Wednesday 2 December 2015

Social Media Tips for Small Business

You’ve put together profile pages on a few popular social media sites, made occasional posts, and responded when you were aware of activity. social media marketing university Isn’t that enough for a small business like yours?Not according to a recent New York University study, which found that although more than half of consumers communicate with businesses via social media, only 8 percent are satisfied with those interactions.To fill that gap, here are our top social media tips on creating and maintaining a social media strategy that’s a brand-building, rain-making machine for your business.First, ask yourself some fundamental questions: Whose attention am I seeking with social media? What do I want them to do? Why am I investing time (and therefore money) in social media? Are there social-media platforms that speak to segments of my market?To succeed, your social media engagement must be part and parcel of your overall sales and marketing approach. “Social media is the vehicle, not the strategy,” says Lisa Tilt, president of Full Tilt Consulting in Atlanta. When choosing social media sites to extend your company brand, marketing and sales efforts, start small and be selective.Match the demographics of your market to social platforms. Before you build a profile on yet another social site, make sure that you have the resources (people and time) to post consistently and respond speedily to all customer and prospect activity. Measure the effectiveness of your choices with social media analytics tools. Early in the game, choose and use a social media management platform like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to coordinate all of your social accounts and RSS feeds from one screen, schedule posts, assign tasks to your employees, and so on.
“Having a handful of trusted employees that can help disseminate your company’s message will make implementation more manageable,” says Cheryl Foster, what is social media marketing marketing manager for accounting firm Brown Smith Wallace in St. Louis.Even if you don’t hire a dedicated social media officer, choose carefully who does this work. You’re looking for social-savvy, energetic folks who know your business, understand its messaging, and can write in the clear, friendly voice of your company, while never losing their cool. Not always so easy to find. As social media expert David Meerman Scott recommends, use social media monitoring to track your company’s social-media presence all over the Web.This will enable you to make sure customer activity isn’t going unanswered, that your social media communiqués are staying on message, and that any false or negative postings about your company receive a measured, prompt and positive response. As Ann Handley recommends with social media marketing to go very light on selling and on small talk that’s not related to what your business has to offer. Instead, be helpful. Jerry Sullivan, owner of Framework Media Strategies in Fords, N.J, agrees. “The most successful messages are the ones that answer questions that you can anticipate from your customers,” says Sullivan. But remember, as with any branding, marketing or selling effort, your social media activity must have the ultimate goal of gaining and retaining customers and increasing sales.“Too many companies just throw something up against the proverbial social media wall, hoping something will stick,” says Paul Kurnit, professor of marketing at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York.

Mine Twitter to Grow Your Audience

While “if you build it they will come” is a great line from a movie, it’s a terrible marketing plan. social media marketing jobs To succeed on the Internet today, you have to create content that ignites and engages an audience. However, if you are a new blogger, you should probably spend more time developing an audience than creating your content.Here are three easy but overlooked tactics you can use to build an audience on Twitter, which is arguably the best platform for this.Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you’ll notice people will place you on public Twitter lists. Lists are generally categorized by a special interest or geographic location. For example, I might be on lists for “marketing experts,” “bloggers” or “business educators.” Find a relevant person to follow, and then dig into his or her lists. You’ll likely find a goldmine of interesting people to follow who will hopefully follow you back. There are many apps to help you find new followers, but one of my favorite places to find targeted followers is Twellow. This useful and free site is like the yellow pages for Twitter, and you can find and follow targeted users for every category, industry and interest imaginable.Use specialized Twitter search prompts. Unlock the basic search functionality right on the Twitter screen by learning a few of the specialized prompts. This is one of the most powerful market research tools available. Follow this link if you want a complete tutorial on Twitter search.With these tactics, you can expand your audience to reach people who are seeking your products and services.Mark Schaefer is a college educator, blogger, speaker and consultant who specializes in corporate social media marketing workshops.
Social media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example there is a limit on twitter on the number of people you can follow per day; there is also a limit on Google+ on the number of people you can add/delete from your circles, social media and marketing Facebook has its own rules etc.This means that it may take some time to build thousands of followers so you need to be patient and not try to rush into results either by breaking the rules (your account will be suspended) or by spending your money in ‘buying followers or tweets’ or anything similar.Try to spend your time in creating a great social media profile that will stand over time and why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche. Most people concentrate on how to get new followers but they forget to follow back those who have already followed them. Every day you should create the habit of viewing the people who are already following you and decide who to follow back. If you don’t do this on a regular basis then most likely some will un-follow you and this is why you may sometimes notice a decrease in the number of followers. A common question by people who are just beginning on social media is “how many times should I post per day?” The answer depends on the network. There are many studies analysing the effect of posting frequency and some best practices are. This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and this true in social media as well. If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website and under some conditions more customers as well.

Analyze Past Content to Improve Posts

Most businesses analyze the effectiveness of their social media after they publish. social media marketing agency Now, there are tools available to analyze data for content curation before you post.Here’s how to use BuzzSumo to leverage the data of what has already been successful in terms of social sharing.First, enter a keyword that is part of your social media content strategy. BuzzSumo will provide you with a list of the top-performing content in terms of social shares according to your keyword. Next, because some content performs better on some networks than others, you can curate content by social network. Armed with this data, you can increase the effectiveness of your content curation by publishing content that has a greater chance of success on a specific network.You can also filter content by type (which is ideal if you’re looking for videos or infographics to curate) or filter by time period. The latter lets you find content that’s been most popular in the last 24 hours or evergreen content that’s been popular over the last year. The choice is yours!Neal Schaffer is president of Maximize Your Social, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: Understanding, Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn. They will most probably share important and useful information about the niche so you have a chance to learn something new and re-share that with your followers. When you follow popular people who are likely to get followed by others as well. A trick many people use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that some will follow them back as well.Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow so by following popular people in your niche is like telling them that you are also in that niche.
Once you start following people you should always have in mind that it’s better to keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people they follow you back. social media marketing company This is important especially in Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot.Software applications are using this ratio (followers/following) to make suggestions on ‘who to follow’ so if you have a very high ratio you minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.It is a matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile: someone with 1000 followers but following 2500 or someone with 550 followers that follows 510?A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEO’s have been talking the last couple of months about the importance of social media for SEO and ho things are changing and although it is not yet confirmed, it is more likely that people with strong social media profiles are in better position that those with weak profiles.A strong profile in this case is someone that has more followers than following and someone that is followed by people who are considere influencers in the niche. So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media pages and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction. The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of followers.I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are described in points 6-10 below. Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche.

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