Tag: Social Media Strategy

3 Things Your Team Should Do to Support Your Social Media Marketing

Once you have a handle on consistently sharing your brand story on social media, it’s time to brainstorm how to encourage and incorporate every member of your team in supporting your social media marketing efforts. Marketing doesn’t have to be done in a silo. Everyone in your company can like, comment, share, and engage in online conversations around your brand.  

Here are some ways you can encourage your team to support your social media efforts:

Social Media Training

The best support you can give your team is to set up policies and guidelines for social media marketing for your brand and then provide education to your team on not only the proper way to interact with your audience online, but also providing training to help them understand concepts like algorithms and engagement so they understand how social media works and how best to utilize it. This encourages brand ownership and motivates your team to spend more time online, growing and interacting with your audience and customers.

Engage with Your Brand Online

You may have an individual on your team that is responsible for monitoring social media and engaging with followers. If you don’t, you certainly should. However, by giving the rest of your team a bit of ownership when it comes to interacting with your audience online – you can increase your reach and impact, earning even more trust from your followers. The key is to train your team first, to ensure everyone is on the same page about what is or isn’t okay, and then regularly encourage your team to spend time online engaging with your audience. 

Become a Brand Advocate

The first two tips will amplify this one. Once your team is confident in their ability to interact with your audience online and is excited about taking some ownership in social media engagement, they very well may become some of your strongest brand advocates. You’ll know it’s successful if your team shares your information on their own feeds and doesn’t just spend their online time on your brand channels. 

While you can’t force someone to become a brand advocate for you, encouragement and regular practice using social media on your behalf may, naturally, unfold into creating more advocates for your company online. These advocates for your company will be excited about sharing positive messaging and stories about your brand and will have more empowered ownership in their role at your business.

Many companies either don’t consider or don’t take the time to expand their social media efforts outside their marketing department. It’s a safe bet to have a trusted, experienced marketing professional or someone in leadership exclusively handle social media. However, even more potential exists to make your social media marketing mean more than just an online marketing effort when you train and encourage your team to participate as well.

Are you looking for a social media company to train your staff on online marketing strategies and equip them with the tools to maintain engagement, spark interest through Linkedin and other social media platforms, and build a solid foundation company-wide? Contact us to set up a training session for your sales team to improve your online marketing efforts.

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 LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

Developing a Social Media Strategy for Marketing Your Business

Posting consistency on your business social media channels is vital. Consistency is one of the keys to success on social media. However, making sure you have a post up every day isn’t necessarily a social media strategy. If you’ve found that posting to social media isn’t producing the results you had hoped, it’s time to evaluate what you are posting and whether or not it’s the type of content your audience actually wans in their social media feeds.

When developing a social media strategy for marketing your business, these three tips are what we’d like you to focus on right now:

Organic Growth

In today’s social media world, there are really only two paths for growth on Facebook for small businesses. Organic growth is where you grow your audience on social media without investing in any platform-based advertising. By creating and sharing branded content, you attract like-minded individuals and nurture those relationships through social media engagement and posting valuable information. The best organic growth strategies incorporate community building – encouraging your audience to come back daily for connection and community.

Social Media Advertising

Once you know your content is working (because your audience is growing and engaging with your posts), it’s time to consider investing in social media advertising. For many industries, social media advertising is quite affordable and helps to draw new traffic to your channels. Once you know a post is doing well, boosting it can draw fresh eyes – people that may decide to follow your channel (growing your audience).

You can also craft ads using a targeted strategy to draw traffic to your website, landing page, newsletter sign-up, or other call to action area. These ads don’t necessarily have to start as original content in your feed. However, since you are sending traffic elsewhere this effort probably won’t result in an increase in social media followers on that channel.

Which method works best? It depends on your strategy and what marketing goal you are trying to reach. Are you trying to drive traffic to your new launch? Increase your Facebook followers? Build your email marketing list? Each effort requires a specialized advertising approach.

Analytics & Reporting

What you think makes a great post won’t always align with what your audience believes is valuable content. That’s why it’s important to track your data frequently, evaluating what is and isn’t working, so you can optimize your social media posts to gain even more reach and engagement.

Social media strategy is about building your audience on your social platforms. This is done with a consistent content marketing strategy and by boosting your efforts through paid advertising. A content marketing strategy is key to organic growth so creating original content (blogs, videos, podcasts) using monthly themes and then repurposing that content for sharing on social media comes first and is then followed up by boosting content that is doing well and creating ads to direct targeted traffic to what you are sharing.

Are you looking for social media training you can participate in, right from the comfort of your home?  Join others utilizing our 40+ video training series that you can participate in, at your own pace, from your home.  We have a Private Facebook Support Group, Monthly Ask the Expert Mastermind Sessions, FREE Ebook and regular new videos to support your marketing. Learn everything from creating the editorial calendar, to creating custom branded images, to the best use of hashtags, to paid ads and reporting by joining the Social Power Program.

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 LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

How to Tell a Story for Your Business in Social Media

Storytelling matters. It matters in our lives and it matters in our businesses. Human beings, since the dawn of time, have been drawn to stories. It’s how we learn and it’s how we relate to one another.

One of the reasons many businesses struggle with social media marketing is that they are using it strictly as a sales tool. However, people aren’t on social media for that reason. They open up their social apps to connect with other people, to learn something new, to become motivated or inspired. If your content isn’t doing these things, then it’s falling flat.

If you want to garner attention and interest on social media, you need to create content that your audience actually wants – and often that involves telling a good story.

Here are some ways to tell a story for your business in social media:

Create an Editorial Calendar

It’s difficult to weave together a consistent, relevant, and clear story if you aren’t certain what you are going to post on social media on any given day. An editorial calendar is a compass for your social media content, outlining what type of content you will share on what days. Once you have a plan for sharing and promoting your content, you can use your editorial calendar as the structure for your storytelling.

Without a calendar, you could find yourself in a situation where you are talking about your service one day, your ideal client another day, sharing a motivational quote another, and then forwarding an article that caught your interest later in the week. What’s ineffective about this approach is that there is no strategy involved. On any given day, you are posting content that isn’t related to the other posts. While you get points for consistency, this method of posting is not telling a cohesive story that motivates people to act.

Here’s a better example of utilizing an editorial calendar:

For the current month, you’ve chosen the theme of ‘Sharing Our Business Origin Story.’

You know that on Tuesdays, you share your main piece of original content (this could be a video, a podcast, or a blog post). On Monday, you post a quote from that content and share it as a kind of teaser of what’s to come. The day after you share your original content, Wednesday, you create a post that’s promotional, tying in what you do with what you created. On Thursday, you share some behind the scenes photos of a past project, your workspace, or an inside peek of how you began your business. Friday is a great day to engage your audience by posting a poll or asking a question.

In this scenario, your editorial calendar looks like this:

Monthly Theme: Our Company’s Why & Why It Matters

Weekly Theme: Our Origin Story

  • Monday – Quotes
  • Tuesday – Original Content
  • Wednesday – Promo Day
  • Thursday – Behind the Scenes
  • Friday – Engagement

For ease of use, keep the calendar the same every week/month, switching out only the content themes.

An editorial calendar is really the foundation of any successful social media strategy. It allows business owners to know exactly what type of content to create and also provides a structure around their storytelling and calls to action so that the output is easy to understand and has a natural flow (like a story).

Plan for Engagement

Any social media marketing plan comes with a word of warning: DON’T be one of those businesses that posts content and then disappears. Scheduling social media content is a great way to save yourself time and to stay on track with your messaging, but social media is meant to be… social.

Too many businesses use a post it and forget it strategy and then go around telling any other business that will listen that social media marketing doesn’t work. The truth is… it doesn’t work for absentee business owners. Have a plan for social media engagement. Even if it’s only 15 mins a day, 3 days a week – some presence is better than none.

Your audience will quickly grasp onto the knowledge that you aren’t there for them and they will take their time and attention elsewhere, leaving your story to be unseen by the people you want to attract.

Showcase Your Brand

We encourage our clients to share their personal and professional stories on social media as often as they can. It’s important that, in your content, you are showcasing your personality, your business culture, and all of the things that make your brand unique. This helps your audience get to know you better which builds both interest and trust. No one is going to do business with you until they trust you.

When showcasing your brand and business on social, have your audience in mind. You want them to be inspired by the good you are doing in the world, but you also want them to feel motivated to strive for more so that they’ll sign up for your product or service. How can you make your audience the hero of your story?

Not everyone is a writer and storytelling doesn’t come naturally to all. However, mastering the art of sharing your story online is the most impactful way to build your brand and grow your business.

Are you looking for social media training you can participate in, right from the comfort of your home?  Join others utilizing our 40+ video training series that you can participate in, at your own pace, from your home.  We have a Private Facebook Support Group, Monthly Ask the Expert Mastermind Sessions, FREE Ebook and regular new videos to support your marketing. Learn everything from creating the editorial calendar, to creating custom branded images, to the best use of hashtags, to paid ads and reporting by joining the Social Power Program.

 

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 LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

#BePrepared – How to Read Social Media Reports

Have you been using social media for months and months, but you have no idea if you’re even getting any results?

Don’t worry: You’re not alone.

Tons of small business owners post daily to social media without any real idea of what’s working and what’s not.

We get it: Checking all of those reports and trying to interpret the data can be daunting. But it’s important to check your analytics regularly so you can spot trends and improve your strategy where necessary.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do if you know what to look for. These are the key metrics you should focus on for the best ROI:

Followers

These are the people who have “liked” your page and (hopefully) see your posts show up on their timeline. This number is important because the more followers you have, the more engagement and traffic your page will receive. All of those add up to higher visibility.

To see how many followers you have, simply visit your profile page on any social media network and look at the number displayed there. For more in-depth information, you can view insights or analytics reports and see exactly how many followers you gained and how many you lost in any given time period.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of users who saw a post. Most of the big-name social media networks have built-in analytics that will show the number of impressions your posts receive.

Why are impressions important? Because the more people that see your content, the better, obviously!

Check your analytics to see which days and which posts received the most impressions so you can create more of that type of content!

Engagement

Engagement goes beyond audience members just seeing your posts. When they engage, they “like” your posts, leave comments, and share.

Impressions are nice, but engagement gets you in front of new eyes. When an audience member shares your content, there is the chance that everyone on their friends’ list will see it as well.

Like impressions, you should monitor engagement to see which posts receive the most activity – and then make more of them.

Mentions

The best free advertising of all? Brand mentions: When a user talks about your brand of their own volition.

On the flip side, of course, people may mention your brand because they are unhappy with your product or service.

Either way, mentions are worth monitoring and responding to. A quick reply to ANY mention shows that you take customer service seriously and that you value your audience.

Don’t think you have the skills to monitor analytics on your own? Never fear! Our Social Power program will give you all the tools you need to grow your business on social media. Reach out today to learn more.

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 LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.


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