Summary: The content that works well for one social platform may not work well for another. That's because every social platform has its own unique formula for a successful post.
How to on each platform and best times of day to post.
Sunday 27 April 2014
How to Create Perfect Posts for the Most Popular Social Platforms
Source: http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/24944/how-to-create-perfect-posts-for-the-most-popular-social-platforms-infographic#ixzz305dwi7Jc
Summary: The content that works well for one social platform may not work well for another. That's because every social platform has its own unique formula for a successful post.
How to on each platform and best times of day to post.
Summary: The content that works well for one social platform may not work well for another. That's because every social platform has its own unique formula for a successful post.
How to on each platform and best times of day to post.
50 Tweetable Twitter Tips You Wish You Knew Years Ago
Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/twitter-tips-list
Summary: 50 tips for twitter training
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Summary: 50 tips for twitter training
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Optimizing Your Twitter Profile
1) Make yourself easy to recognize by using a close-up headshot of yourself as your profile picture. [click to tweet]
2) Make the most of your Twitter bio. Show off your skills and uniqueness without over-hashtagging. [click to tweet]
3) Twitter's new profile design dimensions: header photo = 1500 x 500 px | profile pic = 400 x 400 px. [click to tweet]
4) Include your URL in your Twitter bio, not just the URL field, to optimize for mobile users. [click to tweet]
What You Should Tweet
5) Structure your tweets like this to increase clicks: KEY MESSAGE - LINK #HASHTAG AFTERTHOUGHT [click to tweet]
6) Don't be entirely self-promotional on Twitter. Mix up your content and interact with your followers. [click to tweet]
7) Establish yourself as an industry thought leader by adding commentary to the links you tweet. [click to tweet]
8) Try keeping tweets short -- 100 characters instead of 140 -- to let people add their own commentary. [click to tweet]
9) Curate content you tweet from a wide variety of sources to keep your followers interested. [click to tweet]
10) Let your personality shine on Twitter. Tweet funny/interesting content along with the business content. [click to tweet]
11) Share images in your tweets to increase engagement, since images now appear inline on Twitter. [click to tweet]
12) Be real. It's okay to tweet mundane things like weather commentary or what you're eating SPARINGLY. [click to tweet]
Increasing Twitter Engagement
13) Engage with others and show appreciation for their tweets by using the favorite button as a "like." [click to tweet]
14) Be responsive on Twitter, not a robot. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, answer it! [click to tweet]
15) If you retweet every single tweet you're mentioned in, followers will think you crave attention. [click to tweet]
16) If someone regularly retweets or replies to you, add them to a list so you can return the favor. [click to tweet]
17) Twitter is a two-way conversation. Tweet questions to encourage your followers to interact with you. [click to tweet]
18) Nobody HAS to share your content on Twitter. So if someone authoritative retweets you, thank them. [click to tweet]
19) Run Twitter contests using hashtags to increase engagement quickly. It's gratifying to win! [click to tweet]
Making Sense of the Chaos
20) You don't have to follow back everyone that follows you. Doing so would clutter your stream. [click to tweet]
21) Use hashtags (#) to join relevant conversations and make your tweets easy to find. [click to tweet]
22) Use lists grouped by industry or topic to follow people you want to pay attention to on Twitter. [click to tweet]
23) Create public Twitter lists (vs. private) so members know when they're added and likely reciprocate. [click to tweet]
24) Save time by using tools like Tweetdeck or HubSpot's Social Inbox to schedule tweets for the week. [click to tweet]
25) Blocking people doesn't "block" them from your tweets, but removes them from your Twitter stream. [click to tweet]
Avoiding Silly Twitter Mistakes
26) Don't tweet at people with links to your blog hoping to get their attention. That's called spam. [click to tweet]
27) Don't send auto-DMs. Ever. No exceptions. Just don't do it. If you do, people will unfollow you. [click to tweet]
28) Don't #overuse #hashtags #in #your #tweets. Limit yourself to 1-3 hashtags per tweet. [click to tweet]
29) If you favorite every tweet someone is mentioned in, even via automation, you'll seem like a stalker. [click to tweet]
30) Don't gripe on Twitter. People like to surround themselves with positive people, not complainers. [click to tweet]
31) Long personal chats should happen over DM. Otherwise whoever follows both of you will be inundated with your tweets in their Twitter stream! [click to tweet]
32) Don't repeatedly follow and unfollow Twitter users seeking attention. They will notice ... in a bad way. [click to tweet]
Optimizing Your Twitter Stream
33) Use landscape-oriented images on Twitter, using approximately a 2:1 dimension, for the best appearance on the Twitter feed. [click to tweet]
34) Try incorporating an image into every three to four tweets so they're more prominent in a user's feed. [click to tweet]
35) Track which tweets get more replies, retweets, favorites, and clicks. Use this data to influence future tweets. [click to tweet]
36) B2C brands report 17% more engagement on weekends. B2B see better engagement Monday - Friday. [click to tweet]
37) Share important tweets four times throughout the day using different angles to cover all time zones. [click to tweet]
38) If Twitter is your morning task, schedule tweets throughout the day instead of posting them all at once. [click to tweet]
Getting More Twitter Followers
39) Measure your Twitter success not by your number of followers, but by the quality and level of engagement. [click to tweet]
40) Follow twenty people with similar interests per day. That's not overwhelming, and reciprocal followers will add up quickly. [click to tweet]
41) Tweet about Twitter itself to get more followers. @HubSpot's most-shared content is about Twitter. [click to tweet]
42) Don't follow more than a couple hundred people per day. Twitter might mistake you for a spam bot and suspend your account! [click to tweet]
Having Good Twitter Etiquette
43) If you wouldn't say something to someone's face, don't say it to them on Twitter. [click to tweet]
44) Don't try to start arguments with people on Twitter. A friendly debate is fine, but respect others' opinions. [click to tweet]
45) Don't be a troll on Twitter, no matter how angry you are. For most, Twitter isn't really anonymous, and your public anger could come back to haunt you later. [click to tweet]
46) If you tweet spoilers while live-tweeting TV shows or sporting events, use the right hashtag so people can filter it out. [click to tweet]
Optimizing Your Blog for Twitter
47) Optimize your blog post titles so when people tweet them, they're catchy enough for people to click on the links. [click to tweet]
48) Add social sharing buttons like AddThis to your blog to make each post easy for readers to tweet. [click to tweet]
49) Use Click to Tweet to provide bits of text in your blog posts readers can tweet in a single click. [click to tweet]
50) Don't overthink your tweets. If tweeting for a company, be agile without implementing a huge approval process. [click to tweet]
Ideas on digital business models
Source: https://medium.com/p/4dbb1d82eb52
Top Tip: ... we’re living in a world where there have never been more sustainable business models. Justin Fox neatly sums up a lot of them, working off Marc Andreessen’s list:
Summary:
So here’s the idea: let’s say we can serve up high-quality Fusion-branded content to a new generation of digital natives, and that they love that content. If and when that happens, it’s going to be a lot easier for the cable companies to persuade that audience to pay for cable TV if their cable lineup also includes Fusion. The content won’t be the same, of course — but the brand will be. And the cable companies are going to want the Fusion brand on their lineup because that’s the only way they’re going to be able to seem relevant to anybody under the age of 32. The result: Fusion has negotiating leverage with the cable channels, and becomes very valuable.
Why I’m joining Fusion - Felix Salmon
Top Tip: ... we’re living in a world where there have never been more sustainable business models. Justin Fox neatly sums up a lot of them, working off Marc Andreessen’s list:
At one point Andreessen offered up the “most obvious 8 business models for news now & in the future.” After listing today’s staples, (1) advertising and (2) subscriptions, he continued with (3) premium content (that is, “a paid tier on top of a free, ad-supported one”); (4) conferences and events; (5) cross-media (meaning that your news operation also generates books, movies, and the like); (6) crowd-funding; (7) micropayments, using Bitcoin; and (8) philanthropy. Nicholas Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker’s Web site and a co-founder of the digital sort-of-magazine The Atavist, chimed in with two more: (9) “while building product you’re passionate about, create software you then license widely!”—The Atavist’s approach—and (10) “fund investigative business stories + then short stocks before publishing,” a reference to the billionaire Mark Cuban’s controversial relationship with Sharesleuth.
Summary:
So here’s the idea: let’s say we can serve up high-quality Fusion-branded content to a new generation of digital natives, and that they love that content. If and when that happens, it’s going to be a lot easier for the cable companies to persuade that audience to pay for cable TV if their cable lineup also includes Fusion. The content won’t be the same, of course — but the brand will be. And the cable companies are going to want the Fusion brand on their lineup because that’s the only way they’re going to be able to seem relevant to anybody under the age of 32. The result: Fusion has negotiating leverage with the cable channels, and becomes very valuable.
How To Self-Publish Your Book Through Amazon
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2014/04/25/how-to-self-publish-your-book-through-amazon/
Summary: It says it in the title.
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Paul Jarvis self-published his latest book, “Everything I Know.” Between the print and ebook versions it sold a total of 4,000 copies in just a few months.
Summary: It says it in the title.
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How To Self-Publish Your Book Through Amazon
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Not so long ago, the first hurdle for an aspiring book author was to get past the gatekeepers. First you would have to spend weeks or months writing a book proposal and sample chapters. Then you might contact a bunch of agents to see if they would be interested in pitching your book to major publishers. Most would grumble that your idea would not be likely to make a lot of money, or that it sounded “more like a magazine article than a book.” At this point you might abandon the project or, if you were really persistent, send your proposal directly to publishers. If they didn’t ship the package back to you unopened, they would either send you a form rejection letter or make you a lowball offer.
Various tools for self-publishing have taken down these barriers for authors who prefer to go it alone. I’m one of them (see my post, “How My Book Became A (Self-Published) Best Seller). Paul Jarvisis another. He’s a web designer and author who has self-published four books, including Everything I Know, which between the print and ebook versions sold a total of 4,000 copies. His upcoming book,The Good Creative, due out June 4, explores 18 traits of the world’s most interesting and respected creative professionals. In the following guest post he provides a roadmap to the various Amazon services that have liberated authors from traditional publishers. You can follow him on Twitter.
Paul Jarvis self-published his latest book, “Everything I Know.” Between the print and ebook versions it sold a total of 4,000 copies in just a few months.
Most independently published authors fall into one of two camps: Those selling books on their own website using an ecommerce tool; and those selling only through Amazon.
I started out in the first camp two years ago when I used Gumroad to self-publish the ebook, Eat Awesome. Gumroad allows you to sell a variety of digital products from your own web site, including ebooks, music and software. Setup takes less than five minutes. They take a very small percentage (5% + 25 cents) of each sale. I sold 5,410 copies of the book I published with them, netting about $12,033 (after they took their fees).
My second book, Be Awesome at Online Business, I sold exactly same way. I also signed up for distribution through Bookbaby, but didn’t promote those avenues, so I noticed little or no sales.
Curious about Amazon’s services for independent authors, last year I listed my third book, Everything I Know, for sale exclusively through their website. Sales during the first four months exceeded 4,000 downloads. That’s more than double the number of downloads of either of the previous two books during the first four months of publication. I also now sell paperback copies, which Amazon prints as orders come in, accounting for 10% of my book sales each month. Typically I sell 70 to 100 print books per month, netting around $400 per month from that version of the book. In addition, I’m averaging about 700 digital downloads per month, which net me $2,870.
Amazon’s suite of services for independent authors makes it possible for me and many other authors to bypass traditional publishing companies. It gives us the tools to create and sell digital books; print and sell paperback copies on demand; add author pages and even market books. Here are five Amazon services, all of them free to set up, that every indie author needs to know about.
Kindle Direct Publishing. This service, known by the shorthand KDP, enables indie authors to sell the digital version of their books on Amazon.com (or other Amazon country websites). There’s no charge to upload the file. Authors get royalties of 35% to 70% of the sale price, depending on whether the book is sold on KDP or through another Amazon service called KDP Select (more about that below).
Unlike most other digital retailers, KDP uses the format known as “mobi.” This is simply the file format for digital books that Amazon uses, and it works on all Kindle devices. You can upload your book on Amazon using other formats as explained on the Amazon site, including ePub, which is the most popular one (that’s what Apple uses), and others such as HTML, Doc, and RTF. However, in my experience it looks better if you start out with a mobi file because any formatting you create – for example for images, charts and tables – stays intact.
Let’s say you have written your book in Word and want to convert it to mobi. You can do this using the free software Calibre (available for PC or Mac). I’ve used the Mac version and it works very well if your Word document has no page numbers. For best results it should include links to each chapter in a table of contents that’s formatted to meet Amazon’s specifications listed here.
Another option is to pay one of the many digital publishing or formatting companies that offer the service of converting a Word file to the digital format of your choice. Pricing is either per book or based on the number of words. With a professional service you should expect to pay in the hundreds of dollars to have your book set up, formatted and converted from a Word DOC to a mobi or ePub file. You can locate less expensive services through fiverr.com. But as with so many other things, you typically get what you pay for, so look at the company’s portfolio and speak with some of their author clients before retaining the firm.
You will also have the ability to preview your Kindle book before it’s published on Amazon.com, so if you catch any mistakes, you can make your changes and re-upload.
One of the nice things about KDP is that Amazon does not require digital exclusivity. So authors can still sell the same digital book anywhere else on the Internet on through other stores like The Nook Book Store or iTunes.
KDP Select. By using this service, rather than the plain-vanilla one, you tap into Amazon’s marketing muscle. To do that you must give them an exclusive on your digital book for 90 days. In return, KDP Select pays higher royalties (closer to the 70% mentioned earlier), and allows those books to be part of the lending library for their Prime Members. Authors get paid a percentage of the total amount Amazon Prime members pay for each book lent out.
For example, if the total amount Prime members pay in April is $1 million and 300,000 titles are lent out, if your book is lent out 1,500 times you would make .5% or $5,000. Last month it worked out to $2.12 per book for me, which is average. This month alone 127 people have grabbed Everything I Know from the lending library, so it’s a decent chunck of “sales.”
KDP Select also gives you the option to make your book free or discounted for up to five days, as part of your promotional campaign. During that time, it appears on sales pages on Amazon.com, which drives more people to it. Though you will obviously earn nothing from these sales, it can help build buzz for your book just as you are launching it.
If you subscribe to the theory that offering a book for free – even briefly – can ultimately pay off, there are also lots of websites that promote free or discounted Kindle books to massive audiences. Bookbub is the largest, with over 2 million subscribers. Bookbub and other larger promotion websites will charge you a fee (from $40 in less popular categories to $400 to $1,500 in very popular categories) to advertise with them. I think it’s worth it (if you can afford it), to put your book in front of a much larger audience.
Using Bookbub, Book Gorilla (the second largest Kindle promotion company) and my own marketing efforts, I drove 39,000 downloads to Everything I Know in just three days. Four weeks later, after the book went back to the normal price of $6.99, sales continued at a slightly higher volume than prior to the sale. I have now sold more than 4,000 copies.
Based on my conversations with other indie authors and their posts on various message boards and blogs, other authors also see huge sales on days when their books are discounted, and even more massive downloads on days when those books are free. This, in turn, leads to higher than usual sales on the days right after promotions (when the book has gone back to its regular price), and generally helps to expand awareness of the book.
CreateSpace. This is Amazon’s print-on-demand service for indie authors. It lets you sell a paperback copy of your book either on CreateSpace.com or directly from Amazon.com. All you have to do is upload a PDF based on their specifications and set how much you’d like to make. (They give you a base price; you make the public price something over that.)
You don’t pay for book printing – you simply collect a commission whenever it sells. You’re in charge of the price and associated commission as well. When you upload your book, Amazon tells you what their costs are — $2.50 for example, for a 150-page book. From there you can price your book at anything higher, say $9. Under that scenario, for each paperback sale, Amazon keeps $2.50 and the shipping costs that it charges the buyer, and you keep $6.50.
Authors design (or can have CreateSpace design for an extra fee) a cover and upload their content in PDF format. Once it’s uploaded you can download or physically order a “proof” copy or view it directly on their website. That way, if you need to make changes, you can do that before it’s made available for sale.
CreateSpace also lets you link a Kindle version of your book to the paperback. This way, purchasers can pick their format on the same sales page, which is a helpful customer-oriented feature. All it requires is that you upload a properly formatted Kindle version as well. If you’re already added your Kindle version to KDP or KDP Select, Amazon will connect your paperback to the digital version on the same page on their website.
Print on demand is perfect for most indie authors because it’s hard to judge how well your book will sell, and ordering copies before they’re sold can be a massive expense. With CreateSpace, those obstacles disappear. However the current limitations are that there’s no hardcover option and I’ve found the binding and spines of the books printed through them are weak. You also have to use one of only a few options for the size of the book.
I didn’t think print was worth it for independently published authors since it can leave you with unsold inventory (which you will need to store at your house or arrange to store elsewhere). But as soon as I started offering paperback copies of Everything I Know through CreateSpace, I noticed that at least 10% of my sales were physical copies. Since it’s printed on demand through Amazon, there’s no inventory — just royalties, automatically deposited to my bank account each month.
Amazon Author Central. Whether your book is published by a traditional publisher or you are an indie author, Amazon lets you create an author page like this one. You can add your biography; your photo; editorial reviews; and your blog’s RSS feed (so it grabs new articles). It’s even possible to share upcoming speaking and book-signing events and show your latest tweets.
Every Amazon page for your book links to this enormously useful marketing tool, so it cross-links other books you have published, too. On your author page, readers can even sign up to get email notifications from Amazon when you release new books.
Having an Author Central page doesn’t require using other Amazon services. All that’s necessary is that one or more of your books is for sale in any way on Amazon. From there it’s simply a matter of letting Amazon know that you’re the author and following the prompts to set up the page.
Amazon Associates. This is an affiliate service that pays you for linking to products on Amazon.com. You can use this to link to your own books (it’s not against the rules), and make an extra 4% to 8% on each sale. You also get commissions from any other item someone buys on Amazon.com if they landed on the site by using your affiliate link.
Anyone can sign up for a free affiliate account — you don’t even need to be an author. After that, there’s a step-by-step walk-through for generating affiliate links. I use affiliate links on my own website, as that’s a large sales channel. So each time someone clicks the link to buy my book from my website, I get paid twice: once from the affiliate and once from the royalties I receive.
On average, I make a few hundred dollars each month from my affiliate account, because every time I link to my books from my website I use an Amazon Associates URL that’s got a tracking ID attached. This tracking ID tells Amazon that I sent that sale to them, so they’ll send me a commission of that sale.
There are important rules to be aware of with Amazon Associates. For instance, you aren’t allowed to use associate links in newsletters, emails or PDFs. It’s also against the rules to shorten your affiliate link on social media (which Twitter and Facebook do automatically).
The downside of selling on Amazon is that authors don’t get access to customer information (like name or email addresses) and the royalties are lower than they would be selling directly on an author’s own website, using services such as Gumroad.
Returns or refunds are handled by Amazon. I’ve never seen a refund request for any paperback copies of my book, but Kindle ebook purchasers do request them within the seven days that Amazon allows. Of course some buyers abuse the system, reading the book and then returning it. There are even petitions from authors to stop or shorten the refund time. But I don’t object to the policy. The return rate for my Kindle books has only been about 1%. And I even think the policy helps encourage customers to take a chance on indie authors. If they dislike the book enough to request a refund, they should get one.
Self-publishing through Amazon makes sense for authors who are willing to give up the customer details and accept lower royalties for a potentially higher sales volume. I’ve seen a massive spike in sales by selling this way, rather then with services like Gumroad. Everything I Know, which has only been out a few months, has already had double the sales of my previous book, Be Awesome at Online Business, which has been out 1½ years. So I don’t plan to ignore Amazon anytime soon.
For future books, though, I plan to sell on both platforms. I will still use Amazon but avoid the exclusivity that’s part of KDP Select.
Social Journalism Proposing a new degree at CUNY
https://medium.com/whither-news/39c0edce8a9
Summary:
"...journalism must shift from seeing itself primarily as a producer of content for masses to become more explicitly a service to individuals and communities. Content fills things; service accomplishes things. To provide a service with relevance and value requires knowing those you serve, and to do that requires building relationships with those people. Thus, we must learn relationship skills."
Jeff Jarvis
7 Tips for Building a Social Media Audience
http://mashable.com/2013/12/24/grow-social-audience/
Summary:
1- Pay to Play "Logan suggests that businesses serious about entering the social space allocate a marketing budget specifically for social media ... The key should be quality over quantity. If you can't compete on a paid level, then you should focus on building the right audience on social — this means getting your most avid customers to become a part of your social media audience and providing value for them once they're there,"
2 -
Summary:
1- Pay to Play "Logan suggests that businesses serious about entering the social space allocate a marketing budget specifically for social media ... The key should be quality over quantity. If you can't compete on a paid level, then you should focus on building the right audience on social — this means getting your most avid customers to become a part of your social media audience and providing value for them once they're there,"
2 -
Pick Your Platform(s) Wisely
Not every business needs a presence on every social platform. "I think the best advice for businesses that are trying to take things online and create a presence is first to watch — instead of jumping in — and look at pages that you like and make active observations about what's going on,
3. Create a Community of 'Insiders'
it's important to listen to the fans and followers who take the time to find you online, and take their suggestions or feedback to heart
4. Social Is Not a Hard Sell
Don't be the overly promotional fan page — it's the equivalent of your annoying, Ivy-League-educated relative who dominates every dinner conversation bragging about various accomplishments.
5. Social Is 24/7
Posting on social platforms on a daily basis — and monitoring comments, retweets, reshares, etc. — is one way to engage with the online community. You can't be 24/7, but hire someone who loves your brand and loves listening to clients/customers
6. Sweepstakes and Giveaways
One of the easiest ways to attract a social following is to offer your customers incentives to "like," follow or connect with your business Free stuff and special promotional prices. Beware of platform competition rules
7. Agency vs. In-House
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Self-proclaimed "social media gurus" are a dime a dozen these days.
When it comes to a successful social media marketing strategy, it can be tough for small businesses to sort through the noise, statistics and flurry of misinformation.
One statistic we found online, for instance, claims that a Facebook fan is worth about $174 — but ask a small business with 300 Facebook fans if they've seen that $52,200 reflected in their revenues and you're likely to get a skeptical look or chuckle.
For small businesses seeking to engage audiences via social media and get the most bang for their buck, figuring out where to start — and more importantly, how to leverage the huge potential of an engaged online audience — can be a daunting task.
Let's forget about the statistics and wild claims, and focus instead on good, old-fashioned advice. Below, we've talked to entrepreneurs and marketers from companies with successful social strategies to get a grasp on some best practices for building and retaining an audience on social media.
1. "Pay-to-Play"
Beware of "experts" that tout the distorted notion that social media is free marketing. While most of the platforms themselves are free, RG Logan, director of strategy at Carrot Creative, points out that social is an increasingly "pay-to-play" endeavor. Logan suggests that businesses serious about entering the social space allocate a marketing budget specifically for social media.
"It's quite difficult to break through if you're not putting money behind your efforts,""It's quite difficult to break through if you're not putting money behind your efforts," he says. Last year, Facebook admitted that the average brand post is seen by just 16% of the page's followers, and paying to promote boosts your reach and thus your impact.
Not all hope is lost for small businesses that simply can't afford to splurge on social, however. "The key should be quality over quantity. If you can't compete on a paid level, then you should focus on building the right audience on social — this means getting your most avid customers to become a part of your social media audience and providing value for them once they're there," says Logan. "If you take care of that core and show them that you care, they'll reciprocate by singing your praises to their own networks, thus increasing the opportunity to build your audience more organically."
Image: Flickr, mkhmarketing
For businesses that don't promote via paid channels, it's especially crucial to get the word out about social efforts by taking advantage of as many avenues as possible — add social media widgets to your company's website, put Facebook URLs or Twitter handles on business cards and email signatures and post flyers in-store that clearly direct customers to your social pages.
But with more and more social platforms introducing advertising (both Instagram and Pinterestlaunched advertising services this year), and Facebook advertising becoming increasingly important for fan pages that wish to drive sales, there's little doubt left that businesses should expect to fork over some cash for a truly successful social strategy.
2. Pick Your Platform(s) Wisely
Not every business needs a presence on every social platform. Certain businesses will flourish on visually rich sites such as Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube, while others may have more success with Twitter's 140-character format (though it's important to note that visuals generally perform better than text-only posts, regardless of the platform on which they're posted).
"I think the best advice for businesses that are trying to take things online and create a presence is first to watch — instead of jumping in — and look at pages that you like and make active observations about what's going on," says Doug Quint, owner of Big Gay Ice Cream. "Secondly, if you're not comfortable on one of these streams, don't sign up. I didn't go on Foursquare for three years because I couldn't make sense of it for me and how I wanted it to come across. So don't go places where you're not comfortable."
3. Create a Community of 'Insiders'
One of the biggest appeals of "liking" a brand on Facebook or following your local coffee shop on Twitter is the promise of being in-the-know about events, promotions and special offers or discounts. In addition, social media provides brands with a unique opportunity to show their audiences a behind-the-scenes look — or the human side — of their businesses.
“We interact with our followers individually to breed a close community of brand ‘insiders’ who feel comfortable regularly engaging with us,”“We interact with our followers individually to breed a close community of brand ‘insiders’ who feel comfortable regularly engaging with us,” says AJ Nicholas, senior director of public relations and marketing for Rent the Runway.
Along with a community-centric attitude and promoting your pages, it's important to listen to the fans and followers who take the time to find you online, and take their suggestions or feedback to heart — even if the comments are negative. Community managers or small businesses should think long and hard about ignoring or deleting customer feedback without first addressing the stated concerns. Not only is this a poor customer service practice, it can potentially blow up into a PR nightmare.
"We respond to everyone — from fielding personal inquires and suggestions in our general inquiry box to answering comments on Instagram or Facebook, every fan and follower is important to us. We appreciate our dedicated fans who take the time to send submissions — it's in best practice to take everyone's comments into considerations. It's because of this [feedback] we use faux fur versus real fur in projects," says Erica Domesek of P.S. I Made This.
4. Social Is Not a Hard Sell
We've said it before and we'll say it again: Social channels are not the place to force your brand messaging on unsuspecting fans. Online audiences are particularly wary of thinly veiled advertising labeled as "content." This can be a hard pill for businesses to swallow, particularly for enthusiastic small business owners that want to share their innovative new concept with as many people as possible. I love hearing about my company and how awesome we are, so why wouldn't everyone else? This attitude is a terrific way to drive fans to "unlike".
Image: Flickr, mkhmarketing
Don't be the overly promotional fan page — it's the equivalent of your annoying, Ivy-League-educated relative who dominates every dinner conversation bragging about various accomplishments. The occasional humblebrag might fly with your audiences — particularly if your brand or business is creating something newsworthy or is up for an award — but there's a fine line between sincerity and smugness. Your social audience knows the difference.
Domesek advises businesses to adopt a content strategy that appeals to audiences' emotions. "It's a balance. Focus on emotional analytics as well as numerical ones. Pushing out content that is strong, conversational, and that especially evokes an emotional response will build stronger engagement and audience growth." She adds that people are more likely to comment, retweet or share "feel-good" content that elicits memories or positive associations.
"You're marketing to humans, not robots,""You're marketing to humans, not robots," she says.
And it's not just what you say, it's how you say it — delivery is key. "While we find it important to share aspirational content to pique the interest of our demographic, we take care to deliver it in an accessible and personable way," says Rent the Runway's Nicholas.
5. Social Is 24/7
Show us a job listing for a nine-to-five social media manager position, and we'll show you a thousand and one missed opportunities. The truth is that your customers are likely going to be online during off-hours (nights and weekends), and the ideal social strategy doesn't shut off completely for hours or days on end.
Jon Crawford, CEO and founder of Storenvy, says the company owes its success in large part due to a dedicated social strategy. "Social media is an extremely powerful avenue for everything from customer support, customer acquisition and building long-term relationships with those who are passionate about what we do. From advice and resources to user and merchant stories, new and trending products to promotional contests and giveaways — our social media never sleeps," he says.
Posting on social platforms on a daily basis — and monitoring comments, retweets, reshares, etc. — is one way to engage with the online community. That's not to say every small business needs to hire round-the-clock surveillance of its social accounts (for big brands or corporations, this is another story); but going completely MIA from 5 p.m. on Friday evening until 9 a.m. Monday morning may mean missing out on potential business, or fueling the flames of an upset customer by seemingly ignoring his complaints.
6. Sweepstakes and Giveaways
One of the easiest ways to attract a social following is to offer your customers incentives to "like," follow or connect with your business. Hosting a sweepstakes or contest can generate valuable buzz about your business, create brand affinity and entice potential customers — who might otherwise have never heard of your company — to check out your site.
"Everybody loves free stuff — that's been true since the dawn of time."Everybody loves free stuff — that's been true since the dawn of time. We've worked on enough of these [campaigns] to realize that the real strength in a sweeps is the scale of the audience you'll bring in. Sweepstakes and contests are a great way to generate leads and build your CRM database," says Logan.
He warns businesses, however, not to expect every participant to translate into a loyal, converting customer. "The dark side to this is that while you're attracting a wide audience, you risk sacrificing the quality of those leads, and may end up with a low-value customer who doesn't care about your brand in the long-term. Brands and agencies must accept the fact that not everyone who participates is going to be a brand loyalist, but know that you now have the ability to nurture them toward loyalty in the long run via content and worthwhile experiences."
SEE ALSO: 5 Biggest Social Media Lessons of 2013
Companies attempting to organize a contest for the first time should conduct research onsuccessful examples and best practices before jumping in head-first.
Facebook recently loosened its guidelines for hosting contests on the site, which is great news for small businesses that previously couldn't afford the time or cost of a complicated sweepstakes hosted by a third-party application.
7. Agency vs. In-House
There are differing — and very strong — opinions about who should handle your brand's social media efforts.
On one hand, hiring in-house ensures that your brand messaging is on-point, and having a member of your own team managing a social presence ensures information is more likely to be accurate, timely and cohesive with your brand's unique voice. On the flip side, many small businesses simply don't have the time, resources or know-how to dedicate themselves to social, and handing the reigns over to professionals who are well-versed in online marketing strategy may prove effective (albeit somewhat nerve-wracking).
Logan suggests brands hire in-house only when willing to commit 100%. "Brands should keep social media in-house if they are willing to dedicate appropriate resources internally to creating content. This means having full-time staff (not interns) dedicated to drafting copy, designing content, analyzing content and optimizing that content. A brand can look into their internal infrastructure to see if they can repurpose any current employees (designers, copywriters, marketers, media planners, etc.) and dedicate them to your social team — but
it's really important that social media isn't treated like a side job, or you'll get side-job results."it's really important that social media isn't treated like a side job, or you'll get side-job results."
Logan goes on to add that hiring an agency may be an excellent investment for companies that are overwhelmed, out of ideas or already spread too thin. A big "however," though, is that the brand must be willing to place its trust in the agency, as well as maintain open lines of communication and approve content in a timely manner.
Domesek takes a middle-of-the-road stance. "Agencies can be great for larger, one-off opportunities for buzzworthy projects or launches; however, handling in-house allows you to control the brand," she says.
The answer to this heated debate, realistically, is the frustrating cliché of "it depends." Your company's budget, as well as its overall goals in regards to social, comes into play when deciding whether to trust your social efforts to an in-house team member or to outsource to the pros.
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