Showing posts with label automation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label automation. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 March 2017

A beginner’s guide to email marketing automation

Email marketing automation may be the secret to a successful marketing strategy, provided that you know how to use it. Here’s how to get started.
Email marketing is still a powerful method to boost your marketing goals, but as your business grows, it becomes more challenging to handle all the different types of emails you need to send.
Email marketing automation could be the solution to this problem.

What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation is simply the automated process of sending emails to a specific list of people, depending on the predefined triggers. Once the trigger is activated, the email is sent.
The use of email automation software allows you to set all the parameters that will determine when the automated emails will be sent, making the planning of them easier.
In other words, it’s the use of technology for the sake of an improved marketing strategy that may lead to an increased effectiveness.

Why use email marketing automation?

The first reason that marketers turn to email automation is the fact that they manage to save time and effort, by creating the triggers that send the right emails, to the right people, at the right time.
Moreover, the automation of this process is saving them time from future similar efforts, as the triggers can be adjusted to include more people, or additional emails to each action.
This increases the efficiency of their email marketing strategy, in such a way that their creativity is blended with technology for the best possible results.
According to Epsilon Email Institute, automated email messages lead to an average 70.5% of higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than usual emails.
Effectiveness also goes beyond click rates, as automated mails seem to contribute to a message’s relevance for the target audience. In fact, according to Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups, companies that send automated emails are 133% more likely to have relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle.
Now the question is, where should you begin with email marketing automation?

6 tips to consider when starting with email marketing automation

1. Think carefully about your lead magnets

The first step is to encourage people to sign up with the right lead magnets that provide them a reason to do so. It’s better to think of a reason that is relevant and useful, rather than an instant reward, as this increases the chances to create a long-term relationship with them.
Lead magnets have to be clear, offering value that cannot be ignored from the target audience. Testing of several forms can help you understand what users find more interesting and this can be the indication that will make the building of the list easier.

2. Focus on the welcome message

Once a user signs up to a list, it’s important to send a welcome message that’s as relevant as possible. Not every user is part of the same customer journey, and this may affect their future relationship with your business.
A proper segmentation of users allows you to send a warm welcome message that addresses their problems, helping them find the right answers while they are also learning more about your brand.
It’s also important to plan the emails you’re going to send, and how the workflow of the messages will work from now on.
What’s the best way to use automation to build a relationship with users who have already showed interest in the value you’re offering them?

3. Don’t underestimate lead nurturing 

Automation doesn’t have to be impersonal. On the contrary, it’s crucial to add a personal touch to your emails, as a way to show your genuine interest in every message that you send.
A personalized communication can be very useful as part of your nurturing process. A warm and welcoming message increases the chances of turning a prospect into a customer, with a smooth and positive inbox experience serving as a great lead magnet.
Once you manage to find the balance between automation and personalization, each email should indicate your genuine interest towards every recipient. Lead nurturing is all about consistency and although automation can be very useful, it’s still important to excel in the segmentation of your audience to ensure that each recipient receives the right message.

4. Set your goals and work towards them (create the right triggers)

Before you start with automation, it’s useful to focus on your goals and your expectations from each automated process. How could automation boost your email marketing campaign? What’s the best way to save time while increasing your effectiveness? What do you define as an effective email marketing campaign?
The ROI from email marketing automation depends on your goals, and it’s useful to be clear on what you expect from the earliest stages of your planning.
For example, if you’re interested in lead nurturing, then you can use email automation to send consistent and personalized messages to your recipients to create a relationship with them.
If you want to use email automation to increase sales, you can create the right set of emails to promote your products in the most relevant and appealing way.
Remember, not every email has the same purpose, and there needs to be a distinction between your goals in order to enjoy the benefits of email marketing automation.

5. Keep evaluating the process

Although email marketing automation aims to help you create a streamlined process among your emails, it’s still useful to evaluate it from time to time to measure its performance and examine whether it needs to be changed.
Does automation bring you closer to your goals? How does the audience respond to your emails? Is there a part of the process that can be improved?
As every audience is different, it’s a good idea to monitor its automated process on its own to test whether it’s contributing to a successful email marketing strategy.

6. Make subscribing and unsubscribing obvious

It’s frustrating for users to keep searching for the option to unsubscribe from an email that they are not interested in. Thus, it’s best to have a clear display with all their available options.
Just as you add a CTA button to encourage further clicks in case they are interested in the email’s content, you should also feature an easy unsubscribe process.
Even if this means that you’re increasing their chances of opting out, it also means that you’re only maintaining the ones that are truly interested in your content.

Overview

Email marketing automation can be a very useful ally to your marketing strategy, provided that you find the right balance between automated messages and personalization for each segment of your contacts.
Even if the initial planning may seem time-consuming, the benefits should give you an additional motivation to work towards an effective process that will help you reach all your set goals.

Thursday, 7 January 2016

Three ways to invent and improve automated content

kid-eureka
Depending on whether they’re in the awareness, education or action phase, different customers need different content. Here are three tips for automating it.
It’s worth aspiring to construct your retention content strategy around real-time interactions. Certainly, watching customer behavior and automatically sending the exact perfect message at the moment of truth for each decision point is the ideal.
Recently, however, I’ve been having a lot of strategy conversations with marketers struggling to get off the ground. What is needed is a framework, from which we can start the engagement conversation, track activity and learn about what content and offers are most interesting.
A review of your content approach is worthwhile if you are just starting out or if you are going after a new market or segment. And if your automated content program has been running for a while, it may just be in need of an upgrade.
I like to construct this framework based on life stage. Start with three to six content experiences – which could be online, in your app, via email, on Twitter, in the retail store, even over the phone – based on what you know about your customers and synched to the kinds of problems that your offerings solve.
Watch how people interact and engage with the content. As you learn, and study your analytics for experiences you can add in between, you can trigger more of them for real time.
There are usually three questions at this point:
  1. Which life stages matter most?
  2. What content is most likely to resonate?
  3. When, and how frequently?
Regardless of topic, the answer to marketing strategy questions is always the same: “It depends.” (“Test it” is also a very good universal answer!) Customize your approach based on this simple framework that can work for nearly any audience.
thinker-statue
Just as there are three questions, there are three major life stages and complementary content strategies:

1. Awareness

Usually, this is basic content to make an introduction and show a little personality.
Is your brand fun and whimsical? Stoic and serious? Whatever it is, be authentic, and let it shine through while you introduce your position in the market and your value to customers.
Refrain from either strong pitches or making it all about the product at this stage. Use top-of-the-funnel material to attract leads, not close them.

2. Education

Blog content works great here, since it’s usually the freshest material that addresses the unique trends and activity in your industry.
Customers in this stage are actively looking for information, so make that easy to find: online, in person and through your sales or customer service team. Being helpful and informed is most important at this stage; these are the activities which will lead to a sales conversation.
The hardest part is to stay in education mode until the customer is really ready. I think it’s OK to hint strongly – but don’t scare them away.

3. Action

You know when someone is truly interested. An action could be a download from your library of whitepapers, a first sale from a deep discount coupon or a newsletter sign-up.
The beauty of automation is that you can trigger a follow-up action immediately after each, which gradually brings your customer or prospect toward a richer relationship (and larger sales opportunities) with your company.
Content here still needs to be educational, but it is oriented toward the action. Always give people a chance to contact you directly in whatever ways you make available, be it a sales team, a retail outlet, customer service hotline or even online comments.
That leaves the question of timing. Again, the answer is, “It depends.” It’s hard for marketers to be passive about timing; we are so excited about our products and services that we often rush the customer with more information than they need or can consume.
It’s definitely frustrating to see a lot of people in the upper funnel who never go any deeper. While it’s always worth trying to increase the conversion rate from Awareness to Education, it’s probably a better use of time to concentrate on the move from Education to Action.
director-action
The operative word in constructing your content cadence is “respect.” The best marketing makes it all about the customer’s needs, and not about the product (or the hard sell).
It’s hard to build content that is effective at the Awareness stage because people are all over the place with their needs and intentions. Still, map out a set of conversations that you are willing, able and qualified to have with your customers, and focus on content that allows free interaction on those topics.
Often, this is about the problems your company solves, not about the product itself. Make it too broad and you risk building awareness among people who will never be your customers. Make it too narrow – “how to post a podcast in iTunes” – and you will limit your opportunity. (Unless, of course, your product is really only about posting a podcast, in which case, have at it.) The timing for how long you engage a customer during this first stage can be anywhere from one minute to one year.
The education stage cadence is usually most tricky. Start with two or three interactions that lead toward an action and see what the response is.
Tweak it from there: add in more content paths if needed to capture segments of the audience that think differently than you originally planned, or create more paths to the same action. For one B2B technology client recently, just adding podcasts built from previous webinars helped boost the number of interactions – and lead to higher conversation to action.
There is, sadly, no magic formula to marketing automation and content strategy, which perhaps means good job security for all of us. However, it is one of the most important strategic foundations of successful marketing and lead generation, and deserves constant nurturing and analysis.

Source

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

5 Social Media Productivity Tips for Busy Professionals

Social_Media_Productivity

In the US alone, social networking is ranked as the top online activity, with one typical American allotting 37 minutes per day on social media websites (according to Go Gulf). In addition to that, Global Web Index revealed that 28% of the average online users’ time in the general population, is spent in social media.
    The numbers are quite staggering, aren’t they?

Of course, since everyone believes in this chain of thought, “where your customers are, there you should also be”, it just makes perfect sense for business owners and marketers to just jump in the social media bandwagon.
However, despite how mouth-watering the prospect of marketing via the different social media channels might seem, not everyone are getting great results from it – mainly because they get distracted.
In fact, according to an article published at Contentbistro, social media is pretty much their number 1 source of distraction for solopreneurs and business owners.
Have you ever gone to Facebook with the hopes of pre-marketing your new product, only to end up getting distracted watching videos of Stephen Curry’s godlike crossover moves? Or you ended up watching on of Gary Vaynerchuk’s motivational videos, perhaps?
Friends, the problem is real.
If you’re struggling with getting things done while on social media and are looking for ways to be more productive while on the platform, then you’re on the right place.
Allow me to share with you 5 tips that can help you with just that.
Let’s hop right in.

1. Understand your goals.

Remember that in any business, you can’t afford to play pin the tail on the donkey.
The reason why most companies succeed at using social media is that they have clear-cut goals of what they want to do. In most cases, every single step was thoroughly planned out before they were executed. By having clear goals in mind, you are taking ambiguity and the role of chances out of the equation.
You can start by answering these questions:
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What step was thoroughly planned out and what does your target audience want to know and need to know?
  • What should your content look like?
  • What are the biggest problems they are dealing with?
  • How can you give solution to these problems?
These are just some of the many questions that you can ask when crafting your social media marketing gameplan.
Once you have the core steps planned out, all you need to do is just stick to it so you can avoid reacting to every single thing that comes to your social media profile’s news feed.

2. Work on your tasks in batches.

Time is a resource that is highly valued, and if it is exhausted without you yielding any kind of productive results, it would definitely cost you a lot.
When you have tons of things to do on your checklist, you attempt to switch from one task to another in order to get things done the soonest time possible.
Well. Guess what?
Our brains aren’t made for multitasking, and this article will tell you why.
Batching things up means allotting time for a specific cluster or type of goals/agenda first before proceeding to work on other goals. Simply stated, you do things by batch. This technique will help you get your goals in order, eliminate distractions, and schedule ahead of time.
That being said, I suggest that you categorize your tasks and work by following these tips:
  • Prepare your draft of posts or a POST BANK so that it‘ll be convenient for you to just pull them out when the time calls for new posts. Thanks to Facebook’s features, you can schedule posts ahead of time or save drafts:

Time is a resource that is highly valued, and if it is exhausted without you yielding any kind of productive results, it would definitely cost you a lot.
When you have tons of things to do on your checklist, you attempt to switch from one task to another in order to get things done the soonest time possible.
Well. Guess what?
Our brains aren’t made for multitasking, and this article will tell you why.
Batching things up means allotting time for a specific cluster or type of goals/agenda first before proceeding to work on other goals. Simply stated, you do things by batch. This technique will help you get your goals in order, eliminate distractions, and schedule ahead of time.
That being said, I suggest that you categorize your tasks and work by following these tips:
  • Prepare your draft of posts or a POST BANK so that it‘ll be convenient for you to just pull them out when the time calls for new posts. Thanks to Facebook’s features, you can schedule posts ahead of time or save drafts:


Social_Media_Productivity
  • Follow peak hours. Web users are more active in specific hours of the day. You can learn more about this by checking out Neil Patel’s infographic.
  • Understand which posts are timely and which are not. The point here is to make your product relevant to your customers given the seasons or the trends.

3. Create a content calendar.

Some companies stay active for a period of time and the next thing you know, they’re off-the-grid in social media. A content calendar helps keep you committed. That way, you remain consistent and you won’t have any excuses.
According to Forbes writer Pamela Springer, “For your social media marketing plan to succeed, it’s crucial that you consistently interact online; even if it’s just 10 minutes a day. If you can’t put in the time, it’s best not to start.”
Your content calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The important thing is that you create one and follow it.
It should contain the plot of your posts, the corresponding dates as to when you want to publish them, include the themes for your posts (among others). Feel free to add other details like specific time of publishing, which social media platform to use and respective purposes of posting.
Important note: If there’s one thing that I really like about using content calendars, it would be that I have a bird’s-eye-view of how my ideas would flow. This helps me polish the message that I am trying to convey on each post giving my updates consistency and more focus.

4. Measure your results.


Social_Media_Productivity
You can plan all you want, hypothesize all you want, brain storm all you want, but at the end of the day, you’ll never really know how effective your social media marketing efforts are, unless you take the time to measure your results.
Through measuring, you can tell which of your strategies are working, and which ones aren’t.
Once you’ve obtained the hard cold numbers proving to you which of your strategies are bringing you results, you can then scrap the ones that aren’t. Then allocate the budget to those that are working – or to new campaigns that you’d like to try out.
This ensures that your effort isn’t wasted on marketing methods that aren’t working.
If you aren’t used to tracking your results and are hoping to start now, then I’d like to warn you that there are several pitfalls that you just might fall into. One is focusing on vanity metrics like the number of views on your post, when what you should be focusing on are the number of actions like shares, comments, engagements, etc…
There is more to measuring results than simply crunching or analyzing the numbers, while there are several blog posts that you can read to learn more about it, I urge you to go for several online courses so the kind of learning you’ll acquire is something that is more in depth.
Simply reading one blog post to another can cause confusion since there might be inconsistencies between what the authors are imparting. Let alone the fact that some publishers aren’t as careful with the tips they share compared to those who really take the time to create an in depth course on a certain topic.

5. Automate your tasks.

Just because social media sites run 24/7 doesn’t mean you have to be online 24/7.
You can automate a good number of your social media tasks by simply using plugins or even free apps.
For example, if you have a website and are regularly publishing blog posts, then you don’t have to manually share the article that you published on your website across the different social media platforms. If your website is powered by WordPress, then you can customize your website’s sharing options by going to your dashboard, “settings”, then “sharing”.

Social_Media_Productivity
Important tip – There are others tasks that you can automate aside from getting your published articles on your website shared on your social media profiles. There are free tools that you can use to pull content from reputable sites like Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, and Inc.com (among others), so that everytime these websites publish something, it’ll automatically be shared on your profiles without you doing anything.


Sunday, 26 July 2015

5 Fantastic Web Based Apps that Make Social Media Marketing Easier

Social media marketing got you in a tizzy? Don’t fret …because you are not alone.
Thanks to changes in the technology landscape, the introduction of various web based applications has most definitely made things a tad bit easier for us all.
I’ve previously written a few posts closely related to this topic: one that covers social automation tools and the other covering resources that can be used to grow your social media following – putting things on cruise control.
Today, I’ve decided to revisit this topic (because I heart social media) and also—because I am a true “tech” tools user.
Any resource or tool that makes online marketing a little easier, I’ll put it them to good use.

Web Based Apps for Social Media Marketing

1. Shareaholic Browser Extension

This extension let’s you quickly and easily bookmark and share content that you love right from the web to your social media networks. Awesome right??
Shareaholic Web Extension
Shareaholic has easily become one of my favorite web applications that I use to share information with my fans via social media while I am on the go.



Oh and I forgot to mention, if you have a WordPress website, then you should also check out their plugin to add to all of your pages, and posts to encourage visitors to share your content.

2. SumALL

SumALL is a Social Media Engagement and Analytics Tracking tool that I use. I have to give kudos to one of my Twitter followers “The Credit Woman” for introducing me to this resource. Guys it is a phenomenal tool!

SumAll Dashboard


Here’s what you can do with it:
  • For Twitter (it will automatically send out Thank You Retweets and recognition to your most engaged fans and members of your community that send out your “Best Retweets
  • For Facebook (the tool features a “Throw Back Thursday” post to your page and shares an old post that performed well with your Facebook community.
  • Metrics and Data reports (every day I receive an automated email that gives me the skinny on how well my social media posts have done on all of my active networks). This helps me gather important data about my social networking and marketing activities to see what’s working and what’s not.

3. Evernote Web Clipper App

This web based app helps you easily put together and “clip” a list of content that you can share on your social media networks.
Evernote Web Clipper


Content curation is the thing these days. If you want to save time and quickly put together a list of “noteworthy” content to share with your community, then Evernote’s clipper app is the way to go.
Additionally for you super techies and heavy smartphone users, the Evernote mobile application works just as well.
Here’s a secretthis is a resource that I use for my Monthly Small Business Roundup blog posts.

4. Bit.ly (The URL Shortener)

Bitly is an additional favorite web based application and extension that I use for sharing content.

Bitly_Screenshot 

What it does is essentially takes your original link to content and creates a “shorter” version of it. In addition to this, you can use the Bit.ly extension to see how well the links that you share on your social networks are performing.
Bit.ly is especially helpful for Twitter users since you can only tweet out content with up to 140 characters.

5. ShareThis (Chrome and FireFox)

This is a web based extension (like Shareaholic) that lets you share content anywhere and anytime from your Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
ShareThis Screenshot


Again, this is a huge time saver for social marketers that find great content via the web and want to share it immediately via your social networks.
Well there you have it, 5 awesome web based apps that make social media marketing easier.
Source

Tuesday, 9 June 2015

15 New Social Media Templates to Save You Hours

Imagine having a quick and fast way to get up to speed with social media or to get your work done in less time (and with more confidence).
When I’m in a pinch or into something new, one of the first places I turn is toward a template. I’ve built a stash of headline formulassocial media updates, and more to help organize my mind when it comes to working fast and learning something new.
Templates can be a lifesaver and a time-saver.
I have my favorite go-to templates, and I was also able to dig up a huge number of others, created by some really amazing folks who are generous to help us all work smarter. I’ve collected them here below. I’d love to know which ones might be useful to you!
Social Media Templates - save timesocial media templates

24 Time-Saving Social Media Templates

The list below is full of a variety of different templates, some helpful in a high-level way of organizing your marketing efforts and others in a specific area of social media marketing and sharing. If you have a favorite template that didn’t appear on the list here, let me know in the comments!

1. Social Media Report

Social Media Report Card
We built this social media report to be easy to fill with just a simple Buffer data export. Take your Buffer stats and import them here, and you can see stats for the past week as well as how they compare week-over-week and to your monthly benchmark.
Instructions:
  1. Export your data from Buffer or add in some stats manually
  2. The spreadsheet does the rest!
>> Free download <<

2. The 15-Minute Social Media Audit

Social Media Audit
We’ve used this template on a monthly basis to check in with our social media accounts and see how things are growing, changing, and (hopefully!) improving. It’s also good to run through the list here to stay on top of any new networks or pages that might need a visual update to stay consistent with your branding.
Instructions:
  1. Add all your social media profiles to the spreadsheet
  2. Duplicate the sheet every month to have a fresh template to start with
>> Free download <<

3. Social Media Publishing Schedule

This template comes in handy for each new blog post that you publish—a way to extend the life of your content and get as much value as possible. Share a new piece of content multiple times, and schedule these shares once the article publishes. Here’s the schedule we go by:
social media posting schedule

Other great scheduling templates include:

4. Tweet Headline Templates

Twitter headline template
We get a lot of mileage out of headline formulas at Buffer, and a lot of this value comes in the way that we can use variations to share on Twitter and other social media outlets. In many ways, we consider these headline formulas to be a really excellent source of Twitter headline templates. I’ve placed them all in a PDF here for you to reference easily:
>> Free download <<

5. Copywriting templates

A copywriting template might seem a bit far afield from social media, but where we find the most social media value from these templates is in composing a short update or thinking through the value and message behind what we’re sharing.
For instance, here is a handful of copywriting templates that we’ve found valuable to think on while we’re scheduling new updates:
  1. Before – After – Bridge
  2. Problem – Agitate – Solve
  3. The 5 Basic Objections
  4. The 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 Formula
Michael Hyatt has a great system also for blog posts and longer social media updates:
Killer Opener – Story – Main point – Practical application
(via)
The copywriting formulas are all here in this blog post.

6. Ways to write an update

Social Media Update Templates
We’ve written before about 71 ways to write a social media update (a handful of variations for each of the different networks). It’s been helpful for me to refer to this list often for new ideas and templates to try. Here is a sampling of favorites:
  • Multi-line tweet
  • Fill-in-the-blank
  • Title case vs. Sentence case updates
  • [NEW], [new post] or [blog post] to tell people what they’re clicking on (via)
All these templates are available in a spreadsheet where you can quickly test out and reference the different styles.
>> Free download <<

7. Visual social media templates

Visual Social Media Templates
Visuals are a key component of the social media updates we post at Buffer, and one of the best resources for developing a system of visual sharing is the templates provided by HubSpot. The free download gives you 30 rectangular and 30 square templates, plus an assortment of warm, cool, and neutral color combinations.
Instructions:
  1. Download the PowerPoint files and open in PowerPoint or Google Drive
  2. Choose the template you wish to edit
  3. Add your text
  4. Save to your computer
  5. Share to social media

8. Influencer Marketing Template

Influencer Marketing Template
With influencer tracking, you can keep on file all those who have reached out to you or linked to you or otherwise made an impact on your social media profiles. You can turn the list into potential/future outreach options as well.
The great part of this template from Content Marketing Institute is that it includes social media follower numbers as well so you can easily combine your website and social strategies together.

9. Editorial Calendar Publishing Schedule

Editoral Calendar
Along with organizing the way that you’ll promote each of your articles, it can be helpful to see how your content and social media marketing fit together from a bird’s eye view. Which campaigns are coming up? Which holidays? Which major events? What product launches or feature releases are on the horizon? Things like this can be great to add into an editorial calendar so that all your many events and activities can mesh with your social media marketing.
Instructions:
  1. Print off the editorial calendar template
  2. Add your big events to the year-at-a-glance view
  3. Add events, campaigns, holidays, etc. to the monthly templates

10. Social Media Strategy Template

Social Media Strategy Template
Most all good social media programs begin with a strategy. The strategy template from Hootsuite covers all the essentials:
  • Clarify your business’ social media goals
  • Audit your current social media status
  • Create or improve your social media profiles
  • Develop your content strategy
  • Use analytics to track progress and adjust your strategy as needed
Plug in your business’s unique info, and away you go!

11. Social Media Content Calendar

Social Media Content Calendar
Adding your content to this template from Hootsuite will help you stay on top of the performance of your social shares, making sure that you’re focusing on the best-performing posts and maintaining a steady stream of content across all your accounts.
Instructions:
  1. Place the title or category of your update in the first column.
  2. Add the update text to the second column.
  3. Add the URL to the third column.
  4. Check back on the performance of the post and add the number of clicks (or whichever metric is most key for you)

12. Social Media Image Sizes

Social-Media-Image-Sizes-Twitter-01
There are many great social media image size templates out there. The one I keep coming back to is this resource from Sprout Social, which lists the ideal image sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Tumblr.
Sprout Social keeps the list always up to date, and you can find the ideal image sizes either via the blog post or via a free Google Doc.
>> Free resource <<

13. Social Network Overview

Google+ Tips from Short Stack
For specific advice on each network—including a simple tutorial on identifying the different pieces and parts of the social network—the templates from Short Stack provide a lot of great value. Each one is available as a separate download so you can pick and choose the ones that are relevant to your strategy.

14. Social Listening Template

Social Listening Template
This helpful template from James Prideaux allows you to track the conversations and engagement happening around your business or keywords.
Instructions: Add the following information to the spreadsheet.
  • The social network where the conversation happens
  • The day and time
  • The post and topic
  • The potential reach, clicks, and reshares
>> Free download <<

15. Twitter Chat Planning template

Twitter Chat planning template
This template from Cathy McPhillips is great for those interested in starting up a Twitter chat. We’ve found that many of the fill-in-the-blank options here are similar to what we do for our weekly #bufferchat.
>> Free download <<

Bonus: Free Photoshop plug-in for ideal image sizes

Ideal Social Media Images
Social Kit—a free resource from Source—contains templates for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube, as well as custom social buttons. If you’re savvy with Photoshop, you can download the Social Kit plugin for free and have an easy way to build ideal social images for your business.

Over to you

Which templates do you use to help with your social media marketing?
Which ones from the list above looked most helpful?
I’d love to hear from you about your favorites! Feel free to leave a comment below.
Image sources: PabloUnSplashIconFinder