Tips to Quickly Master Social Media For Businesses

/0 Comments/in /by

Would you like to improve your social media marketing?

Are you up to date with the best social media tips and tools?

One thing that often gets overlooked in all of the detail is a more general approach to social media for businesses and entrepreneurs.

What should businesses be thinking about? What are long-term trends that businesses can feel good about investing in? What makes for truly good social media content?

Rebekah Radice, Social Media Strategist said :

 “Every business has a story. What’s yours? Share it in a way that attracts clients and encourages prospects to take action.”

Here are few tips below:

1. Analyze Past Content to Improve Posts

Most businesses analyze the effectiveness of their social media after they publish. Now, there are tools available to analyze data for content curation before you post.

Here’s how to use BuzzSumo to leverage the data of what has already been successful in terms of social sharing.

First, enter a keyword that is part of your social media content strategy. BuzzSumo will provide you with a list of the top-performing content in terms of social shares according to your keyword.

2. Make a commitment to social media

The first thing that businesses and entrepreneurs can do to find success is make a commitment to social media.

Like any other form of marketing, social media for businesses can be a real challenge. It’s hard to grow an audience, create great content, and increase engagement. All too often we see brands giving up on social media after just a few months.

3. Create a Social Media Channel Plan

So many organizations feel overwhelmed by the need to create content for every social media channel on the planet. Or worse yet, many brands create one type of content and then blast that content onto every social platform. If that’s you, you need a social media channel plan.

Most likely, your goals are different on each social platform. Since that’s the case, the content you develop for that platform needs to be different as well. Here are the components for your channel plan.

4. Listen to customers rather than promote

Tip #3 is that great social media programs are built around listening to customers, not promoting to them.

The way we like to think about it is that social media offers an incredible, open-ended platform that businesses can use to communicate and engage with customers. That’s why we recommend using it that way!

Social media is becoming a customer service platform and people are coming to expect it. The tricky part is, the better you get at social the more engagement you’ll get, and in turn, the more comments. So be prepared for an influx of love from your fans!

5. Use Hashtags Strategically

If you want to be successful with your social media plan, stop random acts of hashtagging and use a good hashtag to tie all of the pieces of your campaign together

Use a hashtag that is easy to spell and easy to remember. To make sure your hashtag isn’t already being used for something else, check for it on all channels prior to using it for your campaign. Once you create your hashtag, follow and join the conversation!If you want to be successful with your social media plan, stop random acts of hashtagging and use a good hashtag to tie all of the pieces of your campaign together.

To follow your hashtag, use sites like Social Mention and Sprout Social. Use TwiPho for searching images on a hashtag.

Now, it’s your turn!

“If you were to give a one-sentence tip to a small business owner just started out with social media, what would you say?”

What do you think? Do you use any of these social media marketing tips? What’s working well for you today?

5 Ways to Grow Your Business

/0 Comments/in /by

When you first started your business, you probably did a lot of research. You may have sought help from advisors; you may have gotten information from books, magazines and other readily available sources. You invested a lot-in terms of money, time and sweat equity-to get your business off the ground. So…now what?

For those of you who have survived startup and built successful businesses, you may be wondering how to take the next step and grow your business beyond its current status. If you’re ready to grow, we’re ready to help.

Innovate your product or service.
Discovering and promoting new uses for your products or services is a great way to both get existing customers to buy more and attract new customers. Think petroleum jelly and duct tape—and how few of these would actually be sold if they only had one use!

Research the competition
When going to market, and you’re really looking to get your offer to the masses, you need to research the competition. Frasier says he uses two platforms to conduct his research.

This allows you to uncover any advertiser’s online strategy. Find the ads that have been running for the longest and emulate those. That’s the quickest way you scale any business. If it’s proven and it’s working for your competitors, it’s likely it’ll work for you.

Market Your Business Better
Marketing your business well is key to gaining new projects and clients. A professional website and maintaining social media profiles that make sense for your community are two highly recommended options

Invest in the Right Technology
It amazes me just how many business owners have grown businesses without real systems and processes in place and they continue to struggle daily. The business has most likely hit a glass ceiling mainly because of the human limitations on what is manageable in a single day.

By utilizing the right technologies, it gives you the ability to systemize and scale creating sustainable and often more profitable growth because you can do more with less human resources.

International expansion.
Can you expand internationally? Can you take your existing offers and scale them internationally? What would it take to do business in Canada or Mexico or Europe? If you have a converting offer, international expansion could be a quick way to grow. You’ll incur some costs. Sure. But, the potential for profits could be massive.

There you have it; how to grow your business. Don’t let this list overwhelm you; pick one or two of these ideas that are suitable to your business and your circumstances and get your plan for growing your business underway.

While you probably won’t experience growth right away, whichever way of expanding your business you choose, you will see progress if you keep at it, and will successfully transform your business into all you want it to be.

Simple Steps to Great Community Management

/0 Comments/in /by

Many social media pros believe that having lots of followers is key. Most of the metrics they use to measure success directly link back to the size of their following, but size is not everything. Having a smaller but engaged community can actually prove more valuable.

Monitor Communities

Measurement is essential to any community management plan. Track which tactics work best, then pour more energy into them. Without monitoring analytics and social mentions, optimization is guesswork at most.

Listen to conversations around your brand and uncover the themes your audience talks about, where in the world your community is located, what social networks they prefer to use, who the most engaged members are and more. You should also be doing the same for your competitors as well as tracking wider industry keywords. By being aware of competitive and industry insights, you can ensure your community management strategy isn’t created in a bubble.

I’d recommend creating a document or mind map that includes:

  • The most common hashtags in your industry
  • Industry themes and trends you’d want to track
  • Influencers in your industry
  • Content from you and your competitors that has earned notable engagement
  • Any topics that have created a highly negative or positive reaction

Join the Conversation
Having a social community is more than just pushing out your own content, no matter how engaging you think it might be. Community management is all about joining conversations. That doesn’t mean only replying to people talking to you. I’m talking about joining conversations about your brand, general industry chatter and introducing community members to each other to spark further discussions.

 

Optimize content for sharing
Part of a community manager’s job should be to ensure that content is optimized for social media. Consider these questions:

  • Are sharing buttons placed on every post or article?
  • Are tweets short enough that followers can retweet them with your name?
  • Do pages include strong calls to action for sharing content?
  • Are headlines powerful and shareable on their own?
    Is content interesting enough to share? 

Many of these initiatives fall upon other departments — developer and writers, for example — to execute. But the community manager should audit and oversee the process.


Reply to Your @ Mentions

This is really important. Whether someone’s complaining, asking a question, or complimenting your content, replying to inbound messages makes your audience feel valued. If possible, aim to respond to complaints and queries within the hour.

Remember: you don’t always have to push your content! If you offer useful advice to someone and link them to third-party content, they may be more receptive to your brand at a later date since you’ve built trust.

Promoting your community’s content is another great way to gain brownie points and overcome the issue of not being able to turn out content as fast as social media fans expect.

So …

Start with your overall objectives, create content for your audience and listen as your community grows. How have you increased community engagement with your brand? Do your tips align with mine? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments