Social Media Management Archives - Page 9 of 10

June 14, 2016
Social Media Marketing

#TimeManagement – Planning Your Images for Social Media

Social Media management can be tough. Between content creation, image creation (and licensing), scheduling, branding, engagement, and more; it’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel as though your time is stretched in a thousand different directions.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Today, I’m going to share one of my #TimeManagement tools I use to tackle image creation. It’s an online program called Canva. Canva is free, intuitive, and the templates are already in place for the most popular social media sites.

Signing up is easy. Just use one of your social media accounts or email address and you’re all set.

Though there are many different designs available, the default “Social Media” design works great for most platforms. When you select it, you’ll have the option of using premade templates of text and images. There are free and paid options, so make sure you choose the one that best suits your project.

If you don’t like the premade templates, you’re welcome to upload your own or use one of their 100,000+ images. Remember, our aim is to create quality, shareable images for your social media brand in a short period of time. The templates are there to help you save minutes if not hours for each image.

The text options are easy to create and alter as needed. Color, effects, etc. are simple to use. If you’re familiar with Instagram’s filtering options, you’ll have no problem navigating this section.

Once the image is created, you can download it for permanent use. A quick note: Make sure you’ve used your brand in the image with your website link, if possible. You want people to be able to find you, after all, and it’s easy to lose the original thread when an image has been pinned and shared multiple times.

Here’s another #TimeManagement tip for you: If you are an Instagram user, there’s an added bonus for sharing to Facebook when you post. According to a study released in February 2016 by Buzzsumo, images posted to Facebook via Instagram are seeing a 23% more engagement rate than those posted directly to FB. So, if you’re looking for a bigger impact with a nominal effort, just check that little FB box on Instagram.

Do you already use Canva? If not, what image building software do you use? Let us know what you use to #BeAwesome when planning your visual content for social media in comments!

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+,YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and the tools to manage them.

Click here for her Social Media Workshops, Classes and Seminars

January 8, 2016
Social Engagement

Social Seven – Do You Value Your Social Media Fans?

Do You Value Your Social Media Fans?

Special Guest: Melody Jones of Social Media Management Services, LLC

This week we discuss the challenge of showing your social media fans how much you value them. These great tips help keep your audience in the front of your mind and marketing efforts.

Having fans and followers is so important because social media is such a social experience. One of the main complaints about brands is how they don’t pay attention to their fans. However, social media is all about relationships and conversation and not about how many fans you have.

Some basic ways you can show your fans that you care. One of them is to pay attention to what your followers are saying and comment back. Respond. In whatever way you need to, depending on the platform. Retweeting and thanking people on Twitter is often the way to go. Some brands will call out friends and followers by name. It is that easy to value your fans. But it does take persistence, patience, and daily monitoring.

What if your accounts are lacking in engagement? For example, when you are in a classroom and no one wants to raise his or her hand or go first. Having a tribe helps encourage followers to engage more in order to be a part of the tribal activity. Give them something to jump onto and participate in.

People like to be recognized whether it’s saying thank you or mentioning them. They liked to be called by name. Responding and replying is essential. It would be considered rude to ignore someone in person who asked you a question, why do it on Social Media?

In valuing our social media fans, what’s the appropriate amount of time? The quicker you can get to it the better. You need to respond to your fans on a daily basis. If you have a large brand and lots of activity, you may need a team of people dedicated to responding to followers. With a team it will be a lot easier. Create a marketing tribe.

Does response time vary by platform? There are stats available online for what fans expect in regards to response time on different social media platforms. Twitter is often less than an hour, while other platforms are more flexible.

What about negative comments? Everyone is going to get negative comments occasionally. The #1 mistake is to delete them. You need to respond as quickly as possible and give them a venue to continue the conversation offline. There are two reasons for that. One, deleting the comment or post will make the user angry. Also followers are watching how you handle the situation. If you manage to make it right, you could convert that customer into a fan.

These are some great reminders about the value of our fans. Appreciate your customers and your audience. Take the time to make that a part of your daily routine. It’s so worth it. You will keep your fans and followers and continue to grow as a brand.

Learn more about Melody and her company by visiting: http://socialmediamelody.com/

Think this might help you with staying on top of your social media? Follow us on social media to find out when our Social Seven podcast is streaming live!

Join us each week as Erin Cell of Socially Powered and Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor dive into conversations about Social Media Tools, News and Guests in the Social Media World!

December 25, 2015
Social Media Marketing

Social Seven: Tools of the Trade – Post Planner

Post Planner claims to triple your engagement and reach. Erin used the tool for her own business for a while to compare its effectiveness against simply posting natively to Facebook.

It goes back to posting images versus just posting text. Posts with images get more engagement, likes and shares than if you just use text. People are drawn towards color and visual stories. Text alone is boring. It’s good to have a healthy combination of both. There is a lot less reach with a text only post than if an image is added. One of the things Erin really likes about Post Planner is that they have added the capability to create a post in Post Planner then create an image in Canva and the tool will automatically share it. It combines the two processes into one step and saves time. It’s connected to your Facebook and Canva so all those designs are saved in both places.

Another great thing about Post Planner is that it gives you ideas about what to post. When you are drawing a blank, you can search Post Planner for images, quotes, or engaging questions to ask to boost your content management. This is similar to what Hootsuite and Buffer offers but it is more of a searchable database than a list of links. Post Planner also offers insightsfor those seeking motivation or additional ideas.

Post Planner is only $7 a month to use, with occasional sales to make it even more affordable. Therefore, it is a reasonable, cost effective tool with some decent perks to help keep up with social media management.

We’d love to hear your feedback if you have used Post Planner and it has helped your business or helped you engage your audience.

Think this might help you with scheduling content and staying on top of your social media? Follow us on social media to find out when our Social Seven podcast is streaming live!

Join us each week as Erin Cell of Socially Powered and Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor dive into conversations about Social Media Tools, News and Guests in the Social Media World!

December 22, 2015
Social Media Strategy

#GiftYourBusiness – Gift of Budget

There are new social media tools being created every day. Many of these tools make the process of curating and scheduling content more efficient and less time-consuming. When it comes to running your own business, saving time is one of the most important aspects of becoming profitable. Therefore, one of the best ways to gift your business this holiday season is to sign up and incorporate some free social media and online tools into your daily routine. Here are recommendations for some of my favorite free social tools.

Canva

Since visual content is so important to social media, a tool like Canva is invaluable. Canva allows users to create social media and marketing images quickly and easily. These high-quality, easy to design images can be used anywhere. Not everyone is a graphic designer or has access to photo editing software. Canva eliminates the need for either of those and makes image creation simple and amazing.

Buffer

For those maintaining a presence on Twitter, Buffer is a fabulous free tool. Buffer allows users to track their follower activity and gives suggestions as to the best time to post or schedule tweets. It has built in scheduling and analytics. The analyticsmeasures all major engagement statistics for posts on the major platforms.

Hootsuite

If we were to log into social mediaevery day, all the time, nothing else would ever get accomplished. However, it’s important that our brands remain reliable and visible on each of the social platforms to maintain our following. Hootsuite is a widely known and popular tool for scheduling out content. It has also RSS feed capabilities and allows users to interact on various platforms via one place.

Commun.it

Another tool that is nearly essential for Twitter users is Commun.it. This tool is based on the need to stay on top of relationship management within the platform. It tracks all the major interaction on your Twitter account and automatically works to nurture and engage fans and followers on the site. The tool monitors what others are saying about you, your brand and your business. It also shows who is linking to your site, discovers new leads for you, tracks who follows and unfollows, and reports back on community engagement. There are options to auto-engage people who follow, mention, post or retweet your content. This helps keep Twitter accounts relevant on a platform that moves very quickly.

Paper.li

This tool provides an area online to automatically curate and organize content based on chosen topics. It is displayed in a visually appealing newspaper format. These newspapers are a great place to gather together content into a readable feed. Feeds can be organized by topic or by type of media. Users can create multiple newspaper feeds at a time and can follow people, lists, and hashtags. It also has the capability to follow Twitter lists without actually following them via your own Twitter account.

These are just some of the tools available to make life and work easier for business owners and marketers. All of these tools offer a paid upgrade option with additional features in case you stumble upon one you just absolutely love and want access to additional benefits. However, each of these tools can be incorporated into your company today at no cost to you. So, give your business the gift of both time and money this holiday season by finding tools that make you more productive. Use all that extra time you now have to come up with even more ways to #BeAwesome!

~ Social Media is changing the way people do business. Don’t get left behind ~

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere, of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+ , YouTube,Pinterest, Instagram and the tools to manage them.

Click here for her Social Media Workshops, Classes and Seminars.

Free + Free = Win!

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