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Social Media

How to Effectively Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts

Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts – How Do You Do It? 

Is managing multiple social media accounts every day tiring for your business? Whether you’re a small business owner or a social media manager at a large corporation, you’re looking for ideas to help you get the most out of your social media marketing efforts. 

 It’s no secret among social media managers/users that jumping between different tools and accounts can be exhausting. It is common for social media marketers to manage multiple accounts for different departments or accounts on different platforms. Some accounts may be dedicated to sales, while others are used for customer service. 

 Despite the fact that it sometimes requires energy, managing multiple accounts on different social networks can be useful in promoting business success. It all depends on how you combine your efforts and take advantage of the most platforms. 

 Why should you have multiple social media accounts? 

Before we get into social media management, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of creating multiple accounts for individual brands. 

Benefits of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts

Creating multiple accounts means you can share different content and speak to different audiences. Customer segmentation allows specific accounts to focus on specific topics rather than trying to engage everyone at once. This is especially useful if your business serves both consumers and businesses. 

 If your brand has multiple locations in a state or country, creating a separate account for each can help you localize content to meet the unique needs of customers in that region. They feel cared for, which can greatly increase engagement. Multiple accounts also allow users to choose the type of content they want to consume. Even if you have one umbrella account, you may want to expand it with dedicated accounts. All of this content can be fed into the main account if you want, but if people find they only want one thing from you, it’s easy to find. 

 Disadvantages of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts

On the other hand, having multiple accounts can confuse your audience. They may not understand the purpose or value of each account. Should they monitor everyone or just those who have the information they need? People might think they are missing out on something important if your content is posted on different accounts. You also risk dividing the people you want to reach. 

 Additionally, having more than one account means more work for social media managers. Time management can become difficult, not to mention exhausting employees. If your social media team doesn’t have the resources to manage multiple accounts, it’s time to rethink your strategy. 

 Brand management can also suffer from using multiple accounts, especially when different departments are left to manage their own social media channels. When social media tasks are spread out, it’s harder to make sure everyone stays on message. 

 This is where a social media style guide comes in handy. The guide will help you ensure all employees are on the same page when it comes to social media and ensure consistency and best practices. Guidelines can include tone and language, as well as hashtag usage, image and video guidelines, and audiences.

 Pros and Cons To help you understand the pros and cons of managing multiple social media accounts, we’ve put together this handy guide. 

 If you have multiple accounts or are considering it as a strategy, are you sure it’s the best use of your time and resources? If you only represent one brand, there are a few things to consider. 

1. Complaints can take up most of your feed

More and more people are using social media to connect with businesses. Sprout Social Index, Edition XVII: According to Accelerate, 98 percent of consumers agree that social media is the fastest and most direct way to connect with a brand and is the primary channel for customer service inquiries. 

 So, if your social media team finds that handling complaints or managing online customer reviews takes a lot of time in a general account, setting up a separate account to handle support issues can help. This gives customers an easy channel to complain and sends a clear message that you care about solving their problems. 

 Separate complaint accounts can also work differently if you implement an effective system for handling customer needs, such as support tickets. Learn how brands are increasingly using social media as a customer service channel to attract and retain customers, as many brands adopted WhatsApp messaging during the pandemic.

2. You have several departments or offices 

If your company has several departments with different target groups, it may happen that each of them has its own social media account. 

 Customers can then follow an account that only promotes products or services related to their industry, instead of consuming everything at once. 

 The same applies to companies with several offices or franchises. With separate accounts, customers can find the information they need much faster. It’s fine for these accounts to share the same content, but make sure you’re responding to the unique needs of customers in your region.

3. You have a variety of products or services  

Larger companies usually sell a variety of products and services that address different problems and relate to different audiences. For example, if you know how to sell both sports products and technology services, there will likely be very little conflict between consumers. 

 Managing social media accounts for different products and services can help avoid confusion and streamline the buying cycle. Everyone knows exactly what they’re getting into, and you can respond to the changing needs of different audiences by creating compelling content.

5 steps to manage multiple social media accounts 

Now that you know if you need multiple social media accounts, it’s time to start managing them. Here are five steps for managing each account.

1. Document your social media strategy  

If you have a team with multiple accounts, it can be difficult for everyone to stick to the brand. Developing a social media strategy that includes policies, procedures, and style guides can give users something to follow at all times. Each account has different goals, but a documented strategy helps keep everyone on track and on the company’s message.

2. Use social media management software

Copying and pasting the same content to multiple accounts on different social media platforms can take too long. solution? Investing in social media management software like Buffer allows you to manage your posts and engagement in one place. This software helps you publish content to different accounts on different networks simultaneously with the click of a button.

3. Create an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar can help give you direction and keep your social media strategy on the right track. This can be done using social media management software or by sharing a simple document with your social team.

Bring it all together in one place and give your social media manager a reference. It also helps identify gaps and missed opportunities in your social media posting schedule.

4. Monitor and participate in social media activity

Tracking mentions and keywords is important, especially when setting up support-related accounts. You want to know if your customers need help or if you can jump to trending topics relevant to your business.

Most importantly, I don’t want to duplicate my colleagues. A social media management software should be able to help you monitor while providing space for collaboration within your team. It doesn’t look good when Brand responds to her year-old post or receives her two responses to a request.

5. Analyze your social media strategy

It’s important to analyze the results of your social media strategy and compare it to your key social media metrics. Are some accounts better than others? How can you help those who are lagging behind? Does each account contribute to the brand in some way?

I don’t know the answer without looking at platform analytics. Execute your strategy, use data-driven marketing to read your results, understand what’s working, and fine-tune your social media approach for optimal results.

Think before setting up multiple accounts

There may be reasons why your business has multiple social media accounts, but before you start creating accounts, make sure you’re creating them for the right reasons. Don’t make the mistake of doing this because you think your competitors and more accounts will give the illusion that you’re a big player. To get the most out of it, you need to use your resources wisely.

With good strategy, smart investments, and the passion of your social media team, your chances of success are always within reach.

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Content Marketing Data Analytics SEO Social Media

Optimizing your SEO and Social Media

Whether you’re starting with your small-scale business or you’re already a full-fledged organization still waiting to live on the internet, the first step in your learning process is Search Engine Optimization. Once a user searches for a particular service, the first result that appears on the page has the highest probability to be clicked on, but getting here isn’t that easy. Hundreds if not thousands of pages are struggling to get here and you’re one of them, let’s see how you can beat this competition. 

There’s a similar story going for social media, except the strategies are a little bit different. Yes, we have talked about SEO before and we’ve talked about social media marketing before, but in this article let’s discuss how both of these are interrelated and how you can get started without losing the balance between the two. Let’s get started with Social Media and SEO 101

Search Engine’s relation with Social Media

While you might already know that social media companies track humongous amounts of user data and use it for their machine-learning algorithms to provide better recommendations, you might not know that this data is sold. This might sound scary but it happens at safe levels, mostly. Well, the point here is that data finds one way or the other to seep into other systems, and somehow the web becomes unintentionally interconnected. 

Search engines like Google sieve through loads and loads of data to optimize the search results for the user. This is important for us to understand because now we understand how our google search engines are affected by our social media presence and activity. 

Understanding Social Signals

Social Signals are nothing but collectively the likes, shares, and comments on social media posts of a particular page as perceived by search engines like Google. These are known for their effect on organic search results by search engines. According to Bigcommerce.com, “These activities are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks”. Just like the above example, backlinking is the process of getting your page featured on another site as a reference to some relevant information. This itself explains a lot about the importance of social media presence and reach.

Google also collaborated with Twitter to increase the database furthermore and added the feature of featuring relevant tweets in search results. The number of tweets, retweets, and shares directly affects your ranking while mentions on sites like Reddit can add to it. Social signals were suddenly discontinued in 2014 but still don’t fail to show significant effects.

Interconnected

Social media posts have a higher tendency to be found as the reach is far more than your blog. Posting your blog’s link on social media would create hundreds if not thousands of impressions and if it comes across a digital creator’s article, they might use it to backlink to your page for relevant information, thus positively influencing your SEO. 

Backlinks

Now that we understand that Backlinks are the backbone of the relationship between social media and SEO, we must know how to gain valuable backlinks. If we seek value, we must provide value as well, so start with producing and posting valuable content. One will only backlink to your post if they find value in your piece of content, that is when they are convinced that their reader would be satisfied with your information.

Build your social media presence and feed them with relevant content regularly. Promote your posts and start an email newsletter to keep your followers engaged.

The Integration

At this point, you can pretty much tell that it’s all about the perfect balance between your SEO, Social media presence, and content marketing. Pour in all the value you have to give to your users and readers, keep a steady flow of content flowing, write blog posts, conduct podcasts, and produce videos and infographics. The more engaging your content is, the more attention your page gets. Here are 5 tips to start integrating your social media and SEO.

1. Quality content

And this might be the millionth time we’re saying this, content is the king and the first step towards successful marketing is well-tailored, shareable content that is valuable, informative, and interesting to your audience and fulfills the user intent.

2. Build a profile

A very overlooked step in this hustle is building yourself a robust profile, a profile that introduces you as you and the page’s owner. A trustable source of information is accompanied by a good explanatory profile of the owner

3. Backlinks

One way to generate quality backlinks other than creating quality content is by reaching out to other bloggers and websites in your industry and asking them to link to your content. It’s important to make sure that the websites and blogs you approach are reputable, as backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites can actually harm your search engine rankings. 

4. Influencers

Digital marketing with influencers can be an effective way to reach a wider audience and promote your product or service. Here’s how to get started

  • Identify influencers in your industry or niche who have a large and engaged following on social media or other online platforms.
  • Reach out to the influencers and propose a collaboration, such as a sponsored post or product review. Be clear about your goals and what you are offering in exchange for their promotion.
  • Once you have agreed to the terms of the collaboration, provide the influencer with any necessary information, such as your product or a unique discount code for their followers.

Monitor the influencer’s post and track the performance of the collaboration. This can help you evaluate its effectiveness and learn what works and what doesn’t for future campaigns.

5. Social Listening

Social listening is a technique used in digital marketing to track and analyze online conversations about a brand or industry. By monitoring social media and other online platforms, businesses can gain valuable insights into what their customers and competitors are saying, and use this information to tweak their marketing strategies.

To use social listening in a competitive space, follow these steps:

  • Identify the relevant social media platforms and online communities where your customers and competitors are active. This could include popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as forums, blogs, and other online platforms.
  • Set up alerts and monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand, competitors, and relevant keywords and phrases. This can help you to stay up-to-date on the latest conversations and trends in your industry.
  • Analyze the data and insights you collect from social listening to understand what customers and competitors are saying about your brand and identify any gaps or opportunities in the market. For example, you may find that customers are complaining about a particular aspect of your product or service, or that a competitor is gaining popularity for a feature that you don’t offer.

Use the insights from social listening to inform your digital marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions. You can then use the information you collect to improve your customer service, develop new products or features, or create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Promote your content on social media, using hashtags and other tactics to increase its visibility and reach. Encourage users to share and engage with your content, as this will help to increase its visibility and improve your search engine ranking.

Monitor and track the performance of your social media and SEO efforts, using tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics to understand what is working and what is not. Overall, combining social media with SEO can help to increase your online visibility, improve your search engine ranking, and drive more traffic and engagement to your website. By creating high-quality content, optimizing your social media profiles and posts for SEO, and promoting your content effectively, you can increase your reach and visibility online and reach a wider audience.

Thanks for reading this far! We hope you found this post informative and helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section below. And don’t forget to follow us on social media for more great content and updates. Thanks again, and we’ll see you at the next one!

Categories
Content Marketing Digital Technology Social Media

Cracking the best times to post on Instagram

If you have been seeing a decrease in the number of views that you are getting and the number of followers you are getting on Instagram it is probably because you are posting at the wrong time. The best time to post on Instagram has recently changed and if you don’t update the time that you are posting, fewer people are going to see your content which means you are not going to be getting as many views, not going to get as many followers and you are not going to be able to take advantage of the organic reach. It is easier to grow on Instagram right now than it was earlier. 

Now is the best time to grow on Instagram, as it is fully monetizable. You can get paid just for uploading reels, and as long as you are posting at the right time, you are going to see a massive increase in both the amount of use and the number of followers that you are getting on Instagram. 

What does Instagram say about the best time to post?

The CEO of Instagram Adam Mosseri has said the following things:

  • Know where your target audience is located
  • Post before peak times
  • There is no perfect time to post. 

Does the time you post on Instagram matter?

Choosing the right times to post or publish your content is often said to maximize the reach and post engagement, which in turn helps in earning a great return for the marketing efforts. So, to think about the best time to post varies according to the industry, or the day of the week. 

3 Best times to post

  1. The first best time to post is from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. You need to make sure that you are posting at the general best times to be posting. Posting somewhere within this time frame should give you a boost in reach, views and engagement. There are two reasons why this time frame is effective. The first is that it covers lunchtime. People who are on lunch break, and taking a breather from their daily duties will check their phones while they eat. The second reason is that a lot of people’s morning schedules are hectic. 
  1. The second best time to be posting on Instagram is from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. This is going to be the time frame that people are leaving work or school. To find out the general best time to post, to make your post go viral, you need to look at the best time to post for your specific account. For this, you need to go into your analytics, see when your followers are online, and begin posting during the time slot where the majority of them are online. You need to wait at least an hour in between each post unless you are doing a story post. 
  1. The next best time to post on Instagram is from 8 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. This is the time when we see a surge in app usage. You need to be posting at these times, for your followers’ time zones wherever they over-index, that is a time zone that you should be posting in when it comes to the best time to post specifically for your account.

Best time to post on Instagram according to the content

1. Instagram feed 

Wednesday – 11 am

Friday – 10 am – 11 am

2. Reels and IGTV

Monday – 5 am

Thursday – 5 am

3. Instagram Live

Monday – Friday – 11 am or 7 pm – 9 pm

4. Instagram Stories

Monday – Friday – 11 am – 1 pm or late afternoon.

As per the research done on over 30,000 different accounts on Instagram, by Sproutsocial, which is a social media management and intelligence tool, here are the best times to post. 

  • Monday- 11am
  • Tuesday- 10am- 1pm
  • Wednesday – 10am -1pm
  • Thursday- 10am-11am
  • Friday- 10am-11am

The best days to post on Instagram are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the worst day to post is Sundays. Loading up reels should be avoided. Posting too much on the story or posting too much on the feed, should be avoided. It makes people ineligible to be able to see your content, which means your reach is going to decrease. You need to be waiting on your feed, for at least an hour in between each post. You should only be posting one to four times a day on Instagram. 

Just because you are posting at the right time on Instagram doesn’t mean you are going to go viral. It doesn’t mean you are going to get more followers. It isn’t just the time you are posting, it is the hashtags that are used, the topic you are using, the length of your video, the sound that you are using, and all these other things that are going to combine to make your post go viral. The posting time is important, but it is not what makes or breaks the reel. Good quality content has great importance for it to perform well. 

Categories
Social Media

Social Media and Privacy: Why is it important?

Privacy has become a priority for consumers of digital channels. Many want to protect their information and are more concerned about what they share on social media and who they share it with. 

This is a challenge for social media managers, business owners and content creators who manage social media pages to engage with customers. In addition, many countries have established rules and regulations that affect marketers and require actions to ensure compliance. 

How can companies manage data privacy on social media platforms? In this guide, we look at common privacy issues and important social media privacy laws and tell you how to follow them to protect your customers and build trust. 

What are the most common privacy concerns about social media? 

A new Cisco report, “Consumer Trust Through Transparency and Control,” found that 86 percent of consumers are concerned about privacy and want more control, while 79 percent are willing to invest time or money to protect their privacy, you need to understand the privacy issues affecting the most common social media channels. At the end of the day, it’s about protecting and valuing your customers’ data and avoiding a social media crisis that gives your business a bad reputation. 

Data mining 

Data mining is a way for businesses to gather information using automated computer systems that sort through data to identify trends and patterns. It is often used to study people’s behaviour based on past purchases, location, content preferences or events such as birthdays. 

 Available data sources are: 

  •  Websites 
  •  Social media 
  •  Apps 
  •  Mobile phones or smartphones 
  •  Internet of Things 

The advantage of data mining is that it helps you understand unstructured raw data that can be used to target customers. It also allows you to predict how your customers might behave so you can tailor your message and content more effectively. 

It is important for social media managers to use a data collection method that complies with the law. For example, EU law defines certain restrictions on data collection (see the final GDPR checklist for marketers for more information). 

Ensure that all information collected and used is provided with the express consent and fully complies with applicable privacy laws (for example, create a privacy page if you do not already have one). You must also ensure data security at all stages of the process, from collection to storage, analysis and disposal. 

Data Breach 

When a business is hacked, one threat is customer data, and one source can be social media. Individuals provide a lot of information on social media, such as marital status, location, preferences, and job duties. 

According to the BBC article “How to scrape personal data from social media”, a hacker named Tom Liner compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users worldwide and put it up for sale for about $5,000. This case raised concerns about improving data protection in social media. 

You must use intrusion detection and prevention systems to protect customers from social media data breaches. If you have an IT team or external support, make sure you have systems and processes in place to monitor and manage potential breaches. 

If you become a victim of a breach, notify your customers immediately. To maintain your reputation and retain customers, you must be open and transparent. 

False information 

Social media can be used to spread false information and in some cases propaganda. During the 2016 US election, the media reported that Russia favoured Trump and created 30 Facebook pages for black Americans and ten YouTube channels to promote Donald Trump. 

Trolls or bots are also known on Twitter for impersonating a person or cause. Often the content is inflammatory or used to cause a reaction. It has also been used for stalking, harassment or cyberbullying. 

As the person in charge of social media, you must avoid sharing false information or dealing with trolls. Use the moderators if you find yourself making hurtful comments or posts. You can also use moderation tools or reporting capabilities on social media to address this. 

What are the important social media privacy laws you ask? 

Several social media privacy laws have been enacted in recent years, with more on the way. Let’s look at some of the most important ones. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created by European authorities to protect the personal data of individuals. It also has instructions to limit the export of personal data. 

In relation to social media, GDPR means many things for your social media campaigns: 

Remarketing on social media is prohibited unless the user has participated in such activity by participating or joining. 

Users must agree to your privacy policy, which can sometimes mean opting in twice when redirected from a social media site to a landing page or website. 

Tracking and ROI can be difficult with analytics if you can’t link activity to a social media channel. 

The right to be forgotten 

The right to be forgotten is part of the GDPR that allows individuals to ask companies to delete all personal data from their databases. 

There are several situations in which a person can request this, for example, the information is used to exercise freedom of speech and information or to comply with a legal order or obligation.

Categories
Content Marketing Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing Social Media

Cracking the best times to post on Twitter

What is the importance of posting at the right time?

Twitter has been running its feeds since 2016, like other social media platforms on a popularity basis or an engagement, and not on reverse chronology. But now citing users’ feedback Twitter allows people to switch their feeds from top-ranked tweets to the latest post tweets in a click. A reverse chronological feed shows the Twitter users a tweet as they are getting posted. As time passes, more recent tweets would replace these on the top of the feed, and that is why you need to publish your tweet when most of your audience is online.

The average best time to tweet on Twitter?

Just like most social media, Twitter has no best time to post either. This is simply because different businesses have different audiences and so are their preferences and content posting time. But then you can always check out popular social media marketing companies suggesting when brands should post on Twitter. Twitter provides all the tools. Dig into your Twitter analytics. Your Twitter analytics provides a complete overview of your profile visits, tweet impressions, and other engagement factors. You can also use Twitter Analytics to track your progress over time and make new posting strategies accordingly. 

To make it easier you can also use Twitter analytics tools. Log in to your Twitter first and click the more button and go to the media studio. There you have to click on the insights button and then click on the audience. The graph provided by Twitter insights there shows when your followers and your audience are watching videos the most on the platform. In the graph each square represents an hour-long block, the darker the square the more active your audience is during that hour. There are also social media sites like sprout social that are dedicated to social media research. 

You can go there and find the best times for Twitter global engagement, and there you can find the best times for posting. Check the date on the articles that you read, to confirm that you are looking at the most recent data for the best time. This is because the times that are the best to post on social media and Twitter specifically change almost weekly. The best day to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Thursday. And the worst day to make a post on Twitter is Saturday. The best time to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Friday at 9:00 a.m. In general Monday to Friday between 8 am and 4 pm are great times to post on Twitter. 

When to post on Twitter for the most engagement?

Considering the recent Twitter algorithms, engagement plays a pivotal role in tweet rankings. When something is posted on Twitter, the common goal that all brands have is to connect with their audience. If you wish to stand out among the tweets of all other brands, you have to be thoughtful, creative, and in harmony with your brand’s tone. 

Things to keep in mind

  • On average, the tweets that are posted between 2 to 3 am get the most engagement. The least amount of engagement happens during work hours i.e between 9 to 5 pm. 
  • The highest number of retweets and favourites happen between 8 pm and 11 pm.

Experts say that it is not a specific time like 8:00 a.m. or noon. You shouldn’t be tweeting during a specific time of the day, you should be tweeting throughout the day from morning to night, when people are sleeping, there are people all around the world. When you are sleeping someone else is awake. So why not tweet and engage? Business never sleeps. If you want to do well, be out there each and every single hour of the day. 

You can use tools like Meet Edgar which will make the whole process easier in which you can keep promoting your content 24/7, so that way you can generate traffic from social sites like Twitter even when you are sleeping. You need to be tweeting multiple times a day, ideally once per hour, and you need to be doing this seven days a week. 

The best thing to do is to test out different post timings using a Twitter scheduling tool. Here you will have to experiment. Try to post your tweets in the morning, noon and evening at specific times and see what works and what doesn’t.

Categories
Content Marketing Digital Media eCommerce Marketing Social Media

Leading the Digital Revolution – Facebook

The spring of 2006 brought a wave of a digital revolution, rising from Massachusetts USA, this wave gradually engulfed the whole world. People were ready to connect with their long-lost friends around the world. If that wasn’t enough, you could constantly know what all your friends are doing during the week. This quickly became the century’s biggest trend, this was Facebook.

As of now, Facebook (renamed Meta) owns a big chunk of the major social media market, occupying big names like Chainspace, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mark played smart, not just with the technological developments, but also with the market acquisition, spending more than $23.3 billion in the process, for a quick comparison, that’s more than Zimbabwe and Maldives’ combined GDP!

That said, the trust that Facebook had in its users has never been the same over the years as the brand and founder constantly get listed in a bunch of acquisitions all around the world, ranging from data privacy to many suspecting that Facebook listens to all its users.

However, leaving the controversies aside for the ones interested, there’s a lot to learn from the ways of the brand and how you as a digital marketer can put all of the learning into phenomenal use. Through the hard times of exponentially growing competition, let’s see how Facebook managed to retain the power it still has in the market.

Strategies to Success

Throughout development, Facebook has undergone nothing less than a metamorphosis. Starting from a medium to stay connected to your friends, to becoming a hybrid marketplace, game zone, organization hub, and whatnot. 

Regardless of the continuous change, it showed that the most important factor for constructive change is sticking to your values. Facebook still, to its baseline, is an excellent way to stay connected with your people. Also, staying relevant isn’t always easy while also accompanying constant change. Keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at the chain of strategies Facebook used to develop itself into an immortal name in the industry.

  • Constant tech developments
  • Market acquisition
  • Tackling competition
  • Sticking to the concept
  • Evolution
  • Secret marketing

We’re sure you already have a lot of thoughts bubbling up in your head right after reading these titles, but let us shed some light on how these unique strategies were put to optimum use.

Constant tech developments

Since the start of the company, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg has barely left any room for improvement. Any possible upgrade to the company was instantly added on without thinking twice of the consequences on the performance or budget, love or hate—this has been by far the strongest driving force for Facebook.

Market Acquisition

Mark has an excellent team of marketing geniuses working alongside him, taking the next right step and avoiding wrong decisions are the key skills of an elite strategist. Having a big share in the market always helps, when you have a bigger market share, you have a bigger community, a bigger following, and thus, a bigger user base.

Tackling competition

This big strategy goes unnoticed by a big part of the Facebook user community. Since its early years, Facebook has been putting a lot behind acquiring the next big thing. When you’re the big name in the market, the easiest way to tackle competition is by owning your competitors. As discussed earlier, Facebook has spent over $23 billion, in just acquiring the potential competition, resulting in not just a bigger community, but also obliterating the competition.

Sticking to the concept

This goes without saying, Facebook has stuck to the basic concept of connecting people even after these years of changes and development. It still reminds you of the early years and even if the potential of UI development is virtually unlimited, Facebook decided to never shift a lot from their initial look, the interface still has almost the same look with just little aesthetic changes that were obvious with time.

Evolution

While acquiring your competition and constantly investing in technological developments is obvious and sticking to base value is necessary, evolution is the third aspect of growth. With time changes era and with the era, trends change. Opinions, choices, values, and fashion, everything changes with trends almost every year and every decade faces a completely visible change in lifestyle. Facebook did an amazing job at integrating the upcoming trends at an appreciable pace and also keeping the user intent alive. Acquiring brands like GIPHY, Beatsaber & many more was a sleek part of this strategy. This goes down as one of the most underrated but effective strategies.

Secret marketing

And at last comes the controversial side of the coin, occupying a little section but enough to express it all. Throughout the past years, Facebook is accused of many things which we won’t list down due to the existence of opinionated polity. But one conspiracy opinion states that all this is fabricated just so as to keep the name of the brand in highlight at all times. This might sound funky but is evident with enough obvious incidents. The brand is always on the news, always in limelight, be it positive or negative, it’s publicity at its finest.

Regardless, what we need to learn from Meta, is the elite configuration of strategies and always keeping up with the world’s pace are two of the key secrets to success.

With that, we conclude this amazing article and you are free to leave your opinions down in the comments down below. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for similar informative content. See you on the flip side!

Categories
Content Marketing Social Media

The Best free-to-use Social Media Tools

Social algorithms are tough, they are becoming harder to get great traffic from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social websites that are there. Here’s a list of very useful free social media tools that you can use.

1. Hootsuite

It allows you to schedule your social content. With Hootsuite not only can you share content on all social sites with ease and a few clicks, but you can also schedule your content many months in advance. Why this is important, is because many people share their content only once on social sites like Twitter. But if you share your content on Twitter six times in a year, that same piece of content will roughly get 2 to 3 times more traffic. When you share your content most people won’t see it. There is nothing wrong if you sharing the content multiple times throughout the year. 

2. ManyChat

If you are someone struggling to get more traffic from Facebook, ManyChat will solve your issue. It is a chatbot tool that leverages Facebook Messenger and what you will find is the click-through and the open rates are ridiculous. It beats out the email. If you want easy traffic, leverage ManyChat. When people visit your website they can do things such as subscribe to you through Facebook Messenger and when you have a message or a blog post, you can push it out through ManyChat. You will get open rates of about 60% and you will get click-through rates above 30, 40, and 50%. Even when it drops down you will still see your click-through rate above 30%. It is that effective.

3. Buzzsumo

When you write blogs or some kind of content, even after you share it on the social web a lot of times, sometimes no one wants to like it or comment on it. But with Buzzsumo, it will show you all the other popular articles within your space, and all the ones that aren’t popular. Look at the topics that are popular, write more of that on your blog, promote those on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and again you will get more traffic, because you are only writing things that people want to read about and see, than just writing whatever you want to write about. 

4. SocialBlade

SocialBlade is a platform where you can go on and check statistics from any account from YouTube to twitch Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It will show you, your subscriber growth over time, as well as how much content you are pushing out. It will help in optimizing how much content you should be creating to get the maximum amount of subscribers, fans, and followers. 

5. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is an easy way to manage notifications on your website to your customers. It helps you collect emails from your website. If the first hour that you are posting content on the social web, any social site, does well, the chances are it will go viral. You can use Hello Bar to collect and gather emails from your website or your blog. When you collect these emails, then when you push out content on the social web, you send out an email blast to all your email subscribers asking them to check out the new posts. That will help you get way more retweets, likes, and shares, and that will make the post go viral. 

6. Subscribers

It is similar to Hello Bar. Here, instead of helping you to get emails, it will help you to gather browser notifications subscribers. When people are browsing your site on Chrome, they can click subscribe and you can give them a notification and let all of these people know when you have your content that comes out and you can even push them to the social sites. That way when it gets released in the first hour, you will get more likes, shares, and comments. This will also help you go viral on the web.

7. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a platform where people, agencies, and businesses can come and get their businesses started. They have multiple applications and one of them being socials. It makes it easy to work with your team members and on top of that, they help you research keywords. Using Zoho Social will help you determine what keyword you are targeting when you are going after these social sites. This is because, if you are using the wrong keywords in your titles, descriptions, and throughout the whole text you will find that, not as many people will see it. A lot of people use Twitter search. Always make sure to use the right keywords, and then you will get more traffic.

And that was our brief list of free-to-use social media tools, now go ahead and use them to the fullest to get your social media marketing game on track. We will see you in the next one, till then, follow us on social media to stay up to date.

Categories
Social Media

Brands doing CSR Successfully

CSR refers to the awareness of a brand about social and environmental issues to build a brand identity that connects with the masses. A random user could be impressed by the vision of the brand and can be a potential customer.

At the same time, this brand value can be a point of conversion for a potential lead to a customer. This brand image or brand value is not something that you can implement with payable methods, marketers can’t buy it overnight – it must be earned. The consumer base that consists of environmental activists and socially aware people is constantly willing to be a part of any social reform that leads to the betterment of our surroundings.

 These users are greatly moved by such campaigns and once you as a brand, earn their trust and loyalty, they’ll always set their best foot forward to not just be a consistent customers with you, but also as a promoter of your brand. Now let’s see in what ways can CSR be implemented.

Ethical Approach

An ethical approach to CSR demands equal treatment for employees and customers of all races, gender, age, or ethnicity. A synchronous treatment of people from various backgrounds is the gist of corporate social responsibility.

A fair opportunity for job openings at a marketing firm to aspirants regardless of their personal differences and similar open-mindedness in opting vendors for distribution or sales of the product can be shown to enhance the positivity of the brand message.

Environmental Approach

Moving forward, thinking of the ecological sustainability of your firm is a clear indicator of the brand’s wisdom. Ecology refers to the study of all the biological creatures and the environment they live in as a whole, termed ecosystem.

A company should always take into consideration and plan the management of the carbon footprint they leave, the resources they exploit, and the wastes they produce. This has proved beneficial for brands multiple times and has emerged as one of the key approaches to successful CSR implementation.

Philanthropic Approach

The philanthropic approach of an organization mainly refers to the good deeds they get involved in. Apart from making profits and creating employment, an organization can play a key role in making the society we live in, a better place. These could be donations, fundraiser events, or even free or discounted services to the needful.

Brands should understand that while people connect with the ecological and ethical influence the brand has, they also keep their eyes on the occasional acts of kindness towards humanity. Not just with the customers, an organization is also expected to show the same kindness to their employees at times.

Financial Approach 

While all the other approaches are centered on getting the attention of the user or employee, the financial approach lets the organization focus on planning the sustainability of funds involved in implementing CSR effectively.

Costs involved in the research and development of strategies that directly affect the sales and productivity of the organization while constantly targeting the crosshair of CSR.

Takeaways 

While we are on it, let’s take a quick look at the takeaways or benefits of complying with a planned CSR strategy:

  1. Engaging Employees

As we just saw, the benefits of CSR to an employee are far greater than a financial bonus that wraps up with the month-end. It creates a long-term impression in the employee’s minds and lives on with them as the legacy of the organization.

  1. Lower Risks

Unawareness of employee rights or user sentiments may give rise to disagreements and have a higher chance to convert into lawsuits. These acts further lead to the decline of the brand’s reputation in the market.

  1. Brand Identity

Apart from reinstalling the positive brand message into the existing customer base, CSR naturally increases the reach of the organization and highlights the kind and more human side of it.

  1. Investor’s trust

Companies that have an edge in environmental and social issues are observed to have a higher valuation by investors. Moreover, participation in CSRs shows the growth and awareness of the organization.

10 Brands heading the right way:

Now that you know the types and benefits of CSR, let’s see which brands have been using it for years and have earned the current reputation in the market:

  1. Google

The first name that comes up when thinking of effective CSR practices is none other than Google. The company has an ever-growing list of loyal customers, not just because of their user-friendliness but also from the incredible communication they’ve established through their CEO. Google has also pledged to dedicate over a billion dollars for renewable energy projects and is already working on many as their data centers reportedly consume roughly half the power as compared to all data centers across the globe.

  1. Tesla

With the incredible CEO and unstoppable engineers, this brand is overflowing with talent while not failing to build a brand reputation bigger than any other motor company of the century. With the sole purpose to make all-electric cars and reduce the overall carbon footprint of their brand, they’re not just selling cars, they’re selling the exact same satisfaction to every happy customer. Undoubtedly Elon Musk will be counted among the most successful entrepreneur of the century.

  1. Johnson & Johnson

The brand that normalized baby care products and brought the most affordable versions of the same into the market, has successfully built a castle of trust in the market for the last three decades. Their aim to provide safe drinking water to poor communities across the world as well as the initiative to reduce their carbon footprint has resulted in never-ending trust and loyalty among businesses and customers too while also enriching the existing consumer base of the brand.

  1. Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola stands out as a brand that never was expected to announce something as reforming as reducing its carbon footprint by 25% in the coming eight years. They have the surprising aim to recycle every Coca-Cola bottle on earth and thus make their packaging 100% recyclable. They’ve also promised to return all the water back to the environment that is used in making their world-famous drinks.

  1. Netflix

The world-famous OTT platform Netflix provides a lesser-known scheme to their employees. They aid the upcoming child of their employees by offering them a 52-week paid leave. Usually, big organizations offer a regular 18-week parental leave but Netflix took a step forward to keep its employees happy and loyal. Netflix has also never thought twice to spread awareness about social issues through its content.

  1. Toms

Toms footwear had pledged to donate a pair of footwear for every single unit sold. And they sure stood for the claim donating more than 100 million pairs of footwear to date and spreading double the smiles. They went further to donate eyeglasses for the visually impaired and provide safe drinking water to the masses. Later the company discontinued the mentioned kind of practices due to NGO backlashes. They now continue to donate a third of their total profits to social campaigns.

  1. Disney

No one saw this giant stepping forward to step back from its carbon footprint. They are putting an equal foot forward towards improving the lives of their employees and customers. Even during the pandemic, Disney donated over $27 million towards food donations and PPE distribution. They’ve also committed to reducing their water wastage by a significant number.

  1. LEGO

Lego heading towards sustainability has pledged to donate over $400 million following a period of the next 3 years. Their goal is currently their biggest challenge, which is to remove the single-use plastic from their products completely and make their packaging sustainable too. This is a huge and admirable step from a brand based completely on single-use plastic, it seems that it will be worth the wait to see the brand emerge as an even greater legacy in the coming years.

  1. GE

General motors with their EV production line, made a comeback in the market they largely dominated for decades. SUV lovers are not new to the name of Hummer and the fan base that beast had. With GE launching Hummer EV, the dream of owning a military-grade road dominator became the reality for many fans. Along with the lighter carbon footprint of electric vehicles, GE also conducted a campaign rewarding $500,000 to people who innovated ideas capable of saving our environment.

  1. Starbucks 

Last but not the least, call it your favorite café or the coolest remote workplace – Starbucks along with their excellent warmth and services, decided to pay respect to veterans who served the nation by providing them and their spouses with over 25,000 job openings. And in no time, they were already there, now employing over 5,000 veterans every year. This in itself is one peak respect to the devotion of soldiers and makes the bond between Starbucks, Armed Forces, and the civilians even stronger.

These were some of the many known examples of brands adopting CSR effectively and with the aid of humanity and the ecosystem. Brands of all sizes and sectors have a lot to learn from these pioneers of success and kindness.

We surely missed some other examples, feel free to add them in the comments down below. If you liked the article, consider subscribing to our newsletter for future notifications. Find us on social media and we can have your queries solved there.

Categories
Social Media

Developing ROI Driven Social Media Strategies

What is a social media strategy? 

Simply put, a social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them, and the performance metrics that will be tracked. Your strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. You want  a simple and precise plan in meaningful, measurable ways. This will help you identify  channels and tactics that succeed and those that fail. Watch this webinar to learn how to love your social media strategy! Ultimately, your social media strategy should increase your target audience’s brand awareness and engagement across social media. 

What are the benefits of  a social media strategy? 

 Maybe you’ve run a successful social media campaign or you’re good at engaging with the content you post. This one time success is within reach. However, the hardest part of social media marketing is consistency. Do you understand why the campaign or post was successful? Can you copy it easily? Creating a social media strategy can be scary to think about, but it offers many tangible benefits for your business, such as 

  •  A Guide to All Social Media Activities 
  •  Improving Brand Awareness 
  •  Providing Communications Customer Service and Support 
  •  Improving Audience Targeting 
  •  Driving and Increasing Website Traffic 
  •  Content Optimization 
  •  Generating Higher Quality Leads 
  •  Creating Social Media Influencers 
  •  Promoting your unique content that can go viral (remember the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?) 
  •  Offer social commerce and shoppable posts 
  •  Information, which you can analyze and measure

 As you can see, social media has huge benefits, so creating a strategy will help you achieve your business goals and increase customer engagement. 

 Although content Marketing and Social Media Marketing are closely related, there is a difference between them. 

 Marketing strategy is the right place to start if you want to direct and improve your social media activities. It includes some basic elements like audience research, creating personas, choosing  social media platforms and  more. Content strategy focuses on  content formats and results. So you should look at content creation, communication and tone, content timing, etc. 

What is a social media engagement strategy?

Your social media engagement strategy is important because it creates relationships with your audience across different networks. It helps you  manage your community through social media  and build your brand. 

 The two main goals of an engagement strategy are: 

  1. Community management: This can be done by offering advice via a blog, responding to post comments, answering channel surveys and taking surveys or polls to learn more about your customer base. . 
  2. Grow your following: Interaction is key here, so provide valuable content  such as engaging video content, attract potential customers with free content or contests, or simply present your brand as active and helpful by engaging people in your networks in a responsive manner. 

 User Generated Content (UGC) can play a key role here because it is proof that the people who support your brand are talking about  it and are not coming from your company or marketing team. Here are four great examples of UGC to inspire you.

 What are the steps to building a successful social media strategy? 

 Now that you understand the basics of a social media strategy, let’s move on to the  steps you need to take to create a strategy. We’ll also highlight where you can integrate your content strategy and engagement strategy into your overall social media activities to ensure you’re covering all the bases. 

 Here are 5 steps to creating a successful social media strategy, including:

1. Know your target audience 

 The first step in developing any  strategy is to know your target audience. There are thousands of different categories of people on social media, and you want to target your ads and  social media posts to those few who will actually convert into potential customers. And for that, Ms. Alka Thakur uses her expertise to help clients identify their right target audience on social media and then figure out ways  we can serve that  audience. 

 The second part of this step is also to do a lot of research on anything and everything related to your product and service category,  from  competitors to other  market entrants with similar service products, and only then can you develop appropriate strategies to proceed. your business marketing plan 

 2. Create interesting content 

 The second and most important step would be to create  content that your target audience would not only be interested in seeing, but would  be interested in. The  content you create defines your current customer base and helps attract new  customers. Our Nagpur social media marketing company at OSK works round the clock to help  clients create the best  content for  social media. 

 3. Engage with your followers 

 Your followers can be existing customers or potential customers who are interested in your brand. Either way, it’s the best way to get a return on investment from whatever you’ve spent  marketing your brand on social media. communicate with  followers, not only to retain them, but also to engage them and know their feedback to improve our products and services. In this century, where the customer is  king, it is important to know exactly what the customer wants and needs. Running regular sweepstakes, contests and other engaging activities will help your customers connect with you on a brand level as they would benefit from the brand  more than just the product or  service. 

4. Use a separate content strategy for different social media platforms 

 Now we all know that there are some different groups of people who have adopted different social media platforms and  to target them you  need different social media strategies for each platform. If you post content on Facebook aimed at the younger generation, which is often used by Gen x and boomers today, the result will obviously not be as effective. Ms. Alkal has always had a habit of using different social media strategies for each client for their different social media accounts and this has been very beneficial to the clients  we serve. 

5. Stick to your brand theme 

 Every brand has a theme created from the beginning that later becomes their identity. But for it to become their identity, they need to be consistent with their theme and allow customers to associate your brand with that  theme. Only if a customer can retain and remember the small but important details of your brand are they  likely to stay or return. By creating a specific color palette  on Instagram or using a similar pattern in their posts, the client connects with them and thus increases  brand awareness for their customers, ultimately increasing their ROI.

Categories
Social Media

WhatsApp Marketing #101

Why do you need WhatsApp marketing?

WhatsApp is a powerful and useful messaging app that anyone can use, be it for personal use and also for business purposes. If you want to use a free messaging app for connecting with your friends and family, you can download the WhatsApp Messenger personal app. For business purposes, you can download the WhatsApp Business app to showcase your business profile and connect directly with customers or potential customers. When using the WhatsApp personal app, sending too many messages might put your account at risk. This is where WhatsApp business becomes the best option. It’s possible to showcase your business on the WhatsApp business app. You can use features such as the status to show a demo of your product and remember to build a trusting relationship with your regular and potential customers, give value and don’t expect every message you send them to make a sale or you might risk losing your customers. You can also use the WhatsApp web through web.whatsapp.com. WhatsApp web mirrors the WhatsApp personal app on your mobile phone. It saves you time. Today, WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging app. It is a free platform that anyone can use to send messages to anyone under WhatsApp contact lists. WhatsApp is the most popular messenger application which is widely used. 

WhatsApp has a very wide global reach. And by using the app you can talk to people and impact people in your country. You also get to have a great chance to reach your target market. With the help of messaging services, people communicate fast, active users are making use of the various features of WhatsApp and smart businesses are using it for their benefit.

Different ways to use WhatsApp as a marketing strategy

  • You can provide fast customer service to your customers. You can get in touch with their customers and respond to their enquiries and solve their issues right away. By doing this, your customers will experience great support from your business. After-purchase support is very much important for the customers if your product is great. But then your customer support is bad, especially when complaints arise, it will make your business be rated low by your customers, and it will ruin your business’s reputation and will turn off your potential customers.
  • Send exclusive discounts on WhatsApp.

 If your customers are aware of your WhatsApp business account you can use it to send them offers and promotions. In addition, vouchers or coupons can be sent as discount privileges to encourage your customers to purchase the product. People love getting discounts. so even if they don’t need your product for service coupons where they can get use discount will urge them to buy from you.

  • Send creative promotions to your contact list. 

WhatsApp isn’t limited to sending plain text messages to people on your list. You can send messages as videos which you can use to promote new products or services, as people love watching videos more than reading text products or still photo promotions. You can also share pictures that you have created for a particular campaign for upcoming products that your customers can look forward to. You can also share voice messages, if you prefer sending recorded voice messages, you can use WhatsApp to ask your customer you give a review of a product or service used by your business. 

WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp Business is a mobile application from WhatsApp, that is meant for small-scale businesses. It will be easier to respond to customers using the WhatsApp Business app. You can even set auto-replies if a customer sends you the same messages, and instead of answering the same question every day, you can set a default answer to such questions. this is very helpful if you are a very busy business owner who needs less time in handling thousands of messages every day. This business app will save you time. So you can spend more time on more important business activities. you can also present your business, by creating a business profile with all the necessary information that your customers will need if they visit your local business address, know more about the business or contact you. Facebook owns WhatsApp. So a feature of WhatsApp Business that is driving an increase from your Facebook page’s advertisements to your WhatsApp business account is available. So when your customers click the message button shown in your Facebook ads they will be automatically directed to your WhatsApp Business account page. Businesses can now enjoy the benefits of the features of WhatsApp Business, regardless if they are using an Android or an IOS mobile phone. They are both usable on both platforms. WhatsApp Business app charges the businesses on those messages which are not attended to for more than 24 hours. This feature encourages business owners to offer the best customer assistance and service, which would help in building a good trusting relationship with their customers. We all hate it if our inquiries for complaints are not attended to right away. This feature helps the customers, in getting their concerns addressed by these business owners in less than 24 hours using WhatsApp Business. There are features on the business app which are not available to the personal app.

Messaging tools

  • Pre-Defined Greetings

When someone sends a message on your WhatsApp business account for the first time you can automatically send them a greeting message. It serves as a welcome message for your customers on your WhatsApp business account. It will help improve your customer experience and customer satisfaction with your business. You can set your greetings relevant to what your business promotions are. You can also set customer support greetings as well. You can also collect leads using your greeting message. For example, inform them that you cannot respond at the moment and tell them to leave their name and email address so that you can get back to them within business hours. 

  • Away Messages

The away messages help inform your customers that you are not currently available to send the response at the moment. It also reassures them that you can reach them once your business is back from a temporary vacation or business activity. If you don’t enable this feature, your potential customers might lose interest in doing business with you. if they are informed that you are away for a specific reason and tell them when they can expect to receive a message from you, then they will be eager to wait for your response at the set date. 

  • Quick replies

WhatsApp quick replies are saved messages that you can easily use to send frequently asked questions. This helps you respond to users without typing the same messages to different contacts. Quick messages help improve your response time and it is easier to keep the same tone of voice when your business team is sending messages to your customers. 

  • Labels

Users can mark chats from their contacts with the label. it can help you categorize the chats you receive from your recipients. it will allow you to add labels and organise chats with the color coding scheme. you can set labels such as new customer, new order, pending payment, paid, order complete, and you can add more labels that you can customize for your business needs. 

  • WhatsApp Short Link

If you have customers, you can allow them to send a message and chat with your business directly. When you want to share your WhatsApp contact number faster, you can use the WhatsApp short link feature. Using a WhatsApp business app you can create a generated link to use for sending to multiple customers. 

  • QR code

You can also use a QR code and share them with your customers instead of using a link. This is useful when you have a physical store and you want to use this QR code so that your customers can easily send a chat with your business. this also saves them time rather than saving your contact number. you can also use this QR code on other social media platforms so that your visitors can send you a direct message on WhatsApp. 

  • Business Profile

Your WhatsApp business account should have details about your business including your business name, business category, description, business location, business hours, email address, and your website. Your business profile is important as your customers may check out your business profile before they choose your business.

  • Catalog

WhatsApp Catalog helps businesses share their products with their customers. It can allow your customers to enjoy online shopping using your catalog. Instead of sharing photos of your products with any potential customer, who asks about what products you are offering, you can save time by adding items to your catalog. It can allow your business to showcase your products on one page. it can result in a better customer experience and an improved shopping experience with your business. 

  • Using cart

With the use of carts, customers can place orders from businesses that have an existing catalog under the WhatsApp business app. Customers can place orders quickly, ask questions about the items in your catalog, and place an order for multiple items simultaneously. 

  • Collection

This feature allows businesses to organise their catalog and group similar items into categories. This is helpful for your customers to browse the items in your shop without scrolling through a list. 

  • Advertise on Facebook

Advertising is essential to promote your business. You can create an ad that can help you reach customers on Facebook and send them directly to your WhatsApp Business account. 

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