Tips For Creating Your Social Media Strategy

Need help getting started with your social media strategy? It’s no longer time to be sitting on the fence. Social media marketing has becomes a powerful lead generation tool. social media for marketing And it’s time you use it to your advantage! Why is social media so important for small business?It’s an inexpensive way to build a following, promote your brand and generate leadsIt’s become a major factor in the ranking algorithm for search engines like GoogleBut with the “avalanche” of social media platforms, how do you know which platforms to use? Basically this depends on the resources you have at your disposal and how well you know your target audience.Most small businesses don’t have unlimited resources. In fact the average size of an effective marketing team is now 5-6 people, with many smaller companies only having a “marketing-team-of-one”. For this reason spending time defining your target audience is a critical step in creating a solid marketing strategy.In the following 10 tips I’ll help you identify your ideal customer, choose the right social channels and create posts that support your business goals. Infographics are defined as graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.Dragan Mestrovic illuminates the benefits of infographics in four persuasive points:Infographics are shared on the web, Twitter and Facebook more often than other content online.nfographics are easy to understand, consume and share.On Twitter, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, infographics get more shares than other content.Marketers love infographics because they offer an easy and powerful viral marketing tool to spread the word about your company’s products and services.
Infographics are a great way to synthesize information simply and visually as seen in the above image from Vsual.ly. social media marketing course When done well, an infographic is a perfect poster-child for quick and effective dissemination of information via social media. Why is it that some businesses are posting fast and furiously and others are crawling far behind? Chances are that the businesses posting more frequently had to justify to management the importance of maintaining an active presence.As we discussed in #5, autoposting does not offer a suitable alternative to real-live human beings who can respond to comments and post breaking news updates.A tool such as How often do you tweet could shed some insight: Monitor your social media engagement compared with your competitors’. Share the results with management to help justify a request to dedicate more time and resources to the company’s social media efforts. Klout utilizes Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Wikipedia and Instagram data to create a Klout user profile that is assigned a “Klout score,” a numerical value between 1 and 100.Many critics suggest Klout scores aren’t representative of the influence a person has and discount the scores, as well as the thinking behind Klout.Mark Schaefer offers an alternate view: “The ability to create and move content is the absolute key to online influence. So think about this—to the extent that you could actually measure that, wouldn’t you also be creating an indicator of relative influence?” When it comes to Klout scores, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead, ask what you can learn from your competitor’s higher score and how you can do what they’re doing with their content.

Know Your Business Goals

Make sure your social media strategy supports your business goals. Which probably aren’t to get more Facebook likes and shares. Instead they’ll be focused on generating leads, converting leads to customers and making a profit. b2b social media marketing If your goal is to generate more sales ask yourself, “How does my social media activity contribute to that goal?“.Every post should have a well defined goal that supports your business goals. For example it may be a Facebook post that pulls visitors to a landing page and into your sales funnel.Next, when you set a goal, regardless of whether it’s personal, professional or specific to a post, it should always be a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based) goal.As an example this Facebook post had a goal: “To attract 5 new leads from Facebook by the end of August 2014”. The post was well defined, in terms of a SMART goal, and using Facebook’s Analytics tool Insights it was easy to measure its success.You can start creating personas by interviewing existing customers. Choose customers you really enjoy working with, your ideal customers. Most companies will have 2-3 personas that can be used to generate content that will attract ideal customers. Understand the goals of your company’s social media content delivery to help you develop a more attainable strategy.Jayson DeMers suggests, “First you need to know what to measure. The end goals dictate the measurement metric.”He offers metrics for four social media goals:If you’re looking to generate traffic, your metric should be: unique visitors from social websites where you’ve run your social media campaigns.If you’re looking to create a following, your metric should be: subscribers, followers on your social channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).If you’re looking to generate interaction, your metric should be: quantity and type of commentary (Facebook comments, Twitter replies/mentions).
If you’re looking to generate revenue (which is the ultimate purpose), your metric should be: the precise dollar value of every lead a social post generates. social media marketing plans Small businesses can learn valuable lessons from the big-brand approach to social media.ick Mulready suggests three things big brands do very well that small businesses can emulate:Find where their customers talk and “go deep.”reate content that people want to talk about.Use social media to listen to customers.Starbucks, with over 34 million fans on Facebook, is a good example.On Thursday, June 6, they posted a Facebook offer “Enjoy a Grande Iced Coffee, Iced Tea, or Starbucks Refreshers Beverage for $1 on June 7.” The update was shared by 13,931 people and received 1,553 comments. The offer was not tweeted to their 3,852,454 Twitter followers.By promoting the offer on Facebook, where they have a significantly larger following, Starbucks leveraged the promotion on a platform where they were sure to get higher visibility, giving followers an incentive to follow the brand. Ensuring that your posts and updates have a good chance to be seen by your target audience is an integral part of a content strategy.Leo Widrich offers 3 key tactics:Frequency: Post around 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook for optimal outcome.Timing: Almost all research studies highlight the main work hours from 8 am to 8 pm as good times to tweet and post to Facebook.Multiple sites: Post to multiple social sites, in addition to your own blog or website.

Know Your Ideal Customer

This is where we start answering questions about which social channels you should be using. Before you even start posting or choosing social media channels, take the time to create buyer personas. social media marketing podcast A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious character that represent people within your target audience. People who share similarities, such as, challenges, ideas, the way they find information and the social media channels they use. Data from social channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and blogs) can be overwhelming unless you have clear goals to guide what you’re looking for and what you’ll do with the information once you find it.Douglas Karr points out, “The sheer volume of social media data makes it incredibly difficult to analyze.”He offers five practical ways you can use social data to benefit your business: Lana Bandoim writes, “Social media engagement is often defined as the real interactions that happen on these networks.” She points out that social media engagement relies on daily interactions among users to survive. While autoposting tools are one way to communicate, more businesses are beginning to understand that engaging with their audiences in real conversations will bring them better results and add more value to their social streams.Be available to your audience in real time, when you can have more meaningful back-and-forth conversations. Got the hang of your Facebook Page? Enjoy it while you can, because based on Facebook’s history, the only thing that’s certain is that Facebook will change.A Google search for the words “Facebook changes” brings up a great number of results with a range of topics such as changes to timeline, cover photo policy, implications for merchants, mobile layout and much more.
Google‘s new standalone reports, Data Hub Activity and Trackbacks, give marketers more in-depth insights into social networks and how users respond to a business’s content. social media marketing blogsThe Data Hub Activity report shows you how people are talking about and engaging with your site content on social networks. You can see the most recent URLs people shared, how and where they shared (via a “reshare” on Google+, for example), and what they said. The Trackbacks report shows the sites that are linking to your content, and in which context. This can help you replicate successful content and build relationships with those users who frequently link to your site. Promotions—hashtags make it easy to track a promotion’s activity across many social platforms.Unification—you can track a hashtag across all the major networks or filter them individually using new tools such as Tagboard. Conversations—giving a customer your website URL doesn’t make it easy to begin a conversation, but hashtags do.Targeting—unlike going after a general web surfer on the open web, people who use hashtags are likely to engage in social conversations and therefore are more likely to share a positive experience they’ve had with your brand once you’ve broken through.Innovation—because they’re so flexible, simple and ubiquitous, more businesses are able to find creative ways to add power behind the hashtag.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan

So now you need to create a social media marketing plan. No easy task, right? Many of us struggle to iron out exactly what that is, let alone how to build one from scratch. atlanta social media marketing Put simply, every action you take on social networks should be a part of a larger social media marketing strategy. That means every Tweet, reply, like and comment should all be guided by a plan and driving towards pre-determined goals. It might sound complicated, but if you take the time to create a comprehensive social media plan, the rest of your social efforts should follow naturally. Everyone can do this if they approach it correctly. A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. This plan should comprise an audit of where your accounts are today, goals for where you want them to be in the near future, and all the tools you want to use to get there. In general, the more specific you can get with your plan, the more effective you’ll be in its implementation. Try and keep it concise and don’t make your social media marketing strategy so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable. This plan will guide your actions, but it will also be a measure by which you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing at social media. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure from the outset. Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception. Of course, with a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. For guidance, look to the challenges before you.
Social media was often seen as the wild child of the marketing department—the place where interns started their careers and brands could say random things with little to no repercussions. how to do social media marketing But times have changed, and the industry has matured.Yes, social media is still a wonderful place for brands to have a little fun, but it also has a real and measurable impact on a business’ bottom line. Thus, social media can no longer live in a silo; it must be work in tandem with the rest of your business strategy.To ensure that your social media marketing campaigns contribute to your brand’s greater business objectives, we’ve put together a 7-step guide to coach you through the process. We’ve also incorporated a checklist you can use to make sure you’ve done it all right. Click here to jump right to it. A smart social media marketing campaign can answer each of these questions. Prove your team’s worth by tackling them head on. To get you started, we pulled together a few common business obstacles and social objectives that can help brands overcome them. The world is online. A brand’s website, therefore, is one of its most important marketing tools. Low website traffic can mean fewer customers and lower profits. To combat this challenge, your social team should focus its goals on creating links directly to the website (whether they’re from your own social posts or influencers’). Link to useful content, subpages and company images to position your website and your brand as a resource rather than just another cog in the corporate wheel. This traffic should increase leads and, in the long run, revenues.

Create social media objectives and goals

The first step to any social media marketing strategy is to establish objectives and goals that you hope to achieve. social media marketing trends Having these objectives also allows you to quickly react when social media campaigns are not meeting your expectations. Without these goals, you have no means of gauging your success and no means of proving your return on investment.These goals should be aligned with your broader marketing strategy, so that your social media efforts all drive towards business objectives. If your social media marketing strategy is shown to drive business goals forward, you’re more likely to get executive buy-in and investment. They should also go beyond vanity metrics like retweets or Likes, in favour of more advanced metrics like leads generated, sentiment or website traffic referred. Strive to approach these goals using the SMART approach, meaning they should all be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.A simple way to start your social media marketing plan is by writing down at least three social media goals. Make sure to ask yourself what the goal will look like when completed, and use that to determine how you will track it. It doesn’t matter how large your following is, your message sometimes can fall through the cracks. With increasing numbers of brands utilizing social channels, you have to find better ways to get your message to stand out from the noise.Jay Baer of Convince and Convert shares Why It Might Be Time to Completely Change Your Social Media Strategy.The gist is this. Unless you call, email or otherwise send your content to your audience, you have no idea if it’s going to reach them. Even if you have a huge fan base on your social networks, you never know if your people will see your message.
Jay’s solution is to have a shotgun approach for your social media strategy, as opposed to a rifle approach, which is how most people distribute their content. social media marketing new york Jay went into detail on this at the Social Fresh conference. Jay Baer explained the shotgun approach to social media strategy.According to Jay, the rifle approach represents best practices for social media: create quality content, approach each channel in a unique way and build a large following.The shotgun approach, Jay says, is based on the mathematical realities of this wave of social media. Increase the amount of content and post in more places to increase the chances it will be seen.When you post more content in more places, the possibility of connecting with your fans increases substantially. Perhaps the most important research for your social strategy is an analysis of your competition. Discover what works for your competitors and then determine how to use that information to improve your social media strategy.On Jeff Bullas‘ blog, Vibhu Satpaul shares The Simple 6 Step Checklist for Analyzing Your Competition on the Web.To effectively analyze your competitors, Vibhu says to look at their keyword prioritization patterns, break down their rankings and monitor their online visibility, especially on search engines. Produce content with your (whole) audience in mind (who your customers are and what they have in common), and you’re more likely to inspire consistent, shareworthy content.So said Brand Savant’s Tom Webster, when he spoke about Why You Don’t Need a Content Strategy at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit. His recommendation: create an audience strategy instead.

Conduct a social media audit

Prior to creating your social media marketing plan, you need to assess your current social media use and how it is working for you. social media marketing pdf This requires figuring out who is currently connecting to you via social media, which social media sites your target market uses and how your social media presence compares to your competitors’. An important part of your social media marketing plan will be to create mission statements for each social network profile. These one-sentence statements will help you focus your attention on a very specific goal you want to accomplish using Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. They will guide your actions and help steer you back on track when these profiles become less effective. They also force you to realize that not every social network is good for the right thing. Instagram might be great for selling a clothing brand, but for construction supplies Facebook might be a better medium. Take the time you need to determine the purpose of every social profile you have. If you can’t figure out its purpose, you should probably delete that profile.To help with creating these mission statements, learn about your audience on each profile by using Forrester’s Social Technology Profile Tool. This will provide you with data that classifies consumers into seven levels of how they engage with technology. By profiling your customers’ habits on technology, you’ll be able to gain a clear perspective on where each of your social media profile stands with your customers.Once you’ve audited your accounts, it’s time to hone your online presence. Choose what networks best meet your social media goals. If you don’t already have social media profiles on each network you focus on, build them from the ground up with your broader goals and audience in mind.
Social allows you to reach a broad audience. But honing and perfecting that message takes brain power and time. social marketing media To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid a slew of promotional messages; instead, focus on creating meaningful content and a strong brand personality through your social channels. Determine relevant hashtags and industry influencers you can engage with, and tap into those resources to extend your brand’s overall awareness.People turn to social to engage with businesses. Therefore, it is important for your brand to be ready to help customers on any channel they can contact you through. Arm your social media team with the materials, education and authority to respond to customer questions and issues. When you do so, you’ll be equipped to respond to your customers in a timely and accurate way, regardless of how they reach out to you.According to The Chartered Institute of Marketing, it costs 4 to 10 times more to acquire a customer than to retain one. To keep your customers around, use social as a tool to support, communicate and engage. A good social relationship with your customers should translate into a better perception and offline relationship with your brand. By developing a strong social bond, customers will be more likely to stick with your brand time and time again.The world is online. A brand’s website, therefore, is one of its most important marketing tools. Low website traffic can mean fewer customers and lower profits.To combat this challenge, your social team should focus its goals on creating links directly to the website (whether they’re from your own social posts or influencers’). Link to useful content, subpages and company images to position your website and your brand as a resource rather than just another cog in the corporate wheel. This traffic should increase leads and, in the long run, revenues.

Rules For Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies

It is important to revisit the whys and hows of social media marketing strategies often if you are a brand or a company. You have to constantly stay up-to-date with how things work and how things change when it comes to the top social media services. marketing using social media It’s not an easy task, I can tell you that, but it’s necessary if you want to stay ahead of the game. Knowing what way social media is swaying is one of the most profitable pieces of information you can utilize when planning your marketing campaign.Since click through rates are getting continuously worse on the top social networking services, we all have to regroup every once in a while in order to make an effective impact. Influence is no longer gained the same way it once was, and reaching a larger audience is becoming more and more difficult. The effect is usually that when a new social media service becomes popular, the click through rate of your posts and shares are incredibly higher than after a few years of that site being in the limelight. It’s like people are getting more and more saturated with social media marketing campaigns, in whatever form or shape they come in, and they decide more carefully what they are going to click on to check out. Time becomes more valuable in a way, and it’s important to spend it wisely.We are continuously trying to improve our own influence as well as help you improve yours on the different social networking services, and this is in a way an attempt to help you look at social media marketing strategies in a different light. Implementing new standards and approaches can sometimes mean a whole lot more influence on the Internet. Still, creativity is one of the most important factors when it comes to social media marketing strategies.
In yet another attempt to help you gain more influence and reach when applying your social media marketing strategies, I have dug up an infographic that might come in quite handy. los angeles social media marketing It’s called 21 Rules For Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies and is presented to us by Social Metrics. It’s a particularly useful piece of infographic that might shed a bit of light on how to break through the noise and allow you to actually execute that creativity of yours to gain more followers and influence.I am not one to jump on new social media trends right when they are announced. Why? Well, I mostly like to observe people’s reactions for a while in order to see how it progresses first. Call it a calibration time if you will. It’s a way to finalize a more creative plan than perhaps most people introduce into their social media marketing strategies. And, that’s kind of a shame really. People can accomplish a whole lot if they just look at things a little bit more creatively. Try to find new angles, and you will find that good social media marketing strategies aren’t that hard to discover. An editorial calendar is a valuable tool for defining the who, what, when and where of your social strategy. What topics will you address? How frequently will you post, and to which networks? This clear framework serves as the foundation of your social media marketing plan, but it must be flexible enough to readily adapt to audience feedback. If you’re posting seven times each day and losing followers, tone down the frequency for a few days and measure results. Social media is built around engagement, and it requires continuous input from you or your social marketing manager.

Social media marketing is effective

In 2015, we’re seeing a bit of a backlash again social media with some saying that social media is a waste of time and even an ‘infantile delusion’. social media marketing university review We disagree! Social media is here to stay and will only grow in importance. Social media has transformed the marketing of many businesses since it is a fantastic way to engage audiences, encourage participation and sharing and so build brands and businesses.But social media strategies are needed to make the most of it, so that social is managed, measured and optimised alongside a content marketing and customer engagement strategy.Social media marketing is rated effective by many Smart Insights readers. In our research on Managing Digital Marketing in 2015, both organic and paid social media was rated not far behind search and email marketing. How does your social media marketing strategy rate? To help you review ways to make better use of social networks we have created a new social media benchmark where you can score how you rate on a 5-point scale for each of the 7 key areas we recommend you focus on.Over the past four years at Convince & Convert, we’ve continued to refine our social media strategy process. Here’s one of the latest iterations, presented as a keynote speech to ESTO (Educational Seminar for Travel Organizations) last Fall. I’ve pasted the slides below, but also included a short summary of the 8 steps in our social media strategy process, as the slides are more visual than descriptive.Nobody should “own” social media strategy in your organization. Social impacts all corners of the company, and should be more like air (everywhere) than like water (you have to go get it). Thus, the first step in the process is to create a cross-functional team to help conceive and operate the rest of the strategy.This visual capability review is one of a series available for download by all Smart Insights members in our Digital Marketing Benchmark download.
Social media is more than just a publishing platform. If you ask questions, you should stick around to participate in the discussion. facebook social media marketing There are dozens of social media monitoring tools that provide instant alerts when your posts have been shared, commented on or “Liked.” These tools often mean the difference between dedicating your entire day to monitoring your social networks and actually running your business while remaining on the grid.Obsess is a strong word, but you do have to be serious about your analytics. Platforms from Twitter to Facebook offer built-in analytics these days, allowing marketers to see which posts and updates are making the biggest impact and even identifying the specific number of people a single post reached. In addition to this data, your website analytics are a big key to measuring your social media success. If your strategy is working, you should see an increase in traffic and leads from your social networks.Social media is a powerful and affordable marketing tool if it’s taken seriously. Instead of a shotgun approach, follow these steps to create a social media marketing plan with a focused, refined strategy that can generate results.It’s an old social media strategy chestnut by now, but “listen” is still good advice that’s often ignored. The reality is that your customers (and competitors) will give you a good guide to where and how you should be active in social media, if you broaden your social listening beyond your brand name.Yes, you can use social media to help accomplish several business objectives. But the best social media strategies are those that focus (at least initially) on a more narrow rationale for social. What do you primarily want to use social for? Awareness? Sales? Loyalty and retention? Pick one.

Select Success Metrics In Social Media

How are you going to determine whether this is actually making a difference in your business? What key measures will you use to evaluate social media strategy effectiveness? disadvantages of social media marketing How will you transcend (hopefully) likes and engagement? Will you measure ROI? With whom will you be interacting in social media? What are the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your current or prospective customers? How does that impact what you can and should attempt in social media?It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you sell, your product features and benefits aren’t enough to create a passion-worthy stir. How will your organization appeal to the heart of your audience, rather than the head? Disney isn’t about movies, it’s about magic. Apple isn’t about technology, it’s about innovation. Only after you know why you’re active in social at all, and how you’ll measure social media strategy success should you turn your attention to the “how” of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the rest. This channel plan should be distinct, in that you have a specific, defensible reason for participating in each (I covered this more in-depth in my post on 3 Rock Solid Questions to Guide Your 2013 Social Media Success).When we’re working on social media strategy for major companies, the plan and the deliverable is quite a bit more comprehensive than what you see above, but it’s based on this scaffolding and thought process. I hope you’ll find it useful in your own endeavors.Social media can be a huge benefit for small businesses, but it can also be a hindrance when implemented unsuccessfully. Developing a comprehensive strategy that will allow your organization to grow a strong and recognizable brand with consumers and potential business .
Another important aspect of growing a brand through social media accounts is to post consistently, Sherrill said. The types of content involved might vary, hotel social media marketing but in order to establish your organization as a thought leader within your industry, she said that frequent and relevant posting is vital. Within the scope of B2B marketing, she warned that updating an account multiple times per day may not be appropriate – this strategy is generally acceptable for consumer-oriented marketing, but not for appealing to other professionals.In addition, Sherrill advised that certain social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. – can be more valuable than others depending on the situation at hand. For example, she said that LinkedIn is the best way to engage with other professionals within your industry, which is helpful for B2B marketing. But Twitter can offer instantaneous communication with other businesses and potential clients on a much more casual level, while Facebook is more consumer-oriented. Depending on your marketing goals – which should be focused on the target audience’s interests – each format can have varying degrees of value.The author also noted that there are various different strategies to help determine which kinds of content to post, and when. In general, SMBs should aim to post relevant news that is produced by industry experts, as well as original content and some promotional elements. How you choose to distribute these categories may depend on your audience’s interests or the standard dictated by leaders in your particular industry.Sherrill pointed out that a number of tools are available that can help social media users assess the value they are gaining by operating their accounts.

How to Build a Social-Media Strategy That Works

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. If you use it correctly, you can create a strong personal connection with your prospective customers. social media as a marketing toolHowever, marketers often make the mistake of diving into social media without a clear plan. At best, this is a waste of time – and at worst, it can lead to a PR disaster. To benefit from social media, you need to build a clear strategy that takes into account what you’re trying to achieve, who your customers are and what your competition is doing. We all know that social is a key part of modern marketing, but how do you get started? How can you be sure that your efforts on social are strategic, and that you aren't just "marketing at random"?To be successful on social, your social marketing strategy needs to include high-level objectives, as well as specific, granular action items. In other words, you need a social media tactical plan. As with any journey, the first step in creating a social-media marketing strategy is to understand where you want to go. What is the purpose of your social media marketing efforts? Do you want to create or raise awareness of your brand? Are you looking to increase sales, or website traffic, or both? Is your goal to build customer loyalty and increase retention? These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but you should focus on one or two: If you spread yourself too thin, you’re not going to accomplish anything.It’s time to set clear objectives based on your goals. Focus on the S.M.A.R.T. strategy for goal setting to ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based.For example, if you’re a B2B marketer looking to increase sales, you might decide that you want to generate an additional 100 online leads a month.
On the other hand, if your goal is brand awareness, then you might want to increase the number of times your brand is mentioned on social media by 50 percent. social media marketing pricing In all cases, these objectives should be directly tied to your business goals, and they should be achievable. Otherwise, they’re just wishful thinking. Also, make sure your objectives are time limited. For instance, you need to achieve that 50 percent growth in brand awareness within six months, not at some undefined time in the future.Once you set your objectives, make sure you can measure them. Find the right tools to track and analyze each one, so that you can quantify your progress. Not only will this let you know when you have arrived, it will also help you to spot problems early and adjust your course if you need to.Now you know where you’re going, but you still don’t know how to get there. A successful social-media strategy is all about targeting the right people with the right messages. To do this, you need to understand your audience. For instance, there’s no point in targeting everyone in the 18 to 35 age group if you really want to get to upwardly mobile young professionals who are technology enthusiasts.The best way to do this is to create buyer personas. Sit down and create a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Start by giving them a name. How old are they? What is their income? Do they have children? What do they like or dislike? What motivates them? And so on. If you have more than one ideal customer, create a persona for each.When it comes to social media, your competition can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t. After all, they’re targeting the same customers you are. If you ignore your competition, you’re giving up a fantastic opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes.

Research and know your audience

What topics and interests are they are most social about? What problems are they trying to solve? What are their pain points? For example, social media marketing blog if you sell snowboards, do your competitors talk about how their snowboards perform, or do they post amazing snowboarding videos that just happen to include their products? Then, see how well each competitor is doing (e.g. how much engagement -- comments, shares, likes) -- they get on their Facebook updates.) This will let you determine which strategies work and which ones don’t.Now you have a handle on your ideal customers and your competition, it’s time to start building your messages. This isn’t detailed content; rather it's the top level set of key messages that you think will resonate with your customers based on the personas you have created. Choose two or three messages, then break each one down another level creating a simple messaging hierarchy.There’s nothing wrong with adopting some of your competitors’ successful messaging ideas but also try to create original messages that set you apart -- this will help you to create a unique brand voice. Don’t be afraid to get creative as your social media presence should be exciting, not boring.Not all social-media platforms are the same. You need to choose the right ones for the products or services you’re selling.For example, LinkedIn is a good platform to target for business-to-business sales while Pinterest may be better if you’re in the fashion business. Some of these channels will become obvious when you look at your competitors but see if any relevant channels were overlooked.You should also identify influencers who can reach your target audience. Good bloggers command high levels of trust in their readers and are indispensable in creating buzz around your brand. Take the time to target the most appropriate bloggers – sites such as mine, Tomoson, can help you to do this.
Finally, you need to develop a strong content plan that will deliver engaging material. The content needs to align with your overall messaging and be appropriate for the channels you’re using. social media marketing experts This is more than just product information – think about how you can deliver real value to your audience. Don’t just stick to one type of media – a mix of videos, guides, infographics and other styles will engage your potential customers more effectively. Also, don’t think of content as something you post once. You need to have an ongoing presence on social media, and that includes delivering fresh content on a regular basis. Who are you trying to reach? To plan an effective social media strategy, you need to have a clear picture of your ideal customer. Armed with this data, you can match up your social media marketing efforts with the social networks where your customers are spending their time.Women between the ages of 18 and 29 comprise Facebook’s primary audience, for instance, while LinkedIn’s users are predominantly males with graduate-level education. Find out where your target customers are networking online. Competitive analysis is a key component of any marketing tactic. Katherine O’Hara, founder of The O'Hara Project, a WBENC and MBE-certified firm specializing in advertising, public relations and social media, recommends performing a competitive deep-dive to get a sense of not only your competitors’ strengths, but their weaknesses. Tap into those topics and start generating discussions, and you’ll be carving out your place in the social sphere from the start.A strategic social media marketing plan requires more than just throwing out a few tweets or status updates.

Use the same social networks as your audience

Are Facebook and Twitter their platforms of choice? Do most of them use Pinterest and Instagram? Go where your target audience is to create awareness,engagement, and brand ambassadors.Identify your KPIs (key performance indicators. social media marketing articles They measure progress toward your goals. What do you want your social media efforts to accomplish? What does success look like in quantifiable terms?Write a social media marketing playbook. The playbook should detail your KPIs, audience profiles, brand personas, campaign concepts, promotional events, contests, content themes, crisis management plan, etc. Make sure to tailor strategies that are unique to each of your social media channels.Align the people at your company with the plan. Get everyone on board with your strategy. Divide responsibilities among your team, such as who is in charge of posting to your blog and each social media network, who will respond to comments and @mentions, and who will own metrics tracking and reporting.Set aside some time at the beginning of each week to prepare. Take 30-60 minutes to schedule tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, Pinterest pins, and other social media content. Come up with some original ideas, links to your own content, and links to outside content that is useful or interesting to your audience.Develop a content marketing calendar. Use one of the example spreadsheets I’ve created as a starting point to plan content topics, headlines, related links, desired scheduling, name of authors, etc.Post content that is relevant to newsworthy topics and events. As soon as breaking news comes out about anything related to your brand or industry, you should share your opinion and become part of the conversation.Treat all of your social channels differently. Don’t post the same message everywhere – remember who the audience is on each platform and how they interact.
What works on Facebook will fall flat on Twitter, and vice versa.Assign someone to act as a customer service rep. It’s vital to be responsive to user generated content, comments, social media marketing dallas and feedback (positive or not). CRM (customer relationship management) is a fundamental to social media marketing success.Schedule metrics reporting. Reporting metrics can occur weekly, monthly, or bimonthly depending on your goals and desired outcomes.Reanalyze your plan on a regular basis. If something in your plan isn’t working, switch it up or do some A/B testing to determine what your audience responds to better. Use 2 versions of your content simultaneously and measure to see which one is more successful and use it going forward. “Social media is like a party; barging into a group already talking and saying ‘buy my stuff’ is rude,” advises Michael Procopio, co-author of 42 Rules for B2B Social Media Marketing and a 15-year veteran of the marketing industry. Procopio says the route to success in social media is finding a way to offer value without over-selling. This can be done by offering discounts, but also by providing information around your products or services. Megan McManus, digital and social content coordinator at Blueview Agency, suggests figuring out solutions to frequently asked questions and offering those ideas through original photo or video content. “In social media strategy, the business should also conduct some trial and error to see what kind of posts their audiences like. Some audiences will respond well to product information while others may prefer to hear about a business's community involvement,” she explains. Social media audiences are finicky. They don’t appreciate hard sales pitches, and they like to be engaged—but not over-saturated with content. Finding the right balance is essential to your success, and it’s another aspect of your campaign requiring a trial-and-error approach.

Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content

ou’ve spent hours researching, analyzing, and finally creating compelling content to help you reach whatever content marketing objective you have. social media marketing strategy template Just like authors who write a book, you’ll probably need to spend as much if not more time promoting the content than the actual writing of it. Where better to promote your content than where we spend more than 25% of our online time: Social media. 80% of marketers are already promoting their content in social media – but are they doing it effectively?Before we get deep into the social media tactics, ensure you are planning out your content — and your social media updates — on an editorial content calendar. This will ensure every piece of content gets properly promoted in an organized manner. Download this free editorial calendar template to start planning today.Now it’s time to take your social media promotion to the next level.tweet-thisHere are 11 effective ways to use social media to promote your content that you might not already be doing enough of. We all know that tweets with images get more engagement. We’ve known for awhile that photos on Facebook get more engagement. Even images on LinkedIn get more engagement. Three of the “newest” social networks, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, are based entirely on the visual. So why aren’t you leveraging the visual when promoting your content? Create not only a branded “featured image” to share with your post, but also create separate images for each of the main points in your content so that they can be shared when you repeatedly post them to social media (see below for more on that point). Check out my post on top social media for business quotes for an example that clearly illustrates how to leverage the visual.
Create a new title that you will use to share your content in social media. Don’t just settle for one title: Because you should be posting your content multiple times, social media marketing resume you should be creating multiple titles and even doing A/B testing to see what types of headlines are more effective to promote your content on what social networks. You might also want to use a tool like BuzzSumo to help you research effective titles for the same type of content per social network. When sharing content, take advantage of the customizable posting features allowed on the social media platform being used. This includes the headline, image and a description of the content you are sharing. Every marketer and social media user is competing to catch the user’s eye, so the more optimized your post is for that particular platform the more effective your social media promotion will be.For example, if you shared a link via Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a post that truly will stand out amongst the rest; all you need is an attention-grabbing headline, a clean, relevant image that piques interest which might be different from the featured image used in your content, and a short, compelling description.With this formula, you can entice readers to click on your content. In the same manner, appending your content with hashtags can help make your content more discoverable for those social networks that support them.Though this tip may seem like common sense, most content marketers get too caught up in other aspects and overlook this simple concept. Because you want the content you are sharing to reach as many people as possible for maximum engagement, you have to go where the crowd is and when they are most likely online and active.

Social Media by the Numbers

The answer is an astounding yes. Social media allows smaller sized companies to compete against some of the larger companies and reach more customers. social media marketing campaigns There are plenty of stats that showcase just how powerful social media is for businesses of all sizes. Here are some powerful numbers that make it more than evident that social media is the way to go in 2015.Despite the growing popularity of social media, and our dependency on sites like Facebook and Twitter for information, some businesses have still been hesitant to jump aboard. There’s skepticism around its effectiveness for local small businesses. We see huge brands like Coca-Cola, Nike and Starbucks using social media with great success, but what about the average coffee shop around the corner or a non-celebrity dentist? Can they use social media to grow their businesses in 2015?Social media has crossed over from being a tool that only forward-thinking companies should use. These stats show that social media marketing has become a necessity just like paid ads, flyers and other “traditional” marketing efforts. In order to compete today, businesses can’t afford not to be active on social media.Despite all of these stats, some businesses still aren’t sold on social media as a marketing tool. In fact, one in three small businesses don’t think social media is important for their business. One of the primary reasons for this is simply because they don’t realize all of the benefits it has to offer yet. And this is partially understandable due to the nature of social media. It’s used as a way to build brand awareness, fuel content marketing and other important aspects that aren’t as measurable as what small businesses are used to.It’s time to do away with the old mindset and outdated views of marketing. The Internet has completely changed the way your business has to look at marketing. And social media is the perfect example of this shift.
When is the last time you filled out a customer survey? If you’re like most people, it’s probably been months or even years. social media marketing service The old ways of finding out information about consumers aren’t as effective today. People have grown to hate unsolicited messages from marketers and will only fill out a survey if there’s some type of gift at the end which can taint the data. Social media gives you the opportunity to find out about your customers in a completely non-intrusive way.On top of that, you have the ability to see what your ideal customers are Tweeting about, what they put up on Instagram and other social media activity. All of this information lets you get a deeper look into who your customers are and what they like/dislike. Before social media you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to put together focus groups. But now it’s all at your finger tips.People aren’t afraid to voice their opinions on social media. That makes it a great place to get honest and raw feedback of what people think about your products or services. You can monitor what’s being said about your business and resolve issues right away. This is a huge advantage.In the past, if a customer was unhappy with the service at your business they would just go home and tell their friends. So not only do you lose them as a customer, but you’re also losing potential customers as well without ever knowing about it. But in the social media age, when people don’t like the service they receive they Tweet about it publicly. So if you’re monitoring mentions of your company name you’ll be able to see it and fix the issue which could save you from losing customers.People don’t only Tweet negative things about companies. Social media has done an amazing job of breaking down the wall that used to exist between businesses and customers.

Let your fans and followers vote

Voting allows fans to have a say in the brand’s direction, whether it’s helping choose something as light-hearted as a t-shirt design, or as important as a magazine cover photo. With engagement apps, social media marketing conference fans can vote for their favorite destination, product, design — or marketing theme — and share their vote. Those voting results, enriched by commentary and insights, can provide content that fuels other branded channels and provides wider audience insights into how the crowd thinks and feels about your brand. Vitamin Water successfully deployed this idea with its social ‘favor creator’ campaign back in 2009. More recently, Outside Magazine tapped social fans to pick the ‘Best Town of the Year’ in 2011, 2012 and again in 2013 — campaigns that also fed valuable content for both the print and online magazine.A brand experience tailored to a user’s profile provides fans with something unique that keeps them exploring. Engagement apps can deliver a personalized experience, such as a set of product and service choices, white papers and case studies, or even fashion outfits, and reflect the identity revealed in their profile data. The clothing brand Jones NY is currently leveraging followers’ LinkedIn profiles this fall with their Style Creator campaign, allowing executive women to have outfits suggested based on their professional LinkedIn profile.Contributions from fans don’t just make the community feel like a more essential part of a brand, they also help brand marketers delegate content creation. Social engagement apps can ask fans to submit photos, videos, or other stories on a brand-related theme. That fan-submitted content can then enrich a brand’s own marketing channels. For example, Dressy.
Challenge your fans, to get their attention and their engagement. Challenges can take the form of quizzes or polls that test a fan’s knowledge. effective social media marketing They can pose questions for which the answers are informative and useful, and themselves become shareable results. Earlier this year, Air New Zealand launched a “Kiwi IQ” quiz that challenged fans’ knowledge of New Zealand sights by asking them to decide whether a photo or fact was about Auckland or about San Francisco. On a similar travel-related note, Visit Norway USA challenged their fans earlier this year to answer questions about Norway facts — a question a day for a month.Fans will be more likely to come back to a brand if they learn something about themselves by interacting with your brand or branded content. With engagement apps, access to a user’s profile can yield valuable personal insights that the user may not have noticed. By logging in with social credentials, a fan or follower might be able to see patterns or relationships in their profile they hadn't seen before, or might see how they become ‘matched’ to some brand-related identity or product. For example, Microsoft launched a “Nametag Analyzer” powered by LinkedIn’s professional graph that gave followers a new look at their job title, while at the same time was introducing them to Microsoft products.Success on social means finding a brand voice that resonates with fans and followers. Having audiences contribute content, discuss content, and talk about wider themes that relate to a brand is a way to cultivate a more prominent voice.Marketing on social shouldn't involve just talking about a brand’s products and services endlessly. Delivering informative and entertaining content is essential.

Social Media Marketing Management Tools

Tools make reaching social media marketing goals possible. Whether you’re a soloprenuer or a multinational enterprise, it’s nearly impossible to manage a social media marketing program without using 3rd party tools. small business social media marketing During your journey through the 3D chess of social media tool options, you’ll have many decisions to make: Which tool should you start with? Should you use specialized or multi-purpose tools? What features distinguish basic from intermediate to advanced and when should you upgrade?With the help of Emeric Ernoult (CEO of AgoraPulse, which is included in the list), we’ve updated our list of social media marketing management tools to help lead you in the direction of answering those questions. The list below contains information on 22 of the best social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web. Typically, self-service tools are best suited for small and medium businesses and enterprise tools are best suited for large organizations. However, there are exceptions to every rule, so we urge you to research and tools that best meet your company’s needs. provides great reports for social accounts and shows social content and monitored keyword searches in one stream. You can schedule content on all your accounts with a convenient publishing system and manage your Social messages on the go with a mobile app available on iOs and Android. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.Hootsuite is the leader in the Social Media Marketing Management space. It offers everything a Social Media manager needs from publishing, to monitoring, including reports and team collaboration features.
Contrary to Sprout Social, it displays all your Social Media accounts in multiple streams. Some users prefer the unified stream approach of Sprout Social and Agorapulse, some like the multiple stream approach. social media marketing plan sample Really a matter of personal preference. Hootsuite also provides a mobile app to manage Social streams on the go.Agorapulse is a social media management toolkit for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, supporting contest applications, monitoring, CRM and one-click, customizable ppt reports. All social content is funneled into an ’email-like’ inbox feature and syncs accounts in real time while retaining past conversations and social data from fans & followers.Buffer is the pioneer of Social Media publishing. It was the first software to introduce the queue publishing system allowing its users to schedule content accross most social networks without having to individually schedule them. It covers all Social Networks except for Instagram, and is definitely the best publishing system out there. Buffer offers a free version. Sendible is a Social Media marketing platform supporting 30+ networks with services for accounts/profiles, messages and social content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content and promotion, monitoring, and analytics. Sendible also provides a white label version for agencies. PostPlanner is a publishing solution for Facebook and Twitter. It allows to schedule posts at specific times or add them to a queue. The most unique feature of PostPlanner is its “viral content” feature.

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram—they're all free platforms

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram—they're all free platforms businesses can use to directly engage with their audiences. marketing on social media But the idea that engagement is easy, free, and quick is false, according to Amy Vernon, social marketing consultant and cofounder and CMO of Predictable.ly. "One of the biggest false assumptions about using social media for marketing is that it doesn’t cost money and it’s fast," says Vernon. "Like all good things, 'getting the word out' takes time." Luckily, she says there are things you can do to help speed up the process.Don’t wait for launch day to create your social media channels," says Vernon. She suggests you start building your social media accounts—and your presence—early. But what can you share before you even launch your business? "Share information relating to your industry," says Vernon. "Become a resource of information. Connect with others in your industry and talk to them.""Just like your social media channels, you need to build relationships before you 'need' them," says Vernon. She suggests starting out by looking for journalists and bloggers who write about your business topic. "Read, comment on, and share their posts, if appropriate." Connecting and developing relationships with influencers and experts in your field of business will help you down the road. "When you approach them later, they’ll be more likely to recognize your name, or at least be receptive, because it’s obvious you know what they cover," says Vernon.If you haven't taken the time to build your networks and develop relationships ahead of time, Vernon suggests figuring out which social platform is best to reach your target market. Then she says you should study those platforms and, when possible, take your targeted advertising to those platforms.
Find out who's talking about what, where they're talking about it, and then start listening there," says Vernon. social media marketing campaign Figuring out where to find your target market on social media does take time, and involves searching for people who are talking about topics that are important to you. There are many social listening tools out there that can help. She suggests FollowerWonk and SpiderQube. Vernon suggests just joining the conversation. "You can participate in Twitter chats and Google Hangouts that relate to your business," she says. Or you can join an ongoing conversation about a topic by using popular hashtags on any platform. "You can’t just jump into the conversation with, 'Buy my stuff!', but if you join in the conversation, you’ll raise awareness."While LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social platforms for business, Vernon says that no platform is off limits so long as you adapt your content to that platform. "I'd have thought, for example, that people would hate seeing businesses on Tumblr," says Vernon. "But IBM does a fantastic job on Tumblr because the content they create for it and share there really taps into the type of content that Tumblr fans like." Vernon says that as long as you are a part of the community, and understand that community, and you're not just promoting your business, you can succeed on any platform.So, when can you jump in with "Buy my stuff!"? Vernon says that the general rule of thumb is 90/10: Ninety percent of your content should be sharing other people's content, and 10 percent should be promotional. While that's not a hard and fast rule, Vernon says that "people are not going to come around often to check out what you have to say if you're talking about yourself all the time.

Social Media Can Reduce Your Overall Marketing Costs

Social networks are a cost-effective way to get your brand in front of fans and prospective customers. It doesn’t cost you anything to tweet a message, social media marketing degree pin a product photo to Pinterest, or promote a discount on Facebook, so there’s no cost outside of your own time spent.If you do have money to invest, these channels offer advanced but affordable advertising platforms that you can use to target consumers with demographic, keyword, and interest-based campaigns.The highly specific targeting parameters offered by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can help you get the biggest bang for your marketing buck. When it comes to impacting your website’s position in search engines, you need to create optimized and compelling content if you want your domain to appear high up on the search results page.By sharing this content on social media as well, you can get in front of interested readers who may visit your website, like or share your content on their own social networks, and link to it from their own domains. Google and Bing both pay attention to social signals like this when they decide how to rank links on the search results page.If you’re looking for a way to field customer comments, concerns, and questions, then you are going to find social media to be extremely beneficial.Customers using one of the common platforms like Facebook or Twitter can communicate directly with you, and you can quickly answer them in a public format that lets other customers see the quality of your customer service.The impact of this activity can be huge: 71% of consumers who receive a quick brand response on social media say they are more likely to recommend that brand to other people.
Social media is meant to be more like a cocktail party than a business meeting. You will always do a lot better in a social situation if you are more like yourself and less like a corporate robot. social media marketing los angeles Social media is a great way to display your business’ personality, as well as behind-the-scenes information about you, your employees, your workspace, and more. When you humanize your brand in this way, it makes it easier for consumers to connect with you and develop loyalty.The fact that you are able to connect directly to the consumer means you can use this platform to also connect to other entrepreneurs and business owners.From possible strategic business partners to new distributors, social media lets you have real conversations with actual people who might otherwise be socially or geographically inaccessible in the real world.The idea behind allowing customers to correspond directly with you is so that they can get the best customer service possible. When this occurs, it happens in a very public forum that can be seen by other prospects.So when customers sing your praises to their friends, it not only boosts your online reputation, but increases the chances that someone else is going to give you a shot next time they need your services.The idea that you can provide a truly valuable service to your target market means you are positioning yourself as an expert in your industry. Whether that’s educational and entertaining blogs, posts, or tweets, if you are solving a problem or providing information, you’re adding value that customers will appreciate.The true advantages of social media are the ability to get a leg-up on your competition by connecting with your current and prospective customers in an organic way across the web.

Best Social Media Community Managers Actually Do in Their Jobs

Searching for someone to run your social media efforts can be both an eye-opening and frustrating experience. It might seem that, of the applicants who can boast any goal or metric from their job, social media marketing for dummies the one thing they point to doing is "driving engagement." While engagement metrics can be tied back to a business' bottom line, more often than not, social media marketers aren't moving the metrics CEOs care about.Years after the very first "Can we measure the ROI of social media?" blog post, the role of the social media community manager hasn't evolved much in the ways of goal-oriented, metrics-driven marketing. It's possible this is because many companies haven't figured out the right way to measure the ROI of their efforts, so they don't know to hire someone who can help them drive real business results.It becomes a vicious cycle. With little focus on the bottom line efforts from social media, companies relegate the social media role to people without much experience proving bottom-line results, and then once hired, those social media specialists don't have experience proving those bottom-line efforts. But someone's got to break out of the cycle. Whether you're a social media job seeker looking for your next gig or a manager trying to hire your next social media manager, keep on reading. I'll walk you through the seven other skills a social media community manager should have besides "drive engagement." Content is a key component in any marketing function, and social media is no exception. Even if you have dedicated bloggers, ebook writers, and designers, that content still needs to be adapted to each social network.A good portion of a social media community manager's role is creating and adapting content for each specific network.
This includes positioning content in under 140 characters for Twitter, creating images and graphics to accompany Facebook and Twitter posts, social media marketing definition taking and curating photos and videos for visual platforms like Instagram, Vine, and Periscope, coming up with several iterations of post copy (since the lifespan of a social media post is so short), and even creating content from scratch specifically for growing a following on social media. Adapting content specifically for each social network yields more clicks and leads. For example, in an A/B test, we found that tweets including both a link and an image optimized for the platform yielded 55% more leads than tweets with just a link. Adapting and creating content for each specific network is critical to driving results. As all marketing roles become more and more data-driven, a social media community manager needs to be able to dig into the data, analyze that data, and draw actionable insights. That includes macro data (like overall reach, leads generated, leads nurtured, customer cases supported) all the way down to micro data (like individual experiments around content positioning). This person should also know the pulse of the community and be able to set goals that are just out of reach -- and find a way to hit them.A successful social media community manager enjoys looking at data and knows how to use it to make informed decisions. At the same time, this person shouldn't be so stuck in the data that it prevents experimentation and risk-taking. It's important for a social media community manager to constantly test new strategies, new content, and new campaigns.

Social media and online networking

Social media is a core networking tool and an essential part of the marketing mix for businesses of any size. social media marketing firm Getting started with social media is as easy (if not easier) for a small firm as it is for big companies with large marketing departments and budgets. So it really does level the playing field.Many small firms are finding that a presence on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook opens up new lines of communication with their existing customers as well as bringing in fresh new business opportunities.But the digital world has not replaced other forms of marketing communication. Instead, businesses now have to ensure that they engage with customers wherever they would like to be found, both online and off. When it comes to social media, where you focus your activity depends entirely on where your customers and prospects expect to find you. Creating your profile is a vital first step. Unlike big businesses that rely on a logo or a corporate identity on social media sites, as a small business owner you can present a friendly and personal face to the world. Use a professional photo and make sure you convey what’s special about you and your business without sounding too salesy.Once you are up and running, you can focus on building up followers and finding key influencers that can help raise your profile. If you are thinking of working with an outside consultant to establish your social media strategy, think carefully about what to ask to ensure you find the right person for the job. It’s also worth researching how other companies like yours are using social media. Check out what your competitors post, and how often, and notice how they engage with their followers.
Social media can be a risky business. Make sure you protect your brand and keep within the law. It’s also worth drawing up a social media policy for your firm so that all your social media conversations are on message, social media marketing firms no matter which member of the team is posting content. Once you’ve got into good social media habits, you can set fresh objectives and try to improve your results. This could include anything from boosting your connections to getting more out of groups on LinkedIn. Social media tools can also help you to manage and measure your day-to-day activity on sites like Twitter.Constantly testing and analyzing results helps social media community managers build more effective standards in their routines. For example, that Twitter image test we spoke about before was run by our former social media community manager she designed the test, implemented it, and measured it all on her own. Being on social media is like being in a crowded room at a networking event and a social media community manager needs to be in the thick of it. A successful social media community manager will be able to find new opportunities for the company by keeping a pulse on the industry. They need to know where to look for the news and what people are saying about it. They also need to know what's changing on social networks and in the industry and be able to react and respond accordingly. They should be skilled at "tactful newsjacking," meaning the ability to (tactfully) capitalize on a news story, (think Oreo's Super Bowl tweet), trend, or hashtag. And if something goes awry, they need to be able to mitigate the issue calmly and diplomatically.

More People Look for Business on Search

Think about your own habits. Whenever you are looking for something, from an air conditioning repair company to a zumba instructor, where do you go first? Most likely, social media marketing books you will go to a search engine – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL, Blekko, or one of the many other options available.A report by Econsultancy found that 61% of consumers use search engines to help them in product research before making a purchase. This means that if you want to get discovered, you will want to rank well for your target keywords. When it comes to search engines, while the numbers might not be exact, you have a lot of great tools to use in your research of what people are searching for. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a great start in this process. While “pet supplies” may not actually get an exact one million searches per month, you will know that “pet supplies” is a more popular keyword phrase over “pet supply” that comes in at only 368,000 monthly searches.If you can’t make it to the top of organic search results, you can always buy your way into the sponsored links section of Google using Google AdWords. In a search for “printer ink,” two domains that are not in organic search results appear in the top two spots. Even though organic search results might get more clicks, having any presence on the first page is still better than having no presence at all.The bonus of paid search listings is that you can customize your appearance in search results. Instead of your usual website’s title and description that is used in organic results, you can use something that calls out to a specific sale in sponsored results. As an example, the company ranking 2nd in organic search also shares its Cyber Monday sale in the sponsored listings to the right.
In the same report by Econsultancy mentioned earlier, they found that 75% of people in the 18 – 26 age group used recommendations on social sites in product research before making a purchase. social media in marketing One of the nice sides to social media is once you have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, peer recommendations will happen when someone likes your page, mentions your Twitter handle, or tags your brand name. When someone takes these actions, their connections will see them which may help your business get discovered by others with that perceived seal of approval.One of the worst problems when it comes to search engine results, aside from not coming up in them at all, is having something negative come up. Online reputation management is a thriving service thanks to rip off reports, bad reviews, and other damaging articles about a business. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to counter these in search engine results themselves.Whenever you are presented criticism on social media, however, you will have a chance to turn those complaints into compliments by responding back to them in real time. There is a lot of great information today, including books like The Now Revolution that help businesses learn how to plan for, find, and manage real-time crises in the social media space. Knowing how to do this is essential to showing current and potential customers how much you care about everyone’s satisfaction with your business.Thanks to Facebook Advertising, StumbleUpon Ads, Promoted Tweets, and other social media advertising, businesses can put their content in front of social media audiences.

Effective Facebook Marketing Strategies for Businesses

You probably know that Facebook is the number one social media platform, which most people use.Apart from the fact that we are using it for chatting with our friends or sharing the things we love such as photos, videos, or even document files, learn social media marketing some people especially business owners use it as their number one source of traffic and sales and a spot for branding.Facebook has become one of the best drivers in terms of conversions and sales for most of my clients.This client approached me to do full social media marketing and management for them. Although Facebook is not the platform that best gives them the most traffic, I’ve found out that the social platform that best gives them conversions such as sign-ups and sales is Facebook. This client approached me to do Facebook marketing only for their new brand. Their goal is to increase sales, branding, and of course following. Since they’ve hired me to do Facebook marketing, it is important to help them achieve their goals.For most business cases, before you can use Facebook to gain sales and traffic or to produce conversions, you should let the people know that your business exists on Facebook’s platform.In this list, I will be with you for a tour about the best, engaging, and the most effective Facebook marketing strategies for businesses that anyone can do. So, let’s start rocking and rolling! A custom page tab/app is a great option if you want to offer an exclusive advantage for your fans. It allows new visitors to see details of your events, contest, opt-in forms, or deals, which can help you gain more fans and likes. According to Socially Stacked, 42% of fans like a page to get a coupon or discount. Another study by Wildfire Interactive showed that coupon-based campaigns received the highest engagement rates.An example of customized tab/app for your Facebook page is what I currently use to gain subscribers as well as likes in exchange for exclusive business and marketing tips.
Using social media plug-ins or integrating social media sharing buttons on your website makes it easy for your visitors and customers to share your website pages. importance of social media marketing Once a person shared your content through Facebook and other social media sites, their friends can easily see those links on their Facebook profile and news feed.You could also gain a share from them, which will make the process repeatable in a sense that it can also be shared by their friends of friends—possibly making it viral. This will also help increase your website traffic. Engaging and talking with your community on Facebook could build a strong relationship, trust, and loyalty. The most exciting result about this is that they can also turn as your repeat customers or potential leads.Facebook can also be used as one of your customer support hub. You might want to engage with other Facebook pages using your Facebook page account. Find those Facebook pages where your customers hang out.Your comment will serve as a link toward your page that can lead to an additional like or following (see below image). You could convert those “likes as fans” into “likes for conversions. People love images and videos; they can also be seen easily on Facebook News Feed, which makes them easy to engage with.Wishpond’s data says that posts that include photos receive 120% more engagement than the average post, while posts that include photo albums received 180% more engagement. You might want to put a call-to-action text with shortened links on each of your photo descriptions toward your website to gain traffic. My favorite resource for this is Bitly.Why shortened links? Shorter posts get 23% more interaction. Posts with 250 characters can get you 60% more engagement while posts with less than 80 characters can help you gain 66 % more engagement.

Leverage the Existing Traffic to Your Site

Remember that it is advisable to have a website for every business since it will function as your sales transaction hub or storefront where people buy your products or learn more about your services. social media marketing agencies You can easily leverage the existing traffic on your site by putting social media icons that can be seen and clicked, which are direct links to your Facebook page and/or any other social media account pages you have. Refer to the picture below as an example. Most websites put their social media icons above their home page or header since it is the area where these icons could be easily seen; thus, this move provides better click-through rate (CTR) placements. Target your desired audience (gender, age, locations). If you use Google Analytics display tracking, you can use the data from there and use it for retargeting.Use an engaging picture if you’re planning to use Facebook ads for your page or external pages.Use an easy-to-answer or an engaging ads description, here’s an example.If you’re selling gift items, you might want to put something like this:“If you think giving gifts can make someone smile, Like Us today!”Since the text is easily answerable by Yes or No, those people who most likely say “yes” will be converted as your fans. Trust me, this is so effective.Note: You can only use 90 characters for your Facebook ads text/description. Make sure that everybody can join and don’t forget to promote it! Facebook groups have three types of privacy: open, closed, and secret. These different types also serve different functionality and ways to use. Anyone can see the group, who’s in it, and what members post.Open groups are mainly used to build awareness, authority, and interest in your brand.
This is the best group if you want to establish yourself as an expert and to network with others in your industry. search and social media marketing The main focus that you should do on open groups is not selling but rather participation and interactions. Anyone can see the group and who’s in it. Only members see posts.Closed groups are best to use for customer support purposes. For example, we are using Closed Group for one of my clients current customers who want to share ideas with other users. We also use this for customer support and solve problems.Only members see the group, who’s in it, and what members post.Secret members-only groups are great for higher-level discussions that need confidentiality. For example, since I manage lots of teams, companies, and businesses, we use secret groups for collaboration and follow-ups.Other companies find the secret group useful as one way to network with their clients or customers especially for those on coaching, training, or consulting industry. Facebook marketing and any other social media marketing campaign are just like a courtship in real life. You should do it step-by-step until you build the relationship you wished to have.There should be more Facebook marketing ideas out there, but I assure you that the above list will give your Facebook business a big lift. If you would like to add more ideas and tips, feel free to comment below or subscribe to my newsletter. To research your competitors, start by picking three or four of the top ones. Find out which social networks they’re active on, and study their content. Is it funny or serious? What kind of cultural references do they use? Do they talk about their product primarily, or do they focus on other things?

Use Your E-mail Signature to Display Your Fan Page URL

If you’re using e-mail as one of the ways to contact or reach your customers, using your e-mail signature to display your fan page URL will be effective. social media marketing applications Having your social media pages URL beneath your e-mail messages or at your signature will make your recipient see it easily and probably click it, which can convert into traffic or a following.If you have current events on your social media pages, you might want to include them on your e-mail signature with a call-to-action format.Letting people know that you are on Facebook is the first goal you should achieve. Sending an e-mail blast is just one of the best ways to do this.Few of the great e-mail marketing tools are MailChimp and AWeber.You might want to consider sending an e-mail blast between Monday and Wednesday mornings for most conversions. A study from HubSpot, The Science of Email Marketing 2012, stated that morning e-mails get high CTR. Do your customers come to your store? Promoting your Facebook page and other social media accounts in-store is just another great way to let your customers know that you are on Facebook.Remember that if you’re exerting efforts on your Facebook marketing online, you should also do it offline. Perhaps my favorite feature that Facebook Pages have is the Insights. By going to your Posts Insights, you will be able to see the average time when your fans are online.In case you’re planning to schedule three posts, you might want to check the best hours that your fans are online and select those hours on scheduling your post. Go to your Facebook Page.You will see “See Insights” above your Page, click it.You will see your Insights overview from there, find the Posts tab and click it.Hover your mouse on the day you want your post to be scheduled and you will able to see the best hours that your fans are online.
Alternatively, tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social will help you find the data and metrics you need including what type of post you should be using for your social media copies The average daily active user on Facebook is 757 million, according to a January 2014 report. And a certain percentage from those millions of people could be your next potential customers.If you want to use Facebook for maximum advantage, you need to post contents for your target audience with consistency. Your goals should be either to educate, to entertain, or to empower them. Integrating Facebook Plugins on your website will give you more advantages on branding awareness and followers increase on Facebook. For blogs or websites with sidebars, you may want to use the Facebook Like Box or Like Button.For your website pages and blog posts, it is best to use the Like Button, although you can use them both! You may want to consider doing experiments on what’s the best Facebook plug-in for your website. You may hate it, but investing on Facebook ads will give your business a lift especially if you’re a start-up or a small business.Facebook ads aren’t really expensive as you might think; you will love them once you tried to test them to get the best conversion that can impact your followers and your business growth. Consistent testing and experiments are necessary once you use them. A 2013 report stated that 35% of Facebook fans like a page so they can participate in contests.People love contest and free stuffs. Doing a Facebook contest for your fans will give you higher engagement scores and activity. A simple “caption-this-photo” contest can bring in 5.5 times more connects than regular posts.If you sell products, you might want to give one of your products as a prize; whereas if you provide services, perhaps a free 1-hour consultation, designs, or any of your service can be used as the prize.

How To Choose The Best Social Media For Your Business

As you know by now, using social media for business is practically mandatory. The benefits of using social media to market your brand, engage with your customers, provide customer service, marketing through social media increase brand awareness and build your customer base are huge – so huge that you’re in essence hurting your marketing strategy by not using social media. But the thing is, there are hundreds of social media platforms out there. Even if you narrow it down to the most popular and effective social media networks, you’ll still have a dozen or so that you’ll need to choose from. Unless you’re a large corporation with a dedicated marketing team, you’re not going to have the resources to be able to maintain a presence on all of these different social channels. Instead, you’re going to have to pick a handful that will benefit your business the most. The question, of course, is what social media platforms should you use? There are basically six things to look for when choosing what social media platform to use – but keep in mind, the platform (or platforms) you decide on depends a lot on what kind of business you are running. The popularity of a social network can be determined in part by their number of users. The more users a social site has, the more potential you have of exposing your brand to a bigger audience. In comparison to traditional display ads, think of the number of users that a social media network has as the amount of potential ad coverage or impressions you could get. Of course, this does depend on whether the audience of a social network aligns with your particular target audience.
In addition to the number of users each social platform has, you’ll also want to consider how often each user uses the site. social media marketing certification A social network with 10 million users in which the average user only uses the site once every other day probably isn’t as popular as a social network with 5 million users in which the average user uses the site three times a day. Like we said before, while the number of users and active users of a social network platform are very important, you’ll want to make sure that your target audience is part of their target audience. The demographics of your particular business need to match up to the social media network you decide to use. This means that you will need to figure out who your buyer persona is before you make any decisions regarding what social media networks you are going to use.For example, say you represent a business that sells universal design home improvement features, such as grab bars or stair lifts. The odds are pretty good that the demographics of your target audience will be retired senior citizen homeowners with some money to spare. If you do some research, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that Twitter, whose user base is generally under the age of 50 – the majority of which are between 20 and 29 – is probably not going to be an effective platform for you – even though Twitter is one of the biggest social media networks out there.Also keep your particular niche in mind. Say you sell clothing for cats. A social network such as LinkedIn, which is aimed at professionals, may not be the best option, whereas a more niche-oriented social network, such as Catmoji, will connect you with people in your target demographic more effectively even if the user base is much smaller.

Community Manager & Facilitator

Part of building a following on social media is helping that following connect with each other and become a community. social media marketing consultant True communities don't simply engage with the company or moderator; they engage with each other which actually scales the social media community much better, too. But community management takes work, including asking questions to seed discussions and kicking out people who spam or otherwise detract from the community. Part of being a good facilitator is asking good, relevant, and thought-provoking questions in an engaging way. Another part is setting the tone for the community, being present, enforcing community guidelines, and sometimes even removing members or deleting posts when appropriate. Social media is a powerful tool that can help the whole funnel, not just the top. It expands the reach of your content, attracts visitors to your website, generates leads, and nurtures them to become customers. That means a social media community manager needs to be able to pick and share content in a way that will accomplish each of those goals.They need to share content that generate leads, and run new campaigns to find the best ways to do lead generation via social media. A social media community manager also needs to engage one-on-one with potential customers who are considering their company's product or service, or simply need their help. Social media is particularly effective as a lead nurturing tool because prospects use multiple media (not just email) to consume information and social channels allow you to engage in a more timely manner.
In order to do all of this effectively, social media community managers need to have a strong understanding of the sales and marketing funnel, which leads to monitor and nurture, social media marketing ideasand what content to use in getting those leads to the next stage in the process. They'll also need to pass appropriate leads off to the sales team and keep sales reps informed when there's something they should know. Effective social media community managers are seemingly everywhere and in communication with everyone. Sharing conversion-oriented content on social media can attract more visitors to your site and convert them into leads for your sales team. More than 50% of businesses report they've acquired a customer from Facebook, more than 40% have acquired a customer from LinkedIn, and more than 35% have acquired a customer from Twitter. With the right person at the helm of your company's social media accounts, you could be one of them. Many people across a company may want certain things posted, responded to, favorited or Liked, and so on -- and it's up to the social media community manager to decide which requests to honor, and when to honor them. This means they need to be highly organized and able to manage multiple simultaneous (and possibly conflicting) requests. They need to be able to quickly assess whether a request would resonate with the company's followers, or whether it's too niche or too narrow. (For example, a location-specific post might be too narrow to send to a company's entire Twitter following.) Social media community managers also need to effectively coordinate with different departments to organize campaign launches, while pushing launches and growth initiatives of their own.

Tailor Your Content According to Specific Social Media Platform

Many business owners and digital marketers make the error of posting the same kind of content through all the social networks they belong to. social media marketing packages By doing so, business fail in delivering the unique user experience social media users are looking for from each particular platform. Each social network is focused on a particular demographic and social user category, so broadcasting the same type of content to all simply will not deliver the results you want.Users who use Pinterest and Instagram more often are more interested in content with a visual nature and will be more attracted to really high-quality pics and graphics that tell your story. The key to success in this regard is to tailor-fit your content for each particular social media platform – and check which format will work best. While social media is still a digital marketing tool, using this platform to sell your products directly right in front of users’ face will bring more harm than good to your brand or business. People love stories and they go to social media networks to read stories, be amazed with interesting features, and learn new things from uploads and shares. To use social media as an effective, you must learn how to tell a story first before you can even sell stuff.When you tell stories, people will get interested in you and your brand. They would want to know more about you and thus want to read, view or watch more stories, pics and videos about you. There will come a time when their level of interest has grown to the right proportions that they can now be interested in your business, in what you do and in what you sell – and this will be the right time for profits to come rolling in.
When Facebook introduced a new feature that allowed Instagram videos to be introduced, the social network experienced up to 5 million video uploads during the first 24 hours right after their announcement.social media marketing proposal That’s the power of video and other visual elements and learning how to harness the power of these tools and elements can give you maximum exposure for your business. Now, micro-video is slowly gaining ground providing yet another form of content that will change the social media sphere.Snapchat, Twitter’s Vine, and the new micro-video sharing feature in Instagram will definitely gain more usage, now that such video sharing activities can be done through smartphones and other Internet-enabled mobile devices. Pinterest is fast evolving and discarding its “women’s only network” reputation to gain more subscriptions from more and more online users regardless of gender or demographics. Other social networks in the visual content focus like Mobli, Path, Slideshare and Tumblr are gaining increased mileage as well. One of the most effective strategies for social media in general is to get your targeted audiences directly involved in activities. Conducting contests and other promotional activities are perfect ways for driving their interests and soliciting their participation. You can be as creative as you can be in the type of contests you can conduct, but making use of the sharing and other viral components available in your social network can bring even more exposure for your brand or business as more and more online users join in. Research from Social Media B2B indicate that businesses who make use of social media strategies for content marketing like maintaining blogs generate up to 67% more leads than companies who do not have a social media presence.