November luncheon was filled with social media tips by Kim Garst
On November 10th AMA Tampa Bay hosted Kim Garst – best-selling author and CEO of Boom Social – at our monthly luncheon to share the latest on how we can successfully leverage social media to grow our businesses.
Kim’s impressive introduction made it clear that she was highly qualified to give tips on managing social media campaigns. She has 35K followers on Facebook, 148K followers on Twitter, and 66K followers on Instagram – so she knows how to get and hold people’s attention. Her social reach has grown over the years by using all digital marketing tactics, but she claims that content marketing is king of them all!
Kim shared several tips, but the two most important where frequency and engagement.
Frequency: In successfully developing any worthwhile relationship, consistent communication is the key. Kim reminded us to regularly create a plan to share entertaining, informational and inspiring content. Posting evergreen content on your blog allows you to recycle timeless information in various forms on social media, while providing time to develop contemporary content that will provide variety and actionable information to your readers. Automating a consistent schedule of article posts helped Kim gain over one million engagements on Twitter alone last year. She suggested a few tools for automating content: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse, and Socialoomph.
Engagement: Interacting with others on social media is what leads to customers – so comment, share, retweet, direct message (and more) as much as possible. Kim referred to this as capitalizing on the constant “chitter chatter” on social media. This level of engagement requires time – so don’t automate this part. The ultimate goal is to move people from social media to your email list so you can serve them more consistently. Kim emphasized that building a list is what turns followers into customers.
To add even more benefit to the luncheon, our even sponsor – Entravision – provided two lucky attendees with a pair of tickets each to Busch Gardens!
So, don’t miss the last AMA Tampa Bay event of the year on December 8th. The topic of social media continues when speaker Kerry O’Shea Gorgone discusses the legalities every marketer should know about live streaming on Facebook and Periscope. 
By: Alison Clinton