4 Do's and 4 Don'ts for Businesses Using Social Media

As a business owner, you know the importance of social media as a way to make a connection between your business and customers. Whenever potential clients are looking for a new product or service, they generally start their search on social media, not only to learn more about your brand, but also to see what others are saying about a brand or business.

While more companies are creating social media strategies in their marketing, not every strategy is effective.

If you want to guarantee a more effective strategy, Caitlin Burns, a New York-based business strategist for media companies, has outlined a few social media tactics for brands to definitely use and ones to avoid.

1. Know who you are.

Understand your identity, your brand's identity and the voice of who is speaking on any social media platform. You’re the one who knows your product, production, company or brand best. Being able to communicate that is the first thing I recommend for clients so that on whatever platform they use, people have a sense of who is doing the speaking. The rest of the tactics come down to language and specific things that you might do to turn a phrase on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

2. Don't wait until after the fact.

You don’t want to find yourself without a sense of what’s coming next, or responding to controversy in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s coming from the same person who created a status update or tweet. You can get in a lot of trouble if you say one very appealing thing, but you can’t replicate it. Another problem is if what you say goes against what you do in the company.

3. Understand your audience.

It’s important to know who you’re targeting. What do they do? When do they live online? With a savvy social media expert, you’ll be able to figure these things out. Understanding your goals will allow you to see how your successes and failures are working -- social media allows you to see that faster than any other platform.

4. Don't make assumptions about your audience.

It is a mistake to think your audience is going to act a certain way just because you think they will. Treat your audience as a subject, not as an object. Your work on social media is a dialogue, a conversation between you and that individual.

Look at how your audience is changing. Learn about them by communicating with your social media team on a regular basis. They are the front-line people who can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t -- what people are really engaging with and what they couldn’t care less about. This is an opportunity to quickly understand how your brand is being received. 

5. Plan ahead.

Unless you yourself are a savvy social media strategist, it’s probably worth the energy and expense to bring in someone who is an expert. You need someone who is immersed in these platforms to help you measure your goals. Whether your team is very experienced or inexperienced in an application, a good strategy is going to put you in a great place to execute. 

6. Don’t assume that your presence on social media means you know everything about it.

Having a personal account is not the same thing as understanding the scope of what Facebook ads and Twitter-promoted posts can do. Because these platforms are refining and changing these specific things all the time, having an expert on call is going to save you a lot of heartache in the future. It helps to have someone whose job it is to stay up to date on what’s going on. 

7. Adopt a test and learn methodology.

Start out with your strategist and social media team to test the waters. Put out a variety of concepts to see what is working with your audience and what isn’t. The more you test out an idea and see if that hypothesis is validated by audience data -- which you can get very easily from social media platforms -- the better feature concept you’re going to be able to build. Learn what works and budget away from the things that don’t. 

8. Don’t get comfortable.

You want to make sure that you’re engaging in a creative experiment to communicate with other people. If I’m out with friends every Friday and tell the same story over and over again, I wouldn’t have friends to go out with on Fridays for very long. You want to keep engaging and developing partnerships with relevant communities. They can help you understand the broad strokes of all the things they’re interested in, which will help you keep your brand interesting. 

Finally, take a hard look at your social media strategy and make changes and additions where necessary. Always keep in mind that social media can potentially make or break your business. You want to use the strategies that drive people toward you and your business and make them come back for more.

  Source: http://entm.ag/29UYNI3

How to Grow Your Startup Without a Budget

Here are 4 things you can do right now to grow your startup without a CMO or budget:

1. Use Free Resources to Spread the Word

There are some high-quality blogs and forums with a large and relevant audience that can be your content distributor and promote your startup. Popular blogs like ProductHunt, Betalist and startupli.st are ones that are being visited often by potential customers, tech industry members (including possible future investors or employees) and reporters. Promoting the launch of your startup in one of these blogs can generate massive traffic to your site and even spark interest in tech reporters who can, later on, cover your startup in large tech news outlets.

2. Reach Out to Bloggers and Reporters Yourself

Having a small or zero dollars marketing budget probably means you won’t be able to afford a good PR agency. Don’t be tempted to work with cheap agencies that can’t deliver (for reference, good PR agencies in the U.S charge somewhere between $5K-$10K/month), but rather do the outreach yourself. Whenever you are ready to spread the word about your company, prepare a pitch or a press release and send it to reporters who you know cover your field. Like anything in marketing, the best results are the targeted ones. Most media outlets publish their reporters’ emails, and there are some great templates you can use to draft a release. Before sending, do your homework on what a reporter is interested in. Influential reporters and bloggers receive hundreds of pitches a day, so the major part of your work is to plan and create a great pitch. To make sure it’s appealing and interesting, run it by your friends first to solicit feedback.

3. Use Your Personal Network

Not all marketing and growth has to do with SEO, conferences and buying media. Your personal network is valuable and can lead to even more valuable second and third-degree connections. Maintaining a strong personal network is important for any entrepreneur, as it can be tapped into from the brainstorming stage – advising with friends on aspects of the product, name, etc. – all the way through to the launch stage and future partnerships.

4. Use A/B Testing Methods to Increase Conversion

A/B testing is something that can really help you grow, without investing a lot of money. By using tools such as Optimizely and Unbounce, you can maximize the potential of users who are already visiting your site. A/B testing can be tricky if not done right, as you don’t want to be overwhelmed by numerous variables. Simplify the tests, and each time, check one variable or two. You will be surprised how a small change in the color of a button or the size of your header image can boost your conversion rate, sometimes by 20%-30% or even more.

Source: http://bit.ly/1UoWjNg

More about me. Be curious.

3 ways marketers can improve customer experience

Customer experience is a hot-button topic in marketing.

As more and more marketing pros seek to add this skill to their toolkit, advice from one of the leading minds in the field, Brian Solis, can help.

I met Solis, a former public relations and digital media executive, a year ago. My blog post about our conversation, Is Customer Experience the Next Killer App? was one of the most widely shared, liked and tweeted blogs that I have ever written. Since then, marketers are chiming-in everywhere you turn about improving CX.

I was talked to Solis again while he traveled to one of his worldwide speaking engagements discussing CX, and gathered more insights. Here are three main ways that Solis says PR and marketing pros can improve customer experience:

1. Uncover points of friction.

The first step is the most difficult. It requires that you recognize that customers’ experiences could be improved and requires you (and others) to step outside of your roles and collaborate to bring about sweeping change. But, it can start with small steps.

Any employee or manager can address customer experience by looking within their domain—whether it is sales, marketing, product development or customer service.

A good place to start is uncovering points of friction. This can be done personally or with the help of other team members and customers. Look at the experience within and outside your department, paying attention to what happens before and after your department becomes part of the customer experience.

When you involve your customers and other departments, interesting developments can appear, enabling you to identify things that are broken and how to fix them.

2. Place innovation over iteration.

Changing the customer experience may not require a complete product or customer journey redesign, but every aspect can benefit from a benchmark review through the eyes of the connected customer.

To make meaningful changes, you need to look at the experience from both ends. This leads to improvements and opens the door to innovation. It’s important to find a balance between innovation and iteration. Both are required for success.

Take a note from Steve Jobs and the development of the iPhone. Jobs didn’t want designers with traditional cellphone experience on the team, because he didn’t want any previous biases. Rather than focus on what a phone was, Jobs looked at what it could be.

3. Rethink what success means to CX.

Improving the customer experience can have widespread value. It is important to determine goals and how to measure them early in the process. Goals should focus on business value as well as how they affect the customer experience.

What’s the ROI of customer happiness? You can use existing metrics, but to truly track experience, rethink what success means and develop additional metrics that ensure how the two align.

Track key performance indicators related to customer satisfaction, shared experiences, customer paths and conversions. Focus on new customer growth baselines, looking at revenues and return on revenues once changes are completed. Also look at the journey and whether or not it is efficient for customers based on intent, context, device and immediacy.

The more tangible goals that you set, easier you can measure success.

  Source : http://bit.ly/24Uyndd

Quote of the day

Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing

Your company finally has its website, Facebook, and even a Twitter account set up. You are getting some traffic, you have a small following, and you've thrown up a few status updates and links.

Maybe your website or social media handles even show up in a Google search once in awhile. Check "Social Media Marketing" off that list of things to do. Mission accomplished. Wrong! Or maybe you still think that your business can't benefit from social media marketing at all? Wrong again!

It really doesn't matter if you are a sole proprietor or a CMO at a Fortune 500 global corporation. Your business can significantly benefit from social media marketing regardless of its size or business model. Why does social media marketing matter so much? 

Well I'll tell you why! Here are just a few simplified reasons why your business will grow and improve with SMM:

1) Increase Website Traffic, SEO, Referrals, & Revenue Generation

This is pretty obvious. Your social media platforms promote your website links and the content you produce. You get more traffic to your site, your search engine rank improves (and in turn more organic traffic is generated), you get more referrals from readers / viewers / subscribers / followers / customers / clients / colleagues, and you make more money! Depending on your business model, your income may be generated from product / service sales, advertising revenue, sponsorships, contracts, partnerships, subscriptions, investors, donations, or other means. Simply put, increased quality and quantity of traffic derived from social media = more money. This can be true for all companies whether you sell muffins, clean houses, manage portfolios, or market the latest cloud computing software.

2) Interaction, Branding, and Exposure with Customers, Prospects, or Industries

Your business can always benefit from interacting with your customers, clients, readers, viewers, peers, prospects, or industry heavy hitters. Many people and organizations believe this to be the most important aspect of social media marketing. So establish a positive dialogue that will lead to signing a new client. Successfully promote a current client's business. Provide exceptional customer service by answering a question or addressing a concern. Tell the world about your latest campaign, product, or service. Let the customer tell you what they view as your strengths and weaknesses, or how you can improve your business. The possibilities are endless and you'll be missing opportunities if you don't have a strong social media marketing strategy in place. If you don't properly manage or expand your company's community and network, you are leaving money on the table.

3) Increased Perception of Being Connected, Tech Savvy, and Legitimate

A lot of people think this is more of a subjective or less important aspect of social media marketing. I think it's an incredibly important one if you consider basic human psychology. While business professionals can usually distinguish between quality and quantity of social media statistics, the average person may not. So who cares if your company doesn't have many followers, friends, subscribers, views, tweets, likes, posts etc? Turns out a lot of people DO care. If you are a billion dollar corporation and you have 200 Twitter followers, that obviously doesn't look very good. It looks especially poor when your competitors have 200,000 or maybe 2,000,000 followers.

Why does your company have 6 tweets when you do business on 6 continents?

 Perhaps your business is nonexistent on critical social media platforms or your employees aren't representing your company online. 

Or maybe there is little or no activity on any of your social media accounts. This can make your company seem out of touch, which can be especially damaging if your target market includes younger or more technologically proficient customers and industries. It certainly won't help you relate to millenials if you are a B2C company and have them as one of your main "buyer personas". I've seen technology, media, marketing, and online retail companies with minimal social media marketing presence! It's not pretty. 

People and companies do look at numbers and make judgments based on them, fair or not. Having a minimal or nonexistent social media presence makes your company look bad and your competitors look better by comparison. You will lose revenue and market share if you don't successfully compete on all relevant social media platforms.

4) Return On Investment (ROI)

Social Media Marketing can have an excellent Return On Investment (ROI) compared with traditional forms of marketing such as mailers, radio ads, television ads, magazine / newspaper ads, billboards, etc. 

You could easily spend hundreds or thousands (or significantly more depending on your business) of dollars on any of these traditional marketing methods. 

If you are a sole proprietor or small business owner, that price tag can be a risky or completely impossible option. 

Even a global corporation may be looking to tighten their marketing budget or get more value for their dollar (for example: Procter & Gamble this year opted for a frugal Twitter campaign as opposed to a multi-million dollar Superbowl ad). Social media marketing can be that viable affordable alternative, or a significant component, of your marketing strategy. 

Not only will your social media platforms save you money in the short term, these platforms and SEO-boosting power remain in place to pay dividends months and even years with minimal maintenance.

And because it's digital, you can usually modify your social media marketing platforms or strategy as needed .

It is necessary these days to be able to adapt and make changes within a matter of days, hours, or even minutes. You could be spending a fortune on traditional advertising or marketing consultants when social media marketing could get the job done for a fraction of the price.

5) Analytics 

This is an enormous benefit that you receive from implementing social media marketing into your business strategy. You usually get minimal data in response to traditional marketing campaigns. 

Sometimes you aren't sure whether your business is benefiting from one traditional method or another. With social media marketing, you can get incredibly detailed, immediate, and convenient statistical reports on nearly every aspect of your SMM campaigns. 

You'll get key measurables such as impressions, clicks, comments, likes, shares, subscriptions, referring links, sales, time on site, detailed demographics, and much more. Analyze this data and modify your social media posts and ads accordingly to achieve even greater results. 

You don't get that with a newspaper ad or television commercial. You can get these detailed SMM analytics from Google Analytics, CRM platforms, individual social media platforms directly, or other web services. 

6) Integration

Finally, you can seamlessly integrate social media marketing into your overall marketing and business strategy. 

Your social media marketing complements and/or links to your email marketing, website, direct mailers, telephone, print ads, and radio / television ads. You may notice these days that half of the ads out there already have links to the company's social media URL or solicit readers / listeners / viewers to follow them on social media. 

Every email marketing campaign and website should be fully integrated with its SMM if it isn't already. And everything radio and television is already integrated or being integrated with online media. Magazines, newspapers, and newsletters are all online now as well. Complement your overall business marketing, sales, and customer service with social media savvy. 

Of course there are dozens of other important reasons why social media marketing is important for your business success. I will continue posting more specific SMM articles so I can share my thoughts and experiences with specific social media platforms, paid advertising options, specific industries, and various business models. 

Source : http://bit.ly/1Jup3Wc

Simply Fresh !

5 Quick Ways to Automate Social Media Marketing

There are experts who tell you not to automate social media. But small businesses devote a lot of time and energy to marketing – and the job is a continuous one.  It’s essential to invest time to market your business, but often hard if you have to manage orders, market, create content, advertise and sell at the same time. According to LinkedIn, 81 percent of small and medium-sized business use social media. It’s a great way to market your small business but can turn into an unwanted distraction.

When automation is done right, it allows you to put some tasks on autopilot. Here are some great tips to keep in mind as you enter the world of automation.

Queue your tweets.

Twitter can easily turn into a time suck leading to little productivity – something your small business can’t afford. Avoid getting distracted by queuing in advance. You will reach more followers on Twitter by spreading your tweets across a few hour time frame. You may wonder how to write for social media – don’t underestimate the importance of your posts. When it comes to Twitter, make sure your message is short and scannable for more engagement.

Use apps.

It’s simple to manage automation while you travel now that most social networking tools have apps for smartphones.  Apps can save you countless hours and streamline the automation process.

Interact

Log in and interact socially on all of your social networks at least daily so that all of your posts aren’t automated. Dive in daily for spontaneous updates so you remain engaged from beginning to end. It’s acceptable to take a break from social networks when you are on a vacation, just make sure you join the conversation when you return.

Automate your RSS.

Bloggers want to share their latest posts to as many social platforms as possible. Since nearly everything that ends up on the blog eventually makes its way to social media, automation comes in to play. You can automate so that new posts get transmitted directly into your social media channels. The only catch is that you want to double check the formatting of everything prior to setting this process in motion. Pay attention to the feedback from you audience – RSS content can scream automation which may turn off some of your social audience.

Recycle your blogs.

It takes a lot of time to create new and valuable content, which is why it’s so important and smart to create pillar content that can be re-shared often. Content creators often want to know how to make your content go viral. One way to do this is to create pillar posts — ones that should not ever go out of date and will likely be shared time and again.

Remember that the goal of automation isn’t to remove all of your work entirely. It is actually to help you work more efficiently. Automation can allow you to work more effectively and frees up some time for you to spend on the other tasks that accompany small business ownership.

What tips do you have for social media automating?

Source : http://bit.ly/1Sk1vWt

The 4 attributes of a great marketing hire.

When I’m looking for the next great marketing mind or business development genius, I’m not looking for just an employee. I’m looking for a partner. Being smart and having a great college pedigree is carrying less and less weight these days. Bottom line: Your education is not going to make my clients ecstatic about the work we do or put my company on the front end of innovation. What companies need in today’s world is talent with the ability to think, do, and execute in any circumstance – without anyone holding their hand.

Here’s what I look for when I hire people. It’s not exactly traditional HR wisdom. But I’m not looking for traditional. I’m looking for great.

1. I want someone who has failed. If you’ve failed, it means you got out there and did something big. Maybe this job candidate tried to start a company and went down in a blaze of glory. Maybe they tried to build a product or launch a marketing plan with no idea what they were doing, and it failed. That’s actually good. That I can work with — way more than someone who swallowed the business school textbook. Because if the candidate has been through failure, it means they tried something big. It means they had the wherewithal to get some power, the curiosity to go somewhere with that power, the leadership to get people invested in the project, and the chutzpah to try something crazy.

When you hire a candidate with at least one big, messy failure behind them, you know that person has at least one use case for what didn’t work. It’s much more productive to learn from a project that failed than get narcissistic about one that succeeded. To borrow from Thomas Edison, I want a candidate who can tell me about the 10,000 ways you can’t make a light bulb. That’s much more interesting than if a candidate just shows me a perfectly-made candle.

2. I hire people who got out of the classroom. Full disclosure: I was a marketing major myself. And, yes, it was helpful to learn the basics of the field, but that was far from the most valuable experience I had in college. My best learning experience was when I came in, totally green, and ran a marketing department for a company that had absolutely no budget. They didn’t have anything to lose, so I had free rein to try whatever I wanted – with the catch that I also had no resources. Everything I wanted to implement was on me to make happen. I had to go door-to-door with fliers, stay up all night to make the photocopies myself, and scrounge for anything I could do free, cheap, or stolen.

Was it dignified? No. Was it great experience that’s still informing my business today? You better believe it. There’s no better lesson in cost per lead than when it has to be zero. I want people on my team who have actually gone out there and done things.

3. I need to see references that aren’t professors. Here’s the thing: Textbook learning is at best third-hand. The visionaries who had the idea to pull off the impressive campaigns almost never become professors themselves. They’re out there, having bigger and better ideas. I want to hire someone who has learned from the visionary directly – or is one herself.

There’s no right answer in business. That lesson is different if you read about it in a book than if you’re on the team that actually failed. Brilliant people make terrible investments, successful companies make bad calls, and Windows Vista is somehow a thing someone thought was a good idea. I don’t want to work with people who think they hold all the cards. That’s why I hire people who have mentors from outside the schoolyard.

4. I’m going to hire someone who doesn’t need me to tell them how great they are. There may have been a time when validation from your company or your boss was healthy and productive. But those days are over. A great professional is not going to work at your company for 20 years – and frankly, you shouldn’t hire someone you think is going to do that. That’s what makes people stagnant, stuck in old methods, and unwilling to innovate.

I’m looking to hire someone who’s good enough to leave any minute to go solo or even found their own company. A good performance review is nice for them, but approval from me isn’t their be-all end-all. This person is building something bigger than the company they work for or the person leading the team.

Today’s truly successful professional is a brand all their own. They’re a thought leader, an innovator, a creator that has big ideas and isn’t afraid to share their opinions. They have a network and social properties that stand alone from their title within a business. When I look to hire someone, I don’t spend much time mulling over their resume. I look at their LinkedIn and Twitter, what they’ve been sharing and writing. Who are they connecting with? Do they have any influence?

I don’t want to hire someone who can make a perfect candle. I want someone who’s going to help me invent the light bulb, even if it takes 10,000 tries.

Source : http://bit.ly/1O3iJGb

5 Pinterest Demographics Facts Marketers Should Know

Last week Pinterest announced that they have reached a whopping 100 million monthly active users. To put that into perspective these are the most recent user stats for other popular social media networks:

While Pinterest may not be the most popular social network , it is amongst the top 5 in the world. Pinterest is also the biggest social site being predominantly used by women.

Some marketers ignore its importance because their business is not targeted toward the female demographic. This is a big mistake. The social network has grown in popularity amongst other demographics, and is proving a valuable resource in many industries.

Here are 5 reasons to monitor Pinterest demographics so you can make an educated decision on whether Pinterest data is important for your market research:

Fact #1: Men Are Now Pinterest’s Fastest-Growing Demographic

In November 2014 Pinterest announced that men were their fastest-growing demographic. In fact, in emerging markets sign ups are an even gender split of 50% men and 50% women. (Techcrunch)

Fact #2: Pinterest Attracts Users From All Income Levels

In 2014 there was a significant increase in Pinterest users whose income levels were below $30,000 and above $75,000. The easy-to-use social media platform caters to people of all income levels. (PEW Research Center)

Fact #3: Pinterest User Numbers Have Doubled Since 2012

We  Pinterest had hit a 100 million user milestone. But did you know that in 2013 they had only 70 million? Alongside Instagram, Pinterest has doubled its usage since 2012, and now counts 31% of online adults amongst its user base.

Fact #4: Half of Pinterest’s Users Are International

According to an article published by Venture Beat, 45% of Pinterest users come from outside of the United States.

Fact #5: Popularity Boom Amongst Older Generation

Pinterest is extremely popular amongst young people. 34% of online 18-29 year olds, and 28% of 30-49 year olds use Pinterest. But it is the older generation of internet users who have most recently taken to using Pinterest. Between 2013 and 2014 Pinterest saw a growth of 14% in users aged 50-64. This places Pinterest behind just Facebook and LinkedIn for social media usage within the 50-64 year age group.

Want to know more about Pinterest?

Knowing Pinterest demographics gives you the power to target the right market during advertising campaigns. 

Source : http://bit.ly/1FLrNwo