Thanksgiving is behind us as well as Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, three of the major shopping days of the year. I hope these events were successful for your business. Now is no time to rest and coast through the last month of the year when it comes to finishing out your holiday season marketing. By making email and online marketing as part of your marketing campaign, you can easily create new and easy ways to market your business.
Here are 12 ideas to make these last weeks a success.
Twitter is such an under used and unappreciated “social network” for business use. In fact, in a survey conducted by Pew Research, only 19 percent of online adults use Twitter verses 71 percent using Facebook. With that said, those businesses not incorporating Twitter with running a major event are missing the mark on attendee involvement before, during and long after the event.
I am going to go a bit off course this month and not focus on just social networks. Why you ask? Well, I'm preparing for my classes at RACC and always read new ebooks and books on marketing to share the latest and greatest. I find myself totally engulfed in a book written by David Meerman Scott called The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
When I ask the question in my classes, “How many businesses in attendance have a Google+ page,” very few hands go up. The answer is that only two out of 10 businesses who have a presence on the internet have claimed their Google+ business page. Yet, Google has created a business page for you to easily claim. Assuming you haven't claimed your page, the question is, “should you?” The answer is, “absolutely!”
When I meet with business owners to discuss their involvement in social networks, I seldom find them using Twitter. Twitter, with its hashtags, retweets, and mentions, doesn’t make sense to them. Well, first of all, Twitter is not really a social network but instead a feed of microblogs. Microblogs are short messages and, in this case, 140 character messages.
There's more than one way for your business to be found through search engines. Businesses who are active on social networks are finding that Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn are showing up as part of their search and sometimes before their website. When social networks are optimized, it is called Social Media Optimization (SMO).
When teaching a class about Social Media Mastery, I find it interesting to see the level of knowledge and involvement when it comes to using social networks as a marketing and sales tool for business. It goes the gammit, from total lack of involvement, to over the top, in your face. To find a balance for social network involvement, is to understand the rules of Social Media Mastery.
We have had the wonderful opportunity of working with a financial advisor to do her marketing, be it social media marketing, email marketing or print marketing. To work with her, I had to go through security screening and fingerprinting for compliance. Needless to say, we take the responsibility of working with her seriously. Every article, advertisement and online change to the website goes through a process of approval. We actually have an employee who has been trained to make certain there are no issues with any sort of implications of guarantees.
There are so many useful tools that can help you create, organize, and schedule your social media. Here are a few that might be able to save you time and help you with the creative side of creating social content.
Canva is a great program to help you create graphics for your social media. It has free templates for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. You can upload your own pictures and logo to brand your graphics. The paid version has more capabilities including setting uploading special fonts, collaboration tools, and setting up your brand colors.
It’s said, it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know. Your involvement in social media easily allows you to open the channels to reach out and connect to those individuals who may become an impact on the success of your business. With that said, how do you go about the strategy of connecting with these individuals?
With over a billion monthly users, Instagram is a social media platform every business should consider. It is a great way for a customer to visualize the lifestyle that they would have with your product or service. Here are some easy ways to get started.
Branding is something that you need to keep consistent across social media. In the bio, you should use the same profile picture that you have for Facebook or Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, use the same handle as well and link to your website so that people can find you.
Recent changes with Facebook Marketing have left us a bit unsure whether Facebook is planning to say goodbye to marketing for businesses. Recently, I was working with a client’s Facebook Boost which requires us to fine tune the market based on net worth and interest in investing in land. What they are eliminating is all those demographics that would fine tune the audience and only allowing us to choose just interests in hobbies and sports.
I know that you are thinking, “Not another social media task to add to my to do list!”
What are Facebook Stories? They are user-generated pictures and videos that are shared with your followers for only 24 hours. Why should you use them? Stories are a fun way to interact with your followers. If your followers are a little younger, you are giving them content in a way that they consume it. Facebook introduced Stories to compete with Snapchat.
Everyone will give you an opinion on the “right” way to post social media content. Truthfully, you must figure out a system that works for you and be consistent. How do you get from being overwhelmed, to a monthly content plan? Here are a few tips.
What are the various social media platforms you are currently posting on, and how often are you posting? Is that working for you? Make a note of what you think you need to change. If you are not posting consistently, what is a realistic goal?
Facebook gives you a lot of tools to analyze your audience, and they can be used to help craft your social media strategy. Understanding your audience and their viewing habits can help increase your reach. Here are three Insights to watch.
Since January when the announcement was made about Facebook’s change to their algorithm, we’ve been testing what we’ve done in the past, as well as some of our new adjustments. In some cases, with no engagement what so ever, we didn’t see any changes.
Those where we moved attention to GYBO posts and more engaging posts but less of them on Facebook, we noticed an uptick on organic reach on Google and about the same result on Facebook.
Have you ever gone live on Facebook? If you haven’t you are missing out on a great way to increase your reach and engage your audience. Here are a few tips to get started.
