social media marketing Archives

How to Market Your Business With LinkedIn

Posted on April 19, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

LinkedIn is not just limited to job seekers and professionals; nowadays, businesses also make use of this platform for their growth.

Using LinkedIn, you can generate leads by making connections, establishing partnerships and also for creating exceptional brand awareness.

LinkedIn is an expert professional social platform. Organizations have direct access to their customers where they can market with their status updates, pictures and other posts.

As the platform consists of an entirely different crowd, LinkedIn marketing requires an alternative way to get the results you need.

In order to explore LinkedIn as a marketing network, here are 12 marketing hacks you can use to discover new clients, make new contacts, and eventually develop your business.

1. First, make your own profile

You might be wondering why your own profile comes first rather than your company profile on LinkedIn. No! We are not wrong! It is because your profile and the profiles of other employees of your organization make up the roof for your organization’s image on the network.

When targeted audience searches for your name and visits your profile, you need them to discover something catchy that influences you to stand out from other employees of your competitors.

There are a lot of chances to excite the people who view your profile. Focus on completing your profile and after that streamline your profile in the long run; including your new aptitudes, accomplishments, and cases of your outstanding work.

2. Create an outstanding company page

Your company LinkedIn page is important as it showcases your company’s image. Your company page should be simple enough and be inviting for your targeted customers to understand about your organization, learn more about the employees in the association, and hook up with your content.

Creating a company page is of free for everyone, so you don’t need to worry how much to pay for your profile. Need guidance on how to start a free LinkedIn page, you can find it here.

3. Determine your marketing goals

It is crucial to determine your LinkedIn marketing goals which generally include creating leads and raising awareness of the brand.

When you have an idea of what you need to achieve, it will be quite simpler to determine your target audience.

For instance, if your company is making toys and currently only focus on developing their business on one area, you can set your ad campaigns in a manner that it will be only shown to people who come from that particular place or near that place.

4. Enhance company page to find targeted customers

It is important that you need to enhance your company page to find targeted customers. You need to optimize your company page in such a way that it should appear easily when someone is searching for your company details.

Also, company page should be SEO friendly; for that, you need to do the following:

Suitable Keywords: Make sure that you include suitable keywords for defining what your company offers. The keywords should be the one the target audience is most probable of searching on the internet.
Link to your company website: Linking the company’s LinkedIn page with your company website is crucial as it will help in increasing your search ranking.
Not only your company website, you can even link to blogs and include marketing materials. Also, make sure employees of your organization update their LinkedIn profiles; as they add your company as their workplace, a link is made back to your company LinkedIn page.
Offer consistent content: A standout amongst other approaches to enhance your rankings and to include your company in search results is by consistently sharing relevant content.
All the more often as possible you share content that engages the audience, the higher your company will show up in Google’s search results.

5. Add the maximum number of followers

When you get followers for your company page, your updates show up specifically on their LinkedIn page. The more followers you have, chances are also higher your updates will get more views.

Encourage your employees to share the content on their page so that it will reach more people. Also don’t forget to promote company page via emails, messages and so on to various people to attract more followers.

Make sure that you add ‘Follow’ button on your page so that the visitors only need to click on that to always get your updates.

6. Post first-rate content

Ensure that your content is of high-quality because it should be engaging and also focus to achieve two objectives. First, it should help others to take care of an issue or how to carry out their activity better.

What’s more, then it sets you up as an ideal thought leader in that space. If you are offering viewers with valuable content, every aspect of it normally prompts more business.

7. Sponsor your high engaging update

Not only constant updates are necessary, but also when one of the updates goes viral you should think of sponsoring that update. It is an advertising strategy where businesses pay to promote their update into a user’s LinkedIn feed.

LinkedIn users have the privilege to select their interested industries so that they don’t have to receive unnecessary updates and messages from other industry.

So a sponsored update can be a fantastic method to promote thought leadership content which is valuable basically for the targeted audience with a solid invitation to take action.

By promoting your content through this system, your business can focus on a speciality crowd, increase visitors to the website and create potential customers if the content is sufficiently convincing. Know more about here.

8. Constantly influence targeted customers

It is essential to have consistent updates on your page. Images, colours, and content should be consistent with your site and other social media profiles of your business.

The page needs to be updated always to create the impression that the brand is dynamic and active. Keep in mind that it makes a terrible impression on audience mind if the social media networks are updated once in a month or haven’t updated in months.

9. Make sure of your custom URL

Everybody should ensure that they have their custom URL with their name, for example, http://linkedin.com/in/yourname. This is particularly critical for individuals who have a great deal of contact with potential customers..

When you ensure that you have your custom URL, you are also ensuring that your LinkedIn profile comes up in the search engine results.

10. Focus first on connections and then on relation building

Through LinkedIn, business owners or entrepreneurs can connect with their prospects, targeted partners, and other entrepreneurs. What’s more, once the connections are made, the owner can choose how to sustain those connections to build a relationship.

11. Utilize LinkedIn Advertisement campaigns

There are two ways of ad campaigns in LinkedIn – self-service ads and paid campaigns. Like setting up your company page, it is also critical to define the ad campaign goals to understand if it is boosting brand awareness, bringing leads, or building relationships.

12. Make use of LinkedIn analytics

When you are done with creating valuable content for your page, don’t think you are done with that. You also need to monitor your targeted audiences’ behaviours and preferences. For that, you need to make use of various analytic methods of LinkedIn.

For monitoring and enhancing your company page’s free campaign performance, you can make use of LinkedIn’s company page analytics.
Enhance your paid campaign performance with assistance from your LinkedIn campaign manager analytics.

Observing your LinkedIn analytics dashboard day by day can enable you to settle on information based choices that prompt better outcomes.

Sum Up

We hope that this article has helped you in getting an idea to launch and maintain your LinkedIn page to successfully market your products and services. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to share with us. We would love to hear you.

How Visual Content Enhances Your Social Media Marketing

Posted on November 21, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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

Posted on November 14, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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:

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

Posted on November 9, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

How Businesses Benefit from Social Media Marketing

Posted on October 12, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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.

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

Posted on August 10, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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

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.

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.

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

Posted on July 28, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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

Posted on June 27, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

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.

Best Social Media Posting Timings for Different Industries in 2017

Posted on April 7, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others can be your marketing weapons. But, only if you know how to optimize your content in a good way for your audience. From facebook posts to tweets, general information to personal experiences and stories, there are few factors that matter to the social media audience.

These are:

Do they actually see the content? (Post timings)
How relevant is the content to them?
Is the content attention grabbing and share-worthy?

All three questions deserve attention and require research. Unless a post gets all three of these right at least to some extent, it will get lost among the massive social media noise.

Here, we deal with Social Media post timings for different Industries in India. We have arrived at these timings looking at popular posts in popular pages, some of which are cited as examples.

Timing is the key factor of promotions of your service or product.

Your audience might prefer using social media sites during precise hours. It means if you share your content at the time when your audiences are on these networking channels, you will be able to gain more followers resulting in the increase of traffic.

Here are few information about when, what and why to post in social networks for various industries.

Entertainment

The entertainment sector is quite huge. And they have found a special liking for social media.

Ideal Social Media Platform– Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Reason-As Facebook itself is an entertaining factor, most people wish to see content related to entertainment in this platform. It is a perfect platform to promote entertainment related content.

In twitter you can see lots of entertainment content. It’s a news based social media. If you can creatively add content, your next 15 seconds of fame might be round the corner.

Time– Doing postings after 7 pm might show good results in your Facebook page as most of the people become free form their busy schedules at this time. Also, you should share posts after any type of events, even if it’s not part of your original social media plan. In Twitter, you can add tweets as soon as something new happens. It’s like breaking news. For example, the review of an anticipated movie just after it is premiered for the first time. Twitteratti is always online. So, anytime is a good time. Mentions and matter more than just time.

Youtube is really a good platform for promoting content relating entertainment. People usually like to see videos rather than reading a long content.

Type of posts– Events, offers, posters relating to your site in Facebook and quick short breaking news type or creative content in twitter.

Examples of good Entertainment pages– Zee Entertainment, Sun TV Network

Real Estate

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn

Reason– These social media platforms are perfect to start a real estate digital profile as it allows to interact with the buyers of past, present and future.

Time– It will be better to do promotions on page after 6 pm as it might be the time when your targeted audience wants to check out new commercials or updates about real estate.

Type of posts– Images of property, posts highlighting features of home such as front porch, hall, fireplace, interviews with architects, etc

Examples of good Real Estate pages– Indiabulls Real, Prestige Estate

Retail

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter

Reason– These platforms are must-have factors of a great customer acquisition strategy. All the given social media have effective ad tools and significant reach.

Time– Morning before 11 am and evening after 6 pm will be good to reach your audience in general. But, try to experiment with your timings as people will definitely respond differently to each retail product.

Type of posts– Products with eye-catching descriptions, engagement posts asking them to share their experience. Videos showcasing their unique features, product review videos, etc.

Examples of good Retail pages– Trent, Shoppers Stop

Education

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook

Reason– Facebook pages are really an important resource for students, parents and educational professionals to share and get experiences and ideas about today’s education.

Time– Posting after 1 pm will be good as students, tutors and parents would be busy with plenty of work in the morning.

Type of posts – Online education tools, good study materials, education news and engagement posts asking them to solve puzzle or quiz.

Examples of good Education related pages– Educomp Solutions Limited, McGraw-Hill Education India

Restaurants

Ideal Social Media Platforms – Instagram, Facebook

Reason– Both social media have lots of focus on photo/video posts and the audience is there for informal engagement.

Time –Just before 1 pm is a good time to post as during lunch hours most of the people login into social media networks and might make plans.

Type of posts – Special dishes of the day, images of well decorated food, recipes, engagement posts asking audience to share their recipes, experience, food coupons or offers, etc

Examples of good Restaurant pages – Indian Accent, Peshawri

Fashion

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

Reason– Fashion again depends a lot on the visual aspects. This makes Facebook and Instagram ideal platforms as both social media focus significantly on visual content. On the other hand, twitter helps spread fashion related news in quick time, and also encourages conversations between fashion experts, wannabes and followers

Time– Evening is the best time to post. After 4pm, people tend to look for entertainment and Fashion related content.

Type of posts– Dresses of modern trends, costume depending on the occasion that too with the suitable hairstyle if possible.

Examples of good Fashion pages– Digjam, Alps Industries

Automotive

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube

Reason– Buying a new automobile is a big decision for any consumer. They would be looking all over the web and checking with their friends circle to arrive at the final decision. Facebook is a medium where they can get a lot of validation for specific products. It is a personal space where people would share their experiences and opinions with friends in different ways. Because of this, it can be a very powerful medium for automobile advertisements. It sparks general consumer conversations as well.

Twitter on the other hand is great because it sparks conversations among automobile experts and between experts & common consumers. So, automobile brands should be on Twitter to influence the influencers.

Instagram is the hip thing right now, and why not? People love gorgeous pictures. So, serve some unique, glam shots of your product and get noticed.

YouTube is where all the automobile lovers look for reviews, tests, upcoming vehicle launches, etc.

Time– Posting after 5 pm is better to promote your brand. It might receive higher interaction rates as compared to other times.

Type of posts– Images, product reviews, unique selling points.

Examples of good automotive pages– Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd

Banking

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Twitter, LinkedIn

Reason– Twitter can establish your presence socially and can build trust and engagement with customers. It’s a worthy tool to improve customer service and to identify and respond to customer queries.

LinkedIn on the other hand is a professional network and ideally suited for advertising anything banking related.

Time– Evening is the best time to post on Twitter. For LinkedIn, morning is better. These are timings when people usually search for new content on these platforms.

Type of posts– Questions to Fans, Promotions, and Contests, informative posts.

Examples of good Banking pages– Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, HSBC Holdings

Healthcare

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube

Reason– Facebook is one of the best choices for promoting healthcare brands. Your targeted audience might be looking for healthy living ideas such as exercise and diet.

On the other hand, LinkedIn also plays a significant role in the healthcare field as several healthcare professionals use this platform for sharing their ideas and to do discussions.

Like Facebook and LinkedIn, Youtube plays a significant role in the healthcare industry as normally people prefer to see health related videos as it makes them clear what , when and how to do.

Time– Evening after 6 pm is good for sharing posts, ideas, and content regarding your services. As it is the time when you can see the highest interaction rates in the health related pages.

Type of posts– Benefits of using your services, engagements posts allowing the audience to ask their queries, health tip videos, etc…

Examples of good healthcare pages– Wockhardt Ltd, Apollo Hospitals

Fitness

Ideal Social Media Platforms– Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram

Reason– Posting content on facebook consistently is a way to ensure that you’re staying top-of-the-mind in your fans and followers. Likewise, posting unique and special images and videos on Instagram will help grab attention instantly.

LinkedIn helps to share status and experiences with their preferred industry. But twitter, a real- time fast-paced social network allows you to target a completely different audience and customers for your gym.

Time– Evening and night are the best time to post. After 4 pm till morning 5 am, people tend to look for fitness related ideas.

Type of posts– Engaging question, photo, link, or article.

Examples of good fitness pages– Talwalkars Gym, Fitness First

Conclusion

Don’t take this as final— just test the above data once for your respective industry. You’ll be shocked with the results as this might increase the social media traffic by up to 40-50 %. So, good luck and get social today!