Social Media Posting Guidelines For Business

Wouldn’t it sound weird if you said the same thing to every person you encountered throughout the day?

Well, think of your social media posts in the same way. Each platform is different, and your posts should be too.

Even if you’re linking to the same content on your own website, each post on your various social media accounts should be tailored to succeed on that specific site in terms of tone and appearance. Here are some social media posting guidelines on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Facebook

Facebook is for social sharing, so go ahead: add photos, add links, add events, add it all.

The Facebook feed is very visually oriented, and aesthetics are important: use high quality photos (1,200×628 pixels is ideal) and replace visible URLs with well-written text to create a visually appealing post that arrests the eye. Photo-based posts (rather than text-based ones) actually get 39% more engagement on average. And remember to make it friendly–after all, Facebook is for your “friends,” right?

Pro tip: One gentleman from a manufacturing company in the midwest told me that their Facebook feed “is like the company newsletter.” I thought that was great advice.

Twitter

Tweets, on the other hand, must be economical. They’re meant to be short and pithy and to capture the audience’s attention with intrigue and wit rather than explanation.

Don’t worry about aesthetics here; just make sure you maximize your word allotment. Use tools like goo.gl or Bitly to shorten your links (many social sharing tools will shorten links for you automatically, too), saving space for valuable hashtags that increase your tweet’s exposure.

You can also add photos (ideally 1,024×512 pixels) and tag them, neither of which takes up any of your 140 characters.

Pro tip: We’ve found Twitter to be a great tool for finding influencers in an industry or on a topic, and also is good to send cues to search engines to index new pages you tweet about.

LinkedIn

While social sites like Facebook and Twitter can be used to share any relevant content, yours or not, LinkedIn is a more professional platform and your posts should reflect this.

Companies and people often neglect posting to the LinkedIn news feed, even though it can send up to four times as many people to your homepage as Facebook and Twitter. This influx includes potential clients or even business partners, so try to highlight professional growth or achievements.

An appropriate post might be an article you wrote that demonstrates your prowess in your field, or a link to a press release or news clip that sheds positive light on your company. Photos are also great on LinkedIn (are we seeing a theme here?), but always make sure to adjust it to the optimum size.

Pro tip: Your LinkedIn posts don’t just need to go on the company page. Encourage employees to share messages on their personal profiles as well, and make sure your personal profile on LinkedIn is as good as it can be, too.

Now, there are certainly other social platforms that companies are using to generate awareness, find partners and drive website traffic, but managing too many social media platforms can be overwhelming because of the time involved and because you really need to tailor each of your messages to each social media platform for best results.

Third-party applications like HootSuite can definitely make it easier and quicker to manage your social media accounts, but they’re not always the most effective method. By taking the time to ensure every post is optimized for its immediate audience instead of cross-posting the same one across all social media sites, you can leverage your content on each social media platform and ultimately drive traffic back to your company website.

Finally, posting and managing social media could be a full time job for many B2B companies, so don’t spread yourself too thin. Consider scheduling social media posts so you have even distribution throughout the day/week/month.

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5 Online Freemium Tools for Start-Ups and Agencies

Freemium tools are the basics needed to get things going for free – here are five to help start-ups on their way.

Do you want tools that will grow as your business does? If so, freemium is the way to go. Freemium tools allow start-ups to use the basics needed to get things going for free, while also offering paid plans. This way, as businesses evolve and needs change, the tools can grow and adapt too. In this post, we're going to look at five of the top freemium online marketing tools businesses can use at every stage.

Choosing the Right Tools

Before we get started, here are a few questions to ask when choosing freemium marketing tools for your start-up:

• Will the tool save you time in your day-to-day marketing efforts?
• Does the tool help you do tasks that have a direct result on your bottom line?
• Does the free version of the tool offer all of the features you need to get started?
• Will the free version's limitation lead you to paying for the premium version? If so, would you be better off going with a non-freemium tool?

These are good questions for any business to ask before choosing a tool. They are especially important for start-ups so you don't end up investing time into things you may not necessarily need.

Now, let's look at some of the top freemium tools that marketers use in businesses of all sizes. I have selected these tools based on popularity, freemium or free usage options, and their unique applications throughout your marketing campaign.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a powerful social media management tool that allows you to manage various aspects of your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and WordPress accounts. Through the app directory, Hootsuite offers even more solutions to connect with additional social networks and platforms beyond the defaults. This allows you to manage your accounts in easy-to-browse columns all in one place.

Hootsuite's freemium model allows you to start with three social media accounts and basic features for free, which is more than enough to get your start-up's social media presence moving on the top social networks. Paying for The Pro Level Plan increases your account to 50 social profiles and includes more advanced features, such as team members, advanced scheduling, unlimited RSS feeds, and additional security. Companies that need more can request a demonstration of the full-feature Enterprise Level Plan. 

2. SEMrush

SEMrush is a powerful search marketing tool that allows you to research your competition's paid search tactics, organic keyword visibility, and much more. You can use it for a variety of tasks, including backlink research, keyword research, search engine traffic volume, and previewing paid search ads.

While SEMrush does not have a freemium pricing model, I think it is an important tool because it still allows guests to perform a limited number of searches that increases once registered for a free account. A paid account gives businesses access to full reports and additional features. Larger businesses can consider a more substantial paid plan that includes access to unlimited projects, broader data, branded reports, and a larger number of users.

3. Fruition's Google Penalty Check

Whether you know you've been involved in shady search engine optimization practices in the past or not, it never hurts to keep an eye on your website's health, as far as Google is concerned. Fruition's Google Penalty Check lets you to see how various Google search and algorithm updates have affected your website.

Fruition's freemium model lets start-ups review the effects of Google search and algorithm updates over three months old and add up to two domains for free. Paid accounts have access to more recent data, or an option to analyze more websites.

4. Zapier

Want to connect the social networks, apps, and tools you use for marketing and general business tasks all together? Zapier offers a service that allows you to do just that. It has the ability to integrate over 400 platforms to create custom, automated workflows. These tasks, referred to as zaps, allow you to do things like save Twitter search mentions to an SQL server database - a relational database management system. Additionally, you can post a user's tweet to Yammer and other automations, as shown in the image below. 

Zapier's freemium model allows you to create five tasks, also known as "zaps," for free. From there, you may buy a plan based on the amount of additional zaps you may need. If your business needs more automated tasks, you can also request more information about large corporate level plans.

5. Cyfe

Cyfe is used to track analytics and data from a variety of sources. This all-in-one business dashboard solution enables you to bring your website analytics, social media analytics, SEO metrics, and more into one shared and easy-to-read dashboard. In the example below, you can see widgets pulling in data on year-to-date revenue from Salesforce, website visitor locations and funnel paths from Google Analytics, tweets from Twitter, keyword rankings from Google, and email marketing analytics from MailChimp.

Cyfe's freemium model allows limited usage of their platform, and you are allowed up to five widgets. To earn additional widgets, you can refer friends to Cyfe - one new widget per referral. Purchasing a premium package provides unlimited usage and complete functionality of all features, like exports and regular email reports. Enterprise level users can contact Cyfe for additional features like white labeling.

The key to finding great tools that will go the distance for your business is to ensure they cater to everyone, from small businesses to large enterprises and agencies. This means you never have to worry about outgrowing your favorite tool and start from scratch as your business scales in size. Begin by identifying areas in your marketing strategy where you think a tool might be beneficial for saving you time. From there, you can research the options to find the program that best compliments your professional needs.

*Homepage image via Shutterstock.

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Marketers delve into true meaning of real-time social media - Is it a waste of time?

Real-time social media is important, but it doesn’t always have to happen in real-time, according to David Parkinson, head of digital for Nissan in Africa, Middle East & India.

Speaking to The Drum at the Social Buzz Awards in London Parkinson responded to whether or not real-time social media marketing is a waste of time, stating that there are certain times in which real-time social media marketing needs to be planned ahed of time, rather than on the fly.

“Some real-time is actually real time, other real-time is planned in advance. We did real-time for royal baby, and that was actually six weeks in the making, and we just had to wait for the right time to produce it.

"But on the other side, we did the Kim Kardashian real-time a few weeks ago, it got us over 30,000 retweets on Twitter: and that was genuine real-time,” he explained.

The topic of whether social media marketing is a waste of time arose after Microsoft Mobile’s head of digital marketing, Selena Harrington, previously questioned whether real-time in social media was worthwhile given it is virtually impossible to fully measure success of real-time campaigns, and therefore the whole tactic can be hit-or-miss.

Stating that it’s not a waste of time, “but it’s got to be genuine,” Parkinson was one of several top names in social who discussed the question ‘is real-time in social media a waste of time’ while at the Social Buzz Awards.

James Whatley, social media director, Ogilvy & Mather, agreed that marketers should take a considered approach to real-time social media marketing, but added that service-based clients lend themselves well to the speediness of real time communications, particularly when it comes to customer service.

But he added that the true meaning of the term 'real time' should really reference 'right time' communications.

“Being there in the right time does not mean that you have to be there in real-time,” he added.

Merinda Peppard, marketing director EMEA at Hootsuite, described social media as “real time marketing, available at any time, to anyone”.

For Mícheál Nagle, sportsbook social media manager from Paddy Power, live tweeting is an important part of social, and it is here where real-time comes into play for the bookies.

“We live tweet big sporting events all the time because we know people at home want to see what Paddy Power has to say about that event.”

While other businesses might not embrace the real-time element to the same level as Paddy Power, it seems like it is something which social media managers should consider.

You can hear more on what all of the above – as well as Jim Dowling, managing director of Cake and Iain Matthews, strategy director at Jam – think about real-time social media by viewing the video above.

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Social Media Tips: Target Local Search This Holiday Season

Christmas is nearly here, and with it the busiest shopping season of the year. Social media is a great way for businesses to get involved in the conversation, and leveraging different platforms to reach potential customers while they are online and searching for the perfect gift.

For local retail businesses in particular the holidays are a fantastic opportunity to increase sales, and if you have a consumer base in a specific geo-location a well-orchestrated social media strategy can help you strike gold. Here are a few simple social media marketing tips for your Xmas marketing plan:

1.       Identify your target market – Understanding your local market and customer is the first step to building an effective marketing strategy. According to a study*, 79% of people searching online look for local information, while 69% of searches are influenced by a geo-targeted location.  This makes it all the more important to know:

·         The buying pattern of your customers and the most sought after deals in your local market offered by competitors.

·         The most effective platforms - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, or You Tube - for your specific target audience. For instance, if your business sells products or provides services directly to consumers (B2C) your best platforms may be Twitter, Instagram or Facebook; while if you are dealing with businesses (B2B) then you will most likely have more success on YouTube or LinkedIn. Focusing your time or money on a platform that is not popular among your customers will fail to deliver the desired results.

·         The most common social media behaviours prevalent in your local users. Conduct research on the activities of your target customer base on various digital platforms to understand the trending topics and discussions of your customers, using Google Analytics and tools such as Facebook Insights.

2.       Set up your Facebook/Twitter page as a Local Business - The best way to optimise your Facebook or Twitter page for a local audience is to set it up as a Local Business.  

a.       On Facebook, you can select the category of your page (go to Admin Panel > Manage > Edit Page > Basic Information> and then select the relevant category and sub-category for your business). Once your Facebook page is set up as a local business, add your details including street address, phone number and trading hours.

b.       On Twitter, include your current location in the Twitter information as well as a local keyword phrase in your Twitter bio.

c.       You can also include current location in your Google+ profile in the Places Lived section.

3. Connect with Local Audience – Once your social media pages are optimised as local business, connect with the local audience by:

a.       Inviting your friends and customers to follow you, becoming fan of other local business pages, and sending status updates only to people in specific locations (by changing the dropdown for your status update from Public to targeted by location) on Facebook

b.       Finding local people on Twitter via Twitter lists and directories, and using the Twitter Advanced Search to monitor conversations of users near a particular place (which can be specified by name or zip code)

c.       Joining local networking groups on LinkedIn

d.     Having a publicly visible Google+ account (via Profile ‘Edit’ button), using the Google+ internal search to find local Google+ users that might be interested in your business, and connecting with them by adding them to circles.

4.       Run festive campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - Add a cohesive festive message across all your digital channels, to let your audience know that you are ready for Christmas. Decide the most effective language to be used for your targeted local market, and choose the tone and style of the messaging accordingly. You can:

·         Decorate your social media pages with colourful themes, or add a festive flavour to your website to show that you’re prepared for the holiday season.

·         Go beyond your product or business, and participate in the festive mood by posting Christmas greetings, sharing Christmas food and drinks recipes, or discussing local events with your followers or fans.

·         You can encourage your community to tag themselves at your business for extra brownie points. You can also create your own hashtag (#) on Twitter, so that all your followers can come together and participate in the conversation.

5.       Track conversations - When people are looking to buy something they often search social media for information and reviews. It’s always a good idea to track what your potential customers are discussing. If anyone talks about something relevant to your product, you can participate in the conversation and let them know about your business.  You can track conversations either manually or via tools like HootSuite or PinReach that analyse, measure, display, and create reports about the ongoing conversations on different platforms.

6.       Include special promotions and offers - Create special offers on your Twitter and Facebook pages that attract and encourage people to register, enrol, or purchase instantly. You can also share a special coupon code or sale with them to ensure repeat visitors to your page. You can create an advertisement or a sponsored story with your website URL through the Facebook Ads or even use promotional or marketing apps available.

7.       Engage people - Get people talking about their Christmas tips and gifts, and their holiday habits and activities on your pages.  Initiate and participate in discussions where you can add to the conversation. You can talk about your products and services, invite them over to your store, or even share special offers or discounts.

8.       Add a Tweet button to your website - Enable buttons on your content and product pages, so that people can share or tweet directly from your website.

9.       Use Pinterest to initiate discussions around shopping ideas – Leverage Pinterest as people rely on it to look for ideas on everything from creative cookie recipes to Christmas gifts. If you have an active audience, host a pin-to-win campaign on Pinterest.

10.   Send personal holiday greetings to loyal customers – Send personalised season greetings to your loyal customers. You could create an Instagram video and post it to Facebook, or send out direct messages to your followers on Twitter.

11.   Corporate Social Responsibility – Think about a charity or cause that you would like to support, and offer to donate a percentage of your season sales. Announce the percentage that you plan to donate on your social media platforms, track the total donation amount, and keep your customers informed about how it’s going.

12.   Monitor your campaign – Keep an eye on your campaign pages with a stringent monitoring schedule. You wouldn’t want to miss out on an important opportunity or conversation during this time of year.

13.  Analyse your Results - To ensure that local marketing strategies are getting the desired results, check outGoogle Analytics’ Audience Demographics data or Facebook Insights to see demographic information of people liking or sharing your content.

With most people using at least one social media platform, these tips will improve brand recognition and visibility amongst customers, help with repeat exposure of your business, grow your potential audience base, increase in-store customers, improve traffic to your website, and add a distinct competitive edge to your business.

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15 Secrets of Boosting Social Media Engagement: Visuals, Memes and More.

You’ve set up your social media pages, added fun cover and profile photos and received several new likes; that’s excellent! However, are you getting little engagement on your sites, or at least a significant amount below that of your competitors, who have incredible engagement on their social media accounts? What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone participating with you on social media? Here are 15 remarkable secrets that can help you boost your social media engagement through some very simple methods.

1. Uploading Pictures Is Vital. Believe it or not, pictures are the lifeblood of social media. For a time, people enjoyed reading status updates and such, but now with things such as Instagram, more and more people want to see a picture post or two throughout their day. One guess as to why this is the case is simply that people no longer have time to read through the hundreds to thousands of status updates on their newsfeeds. However, if they see a photo, they will look, like, and share pretty quickly. Just how important is a picture post? Well, according to Forbes, researchers have discovered an 85% increase to Facebook interaction and a 35% retweet increase. Moral of the story: start sharing those photos!

2. Create Your Very Own Shareable Image. “But what type of photo should I share?” If you don’t have any photographs to share from your business, craft your own shareable image. You can do this by adding quotes to photographs, whether your own or stock images. In addition, you can also create just a simple quote box with a solid color background like this image we made—it took just 10 minutes to whip up! 

When you create an image, make sure to play around with your hashtags a bit to see what’s out there to add your quote to an adequate tag. You can do this for both Twitter and Google+. Always brand your image—add your Twitter handle, and the topical hash-tag.

3. Know How Often To Post. The main question everyone asks regarding social media is when the best time to post is? The best times vary from social network to social network, but you shouldn’t stop there. You should also start wondering just how frequently you should be posting to social media. This varies on who your followers are and what they want to say, but Buffer does point out it is a great idea to find the fine line between being informative and being a nuisance. The best way to find this out is to play around with it, ask your followers, and pay attention to your analytics.

4. Have Collaboration Boards On Pinterest. Wait, do you really want to allow your clients to add pins to a board? Is that safe? It is actually! According to Social Media Examiner, all you will have to do is follow one of their boards, invite them to be a collaborator on one of your boards, and they have the ability to pin. This can be exciting for everyone involved and really promote a great sense of community and involvement. If you find that you want or need to delete a collaborator and his or her pins, you can easily do this.

5. Have A Funny Bone? Use It! We all have a funny side, whether it is sarcastic or dorky, you and I both have a funny side. Do you know what you should do with that funny side? Use it for your social media campaigns! Yes, I understand that you want to have a more professional aspect to your business, but sometimes humor can really add to a social media experience. A key thing to remember when utilizing humor is that you should always make sure that you don’t offend your audience and that you research just what makes them laugh. Take a look at how Old Spice uses humor on their Facebook account:

6. Keep Twitter Posts Short And Sweet. According to Jerry Low over at The Daily Egg, it is a good idea to keep yourTwitter posts short and to the point. He suggests between 80 and 110 characters. He says that this gives your followers the ability to re-tweet you and add their own take without editing your post down any. Try this out for a few of your tweets; in fact, avoid sharing links in some of your posts as this can take up more characters than you realize!

7. Use A Conversational Tone On Social Media. As I mentioned earlier, it is a great idea to add humor to your posts, and this is easier if you adopt a conversational tone. This is possible whether you are an easygoing, laid back company or if you need to keep things more professional. Just think of when you go to a company-wide event; do you go around talking like you are writing for an academic journal? Of course not! Yet you still manage to be professional. This is the type of voice to take when you use social media. You might find that the more conversational you sound, the more likely you are to have great engagement on your posts.

8. Ask For A Retweet And You Shall Receive. It might seem like begging, but asking for a retweet can oftentimes, well, get you a retweet! It is exciting when that happens, and you’ll find that more people are willing to do this if you ask them. You can always add an incentive such as a retweet being a giveaway entry, but many times people will retweet you without an incentive. That’s one of the many beauties of Twitter.

9. Poll Your Audience. According to Social Media Examiner, a great way to increase engagement on your social media sites is to poll your audience. This doesn’t mean to poll them with what they’d like to see on social media, though that can work, too! You can poll your followers with things such as what their favorite Saturday activity is, which book is their favorite to read on a rainy day, or which Spice Girl is truly the best. This will have people jumping on quickly to give their opinion, and can open up fun dialogue between you and your clients. This is, in fact, what the creators of the new Bioware game, Dragon Age: Inquisition are doing until the release of the game:

10. “Caption This” And “Fill In The Blank” Are Perfect. In the Social Media Examiner article mentioned above, it also says that having your audience caption a photo or fill in the blank will also help improve engagement. Fill in the blank questions are fun, especially since it can often remind someone of Mad Libs. I don’t know about you, but I sure enjoyed those as a kid and still do! Chances are, your audience still enjoys those as well.

11. Make Your Social Media Sites Sound Like A Person Is Running It. This goes in connection with having a conversational tone; make your social sites sound like a person is running it. You don’t want it to sound like some cold robot is running it. If so, you are less likely to have any engagement. Sound like a human, have fun, and be silly with your posts. You can still maintain a manner of professionalism while being fun and engaging. Consider not sacrificing engagement to sound more professional.

12. Always Respond To Customer Comments And Posts. In an infographic from Media Bistro, it says that a great way to promote and improve engagement is for you to comment and respond to people. This goes in connection with point 11, and shows people that someone is actually there listening to what they have to say. You’ll find people are more apt to comment if they see that you are more apt to respond to them.

13. Connect With Those In Your Field And Boost Each Other. You can also improve engagement if you partner with those in your field. This might seem counterproductive because they might just be a competitor, but you might find that both of you see great success if you start working together. If you’d rather not go with a competitor, find someone that provides services that complement your services or products to form a partnership. This can encourage people to engage with you because many people do enjoy seeing others working together.

14. Stay Consistent With Your Social Posts. In the same infographic from Media Bistro, it says that you need to stay consistent with your social posts. This means that you need to find the voice you want to use, and stick to it. People will notice if the voice changes, and this can often turn people off of your social posts. Staying consistent helps people believe only one person is operating the site, which encourages them to engage more if they think only one person is updating and responding.

15. Utilize Great Social Media Sites Like Hootsuite. When it comes to managing all of the social sites, you will find utilizing something such as Hootsuite will help tremendously. This will make sure you can see whenever someone comments or responds to your posts on several sites, giving you a central location from which to comment. This will help you engage more with your clients, therefore helping them engage more with you.

Until Next Time

I hope you’ve found these secrets to be helpful to you and your social media campaigns! You’ll find that even implementing a few of these will help keep you from stressing out too much over engagement, and soon you’ll start seeing an increase in client interaction!

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