Social Media

The Only Keywords You Really Need To Know: Be Genuine

You have probably heard about the big trends in online marketing, like video marketing, blogging, and content marketing, but what about those smaller details that make each customer interaction unique and interesting online? Creating a captivating online experience is not just about the big-picture details, but the little ways in which a customer gets excited about your business. Personalizing your business, creating a buzz, and being authentic and genuine when providing online content are three concepts that are poised to make a huge impact.

Finding more ways to personalize what your customers see can really make a big difference. Most of us are familiar with Netflix and the way they show their “recommended for you” picks each time you log in. With a little bit of personalization, Netflix makes us eager to open it up and discover the next show we will be binge-watching until the wee hours of the morning. We just know that we will always find a great show to watch, as Netflix confidently presents its picks for us day after day, a vast array of colorful titles and pictures chosen just for us that keeps us drawn in. You may not have the budget that Netflix has, but there is always potential to collect data, find out what your customers are missing, and take action to make your website feel more personalized.

Creating and maintaining a buzz around your business is another strategy that many successful businesses use. Your website doesn’t have to just sit there, waiting for interest. A website is meant to always be active, moving, and changing, getting people in on the conversation. This is where social media advertising comes into play, such as with blogging or posting updates on your personal social media pages. Putting out new products and showing people glimpses into your business via videos are great ways to get people talking. Sharing videos and images on your website or social media page is today’s version of word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is still really powerful, we just tend to do it digitally nowadays. And remember, it takes experimentation, trial and error. You may not come up with the world’s greatest campaign overnight and that’s OK. It’s about trying things, making mistakes, learning from them, and eventually coming up with something great.

Last but certainly not least, find ways to be as authentic as possible. With all of the articles and interesting stories out there online, it has become harder than ever to stand out. People are no longer responding to mass messages and impersonal, anonymous content. They want to relate to you, to feel like you know and understand them. Making sure your online content is valuable and genuine will go a long way. Take note of your audience’s needs and issues and provide ways of solving them that show that you understand and care. Being authentic will make you stand out and people will be able to tell that you are the real deal.

Business Blogging Gains More Trust With Less Effort

If you have a small online business, you may be wondering how to build credibility and trust so that you can attract lots of customers, and even compete with the big companies that are out there. Starting a business blog is an excellent way to start building a great reputation and to attract people who are potential customers. This is an important aspect of social media advertising that allows you to build more trust without a lot of effort.

There are tons of great benefits to small business blogs. One of the most important things that a business blog accomplishes is it gives the search engines fresh content all the time. That is exactly what the search engines want to see. As long as you are blogging on a regular basis, the search engines always have new content to index. When you use keywords in your blog posts, you are also boosting your visibility on the search engine results pages. Because of these factors, blogging is really good for your SEO.

For a small business, building trust and a great reputation is really important. Blogging gives you an awesome opportunity to be seen as an expert in your industry. When you provide great information and insight in your blog posts, you are seen as someone customers can trust and someone who knows what they are talking about. Establishing credibility this way gives you a good chance of getting more customers taking the actions you want them to take. Don’t worry, you don’t have to know everything about your products or services to write informative blog posts. Any kind of a story mentioning what you are selling helps to build credibility.

Blog posts are shareable, which is another great benefit of blogging. Every blog post can be shared by other people. People can share the post on their social media profiles, they can e-mail it to someone, they can link to your blog post from their website. This is even more great marketing for your business and it further enhances your credibility.

A business blog allows you to create relationships with potential customers, boost your SEO, and generate more traffic for your business without having to put a lot of effort into these things. What’s not to love?

Social Media Trends That Are Turning Heads This Year

A good business owner is always refining and improving their marketing strategy to keep up with the latest trends and new opportunities. Social media has become a very important aspect of marketing a business, so let’s take a look at some of the social media advertising trends that have been worth paying attention to in 2018.

Videos have continued to dominate this year, as studies have shown that a whopping 95% of messages from videos are retained in a viewer’s mind, while only 10% of the message is retained with text. An expansion of this that has been becoming more and more popular is live-streaming. Studies have shown that 80% of customers would rather watch a live video from a brand than read some posts. The expansion of live streaming on social media has been only growing, as Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr have launched live streaming in the past few years. Studies show that Facebook Live Videos are watched three times longer than regular videos. Live videos are engaging and there is a lot of potential here for a business. Live streaming the making or launching of a product, and a live Q&A session are a few great ideas on how to take advantage of this for your company.

Marketing to Generation Z, called “true digital natives,” is another important trend to consider this year and into the future. Generation Z loves to use Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, among other social media platforms. Making sure that your business is connecting with this generation and understanding what this generation is looking for, is a must.

Last but not least, mobile-optimized content on social media sites is becoming more and more necessary. The number of people using their mobile devices for social media is only increasing, so it is worth it to ensure that your social media can easily be viewed on a mobile device. This includes short and to-the-point headlines, images that work well with smaller screen sizes, and using a content management system.

Keeping up with these social media trends presents exciting opportunities to grow your business and to stay ahead of your competition.

Our Bang Makes Your Bucks With Social Media Advertising

We all know the popular phrase “more bang for your buck” or “more bang for the buck” or whatever your preferred variation is. Well, this phrase can be turned on its head when an e-commerce business takes advantage of social media advertising. If you’re looking for a way to help make your business become more engaging and ultimately to drive more traffic and sales, social media advertising is the way to go. If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of your own bang making your bucks by handling the social media yourself, let an online marketing company’s bang make your bucks by letting them take care of quality social media advertising.

Social media continues to dominate our minds, our souls, our everyday lives, whether we like it or not. With smartphones, tablets, Bluetooth devices, and all kinds of other tech we have gotten used to using, our thirst for information only becomes greater and we give up hours of sleep and important things we need to do because we just can’t escape the grip of our social media networks, enticing us to come in and explore and satisfy our human interests. I’m not saying it’s bad, there is a lot of good that comes from having tons of information right in front of us. We get inspired to decorate our home in a new way or to go for that goal we’ve always wanted to reach but never thought was possible, but now see is possible because we see someone else do it. People are inspiring and interesting and social media allows us to connect with people like never before.

Social media is no doubt an important way to get customers excited about your brand and your business. Leveraging social media for your online store is a must. When you take advantage of social media marketing, everything I just said about the gripping power of social media starts to help your business become a success. Video advertising has become the future, as videos have been dominating Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media networks. It doesn’t even matter anymore if your video goes viral or not, just having one and having the video reach the right customers means new customers coming to your business and old customers coming back for more.

If you haven’t taken advantage of social media advertising, now is the time to check your LinkedIn and Twitter feed to see how big of an impact it makes. Recent studies have shown that people are spending up to 9 hours a day on social media, especially teens. Some say that today’s teens are tomorrow’s douchebags, well, I say that they are tomorrow’s consumers, and the ones worth reaching.

Trends in Social Media Advertising Point to Valuable Changes

Over the last year, there were many changes in the way that customers and brands interacted on social media. It has now become standard for businesses to build a social media presence for their company that allows customers to easily interact with the businesses they like. Most businesses have found that there are many benefits to connecting with customers on Facebook and other social media platforms.

One of the main reasons that social media interactions help to build connections to customers is that these interactions don’t have the same approach as standard advertisements. What this means is that customers are able to see your product in a way that doesn’t make it feel like the product is one that is being advertised. The youngest people advertisers are trying to connect to now are in a different generation than in previous years. This generation is filled with people who are a lot more private and very resistant to advertising. It is no surprise that fun videos and pictures on social media are better for connecting to these customers than other attempts at advertising. Since this generation has close to $44 billion in purchasing power, this is likely to shape how companies interact with customers on social media in the future.

If you are looking to set up successful advertising on your social media, you’ll want to make sure that you are able to adjust your technique to make sure that overt advertising takes that backseat. When you work on advertising through social media, you may want to look at trends from this year. Many businesses have had a lot of success with personally connecting to customers through social media rather than targeting the broadest spectrum of your customers. There has also been a lot more success with visual items like videos and pictures. For example, if you are marketing a bed and breakfast, talking about how beautiful your area is in the fall won’t be as powerful as posting pictures of it or even a video tour of the area.

At this point, social media advertising is something that should be a part of how you market your business no matter what. Since so many people use information from social media to help them make decisions, putting your products in front of people on social media will be a great way to ensure that you can make sales. You can also set up your business as a reliable source by sharing informative articles and other items that can help customers make decisions on what to purchase.

Scheduling Social Media Advertising Can Help You Stay Focused and Consistent

While social media is a valuable piece of marketing your website online, it is extremely important that you don’t get too far off track while working with social media. Many business owners get caught up in all the features available in social media and soon find that they are posting in various ways all over these different social media platforms. While it is good to be consistently present on social media, it is more of a problem to have your social media focus being divided and potentially confused as you work with too many platforms.

One great way to make sure that you can be consistent and straight forward whenever you are marketing your website through social media is to set a schedule for yourself. This will help you divide the time that you have for social marketing between the various platforms and channels you work with. Scheduling specific time to work on your Facebook posts or YouTube videos will help you get something done before moving to another social media site. It is too easy to spend social media time trying to come up with ideas for posts for all your social media, leading one platform or more to become neglected.

For small businesses, it can be good to pick and choose which social media channels you are a part of. If you are selling items online, you have to make sure that you have time to focus on your website in addition to the time you spend on various social media platforms. Trying to cover too many channels at once can make it impossible for you to remain consistent on any of the channels you are working with. Start with one or two social media pages you can focus on. In the future, if you end up having more time or money to devote to social media, you can branch out again.

Staying focused and consistent is extremely important to making it so that you are able to use social media effectively when marketing your business. You’ll want to make sure that all the time and energy that you put into your social media advertising is something that really pays off. To make this possible, you’ll have to get yourself focused by scheduling out your time and not over committing by choosing to run social media through a whole bunch of different platforms.

Follow Your Customers To Where They Love To Tweet, Share, and Watch

As social media has been exploding, people have been looking to their favorite networks to fulfill all of their daily living needs, whether booking a hotel, ordering food, or upgrading their electronics. In today’s digital age, we are all looking to social media for the opinions and things that matter most to us. It is no wonder that so many marketers are following their customers to their favorite places to tweet, share, and watch. The importance of advertising on social media has only been growing, as social media keeps exploding.

Customers are spending more and more of their time on social media platforms, and getting in on their conversations is an important part of marketing your online business. Whether you are posting videos or creating a company Facebook page, customers can easily be reached on social media, and you can connect with them on a more personal and emotional level.

In just a few short years, advertising on social media has gone from close to nothing to billions of dollars being spent on it. It is estimated that billions of people across the world use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Advertising on social media can be very precise and targeted, reaching exactly the customer who will most likely be interested in your particular product or service.

Getting into the game of social media is surely worth it, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you don’t have time to regularly post updates about your business on social media, you can find a marketing company that will create social networks and keep them updated for you. Social media advertising is great for building business recognition and helping customers get more acquainted with your business in a fun way. Plus, every post that you put out there is an opportunity for someone to become a paying customer. Every blog post, image, and video is a chance for someone to react and to visit your website.

Making your business more human is easy to do with social media advertising. People want to do business with other people, not with companies. When you make your business human through social media, people will be much more likely to purchase something, as they will enjoy interacting on a personal level.

Additional Twitter Characters May Be Helpful for Social Media Advertising

Twitter has been testing an increase in Twitter characters since September, but now it is official, Twitter is going to be rolling out these longer tweets to most of their users. While there has been some backlash about the addition of characters to Twitter tweets, Twitter has decided to move ahead with the increase in character limit from 140 to 280 characters. It seems the initial reaction to the character increase was overblown as the change in characters hasn’t done much to change the overall look of Twitter.

Many users worried initially that the change would be one that would ruin the short concise tweets that make Twitter what it is. During the testing phase of the 280 character limit, Twitter looked closely at the tweets that were being produced. They found that just 5 percent of tweets sent by people in the test group were longer than the traditional limit and that only 1 percent of these used all 280 characters. The people who could tweet with more characters during the test were able to pick up more followers, received more likes and retweets, and spent more time on Twitter than other users. This is the reason that Twitter decided that the increase in the limit was a success.

What does this mean for business owners who are using social media to market their businesses? Mainly the increase in the number of characters will allow you the same benefits that Twitter saw with its testers. You’ll have more characters to use while you are tweeting so you’ll be able to more easily engage with customers and connect with them as you tweet about your products or the services that you offer.

If you haven’t started using social media to market your business, now is the perfect time to start. Social media advertising is a great way to engage with your customers and to respond to questions or concerns that may arise. Since social media is used mostly by people in the younger generations, reaching customers through social media can be especially important if the products or services that you offer are targeted at these individuals. Setting up a social media account and using this to touch on topics that relate to your market is a great way to draw attention to your website.