5 Tips on How to Maximize Social-Media Efforts With a Small Team

No matter how small your business is, a good, strong social media strategy should be a vital part of your marketing efforts. An October 2015 study by Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed use social networking sites, which means that if your business doesn’t have a presence there, you’re missing out on two-thirds of the U.S. population.

With dozens of social avenues to choose from, though, social media management may seem overwhelming, especially for a small business. Below are some tools and tips to effectively manage social media for your business, no matter how lean your team is.

1. DEVISE A MANAGEABLE STRATEGY.

Before diving in and signing up for every channel with a social aspect, get organized and be realistic about your capabilities, looking at the following categories:

• Hours per week available for social media management: This will set expectations about what you should prioritize and how many channels you should manage. Critical tasks that should be taken into account for effective social media management include:
• Design: This includes not only signing up for and populating your page with the essential elements but working with a designer to optimize graphics for aspects such as profile banners, profile pictures, and images for shared content.
• Content creation: This includes strategizing and writing posts, as well as working across multiple departments to publicize promotions.
• Content-engagement monitoring and interaction with followers: If your brand experiences negative sentiment online, or you anticipate customer service needs through these channels, allot time accordingly. To keep customers engaged, your social media manager should also be responding to comments and answering questions.
• Analytics: Monitoring of analytics, which includes sales, followers, engagement and sentiment, is imperative to refine content strategy and adjust social media management tactics for your business.
• Determining your target audience: If your product is built for businesses, look at professional sites such as LinkedIn to focus on. If you’re a storefront, establishing a presence on Google+ is essential to ensure you are search-engine-friendly. Facebook is the behemoth social media mainstay, so it should be on your list of must-have social channels.
• Determining your message: Besides increased sales, what do you want to achieve with your social media presence? Do you want your channels to act as an additional form of customer support? Do you want to distribute engaging content in hopes of its getting shared? Do you want to make new connections with leaders in your industry? Deciding on your goals will shape the messages of your channels, which should be unique to each outlet’s specific audience. As a fellowEntrepreneur writer mentioned, posting the same content repeatedly leaves followers less engaged.

2. USE TOOLS TO SAVE YOU TIME.

Now that you have a strategy in place and know what social media channels you’ll use, what type of messaging you want to disseminate and how you’re going to monitor your successes and areas for improvement, you’ll next need to put your approach into action. Thankfully, social media monitoring tools save you time as you’re managing channels and evolving a strategy.

3. USE FREE ANALYTICS PROVIDED BY EACH CHANNEL.

Often, social media in-house analytics tools provided by social media channels, such as those outlined by Social Media Examiner, are some of the most effective ways to keep track of data. Facebook Analytics, for example, shows page managers everything from the number of visitors at varying times of the day to data on how many people carried out a negative action — such as unliking a page — when interacting with a specific post.

Pinterest analytics show you the type of content your users love the most, while Twitter shows you not only yours and customers’ top Tweets but impressions and engagement. Google Analytics will show you what channels are driving traffic to your website and resulting in sales. Explore the free analytics of whatever sites you’re using, and use those insights to craft better content and optimize frequency of distribution.

4. USE FREE TOOLS TO MANAGE MULTIPLE CHANNELS.

While you can use software such as Excel to keep track of messaging and ensure you’re creating unique content for each channel, a multi-channel management application can display multiple feeds at once, saving you the pain of logging into myriad sites and clicking multiple windows.

Free social media multi-channel management services, such as those endorsed by the experts here, include Hootsuite and Buffer; and pull networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, which can go into one easy-to-read window. Some, like Hootsuite, will even display additional data besides your channel content, such as interactions with your business from other brands.

5. MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRESS EASILY SHAREABLE WITH YOUR TEAM.

Since social media is, well, social, you’ll want to make your strategy transparent to your team. This will not only garner you insight and suggestions from the social media users who make up your company but will incentivize them to get involved and boost your engagement by participating on your social channels.

Free project management tools such as Trello and Slack, mentioned by Social Media Today, allow you to display tasks to your team, while also allowing for global discussion.

Social media may be free, but your time is highly valuable. Continue to refine and optimize your social media strategy to maximize results, while saving your business money by taking advantage of free applications.

 Source : http://bit.ly/2dEu6VS

28 great tactics for promoting online content

Content distribution has been a big topic all around social media.

As Mark Schaefer’s book “The Content Code” explains, “Great content isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting line.”

We spend so much time and inspiration on creating our content, and then once we hit publish we forget that we must work to share that content.

Here are 28 tips on how to extend the reach of what you publish online:

Promote your content on social media

This is probably the first place we all go. You hit publish, and your automation tools push your post out on social media.

Then you forget about it and run off to the next piece.

Nope. There has to be more planning. The folks at CoShedule say having a social media sharing schedule will double your traffic.

Here’s what they suggest:

1. Upon publishing —Social media message is sent when blog post goes live.
2. Same day —Initial social media messages trickle out to your accounts over the next two or three hours.
3. Next day —Messages are shared again on the appropriate social media channels.
4. Next week —Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent.
5. Next month —Even more social media messages are pre-scheduled for the following month.
6. Next _____ —Additional messages can be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

Here’s what I do:

1. Upon publishing —Twitter: I schedule this through IFTTT to go out with #new, the title and the featured image once the blog is live. It’s also pushed to Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google Plus the day it publishes.
2. Same day —Twitter: I’ll use the Click To Tweet quotes to send out a few times later the same day, but by using the quotes versus the title these have different ledes (opening or enticing paragraphs) and don’t seem like I’m pushing the same content over and over. (I try to have at least one quote in each post.)
3. Next week —I’ll pre-schedule reoccurring tweets over the next few days, and over the next two months from my personal handle (if it’s evergreen).
4. Next two months —Again, using prescheduled tweets with different ledes and different images (if there are any), my posts are hitting my personal feed for a good two months.
5. Ongoing —From here I let Revive Old Post take over, which helps our evergreen content to “live forever.”

RELATED: Free download: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom

Other tips:

• Changing your lede helps the content stay fresh; try to come up with three different ways to pose one title.
• Ask questions. For instance, for this post, I could change my lede or pose a question (depending on the platform and the space it affords) to say, “Are you doubling your content distribution efforts with a promo schedule?”
• Add hashtags to help searchers find your content.
• Tag people, and ask them to weigh in, but only if you have a good relationship; don’t spam people.
• Use pithy quotes or stats from the article as a new lede.
• As mentioned, use Click To Tweet to create snackable, shareable bites.
• Reference your article—when relevant— in online conversations. Again, don’t be spammy.

Promote your content to your list(s)

If you have a marketing list (and you should), use it.

Many people share weekly newsletters or several times a month. Use this as a vehicle to share your latest post(s).

Here’s what I do:

1. We have a monthly newsletter with themes, so I share a post from the prior month only if it fits with the theme we’re working with.
2. We have a subscriber-only blog email that delivers our blog to straight to inboxes. This is a highly segmented and highly engaged list. How? We give subscriber-only gifts— templates, workflows, tricks and tips—to those on our list as a bonus for the blog post’s theme. In this email we have two places with ready-to-tweet links.

Other tips:

• Have an RSS feed set up on your blog so subscribers can add it to their aggregators.
• If you decide to take it a step further, as we did with our subscriber-only list, make sure those links tag your brand, use any branded/relevant hashtags and are trackable. We use Bitly and Click To Tweet’s link generator to make this happen.

Promote your content through syndication

Our posts are syndicated through a few platforms, including B2Community and SteamFeed.

This means nearly all our posts are republished on these sites with permission.

Many sites do this for free; some do it as a paid service, such as Outbrain.

Here’s what I do:

• I research well-trafficked sites offering syndication (B2Community) and ask to be a part of the program.
• I vet offers from sites asking to syndicate my content (SteamFeed and a few others that are on a post-by-post basis). In some cases, I get paid to let other sites use my content.

Promote your content through advertising

As we ramp up with advertising efforts for our clients, this is an area I have to beef up in 2016.

There are so many ways to promote your content. Here are some of the easiest/most common:

• Facebook ads
• Facebook custom audiences (show ads to your lists)
• Facebook lookalike audiences (show ads to people similar to those people on your lists)
• Remarketing ads (Facebook or Google—ads that “follow” users with cookies)
• Twitter ads
• Google AdWords

There you have it! These 28 tips are only a starting place, but a solid one.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments section.

Source : http://bit.ly/1KTJL1V

6 ways to take your content marketing from good to great

If you want to boost the quality of content on your website, I’ve always found that it’s the little things that make content go from good to great. In my role as Content Marketing Manager, my job is to create content that ‘earns our way in’ to the hearts and minds of readers. With content marketing, the strategy is always to build an audience and give your reader useful information that helps them solve a problem.

Hang on, what is content marketing?

Great question. Content marketing is about creating content that’s in it for the long game. It’s timeless, or known as ‘evergreen’ content. The content marketing approach is about building an audience through creating useful and engaging content. The goal of content marketing is to create content for your audience that is educational and adds value.

Why earning your way in is smarter than going for the pitch

Content that reeks of a hard sell can be off putting. When content is written in a way that assumes the reader is ready to buy, it’s like someone asking to marry you after the first date! Finding the sweet spot with your content isn’t a quick process – but with the right mindset, you’ll get results. Be prepared to tweak and test your content.
Engaging, educational content always wins. By using the the right combination of words, tone and language you can reach customers and prospects. And it’s possible to do this without going for the obvious ‘pitch’ as soon as you have their attention.

Get some insight by doing keyword research

So you might be wondering how the heck you figure out what your readers want to read. No you don’t need a crystal ball, but a great place to start is keyword research. I use Google Keyword Planner to research the terms people type in search engines.

Some phrases get a huge search volume, which can indicate how popular the topic is. You can refine your search in Keyword Planner to specific regions, countries and even cities. For example, you could target the term ‘tax accountant’ to Melbourne and see how many searches it gets. These results can give you great insight into topics of interest in your industry. And the numbers don’t lie! So why not answer people’s questions? Give them what they want. Content that people want to read is content that the reader has actively searched for. Here’s a quick guide of my best practices in content marketing.

Six ways to create great content

Here are my top tips for creating content that goes the distance:

1. Make sure it’s something people want
   Say something useful. Do your research and make your content the solution to their problem. When I create content, I always try to answer the real need at hand. What does this person want? What is fluff and just unnecessary jargon?
2. Make it personal and be conversational and friendly
   Keep your readers interested by including the word “you”. Doing this has been known to make content more memorable to readers. Write the way you would speak to a friend and avoid using words that are stiff and formal. Making things sound more complicated than they are will only alienate your readers.
3. Create “evergreen” content
   This means your content has less chance of being outdated quickly. With evergreen content you won’t get immediate results but you will gain trust, respect and authority in the long game. Be patient and stay the course because great content doesn’t date – it’s timeless.
4. Make sure your content is easy to read
   Never underestimate the power of plain English. If your content doesn’t score 60 or above in a Flesch reading ease test, then tweak it until it does. For example, I could write: “Business owners can drive real time-based productivity from cloud-based software when they effectively utilise the benefits given to them by new online applications.” or I could rewrite it like this: “If you’re a business owner you could save yourself time by moving to online software.”
5. Get to the point quickly
   No one wants to wade through wordy content trying to understand what the main message is. Content that’s just fluff wastes your readers’ precious time, so make every word count.
6. Tell a story
   Produce something that’s authentic. Readers want valuable, educational and engaging information – not advertising pitches. People appreciate entertaining content that doesn’t blast messaging. Think of the last time you had a TV ad in your ears – did you mute it? If you did, the same theory applies to content.

Staying the course pays off

If your content is different from the tsunami of product pitches out there, it will stand out from the crowd. Have faith in the long game and dedicate time and energy into building up a pool of great online content.  

Source : http://bit.ly/1I618pE

8 Skills Your Child Needs to Be the Next Great Entrepreneur

Is your child learning the crucial skills he or she needs to become the next great entrepreneur?

You want the best for your kids.

Imagine it. Your kid turning an idea into a multi-million dollar business and loving every minute of it.

Do you remember young Evan, whose YouTube Channel, EvanTube, has amassed more than a million subscribers, a billion views, and more than $1.3 million in annual revenue?

 Evan is just 9-years-old. And he's just one example.

So many of the world's most famous entrepreneurs became millionaires before they were 20.

Could your child be a budding entrepreneur?

While it may seem like some people seem born to be entrepreneurs, as parents it's important to teach your kids some important lessons early so they can learn to become the next Steve Jobs or Elizabeth Holmes.

Even if your child doesn't become a rich and successful entrepreneur or change the world, they will benefit from these valuable skills, whatever path their life takes.

So what are these eight skills? 

according to an infographic produced by Pumpic, creator of a parental tracking application for smartphones, here are those vital traits, and how to inspire your children to become a great leader:

• Resilience: Allow kids to express emotions and don't minimize their feelings.
• Innovation and creativity: Let them play - it's when kids play that they engage all of their creative energies.
• Industriousness: Build independence by giving kids chores to do and responsibility for getting things done. Lead by example and reduce your own time-wasting habits.
• Curiosity: Encourage your kids to start new hobbies and pursue their interests - no matter how esoteric. Try having tech-free outings with your kids to museums and activity centers.
• Self-confidence: Encourage their opinions and give them opportunities to make decisions. Even if it isn't what you'd do, let them make choices and learn from experience.
• Empathy: Respect your children's individuality and their opinions, encouraging them to be open with their emotions.
• Optimism: Share positive stories and inspirational talks with your kids to cultivate gratitude and encourage positive thinking.
• Giving back: Encourage kids to help out around the neighborhood.

After learning these entrepreneurial skills, maybe your child could find success in a "dying" industry; become a pop icon and business mogul; or simply reinvent a product, make it better, and make millions.

Source : http://bit.ly/1X1jLr2