Monday 30 November 2015

How To Choose The Best Social Media For Your Business

As you know by now, using social media for business is practically mandatory. The benefits of using social media to market your brand, engage with your customers, provide customer service, marketing through social media increase brand awareness and build your customer base are huge – so huge that you’re in essence hurting your marketing strategy by not using social media. But the thing is, there are hundreds of social media platforms out there. Even if you narrow it down to the most popular and effective social media networks, you’ll still have a dozen or so that you’ll need to choose from. Unless you’re a large corporation with a dedicated marketing team, you’re not going to have the resources to be able to maintain a presence on all of these different social channels. Instead, you’re going to have to pick a handful that will benefit your business the most. The question, of course, is what social media platforms should you use? There are basically six things to look for when choosing what social media platform to use – but keep in mind, the platform (or platforms) you decide on depends a lot on what kind of business you are running. The popularity of a social network can be determined in part by their number of users. The more users a social site has, the more potential you have of exposing your brand to a bigger audience. In comparison to traditional display ads, think of the number of users that a social media network has as the amount of potential ad coverage or impressions you could get. Of course, this does depend on whether the audience of a social network aligns with your particular target audience.
In addition to the number of users each social platform has, you’ll also want to consider how often each user uses the site. social media marketing certification A social network with 10 million users in which the average user only uses the site once every other day probably isn’t as popular as a social network with 5 million users in which the average user uses the site three times a day. Like we said before, while the number of users and active users of a social network platform are very important, you’ll want to make sure that your target audience is part of their target audience. The demographics of your particular business need to match up to the social media network you decide to use. This means that you will need to figure out who your buyer persona is before you make any decisions regarding what social media networks you are going to use.For example, say you represent a business that sells universal design home improvement features, such as grab bars or stair lifts. The odds are pretty good that the demographics of your target audience will be retired senior citizen homeowners with some money to spare. If you do some research, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that Twitter, whose user base is generally under the age of 50 – the majority of which are between 20 and 29 – is probably not going to be an effective platform for you – even though Twitter is one of the biggest social media networks out there.Also keep your particular niche in mind. Say you sell clothing for cats. A social network such as LinkedIn, which is aimed at professionals, may not be the best option, whereas a more niche-oriented social network, such as Catmoji, will connect you with people in your target demographic more effectively even if the user base is much smaller.
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Community Manager & Facilitator

Part of building a following on social media is helping that following connect with each other and become a community. social media marketing consultant True communities don't simply engage with the company or moderator; they engage with each other which actually scales the social media community much better, too. But community management takes work, including asking questions to seed discussions and kicking out people who spam or otherwise detract from the community. Part of being a good facilitator is asking good, relevant, and thought-provoking questions in an engaging way. Another part is setting the tone for the community, being present, enforcing community guidelines, and sometimes even removing members or deleting posts when appropriate. Social media is a powerful tool that can help the whole funnel, not just the top. It expands the reach of your content, attracts visitors to your website, generates leads, and nurtures them to become customers. That means a social media community manager needs to be able to pick and share content in a way that will accomplish each of those goals.They need to share content that generate leads, and run new campaigns to find the best ways to do lead generation via social media. A social media community manager also needs to engage one-on-one with potential customers who are considering their company's product or service, or simply need their help. Social media is particularly effective as a lead nurturing tool because prospects use multiple media (not just email) to consume information and social channels allow you to engage in a more timely manner.
In order to do all of this effectively, social media community managers need to have a strong understanding of the sales and marketing funnel, which leads to monitor and nurture, social media marketing ideasand what content to use in getting those leads to the next stage in the process. They'll also need to pass appropriate leads off to the sales team and keep sales reps informed when there's something they should know. Effective social media community managers are seemingly everywhere and in communication with everyone. Sharing conversion-oriented content on social media can attract more visitors to your site and convert them into leads for your sales team. More than 50% of businesses report they've acquired a customer from Facebook, more than 40% have acquired a customer from LinkedIn, and more than 35% have acquired a customer from Twitter. With the right person at the helm of your company's social media accounts, you could be one of them. Many people across a company may want certain things posted, responded to, favorited or Liked, and so on -- and it's up to the social media community manager to decide which requests to honor, and when to honor them. This means they need to be highly organized and able to manage multiple simultaneous (and possibly conflicting) requests. They need to be able to quickly assess whether a request would resonate with the company's followers, or whether it's too niche or too narrow. (For example, a location-specific post might be too narrow to send to a company's entire Twitter following.) Social media community managers also need to effectively coordinate with different departments to organize campaign launches, while pushing launches and growth initiatives of their own.

Tailor Your Content According to Specific Social Media Platform

Many business owners and digital marketers make the error of posting the same kind of content through all the social networks they belong to. social media marketing packages By doing so, business fail in delivering the unique user experience social media users are looking for from each particular platform. Each social network is focused on a particular demographic and social user category, so broadcasting the same type of content to all simply will not deliver the results you want.Users who use Pinterest and Instagram more often are more interested in content with a visual nature and will be more attracted to really high-quality pics and graphics that tell your story. The key to success in this regard is to tailor-fit your content for each particular social media platform – and check which format will work best. While social media is still a digital marketing tool, using this platform to sell your products directly right in front of users’ face will bring more harm than good to your brand or business. People love stories and they go to social media networks to read stories, be amazed with interesting features, and learn new things from uploads and shares. To use social media as an effective, you must learn how to tell a story first before you can even sell stuff.When you tell stories, people will get interested in you and your brand. They would want to know more about you and thus want to read, view or watch more stories, pics and videos about you. There will come a time when their level of interest has grown to the right proportions that they can now be interested in your business, in what you do and in what you sell – and this will be the right time for profits to come rolling in.
When Facebook introduced a new feature that allowed Instagram videos to be introduced, the social network experienced up to 5 million video uploads during the first 24 hours right after their announcement.social media marketing proposal That’s the power of video and other visual elements and learning how to harness the power of these tools and elements can give you maximum exposure for your business. Now, micro-video is slowly gaining ground providing yet another form of content that will change the social media sphere.Snapchat, Twitter’s Vine, and the new micro-video sharing feature in Instagram will definitely gain more usage, now that such video sharing activities can be done through smartphones and other Internet-enabled mobile devices. Pinterest is fast evolving and discarding its “women’s only network” reputation to gain more subscriptions from more and more online users regardless of gender or demographics. Other social networks in the visual content focus like Mobli, Path, Slideshare and Tumblr are gaining increased mileage as well. One of the most effective strategies for social media in general is to get your targeted audiences directly involved in activities. Conducting contests and other promotional activities are perfect ways for driving their interests and soliciting their participation. You can be as creative as you can be in the type of contests you can conduct, but making use of the sharing and other viral components available in your social network can bring even more exposure for your brand or business as more and more online users join in. Research from Social Media B2B indicate that businesses who make use of social media strategies for content marketing like maintaining blogs generate up to 67% more leads than companies who do not have a social media presence.

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