7 Ways You Should Use Social Media in Your Online Marketing Toolkit

Online marketing has come a long way since the inception of the Internet. Through the introductions of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, plenty of opportunities have presented themselves for startups to increase visibility and land conversions.

Any business can profit from using social media. Even taking time to do a couple of brief social media posts or updates a day can have a positive impact and build market awareness.

Because smaller businesses often target niche audiences, they may even benefit more than companies that have massive marketing budgets. You can connect easily and network organically from personal/professional accounts without having the kind of corporate accounts that may get lost in the shuffle.

How to balance your social media strategy

It only takes one hit to rocket a brand to Internet stardom, which will expand brand awareness and drive traffic. That means that with the right content, literally anyone can hit it big at the right time.

Unfortunately, as quickly as it comes, the exposure can fade. And the science that supports the creation of the kind of content that will go viral at any given time is inexact and constantly evolving.

Obviously, one of the most prominent uses for social media marketing is as a tool to promote sales or discounts, but thinking outside the box can promote the longer-term goals of increasing media exposure and conversion rates.

Think about implementing these social media concepts to connect more deeply with your market:

1. Target a niche in the market to create a focused following. Identify and pursue a demographic to increase the likelihood of connecting with site visitors. A business can never please its entire market. But by identifying a problem in a subsection of the market, you can provide unique solutions for that problem, and inspire brand trust and higher conversion rates.
2. Offer opt-in choices for additional connectivity. Opt-in availability that’s well managed will encourage users who find content intriguing to agree to receive a newsletter or updates. It’s even better if a company offers to target the kind of information it sends to users.
   At that point, opt-out functionality is vital. If opt-in can be quickly promotional, an opt-out system that doesn’t work can be at least as detrimental, and likely more. Users should feel confident they have full control over the content that’s arriving in their email inbox. Receiving emails after having unsubscribed is extremely irritating and can lead to company blacklisting, which will make future email campaigns more difficult.
3. Provide content rich in relevancy and usefulness. It’s not enough to have social media and blogs and a well-designed website. Your business should also have content that readers care about. Finding a way to connect with the audience first can provide some clues about how to nudge them toward a brand concept.
   Sometimes the most successful social media content takes two different demographics or concepts, finds the connecting link between them, and capitalizes on that. Having a unique way to reach a wider target market -- in a meaningful way -- can give your company a competitive edge.
4. Don’t overload followers with posts. Less can often be more. Depending on the content provided on a blog or other site, several short posts may sometimes be more effective; or just a few longer posts that really delve into an issue may be the ticket.
   Once again, knowing your audience will direct you to the right answers here. It may also be helpful to know what’s trending online so the information you provide on your site is timely.
5. Funnel traffic to your blog or website. There are several different ways to drive traffic to your company’s sites, the easiest of which is to go viral. Unfortunately, going viral is not something you can accomplish with an exact science; there’s no guarantee that any campaign will hit the jackpot.
   Another way to drive traffic involves having a trusted web host that has the support, uptime, and speed level your company requires.
6. Get creative with ways to divert traffic from social media sites to your professional website or blog. Visual messages with hyperlinks that draw traffic to your site can be extremely successful in promoting conversion rates.
7. Converse with your followers. Any comments on a firm’s website, blog, or social media site should be addressed in a timely and appropriate manner. According to Jessica Ann, a blogger atFatCow, it’s important to “be more social, less ‘media.’”

Retweeting others’ comments and responding to Facebook or blog posts will humanize your company and build trust among users. It’s all about focusing on what the followers -- your potential clients -- care about and addressing those issues.

Increasing sales effectively through social media strategy requires a mixture of these and other online marketing concepts. Determining the right tools for the job and maintaining the effort over time has been statistically shown to have a direct and positive correlation with building revenue.

Source

Read More

Facebook Ad Campaign Changes: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Facebook ads to boost your business?

Are you confused by the latest changes?

Recent changes made to Facebook’s ad campaign structure can affect how you set up and test your ads.

In this article you’ll discover how to set up a Facebook ad campaign in the new structure.

Campaign Structure Changes

The biggest change is that budget, schedule, bidding, targeting and placement of your ads are all configured at the ad set level. Only the images, copy, call-to-action button and Facebook page are configured at the ad level.

So if you are split testing your ads and changing a variety of things, you may need to set up multiple ad sets, as well as multiple campaigns.

Here are some examples of when you need a new campaign, new ad set or just a new ad for the different things you might split test.

Split testing that requires a new campaign:

• Different website landing pages
• Different types of ads (i.e., promoted post vs. website conversion)

Split testing that requires a new ad set:

• Different bidding models
• Different targeting

• Ads that you want to run automatically on a particular individual schedule (i.e., one ad runs on Sunday and one ad runs on Monday—to turn these on automatically individually, they both need their own ad set)

Split testing that only requires new ads:

• Different image
• Different copy
• Different call-to-action buttons
• Using a different Facebook page for website clicks or website conversion ads

Most of the other changes are more cosmetic in the layout. Facebook has simplified the setup so it’s more aligned with the new structure. They have broken the setup into three steps:

Step 1: Create your campaign
Step 2: Create your ad set
Step 3: Create your ad

Notice that you can name your campaign and ad set at the end of the step. Give them a meaningful name to easily see which ads are doing well in the Reports area.

To set up an ad in the new Facebook ad structure, follow these steps after you go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/.

#1: Choose the Objective

This will be the objective of the campaign. Notice the language has changed a bit on the selections here.

Notably, the Page Post Engagement selection has been changed to Boost Your Posts. This may be confusing for people who are more used to the promoted posts vs. boosted posts language.

Choosing your objective sets the objective at the campaign level.

The benefit of setting up the Boost Your Post ad here within the Ads Manager is that you can configure the ad to boost the post to only your fans, rather than boosting to People who Like your Page and their Friends when you use the Boost Post option directly on your Facebook page.

#2: Enter Objective Details

After choosing an objective, you make other selections related to your objective such as entering a website address, selecting a conversion pixel or selecting which event to promote.

Add the details to your objective.

In this example, I chose to promote conversions on my website and had to select the corresponding active website conversion pixel.

#3: Name the Campaign

Once you click Continue after entering the objective details, you can name your campaign. Facebook gives it a name by default based on the objectives, but you can change the name to something meaningful to you.

Name your campaign.

#4: Design the Ad Set

Next, you set up the targeting, bidding and budget for your ad set. While the order of the setup has changed to be more in line with the flow of the new structure, the targeting has not changed.

Remember that the ads below the ad set will all share the same bidding model and budget.

Facebook does optimize the ads below the ad sets so the better-performing ads get more of the budget. Be aware that one of your ads may be shown less often. You can manually control the ads below the ad set by turning them on and off as you require.

The targeting and pricing are set up at the ad set level.

#5: Design the Ad

The last step is to design your ad.

If you’re only going to change the ad image for split testing, you can add multiple images here and multiple ads will be created with the different images. Then Facebook will split test them and optimize the campaign to show the best-performing ad more often.

Design your ad.

If you are changing the text or the call-to-action button for split testing, you can easilycreate a similar ad after the first one has been created.

Click Create Similar Ad to use the same information from the ad you created and then edit what you need to change.

And if you need to adjust the bidding model or targeting for an ad set, you can click Change Ad Set after you’ve created the similar ad.

Change the ad set after creating a similar ad to adjust the bidding or targeting in the new ad.

You can still edit the ad after it has been created. Click Edit next to the Creative area or if you need to adjust anything in the ad set, click the wheel and then edit.

Click the wheel to see the ad set information and you can edit it from there.

Additional Tips and Pointers

Every ad account is limited to 1,000 campaigns, 1,000 ad sets and 5,000 ads. If you hit the limit, you can delete campaigns, ad sets and ads. Each ad set is limited to no more than 50 non-deleted ads.

Make sure you know when Facebook is optimizing your ads for you and when you need to watch your ad optimization.

For example, the two ads below are in the same ad set, but they were created before the migration so they have different target audiences. You can see that the ad with a worse cost per like was taking more of the budget for the day. In an instance like this, you need to manually turn off the ad that’s performing worse.

Watch your cost per conversion and turn off ads that are performing worse.

In the new ad sets, Facebook is supposed to optimize so that the ad with the better conversion gets more of the budget, but I suggest watching those stats to see if you agree. I created a Campaign with two different images in the Ad sets and one ad did not show at all while the other ad got the entire budget.

Watch the optimization between your ads.

Wrapping Up

The new setup flow for campaigns, ad sets and ads does seem to be easier to understand. As marketers, we need to embrace the change, while finding ways to keep our costs low, such as split testing and optimizing our budget to fit our goals.

If you have current ads, you can run them as they’ve been set up, but all ads will be migrated to the new structure sometime after January 2015. Any new ads you set up will use the new structure.

You can read more about the new campaign structure on the Facebook for Business site.
Source

Read More

9 Core Rules of Facebook Marketing For Small Businesses

GREAT BIT ON SMART BRANDING TO STAND OUT IN YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA EFFORTS, DID YOU GUYS FIND IT USEFUL?

Read More

Twitter Marketing for Your Business

CLEAR AND CONCISE! DO YOU AGREE?

Read More

Social Media Marketing Explained

GREAT BEGINNER LESSON! WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Read More

Ad of the Day: Adorable Australian Ad With People Helping Ducks Goes Megaviral

88 million views in 10 days

We've become accustomed to animal rights videos that are so brutal and depressing, you feel like you've been hit by a bus. But this spot from Australia shows a little positivity goes a long way.

The video, titled "People Being Awesome," has been watched a staggering 88 million timessince being posted to Facebook on Nov. 16 by Animals Australia. And yes, the people in it are behaving in pretty stellar fashion—the ad compiles home-video footage of people helping ducks who've gotten themselves into difficult situations (many of them are trying to cross busy roads with their ducklings in tow).

The pitch is revealed in the closing frames, and it turns out we've been watching a political campaign ad—but surely the most uplifting one of the year.

Read more about the ad, and the cause it promotes, here.

Source

Read More

Macy's Black Friday Marketing Now Includes Facebook Video Ads  Store looks to reach people who missed parade 

Macy's jumps into Facebook video advertising for Thanksgiving.

Macy's plans to run video ads on Facebook to round out its extensive Thanksgiving and Black Friday marketing. It already rules the holiday on live TV with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, featuring oversized iconic balloons making their way through midtown Manhattan, but now the retailer is looking to reach social media users with Facebook’s premium video ads.

The videos will feature SpongeBob SquarePants, also a star of the parade, and start running on Thanksgiving evening. 

Macy's head of digital marketing, Jennifer Kasper, told Reuters that she hopes the Facebook ads will keep the brand "top of mind" for people who might miss the parade on TV.

Fashion brand Kate Spade New York also is among the advertisers jumping into video on Facebook, which began offering the format widely this year. The fashion design house told Reuters it has reached more than 6.7 million people since it launched Facebook video commercials earlier this month.

Facebook has reported that video content on the site is exploding—more than a hundred million videos are uploaded a month.

Source

Read More

Pin Down Your Social Media Strategy This Black Friday (Infographic)

For a traffic boost to you e-commerce site, look to Pinterest.

Here's a really good reason to pay attention to Pinterest this holiday season: The visual social network drives a whopping 23 percent of referral traffic to e-commerce sites, according to Curalate, a social media marketing platform.

In the month of November, Curalate collected more than 180,000 "pins" associated with the Top 100 brands in the 2014 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. It found that 82 percent of product images were shared organically from brands’ websites. Yet some retailers are still missing out. Twenty-eight percent of brands don't have Pinterest buttons on their product pages, and 44 percent don't have "Pin It" buttons on their home pages, according to the analysis.

For more on the value of using Pinterest this holiday season, check out the infographic below.

Source

Read More

26 Tips to Strengthen Your Social Media Marketing

Is it time to look at your social media from a fresh perspective?

Are you ready to make some changes?

There are a variety of ways to improve how your business is seen on social media.

In this article I’ll share 26 tips, an A-Z guide, to help breathe new life into your social media marketing.

#1: Add Your Value Proposition to Profiles

Whenever people are on social media sites, they make snap decisions about whom to follow, what content to read and which content to share.

Find 26 tips to strengthen your social media marketing.

Make it easier for them to decide.

To catch your readers’ attention, add value propositions to your network profiles.

For example, Spredfast’s value proposition is about marketing speed: they help customers spread information about their businesses at the speed of “life”—not only a great promise, but also a catchy play on words.

Spredfast highlights marketing speed in their value proposition.

Value propositions describe and differentiate your business, giving consumers a better sense of what your business is all about. When you share it on your profiles, people know who you are and what you do at a glance.

#2: Boost Visibility With WordPress Plugins

To give your blog posts the most exposure possible, optimize them for search. Install an SEO WordPress plugin, such as All in One or SEO Plugin by Yoast.

These plugins have fields to include excerpts and descriptions, which will give your blog posts more opportunities to be found in search results.

Fill in the preview information, focus keyword, meta description and meta keywords in a WordPress plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast.

Take the time to fill in the fields, so you have control over the snippets and keywords that appear in search results. A small step can make a huge difference in blog visibility.

#3: Create Targeted Calls to Action

Calls to action (CTAs) are the backbone of social media. When readers engage with these action-filled words, it boosts your social media presence.

It’s essential for each call to action to have a specific purpose, whether it’s to like, share, comment, retweet or click.

Here’s how Sony uses calls to action on their social profiles.

On Facebook, Sony uses phrases such as “Check it out,” “Don’t forget,” “Find out more,” “Go behind the scenes” and “Read about it here” to get people to click through. The URL destinations include blog posts, Vine, embedded videos, Vevo, a Sony video gallery and their website.

Sony uses a variety of calls to action to get people to engage and click from their Facebook page.

Sony uses calls to action on their social accounts and website that work in tandem to encourage visitors to take the next steps through the buying process.

#4: Don’t Take Shortcuts

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is social media activity.

While it may be tempting to buy Facebook fans or Twitter followers, the long-term challenges outweigh the short-term benefits.

Victor Pan identifies three reasons why buying Facebook fans is bad for business:

• You are watering down the data you have on your real fans doing awesome stuff for you. By buying fake Facebook fans, you decrease the value of your true Facebook fans because there’s no way to separate the two with Facebook’s current built-in analytics tool.
• You will immediately lose trust from web-savvy visitors if they use a fake fan checker tool or visit your historic like data and notice a low brand activity vs. total like ratio.
• Your Facebook fan page could be marked as a spam source and removed for violating Facebook’s terms of service.

Stay clear of fast-fixes and shortcuts. No-one wants to play with someone who doesn’t follow the rules, no matter how tempting or convincing the seller.

#5: Encourage Blog Comments

Blogs create an opportunity for readers to comment, ask questions or simply say thank-you to the writer. It’s important to cultivate relationships with readers through blogs and invite reader response.

Social Media Examiner encourages readers to comment on every blog post.

But the question still remains: why do certain blogs consistently receive a higher number of comments than others?

Blogs that receive more comments generally have the following attributes:

• Good attendance: Loyal followers read the content on a regular basis.
• Quality content: Posts are well-written and add value to a user’s experience.
• Good etiquette: Writers and moderators are polite and welcoming to their readers and respond to questions and comments.
• Environmentally sound: Run by trusted advisors who provide a respite from an otherwise overwhelming online world.

Stay dedicated and committed to your blog. Talk to your readers. They will eventually talk back to you and each other.

#6: Fuel Profiles With Shared Content

Shared content can drive activity to your social profiles. However, before you share,consider these three W’s: When, Who and Will:

When was it written? If the post is more than 6-12 months old, it may be dated already. Even so, if you still want to share it because it contains valuable information, introduce the article by identifying that it’s not current.

Who wrote the piece? Content written by a known author is likely to get traction, no matter what the topic. However, sharing content from a lesser-known individual also has its benefits. You get to introduce a new expert to your audience. Just make sure they have excellent content and an easy-to-read style.

Will the topic/article/post resonate with your audience? Is the artwork pleasing, is the content original, will sharing the article with your audience be advantageous to them?

Don’t share content passively. Make sure it adds value to your social presence. That will in turn add to your stature as an expert in your field.

#7: Generate Interest With Variety

Social media is a great way to package content in many different formats. Create a variety of content to post on your blog and throughout your social media presence.

Here are some items you can throw in the mix:

• Well-crafted articles
• Unique photos and images
• Recorded podcasts and interviews
• Interesting videos
• Eye-catching and detailed infographics

Start with a few types of content, and as your site grows, add more formats.

For example, when Social Media Examiner launched five years ago, we had six categories of content: Case Studies, How To, Reviews, Expert Interviews, Research and Tools.

These are the six categories Social Media Examiner posted about in 2009, accessed via Waybackmachine.com.

We now have 10 categories: Podcasts, Videos, Weekly News and View Points have been added.

In 2014 Social Media Examiner grew to 10 content categories.

If you haven’t added something new to your blog lately, figure out what addition would be of the most benefit.

#8: Humanize Your Company Voice

Customers want to feel a real connection with the businesses that serve them and not just when they call the customer help line. Whether it’s messages and posts on social media or audio and video on a website, humanize your tone.

A few years back, when L.L. Bean first rolled out their social media team, they were determined to offer the same dedicated attention online as they did on the phone. As a result, the tone on L.L. Bean’s Facebook page reveals the same type of professionalism and helpfulness that reps extend via telephone.

L.L. Bean’s reps are as attentive on social media as they are on the phone.

Stay consistent with your company voice on all platforms, especially in terms of customer service. Be timely, helpful and sincere.

#9: Include Social Profiles in Company Communications

Many people find out about a company’s social media sites the good, old-fashioned way: on store signs, in email signatures and on event flyers. So make sure all of your social media sites are listed there.

This one may sound like a no-brainer, but believe me, sometimes things get overlooked.

Recently, I attended a large event where the organization printed cards encouraging people to complete a survey. The cards also asked attendees to engage with them on Facebook. On the card, all social URLs were provided with the exception of Facebook. Oops.

Review each piece of company communication to ensure nothing is forgotten.

#10: Jumpstart Reach With LinkedIn Publishing

LinkedIn’s new publishing platform provides an opportunity to share long-form content with a greater potential for reach.

Stephanie Sammons says that after she published her first post on LinkedIn, she attracted over 200 new followers and her profile views were up 38% week over week.

LinkedIn’s publishing platform is an excellent way to extend your reach and raise your profile.

LinkedIn Publisher offers an important new venue for sharing content. Publish a few articles on LinkedIn to test whether you receive higher visibility than on your own blog.

#11: Kickstart Updates With Custom Images

Finding the perfect image for your blog or profile updates can sometimes be a challenge. So create your own. That way, you’ll have the ability to brand the image with your color palette, web URL and aesthetics.

Customized, branded images are an effective tool for creating and maintaining brand recognition.

There are a number of great photo tools that even non-designers can use to create compelling graphics.

#12: Leverage Trending Topics

Watch trending topics to see what people are talking about on any given day.

Twitter and Facebook will show you trending topics, but you can go beyond these sources. Elisabeth Michaud of Hootsuite suggests five additional resources:BuzzFeed, Google Trends (visualizer and top charts), Google+, Reddit and UberVU.

If they fit with your field and brand, you have material to share. If not, you’re still keeping on top of what’s going on in the world. Never a bad thing.

#13: Manage Workflow

Social media managers have a ton of responsibilities. Keeping on track and on task will help strengthen your social media marketing plan.

For an estimation of tasks and timing, check out this Social Media Workflow infographic, created by Mark Smiciklas in 2012.

Stay on top of your social media workflow and your presence will strengthen.

Time spent on social media varies by person and company. Regardless of the exact hours, this chart is a good barometer for gauging everything that needs to be managed on a weekly basis.

#14: Nip Negative Comments in the Bud

If you don’t have a plan for how to handle negative comments, put one together.

In this article Patricia Redsicker offers four valuable tips on how to do this:

• Create a policy.
• Moderate wisely.
• Respond judiciously.
• Respect feedback.

As Patricia writes, “It’s important to create an open and respectful space where customer feedback is valued and sincere conversations can take place (even when they’re unpleasant.)”

Being prepared is half the battle.

#15: Optimize Websites for Mobile

Mobile optimization has become more important with each passing year, month and day. More people are on mobile devices than ever before. Plus, users move between devices throughout the day. You want your website to display properly on all platforms, so you can keep your audience engaged and happy.

Ian Mills recommends businesses do a “mobile health check.” Just pick up your smartphone and go to your website.

To determine if it’s mobile-friendly, ask yourself:

• Does it load in less than three seconds?
• Does it draw your eye to the key selling points or messages?
• Is the content easy to read and navigate? Are calls to action easy to complete?
• Does it provide a good user experience?

Most importantly, determine if it’s a website you would spend time on if it wasn’t your own. The answers to these questions will tell you if it’s time to make a change.

#16: Pay Attention to All Analytics

Do regular checkups on your social and web analytics to determine if your social media plan is serving your business goals.

Subhro Sen provides great advice about how to use social and web analytics in tandem. Some of the best resources in the article are Subhro’s charts with tools for measuring social and web performance.

Social analytics help you predict current and future market demand for your product, make it possible to get to know your customers and make the most of your marketing and advertising spend.

Here are 17 social media monitoring tools, recommended by Subhro Sen.

Web analytics provide information about your current traffic and what’s not performing as well as it could.

Here are Subhro’s five recommendations for web-monitoring tools.

This may be one of the most important steps you take to strengthen your online presence.

#17: Question Company-Wide Social Media

Social media has grown so far beyond the network platforms. It’s starting to journey past marketing and become integrated into the fabric of business itself.

Not sure if your entire business can benefit from company-wide socialization? Check out these insights from Rodney Heisterberg, advocate for company-wide social media use. They include: human resources might benefit from LinkedIn; sales might benefit from more social leads; customer service might improve if staff can leverage Twitter, rather than only using call centers or email; and research departments or analytics teams should be utilizing social data to enhance their inputs.

This may be an opportunity for outshining your competitors. It’s worth considering.

#18: Raise the Bar on Strategy

It’s easy to become complacent and let your social networks remain on cruise control. But where’s the build or even the fun in that?

Marketing with social media and quality content requires a strategy: an approach that you arrived at via research, industry experience and trusted advisors.

Lee Odden shares three ways to raise the bar on your social media strategy:

• Understand buyers’ information journey and ultimately how to convert them from one stage to the next. This should result in a lead and sale.
• Build social media amplification into your content plan. Involve members of your community in the content-creation process, develop sequential content assets and coordinate amplification in advance with employees, customers, industry thought leaders, bloggers and members of the media.
• Help buyers understand and feel by understanding their questions and emotional motivations. Do this through the use of stories, visual media and engaging experiences to connect with buyers on both intellectual and emotional levels.

You don’t need to do of all these at once. Prioritize and choose one to start with, then move on to the others as your social media and content marketing plan takes form.

#19: Strive to Learn New Skills

There are always ways to up your game in social media. Decide what skill you’d like to learn or improve, then educate yourself online.

For example, if you’d like to tell better stories, explore alternate storytelling formats like audio, videos, photographs and infographics.

Ask yourself:

• What would help make my stories more compelling?
• What format will work best for my product/service and customers?
• Where can I find the things I need to learn?

To begin, you can find ideas for great tools and resources by searching past articles on Social Media Examiner.

Search websites you frequent on a regular basis to figure out what new skill to develop. For example, if you want to improve your photos, there are plenty of articles on the topic on Social Media Examiner.

Another way to determine what to learn is to take a good look at the sites you visit each week, as well as competitors’ sites. Note what they are doing well that you’d like to do better.

Improving your skills gives you a competitive edge. Try to explore something new at least a couple of times a year.

#20: Try Out a Content Curation Tool

There’s a host of content curation tools to help you to identify articles that would be of interest to your target audience. These tools make it easy to deliver a customized story to your audience’s social media feed. This keeps your business front and center in their minds while providing value.

Try out a few content curation tools and determine which ones work best for your needs and preferences.

#21: Unleash User-generated Content (UGC)

Research from CrowdTap and Ipsos indicates that user-generated content is an excellent way to reach Millennials.

GoPro takes advantage of UGC to promote its video camera.

If you want to try user-generated campaigns, look at the article’s recommendations:

• Create conversations over content.
• Source influence from people who love the brand.
• Think long-term, not short-term.
• Invest in your influencer relationships and reward them thoughtfully.

When you receive an awesome piece of UGC shared by a fan of your product and company, go ahead and reshare it.

#22: Venture Into Twitter Audio

Twitter’s latest addition to their offering of cards is an audio card, which allows users to share recordings with their followers.

If you have a SoundCloud Pro account, you’re able to create and share your own audio. Otherwise, do a search for content on SoundCloud.

Search SoundCloud for audio to share on Twitter.

Once you find something you like, share it on Twitter.

Share audio on Twitter via the platform’s audio cards.

This feature has a lot of promise for strengthening your Twitter presence.

#23: Write Hashtags

Hashtag is defined as “a word or phrase preceded by a hash mark (#), used within a message to identify a keyword or topic of interest and facilitate a search for it.”

While many social networks use hashtags (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), sometimes a hashtag is better on one platform than another. Before you write out hashtags for a campaign, research the platforms to see what works best for each site.

Once you hit on winners, keep a list of the hashtags your business most frequently uses by platform. That way, anyone who posts on behalf of your business won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

#24: e(X)amine Google Analytics Benchmarking Data

Benchmarking data returned to Google Analytics in September and offers a great way for businesses to see how they compare to others in their vertical market.

Benchmarking data is found under the Audience reports in Google Analytics.

See how your site compares to others in terms of channels (social, email and display) location (country, state) and devices (desktop, mobile and tablet).

Benchmarking data will help give you a frame of reference on how well your social efforts are performing compared to others in your industry. It also provides an incentive to enhance the way you use social to drive traffic to your website or blog.

#25: YouTube Like the Big Brands

YouTube videos make for excellent traffic and terrific engagement, so make them a focal point of your marketing mix. And be sure to share them on all of your social media platforms.

The Top 100 Global Brands YouTube report from Pixability sheds light on the importance of YouTube and social media updates as key contributors to strengthening a brand’s social presence.

Remember to promote your YouTube content to connect with consumers.

According to the report, brands that use social media to promote their YouTube videos have greater success with video marketing. The top 25% of brands had 330 times greater Facebook and 89 times greater Twitter video sharing than the bottom 25%.

Here are some successful brand practices to remember regarding your YouTube marketing:

• Be a well-oiled, consistent, video content machine.
• Take video optimization and YouTube channel architecture seriously.
• Don’t get caught in the overproduction trap; lower-quality video works well, too.
• Apply an “Always On” strategy to video marketing.
• Apply branding consistently, intelligently and methodically.
• Adding more content is more important than adding more channels.
• Engage your community with social media.

#26: Zoom in on Your Content Workflow

When it comes to blogging and social media, there are too many moving parts. However, you need to post good content consistently to maintain a strong presence.

Set up a comprehensive content management system to make sure all articles get done on time and in the proper order. Arrange articles by topic, assign them to writers, factor in reviews, rewrites, etc. Then, as you get further into the process, see where the articles get caught in a bottleneck and deadlines get missed. Then fix it!

This may not be the most fun part of having a content marketing plan, but it is one of the most critical to immediately strengthen and improve your social media efforts.

What do you think? Which of these ideas have you tried? Which are you planning to try? What do you do to give your social media the kick it needs?Let us know your suggestions and experience in the comments below.

Source

Read More