By Peter @Newton Bell, October 8, 2016

The consensus is in: social media is an important tool for advertising today. Email is still the dominant way of conveying messages about junior mining companies, but I think social media stands to be the biggest growth area for digital marketing going forward.

The Harvard Business Review has published several articles and they range from buzzfeed like articles on "4 Roles Every Marketing Organization Needs Now" to hyper-technical "Programmatic Advertising is the Future of Marketing" to the cautionary "Social Cost of Bad Online Marketing" and comprehensive "Branding in the Age of Social Media". There are a bunch of great ideas buried in those articles, but I would encourage you start by listening to the Hootsuite podcast to help bring it all to life.  

I have studied this material from HBR and reflected on how it applies to our junior mining community. Here are several key points that seem particularly relevant to us:

  • Engage "super-users". A company cannot do all of it's own marketing -- word of mouth matters. You know this, but it’s different online. Social media gives an opportunity for the crowd to see the crowd itself interacting with the company, which is an obscure point but very important. In short, the pesky nerd who keeps tweeting at you from their parent's basement may be your new best friend.
  • Be social! Too often a company will just post links to their news releases. Social media is not a newswire. You have an opportunity to interact with people who love you, hate you, or don’t care. Embrace it and don’t just talk about work. Use your follower’s profile to customize your interactions with them: "Hey, cool cat picture" or "Great news story, thanks for sharing" can go along way to make you seem like you should be there. For advanced users: try to solicit discussions on relevant 
  • Be careful. The internet is forever and people seem to love to fight online. Don’t feed the animals. The trolls win when you are afraid to go online because of what they may say. Don’t ignore them completely, but ignore them for the most part. Be polite and considerate online.  

Any company that follows those three points will standout on social media because most companies are not doing it today. There is not a lot of risk involved in those three points, but there can be a fair amount of work involved. You have to decide whether that work is critical to the success of your business (hint: it probably is). 

If you’re still with me, then read on to hear a few tricks and my own thoughts on how you can use social media to good effect.

There is a lot of money involved in social media. As such, there are some useful tools and tricks that you can use:

  • Use time-release posts to help plan your activity. Look to Hootsuite and others in this space.
  • Use tweet-storms to release a large amount of content all at once.
  • Build your own "tag space" by developing and using hashtags, but don’t forget to connect with other popular tags, too.
  • Use pictures, audio, and video. There is a large menu available to you here, from DIY to professional media production. All of the choices can be daunting, but don’t let that stop you from doing something.
  • Use principles from SEO for social media, which means try revising the words and phrases you use to help get you involved in the right discussions. Consider engaging with a technical consultant who can track the success of your different activities and help you prune your activity over time.  

My thoughts on social media for advertising build on all this stuff. Trust the smart people at HBR and Hootsuite, and consider their ideas.

My idea is short and sweet: repackage your old content.

Don’t let dust gather on your old marketing material, whether it is 6 hours or 6 years old. Post, re-post, and re-post again. I’m not asking you to spam us with this re-posting activity: don’t just tweet the link to your news release once per hour 24/7/365, that is guaranteed to lose you followers.

I am asking you to repackage your old content. You worked hard to make it awesome, right? Well, we want to see it. We don’t want to have to click a link and read something. We will, but only if you catch our eye first. Have you heard of clickbait? Don’t do that.

Find a way to give us teasers of your content. Send out excerpts of your news release as a tweetstorm, screenshots of the news on your site, maybe even a post full of hashtags with a tinyurl that links to your news at the end. You don’t want to look like a bot, but you do want to get your content out there in as many ways as possible.

I have tried to do some of this stuff with my recent twitter activity, but I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. It takes a lot of time to make a good meme, I've found.


As I go forward, I will work hard to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The smart people seem to agree that social media is an important area for advertising, even if other smart people claim that social media platforms are prone to becoming "internet ghettos". Social media represents a big step towards catering to our ever-shrinking attention spans and you should reconsider how you conduct your marketing efforts on social media with that thought in mind.

Social is noisy, but that doesn’t mean you can't send out a signal. You control what you put out onto social media and if you do it well, then you stand to gain an engaged and active audience for your message.