Showing posts with label pinterest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pinterest. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 March 2016

How To Score Better Results On Social Media, Faster

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Social Media is quickly evolving and with more and more platforms appearing every day, we all strive for making the most out of the time we spend on social and staying on top of our game. I think what most of us are looking for, is great results at minimal effort, right? Especially when you manage multiple accounts across different platforms.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some techniques that are bound to help you maximize your impact on social media, while minimizing the time you spend managing your social media presence.
Choose the right platforms
Simply put, the fact that there’s a bunch of social media platforms out there doesn’t mean that you need to be present on each of them. It makes much more sense to focus most of our efforts on the social platforms that make sense to you and are likely to generate the most impact.
A recent study by Hubspot revealed that most consumers expect you to be active on all social media platforms, and especially Facebook and Twitter. In fact, millennials expect brands to be active on at least four platforms. But despite these expectations, the same audience is most likely to follow you only on half of these platforms.


The platforms that are more likely to have the biggest impact for your business are the ones that your audience is using and that are relevant to your product or service. If for example you’re a local retailer, a platform like Google+ is less likely to prove impactful for your brand so there’s no need to invest any time and effort on building your presence there, as your ROI will be relatively low.
A good way to decide where your time will have the most impact is running a super quick social media audit. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: List all the platforms you are active on with links to your social media profiles.
Step 2: Update any imagery and profile description that needs to be updated.
Step 3: Check some key metrics such as audience growth, reach, engagement and traffic generated from this platform.
Step 4: Evaluate your presence on each social media platform by checking your KPIs. This process will help you gain some perspective and assess where you should focus your efforts from now on.

SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT

Another way to make better use of your time is making a division between high frequency and low frequency platforms. For example, as a rule of thumb, Twitter is a higher frequency platform which means that it requires a higher number of posts. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn on the other hand, could be considered lower frequency platforms with the volume varying from one to two posts a day to one to two posts per week.
Of course this division comes down to your own social media strategy, how you’ve chosen to manage social media and the goals you have set for each platform depending on your audience. Making such a plan however, can provide you with a better perspective on allocating your time and placing your efforts where you need to.
Having an idea of how much time you need to invest on each platform will help you to organize your tactics and divide your time more efficiently.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING FREQUENCY

Plan ahead
This is when your initial time investment will actually pay off in the long run. Planning your social media strategy ahead can save you a ton of time and stress in the future.
A social media marketing plan is a summary of everything you plan to do and aim to achieve for your business using social media. The more specific your plan is, the more effective you’ll be implementing it.
When putting together your plan, keep in mind that you’ll basically use this as a guide for all your future social media marketing actions. So it needs to be clear and concise, with well-defined goals and KPIs.

7 steps to creating a social media strategy from scratch

Another deciding factor for nailing your social media presence is the quality of its content as well as the way this content is being delivered. Content is what helps you grow an audience, build meaningful relationships with your community, deliver value and forge your brand’s identity on social.
If you are active on more than one social platforms you often could struggle with content creation as it takes up most of your time. So how can you organize the way you deliver content? That’s right, with a social media calendar! Having a social media calendar not only can save you a ton of time but it also allows you to better plan your outreach around significant dates.

How to create a social media calendar

Choose the right tools
From content curation to posting and analyzing your performance, it is important to keep your social media management simple and effective while minimizing the time you spent on performing your day-to-day tasks.
Luckily, there’s a bunch of tools out there to help you simplify your social media management save lots of time every day. Take a look at some of my most favorite tools of daily quick and effective social media management.

Content curation

Feedly

Feedly is basically a news aggregator that can pull any RSS feed. You can completely personalize your experience and add all your favorite news sources and blogs into a stream so that every day you can immediately find great articles in your niche to share. Feedly also shows the number of shares for each piece which is a great way to quickly grasp the social media buzz around a topic.

Canva

By now social media science has proven that this is what people love to retweet. And luckily, you don’t always need have professional design skills to put together engaging images for social media.
My absolute favorite tool is Canva because it’s insanely easy to use and you can have an amazing result in less than 5 minutes. Canva is offers pre-built templates for social media posts so no need to worry about resizing. Once you pick the template, the rest is basically just dragging and dropping. You can choose to upload your own visuals and build something from scratch or choose something from Canva’s amazing graphics and use customize it to fit your style.

Canva

Posting and scheduling

Buffer

Buffer is a great app for scheduling your content, especially if you’re managing many different social media channels. What’s even more time saving about Buffer is that you can quickly schedule content from anywhere on the web using their browser plugin.

Friends+me

Although it started as a Google+ tool, Friends+me is a good alternative to Buffer that allows you to schedule content across platforms, from anywhere on the internet.

Analysis and Monitoring

Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is sort of a wildcard tool as you can also schedule tweets but its real power lies in Twitter monitoring. Tweetdeck is basically a dashboard where you can keep track of your account’s interactions, monitor hashtags and keywords, making it faster and easier to reply to comments and engage in Twitter conversations.

Twitter Counter

When you’re on a tight schedule you need to get as many insights as possible without having to spend your whole day crunching numbers. From a quick overview of your account’s follower growth, engagement rate and most successful content to an insightful report of all the important metrics, it can all be done in just a click. Take a look for yourself.
Know what works
This requires a lot of experimenting to see what sticks best with your audience. For example, research shows that in general, visuals work on social but does this apply to your followers as well? What type of phrasing content or visuals lead to the best results? Experimentation, A/B testing and a good tracking system will provide you with all the answers you need. Some of the KPIs to look at:

Applause rate per post

This one is easily calculated across social media by dividing the number of favorites, likes or +1s by the number of social media posts within a specific period of time. For example, for Twitter, say I wanted to calculate the applause rate of my tweets during the past week, I would divide the total number of favorites (in my case 8) by the total number of tweets I sent during the week (that would be 10 for me). So my applause rate for the past week would be 0.8.

Applause rate

Conversation rate per post

Your conversation rate is defined by the total number of mentions or comments divided by the number of social media posts over a specific period of time.

Amplification rate

Your amplification rate is perhaps the most important engagement metric as it suggests brand visibility and awareness is the total number of retweets or shares by the number of social media posts.

Clicks and visits

This is another important engagement metric to measure in order to identify the traffic your social media activity generates. Keep a close eye to your Google Analytics dashboard and monitor visits for each of the messages you post across all social media platforms.
Depending on your marketing goals and specific marketing and social media campaigns that you might be running from time to time, the engagement metrics you focus on obviously differ. If for example you are running a promotion through Twitter, tracking conversions on top of everything else is very important.

Qualitative metrics

This part doesn’t necessarily have to do with numbers but it’s more of a qualitative approach on your social media engagement analysis.
Often times, people reach out to you on social media with comments, feedback, ideas or issues they might be experiencing. It is important to keep track of these messages in order to identify any emerging patterns but also use this information to report this first-hand input back to others in your company.

Total engagement

While breaking down your total engagement rate by type and level of engagement gives you much more perspective on how engaged your audience is, calculating the total engagement for a specific period of time is important.
Your total engagement rate on every platform is calculated by the total number of interactions (likes, shares and comments on Facebook, retweets, mentions and favorites on Twitter and so on), divided by the total number of posts shared on each platform.
For Twitter, you can even use this information to decide when it is the best time for you to tweet. For example, checking my Twitter interactions for last week, I see that I scored high engagement last Wednesday which probably means that Wednesdays at 5 pm is a good time for me to post content on Twitter and boost my engagement rate.

Interactions feature

Now over to you! Tell us, how do you minimize the time you spend on social media while maximizing your impact? Let us know in the comments right below.

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Monday, 14 March 2016

13 Social Media Mistakes Almost Every Business Makes

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How prevalent is social media? According to Pew Research Center, over 90 percent of retail brands are using two or more channels—and over half of all adults have at least one active social media account. It’s clear that social media marketing offers huge advantages for businesses in terms of awareness, engagement, traffic, and leads, especially if it’s done right.
Done poorly, however, it can drive away customers (and potential customers) and damage your brand’s reputation. You can avoid unforced errors with good social media policies and a little common sense. Ready to dip your toes into the social media pool? Check out these 13 easily avoidable mistakes you don’t want to make.

1. No Defined Social Media Strategy

Don’t launch your social media presence until you can answer the following questions:
➤How will social media advance your overall marketing goals?
➤How will you measure your social media efforts?
➤What platforms are most closely aligned with your target audience and your social media objectives?
Blindly jumping into the social media milieu is a recipe for disaster; as with every other marketing channel, you need a policy, a plan, and a measurable set of objectives. A documented social media strategy will ensure your content is consistent, engaging, and helpful to your brand.

2. Not Using an Authentic “Voice”

Social media creates a personal, direct connection with your followers, so it’s important to humanize your social media presence. Before you begin posting and tweeting, think about your brand history and identity and how that translates into a social media “voice.” Once you’ve found your authentic voice, use it consistently in all your posts.
Of course, your brand voice doesn’t have to be stuffy or serious; in fact, this is one marketing channel where it’s OK to show your humorous, quirky, casual side. Consider Denny’s weird—and hugely successful—social media voice:




 OK, this voice isn’t right for every brand, but Denny’s has used it to increase growth by 150 percent and boost engagement to an average of over 1,800 interactions per post. That’s 900 million social impressions in two years alone.

3. Signing Up for Too Many Platforms

Your business will likely benefit from having a presence on more than one social media platform, but you don’t need to be on all of them just because you can. It’s smart for an accounting firm, for example, to be on Facebook and LinkedIn, but Pinterest and Instagram? Probably not so much. Match your platforms to your target audience and avoid spreading yourself too thin.
Not sure where you’re likely to find your target audience? This handy post will help you decide where to focus your efforts to engage your brand’s ideal customers.

4. Letting the Wrong People Manage Your Accounts

Social media is a very personal expression of your brand voice and reputation, and you should guard it carefully. This means closely vetting everyone you hand over the keys to your accounts—and tightly controlling his or her access—or you could wind up with a disaster like this one following a layoff at HMV:
393168-tweeting-the-mass-firing mobile app builder
Does this mean you can never outsource your social media accounts or rely on a summer intern to manage your posts? No, but it does mean you should exercise extreme caution and be sure you can shut down unauthorized users before they can damage your brand.

5. Posting the Same Content Across Every Channel

One of the great things about the different social media platforms is that each draws a different audience and is uniquely suited for different types of content. For best results, you should tailor your posts to suit each channel and the interests and characteristics of the people who follow you there.


A deep dive into a recent Supreme Court decision would be appropriate for a law firm’s LinkedIn page, for example, but probably not for its Facebook page, where the audience is less technical—and likely less interested.
Great images, infographics, and videos, however, are the exception to the rule, since this type of content performs well across all platforms, but it’s still important to keep your audience in mind. Remember to write fresh blurbs for each post, specific to the platform, and pay attention to optimal character counts and hashtag preferences for each.
Personal, or Insensitive Content
Unless your business is expressly religious or political in nature, it’s a good idea to stay away from from these often divisive topics. You might be really excited about a candidate in an upcoming election, but a huge chunk of your audience probably isn’t, so keep it to yourself. And unless your target audience is near-unanimous in its position on a particular social issue, or the issue is closely related to your brand, avoid taking a controversial stand.
There are businesses that go overboard when it comes to personal content—if you can’t think of one, you might be one. While work culture has undoubtedly changed as Millennials entered the workforce (visible tattoos, casual attire, funky workspaces, and unusual perks), there are still boundaries for good social content, and certain personal posts are just out of bounds.
Take baby pictures: It’s OK to mark the birth of a staff member’s baby with a cute newborn pic, but unless you’re in a business that caters to babies, save your baby photos for your personal account.
Keep posts professional and in good taste for your industry—and at least tangentially related to your business or marketing objectives. For example, it’s engaging and fun when a Silicon Valley startup Instagrams the trendy craft beer in the company fridge; not so much when a doctor’s office does.
And stay away from disparaging, insensitive, or offensive remarks.

Bq8V6-8CAAADp_d-360x640 mobile app builder

7. Constantly Plugging Your Brand

Too many social media neophytes think social media marketing is all about putting their brand out front and center—in as many places as possible. But social media isn’t designed for that; it’s all about building relationships with your customers as individuals. It’s marketing, not advertising.
That doesn’t mean you should never mention your brand or push your products and services—there’s definitely a place for that type of content. But the non-branded content should far outweigh the branded posts, and the branded posts should be engaging, interesting, and worthy of sharing; go easy on CTAs.




8. Getting the Hashtag Thing All Wrong

Hashtags are dangerous in the wrong hands, and when your hashtags go wrong, all sorts of bad things happen.

 Hashtags are, however, useful for helping people find your content, and boosting engagement, so you should learn to use them to your advantage. Here are a few simple hashtag rules:
🔹Don’t go overboard. Even though Instagram allows 30(!!), don’t go there. Research shows that three is the optimal number of hashtags per post; more than that, and engagement goes down.
🔹Keep your hashtags short, specific, and simple. Use capitalization when needed for clarity—and don’t forget to proofread to avoid embarrassing yourself.

🔹Use caution when hijacking a trending hashtag to promote your brand and make sure you understand the context. DiGiorno made a costly mistake when it hijacked a trending hashtag about domestic violence in the wake of the Ray Rice assault video.





9. Forgetting the “Social” in Social Media

Unlike your other marketing channels, social media involves regular interaction with your followers—give and take is the name of the game. This means you should monitor your accounts, engage with your audience, and respond promptly to comments and questions.
This is especially true when you get negative or inflammatory comments that could reflect badly on your brand. Don’t ignore or delete your unpleasant feedback, use it as an opportunity to demonstrate your customer service chops.
Here are some tips to remember:
➤Respond to everything—within reason, of course. There’s no satisfying the trolls, but you should probably be answering about 90 percent of your comments and complaints.
➤Avoid the non-apology apology: “We’ve been manufacturing the finest cowboy boots in Texas for over 50 years. We’re sorry your experience with our excellent footwear didn’t meet your expectations.”
➤Know when to escalate. Your goal is to solve the problem that caused the complaint, not simply address the complainer. If there’s a technical issue, for example, pass it on to the engineers.
➤Know when to take a conversation out of the public eye. Comments on social media are visible to everyone and too often, negative comments result in a pile-on. Suggest a direct message or an offline channel to resolve the situation one-on-one if it threatens to spiral out of control.
➤Take the time to personalize your response and avoid automated replies.

bofa_occupy_auto_tweet mobile app builder

10. Spamming Your Own Followers

You should definitely be active on your social accounts, sharing content and status updates on a regular basis. But you shouldn’t overdo it and risk turning off your followers. Finding the right balance involves multiple variables, including the size of your audience, how active they are, the platforms you post on, and of course, the resources you have to manage your accounts.
While there’s no hard and fast rule about the optimal frequency for social media posts, here’s what the research shows:
🔹Top brands on Facebook averaged one post per day.

chart-brands mobile app builder
Image via socialbakers

🔹Engagement drops off after the third tweet per day.
twett-frequency mobile app builder

Image via socialbakers
🔹Posting 20 times per month on LinkedIn will reach 60 percent of your audience.

🔹Brands grew their audience fastest when posting 5 or more times daily on Pinterest.

🔹The average brand posts 1.5 times per day on Instagram, but there appears to be no downside to posting more frequently.

11. Not Posting Updates When Your Audience Is Most Active

You spend a lot of time creating fabulous content; wouldn’t you like to post it when it’s most likely to be seen? Knowing when your audience is active on social media can boost your engagement by 30 percent or more, according to marketing research.
Fortunately, you don’t have to experiment yourself to figure out the best time to post on each channel—you can find all the information you need to reach your social audience at the optimal time in this handy infographic.

12. Not Using Automated Social Media Management Tools

If you’ve read the last two mistakes, you’re probably wondering how you’ll manage to post with the right frequency at the right time of day on each of your social platforms. Managing your social media accounts is a daunting task if you hope to get the best results from your efforts.
There are a number of online tools that take the work out of scheduling your posts; some even offer enhancements like social listening, analytics, and reporting. Many are free and/or offer affordable monthly plans with loads of extra features. Here are some of the best:

🔹Hootsuite has a full suite of social management tools including scheduling, analytics, social listening, and RSS feeds connecting with 35 different social apps. Hootsuite plans include a free version for personal use, as well as pro and enterprise versions starting at $9.99/month.

🔹Buffer is a superior multiplatform scheduling tool with powerful analytics and a browser extension for posting. Individual use is free and small business plans start at $50/month.

🔹SproutSocial is an engagement and management platform with a Smart Inbox that routes all your social media messages into a single filterable stream. Plans start at $59/month for up to 10 social profiles.


For single platform management, you should also check out TweetDeck, a free tool for anyone with a Twitter account; SocialOomph, a tool for organizing Twitter accounts with optional Facebook features (free and Pro versions); Friends+Me, a free tool to manage your Google+ account; and SocialBro, a tool to target and engage your Twitter audience.

13. Buying an Audience or Paying for Likes

A huge following and a pile of likes validates your social proof and builds your visibility—but only if they’re genuine and organic. Paying for an audience is a desperate tactic that doesn’t boost engagement, improve ROI, or help you build relationships. In fact, it can damage your brand and your legitimate social accounts. Avoid the headaches and just don’t do it.
One last tip: Don’t forget to monitor, measure, and analyze your efforts to make sure you are driving traffic, reaching the right people, and seeing a good return on your social media investment.

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Friday, 26 February 2016

How to master the art of content curation

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How to master the art of content curation
Image source: pexels.com
Content curation is not a new concept, but what’s impressive is the fact that it still remains important, despite all the changes in content marketing.
Content curation is all about discovering, optimising and sharing interesting and relevant content for your audience and despite its quite simple definition, it still needs to be treated as part of your wider content strategy.  

Why content curation?

There is an increasing need for content nowadays, with time and budget affecting the quantity of content a brand may create. Even if it manages to find both, the audience won’t necessarily appreciate content leading only to the brand’s owned media.
That’s when content curation is needed, as a way to mix the brand’s written content with what can be found throughout the web, with both matching the audience’s interests.
paleoleap
As we are all becoming addicted to content consumption and always seek for more of it, content curation is the ideal solution for the “hungry” readers who keep expecting new content from the brands that try hard to stay on top of their field.
Thus, content curation serves as an integral part of the content strategy, using the experts’ wisdom as an opportunity to boost a brand’s value.
After all, it’s not just about the creation of the content that you’re judged, but also about your critical thinking and your ability to discover (and share) the right content for your target audience.

Think before you share

There is a thought process involved in content curation and it has to do with the factors that make you pick the content you’ll share.
nordstrom
Curation aims to help you:
  • Add value
  • Be relevant
  • Serve as an expert
  • Find influencers
  • Reach a wider audience
There’s no need to curate content if it doesn’t contribute to your brand’s authority, value, or relevance, as curation is still part of your content strategy.

How to excel in content curation

Optimise the content

Curation is not just about the automatic sharing of content, as it is important to optimise the curated content in a way that it is appealing, properly formatted, by also focusing on properly attributing the original source.
What’s more, a post may be more effective when shared at the best format and the right time for your audience, so never skip this step during curation.




Engage with your audience

A topic that your audience will appreciate may be a great opportunity to spark further discussion, exchange opinions and start an interesting conversation.
After all, a brand should always seek for new ways to interact with its followers.
intoro1

Find opportunities to interact with influencers

What if the content you curated allowed you to network with important influencers in your niche?
Think of it, all you have to do is share their content, mention them, and (hopefully) you’re minutes away from a highly prestigious reply!

Keep a balance

Yes, content is everywhere and it’s certainly easier to curate rather than create, but you still need to find a balance between these two, in order to show that you’re able to master both of them.
Your audience will appreciate and your brand will serve as an industry expert in its particular field.

Tools to organise curation

There are many tools to help you organise your content curation and I’ve personally tried:

Twitter Liststwitter lists

Pinterestpinterest

Pocketpocket1

Paper.lipaperli (1)

Scoop.itscoopit

Nuzzelnuzzel

However, if you feel that you need to consider more options, then this list is what you’re looking for.

Where to curate content

Blog

How about compiling a list of the most important news of the week in your niche and turn them into a highly informative post?
By creating an appealing post, which also provides the right attribution the original sources, you are proving that you are able to discover (and present) the best content for your audience.
sew

Social Media

Your content on social media is never enough, so curation is ideal, especially for social networks like Twitter, where the feed keeps updating and engagement may be instant. And of course, you can also use hashtags, which may turn out really effective.
Twitter lists, Buzzsumo, Klout, and Postplanner are some of the options you have when looking for new content, depending on your interests, the people you’re following, the topics you’re reading, etc. Invest time to use and organise any of them and you might be surprised with the results!
greatist content hub

Content Hub

If your business heavily relies on content, then you know how challenging it may be to organise it and even more, to share it with your readers.
That’s when you need to consider the idea of a content hub, a special page, which will help your audience find your content in a creative and structured form.
Thus, the promotion of your content hub could lead to increased clicks towards your posts and could attract an even wider audience.

Ready to curate?

Content curation offers numerous benefits for your brand, providing that you’re ready to include it as an integral part of your content strategy, by investing both in time and resources that would help you find the best available content! And this is an accomplishment on its own!
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