one of these headline templates and quickly adjust it to suit your own topic by filling in the blanks:

6. Engage With Your Audience

The last exercise in our daily workout is engaging with your audience and beyond. It helps to create templates beforehand so you don’t have to come up with a new phrase each time.

Here are some examples:

• Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated!
• We appreciate all your patience and support while we deal with this issue!
• Glad you liked the article! Thanks for sharing!
• Our apologies for the inconvenience! We’re doing everything we can to fix the issue!
• Happy to hear you’re using _______! Let us know your thoughts!

After engaging with people who already mentioned you, search for problems you can solve. On Twitter, that can be easily done using Twitter Advanced Search. Just type in your area of expertise, set the language (and/or set the geo-location) and indicate that you’re looking for Tweets with question marks.

That’s it, our 30-minute workout is over! Start with these simple steps, and your online authority and visibility will gradually increase, plus you’ll set a firm foundation for more complicated and time-consuming activities.

This post How to Increase Your Online Presence in 30 Minutes a Day originally appeared on Sprout Social.