All posts tagged Social Media Marketing

Over the years, I have worked with companies who block access to all social media platforms within their network.

This move was probably intended to keep employees focused on their work.

However, the marketing, HR, and sales teams really needed access to these networks!

No, I’m not talking about encouraging everyone to go waste their days on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. I’m also not counting the necessary marketing tasks of running advertising and content campaigns.

I’m referring to those of us in marketing and search roles who don’t have a perceived good reason to be on social media daily – as well as those managers or decision-makers who direct the time and activities of their teams.

Social media has matured into a major digital marketing channel. It shows up in attribution models and customer journey maps in nearly all industries.

While arguments can be made about niche and old school industries, it is hard to ignore.

Using social media at work is a positive thing for marketing and SEO professionals.

We should be encouraging social media use in our companies.

When given direction and focusing on the seven reasons marketers and SEO pros should be using social media, we can leverage its power and accomplish things that wouldn’t be possible from the brand’s profile and perspective alone.

1. Company Branding
The more content employees share about their work, role in the industry, involvement in their company, and engagement in their community, the more a brand can benefit.

As long as guidance is given on how to ensure profiles are tied to the company and the content is tasteful, employees can serve as brand ambassadors on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

We have all been to the stale and sterile profile of a brand that doesn’t showcase what employees are doing and isn’t connected with the people that make up that company.

If your employees are doing awesome things in their circles, make sure they are encouraged and empowered to talk about it on social media.

2. Personal Branding
Years ago, I had a client’s HR department worry that marketing’s encouragement of employees and sales team members to be on LinkedIn and engaging in their industry would make them ripe for recruitment by competitors.

This was backward thinking and thankfully, they learned to embrace the power of what their employees’ personal brands could do.

By building personal brands through sharing content, building larger networks, and engaging others, they found that individual employees were able to establish their own thought leadership and personas in the industry. This could mutually work for the employee’s career benefit as well as the company’s overall profile.

Read more: 7 Reasons Marketers & SEO Pros Should Use Social Media at Work

Q: When it comes to customer acquisition, how important is paid social media compared with other digital channels? — John L., Houston

Social media has created a beautiful opportunity for entrepreneurs: It’s never been easier to get your message in front of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. But if you want to reach all those people, it’s going to cost a lot.

It’s a simple case of supply and demand, and social media platforms are limiting the supply. Organic reach — that is, your ability to speak directly to the audience that chooses to follow and interact with your business — has dwindled to almost nothing. On Facebook, for example, organic reach touches less than 5 percent of your audience on average. Facebook simply doesn’t show your posts to most of your followers … unless you pay for the privilege. That’s one of the reasons why advertising inside social media has become increasingly expensive, as brands outbid each other in a competition for users’ attention.

Suddenly, social media isn’t such a great deal. If you’re on a budget, all of this can brutally limit your growth and acquisition opportunities.

That’s not to say you should stop using digital platforms altogether. Paid social is a hotbed of marketing insight. With just a small amount of cash, you can easily test headlines, imagery, and offers on different audiences. That’s valuable research. However, if your entire acquisition strategy depends on paid media, you could pay your way right out of business.

But there is another way! You just need to diversify. In the digital world, there are many ways to acquire customers: paid social, paid search, email acquisition, organic social, organic search (earning traffic through content), public relations, influencer marketing, and earned media. Start by identifying a few channels where you want to focus most of your efforts. (Ideally, at least some of those channels will not require the spend of ad dollars.) This way, you can test what’s working while building an omnichannel approach that will pay off down the road.

Read more: How Much Should You Spend on Social Media Marketing?

When it comes to social media marketing, there’s a lot of misinformation, and a ton of unrealistic expectations set as a result. Luckily, marketers are blessed with a massive amount of data from social media activity, so we can course correct misnomers which may lead to disappointed bosses and upset clients.

A recent study conducted by Sprout Social surveyed both marketers and consumers, in order to help identify key challenges, and offer insights on what users expect when it comes to social media marketing. After all, if your strategy isn’t meeting their needs, it will fall flat.

Here are eight key stats of note from the data, which may help inform your strategic approach.

1. “47% of social media marketers say that developing strategies which support business goals is their top challenge”

First off, I want to be direct in an observation on this point. If you’re not strategizing against what matters the most for your business, and working towards achieving that outcome, you’re not marketing. You’re just “doing the things”.

Read more: 8 Social Media Marketing Stats You Shouldn’t Ignore

Have you been spending countless hours and tons of money in an attempt to improve your social media marketing? Social media marketing can be difficult to master for many businesses. With so many companies on social media, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd and truly connect with your target audience. Plus, social media isn’t just for sharing news and chatting anymore. It’s a full-fledged platform for marketing, e-commerce, customer service and more. That’s a lot to manage.

But with artificial intelligence (AI), you can not only make your social media marketing easier to manage, but you can get better results as well.

Here’s how AI can improve your social media marketing capabilities.

24/7 Online Presence

Gone are the days where consumers have to wait until the next business day to hear back from a company. The online world is fast-paced; you can’t afford to miss a comment from a potential customer because they can simply move on to the next company’s social media profile if you don’t respond. Luckily, with artificial intelligence, you can create a 24/7 online presence. You’ll be available to provide support and answer any questions from your customers, no matter the day or time. Of course, you won’t actually be providing the customer support via; it’ll be AI in the form of a chatbot.

Read more: How AI Can Improve Your Social Media Marketing

For social media managers, time is a precious commodity. The online world never sleeps, and in order to be successful. it’s essential to be on the ball, to as great an extent as humanly possible.

Trying to maintain high levels of productivity, while simultaneously juggling the tasks of creating and distributing content, developing your brand’s marketing campaign, promoting said brand across multiple channels, and setting your goals and objectives is no mean feat – and that’s just the beginning. If your business is on the larger side, you may also have the added complication of motivating staff and upholding your respective standards across the board.

It can be an undeniably daunting role, but fortunately, there’s a wide range of tools out there which can make elements of the process easier. Whether you’re aiming to manage your own time more effectively, set a more structured schedule, or maximize your team’s efficiency, here are some tools that can help you optimize your social media marketing process.

Canva For Work

Quite possibly the most important duty of any social media manager is that of creating the content itself. Enter Canva for Work, an easy to use tool which will guide you through every step of the process.

Whether you’re a novice, or a seasoned veteran, Canva has a bit of everything – and it all works via a simple drag and drop system which enables you to create flashy graphics to show off your brand to your heart’s content. You can tinker with fonts, colors, sizes etc. You can also choose from one of Canva’s built-in templates, or create your masterpiece completely from scratch, if you’re feeling confident.

The capacity to establish a uniform style across all of your designs can really help to formalize your branding, while the eye-catching animation tools can help bring a certain sense of flair to proceedings.

Read more: 4 Tools to Help Boost Your Social Media Marketing Productivity

Is your social media strategy failing to generate the desired results? Are you concerned your social media efforts are doing more harm than good to your brand?

Your Marketing Lady shares seven common social media mistakes that you need to avoid in this infographic.

Here’s a quick summary:

• Trying to use every social media network
• Failing to identify a target audience
• Posting without a clear strategy
• Posting too much or not enough
• Using social media as a one-way tool
• Ignoring other businesses and accounts
• Skipping analytics and measurements

Read more: 7 Rookie Mistakes Ruining Your Social Media Marketing Strategy [Infographic]

If you’re looking for a simple method to ensure that your social media marketing strategy covers all the essential bases, the 5 P’s approach is a solid outline.

The 5 P’s is a marketing strategy which has been employed in many variations, but fits perfectly with social media marketing. The elements ensure that you take into account all the key processes required to formulate an effective approach, capitalizing on the opportunities of the medium for maximum impact.

To help you get a better handle on the 5 P’s in a social media marketing context, the team from Branex have put together this infographic, which also includes some key stats on the relevance of social media as a platform for your marketing efforts.

Read more: The 5 P’s of Social Media Marketing [Infographic]

Are you a small business owner who often finds yourself staring blankly at your digital device wondering what the heck you should share with your social media followers? Do you sometimes feel like you’re spending countless hours on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, yet question whether your efforts are translating into sales? If you’re squeezed for time and want to make the most of your time on social media, it is imperative that you take a growth hacker’s approach to social media marketing for your small business. Integrate the following three social media hacks into your small business’ growth strategy, and you’ll be impressed at how quickly your audience engagement rates start to soar.

3 SOCIAL MEDIA HACKS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

CROSS-POSTING MATTERS

If you want to increase your social media marketing ROI (return-on-investment), learn the power of social media cross-posting. Don’t quarantine your social content to just one platform. Cross-pollinate your prose across multiple social networking sites. Post Instagram images to Pinterest, spotlight your Facebook posts on your small business’s blog. Embed tweets from your Twitter profile into blog posts on Medium.com. Once you start cross-posting your social media content, you’ll feel like kicking yourself for not having discovered this social media marketing hack sooner.

Read more: 3 SOCIAL MEDIA HACKS EVERY SMALL BUSINESS OWNER SHOULD KNOW

Social media marketing is an extremely multifaceted field with every aspect requiring a lot of work. You probably know that. That’s why most of us use a whole set of tools to analyze, create, advertise, and more.

Unfortunately, there are enough social media tools on the market to get one absolutely confused. This infographic by Awario, shares a list of the best social media marketing tools for 2019.

The ultimate list of tools is broken down into five crucial categories:

• Social media monitoring
• Social media management
• Content marketing
• Creating workflows
• Advertising

Read more: 10 of the Best Social Media Marketing Tools for 2019 [Infographic]

Every company marketer posting on social media is curious about the best times to post their content. While each audience is unique, having a rule of thumb can be extremely helpful when you’re first starting out. Sprout Social recently published the results of their “Best Times to Post on Social Media: 2018 Industry Research”, a report which includes preferred time slots for the big 4 — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Unlike other reports I’ve seen on this topic, which often recommend a single time or small window, Sprout has detailed “heat maps” for each channel. I reached out to Rachael Samuels, Social Media Manager at Sprout Social, to find out more about the report and the research behind their findings.

Harrison: Other companies have looked into the best times to post on social. What did your data science team do differently?

Samuels: Sprout Social’s data science team constructed a more targeted approach that takes into account interactions with 935 million messages across 420,000 social profiles connected to Sprout. The data that our team uncovered not only provides specific days and times for the most engagement on social for each platform, but offers similar data for specific industries, including tech, CPG, and healthcare, among others. Using this data as a guide empowers marketers with the best opportunities to maximize personalized consumer engagement.

Read more: What Are The Best Times To Post On Social Media? (These “Heat Maps” Have The Answers)