4 Social Media Tools for Beginners

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The ability of social media marketing to effectively promote and establish a brand is widely dependent on the tools employed. These tools provide not only fast traffic to the content but also connect the target audience to brand with customization of search results. Here are some of the most effective social media tools used by the best digital marketers to enhance their brand visibility.

1. Hootsuite: Hootsuite is one of the most extensively used social marketing tool adopted by the leading marketers. With a convenient scheduling feature and Chrome plug in that lets you post across all the major social media platforms, you can see the feeds across various social networks simultaneously, and launch a critical analysis of what is working and what is not.

2. Sprout Social: Another great tool accessible via a mobile app enables you to watch the social content along with monitored keywords searches in a single stream. It also offers scheduling of the content publishing and management of social posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Google +; all on the go.

3. Mention: Most of the digital marketers rely on this powerful tool which provides great insights to the keywords used across the various digital platforms including forums and blogs. It lets you track any mentioning of your brand and also allows you to respond and share it.

4. Post Planner: Facebook is still the most preferred platform a search engine marketing company Delhi targets to take the advantage of. Post Planner is an app of Facebook which provides the customized trending content according to your niche. It also lets you schedule your Facebook posts in advance and do the analysis of most viral posts with loads of status ideas to enhance the brand presence on Facebook.

There is no shortage of both free and paid social networking tools to enhance and develop the digital marketing strategy. These are just four of the easiest tools to begin to use. Their application makes all the difference.

10 Tips to Extend Your Social Media Reach

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Social media is more and more becoming the objective tool for digital marketing. This is not to say that other forms of digital marketing such as email, SEO, and Pay per click are on the decline. It’s just that never before have so many people be so easy to reach, and that reach really is the topic of today. How do we manage to reach thousands upon thousands of people through social media without knowing who they are. The passive answer is that we rely on people’s internet browsing patterns to inform algorithms to show them ads and products or services that may be of interest to them. But no ones browsing patterns are the same and we can’t just take a back seat and depend on the forces at work to reach people for us. We must become that force and perpetuate our own reach to some degree. The best way to increase reach on social is to treat it like a Google search: through optimization. Timelines, news feeds, streams, etc. are so commonly influenced by algorithms now that SMO should be a focus on every network.

You want to make sure to engage the people already seeing your posts, so they’ll spread to other users. You can do this by:

  1. Focus on the right networks – no use in spending a few hours a week on a platform your target audience doesn’t have accounts on
  2. Optimize your profile – profiles themselves should be optimized for discovery
  3. Stay evergreen – since posts aren’t always shown as soon as they’re posted anymore, create evergreen social content
  4. Post smarter, not more – focus on engagement and quality instead of posting a thousand times per day
  5. Use targeting – some networks let you target your posts to specific segments of your audience, which you can take advantage of to write more relevant and personalized content
  6. Post during slow hours – buck the trends and post when the number of users online is lower, when no other brands want to post
  7. Mix it up – when it comes to post types and formats, post a variety of each
  8. Promote your social presence – cross-promote your social media profiles and content on your website, collateral, and other online channels
  9. Balance promotional and useful – always think of the user before your own goals, and balance talking about your business with other topics
  10. Interact – engage your followers by starting conversations and replying to anyone who talks about you

Marketing Takeaways from the Exponential Growth of Snapchat

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Snapchat is the fastest growing social media platform with an estimated 200 million monthly active users that send 700 million photos/videos each day, viewed 500 million times per day, and there’s something marketers can take away from their exponential growth. 

snapchat

In recent years, Snapchat has become a mainstay in the world of social media and marketing, creating an immersive environment that allows users to interact with their favorite brands and even celebrities in real time. It’s methodology of allowing information to be disposable has done wonders to create products and brands, whether corporate or personal, that are completely humanized and relatable and it’s this precise facet that has made the platform so intriguing to marketers as the app continues to grow. What can we learn while traversing the snap landscape? In order to figure this out we have to first go back and take a look of the marketing strategy of the company itself. To begin with, Snapchat had an ingenious and ultimately unintentional marketing strategy/growth hack as a sexting app when it really wasn’t trying to be one. To quote company founder, Evan Spiegel, “It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet everyone decided everything should stick around forever. I think our application makes communication a lot more human and natural…Ultimately, no, Snapchat Isn’t About Sexting.”

This was always the way snapchat looked at itself internally, however, conveying and executing this vision and value proposition was never going to be easy in the marketplace of messaging apps. This can also be evidenced by the early feedback Spiegel received from VC firms, who he says told him, “This is the dumbest thing ever…”

To overcome this problem, The initial app brilliantly included subtle ways to egg the masses and general media on to believe its sole existence was to help teenagers sext, such as ‘trying’ to prevent screenshots, making messages expire by default etc.  This led to mainstream media to start an extended firestorm about how its dangerous for teenagers, asking parents to be wary about it, focusing about how it could never guarantee privacy of pictures and so on.

Playing along to this tune gave Snapchat tons of free publicity, not just any publicity but just the kind of publicity that mattered to their core demographic of rebellious teenagers who liked things their parents hated. User adoption in this group took off and true to snapchat’s earlier vision, they were not a sexting only app after all.

The biggest takeaways for any company from this strategy are

1. Understand your core demographic and what appeals to them, both from a product and marketing perspective

2. Marketing is not always about conveying your vision directly to your market

3. Any publicity is negative only if it is perceived to be negative by your core users

4. Getting featured in the mainstream media can be something meticulously planned for, but not always monetarily expensive

5. Growth hack features can take many ways, shapes and forms, not necessarily only the iterative ‘product-market’ fit we commonly read about

The Key Facets of Social Influence.

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In today’s social media world there is a constant battle being fought by companies and individuals to become as influential as possible. The desired result in becoming an entity with major social influence is a big return on investment and drawing new customers to your product. Whether that be tangible product such as a bookcase from Ikea or something abstract such as humor is besides the point. What matters is that the ideas are getting exposure and circulating. But how does one measure their social influence? There are programs out there such as Klout that do exactly that, but figuring out how Klout manages to come up with the score factors in a great many things.

There are several methods of evaluating someone’s chances of being influential, from celebrity status to tracking of social media behavior, and all are highly relevant.  But if we’re looking at this from the viewpoint of the marketer’s ability to engage influencers, then the critical factors actually have to be willingness, expertise and return.

On the willingness front,there needs to be a connection between someone’s behavior (fan counts, followers, Klout score) and their actual interest in engaging with a brand.  As any decent marketer will tell you, past performance is no indication of future results. When it comes to social influence, just because you exhibit influential behavior at one point, say a tweet that gets multiple retweets, doesn’t necessary mean you’ll become a mainstay that can continuously drive return. The key first step is whether you can continuously convince someone to engage and whether they will raise their hand to get involved.

With expertise in mind, influence is a skill like any other.  The more you practice it, the better you are at it. Someone who metrically appears influential and has the willingness to engage still needs to understand how to be effective.  In today’s social media world, this means being authentic and aware of not shilling themselves out and only engaging with brands they actually appreciate.  There’s also the necessity to understand which tools they can use effectively: which platform are they best at creating content for? Youtube? Twitter? A blog?  As platforms evolve, so do the skills necessary to create influence that matters, and that means influence must be measured through people’s ability to get better at being influential.

Finally, there’s the most important component: return.  After willingness and expertise comes the necessity to deliver value.  Tools need to be developed not to just measure someone’s likelihood to influence, but then the result of their specific influence when it occurs.  These measurements can be produced on the group level (these 10,000 people created this return), or the individual level (this one tweet created this much return) but whatever scale it’s at, it can’t be ignored.  The ultimate guidepost is whether someone’s influence actually influences.

The Simple Steps to Increasing Social Media Engagement

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Social Media: Fans, Friends, and Followers

Growing a following on social media is a major component of running a business. It’s a major source of interest that tends to lend towards lead conversion, so it’s important that you do it correctly or else risk being dead in the water. It can be an intimidating process, but that’s only if you look at it from the wrong perspective: treating it purely as a business tool. This follows the philosopher, Kant‘s, categorical imperative  which dictates that you should not treat people as a means to an end but rather as an end in themselves. Put more simply, in real life you do not try to make friends simply so that you may use them to satisfy some other need but that you try to make friends because you want them to be your friend. Social media is no different if you go about it the right way. Rather than approach it as a way to build your business your should approach it as a way to relate to others and give to them what you get back. That being said, here are a few tips that will ensure you are able to build successful social media channels going forward.

Win the first impression battle

What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.

Be human

Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand. People don’t want to have a conversation with a cold corporate account.

Be patient yet persistent

You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right. Have patience and persistence. Practice different methods of attracting new followers with A/B testing. Slow down, work hard, and do it right, and at the end of the game you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.

Teach them

What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old same old you wrote two years ago that is over used and over sold, by everyone everywhere.

Connect emotionally

Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on social media, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day managing our clients’ account, and I am replying to posts I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond. It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card. Take this example and flip the script. You should be the one grabbing attention by making people feel good, by making them laugh, etc.

Focus on relationships

The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard. Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge so that those relationships become cemented and so that new connections are lured into wanting to start a relationship with you.

Inspire them

Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire … Connect …Achieve. To do this you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better. How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.

 

Make it easy

People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team and not the other way around. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.

Listen

The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen, similar to real life. In summary, building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.

10 Lessons in Startup Marketing

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So you started a business and you’ve got a product, but don’t know how to go about marketing it to your community? Let us help.

 

1. Marketing is about making people want you before they need you. The truth is, less than 1% of the population is in the market for what you probably sell right now. With the exception of paid search, reaching people who want what you sell right now is like playing the lottery. You’re just trying to get lucky. The right way to go about marketing is to start influencing people’s decisions long before they need to make them.

2. The best way to tell a great story is to be a great story. Creating a bar that revolves around being  a dog park is a more effective way to make people believe you’re a fun and dog-loving bar than merely telling people you allow dogs. Actions will always speak louder than words. When you make this actionable, you’ll appreciate just how much marketing influence you actually posses.

3. You’re probably talking people out of doing business with you. The main goal of any marketing endeavor is to get new customers through the proverbial door. But we can assume everyone, including already existing customers, that calls you, emails you or walks in your door is looking for a reason to do business with you. Keep old customers in mind when developing marketing strategies by generating incentive for them to return such as rewards programs while also looking ahead. Also, ask yourself the following questions: What is your closing rate? How can you improve it? This opportunity is neglected far too often.

4. Win the heart and the mind will follow. Decisions aren’t made in the left brain. With every decision you take, every judgement you make, there is a battle between intuition, logic, and emotional response.According to Simon Sinek, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. You have to establish an emotional connection. Today, it’s all about Engagement Marketing. When people are shopping, who do they shop for? Themselves. Not for you, not for me. So you need to become their friend, and as a friend, you look out for their best interest. That  in and of itself is the basis of winning over the heart of a customer.

5. Get customer input. The endgame of any business endeavor is to to generate a profit and the only way to do this is to be a company that people want to give their hard earned cash to. So, what better way to become that company that to keep your ear to the ground and listen to what people are saying when they talk about your business? Granted, it won’t always be positive, and it might make you upset, but you should treat criticism as an opportunity for growth and fine tuning.

6. Don’t stop marketing once you’ve reach your sales goals. After someone makes a decision (either to buy from you or not) your agenda with them, technically, is stripped. What you do in these moments speaks significantly louder to people than what you do while trying to get a piece of their wallet. How about going above and beyond after the fact and creating an experience they can’t help but tell people about? “Hey, you’ll never believe what happened when __________.” This is easily accomplished through generating incentive through rewards programs, discounts, great customer service, and going above and beyond expectations.

7. Blog Blog Blog! It’s one of the easiest ways to be seen as an expert in your field and lets people know that there are real people behind your business who care about them, making it easier for people to relate and reciprocate. Creating your own content, no matter the medium allows you to control the conversation and free up new marketing channels.

8. Help people without asking for anything in return. This goes along with tip number 6. Going above and beyond and being altruistic is a quality that can never be overrated. Most people need to see you as a resource – someone who has something valuable to them before they choose to buy anything. You need to be the one who starts the conversation.

9. Fine tune where you need to be present. There are more types of marketing media out there than ever before and the field is only going to get more and more crowded. Jay Walker-Smith, President of advertising firm, Yankelovich, says, “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970’s to as many as 5,000 a day,” today. Just because a marketing tool or opportunity exists doesn’t mean you need it. It’s better to have one quality marketing campaign that to have 30 average ones. Do research on your target market and fine tune your efforts and opportunities to reach those people instead of wasting resources trying to be everywhere at once.

10. If you’re taking shortcuts, you’re bound to fail. Becoming successful only comes with hard work unless you’re born with a golden spoon in your mouth. There are no shortcuts in marketing. The less effort you put into your outreach, the less likely it is to be innovative, the more likely it will come across as artificial, and the more likely it is to be ignored. Creating things that gain and hold attention is difficult. That’s why it requires so much work to get right.