How Visual Content Enhances Your Social Media Marketing

Are you struggling with social media marketing for your business?

In this blog we will show you how visual content can help you get you more likes, shares and comments for your business on social media. We will also give some tips on how to use visual content to boost engagement.

Reaching your followers without paid marketing can be difficult and frustrating at times. That means marketers have to find ways to reach target audience organically. Visual content is a better way to spice up boring content and increase your shareability.

Visual content includes pictures, graphics, memes and videos. According to Viraltag, visuals get 94% more views than plain text content. Posts with visuals grab attention easily. This is why Facebook has introduced the coloured status background for text only posts.

facebook coloured background posts screenshot

The popularity for visual content is proved by the tremendous growth of visual social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.  Instagram users number has grown from 200 million in 2014 to 800 million in just three years.

Marketers know that visuals are a must -have rather than a good-to-have component of content strategy. In 2016, 53% of marketers stated that over 90% of content they produced contained visuals.

Here is how visual content will enhance your social media marketing

Increase Engagement

 Posts with visuals get more likes, comments and shares on social media. According to Hubspot, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without images. Visual content is also 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content.

However, social media feed is overloaded with images today and there is something you can do to stand out among that. Your brand needs something more with their image to stand out. There are many strategies that successful marketers follow to increase their chances of going viral.

Check out this post by EA Sports:Madden 25. They have successfully used a call to action to drive user engagement.

ea sports facebook page screenshot

Adding a clear call to action in your images will drive up engagement on your posts. Some of the other strategies that marketers use are sharing DIY photos, entertaining or funny memes, optical illusions and images that evoke emotions.

Create Brand Personality

 Visuals communicate much more than words ever can. Images and videos evoke emotions and connect with the audience instantly. You can communicate all that your brand stands for in less than two seconds (which is great considering the fact that human attention span have fallen to eight seconds).

For example, RedBull Facebook page regularly posts videos on adventure and sports. This connects with their audiences who are adventurous and identify with the brand for ‘pushing the limits’.

red bull facebook page screenshot

Images are also more memorable and increase your brand recall. According to Lifelearn, people retain 65% of information when content is paired with relevant image compared to only 10% retention when that information is heard.

Posting images with consistent theme, font and logo increases brand recognition and builds a place in the minds of audience.

Drive Conversion

Visual media can directly increase your traffic and conversions. Visuals are great to if you are a product company. In fact, there are many small businesses which have grown big supported only by Instagram sales. Marketers are now giving due place to visual platformssuch as Instragram, Snapchat and Pinterest in their digital marketing strategy.

Instagram has over 1 million advertisers since the introduction of its ad services only four years ago.

Both Facebook and Instagram have introduced carousel ads (pictures that you can scroll sideways) to make their ads more visual.  All social media platforms prefer visual content in their organic as well as paid feed for the simple reason that it converts better.

tesco facebook mobile ad screenshot

Tips for creating visuals for social media

Whether you are just starting out with visual content or want better strategy for your visual content marketing, following tips will help you:

> Recreate your best text posts in visuals. You do not need to create fresh content every time. Go back to your best performing posts and blogs and redo them in a visual infographic.

Know your type of visuals. There are so many things you can dowith visuals. You can use photos, quote covers, comics, infograhics, memes, videos, live videos. Understand your audience and analyse their response to different type of visuals. Also keep in mind your brand personality.  A funny meme on Donald Trump is not a good idea if you are a professional and serious B2B brand.

> Optimize images for each platform. Keep your posts in line with the overall mood of the social media platform. For example, Instagram is great for a lifestyle and fashion product whereas LinkedIn would be a better place for a B2B software company. Also keep in mind that the dimension and photo quality requirement may differ slightly in each platform.

> Managing too many platforms can get overwhelming. Limit to three platforms to start off with. Choose platforms based on where your target audience is.

Keep a good variety of content. Some options that are popular are – DIY graphics, educational infographics, funny comics or memes, entertaining videos, GIFs, etc. Be creative and play around with what sits well within your brand voice.

> Use live videos to show the human side of your brand or to give behind the scene updates. Live videos are not yet very popular but they are very engaging. It’s the perfect time to jump on the rising trend that will be common in coming future.

> Use contests and user generated images to engage your users.

 Conclusion

We are naturally inclined to prefer visuals to text. The amount of visual content is only growing on social media platforms. Brands must stand out with their creative use of visuals to enhance their social media marketing. Using images, videos and creative graphics will increase user engagement, build your brand voice and ultimately lead to conversions.

How AI-Based Tools are Transforming Social Media Marketing

From interpreting lab results in healthcare industry to automatically controlling air conditioning temperature, artificial intelligence is changing the face of industries and businesses.

It is also simplifying jobs of marketers by providing tools to make sense of consumer data on social media.

Social media gave marketers a powerful way to reach out to their target audience. However, application of AI has made it possible to reach out to each individual user with personalized content. Here is how AI based tools are transforming social media today:

Contact Jointviews

  • Chatbots

Artificially intelligent chatbots are common on social media. There are more than 1, 00,000 Facebook Messenger bots and they are here to stay as messaging is the preferred way of interaction for customers. Chatbots allow businesses to send auto-replies, personalized offers and even solve customer complaints.

More than 2 billion messages are exchanged between users and brands every month on Facebook messenger alone. Companies with AI powered Facebook messenger bots see increased user interaction and sales.

For example, Tommy Hillfiger saw a 3.5 times more conversion on messenger than any other digital channel during New York fashion week.

Even Twitter has launched many features this year to promote interaction of users with brand chatbots.

  • Image Recognition

People share more than 3.25 billion photos a day on popular social media platforms!  Brands can draw useful information about users, with so much visual data on social media.

Photos shared by followers can give marketers a peek into places they visit, products they use and how they interact with brands.

For example, an apparel brand can discover where their customers wear their products based on photos discovered on social media. Currently, there is no way to find out unless people tag the brand on a rare occasion.

A lot of information on buying behaviours, usage patterns and aspirational value can be found out by marketers only if they could read and discover images like text.

Thankfully AI is making this possible through image recognition technology. Using technologies like Google cloud vision companies can scan millions of images on social media to identify logos, products and objects.

This is similar to Facebook photos auto-tagging that you might be familiar with. With this AI tool marketers can listen to what customers are saying through pictures and videos.

  • Advertising

Paid campaigns give the best ROI in digital marketing. Managing campaigns on multiple channel and deciding on best bid for keywords can get difficult at times. Usually campaigns are managed by in-house team or a PPC agency.

AI Tools like Albert and Frank use machine learning to manage paid ad campaign, analyze result and suggest most profitable platform for placing ads. This takes the guess work out of paid campaigns and ensures best return on investment.

  • AI Content creation

Social media success is dependent on good content. According to Gartner, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines by 2018.

There are already intelligent programs that can write financial summaries and fact based articles. Many of the tech giants are working on bots that can speak and interact like human.

Microsoft’s artificially intelligent chatbot ‘Tay’  was made live on Twitter to learn from other users and tweet like a human teenage girl.

Although the controversial account had to be shut down after it tweeted inappropriate remarks, Tay showed us that days when bots produce social media content are not far.

As Natural Language Processing develops, machines will be able to write human like social media posts to engage followers. They would also collect real-time data on trending topics and write interesting content that drives engagement on social media. A tool called Rocco has already done this.

Rocco is an AI powered social media marketing assistant that suggests fresh social media content likely to drive engagement among your followers.

  • Customer Intelligence

Posts shared on social media platform can give useful information on customers. Marketers no more have to interrupt customers for surveys and conduct focus groups.

AI machines can search social media platforms for data that matters and collate actionable insights.

Converseon  is already doing this by applying machine learning to voice-of customer data.

These insights can be used for market segmentation, building customer profiles and competitive analysis.

AI based tools are going to change how we consume information on social media platforms. This is the reason all of the tech giants and social media companies are investing heavily in it.

Facebook has a dedicated AI research team called Facebook Artificial Intelligence Researchers (FAIR). In 2014 LinkedIn bought Bright, an AI based job search portal, to better its job matching capabilities.

Pinterest on the other hand acquired a data software company, Kosei, to boost pin and product recommendations. It is only a matter of time before marketers start using AI based tools widely on these sites.

Why Content Matters in Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has emerged as one of the most advantageous types of digital marketing. Businesses can grow exponentially if they utilize the technique in an effective manner. The success of a social media marketing strategy lies in the activity the brand chooses to execute and the way they visualize this form of marketing.

A lot of brands think of social media to be a means of getting more likes, engagement, reach, and retweets. But we suggest you focus on sharing high quality content in order to engage in a dialogue with users and thereby generate a lead.

Here’s what content can do for your social media marketing strategy and help to build a brand:

  1. Expand your network and establish credibility

High-quality content can do wonders on social media. In fact, experts suggest that social media and content marketing go hand-in-hand. All you need to do is figure out what types match the best with each other, and once you have discovered the right pair, you will be able to reach out to large audiences without any obstructions.

Usually, brands publish content on their official website and promote it using social media handles. They expect immediate results but content marketing is not able to deliver the same. Content marketing must build up momentum in order to deliver the kind of results brands desire.

According to content marketing experts, companies must consistently provide valuable content to their target audience. In the course of time, this engaging content will be able to pull the users and help the brand establish credibility. This is an organic approach and may take time to reap results.

If you are confident of the value of your content and believe that it is worthy of the reader’s attention, you may force it to more audiences using sponsored posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter. You could also tie up with influencers and grow your brand’s reach.

  1. Establish a connection with the brand

Content marketing focuses on establishing a connection between a brand and its target audience. This connection must have an emotional appeal to it. Moreover, content has the power to make people empathetic towards a brand.

A content marketing strategy must be so strong that it should be able to convince prospects to convert into sales. This means that you require content that is unique and valuable. Start by sharing and demonstrating the values of your company through the content you share on social media.

  1. Be an authority

If you regularly address current affairs and specific topics of concern relevant to your industry, you are viewed as an authority. The value and relevance of your content strike a chord with the readers and they will await the next piece of content you publish. And social media is the best place to share such content and engage with your users.

People today don’t have much time, but if they come across content that is valuable, they love it. They tend to share it in their groups and networks giving you the publicity and engagement you require. You need not use technical jargon or absolute facts based on research in order to be an authority. Content written in a manner that is interesting and understandable has huge potential with the reader.

  1. Improves conversion rates

Content marketing is the only tool that permits you to create appropriate remarketing lists. This is done using content analytics.

Your website has a number of webpages with different content and there’s also a lot of content on your social media handles rerouting the user to different links on your website. Google Analytics sets a code on your website that tracks visitors and gives you an analysis of their behaviour. This data is further used to prepare remarketing lists and show prospects content that they were interested in.

If your business stays in front of the prospects at regular intervals, chances that they become a customer when considering a purchase decision are high.

Social media platforms have become the new tool for marketers, however, if you are looking at reaching out to more customers, your content must be high-quality and valuable. Perform a thorough analysis of your target audience before devising a content marketing strategy so that you can offer the content they are looking for.

7 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Presence

Having a stellar social media presence is on every marketer’s agenda this year and there is a good reason for it. Social media drives more than 31% of all referral traffic and it has emerged as the most important traffic source after SEO. Not only does it get traffic, it gets ‘targeted’ traffic that is easier to move along your sales funnel.

But social media marketing can be frustrating for many small and medium size businesses. Founders and marketers invest time and post regularly only to see no visible results. They either struggle with increasing their followers or getting conversions. This can be disappointing and many give up on social media altogether.

Unfortunately , most people are not aware that there are some tactics without which you cannot succeed at social media. Hard work with no smart work can be tiring. In this blog we will tell you how to do that.

But, first things first. You need to understand that social media growth takes time. Just six hours a week on social media can start showing you results in three to four months. However these six hours must be well planned. Work smartly with the following seven tips to improve your social media presence.

1. Get Social

You must use the social networks in social media to your advantage. Invest time in building relations with peers and industry leaders. There is a lot that can be done in collaboration with influencers and communities on social media.

Neil Patel ran a campaign on social media where models with large following were paid to  promote ‘#whoisneilpatel’. As a result the hastag #whoisneilpatel was used 11,000 times and Google searches for ‘Neil Patel’ went up by 71%.

who-is-neil-patel-screenshot

You do not have to spend hefty amounts on Influencer campaigns. A free gift or a percentage of revenue generated by their followers is also good offer to make.

Participate in communities and groups that are relevant to your industry. Answer queries and comment on blogs posted on groups other than yours. Don’t be salesy and avoid talking about how great your product is. The point is to add value to other users. If they see you as a subject matter expert they will follow you.

2. Include your followers

Social media channels are a two way communication street. Just posting interesting content with no conversations is a disengaging and boring way to exist on social media. Instead, make your followers an active part of your page or profile. Here are some ways to do it

  • Start a trivia game. Pick a topic that is close to your follower’s heart and related to your brand.
  • Ask your followers to post how their life has changed after using your product.
  • Use Facebook Polls to understand their interests.
  • Word your posts to get more comments and responses. For example, a fitness apparel brand can post asking followers of ‘their favorite fitness activity and what they like about it’

3. Promote Everywhere

Let all your customers know that you are on social media. Mention your twitter handle and facebook page on all company merchandise, marketing material, PR and advertising copies, blogs and product packaging.

social-media-icons-screenshot

You can get decent traction even if all your current customers and employees promote your page among their friends. Make sure you are creating interesting content. This way they would be happy to share without feeling spammy. 

4. Use your website

You can optimize your website to drive more traffic to your social media profiles. Make it easy for your visitors to share at the click of a mouse button.

Install Click to tweet plugin that allows you to convert blog text into tweetable text.

Use social media icons on your website pages. However, be sure to insert them only where they are relevant. Putting social share icons on your home page or contact page is useless as nobody is going to share these pages.

Instead, place the icons on pages with content that is funny, informative and valuable. Make sure your icons scroll down the page with your visitors. Use Add this plug-in to add scrollable icons and make your images shareable on Pinterest at a click.

5. Be human

It helps to show your soft side on social media as people want to connect with real humans and not a faceless brand. Feel free to share behind the scene photos or founder’s story.

Not every social site is fit for all types of content. Always keep in the mind the mood of the social media platform you share on.

Instagram is great for lifestyle promotion; feel free to share glamorous photos here. LinkedIn is professional and suitable to share your expert take on your client’s industry. Facebook has a friendly mood and you can show your personal side here.

The rules of great conversation also apply to social media interactions. Make the conversation more about your followers than about your brand.

It’s good to post content that is not directly related to your products but connects with your audience. Use the 80:20 rules. 80% of your posts should be non-promotional and only 20% should be promotional.

6. Have a Plan

You already know the result if you have been posting on social media sites without a formal plan. It gets you nowhere.

You must have a goal and a content strategy that chalks out how you are going to get there. It does not have to be a super complicated document. Just a structured content calendar that lists what you are going to share everyday will be good to go.

You must decide what platforms are best suited for your brand based on where your target market spends their time. Also make sure your goals are specific, measurable, realistic and time-based.

A structured plan will serve two goals. First it will make sure you post regularly. Second, you will get the content ready beforehand since you know what you have to post. This removes haphazard posting.

7. Live Videos

Live videos have made a mark as the most exciting marketing tool this year. Internet celebrities like Gary Vaynerchuk have used it successfully to grow their following on social media.

According to Livestream.com , 82% of brand audience would prefer a live video rather than social post. Individuals and brands are using it to give more immersive feel of their life to their followers. It has become the new reality TV in every person’s hand.

Live videos are not yet fully exploited which is why social media sites are pushing the feature. Facebook and Instagram send users a notification every time any of their contact starts a live video.

Conclusion

Following these seven practices consistently will increase your social media presence. What are some other tactics that have worked for you to increase social media presence? Let us know in the comments below.

How Businesses Benefit from Social Media Marketing

Social media was considered to be a passing fad a few years ago. Today it is a proven platform for businesses to reach target audience and grow revenue. Businesses are taking social media seriously. Facebook reported $9.16 billion in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2017.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter help businesses reach out to their prospects personally and develop relations. Here are some ways businesses benefit from social media marketing:

  • Builds a Brand and Brand Loyalty

 A brand is built by consistent messaging and presence. According to Global Web Index, people spend more than two hours on social media platforms daily. You are missing out on precious customer attention if you are not active on social media.

time spent on social media screenshot

Source : MarketingProfs

Having a profile on social media allows you to post and interact with your target market. A Study by Convince and Convert has also shown that people who follow a brand on social media are more loyal to that brand.

A profile on these platforms ‘humanizes’ your brand. You can like and comment on your followers’ posts like a friend. This is great because people like to do business with humans and not a company without any human traits.

Social media is a necessary platform to be on and give your audience a seamless experience between the offline and online branding efforts.

  • Reach more people

In traditional marketing, businesses had to spend big money to reach their target customers. Advertisements in print and television assured no guarantee that your target audience would see it despite investing huge amount.

This has changed with social media. Now you can reach the right target audience for free! Followers increase consistently with time as long as you post content regularly. What’s more, users who follow you are interested in your brand and ready to engage with you. This is much better than placing a hoarding that most people don’t even look at.

It is also an excellent platform to reach the global audience. Viral marketing can increase your followers exponentially overnight. Although there is not set recipe for a viral content you must strive to post content that connects with your audience and is something that they identify with.

  • Source of Inbound traffic

 Social media is an important source of traffic in inbound marketing. It is a channel for content distribution and is great to attract new visitors to your site.

Every post, infographic or video you share can lead your followers to your site. This is the reason why more than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer see improved search engine rankings (Source: Social Media Examiner, 2015). Most of the social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter allow you to include a link in your post.

Make sure to include a call to action in your post. This way social media will give you a steady flow of traffic to your website. This works great for your inbound sales funnel as more targeted visitors convert to leads and eventually customers.

  • Get Detailed Customer Profile

 Never in the history of marketing have marketers been able to gather so much data about their audience. You can know the locations, interests, like and dislikes of your followers on social media. Social media is a gold mine of data for marketers. You can know your customers and prospects intimately by the conversations they are having and concerns they are voicing.

A simple search on your industry or topic can give you large amounts of data for research.

This detailed data on your followers can help you in market research, business idea validation and customer profiling.

  • Grow a Community

 Social media is a two way communication platform where you can grow a community. Some companies are using it to foster brand loyalty among their current customers. This can be done by encouraging conversations between customers.

You can also share tips on product usage and lifestyle. For example, if you are a company selling bicycle you can share information on fitness and diet to encourage a healthy lifestyle among your customers. This lets the customers know that you care and increases chances of them recommending you to their friends.

Brands are also using Facebook pages for handling customer complaints, feedback and product training. In fact social media has now emerged as the top choice for customer care contact.

Source: Sproutsocial

  • Increase Conversion rate

Yes! Social media has a direct impact on your sales too. Studies have shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

This is because you can get highly targeted leads from social media. Only users who are interested in your brand follow you and are more likely to visit your website. Also, a higher number of social media followers tend to improve trust and credibility in your brand which then drives higher conversions.

  • Support HR and R&D

 Social media has benefits beyond sales and marketing too. Human resource can use social media for recruiting, employee engagement and monitoring employee sentiment. According to Jobvite, 59% of recruiters rated candidates found through social media as “highest quality”. LinkedIn has become a major source of data on prospective candidates for HR.

Contacts and conversations on social media can also be helpful for product development and research teams. Social media is also the place for latest news and trends in the industry. Therefore all departments can benefit from having a presence in social media and being in touch with industry influencers.

With so many benefits at no extra cost, a brand must invest in social media platforms. It does take time to build your followers on social media but the opportunity of being in close touch with your market is something we must take advantage of. It is something the previous generations of businesses had no access to.

According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found that as little as six hours of effort per week were enough to generate increased traffic. Even an hour a day can show results over the long run.

Choosing the Best Social Media Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an integral part of digital marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are used by marketers to drive traffic, distribute content and provide a customer experience. According to Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers have increased their exposure through social media and 80% had positive results in terms traffic.

This blog is for you if you have your own business page and want to improve returns from social media marketing. Social media marketing includes all the activities done online to market your product or service. SMM can lead to more following, increased traffic to your website and customer relationship building.

Whether you are considering hiring a digital marketing agency or buying  SMM software to manage on your own, following is the information you must know to choose the best SMM service for your small business:

  • Have a Documented Strategy

Has your marketing agency developed a written documented Social Media Marketing Strategy? Not having a formalized plan will only lead to ineffective posting on social media platforms. Here is what you can do to document a formal strategy:

1. Know your audience Think of the profile of followers you want to generate on social media. Quality of traffic is as important as quantity. Develop buyer personas and document the needs of your target audience.

2. Develop content to address those needs. Content creation must fit into the broad content plan that you have developed.

3. Make a content calendar to plan when you will share your content. This will ensure consistency in your posting.

4. Also share interesting content by other players in your industry. This could be industry reports, studies and news. Post polls to engage users.

  • Use Social Media Marketing Tools

social-media-marketing-screenshot

There are many tools that allow you to manage all your social media accounts at one place. Platforms like HooteSuite, SproutSocial and Buffer are well known. Using these tools will allow you to schedule posts, track user engagement and monitor your growth on social media.

According to eMarketer, 60% of small business owners say they are not able to track ROI from their social media activities. Tools like Kissmetrics allow you to measure the ROI for each platform  and track traffic and conversions coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. It also tracks multiple site visits to give the long lifecycle return from a visitor.

  • SMM must be tailored to your business

The goals of each small business will be different on social media. Define your ultimate goal clearly. Do you want to drive social media traffic to your site or just want to increase brand awareness in the audience?

As a small business you may also have some budget constraints. Here’s the good news. You do not need a huge budget to market on social media. High level of targeting allows you to reach your relevant audience and convert them.

  • Visual Content

According to Buffer, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. Many of the social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are visual platforms. For this reason, any SMM service that you choose must have experience in producing infographics, images and videos for each channel.

  • Paid Marketing

All social media platforms have paid marketing tools that make your posts and ads visible to target audience. In fact, major social media networks are focusing on paid channels to monetize their platforms.

It has become difficult for business pages on Facebook to be visible without running an ad campaign. Instagram has introduced carousel ads and ‘shop now’ buttons to its ads.

social-media-usage-screenshot

As per above graph 92% of marketing professionals are using Facebook to advertise. You can start on Facebook with a small budget. The platform is sure to give you returns by micro targeting your audience based on age, location, interests and much more.

Although social media is only one part of digital marketing, it is by far emerging as the biggest and most influential part of it. According to Hubspot’s marketing statistics, more than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least two years report it helped them improve sales.

SMM failed for the others because succeeding at social media requires keeping up to date with the latest algorithm changes and new features. You can take help of a digital marketing expert who will take care of all the above points mentioned.

 

15 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools You Can Use in 2017

Social Media and its evolution into an effective digital marketing medium have changed the face of marketing big time.

At present social media marketing is not just confined to posting and sharing content out there. There are a variety of tools which helps users to retrieve data of their choice from the internet and assist them in creating effective marketing strategies and campaigns.

But what was the reason behind the invention of such tools?

Listening to the audience is crucial for any marketing business. It became impossible at a point of time owing to the vastness of the internet.  As a result, there was a desperate need for an innovation. Thus, social media monitoring tools were born.

Also called social media listening tools, they have great potential if used correctly. They can be the driving force and lucky charm behind your decision making in business.

Modern tools are much more advanced and integrated than it used to be. They can incorporate insight as well as analytics to come up with promising marketing strategies.

People often get confused while choosing a social media monitoring tool as there are plenty of them.

Even though monitoring tools like, HootSuite,  Keyhole, Google Alert, Klout etc. are famous nowadays. There are others which are considered as effective by many.

Let’s go through an infographic to know about the most effective tools in the market.

best-social-media-monitoring-tools-infographic

How Social Media Can Help SMEs to Acquire New Customers In 2017

Today, Social media presents entrepreneurs with a pool of opportunities to expand their businesses and boost their profitability. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are great platforms for small businesses to expand their businesses by creating conversations with prospective buyers and by serving as a medium for customer care services. Engaging with the customers via social media platforms helps understand their needs better and improve their service delivery.

A quick view on social media platforms:

Facebook:  Widely used social media platform all over the world with over 2 billion active users. It helps SMEs both in brand awareness as well as lead generation.

LinkedIn: One of the main factors which SMEs can’t avoid as there is no other platform better than LinkedIn for quality leads.

Twitter: Twitter is slightly different from other social platforms as it’s mostly news based. But still, it has immense power to change the image of your brand if done right.

Instagram: Owned by Facebook and is the fastest growing social media, thanks mainly to its focus on visuals. Best medium to promote your products as there is no better way to showcase your product’s quality than through pictures.

Pinterest: Another social discovery platform that gives importance to visuals. In this, you can portray the complete story behind your product via images.

In recent times, social media has helped both SMEs and multinationals to effectively handle customer relationships.

If you have a reasonable social media presence, let your customers understand that everything is under control.

One of the main areas where small businesses have made good use of social media is in advertising and marketing. Earlier, companies had to use television, newspapers or other conventional platforms to promote their services and products globally. Many people couldn’t afford this as it was an expensive exercise.

Today, with enough effort, anyone can create a good number of Facebook fans, twitter follows or YouTube views. And you can both advertise and market your products and services at minimal costs to a global audience.

SMEs can attract new customers via social media in various ways:

You must know how to engage people on your selected social media platforms. Researchers revealed that people spend their most of the time on social media. Posting image of your products or sharing information about your products and services in a correct way can help you to reach out your targeted audience.

1. Be Flexible: Every strategy may not work for you as situation changes. You may identify that it is time to change your current strategy and try out something new and more interesting than the previous. Don’t stick to a strategy which doesn’t work for you.
Produce Quality Content That Is Genuinely Useful: People usually think many times before purchasing any product. Experts say that people wish to purchase from the one which is quite popular or they have seen many times in their everyday life. So you must be very careful while marketing your products- use images, interesting words and so on…

2. Entertain Your Fans: Always engage your fans or followers with your posts. Keep an eye on what they like and their comments in your posts, you can get to know from their comments if they get bored. You are supposed to be persistent while implementing a plan and in monitoring your results to know whether you’re on a right track which can let you achieve your goals.

3. Social Organic Search: Sharing a post several time is good for organic search as it will make the post reach to a huge audience. Search engines assume that more shares a post has, the more useful and important readers deem it.

4. Follow Branding Guidelines: You must follow the branding guidelines whenever you are promoting your brands. As if you don’t follow those guidelines it may affect your brand negatively.

5. Social Ads: Social ads provide the most flexible content promotion and are proven best to turn visitors into leads and customers. Making use of social media ads can build your brand recognition and double your organic search click-through and conversion rates!

6. By Creating Events: Social media event marketing isn’t too much time consuming and moreover social media can play a huge part in an event promotion. Consider creating a branded area for people to create good images, take photos, etc.

7. By Initiating Group Discussions: As all know, Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites, so creating and participating in Facebook groups is simply beneficial. It will help you to get noticed by others.

8. Leveraging Social Media Influencers: Influencers are really one of the big deal in social media. Leveraging the influencers enables you to access to a huge circle of influence instantly, helping you to build more audience from which you can build a long-term and stable campaign.

To get the best from social media for your small or medium enterprise, you must lay out a plan first. Do you really need to join social networking site? What is the goal? The objective may be for promotional purposes, customer relations, marketing and advertising and sales among others. The goals have to be measurable.

The most important question, however is among the many social networking sites which are fit for your business? To answer this, consider reviewing where most of your customers belong. To stay safe, use more than one, have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for a start.

Social media tools that no “SME” should be without:

Social media can be the most powerful method of gaining exposure for SME globally as having a social media presence creates a close connection between the brand and its followers. Following are 4 tools which no SME can avoid.

Evernote: A free platform helping users to share their ideas and with this, you can also compile content.

Google Analytics: Provides free and enterprise tools so as to measure online & offline data to gain customer insights.

MailChimp: An online email marketing solution to send email, manage subscribers and track results.

Statusbrew: Allowing users to schedule posts and manage audiences on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Social media is an effective and adorable way for SME to attract their target audience all over the world.

If you’re an SME and not on social media, then you’re missing all the fun…

10 Reasons Why Businesses Need Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization (SMO) can be called as a viral publicity created through social media outlets and communities. The main intention of an SMO is to generate and increase the awareness of any product, brand or event.

Social media optimization is wider today. It includes using RSS feeds, social news and bookmarking sites, as well as social media sites, and video and blogging sites. You may wonder why businesses need the support of social media marketing for their growth. Well, here’s why:

Increase brand image and recognition through social media optimization. When people connect the brand with their life, it eventually promotes the brand image and its recognition among the crowd instantly.

Social media optimization can create brand awareness within a       short period. Unlike other marketing strategies it is done by connecting the brand with each customer directly. Also, search engine optimization helps to build a brand equity by creating a high value for the brand in the customer’s perception.

Gives you a genuine and sometimes worthy suggestions for your business, which promotes the growth of the brand and company. It even helps the management to take a smarter business decision with real-time information.

Social media increase the customer retention and sales through regular interactions and timely customer services. Customer retention is a big challenge faced by every industry today and so, SMO makes it simple, for you and your business.

SMO helps to develop a relationship of trust among the buyers. The intention to buy a product mainly depends on trust and its usefulness, and so, SMO is largely involved in this process.

SMO creates targeting and retargeting of your brand among the buyers. It means that SMO gives you the extra wings to target the crowd which you are intended to and even can relink with those customers by installing a social app in your company pages.

SMO enables you to generate more attention and publicity towards the events that the business sponsors, which in turn can increase the credibility and image of the brand.

It even reaches to the customers whom you weren’t so aware of or you couldn’t point out through the regular means of advertisement or marketing.

SMO acts as a vehicle to increase traffic to your website. It helps to increase the number of people visiting your website, extend their duration of stay in it and even encourage them to visit frequently.

Ultimately, the social media also focuses to create a humanisation of brand through regular interaction with the person rather than a robot or any other machine. So, you can make informed decisions with your historical data that you receive through your humanised approach towards your customer.

According to recent studies, about 90% of marketers believe that social media generates enormous exposure for their company and brand.  Social networks have now become an inevitable part of every business marketing strategy and the benefits of using social media are really great. If there is anyone who is not implementing this cost-effective resource is clearly missing out on a remarkable marketing opportunity for their business.

If you haven’t still tasted the fruit of social media optimisation, it is a good time to create an appropriate profile for your company by filling all the essential data and get set to gain the followers. A great marketing strategy will lead to an excellent social media optimisation for your brand. Every product or brand that is presented in the Internet is viewed 30% based on its title, 30% based on its presentation and the rest of the 40% is for the quality of content.

5 Ways to Track and Measure Your Social Media Success

Nowadays, Social media is everywhere starting from our smartphones, computers to tablets. Knowing this to be true, more and more small businesses are making use of it to reach their targeted market. But if you’re off to a great start and already grabbed great presence by keeping your audience engaged, then it is quite good. But how do you know what’s really working as there are many social media platforms which can be used for your business.

Measuring or tracking the overall success of any strategy can be a difficult task. But this can be easy as there are hundreds of ways now. But the main question is, do you know where to find them and do all they really necessary for your business?

Here is the answer for this…

On Facebook, it is quite easy to get the detailed analysis of your page. Just go to your FB page and click insights given on the top. Here you will be able to know about page likes, views, reach, engagements and also any actions occurred on the page.

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Not only this much, you can also view the total number of likes. This will help you to find out which time and type of post are best for you and also to monitor your audience reaction to your posts if any.

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If you log in to your twitter account page, you can find your followers and how many people you follow. But to view the statistics, you must visit the “Twitter Analytics” page. Click on the profile image given on the top right of your page and select analytics.

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As from the image itself it is clear that by visiting analytics page, you will come to know about the 28 days summary of your page. You can view gain/loss of your followers.

Checking analytics constantly can help you in your social media success. You can check the analytics of your Linkedin page without any difficulty. Just click on the “Me” given on the top right of your page and below MANAGE, select your page. It will navigate you to the new tab, where you can click the analytics tab and select visitors, updates, followers and legacy analytics from the dropdown.

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Measuring Pinterest analytics always will help you analyse which type of images are best for your business to grab the audience. To visualise this, confirm your website first and then go to settings drop-down menu given on the top right corner, click analytics.

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Constantly checking your YouTube analytics will help you to know more details about your videos such as Watch time, Average view duration and Views. It will also show you the key things that might be driving traffic to your video.

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You can also able to see your top 10 videos and its details. Actually, more your video content speaks to your target audience, better your results will be.

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Tracking and measuring your social media performance is really an important thing for every business type. These can help you to find out where you should focus while promoting your brand on social media. It’s a fact you can track your followers and engagement but more than that, it will help you to achieve success.