Category: Social Media

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Social Media

Social Media Management & Personal Balance: How to Step AFK

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 11, 2019
No Comments on Social Media Management & Personal Balance: How to Step AFK

Balancing social media management with personal life involves setting clear boundaries, scheduling content in advance, and using management tools for efficiency. Prioritizing mental health by taking regular breaks and not over-engaging with negative content is important. It’s also beneficial to diversify tasks and delegate responsibilities to maintain a healthy work-life balance in the demanding world of social media.

The world of social media is always changing and can be incredibly fun and exciting. Social media managers often find it exhausting, though. Why? They become attached to their work and remain connected far more than they actually need to be. Does this sound like you? It’s time to learn how to step away from the keyboard (AFK) and find better work/life balance.

A Minimum of Two Tech Free Hours Per Day

Yes, social media managers need to be connected. No, they do not need to be online 24/7. Put that crazy myth aside. No one dictates your accessibility but you, whether you’re an employee of the brand or a contractor. You’re either charging a premium rate for regular monitoring or they need to have someone else on-call for your “off” hours to make sure there are no fire that need to be put out.

That said, you need to have at least two tech-free hours per day. Upon waking, spend some time thinking about your gratitudes, having breakfast, showering, and planning your day. Do not pick up your phone or tablet and immediate hop onto social media. It can wait. Someone will probably call you if it can’t.

Spend at least one tech-free hour at the end of each day, too. We know it’s hard to completely unplug from tech, even after our work hours are over. It’s important, though. Unplugging to spend time resting, thinking, meditating, reading, and quieting your mind will lead to better rest and better focus the next day.

Schedule Other Non-work Time

Listen. You are a human being. You are not an extension of your computer or your phone. Leave your phone on the desk when you go to the bathroom. Allow the phone to remain in your purse, briefcase, or coat pocket while you have lunch in the middle of the day. Do not eat meals at your desk while working. Turn your notifications or sound off for an hour or two in the afternoon so you can exercise, have coffee with a friend, or do something social. Yes, social media managers can have social lives away from technology, too.

Limit Social Media to One Device

A lot of social media managers think they have to be connected via their phones all the time. This isn’t true; or it doesn’t need to be. Designate a single device for your social media “work,” and leave it at that. No protests. A secondary device should be for emergencies only. This will make it easier for you to walk away and deal with your offline life whenever necessary.

There is nothing you can do on your phone that you can’t do via a third-party desktop app, including Instagram interactions. Designating a device for work will help you to maintain a degree of separation while you’re out and about, spending time with family, and living your regular life. You don’t need to worry about whether or not your last post is getting engagement while you’re sitting in the dentist’s chair or while you’re picking up your kids from school. If you’re not at work you’re not at work. Disengage.

Stop Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Yes, people like quick responses to private messages. But do they expect them? Not in the way you think. According to Edison Research, approximately 42 percent of people using social expect some sort of response within five minutes to an hour; 25 percent expect a same-day response; and more than 33 percent expect to hear from you within a couple of days.

Here’s the deal, though. These are expected response times for customer service. What average brand do you know with 24/7 customer service? Very few, we’re sure. What does this mean to you as a social media manager? It means you should glance at social messages once every hour or so throughout your regular work day. Assign a team member to monitor for a couple of hours in the early morning or evening if there is a true time zone difference. Otherwise, put up an automated response letting your customers know someone will get back to them within normal business hours.

Planning Ahead for Vacations

Not only do you deserve time AFK during the work week, but you also deserve a real, true vacation. All you have to do is plan ahead. Use social media tools like HootSuite or Buffer to schedule your social content in advance, repurpose content to fill in any gaps that may appear while you’re away, and find someone to monitor notifications and messages while you’re gone.

Once you’ve got a plan in place you’ll need to be like Elsa and just let it go. Seriously. Turn off your notifications (especially push notifications), let your boss and team know your schedule, and set a time or two to check-in to advise if there are true emergencies. Note, this time isn’t to work — just to advise or consult if they are having an issue. Otherwise, take deep breath and enjoy your time away.

Set Your Own Standards

Remember, again, you are in control of your social media presence. It’s your job to create the standards for the job. Decide on the hours you’ll be available and which are your days off (yes, you get those, too). Communicate your goals. Create your own set of backup plans and share tasks with your team members. Don’t have a team member? Find one. These points are just as important as the social marketing strategies you’re employing.

While it’s very true that social media trolls never sleep, they’re just that — trolls. You, on the other hand, deserve to live a nourished, healthy, sleep-rich life. The trolls will be there when you wake up, and your real customers won’t really care about them. Focus on creating great content, engaging appropriately with your true audience, and sending leads back to your brand’s website and campaigns. You can do all of this and maintain a healthy work/life balance. Don’t let anyone trick you into thinking otherwise.

Tags personal balance, social media management

9 Social Media Trends to Watch for in 2019

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 24, 2018
No Comments on 9 Social Media Trends to Watch for in 2019

The New Year is right around the corner. With it will come brand new advice from every social guru you follow. While you want to keep up with upcoming trends, you don’t have to throw your entire social strategy up to this point out the window. Make sure you go into 2019 with the following ideas in mind:

Video to Text Ratio

Video will continue to be a huge part of social in 2019. Right now, a combination of video and text is a great strategy. Tipping the scale a little more toward video in the first quarter is suggested. Video should be a priority, with text coming in at a close second.

Live video will become more important than ever, so you’ll want to create a strategy that incorporates regular live feeds on both Facebook and Instagram. Even though live video comes with its own set of technical issues, followers are more likely to accept errors because the real-time aspect makes brands more relatable.

Long-Form Content

Video aside, make sure the content you are creating is valuable. This means taking more time to focus on long-form content that provides a valuable punch as opposed to short nuggets of information. Many publishers are focusing on content at least 1,000 words long; most only publish content at 1,500 words or more. Experiment with long and short form blogs to see what works for your audience.

Data Security and Trust

This year saw an endless number of scandals due to security and data breaches. Earlier in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook allowed unauthorized third-party access to the personal data of more than 85 million users. Just this month, they announced a second breach that accidentally exposed private user photos.

While you can’t do much to control the security of major social networks, you can make sure your own message is crystal clear. Communicate with your fans without always clamoring to collect data on forms. Social networks are asking business owners to be more transparent than ever in social marketing. With Facebook, anyone who visits a page can now see ads run by the page whether they are targeted or not.

Artificial Intelligence is Here

Are you using messenger bots to communicate with your customers? If not, you are likely falling behind. While the technology is still new, these tools can increase your response times and customer service turnarounds – when properly implemented. This method of communication is particularly appealing to millennials, who find it easy and engaging compared to the frustration of waiting.

Hootsuite recently predicted that more than “85 percent of all customer service interactions will be powered by AI bots” by 2020. Facebook and WhatsApp are now paving the way for integrating these technologies.

Personal versus Business Branding

To clarify, personal branding doesn’t mean you have to open your personal profiles to the public. It means that consumers are becoming more curious about the faces behind the brands they know and love. The public wants to know your company’s CEO is real and involved, not just a talking head.

What does this have to do with your marketing efforts? You need to become more visible about who you are and what you’re all about. Create separate brand pages for your business owner or public leaders, and cross-promote them along with your brand’s main social platforms.

Hiding behind your logo is a thing of the past. Real people and honest human interactions on social media, within guest blogs, and through public appearances (online and in person) are what build trust.

User-Generated Content

Brands are already deeply involved with UGC, but we should see exponential growth in this area throughout 2019. You should let your customers share photos and experiences, and then share them yourself to your own channels (with permission and credit). Most consumers perceive this type of content as authentic. It’s also a terrific boost to organic engagement in a marketing world that focuses on paid strategy.

Social Stories

The stories function on Instagram and Facebook continues to gain traction. Both show remarkable results compared to Snapchat because they allow brands to share quick snippets of information in a format that piques the interest of curious followers. The quick turnaround time from publication to disappearance creates a sense of urgency. Stories are cheap (sometimes even free) to create and allow you to generate regular content without overwhelming your main feed with too many posts.

Paid Strategies

Like it or not, Facebook and other social media platforms are pay-to-play in reach and exposure. We looked at a Facebook page with 100,000 “likes” the other day; some of their posts had as few as nine reactions. NINE!

According to HubSpot, brands saw around 16 percent organic reach in 2012. By 2018, that number fell to six percent. Brands seeking success on Facebook will need to set aside at least a small budget for paid promotions.

Some Users Share Content Privately

Users are still sharing content, but they’re sending content via private messages and text instead of sharing to their public timelines. This makes it harder to track how much engagement your content really achieves. This doesn’t mean you can’t continue to create and share great content, but it does mean you must pay attention to platform changes, so you can adapt to (and create more of) the things your audience reacts to most.

If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s change. 2018 has been a year of change; a whirlwind of sorts. 2019 isn’t likely to be much different, but you can put yourself in a better position to deal with it. Spend some time each day reviewing social media and marketing updates. Staying on top of changes as they play out makes it easier for you to adapt your strategies as the year progresses.

Tags social media, social media marketing, trends

Social Media

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ad Campaigns for Beginners

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date November 28, 2018
No Comments on The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ad Campaigns for Beginners

I’ve written a post on how to optimize your Facebook Ads strategy, but I’ve never taken the time to break the process of creating a campaign down step-by-step. For us here at Sachs Marketing Group, we’ve implemented countless social media ad campaigns, so we’re familiar with the process. But if you’re not – this guide’s for you.

How to Setup Your Facebook Ad Campaign

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to focus on the Facebook Ads Manager. I’ll write another piece about how to use the Power Editor for your Facebook campaign soon. You’ll get to this by clicking on the menu in the upper-right hand corner and clicking “Create Ads” to get started from scratch, or “Manage Ads” to handle existing ads.

The Ads Manager breaks down like this:

Account: You’ll have one ads account you use to run everything.
Campaign: Create a campaign for anything you want to create ads for. Create campaigns for specific products or services. Create campaigns to drive traffic to your site, or to grow your Facebook following.
Ad Sets: Organizes sets of ads for a single campaign together. It’s a good idea for creating similar ads in different groups or categories.
Ads: These are all of your ads, and the only part others will eventually see.

Step 1: Create Your Budget

It’s hard to know what kind of Facebook Ad budget you should have if you’ve never run a campaign before. Ask yourself:

How much is your product or service?
How many units/subscriptions do you want to sell?
What’s your current conversion rate?

If you don’t know the answers, it’s all right. It’s just a starting point to help you figure out what budget may work for you.

For instance, let’s say your product costs $50 you want to sell 20 and your conversion rate is 1%.

Basic math helps us figure out that in order to make that $1000 off of 20 sales with a one percent conversion rate you will need 1000 visits or clicks on your ad.

The question then becomes how much will it cost to get those 1000 clicks and that’s what you’re trying to figure out here. This will tell you how much to set aside for a daily budget which is the maximum amount of money you want to spend every day to get your goal. It’s a small portion of your overall lifetime budget for the entire campaign.

Once you’ve defined your budget, you can choose to select an objective so Facebook will automatically help you do a better job of reaching those goals. You can set conversions, or link clicks as the ad delivery optimization method to get the best possible result.

By taking the time to choose your ad delivery optimization method, you’re allowing Facebook to help you out. If you choose clicks, their system will monitor and adjust to ensure you get the most clicks.

If you choose conversions, they will look for patterns in what’s working whether it be certain types of people or the time of day. They will then self-correct the campaign as it runs to kit to the best results.

When it comes to deciding how much you should spend on each click, you can choose to automatically bid or manually set your bids.

Manual allows you to control the limits for how much you spend but automatic offers a good alternative to no prior experience of what’s your acceptable limit should be. You shouldn’t be focusing on the cost per click but instead the cost per action when you are trying to drive the sales. Choosing automatic bidding will help you adjust the campaign so that you can maximize your sales.

Delivery schedules allow you to adjust how much you’re spending by time of day or the day of the week. It doesn’t make any sense to show ads over the weeknights or weekend, if your office is only open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to take phone calls from new leads.

After you run the campaign for a few weeks, you may notice that certain times of day or days of week generate better results for less money. You can use this option to control how and when your ads are shown throughout the week.

The delivery type determines how frequently you want to add shown. You can have them shown as quickly as possible to blow through your daily budget sooner, or you can spread them throughout the day.

Step 2: Create Your Fan Page

To use Facebook Ads, you must first have a Facebook page. If you don’t have one already, follow the steps in this guide to help you create a page for your business. Once you’ve created the page, make sure you have a photo, cover photo, and a call to action. Use a tool like Canva to create your Facebook Cover Photo in a matter of minutes.

Step 3: Create Your Campaign

Now you’re ready to create your first campaign. At the top right corner of your fan page, click the “Promote” button and then click “Go to Ads Manager”. You will then be directed to your Ads Manager. Click “Create campaign.”

Here is where you choose what you want the ad campaign to do. Keep it simple and choose “send people to your website.”

Enter the link to your website. If you are promoting a product, direct them to a sales page. If you are promoting an event, direct them to a signup page. Or you can send directly to your homepage if it has a chance to join your email list.

Step 4: Create the Ad Set

Now you’ll be taken to creating your ad set where you have to decide on your target audience burst.

If you’re starting out small and don’t have much of a budget then 10,000 may be a decent audience size. But, if you’ve got a healthy budget you can go up to a million. You’ll need enough people to allow Facebook technology to help optimize your campaigns. You can even choose to go up to 2 million people for a new audience if you know what you’re doing and have the money to spend.

Going too broad however means that you will waste your budget on people who have no interest in what it is you are advertising. It’s better to start small and expand your efforts later after you are beginning to see results.

Choose your audience based on demographics that match your customer personas.

Step 5: Create Your Ad

Choose the type of ad you want to run – photo, video, carousel. They all have their place in the advertising world, but we want to keep things simple. Start with a photo ad first, and move into the more advanced options once you’ve launched some successful ad campaigns.

Upload your image – either something you’ve taken, or a stock photo you have the rights to, paying attention to Facebook guidelines on the sidebar to make sure you’re using what you’re allowed to. If your image has text, the less text the better.

Write the copy and choose your CTA button. Make it grab attention by tapping into emotion.

Preview the ad. When you’re happy, finalize it and add it to your set.

Step 6: Create Ad Variations for Split-Testing

Create two more versions of that ad that are similar. Use slightly different text to split-test the text, or different images to test the images, to see what your audience responds to the best.

Step 7: Run All Ads for 24 Hours

Run all three ads in the ad set for a full day to gather data.

Step 8: Stop the Ads That Aren’t Working

Look at the data for each of the ads. Stop the ones that aren’t doing as well. Assess why. Keep this in mind for future campaigns.

If you have the budget and want to, create additional ads in the ad set and try for another 24 hours to continue split-testing.

Increasing Your Budget

Now, allocate all of the money you were spending on the multiple ads to the single ad that’s performing the best. Periodically increase your budget as finances allow, because once you have an ad that’s working to bring profit to your business, the more you run it, the more you can make.

Using Custom Audience and Lookalike Audiences

Once you’ve gotten the hang of Facebook Ads and you have multiple campaigns for different purposes, you can start using custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

Custom audiences are great for uploading your email list to, so you can advertise specifically to people who are on your email list, or people who have purchased from you in the past.

Lookalike audiences allow you to choose people who are similar to a group of people you choose – whether they are people who like your page, or people who’ve visited certain parts of your website.

If you want to use the lookalike audience feature, you’ll need to create and install a Facebook pixel on your website.

Facebook Ads Work

When done correctly, Facebook ads can bring you new customers much faster than other platforms. After all, it is the largest social network online, with 1.32 billion daily active users and 2.01 billion monthly active users as of June 2017.

Start small and scale up so you can make the most of your budget, no matter how limited.

Tags facebook ad campaign

Social Media

Social Media and the Holidays: Mistakes to Avoid

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date October 26, 2018
2 Comments on Social Media and the Holidays: Mistakes to Avoid

The holiday season is incredibly festive and fun. It also just happens to be a great time of year to be creative with your social media content. Occasionally, though, we see someone take the fun a little too far – they get a little too pushy with their marketing or they try to use humor where it becomes downright offensive.

This holiday season – avoid being that business. You don’t need that kind of attention! Instead, use these strategies to nail down your campaigns, celebrate, and excel, all without risking a PR disaster in the process.

Don’t Plan Too Late

Bad news: you’re already a little behind schedule if you’re just starting to think about holiday marketing now. Good news: it’s not too late to catch up.

It’s “game on” the second the Halloween costumes come off, and people will be bombarded with ads starting at the beginning of November. If you wait too long, your potential customers will have already made their holiday purchasing decisions. That means you need to start planning now, and hopefully, have something firmly in place by Halloween.

Create a schedule that starts on November first and make sure it carries you through the entire holiday season, but don’t extend the “season” too far. Make sure it ends at the New Year and move on to your next set of advertising goals.

Don’t Ignore the Holidays

Maybe the holidays don’t really mean much to your service-based business. It may be hard to get festive about MOSFET transistors, steel manufacturing, or pest control, for example, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the holidays altogether. And there’s almost always a way to tie the holidays in, no matter how strange it feels.

Here’s the thing: your customers still want to feel a bit of holiday cheer when they visit your social media profile. Specials and deals may not be appropriate, and that’s fine; it’s not the only option. Find ways to use your social platforms to show your involvement in the community, sharing photos of seasonal events, holiday drives, or special charity work.

Don’t Disregard Smaller Celebrations

Everyone always focuses on the big marketing opportunities: Black Friday is a no-brainer, and Hanukkah and Christmas get promoted every year. But what about the lesser-known but potentially high-ticket days in between? Are you running promotions for Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, or Free Shipping Day?

You may even want to think even further outside the box and put together something for the 12 Days of Christmas or for those celebrating Kwanzaa. Not everyone celebrates the same holidays, but everyone likes to feel included. A little creativity might just put your work in front of a market you hadn’t previously considered.

If all else fails, there’s always Festivus for the Rest of Us!

Don’t Try to Work in Real-time

There is too much to be done during the holiday season. Attempting to launch campaigns manually on the day they’re set to go live will cause you to pull your hair out, and possibly throw it at your colleagues. That’s just not very festive! You may also end up forgetting to implement critical parts of your campaign when other emergency situations or meetings pop up.

Use your favorite scheduling tools to make sure all your content is planned and scheduled in advance – months in advance where possible, but at least several weeks if nothing else. Everything will go up at the right time of day and your team will be able to monitor as-neededfrom a customer service perspective.

Don’t Be A Self-Serving Billboard

Yes, it’s the holiday season. Yes, you need to promote yourself. Yet you still need to make sure you are offering quality, informative content in between your deals and steals, or it may come across as overselling. Funny memes, holiday tips and tricks, and shared posts about charities and the good work other people are doing in the world should be incorporated into a solid social media calendar all year round.

Everything you do needs to relate back to the people you are serving. Don’t make it all about you. Make it about them. What/How are the products and/or services you offer going to do to help them get through the holiday season with less stress?

(Hint: this approach doesn’t only work during the holidays! Use it throughout the year and improve audience loyalty.)

Don’t Neglect Your Email List

Use your social media platform to highlight your subscriber-only specials. Entice people to sign up for your email newsletter for exclusive access to your upcoming holiday deals, which promise to be amazing! Start early, especially if you are setting up your email series to tease the specials and then launch for a specific day.

Don’t Forget to Check Out the Competition

What is your competition doing on social media for the holiday season? Are they updating their cover banners and thumbnail images? Are they running extra special holiday promotions? Are their specials a better bang for the buck than yours? Make the adjustments necessary to compete.

Don’t Leave Out the Shared Testimonials

The holiday season is fast-paced, so you must give potential buyers everything they need to make a quick decision. This includes sharing testimonial photos and quotes from last year’s happy customers. People are more likely to make a purchase when they can read about a product’s positive attributes from someone they feel they can relate to or understand.

Don’t Refuse to Pay for Ads

The reality of modern holiday marketing is that you need to run some paid ads, even if you don’t have a huge budget. Your competitors will most likely be running targeted Facebook campaigns, and ignoring them on your end means that your potential audience will be overwhelmed by everyone’s ads except yours.

The holiday season results in heightened competition with a lot of other online noise; it’s up to you to beat ‘em or join ‘em. Paid campaigns help you work around that.

Don’t Skimp on Social Media

This should be a given, considering we’re talking about social media mistakes, but it’s important enough to mention again. Don’t spend so much time focusing on email campaigns, website updates, coupons, and banner ads that you forget to place emphasis on your social media profiles.

As a side note, the festive season is a great time of year to make your brand’s presence known. Work on strengthening your identity; this will cement who you are and what you have to offer to your target audience.

Don’t Overlook Tracking Your Statistics

Go into the analytics section of your social media accounts and see how you’ve done year over year. Were your holiday campaigns more successful one year than the others? What did you do differently? Can you apply some of those same concepts to this year’s campaigns? Make it happen – the earlier the better.

Track week-to-week throughout this year’s campaigns, too. You may see areas that need improvement going forward to ensure you maintain your upward momentum.

The holiday season is huge, no matter what type of business you’re running. Make sure your social media platforms are a major focus in your marketing strategy. Your mobile followers will be watching, and so will we! Can’t wait to see you succeed!

It’s a little too early for us to wish you all Happy Holidays, but here at Sachs, we’re always happy to give you a hand with campaigns when you need it most. Connect with us here and get a solid start on this year’s festive season.

Tags holidays

Social Media

Planning Your Email Marketing Leading Up to the Holidays

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date October 10, 2018
4 Comments on Planning Your Email Marketing Leading Up to the Holidays

Like it or not, the holiday season is here. The kids are back in school. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas items are on store shelves all at the same time, and you need to wrap up your holiday email campaigns to take advantage of the ever-growing buzz. We’ll show you how in today’s post!

Discover the benefits of email marketing here!

Identify Your Key Holidays

Think outside the box. You should know your audience by now, which means you should also have enough data to identify which holidays make them want to spend. While it’s true that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are significant opportunities for sales, you shouldn’t be afraid to think outside of the box.

Ask yourself:

If your audience celebrates “the holidays” instead of identifying with the word “Christmas.” If the answer is yes, diversify and broaden your language to be more inclusive of non-denominational celebrations.
If your audience celebrates Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or some other alternative to the traditional American Christmas. Consider targeting these alternative holidays, or at least including them, if so.
If you have products that celebrate the start of fall, the winter solstice, a full moon, an eclipse, the fall harvest, or something similar. Use this to guide the tone and content in your campaigns while also increasing sales.

Above all else, don’t pigeonhole yourself. Be creative and remember that you don’t need to run a massive campaign for every special occasion; even a small sale or tokenism will intrigue your followers.

Create a Holiday Preview Sale

Have something genuinely unique to offer your audience? Run a special shopping day (online or offline) for your email subscribers. Offer a deep discount across the board or a unique coupon code for your subscribers.

Running a special preview sale early in the season is a great way to get new subscribers. If they join your list, they’ll get the preview-day code or information, but they’ll also be on your list for your more significant and lucrative promotions during the thick of the holiday season.

Remember: people often shop here and there. Just because they don’t buy right away doesn’t mean your attempts aren’t useful. The more often you remind them of where they can shop, the more likely they are to return to you once they’re ready to buy.

Do Not Skip Black Friday or Cyber Monday

Black Friday in stores isn’t what it used to be. These days, it feels like more people shop online. But whether online or offline, everyone really wants the same thing — a great deal. This is your opportunity, so don’t be afraid to take it the moment it comes.

Be prepared with specials and emails that run from Thanksgiving day (Thursday), through the next day (Black Friday), and all the way into that Monday (Cyber Monday). Send some teaser emails leading up to these big shopping days. Follow up with reminder emails on the day of your sale.

Create a Holiday Gift Guide

Not everyone can look at a product or company and think outside the box to come up with creative, imaginative gift ideas. That’s where you come in.

Create a holiday gift guide that offers suggestions and ideas for different categories of people. Spouses, significant others, grandparents, children, grandchildren, friends, co-workers, and teachers are just a few great examples to get you started. A little inspiration can go a long way when it comes to driving a sale, especially when it comes with visuals and links.

Add a Little Sparkle to Your Subject Lines

Make your subject lines stand out. Subject lines should be clear, urgency-driven, and directly tied to the holiday content inside your emails, but you do have room to get a bit playful during the holidays. Try using fun wording or even emojis to lighten up the mood. After all, ’tis the season!

Wondering if emojis are wise? As it turns out, they aren’t as fluffy and ridiculous as some people think. Campaign Monitor reported that emails with emojis in the subject lines have a 56 percent higher open rate. Try adding a pumpkin, turkey, snowflake, snowman, or Christmas tree and see what happens.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Always create a sense of urgency when crafting holiday deals and steals. You need to drive the point home in a way that makes consumers think, “I need to do this right now!”

First, don’t make deals open-ended. Limit them and let your customers know when each special is set to expire — e.g., within a few hours, a day, a week, or even a month.

For Christmas holidays specifically, consider a “12 Days of Christmas” campaign. Send out 12 day-by-day codes that expire 24 hours after the reader opens the email (or 24 hours after you release them). Add a new code with a different offer for each of the 12 days.

Early-bird pricing grabs attention. Knowing your fixed cut-off dates for holiday shipping and on-time arrival is helpful in this case because you can structure your deals around it. “Buy now to receive before Christmas” sounds much more compelling than just “buy now.”

Don’t Forget the Footer

We see it time and time again: companies create stellar email marketing headers, great menus, excellent body content, and call it a day. The problem? The footer exists, and it should be optimized, too.

Make sure your footer has another call to action, extra exclusive information, one last top deal, or even instructions for buying gift cards to maximize your impact. You can also use this section to highlight other products or share contact information.

Give Value to Your Customer

You will send more emails than usual during the holiday season, but you shouldn’t necessarily make them all sales pitches. You can also offer other forms of content, including excellent customer service, tips to ease the stress of the holiday season or even gift-giving guides. The goal is to craft useful content they will enjoy and want to read more of whether they make a purchase or not. Slowing down to send a simple holiday greeting can go a long way, too — plus, it humanizes your company.

Make Sure Your Emails are Mobile Friendly

Busy people often find themselves checking emails from smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. According to GoMoxie, there was a 65 percent increase in sales between 2015 and 2016 as a direct result of this trend. You need to optimize your email for easy viewing if you want to take part, especially if you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor. The landing pages they need to have to be mobile friendly as well. The easier it is for your customers to read, the more likely they will be to take quick action.

Reflect and Say Thank You

After the holidays are over, and your most significant post-holiday season sales begin to wane, it’s time to reflect and thank your customers. Let them know how much you’ve grown over the past year, tease some plans for the coming year, and then tell them how much they’ve helped you evolve. Customers love hearing about successes, especially for businesses they actively support. Double down on this strategy if you’re a small “mom and pop” shop or small business.

Start Earlier Next Year

You don’t have to wait until November to test your holiday ideas. Christmas in July is becoming a bigger deal every year, mostly because technology allows us to plan further in advance. Test a promotion in the summer to get an idea of what your customers like and actively respond to during your bigger holiday push later in the year. If it doesn’t go well, no harm, no foul (as long as you don’t offend, anyway).

The holiday season seems to start earlier and earlier with every passing year. As a business owner, it’s up to you to ensure your marketing plan doesn’t lag behind. Create a good mix of promotional emails, reminders, and thank-you messages and your customers will always look forward to what you have to offer next.

Have a happy holiday season and a lucrative fourth quarter, from all of us here at Sachs Marketing Group!

Tags email marketing

Social Media

Social Marketing 101: Utilizing Pinterest

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 26, 2018
No Comments on Social Marketing 101: Utilizing Pinterest

At first glance, Pinterest may seem like just a platform for stay-at-home-moms, crafters, and foodies, but the truth is that it’s a rather diverse platform where people can peruse and “pin” their favorite pieces of content on their own “boards.” These boards serve as indexes for future reference, which can make them a powerful marketing method for businesses in specific niches.

While it’s true that Pinterest isn’t as large or as popular as Facebook, the reality is that more than half of today’s millennial population is using Pinterest. These numbers include more than 68 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54. To ignore those numbers is to miss an excellent opportunity to reach out and connect.

Is Pinterest Really Right for My Niche?

Here’s the complicated answer to this question: yes and no, but almost always yes, all at the same time. If your head is spinning, hang in there. We’ll explain.

Many people see Pinterest as an excellent tool for cooking industries, crafters, and fitness gurus, but not for B2B businesses. The reality is that some companies will have to work a lot harder on Pinterest than others.

If your market research doesn’t show that your primary audience uses Pinterest, then, by all means, focus your social media efforts on other platforms first. You can always come back and visit Pinterest later.

Just know that the fact that your primary audience isn’t there doesn’t mean you have no audience at all. Businesses in niches that aren’t categorized as “hot topics” on Pinterest can do quite well on the platform because they don’t have much active competition.

How to Better Utilize Pinterest

You have an audience of approximately 200 million people at your fingertips; the average user spends around 14 minutes at a time on the platform. That is a significant amount of time for you to grab your piece of the pie.

To get started, first make sure you’ve created a business account. If you began with a personal account, convert it into a business profile first. Don’t have an account at all? Head to Pinterest for Business, join, and create a properly optimized profile.

Making sure you are using a real business profile matters; it gives you access to analytics that empowers you to ensure you’re making an impact over time. You’ll be able to see how many repins you receive and how many times people have visited your profile.

Optimize Your Website

Start by optimizing your website. You need to make sure your site is optimized to promote your involvement on Pinterest. Make sure you’ve added the plug-ins necessary for your website visitors to pin the pages they love to their boards without having to look for you on the platform.

By allowing pins, you make it fluid and comfortable for your visitors to save your valuable information on their platform of choice. They are more likely to be re-exposed to it and are more likely to revisit you in the future.

Get In There and Socialize

Be social, not one-sided. You have to give to receive. Look for industry-related content that isn’t necessarily from a direct competitor and start pinning the content shared by other people. People love the interaction on Pinterest and visitors will be more likely to share and follow your boards if they see them as informative and not just promotional.

Make It Interesting and Unique

Create new, unique content. Yes, many users scroll through Pinterest and pin based on the photos they like. You need to hold your business to the highest standard possible by making sure the content your pins lead to is helpful and useful.

You should be reaching for this goal when you are creating content anyway, but it is especially important if you are going to start sharing on this particular platform. No one likes clicking on a pin only to land on a page that turns out to have no real value and an ugly layout.

Use Branded Boards

Create branded boards. Yes, you should be sharing other people’s content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some nicely branded boards within your profile.

Let’s say you are a restaurant owner. You should have separate branded boards for your different menus (lunch, dinner, appetizers, and specialty drinks) to start off. This approach provides beneficial information to your audience that might convince them to visit.

As a fashion brand, you should have separate branded boards for various clothing lines or perhaps times of the year. Think about boards for back-to-school ideas, casual work attire, business casual, business professional, holiday, or wedding outfits.

Organizing your content into collections makes it easier for visitors who land on your profile page to browse and ultimately follow their favorites. Even as a lawyer, you can create separate boards for family law, real estate law, personal injury, and property damage.

Aesthetics Matter

Aesthetics are critical on Pinterest; this is where businesses find themselves stymied with where to go next. Make sure every piece of content you create has a Pinterest-worthy image attached to it.

As for what your images should look like, they need to be clear, colorful, and perhaps even branded. Text should be short and sweet, easy to read, and worded with clarity to identify the nature of the pin. People are drawn to great images, but they also need to be able to quickly identify what they are looking at when they later go back through their albums.

Be Engaging

Encourage engagement. Pinterest likes to encourage people who pin certain things to upload photos of themselves trying them out. For example, if you post a mocha mint coffee recipe, Pinterest may ask anyone who pins the recipe to share a photo of the finished result. Watch for this type of engagement, make sure you acknowledge and thank people who share and be mindful of their comments (especially if they ended up not liking the recipe or had trouble finding an ingredient).

Post Consistently

Be consistent in your posting schedule. Just as with every other social platform, consistency is critical. You can’t post 20 times in one day and then abandon your boards for a month; your fans need to see regular posts on a consistent basis, or they won’t identify with and remember you. That’s the point.

Pinterest is an excellent place for entrepreneurs and business owners to connect, network, and add another layer to their professional portfolios. Just keep in mind that Pinterest doesn’t necessarily cater to the individual so much as it caters to groups of people while encouraging networking in the form of sharing.

If you need a hand integrating Pinterest marketing into your overall campaign, or if you really aren’t sure which platforms are best for your business, let’s talk about it. Reach out to a Sachs specialist at this link!

Tags pinterest

Social Media

10 Things You Need to Know about Instagram’s IGTV

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 19, 2018
No Comments on 10 Things You Need to Know about Instagram’s IGTV

Just a few months ago, Instagram officially launched IGTV. This brand-new, shiny longform video app gives creators the ability to publish content that is up to an hour in length, instead of just a few seconds.

Before the launch, Instagram story videos were capped at 15 seconds; main feed videos were capped at around one minute. That’s an incredibly small amount of time to tell your story, even in Influencer marketing. In this post, we’ll tell you a bit about IGTV, how it works, and what you need to know to make it work for you.

1. How to Access IGTV Content

Instagram users will have two options for accessing IGTV content. The IGTV app itself will give users immediate access to the video content for anyone they already follow with just the click of a button. If someone prefers to continue using the regular Instagram app, they will have to navigate to a separate section of the app to see IGTV video; it will not show in the regular feed.

2. Anyone Can Create a Channel

Unlike other social platforms with specialized features for longform content, Instagram has stipulated that anyone with an account can create an IGTV channel. They act similar in nature to YouTube channels, so subscribers to your Instagram content will see your IGTV content in their feeds as described above.

Channels give users other features that aren’t as common on Instagram. Anyone with a channel can post a link to their website landing page. They can also still include captions to entice people to watch content, which may benefit businesses working on SEO campaigns.

3. You Aren’t Limited to Square Videos

One of the fun features about IGTV is that you have more screen space to use, as the new platform is moving away from the square-only format. If you hold your phone vertically for video, you will now be able to use the entire screen. According to Social Media Today, up to 80 percent of social media users are on mobile devices. This particular format caters to the way mobile users most often use video creation tools.

4. All IGTV Videos are Pre-produced

Users can’t go LIVE with IGTV, which means channels will be able to get very creative with editing before uploading their content. Add a filter, toss on overlays – the sky’s the limit if you have enough ideas. Instagram announced during the official launch that they will, most likely, have a LIVE option in the future.

It is very easy to upload content to IGTV. All you have to do is go to your channel profile and hit the “upload a video” option. You’ll be immediately taken to your camera roll where you can upload videos, add titles and descriptions (including hashtags), and publish.

5. IGTV Content Length is Limited

While we mentioned earlier that IGTV content can go up to 60 minutes, not all users have access to this length for publication. As a matter of fact, the average user with a relatively small following will have to keep videos between 15 seconds and 10 minutes – still a massive improvement on the earlier noted 60 second limit.

Larger brands and accounts that are verified, such as those for public figures and celebrities, will be allowed to publish content up to 60 minutes long. This length is perfect for web series and regular shows, and just right for specials, too. Longer content will need to be uploaded from a computer instead of from a mobile device.

The time limit leaves a lot of room for creativity and variety in your content types. You can still upload very short clips, but you can expand your content when you have more to say or show, too. This will also make it easier to schedule content you have time to create.

6. Aspect Ratio and Size

All IGTV videos must follow guidelines for file type, aspect ratio, and size. Videos should be uploaded in MP4 format, regardless of the format you used when you created the video. If your device does not record in MP4, you will have to convert it before you upload.

As mentioned, all videos must be vertical. Landscape videos just don’t work on IGTV. The minimum aspect ratio is 4:5 and the maximum is 9:16.

File size is important. Videos that are 10 minutes or under can be no larger than 650MB. Videos up to 60 minutes can be no larger than 5.4GB. That said, this is a fairly generous range and you shouldn’t have any problems.

7. Your IGTV Videos are Permanent

Instagram story videos disappear from your feed after 24 hours. IGTV videos are here to stay. Once you upload them, they will remain a part of your channel until you opt to delete them.

What does this mean? Essentially, you can still upload short bites of content to your stories, but you now have the option to leave even your shorter content as a permanent part of your collection. Moreover, you can grow that collection over time.

8. Using Stories to Share Your Content

Many Instagram users were using several short stories in a row, pieced together one after the other, to get around the short video length. The longer IGTV format will keep users from misusing that particular part of the platform.

At the same time, creators can still use stories to promote their IGTV content by simply including a swipe-up link in the story post. This feature will be great for driving more viewers to the new platform from outside sources and inside users.

9. Using IGTV for Promotional Videos

It’ll be up to you to experiment with your brand’s page, but IGTV seems to be more along the lines of YouTube: a great place for evergreen content, but perhaps not as great for promotional videos. Since a lot of users don’t yet know about or find themselves using IGTV, your short promotional videos may still do better in the traditional IG feed. Experiment with your brand’s content to figure out where it does best.

10. There Are No Limits – Other Than Instagram’s Community Guidelines

IGTV really does give amateur video creators, vloggers, and anyone with a camera a lot of leeway when it comes to creativity in creating tutorials, documenting life, or branding their businesses. The only limitations thus far are those already outlined in Instagram’s Community Guidelines. As long as you continue to follow Instagram’s rules, you can create as much video content as you feel your audience would like to see.

The IGTV app is still new and exciting. You still have a chance to get in on the ground floor, add to your following, and grow from the ground up. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes. We can’t wait to hear how you’re utilizing this new tool.

Tags IGTV

Social Media

Holiday Instagram Hacks for Businesses

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 12, 2018
No Comments on Holiday Instagram Hacks for Businesses

Believe it or not (like it or not?) the holiday season is once again just around the corner. Summer is coming to a close, pumpkin spice is making a comeback, and Instagram continues to climb in popularity, showing massive strength for marketers this fall and winter.

With Instagram’s rapid rise in the digital marketing world, you need to be sure you’re using it to market your products and services. But it’s important to note that Instagram doesn’t function like many other platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. Whether you’re on the site already or you’re finally making the jump, you need to know how to make the right changes if you want to succeed without any waste along the way. These tips will help you stand out.

Update Your Profile Page

Make a few quick tweaks to your profile page. Alter your thumbnail image, make a couple of wording changes to add a holiday vibe, or overhaul the entire thing. As with websites, occasional fresh changes help with ranking on Instagram, especially in your bio.

Have a holiday-themed website? Make sure you update your website URL to lead into that special content, not just your main page. Take the same advice for special landing pages.

Showcase Your Charity Work

It’s good for your business to get involved in charitable work throughout the year. Not only does it get you free publicity, but it also shows that you’re about more than just cold, hard cash, and audiences love that kind of attitude. The holiday season is a great time to put extra emphasis on the way your company feels about supporting the community.

The festive season is all about sharing. Document your food drives, trips to soup kitchens, or any other volunteer work your organization participates in along the way. Showcase the work your business does as a group, but also share the projects your employees love and support, too. Showing the public that you are dedicated to bettering the community around you is critical to your brand’s reputation.

Connect with the Community

Even if you can’t partner or participate with your own product or service, make sure you showcase the activities going on in your community for the holidays. Share pictures of parades, decorations, and other special events happening with the town, local charities, and schools to be more relatable. Your fans will love that you are participating, supporting other small businesses, and generally staying involved.

Incorporate Video

Incorporate video into your Instagram feed – and don’t be afraid to inject a little humor into your creations, either. You don’t have to show a particular product or special price to have an impact.

Show your products in use, solve a problem, or offer tips, or show your audience an out-of-the-box way to utilize what they’ve already purchased from you. Add a little holiday flair for a bigger one-two punch.

Use this opportunity to create special moments, too. Let your fans know when you will be going live so they know to tune in. You can even tease them with the promise of a special “event only” coupon code for those that stick with you until the end of the broadcast.

Work with Influencers

Look for a few Instagram influencers in your niche; watch what they’re doing and how they interact with their audiences. They should have a strong presence and at least 3-5 percent engagement on their posts. Send them gift bundles in exchange for a few posts on their feed showcasing your holiday-themed package and tagging your page.

Take this idea further with holiday-themed discounts. Give influencers a coupon code to use; then, track whether or not you received any sales from their fans. Just make sure you are following FTC guidelines regarding working with influencers, product reviews, and disclosing relationships, even if it is the shopping season.

Ask Themed Questions

Post cute photos with holiday themes and ask your audience questions about their favorite holiday traditions. This type of posting style can carry you from Thanksgiving through the New Year. People LOVE to talk about their family traditions, the rituals they had as children, and the new things they’re doing today, and it’s okay to get involved as long as you’re respectful.

An alternate post style is asking people if they’d choose one item or the other in the form of an “A or B” or “This or That” style post. For example:

Do you put up a real tree or a fake tree?
Do you open gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day?
Do you bake your Thanksgiving turkey or do you fry it?

Tailor the posts to incorporate general holiday season ideas, but cater at least some to specific holidays throughout the season. A little bit of diversity doesn’t hurt, here; remember that some people celebrate Kwanzaa, while some celebrate Christmas. Still others celebrate Hanukkah or even “Festivus for the Rest of Us.” These posts are great for engagement and will help with the visibility of your more branded posts later on.

Personalize Your Posts

Speak directly to your audience. Make each reader feel as though you’re talking directly to them, not just to your whole demographic. Tell them what they can do, or won’t have to do, as a result of using your product or building a relationship with you. “You’ll never have to _____ again if you ____.” Make them feel good about what you have to offer and how it impacts their lives.

Show them how you can help them get through the holidays, too. If you’re a cleaning service, let them know they don’t have to worry about getting the house prepared for guests. Own a bakery? Let them know you’ve got desserts covered.

People are always looking for ways to simplify their lives. Most are happy and willing to pay for the convenience, especially during the busy holiday season.

Make Sure You Say Thank You

Share photos or videos thanking vendors and visitors for the gifts or treats they bring you throughout the holiday season. Show thankfulness throughout the year, not only to those who give you physical gifts, but to those who visit you. It doesn’t hurt to include your customers and fans who support you all year long. Gratefulness is always in fashion!

Create Gift Ideas

Own a retail store, a restaurant, or a service business with gift certificates? Come up with gift ideas suitable for specific people or demographics. Small, affordable bundles work best for teachers, service professionals, and people on a restricted income. Pampering gift bundles make the perfect present for moms, sweethearts, aunts, and sisters. The sky’s the limit when it comes to gift bundles you can make available or for purchase online.

Once you come up with a few bundle ideas, it’s time to get real with your marketing. Take professional photos and draft up posts that get people excited about them. Ask your audience to tell you who they think would love each bundle the most to inspire interaction.

Don’t let your Instagram account take the backseat during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. Start now, become more active, and focus on building up your community. It’s time to begin creating the content you’d like to use to ramp up your sales during what can be one of the most profitable times of the year.

Social media development is more complex than ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s too complicated to get involved. With over 500 million active members on Instagram, there’s an immense amount of opportunity just waiting for you to snap it up. We’d love to become a bigger part of your social media story! Click here to learn more about how our experts can help.

Tags instagram hacks

Social Media

Is Facebook the Next Best Zone for Influencers to Make Money?

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date July 3, 2018
4 Comments on Is Facebook the Next Best Zone for Influencers to Make Money?

We spent the last year telling you that Instagram is the biggest up-and-coming platform, both for regular businesses and for influencer marketers. Now, we’re about to turn that advice on its head and suggest that Facebook may be a serious contender for second place by the end of the year.

Facebook officially launched a new marketing tool called “Brand Collabs Manager” just last week. This interactive plugin gives businesses the power to identify, explore, and connect with influencers who can seriously boost their brand.

Supply and Demand

After glancing over the details surrounding the new tool, it’s pretty obvious that Facebook wants a shift – and that shift is to make their platform more friendly to influencer marketing efforts. It’s a change many of us saw coming after Facebook bought Instagram for a record-breaking $1 billion back in 2012. Granted, the change did take a little bit longer to arrive than we expected.

Influencer marketing is on the rise. Nearly 90 percent of all users trust word of mouth, including influencer content, over advertising alone. Around 30 percent are compelled not by celebrities, but by small-time bloggers and non-celebrity bloggers they feel are “more like them.” Around 19 percent find Facebook to be the most compelling and engaging platform for influencing users.

That’s a significant amount of demand for a platform that stereotypically made it more cumbersome to collaborate instead.

Additionally, we know that Facebook saw a dramatic slump in stocks after Cambridge Analytica. More than just a few businesses jumped ship out of fears about insecure user data, often heading off to more reliable platforms. While the user base hasn’t dropped (in fact, it’s grown), businesses are still feeling nervous about the social media giant’s intentions.

Facebook clearly saw a massive opportunity to serve a relatively untapped demand while also ironing out negative opinions and fears. In tandem with their efforts to fix privacy concerns, it could be exactly what they need to bounce back.

Brand Collabs Manager

“Brand Collabs Manager makes it easier for brands and influential content creators to find each other.”

Sounds simple, right? That’s Facebook’s tagline on the new tool, and honestly, I can’t say it much simpler than that. What I can do is go beyond the tagline to tell you about the features I’m seeing and how they work.

The tool, which is currently operating on limited list access as they ramp up, has two distinct sections – one for creators, and one for businesses. Both must apply and indicate their Facebook profile, website, and information, after which a review takes place to determine whether they’re suitable. It isn’t yet clear whether this application process is a product of the beta testing or whether it will remain in place long-term.

What’s Under the Hood: Businesses

On the business side of the platform is an aesthetically-pleasing, clean dashboard with an easy-to-scan grid of influencers. A set of filters at the top lets you add promotional requirements and drill down through the presented influencers to find someone who really matches your business.

Facebook gives the example of filtering for “Creators who really like my brand;” useful, given that pages can’t see the names of likes anymore.

Even more helpfully, every influencer has a percentage profile listed on their account beside their information. That number tells you how closely the influencer matches up with your niche, business, product, or service based on a number of in-depth factors ranging from interests to age and other standard demographics.

Once you find someone you think is a good fit, just click their picture. The tool will take you to a short profile listing information like age, gender, preferred post types, content categories or niches, location, language, and sometimes, links to their website or Instagram. You can also review all of their past collaborations, making it easier to judge the quality of the content and their interactions at the same time.

All of these features shorten the length of time it takes to link up with influencers. It’s much easier to find who you’re looking for quickly, rather than hashtag surfing or relying on your own analytics. It’s also far more straightforward to get into contact or make a connection.

What’s Under the Hood: Creators

So, what about creators and influencers? Whether you’re an industry influencer or a true online celebrity, Brand Collabs Manager has features you’ll love, too. Moreover, they go far beyond the simple recognition and visibility improvements mentioned in the previous section.

When creators are approved for the platform and log in, they’re presented with their own brand collaborator profile. Like a traditional Facebook profile, this section has room for basic information, contact info, a cover photo, a profile photo, gender, and more. It also provides room for intro videos, case studies, pitch decks, and original content explicitly created for review by brands.

As a creator, you can also use your influencer profile to “like” specific companies on Facebook you want to work with. They’ll get a message letting them know you like them, and that you may make a good partner for future content.

Will it Work?

Whether or not Brand Collabs Manager will turn out the way Facebook hopes it will remains to be seen. Until they officially launch the platform and open it up to all creators and businesses, you should consider it more like a growing experiment or case study. Don’t jump in feet-first just yet expecting perfection – but don’t be afraid to apply and get those feet wet, either.

Something else to consider is that Facebook isn’t charging anything for the tool, nor are they taking a cut of the profits creators and businesses make when they work together. That’s encouraging because it means the platform really cares more about the connection than any potential profits. That said, Facebook will still benefit from ad campaigns created as a result of those partnerships.

It makes sense for Facebook to move in this direction on multiple levels. The open willingness to find solutions, the desire to make it easier for creators to get noticed, and even the desire to provide the tool free of charge are all a sign of positive growth and rebounding.

Another influence (pun intended) is whether Facebook might move forward in the future toward monetization like YouTube, Vimeo, and other content platforms. A monetized Brand Collabs Manager could become very lucrative for businesses and influencers alike, especially if they can maintain quality of options.

Tags facebook, influencers

Social Media

Here’s How Instagram’s New Algorithms Functions

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date June 15, 2018
No Comments on Here’s How Instagram’s New Algorithms Functions

Instagram is changing – okay, that’s not really a new phenomenon, really. The platform evolves every few months much like Facebook, changing back end coding here and there to hopefully produce better results for users and advertisers. The most recent changes, however, are a bit more involved.

Essentially, Instagram is changing how their feed works. Most of the changes seem to be targeted at improving user experience, including how the site sorts content based on interests, likes, hashtags, and more. Depending on how and what you’re marketing on the platform, this may force you to adapt your strategy to keep up.

Weighted Influences and Impacts

First, we need to talk a bit about what Instagram claims is most important. These are the factors and variables that influence how and what a user sees. They’re like a much simpler version of Google search weights (like on-page optimization and backlinks), but they do affect the feed in similar ways.

Instagram claims three main influences have the power to change feed exposure and reach:

Interest
Timeliness
Relationships or connections

All three of these influences will be significantly more influential going forward, but there are changes deeper within. How, where, and when they influence is also changing; we’ll break that down in the next few sections.

Interest

Interest is a bit abstract, and it can be a little bit difficult to get a good grasp on sometimes. Instagram looks at how often the user interacts with pictures or shares from specific accounts or on specific topics, automatically adjusting the feed to show them more of what they’re already viewing.

Here’s where things get space age: Instagram’s new algorithm also cross-checks the visual content of what people post. Using extremely advanced detection, the site determines what the picture is, the photo’s theme, and in some cases, even who’s in the picture. It uses that information to further define the feed.

As a marketer, your biggest challenge here will be in finding out how to meet those interests in a way that serves both users and the algorithm. Think lots of A/B testing and significantly more experiments. This is a great time to branch out a bit.

Timeliness

This influence is really simple: the sooner the post was published, the more likely users are to see it at the top of their feed. Allegedly, Instagram made this change after users complained about seeing too much older content – sometimes, days-old posts would show up in the middle of posts from earlier in the day.

This change isn’t so much an update as it is addressing a significant bug in the platform. Older posts were really never meant to show in this manner in the first place. The phrase “it’s not a bug; it’s a feature” comes to mind…

For the vast majority of businesses that use Instagram, this change won’t really make much of a difference at all. A small percentage may see less reach per post as posts “age” out of the feed much faster than before. Adapting with a more rapid posting schedule and tweaking post times should help.

Relationship

Last but not least are changes to the weight Instagram gives relationships and connections on the platform. This, naturally, starts with followers and followed connections, but it goes beyond just clicking that button. Instagram will also factor in common interactions, including comments, likes, hashtags, and even DMs. The platform also claims they plan to slowly phase in influences as simple as having someone else tag you in a photo or in the comment section of a picture.

IF this works correctly, it should actually improve your ability to target specific audiences. It also paints a compelling reason to start answering your DMs from customers, clients, and followers in a timely manner.

The downside is the potential for malicious use; it’s feasible that people could start tagging others or following from fake accounts with negative connections if they wanted to impact your reach. Fortunately, there isn’t any proof this is actively happening just yet – but you should keep a close eye on interactions just in case.

Explore Function

Alongside changing algorithms, the platform also significantly changed their Explore layout. Traditionally, this function allowed users to type in tags or key terms and “explore” content visually via a grid-style map of images. This worked similarly to Pinterest, and was fairly easy to manipulate if you just included the right tags.

One of the biggest changes to the explore function is that Instagram plans to include topic categorization across the top. Instead of just seeing a photo grid of content, users will now have the option to “channel down” into specific topics, like Photography, Animals, Education, or Finance.

Why is this an issue for businesses? Firstly, guided search puts far more power back in the hands of users. It also makes hashtags and key terms less useful because users are much more likely to follow the suggestions before scanning the grid. It’s right there at the top, in their face, and far more likely to catch attention.

Image detection may play an important role here, too. As Instagram’s algorithms can detect what’s in a picture, it becomes harder for marketers to game the system. You may need to get a bit creative with what you include in your pictures to make it work.

We’ve been hearing rumors that this change may actually point to Instagram’s growing ecommerce involvement. It’s possible that this feature might end up helping product and service sellers later on, leading them through to what they really want to see – whether it works remains to be seen.

Is Instagram Still Worth It?

A bit of brightness on a rainy algorithm-influenced day: these changes don’t mean Instagram isn’t worth exploring for businesses. It may not seem like it at first, but the fact that the platform puts its users first and is making a solid attempt to cater to their preferences is actually a good thing. Transparency and being in control of data are more than just a trend; people want control over what they see, when they see it, and how they consume it. Users should have that right at all times.

But marketers still need to find ways to get noticed, and that’s where the downside comes in. You may need to get more creative with your content, inspiring instead of just tossing down hashtags or tagging influencers to get noticed. Think of it like a gentle nudge into more holistic, effort-based marketing rather than a negative.

Remember: Instagram is all about networking, creating engaging content, and finding ways to connect that motivate and inspire. The back end is what makes it possible to craft that kind of content and still get attention – you just have use the right strategies and methods. Algorithms that make content more specific drive warmer leads to your best content, and that’s a recipe for more sales, better conversion numbers, and fewer angry accusations of spam.

Tags algorithm change, instagram, instagram algorithm

Social Media

Mastering Reputation Management on Social Media Platforms

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date June 6, 2018
No Comments on Mastering Reputation Management on Social Media Platforms

Social signals – how many collective shares, mentions, likes, and follows your business’s social media profiles have on an ongoing basis – are a big deal right now. They hold significant weight in determining rank because Google sees a high degree of positive interactions as indicating that you’re reliable, trustworthy, and ultimately, sharing content your fans and followers find useful.

That’s exactly why so many businesses now consider Social Media Marketing (SMM) an absolute must for staying competitive in SEO. Without social signals pointing to your business, you’re left trailing behind everyone else who manages to get it right, but that doesn’t mean SMM is without risk.

The Risk of a Negative Rep

The problem is that Google considers social signals so important for overall rank and reach. Negative reputations on social media sites have the potential to harm not just your social media presence, but your entire rank and reach right across the board.

Complicating matters even further is the fact that negative reputations can be warranted or unwarranted. On the business side, you may share a joke or post something that seems innocuous, yet has stereotypical, racial, or political overtones, leading to an avalanche of outrage in response to your well-intentioned content.

Or, maybe you really did manage to mess up with a customer or guest. Maybe you went out of your way to repair that relationship, offering refunds or fixes, but they refused them and prefer to complain on your wall instead.

On the other side of the coin is malicious reputation attacks. These are the instances where someone, either a customer or even a competitor, drops by your social media accounts with a well-fabricated story, drops it on your wall, and attracts attention from your fans and followers. Within hours, you’re getting slammed with negative reviews and calls for boycotts. It doesn’t even necessarily matter whether or not you actually completed whatever atrocity they’re claiming; it only matters how loud and visible they are.

Then you have the true public relations disasters – like this post where Adidas congratulated people on surviving the Boston Marathon, or this post from McDonald’s that slammed Donald Trump. Your thoughts on Trump or the Boston Marathon aside, these posts both obviously needed more consideration before they went live.

Proactive Prevention is Best

Obviously, preventing problems from occurring in the first place is the best way to prevent yourself from developing a negative reputation. Serve your customers well, strive for greatness, and carefully review posts before they go live. It seems like common sense, but there are enough businesses breaking these three critical rules that it bears repeating again and again.

But what about when you’re already struggling? What if you’re being maliciously attacked by a follower? If you’re in the midst of a scandal, prevention isn’t going to fix the slide downward. Instead, you need to address the issue with negative reputation recovery strategies to restore your good name.

Truthfully, negative reputation recovery can be immensely frustrating. It’s time-consuming, complicated, delicate, and often, expensive, but it’s a must if you’re already embroiled in a scandal or negative viral campaign.

In the rest of this article, I’ll outline the steps you should take to avoid making it worse. The goal? Pulling your profiles back into neutral territory without being eaten alive on the way.

Step Away from the Keyboard

Yes, this sounds counter-intuitive, especially when you have a scandal unfolding right in front of your eyes. But rapid responses filled with emotion, especially anger and indignant frustration, won’t do you any favors. They’ll just make your business look unprofessional and convince people there’s a good reason for your negative rep.

Whether your situation is unfolding slowly, or you just woke up to a massive PR disaster, the first (and only) first step is to take stock and figure out what happened. This means deep analysis of the situation – how it started, how it’s unfolding, what people are saying, and who is affected.

It is extremely important that you don’t jump in when you see “dog-piling” – negative conversations that tend to build on themselves. Although it may be hard, set aside your desire to break it up and let it be for now until you have a plan. No matter how logical your argument, you won’t win.

Respond to the Right People

Who you respond to (or where you respond) makes almost as much difference as how you respond. If the issue started with a single customer, and mostly expanded with supporters dog-piling on and sending the issue viral, address the customer directly and publicly by apologizing.

It’s best to invite customers to speak with you privately while also treating them like a human publicly. Encourage private communication, but don’t be surprised of they refuse or if you’re accused of attempting to “hide” the problem. This is immensely common in today’s social media world.

Let’s say the issue is bigger than just one person. Maybe you inadvertently re-shared something with subtle racial overtones or a sexual innuendo you completely missed before you shared it. In cases like these, a public post with an apology and an outline of how you intend to fix the problem in the future is better. ‘

If the situation has already exploded, it may be better to release an all-points press release or apology on all channels. Save this type of response for when all other measures have failed.

Start with an Apology

Let me be clear: apologies are an absolute must. Without them, you have virtually no chance of coming back from a disaster.

Apologies should feel genuine, should be empathetic, and should never use cut-and-paste standard responses. Followers see through copy-pastes in seconds, and will usually just point out your lack of effort.

Make it honest, transparent, and genuine, and speak like you were speaking to a colleague or friend. Never include phrases like “didn’t really mean it that way” “sorry you were offended” or any form of sarcasm; this is social media suicide.

Think of your apology as the beginning of your recovery story; your plan for the future is how you reach your happy ending. Don’t just say you’re “taking steps” to resolve a problem – so long as it doesn’t further jeopardize your reputation, tell your followers that those steps are and how you plan to implement them.

Fix the Problem and Move Forward

The next step is to identify whether you can take action to fix the problem. There are no magic solutions here; the best “fix” depends on variables like your business, your niche, your following, and even the scope and category of PR disaster you’re experiencing.

Ultimately, “fixing the problem” generally involves correcting a process or changing your business’s policies to prevent further irresponsibility or issues. And that starts with acknowledging your role or responsibility; then, you need to showcase how you will evolve and grow from it.

In the final section, I’m going to highlight two instances where brands overcame social media reputation disasters to bounce back.

Brand Examples

Sometimes, it’s easier to understand just how good (or bad) things can go based on a single reaction. Let’s review a few major social media disasters and see where past brands got it right.

Entenmann’s Hashtag Snafu

During the culmination of the Casey Anthony trial, when #notguilty was trending on Twitter in reference to the case, Entenmann’s made a major blunder. The company, who sells baked goods, tweeted “”Who’s #notguilty about eating all the tasty treats they want?!”

Of course, what ended up happening is that Entenmann’s appeared as if they had taken advantage of the currently-trending #notguilty tweet to drive home more sales. Naturally, the public reacted swiftly and angrily, accusing them of everything from greed to irresponsibility to making light of the verdict. Sure, that wasn’t their intention…but it didn’t really matter at that point.

Entenmann’s took responsibility of the scenario quickly. They deleted the initial tweet and reposted another:

“Sorry everyone, we weren’t trying to reference the trial in our tweet! We should have checked the trending hashtag first” and added “Our #notguilty tweet was insensitive, albeit completely unintentional. We are sincerely sorry.”

What worked so well here wasn’t just the apology – it was the fact that Entenmann’s addressed their failure directly, acknowledged their role, and identified exactly how they would prevent if from ever happening again (checking trending tags first).

Chrysler’s Media Company Debacle

This issue with Chrysler several years ago is a great example. The company contracted a media agency to handle their posts. Someone from the media company ended up firing out an f-bomb through what he thought was his own account, but was really Chrysler’s account. It slammed Detroit drivers for being unable to drive.

“I find it ironic that Detroit is known as #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f#*!ing drive.”

What made this scenario especially difficult is that Chrysler is an iconic Detroit car manufacturer; they’re deeply tied to the area and the immense struggle it’s experienced over the last 50 years.

Which is exactly why Chrysler didn’t just apologize; they took action by breaking their contract with the media company:

“Chrysler Group LLC will not renew its contract with New Media Strategies (NMS) for the remainder of 2011. NMS has agreed to support us with an orderly transition until a new agency has been named. We thank them for the work they have provided to us and wish them the best as they move forward.”

New Media, the company responsible, also took action by firing the individual and aligning themselves with Chrysler’s innocence by taking responsibility. In short, they did the right thing.

Can’t seem to get on top of your reputation issues? We use advanced strategies to address reputation and PR concerns from a holistic perspective. Let’s come up with a plan to get you back on track and positively regarded by the public.

Tags reputation management, social media

Social Media

5 Facebook Changes Spurred On by Cambridge Analytica

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date April 4, 2018
No Comments on 5 Facebook Changes Spurred On by Cambridge Analytica

Facebook is currently struggling from a poor public image issue. Somehow, the platform managed to allow research company Cambridge Analytica to not only access, but retain years worth of private data for nearly 50 million different users on the platform. Users who, for the most part, had no idea their info had been gathered, used, and studied, all by the same research company.

The entire event led to significant backlash against the company, including a #DeleteFacebook hashtag that encourages people to walk away from the platform for good. But it’s a hard sell for businesses and marketers, who may rely on the platform for publicity and sales.

Fortunately, Facebook is taking some serious steps to correct the current privacy and data issues inherent to its design. We did a little digging to see what’s changing in coming weeks; here’s what we found.

More Auditing for Apps

Facebook has always audited the apps that work through its APIs, but how often and how it plans to audit apps is changing. Not only will the platform audit more frequently, but they’ll also be more proactive about suspending or auctioning issues when they find them – even if those issues are small. This includes apps that ask for too much information, apps accessing too much information, and any app suspected of stealing or misusing member data.

Businesses who rely on Facebook’s APIs for statistics, analytics, market research, and lead generation may find themselves no longer able to access the same kind of data. Such behavior isn’t rare, either; until a short while ago, a significant number of businesses specifically turned to Facebook because it allowed for such robust data gathering, especially through apps. If you’re currently gathering data off the platform, it’s time to find new strategies that don’t risk suspension or bans.

A Temporary Moratorium on New Messenger Bots

If you were planning to create a messenger bot to help you answer questions on your Facebook page more quickly, you might be too late. Facebook also announced a (possibly temporary) moratorium on the creation of new messenger bots.

The problem with bots lies in how, when, where, and why they gather information from the people who interact with them. Most bots require a significant amount of information from people just to function at all; they need to be able to “listen” to input in order to respond, and that means monitoring a person’s text submissions. In the case of on-page bots, this may include monitoring all content submitted to the business page wall or group.

Why is this a problem? The platform believes some developers may be using these bots to gather an excessive amount of information. Moreover, they aren’t sure how to fix the problem just yet, and that means if someone were to create a malicious bot, they could be held responsible. So, for the moment, they’ve decided it’s safer to just take bot creation offline. Existing bots will be permitted to stay, but may face additional audits in coming months.

Stricter Data Access Guidelines

Facebook is also planning to significantly reduce what data apps and businesses can access full-stop. For example, for API-based logins on websites and other platforms (anything that uses a Facebook login), the social media giant will soon only permit you to access their first name, last name, and email address. Previously, some login services were able to access not only the basics, but also advanced information like Facebook profiles (even if set to friends only) and “friends of friends” lists.”

In terms of apps, Facebook is planning to strip back data access to disallow collecting data that “isn’t needed.” Exactly what that means is open to interpretation because the platform isn’t clarifying right now, but likely, it will strip most businesses back to only the data they need to provide customer support or services.

Here’s a few examples. If you include a tab on your Facebook page that allows people to sign up for your newsletter, you probably can’t ask people to provide anything other than a first name, last name, and email address. If you’re using a tab to run a contest, and local laws demand you collect addresses, Facebook will (probably) view this as appropriate use.

The goal here is to make Facebook more secure by preventing excessive data collection. The more free data floating around out there, the more likely someone is to misuse it. Unfortunately, the restrictions will likely impact the SEO and marketing industries as it becomes more difficult to access analytics.

Data Access Permissions That Expire

Cambridge Analytica didn’t just gather more data than they should have; they also stored and actively used that data inappropriately for many, many years. Then, they used that data to create “psychographic profiles of users and their friends,” which later bolstered their clients’ political campaigns – including, allegedly, Trump’s social media team and several Brexit supporters.

Developers who request data will maintain permission to access and store that data for as long as the individual in question actively utilizes the service or app. If the user doesn’t log in or interact with the app for 90 days, they’ll expire access and permissions on the data for good.

A New, Redesigned Settings Menu

There are big changes on the horizon for users, too, especially where privacy controls and security are concerned. Facebook is totally redesigning their user settings menu for both individuals and businesses, making it easier to control what data you allow them to use and how they use your data.

They haven’t rolled out changes to all accounts just yet, but when they do, you should see better data controls for users, brand-new extensive account download and total deletion options, and a less confusing interface. New pages in the works will give users the option to see a list of developers and specifics for data given out in the past – with the option to remove access or permissions at any time.

Ultimately, these changes just barely scratch the surface of the social media security issue. But they do at least take steps to make the platform safer. As a business using Facebook for content marketing and/or digital marketing, it’s up to you to determine how to roll with the changes. We’re always here to help if you need us!

Tags cambridge analytics, facebook, facebook changes

Social Media

How to Create Instagram-Worthy Photos to Grow Your Account

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date February 6, 2018
4 Comments on How to Create Instagram-Worthy Photos to Grow Your Account

Creating Instagram-worthy photos involves understanding good lighting, composition, and the use of color. Utilizing the rule of thirds, experimenting with different angles, and ensuring high image quality are key. Editing photos for a consistent aesthetic and using filters judiciously enhance appeal. Capturing unique, authentic moments and storytelling through imagery resonates with Instagram audiences.

Taking fantastic pictures is, in fact, an art form (hello, photographers!) that goes far beyond even the standard photography basics. In today’s social media-soaked world, you need to go over and above by flexing your post-processing and photography skills to create an image that truly shines.

On no other social media platform is this more obvious than Instagram, where photos take precedence over just about any multimedia format in successful marketing. The second you sign up, you’re competing against some of the most highly-skilled, fierce image creators in the industry.

If you happen to be a business attempting to market a product, person, or service, you have an incredibly steep hill to climb to overcome the competition. Not only do you need to ace every photo, but you must also ensure that your photos meet marketing needs at the same time.

Here’s the good news: this isn’t an impossible goal. With a bit of practice, knowledge, and patience, most businesses can become at least semi-proficient in taking Instagram-worthy photos. We recommend starting your journey with these impressive insider secrets.

Be Your Weird (And Wonderful) Self

Whether the “you” here is you as an individual or your business, you won’t be able to take pics that truly shine until you figure out what it is you’re trying to say in the first place.

Who are you? What’s your goal each time you create your photo? Who is your audience, and what do they enjoy seeing? Most importantly, what is it you’re trying to market in the first place?

You have to know who you are, what you provide of value through your photos, and why people should care before you take your snaps. That said, don’t let it hold you back; it’s also okay to get a bit weird and creative now and again.

One of the best ways to flex your personality is to try on new aesthetics or even create your own new aesthetic. Doing so makes you instantly recognizable, and that leads to more viral sharing power.

Wait… What’s an Aesthetic?

That fancy word refers to your overall style or personal appreciation of beauty. There’s no one specific aesthetic; in fact, people create new aesthetics every single day on Instagram. Think of your aesthetic as a one to two-word description of the main theme present in your photos. Aesthetics can include colors, lighting styles, forms of photo content, or even photo angles – whatever makes your photos truly yours.

Here are a few examples of trendy Instagram aesthetics we see:

Summery beach girl
Mermaid
Unicorn
Dark and Grunge
Minimalist
Girl Power
Outdoor fun
Country chic
Warm and friendly
Romantic and sweet
Bright and bold colors
Rich and Luxurious
Powerful in Business
Professional and polished

You can see a few of these aesthetics (and more) in action at Later.com. Note how the overall theme of each set remains the same, even if the content changes over time.

Ultimately, finding your aesthetic is about discovering who you are, how you want people to feel, and what your purpose for your photos really is. Once you have that information, it’s up to you to create a theme that weaves its way through each of your photos in some way.

Camera Quality Matters

The type of camera you use to snap your photos can make a big difference to a picture’s overall quality. If you’re hoping to get that perfect pic with a 5 Megapixel Sony Cybershot, we’re sorry to say it just won’t usually come out right.

Do This Instead

The fix? Break up with your ancient or obsolete camera and use a newer device instead. Professional cameras like the Sony a7R II, work best, but they can be expensive, especially given that they address only one need.

Budget-Friendly Options

If pro cameras are out of your budget, the GoPro HERO5 and the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GM1 both come in at just shy of $450. This is a considerable savings, and the GoPro is versatile enough for indoor/outdoor shots, too.

You can also bridge the gap by killing two birds with one stone: use your smartphone’s camera instead. iPhones and Android devices like the Samsung S8 may be expensive, but they let you justify the investment because they serve an important second need, but they also boast incredible picture quality and access to on-the-spot editing tools. That combination is precisely what lets stars like Alice Gao enjoy impromptu photo shoots from anywhere.

Lighting is Everything

In photography, photo quality and ambiance are heavily influenced by the quality of your lighting. Too much light will make your pictures overexposed and washed out; too little will induce too much contrast and make darker areas impossible to see.

Color and Position

Even lighting color and position has a role to play because it can change skin tone, create undesired shadows, or draw attention to problem areas rather than highlighting what’s good. Generally, you should light objects that require immediate attention from the front, but don’t be afraid to play around with angle until you find what works best.

Natural Light vs Artificial

Whenever possible, use natural light instead of artificial light. It just plain produces better pictures than most artificial light sources. Whether it’s sunlight, overcast, or even pouring rain, it just makes pictures look better than LEDs or CFLs (don’t even consider pictures under fluorescents).

Sunlight is Best

Sunlight rules the roost for selfies, pictures of food, and all other “feel-good” photos because it’s warmer, more balanced, and kinder to most camera lenses. If you can’t or won’t access the great outdoors for your pictures, try to at least stand close to a large window.

Artificial Lighting Sources

Sometimes, you just don’t have the ability to access natural light. When this is the case, you’ll have to rely on your flash and/or other artificial lighting sources and devices instead. Understanding the differences and how they impact your photo will let you make the most of your tools, so here’s a short overview of the most common.

Ring Light – Use a high-quality ring light with a daylight/UV bulb for portrait selfies and macro photography. It disperses light beautifully and also creates the attractive “ring highlight” within the eyes seen here.
Flash Diffuser – This device softens flash, making it ideal for up-close shots, macros, and portraits. It prevents the blown-out look some up-close pictures can have, especially when you’re snapping light-colored objects.
Strobe Lights – No, these aren’t for a dance party. Strobe lights create a crisp and sharp lighting effect because the camera picks up the light for only a second, preventing overexposure while preserving even lighting.
Fill Light – These come sized for smartphones or for professional cameras. Fill lights “fill” the local area with light, evening out contrast issues and preventing overly dark shadows. They’re fantastic for night shots and overcast days.
Spot Light – Just as the name suggests, a spot light is any light that shines from a specific position within the room. This can be a separate spot light on a stand or even an overhead light in your house. Whenever possible, use daylight bulbs in it for better lighting.

Above all else, remember that positioning and shadows can make any artificial lighting source look bad. This is true whether you’re snapping portraits, food pics, furniture pics, or something else entirely. Always take a few test shots and adjust your lighting as-needed.

The Verdict

Crafting the perfect Instagram-worthy pictures that fulfill marketing needs while also producing a high level of engagement certainly isn’t easy. Even if you do nail down the perfect pic, you still have to think about how to market it to the right audience in a way that boosts your online presence and leads to conversions.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, know that it’s okay to ask for help. What you stand to gain from partnering with an expert marketing agency or influencer often far outweighs the small costs associated with partnering with the experts.

Tags instagram, iphone photography, photography

Social Media

The Ultimate Guide to Running Successful Facebook Ad Campaigns

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date October 4, 2017
No Comments on The Ultimate Guide to Running Successful Facebook Ad Campaigns

How to Setup Your Facebook Ad Campaign

The Ads Manager breaks down like this:

Account: You’ll have one ads account you use to run everything.
Campaign: Create a campaign for anything you want to create ads for. Create campaigns for specific products or services. Create campaigns to drive traffic to your site, or to grow your Facebook following.
Ad Sets: Organizes sets of ads for a single campaign together. It’s a good idea for creating similar ads in different groups or categories.
Ads: These are all of your ads, and the only part others will eventually see.

Step 1: Create Your Budget

It’s hard to know what kind of Facebook Ad budget you should have if you’ve never run a campaign before. Ask yourself:

How much is your product or service?
How many units/subscriptions do you want to sell?
What’s your current conversion rate?

If you don’t know the answers, it’s all right. It’s just a starting point to help you figure out what budget may work for you.

For instance, let’s say your product costs $50 you want to sell 20 and your conversion rate is 1%.

Basic math helps us figure out that in order to make that $1000 off of 20 sales with a one percent conversion rate you will need 1000 visits or clicks on your ad.

When it comes to deciding how much you should spend on each click, you can choose to automatically bid or manually set your bids.

The delivery type determines how frequently you want to add shown. You can have them shown as quickly as possible to blow through your daily budget sooner, or you can spread them throughout the day.

Step 2: Create Your Fan Page

Step 3: Create Your Campaign

Here is where you choose what you want the ad campaign to do. Keep it simple and choose “send people to your website.”

Step 4: Create the Ad Set

Now you’ll be taken to creating your ad set where you have to decide on your target audience burst.

If you’re starting out small and don’t have much of a budget then10,000 may be a decent audience size. But, if you’ve got a healthy budget you can go up to a million. You’ll need enough people to allow Facebook technology to help optimize your campaigns. You can even choose to go up to 2 million people for a new audience if you know what you’re doing and have the money to spend.

Choose your audience based on demographics that match your customer personas.

Step 5: Create Your Ad

Write the copy and choose your CTA button. Make it grab attention by tapping into emotion.

Preview the ad. When you’re happy, finalize it and add it to your set.

Step 6: Create Ad Variations for Split-Testing

Create two more versions of that ad that are similar. Use slightly different text to split-test the text, or different images to test the images, to see what your audience responds to the best.

Step 7: Run All Ads for 24 Hours

Run all three ads in the ad set for a full day to gather data.

Step 8: Stop the Ads That Aren’t Working

Look at the data for each of the ads. Stop the ones that aren’t doing as well. Assess why. Keep this in mind for future campaigns.

If you have the budget and want to, create additional ads in the ad set and try for another 24 hours to continue split-testing.

Increasing Your Budget

Using Custom Audience and Lookalike Audiences

Once you’ve gotten the hang of Facebook Ads and you have multiple campaigns for different purposes, you can start using custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

Custom audiences are great for uploading your email list to, so you can advertise specifically to people who are on your email list, or people who have purchased from you in the past.

If you want to use the lookalike audience feature, you’ll need to create and install a Facebook pixel on your website.

Facebook Ads Work

Start small and scale up so you can make the most of your budget, no matter how limited.

Tags facebook ad campaigns

Social Media

Tracking Social Media Campaigns in Google Analytics

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 27, 2017
No Comments on Tracking Social Media Campaigns in Google Analytics

Your website and social media presence work together to build the foundation of your business – whether you actually conduct business online or not. While there are many tools to help you measure the success of your social media efforts on the platforms themselves, translating that success to measurable results for the business itself can get complicated.

That’s why it’s important to setup your social media campaigns in Google Analytics, so you can see how much business is coming from each social platform. It can help you see where you should be spending more time, which platforms aren’t really performing the way you’d expect, and perhaps most importantly, help guide you as you develop your social media strategy and campaigns in the future.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown on how to track your social media campaigns in Google Analytics.

Step One: Develop Your Social Media Objectives and Website Goals

Before you can start tracking your social media efforts in Google Analytics, you first need to know what you want to track. Your goals and objectives should be part of your overall social media marketing plan, and need to be aligned with your overall business and marketing strategy.

Let’s say your objective is to use social media to increase traffic to your website. Develop SMART goals to help you reach the objective. For instance, if your objective is to increase website traffic by 20% in Q3, your goals could be:

50 Tweets per month will be dedicated to driving website traffic.
10 Facebook posts per month will be dedicated to driving website traffic.

Then you can go from there and determine exactly what you’ll do in those tweets and posts to drive the traffic. Perhaps you’ll offer a free report or eBook, schedule a webinar, or host a contest of some sort.

Step Two: Setup Google Analytics (If You Haven’t Already)

If you’ve not already setup your Google Analytics, pay attention. If you have, feel free to skip on down to step three.

Visit Google Analytics. Sign in with you Google Account, or create one. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the account setup.

Once you’re presented with a tracking code, install it on your website either by copying and pasting the code in the header of your website, using a WordPress plugin, or asking your webmaster to do it for you. Data will start rolling in within about 24 hours.

You can also use the Google Tag Manager, which I recommend because it will simplify things for you if you plan on using AdWords Conversion Tracking or remarketing tags at any point in the future. Watch the video below for help setting up Google Tag Manager.

Step Three: Create Your Google Analytics Goals

To really understand how effective your social media efforts are, you must look beyond visits and pageviews. Instead, you need to know things like leads, downloads, newsletter signups, and product sign ups to help you really see your social media ROI. To do this, you’ll need to create goals specifically in Google Analytics.

That’s outside the scope of this article, so follow these steps by Google Analytics to setup the goals you need. Then, come back here to learn more about tracking your campaigns and the information you can learn from the reports.

Step Four: Use the Google URL Builder to Track Social Campaigns

To associate certain social media campaigns in Google Analytics, you can build URLs with the URL builder, so you understand the traffic is coming from certain campaigns. The URL builder is a two-step process that starts with entering the URL you want to track, and then applying URL parameters.

URL parameters are necessary so you know exactly what you’re targeting and how. It’s best to create a spreadsheet where you track the URLS and campaign names, so you can keep up with everything when you track in Google Analytics.

Here’s a quick overview of the parameters you’ll be able to use when you build your URLs.

Campaign Content (utm_content)

Use with content-targeted ads and split-testing
Use to distinguish between ads and links that point to the same URL

Campaign Medium (utm_medium)

Required field used to identify the medium, such as email, or cost-per-click

Campaign Name (utm_campaign)

Use to identify your specific promotion or campaign
Useful for keyword analysis

Campaign Source (utm_source)

Required field used to identify the search engine, newsletter name, or other source of the traffic

Campaign Term (utm_term)

Used for paid searches
Use to mark keywords

When you generate the URL, it’s long, ugly, and impossible to remember. To make it shorter and easier to track clicks, use your choice of URL shortener. Options include:

You can track these results in the Campaign reports under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics.

Overview of Social Media Reports in Google Analytics

Overview Report: With this report, you’ll get a glance into the conversion value your social media channels bring your business. This graph compares the number and value of all goal completions to the ones that are from social media referrals.
Network Referrals: This report lets you see the engagement metrics from all your social networks. It will also show you the social platforms that sent you the highest quality traffic.
Data Hub Activity: This report shows you how people are talking about and engaging with your website’s content on social media. You’ll see the recent URLs people shared, how they shared it, and what they said when they shared it.
Landing Pages: This report shows you the engagement metrics for each URL. You’ll also see the original social networks for the URL.
Trackbacks: This report will show you which sites are linking to your content and in what context. This way you can replicate your most successful content and build relationships with the people who are linking to your site most often.
Conversions: This is the most important report in terms of showing your social media ROI. This report shows you the total number of conversions, and the total monetary value that comes from those conversions that occurred because of the referrals from each social platform. If you skip the step where you setup goals in Google Analytics, this report will not have any data – so don’t do it!
Plugins: This report shows you which social media share buttons on your site are clicked, and on which pieces of content they’re clicked on. You can use this report to learn which articles are most often shared, and what social media platforms they are being shared on.
Users Flow: This step shows the paths users take from social networks through our site. If you’re running campaigns to promote specific products, you can see where people from social media came in and whether or not they stayed to explore other pages on your website.

Step Five: Reporting the Data from Social Media Reports

With this data in hand, you can compile and present it in a presentation to your CEO or investors, to justify your investment in social media. One of the biggest things to remember to is to only include data that’s relevant to your goals. Include graphs and explain what each of those mean.

For instance, if you want to show how social media is driving traffic to your website, create a graph of that traffic compared to other channels. Talk about how social media channels are driving traffic compared to organic and paid search or other platforms, too.

Always Measure, Track, and Analyze

Even if the data delivers a disappointment, you can still learn from it. If you notice your content isn’t being shared like you thought – think about why. Is it because the social share buttons aren’t prominently displayed, or is it because the content itself needs improvement? Test new approaches, measure, track, and analyze again. There’s always room for improvement.

Are you using Google Analytics to track social media ROI? Why or why not?

Tags google analytics

Social Media

Your Complete Guide to Creating Native LinkedIn Video Content

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 20, 2017
No Comments on Your Complete Guide to Creating Native LinkedIn Video Content

LinkedIn is one of the last platforms to add support for uploading videos. Video marketing has a remarkable return on investment, and with the addition of native video, now those in the B2B space have an even better shot at using LinkedIn. Though the rollout has begun, if you don’t have the ability to upload video directly to LinkedIn yet, you can expect it to be available to all users by the end of Q3 2017.

Before now, users have only been able to share video that’s hosted on either YouTube or Vimeo. Many users have been sharing their YouTube videos for years, but have learned the native video gets far more engagement. We also saw this when Facebook introduced native video – Facebook’s algorithm always gives priority to video directly uploaded to the platform, rather than a link to a video native to another platform.

Find out how video will impact advertisers and business owners, and how to make use of video on LinkedIn.

Native Video vs. Shared Video Links

Right now, video can only be uploaded natively via personal profiles. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to improve your business there. Not only can you expect more engagement from video compared to sharing a link to a YouTube video, you can start including LinkedIn as part of your overall video marketing strategy – customizing video specifically for the platform.

To share a native video on LinkedIn, you’ll need to have the LinkedIn app installed on your mobile device. In the share box on the app’s home screen, tap the video camera icon.

From the next screen, you can either choose to record a video, which will then be saved to your camera roll automatically, or choose a previously recorded video from your camera roll.

Native videos must be at least three seconds in length, but cannot exceed 10 minutes. The file size cannot be any larger than 5 GB. Though you can go up to 10 minutes, it’s a good idea to limit your videos to around three minutes. This keeps the file size smaller, but helps to better accommodate people’s shorter attention spans.

Add up to 700 characters to your update that describes the video. Use some of the talking points of your video, so people are motivated to watch. You could include the basic how-to steps you’ll cover in the video, or write a small update with a link to a blog post or LinkedIn Publisher post.

If you don’t like the idea of typing all of the description out on your mobile device – and I don’t blame you there – you could always type it out in an email or cloud-based service like Google Docs, and then open it from your phone to copy and paste.

When you write the update, remember you can still tag people and ad links and hashtags just as if it were a normal update.

When you’re finished, just tap “Post” like you would for any other update. If you’re an Android user, you’re in luck because you can exit the app to do other things while your video is uploading. If you are an iPhone user, though, you must stay in the app until it is finished.

Your video will automatically play in the LinkedIn feed, but will be muted as it does. People will have to unmute the audio to listen to it.

After it has been uploaded, you can add the native video link to your profile with the mobile app. Just click the three dots icon at the top right of your profile and choose “Copy Link to Post.”

From there, go into your profile settings, edit your intro section, and upload the video to Media. You’re also able to add the video link to any media section, or share the video link on Facebook.

If you want to add the video to Publisher, take screenshot of the video, copy the video link, and then link the screenshot to the video.

What Native Video on LinkedIn Means for Your Business

It doesn’t matter that video is only available to personal profiles. You can have anyone in your company – even your CEO start creating and uploading videos. Then, you can encourage your employees to share the videos.

If we look to the success of Facebook video as an indicator, there’s no reason not to expect LinkedIn video to have the same kind of results. Native Facebook video gets 10x more shares than linked video from YouTube.

Publishers will have access to traditional video metrics such as demographics and viewership, but they will also get access to new information about their viewers, including the companies they work for and their job titles. This information can add to the data you use to develop marketing strategy and campaigns, to improve targeting and return on investment.

Research from Business Insider shows LinkedIn is the most trusted social media platform. This translates to higher trust with our audience, so you have a wonderful opportunity to reach people with your content in the place they’re most likely to trust what you’re saying.

Ways to Use LinkedIn’s Native Video for Your Business

If you don’t have native video on LinkedIn yet, you will soon. Here’s how you can get ready for it.

Start with a video that introduces your company. Add service-specific videos. Include video testimonials from clients. (Be sure to get a video release form so you’re allowed to use it in your marketing materials. Talk to a lawyer or your legal team for more information. Because I’m not a lawyer, I can’t give you legal advice.) Create how-to videos to go along with blog posts. Record some recruitment videos to have on hand when you need them.

Look through the video marketing materials you already have, and see what you can do to use the footage to make videos specifically for LinkedIn. There’s nothing that says you can’t make all your marketing assets do double, or even triple duty for you.

If You’re Marketing on LinkedIn – Add Video

There are many niches where LinkedIn marketing isn’t the best approach, but if you’re already using LinkedIn because you know your audience is there, there’s no reason not to add video to your strategy. You should be on LinkedIn if you’re in the B2B space, targeting professionals or commercial clients, or looking to hire someone.

Are you excited to be able to add LinkedIn to your video marketing strategy without having to rely on linked videos? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Tags linkedin video

Social Media

The Best Practices Guide for Using Facebook Messenger Ads

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 13, 2017
4 Comments on The Best Practices Guide for Using Facebook Messenger Ads

If you’ve ever spent time working in sales, you know the one thing that’s important is to make sure your customers know you’re there and available to them. Usually, that means greeting the customer quickly and asking how you can help them. It works when you’re in person, or speaking to a customer over the phone, but when it comes to social media? There’s not really an easy way to do that.

If people are visiting your Facebook Page, that’s wonderful. But, the reality is, many of them are going to ignore your call to action, whether it be to contact you, visit your shop, or click something to learn more – if they even see it in the first place. Social media lacks in providing an effective way to welcome your users and start a conversation – but Facebook Messenger Ads change that.

They focus on starting a conversation between you and your audience… so get ready to learn about what they are, why you should be using them, and how to create them.

What are Facebook Messenger Ads?

There are two types of Messenger ads: destination messenger ads and sponsored messages. Both are intended to either start or continue conversations with users interacting with your page. Facebook is also testing another kind of ad that work like Newsfeed style ads.

Destination Messenger ads appear in the Newsfeed like regular ads, with the intention of getting users to reach out to you via Messenger. The call to action reads “Send Message” and when a user clicks it, it will take them from the Facebook Newsfeed and open a message with you.

Sponsored Messages are part of the Facebook chatbot program, and allow you to deliver messages directly to users’ inboxes. This increases the chance they’ll read the entire message, which can help drive conversation. Using messages to remind people to use your coupon codes can also help drive sales.

Facebook has been testing newsfeed style ads in Messenger, with them expected to hit users soon. These will only be available to target people who’ve already used Messenger to contact you. Since the ad type is so new, it’s hard to talk about right now. I’ll write another piece soon, and come back to link it here when it’s ready.

Benefits of Messenger Ads

It’s easy to send massive messages to everyone on social media, but when it comes to building relationships, the personal touch just isn’t there. But, with this approach, you can start private conversations with your users, to give them a better, more personalized customer service experience. Having a chance to talk with them one on one and answer questions they may have builds a stronger relationship.

You can use your customer service team, rely completely on the Facebook chatbot, or use a combination of the two. The ads will let you pull customers into conversations where you can sell them something. Chatbots can take care of the entire process from start of finish, and the customer never even has to leave messenger.

Social media has branched away from the “social” aspect that’s essential to it. But, you can use messenger ads to bring it back to what social media is about – building relationships and connecting with people. The ads serve as that warm welcome, to let your customers know you’re available and ready to help them. It also lets them know you’re responsive.

Newsfeed vs. Messenger Placement

Newsfeed placements for messenger destinations are more available, since it’s easy to get cold traffic in your messenger with those ads. Since you can only use Sponsored messenger ads with people who’ve already messaged you, it stands to reason that the newsfeed messenger ads will have more benefits. However, this could change as sponsored messages become more widespread.

You’ll be able to target users who have looked at specific pages on your website, and encourage them to ask you questions through messenger. This could help increase conversions simply because you’re better able to address any issues or hesitations they may have.

Creating Destination Messenger Ads

To create a Destination Messenger ad, you can use the Ads Manager or the Power Editor just like you’d do if you were going to create any other ad. However, Instagram doesn’t allow you to run ads with the call to action “Send Message” so it is best to only run this campaign on Facebook ads with a Newsfeed placement. Customize your copy and images to focus on this.

You’ll only be able to choose “Local Awareness” for your campaign objective to use this call to action. Right now, even the standard “Brand Awareness” objective doesn’t allow for it. Once you choose that, you’ll be able to set up some basic demographic information such as geographic region, age range, and gender. The targeting options are far more limited here than with other Facebook ad options, but they still allow you to reach a local audience.

If you want to create a traffic campaign, you can target with the full range of options, and then choose Messenger as your destination rather than your website.

Creating Sponsored Messages Ads

To create this kind of ad, you’ll first need to create an audience of users who’ve engaged with you in the past. Create a new custom audience. Choose to create an audience based off of engagement on Facebook, then choose your page. From there, choose “people who sent a message to your page.” You can choose to target users based on the time frame when they sent you a message, from within the past month or even the past year. Then, choose Messenger for the placement.

Continue to create the ad as you normally would, but be aware that you can only choose a single image format.

Because Facebook is still ultimately focused on creating a great user experience for its members, it’s important to remember that you can’t spam your audience once they’ve started interacting with you on Messenger, either through personal or bot communication. Facebook has given users the option to block bots from sending messages should they decide they no longer want to receive your content. If you send too many messages, you not only risk losing a customer, but also being penalized by Facebook.

Creating a Facebook Conversion Funnel

Your Facebook conversion funnel could easily look a little something like this:

Target customers with messenger as a destination ads.
Engage those customers with a basic bot that notifies them of new products, or drives them to relevant landing pages where they can get your offers.
Add the Facebook pixel to those landing pages and their ‘thank you’ pages.
Create a remarketing campaign that delivers sponsored messages to the audiences that have visited your landing page, but didn’t go all the way through to your thank you page. This allows you to attempt to convert them again using your bot. Using this approach means your prospect will get a notification in their Facebook inbox, making them more likely to see it than they would be to see a regular Facebook ad.
Get those new leads to convert again but sending sponsored messages to audiences that have made it to your thank you page so they can get additional resources to push them further than down the funnel. It could be an upsell or cross-sell, or a demo or case study in the case of free resources.

Yes, it will take a bit of time to set up, but once the machine is up and running it can guide prospects to conversion practically automatically. What’s not to love about that?

Billions of Messages are Sent to Businesses Every Month

Users send more than 1 billion messages to business pages every month. If you’re not using that platform to market your products or services, or at the least provide customer service to fans and customers, you could be missing out. If you are using the platform, do you plan on working messenger ads into your campaigns? Why or why not? Share your thoughts below.

Tags facebook messenger ads

Social Media

Is a Job Working in Social Media the Right Fit for You?

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 6, 2017
No Comments on Is a Job Working in Social Media the Right Fit for You?

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) social media specialists are grouped in with other types of public relations specialists. In 2015, their median annual wage was $56,770, which is higher than the overall median wage of $36,000 for all workers.

Social media specialists are the ones who are posting content on various social networks for brands – so it seems fairly simple, right? It’s far more complex than most people know – unless they’re in the industry.

That said, it’s not the right kind of job for everyone. If you’re running a business, you know the importance of being on social. But that doesn’t mean you should be handling it yourself – it’s completely okay to hire someone else to handle it for you. Here’s how to tell if you’re on the right track in choosing to do it yourself.

How Familiar Are You with Social Media Channels?

Not all social media channels are the same – even though they may have similar features and end goals. I’m a big advocate of only spending time on the channels where you know your customers are. This way, you don’t spread yourself too thin, or invest time in trying to be everywhere because you feel like you have to be. At the least, you’ll need to be familiar with the ins and outs of Facebook, as 95% of Millennials expect a business to have a Facebook presence. It’s not just them, either – 87% of Gen X’ers, and 70% of people between ages 45 and 60 think you should be there, too. Only about 50% of people expect your business to have a presence on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Google+.

Regardless of your level of experience, posting the exact same updates on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks is not just a lazy strategy – it’s an ineffective one. Twitter limits you to 140 characters, where Facebook lets you be more verbose. Pinterest and Instagram are highly visual networks, so if you lack images, you’ll struggle to gain traction. Instead, adapt the same content for each channel.

If it’s going to take you a substantial amount of time, or trial and error spending money on ads, then you may be better served by hiring someone who has a solid background and experience in social media. Of course, if you’re eager to learn, and want to take those social media skills to a business working in social media to help other businesses, then by all means – get in the trenches and learn.

Do You Have Good Relationship Building Skills?

Social media is all about relationships – and the greater the quality of those relationships, the better your results will be. Stop with the sales pitch about how awesome your business is, and focus on really building connections with your potential customers. Use your social channels as a customer service platform for your audience, and take the time to help them.

If you think you can post on Facebook once a week and tweet a couple times a month – that’s not going to cut it. You’ll have to carve time out of your schedule to make sure you can dedicate attention to not only creating and curating content to post, but to respond to what people are saying when your audience starts engaging.

Remember, building relationships and engagement takes time. If you’ve got a small following, run some ads to help increase the number of page likes – focusing on building a highly targeted following. If you don’t know who your customers are, stop what you’re doing and build out customer personas for each of the major segments of your audience. Then, build ads that target those personas.

Can You Stay on Top of News, Tools, and Trends?

Social media is constantly changing. Even though there may not be a new hot network popping up every time we turn around, Facebook, for one, makes changes to their newsfeed algorithm quite often. If the idea of keeping up with what’s going on makes you want to crawl into a hole and hide, then it’s a good idea to look to someone else to handle your social. If not, then set some Google Alerts to keep up with news and trends.

Are You Able to Balance the Personal and Professional?

Your personal and professional online presences are going to blur to an extent, no matter how hard you work to keep them separate. Customers want to know there’s a human on the other end – no one likes dealing with automated systems. Use social media as a chance to humanize your brand. Do you want to post on your business page about your daughter taking her first steps? Unless you’re in the business of baby products, probably not. Would you share those funny cat memes you secretly love? Unless you’re in the business of selling products to cat lovers, no. But it’s okay to relax and be light-hearted, especially if that’s the voice you’re cultivating for your brand.

It’s possible to find balance between personal and professional, though it may take some experimentation to find out what your audience responds to best.

Can You See the Big Picture?

What you post on social media today needs to fit into your long-term goals and social media strategy. It’s important to go into social with some sort of plan, or you’ll never be able to achieve your goals. If you’re having trouble developing a strategy, you can hire someone to help you with that, if you’re comfortable with the implementation.

To Work Your Own Social or to Hire a Professional to Do It For You – That is the Question

If you’re just starting out and building an audience, or don’t have the funds to hire a social media manager, trying social media on your own is better than neglecting it all together. Set yourself a schedule, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to build up your queue of content, and use a tool like Feedly to find content to share that doesn’t originate with you. Then, take time every day to be present on the network to respond to engagements, find new followers, and share content from your followers.

If you’ve reached a point where you feel like you don’t have the time you need to properly focus on your social media, and you have the funds to hire someone, pass it off to an expert. You can then use the time you would spend on social to grow your business in other ways that you excel at.

Tags social media, working in social media

Social Media

What is Dark Social and How Do You Track It?

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 1, 2017
2 Comments on What is Dark Social and How Do You Track It?

Dark social doesn’t refer to some odd meeting of “chosen” social media professionals. It’s the term used to describe social sharing activity that can’t accurately be tracked, as it isn’t picked up by your web analytics platform. For instance, when someone shares links to your site through private messaging apps, email, or a plain old text message, those shares don’t have referral tags on them. When someone clicks one of these links, it is considered “direct” traffic. And while that’s good because traffic is traffic, the reality is it can greatly skew your Google Analytics.

So, dark social is the portion of traffic that gets thrown in to the “direct traffic” bucket in your analytics, but is the actual result of untrackable referrals. Certain native mobile apps such as Facebook and Instagram, email, messaging apps, and secure browsing (switching from HTTPS to HTTP means the referrer won’t be passed on) are the reason why dark social is an issue.

Why You Can’t Ignore Dark Social

Though the study is dated in 2014, research shows nearly 70% of all global online referrals are a result of dark social. In the UK, it’s 75%, and in North America, it’s 59%. More recent data shows the number has grown – with 84% of outbound sharing taking place through dark social, and 62% of that is from mobile devices.

What this means for your business is that a large chunk of your direct traffic isn’t really that and it’s hard to track accurately. And anything that mucks with your data could lead you to make the wrong kind of decisions for your business – so you want to get it as accurate as possible.

But, let me stop to mention the high value of this kind of traffic. If I take the time to email someone a link to a product, it’s because I know them well enough to know they’d be highly interested in something like this. I know what kinds of things they’re looking to buy, and there’s a higher than normal chance of that converting to a purchase. Dark social is essentially word-of-mouth among people who know each other.

Dark social shares help you target consumers who don’t generally share on social. Nearly half of consumers age 55 and older only share through dark social, compared to those who are ages 16 to 34, where only 19% share this way.If your business is in certain industries, particularly in travel, personal finance, or food and drink, more than 70% of social sharing is through dark social.

How to Measure Dark Social

While I’d love to be able to say that you can track all the dark social traffic your website gets – sorry guys, it’s just not true. However, there are some things you can do to track a lot of in your analytics platform.

If you want an easy solution, look at your direct traffic. If there are a lot of long links, it’s pretty safe to assume someone did not take the time to type that all in manually. The longer the link is, the harder it is to memorize anyway.

This won’t help you in learning how and where the content was originally shared, but it will help you explain to managers and CEOs where your traffic is coming from.

Use a URL shortener like Bit.ly on outbound links in your content so you can get better analysis of your engagement rates. These shorter links also look cleaner on Twitter and other social platforms. If you’re using Hootsuite to manage your social media accounts, there’s a built-in URL shortner – ow.ly. With it, you can upload images and track real-time clicks.

You can use the shortened URLs in emails or on your website to track the number of clicks those links receive.

Make sure your social share buttons are easily found, and easily distinguishable from social follow buttons on your website, so you can get a better idea of engagement.

Consider using dark social tools to track the origins of the dark social traffic and analyze the outcome.

ShareThis allows people to share any piece of content through text message, direct message or email. You can customize it to measure the copy and shares of the website URL.
io is a social media app store. Create an account on their website, or download their Shopify app or WordPress plugin. Once you’ve created your account, paste the code snippet they provide you with to the HTML head section. After it’s inserted, all it takes is a click to start tracking your dark social. Look for the “Address Bar Tracking” app. Then click “Activate” and you’re tracking your dark social, though it may take sometime for data to start coming in.
Po.st allows users to share content and allows publishers to get dark social analytics tools.

That’s not all you can do – you can also take the time to configure Google Analytics to measure what’s likely dark traffic. Until tracking website sharing through messaging apps becomes more conclusive and Google Analytics can add a native report, there are a few things you can do to narrow the information down.

Click “Audience > Overview.” Then, click “Add Segment” on the right. From the list, deselect the other segment options so that Direct Traffic is the only segment selected. Scroll down, and click “Apply.”

With the traffic narrowed down this far, you can narrow down a bit more to get the most likely suspects of your dark social activity. Now, go to “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.”

At this point, you’ll get a list of all the web pages that have been accessed as direct traffic. Now, filter those out that people can remember well enough to manually type into a search bar.

Click the “Advanced” link on the right to create a new filter. Chance the first filter from “Include” to “Exclude”.

Select “Page” as the dimension. Then in the field at the end of the row, type a directory of one of your webpages that’s fairly simple, such as /about, or /contact. If you type the “/”, you’ll get a drop-down menu with suggestions you can enter. Add as many of these as you can. With the filter applied, your results will only show those harder to remember URLs, and will only show the URLs that don’t have referrer data attached to them. These URLs are more than likely a result of dark social traffic.

Another way you can try to learn more about your dark social traffic is to include an email opt-in with a freebie, only on the pages you think are popular as a result of dark social. Keep the freebie different for each page if you want to learn more about the popularity of each page, or the same if you just want an idea of your dark social popularity in general.

Don’t Let the Darkness Frighten You

While you can only narrow things down at this point, so you get a general idea of what’s going on with dark social traffic on your website, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever be able to really see all of it. Tools can help you, and you should use them if you want to get more insights about what’s going on with your audience. Using UTM tags in Google Analytics can also help, since many people copy and paste the URLs they share.

Are you tracking dark social? If not, will you start? Tell me in the comments below.

Tags dark social

Social Media

Stepping Up Your Facebook Live Game with 360 Videos

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date August 23, 2017
2 Comments on Stepping Up Your Facebook Live Game with 360 Videos

Facebook Live has been a hit for many brands. Despite the fact that Facebook Live is only one year old, 20% of videos on Facebook are live. Since it became an option, daily watch time for Facebook Live broadcasts has grown more than 400%.

Now, Facebook is making an improvement to the streaming feature, making it possible for brands to stream 360 degree videos directly to their news feed. This falls in line with Facebook’s push into virtual reality (VR) since they purchased Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion. According to a company spokesperson, viewers who have a Samsung Gear VR have the ability to watch 360 photos and videos with the device, but not as a live stream. Live 360 videos will only be available for viewing in the newsfeed, at least for the time being.

Initially, Facebook 360 video, launched in December 2016, was only limited to certain pages – with National Geographic kicking things off. It became available to all Facebook pages in March 2017. The video below is one of National Geographic’s 360 videos – showing tiger sharks in the waters of the Bahamas.

If your brand has been using Facebook Live to engage and interact with followers, it may be time to take your game to the next level and experiment with 360 degree video. Let’s take a closer look at what it takes.

You’ll Need a 360 Camera

For many people, especially small brands with limited budgets, the smartphone serves as our primary camera. Whether you’re live streaming with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Periscope, your smartphone has everything you need: a camera and an internet connection.

If you want to take advantage of 360 video, you’ll have to purchase a dedicated camera. Your camera needs to be able to stitch in real time and have the ability to stream the video to the internet as you’re recording.

So, what are some of your camera options?

The Gear 360 2017 is a standalone 360 camera that can be paired with either your smartphone or PC for live broadcasting. It includes a 360 view, as well as stretched, round, dual, and panoramic options. It records up to 4096×2048 resolution at 24fps, with a recording time of up to two hours and 10 minutes. It is compatible with iOS and Android, as well as Mac and PC. It’s compatible with Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, Edge+, S7, S7 Edge, Note 5, and S8, and S8+ running Android 5.0 or later. It works with iPhone 7 and 7+, 6S and 6S+, and SE running iOS 10.0 or later. It’s available on Amazon for $184.

Insta360 Nano is available for iPhone. It’s a plug and play device to convert your smartphone camera into a 360 camera. It features a compact design, with a direct internet connection, and real-time image stabilization. There’s one-touch social sharing for photos and video. It shoots in 3008×1054, or 3K resolution. You can get it for $199.

Insta360 Air is available for Android devices. It’s a plug and play device that turns your smartphone camera into a 360 camera. It features a compact design, with a direct internet connection, and real-time image stabilization. There’s one-touch social sharing for photos and video. It shoots in 3008×1054, or 3K resolution. You can get it for $129.

There are also a number of higher-end models designed for professional videographers. I wouldn’t expect those of who are not professionals and on a budget to invest in that kind of equipment.

How to Use Facebook Live 360

Facebook recommends your connection be at least 4Mbps download speed to ensure the resulting video is quality. If you’re using a camera that supports Facebook Live, you can use its app to start a livestream. However, if you’re working with a camera that doesn’t have a dedicated app, simply navigate to facebook.com/live/create. If you’re a page using Business Manager, go to business.facebook.com/live/create.

Navigate to the appropriate live page, unless you’re using a camera with a native app.
Click “Create Live Stream.”
Click the checkbox for Live 360.
If you camera or software supports spatial audio, then check that box, too.
Select the destination for your live stream – either page or profile. Enter the RTMP Server UTL and Stream Key into the camera app or software. Your page can use Publisher Tools functions here, including setting up a scheduled Live Broadcast.
Stream to Facebook to preview your stream.
Go Live!

Your Live 360 video will be streamed in 1080p, with 30fps playback, and can run for a maximum of four hours. This provides plenty of time to create a fully immersive experience for your audience. It also supports 1280, and 4K video. Because most viewers won’t be able to see things that are far away in a 360 stream, you should position your camera no more than 20 to 30 feet away, depending on your camera’s resolution.

What Can You Do With 360 Video?

Show your followers everything about your environment in one video. This is especially great for behind the scenes looks at your office or production process.
Take your followers on a cool trip – if you’re out exploring the world.
Include your followers in any Live Events your business is part of like conferences and parties.
Schedule your broadcast ahead of time to alert your followers to the exact date and time of your broadcast. It will publish an announcement to your news feed, and allow your fans to opt-in to a one-time reminder notification when you’re about to go live.
Use the Live API to setup donations to fund raise for a cause during your broadcast.
Crosspost your videos when it’s no longer live to get more distribution.

How Does Facebook Support Your Growth?

When you publish a 360 video on Facebook, it’s not quite the same as a standard live stream. Facebook will include the 360 logo, and include a header to encourage viewers to explore the entire scene in the full 360 degree immersive views.

You also have the option to enable Guide, a tool that allows you to set various points of interest throughout the video. This lets your viewers choose between watching the entire video from start to finish, or just to take a look at your highlights. You can use it to draw user attention to the most important parts of your video, while still allowing your viewers to have the freedom of choice.

To use Guide:

When your video is no longer live and has been fully uploaded to Facebook, check the “This video was recorded in 360 format.” Then, go to the 360 controls tab, and check “Enable Guide”.

Play through the video to find the points of interest you want to make sure your followers see. When you get to a point you want to mark, click “Add Point” which pauses the video and adds a point of interest to Guide.

As the video plays, your video will pan around to the points of interest. Anyone who doesn’t want to watch with Guide can pan or swipe out of the scene. They always have the option to return to the Guide experience at any time.

Facebook Insights will extend to 360 videos, too, so you can learn what your audience is responding to the best. With it, you’ll get access to heat maps that show you the parts of your videos people are paying the most attention to. Watch for patterns in the data and use the information to make improvements on future videos. Heat maps will only be available on videos that more than 20,000 unique active viewers.

If you want to see a heat map for a specific video, you’ll have to visit your video library under publishing tools, and then click the video you want more information on. You’ll be able to find the heatmap under the video insights tab.

You’ll also get standard metrics, including minutes viewer, views and 10 second views, top videos, and your live video metrics.

You can also check to see if your broadcast was stabilized with the automatic stabilization algorithm. If so, it provides a more comfortable viewing experience for the audience. Facebook may also detect your video could benefit from stabilization after the live broadcast. If this is the case, you’ll receive a notification from Facebook, and you can edit the video from your video library to ensure it gets stabilized.

There’s even a Facebook 360 Community Facebook Group to help you learn more about 360 and VR.

Ready to Rock Facebook Live 360?

If you’re rocking Facebook Live, but want to create a more immersive experience for your audience, then 360 is the next greatest thing. With less than $200 and an idea or five, you can deepen your engagement with fans, and use it to attract a larger audience.

Will you use 360 Live video? Why or why not? Share your thoughts below.

Tags facebook live

Social Media

6 Ways to Ensure You Have Transparency in Social Media Marketing

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date August 2, 2017
No Comments on 6 Ways to Ensure You Have Transparency in Social Media Marketing

Transparency is part of who we are as human beings – that is, unless you’re a pathological liar. I’m willing to bet most, if not all of you reading this, take pride in your honesty in your day to day lives, right? Transparency is necessary to bring the human quality to social media – to bring authenticity, build those personal connections. Transparency builds trust – and trust is absolutely necessary for customer retention. Did you know 1/3 of millennials prefer to use social media as their method of communicating with brands? If you want to win them over, transparency is the way to do it.

Be Honest

Is your company facing criticism as a result of misinformation or rumors? Rather than relying on a public relations company to release a statement for you, try facing the issue head on with complete and total honesty directly from your company.

Remember when McDonald’s was dealing with acquisitions of using pink slime, rather than real meat products in their hamburgers and chicken nuggets? While Snopes long ago set the record straight saying the story is a mixture of both true and false information, the brand clearly suffered. As a result, McDonald’s Canada launched a campaign that allowed their customers to ask them questions directly. They provided answers, and even video to address customer concerns, which helped to repair the brand’s image. The website still allows people to ask questions and get answers.

For example, Don C. asked “Does McDonald’s beef come from a particular type of cow? If so, what breed of cow?”

The company replied: “Great question, Don. Yes, the cattle used to make our hamburger patties are Angus and Herford, Charolaise, and Simmental breeds. The breeds are often cross-bred to foster the best characteristics of the breeds. They’re 100% Canadian beef from independent Canadian farmers and ranchers.”

Be Authentic

No matter what your identity is, hold true to it. Who are you? Communicate your niche, specialty, or practice area, and be proud of it. Don’t try to be everything to everyone – because this can easily create the impression that you are something you’re not.

Share your business values, so your audience understands what your company stands for. Lush Cosmetics, for instance, makes it very clear they’re against animal testing by omitting animal based ingredients, and only using ethically purchased ingredients in their formulas. Many products are vegan, and those that aren’t can still be classified as vegetarian.

As tempting as it can be to delete any comments of criticism or something you don’t agree with – instead, address those comments and issues head on. It’s part of being authentic because if people think you’re just going to ignore or delete the bad comments, they won’t trust that what’s they see represents the whole picture. We all know that no matter how good a business is, they just cannot keep 100% of their customer base happy 100% of the time.

Don’t Be So Serious

It’s common to expect business to be formal, but in the days of social media – it’s everything but. You have to speak to your audience, and unless you’re dealing with a bunch of people who prefer the formal communication of yesteryear, that means being lighthearted and a little funny.

I personally love how Taco Bell handles their social media – Twitter in particular. They engage with their audience, and frankly, they’re funny as hell when they do it.

Share More Than the Best Stuff

Your best stuff should always be out there, of course, but it’s okay to share your less-than-perfect stuff from time to time, too. If you want to humanize your brand, then that’s one of the best ways to do it. No one can be perfect all the time, and we know it. Show video from the behind the scenes of someone cleaning up a mess on the production line. Show bloopers from your recording of your latest video or commercial. Have a little fun with it!

Admit it When You Screw Up

If there’s something going on in your company that you’re afraid would damage your reputation if word got out, the best thing you can do is admit it. Yes, this falls in line with being honest, but being honest about everything all the time doesn’t necessarily mean mistakes won’t happen.

Transparency matters to your customers, of course, but it matters to your employees, too. To earn and keep the trust of both, openly discuss your company’s failures to the best of your ability. It shows your brand is human, and that you’re willing to provide private information for the sake of others. When you admit your brand’s failures, you’re giving your customers the ability to stay customers, rather than being taken down with your brand’s demise. It’ll help motivate your employees to improve their performance, and ultimately, it gives everyone the freedom to decide who they trust.

Think about the Target data breach of 2013. They’re still dealing with the ramifications now, with costs now approaching $300 million… but that’s not the point. When it happened, they quickly reached out to customers and offered free credit monitoring services, to ensure that those who were affected could be made aware of any malicious activity on their accounts before it turned into a full-blown identity theft issue. They owned up to the issue, explained how it was fixed, and what action was being taken to avoid it in the future. Did it damage their reputation a bit? Sure, but the brand still has thousands of shoppers in stores and online every day.

Don’t Hide Behind a Corporate Veil

There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than not being able to find contact information for your company when they need to get in touch with you. Of course, they can email you, but there are some situations where emailing isn’t ideal because they need a more immediate response. Make it easy for people to get in touch with your company by actually posting the right information. It’s unreasonable to expect a solopreneur to have a call center with people answering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but having a Google Voice number that rings to your phone? That’s an option so that people have a way to contact you via phone.

Not only this, but provide real details about the company. Go beyond the standard “About Us” page and provide more information. Tell your customers how your company got started, how many employees you have, what your company culture is like, your annual revenue, and so on. The more quantifiable data you provide customers, the more likely they are to trust you as a credible brand (and source of information) in their everyday lives.

Transparency is Key to Social Media Success

Transparency isn’t a matter of choice. If you don’t take steps to ensure your brand maintains transparency in everything you do online, of course excluding legally protected information, you can’t expect employees and customers to maintain any kind of loyalty to you.

What are some ways you are transparent online? When people meet you, do they say you’re exactly who they’d thought you be? If you can say yes to that question, you’re doing a great job.

Tags transparency in social media marketing

Social Media

4 Ways to Increase Your Content Exposure on Social Media

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date July 26, 2017
No Comments on 4 Ways to Increase Your Content Exposure on Social Media

Social media has done small business owners everywhere a great service, when you stop and think about it. No matter how small your business is, your business can promote itself on social media to people from around the world. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have given small businesses owners microphones. Which is great, until small business owners inevitably realize that when everyone gets their hands on a microphone, it’s a lot harder for you to stand out in the crowd.

Whether you’re new to the world of social media marketing or you’ve been involved for years now, it’s no secret that getting noticed on social media can be an uphill battle. The world’s most ingenious marketing content won’t do you or your business much good if no one else is seeing it.

Generally speaking, the more exposure your content has on social media, the better. While I can’t give you the fool-proof method for creating dynamite content every single time, I can give you some guidance on how to increase your marketing content’s exposure on social.

Understand the Platform

Before you start to look for one-size-fits-all ideas and tactics that you can start implementing, you need to focus on the unique nature of each individual platform. Content shouldn’t be promoted the same on Instagram and Facebook because they aren’t always going to be perfectly compatible. Your audience doesn’t use them the same way, so you shouldn’t either.

Let’s try a quick thought experiment. Take a look at Facebook. While it certainly has the ability to handle visual content like images and videos, there’s more that you can do on Facebook to engage your audience. If you’d like to connect with your audience via something like a blog post, that’s something that you can only accomplish on a platform like Facebook.

If you’re looking to share a short live stream video, Facebook can certainly handle that. And with over 1 billion active daily users, Facebook is a strong choice. But Instagram Stories has already hit 250 million users since it’s inception, and with an arguably more engaged community of users for a very specific tool, live streaming on Instagram has the potential to be a strong choice too.

The point of this thought experiment is to illustrate the fact that the more you understand about any individual platform, its place in the digital marketing ecosystem and the way that its users consume content, the more likely you are to make the right choice when it comes to maximizing your exposure. Ensure that the content you’re producing is custom-tailored to whichever platform you intend to publish it on. Only then can you guarantee that your content is being presented and consumed the way it was intended.

Explore the World of Visual Content

Speaking of things like live video, there’s a massive amount of potential being wasted by most small business owners when it comes to content creation.

Forget about the benefits of experimenting with content in order to discover what your audience enjoys the most, that’s a topic for another time. The real tragedy here is that adding visual content to your marketing efforts has been proven to be a straightforward way to increase the effectiveness of your content, no matter what it is.

Adding a visual component to your content is going to get it more views, that’s just a given. The only thing that you need to be thinking about at this point is what kind of visual content you’re going to use.

Thanks to the inherent low-budget appearance, live videos are a great way to create content with an authentic, intimate feel built right in. And if you’re operating with a modest marketing budget, live videos have the added benefit of actually being a low-budget option. You can document the creation of a product or hold a town-hall style Q&A all for free.

If you’re looking for long-term exposure, you may be better off recording a video with higher production quality. A video that’s officially posted on social media can be shared and watched over and over again.

And that’s not even addressing infographics, slideshows and a host of other types of visual content. To avoid getting too bogged down in this topic, just be aware that you’re going to need a visual component to your content and that the best option is going to be dependant on the platform you’re posting on and your overall vision for your marketing strategy.

Metrics Matter

The interesting thing about this section is that while it’s arguably the least ‘exciting’, it’s definitely the most crucial component of any social media marketing strategy. Without a heavy focus on metrics, your marketing efforts essentially amount to guessing at what’s working and what isn’t.

If you’re looking for ways to increase your content’s exposure, the process actually becomes pretty simple. Experiment with a variety of different styles of content, rollouts, etc. Track the data on each individual strategy using platform specific tools, focusing on metrics like exposure and reach. Once you’ve collected the data on each strategy, create and publish more content that’s designed to capitalize on what your audience is responding to.

Again, it’s easy to look at this section and say ‘well, of course metrics are important’. It’s much harder to actually understand what that means from a marketing strategy perspective. While there’s always room for creativity in the content creation process, taking a look at the metrics for your marketing strategies can be a bit of a wake up call for some small business owners.

An idea that you thought would be fantastic may have fallen flat on its face. An idea that you may have thought up on a whim might be the most successful piece of content you ever publish. There’s no way to be sure at first, but once the data is in, the judgment and preconceived notions need to be dropped immediately. Data first, decision second.

Paid Ads

Ads on social are not like any other ads online. Why? Because they have massive upside. Facebook ads and Instagram ads have some of the best ROI in the paid ads game. And fortunately for small business owners everywhere, the paid ads game has changed quite significantly over the years.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the world of paid ads was dominated by t.v and radio. Unless you could afford a commercial on one of those giants, you didn’t have a chance of getting your marketing content promoted there.

Fast forward to the present and small business owners with smaller marketing budgets can collaborate with micro-celebrities and promote their content, product or service to millions of people, at a fraction of the cost of television. More importantly, you get access to plenty of engaged users. People who actively interact with your collaborator. It’s essentially a way to hijack a curated list of people in your demographic, who want your product/service. It’s hard to think of anything that’ll offer your content more exposure than that.

Most people aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly have the internet’s ear. All you can hope to do is take every step possible to increase your content’s exposure on social by building a marketing strategy that prioritizes data, industry understanding and execution.

Tags content exposure

Social Media

9 Twitter Profile Tips for Creating a Killer Twitter Profile

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date July 5, 2017
2 Comments on 9 Twitter Profile Tips for Creating a Killer Twitter Profile

Looking for some basic Twitter profile tips to help you create a Twitter profile that stands out?

We’ve helped create and optimize Twitter profiles for hundreds of social media marketing campaigns, so we thought we’d share a few Twitter profile tips to help you get started. In this article, you will discover the key ingredients needed to build a killer Twitter profile. Whether you’re creating a Twitter profile for your personal use or for your business, following these tips will ensure your Twitter profile is setup correctly.

Twitter has been around since 2006, and has evolved quite a bit over the years. Despite all the changes, one thing has remained the same – if you want to make a splash on the network and really build relationships with your followers, you must start with a good profile. Think of Twitter as a landing page for your personal brand, because every time you follow someone new, they’re given the chance to follow you back. Your profile is what they’ll use to make that choice, so it matters.

When you consider that most Twitter users get multiple follow-request emails every single day, they must make decisions quickly. That means some people will decide within mere seconds after looking at your profile whether or not to add you to their network. Make the most of those seconds by getting your profile right from the start.

1. Use Your Real Name

Use your real name, or as close as possible for your Twitter handle. Always include your real name on your profile. Making up a name, or going back to your AOL screen name days makes it difficult to connect your Twitter identity to your Facebook identity and all the other places you can be found online. When your handle is seen in a stream of tweets, unless it’s your name, it can be difficult for followers to remember who you are.

If you are creating a Twitter account for a corporate brand, keep your handle as close to that name as possible. Many companies do it – such as @airbnb, @netflix, and even @twitter. You want to do this for the same reason you’d use your real name on a personal profile.

2. Use a Real Photo of Yourself

Twitter – and all social media, really – is about connecting with other people on a human level. It’s best to use a real photo of yourself – one that’s a professional headshot if at all possible. If not, use the best picture you have that features you smiling. Don’t use group photos, or photos with you and your pets. If you don’t have a professional headshot, consider booking a session with a local photographer right away. Try to use the same photo across all your social media marketing channels, so people who connect with you can learn who you are away from Twitter as well. It helps create a more cohesive personal brand.

3. Use a Header Image

The updated Twitter profiles now allow you to have a customizable header image, where the old versions only allowed for a custom background. The main image spans the entire browser window, so it’s best to upload an image that’s 1500 px x 1500 px.

Feel free to be creative with your image. Use it to promote any sales or special deals your company has going on, showcase your talents, or range of products, make it personal, or make a collage. Create it using something like Canva if you’re on a tight budget and cannot afford to hire a graphic designer.

4. Write a Killer Bio Optimized for SEO

Every person on Twitter has multiple areas they operate – some of which intersect and overlap. You want to be involved in as many as possible, as long as you keep them relevant to your interests and expertise. It’s a good idea to consider geographic location, professional, and personal areas of interest, where you may have some followers who fit into one or more space.

You have a limited amount of space for your bio, so crafting it in just the right way can be difficult. With the 160-character limit, you need to succinctly say why you’re awesome and why people should follow you. But, you also need to include common keywords people search for on Twitter to make it easier for people you want to interact with to find and follow you.

One thing to remember is that if you’re on Twitter, your bio will appear in the search results when someone searches your name. That means it will be one of the most visible descriptions of you on the internet, so you’ve gotta get it right. How can you do that?

Make it accurate: Provide one professional description. If you’ve started a business? You’re an entrepreneur.
Make it exciting: Generate excitement and buzz. Use a positive tone and upbeat language.
Target it: You want to target others like you – so use words that describe others in your occupation or role.
Make it flattering: Talk about your accomplishments. Donate to charity? You’re a philanthropist. Workout sometimes? You’re a health guru… and so on.
Make it human: What’s something that makes you, you? Talk about your love of coffee, bacon, chocolate, or something else you consider yourself a connoisseur of.
Connect it: Use hashtags and @’s in your bio to show what else you’re connected to. If you’re the CEO of a company, include the @handle for your company in your bio.

5. Include a URL

If you have a blog or a website, include the link to it on your Twitter profile. If you do not have a blog or a website, link to another social media profile or somewhere else you can be found online. This makes it easy for followers to connect with you outside of Twitter.

6. Pin Tweets on a Regular Basis

The new profile layout allows you to pin a single tweet to the top of your profile page. You can change out this tweet as often as you’d like. It will stay at the top of your profile page no matter how old it is.

You can use it to highlight a promotion your company is running, drive traffic to your landing page, show potential followers more about who you are and what they can expect when they follow you, get more important tweets retweeted more often, and more.

Not just any tweet should be pinned, though. Make sure you’re choosing your best work. Choose the best content you have to offer, to share. Choose a tweet you’ve optimized for clicks and retweets – place the link about ¼ of the way through, and use verbs more than nouns.

For best results, include an image in your pinned tweet. According to the official Twitter blog, tweets with images get about 35% more re-tweets than those that do not. It’s also a good idea not to use all 140 characters on your pinned tweet, so there’s room for a manual retweet, if people want to do things that way.

To pin a tweet, all you have to do is scroll to the tweet you want to pin, then click the three dots next to the “view tweet activity.” Bar. Then, click “Pin” in the dialogue box. You’ll need to refresh your profile to make sure the pinned tweet appears at the top.

Try to avoid leaving the same tweet pinned at the top of your profile for weeks at a time. Of course you’ll need to do some experimenting to determine what works best with your audience, but changing it on a regular basis keeps the content fresh, and helps avoid your followers going blind to it.

If you want your pinned tweet to really pack a punch, choose one that drives emotion. Happiness makes people want to share – so if you choose a tweet that makes your profile visitors feel happy – because it’s something funny or positive, you may see more people share it on your behalf.

7. Share Lots of Visual Content

We already know tweets with images get more shares than those that don’t have images. With the new Twitter profile design, photos and video content are much more prominent than they used to be. With the new design, the number of photos and videos you’ve shared on your profile are now included on the top with your other metrics such as tweets, following, followers, and favorites. This means people who are looking at your profile have an easier time finding the visual content you’ve shared in the past.

8. Think About Filtered Views

With the new profile design, there are new timeline filters to create distinct views of just your tweets, your tweets plus replies, and tweets with photos and videos. The default view is tweets. This means if you want everyone to be able to see your tweet, do not start it with the @ symbol. Twitter considers this a reply, or part of a larger conversation. While this isn’t a bad thing – it just means those tweets are hidden by default.

If you want to include an @ reply in the main stream so that everyone sees it, make sure the first character is a period (.) and then include the @reply.

9. Tweaking Your Profile

It’s okay if you don’t get the perfect profile right away. You can always make adjustments here and there as needed, based on what trends you’re seeing with followers. If you feel like you’re attracting the wrong kind of people – consider what it is about your profile that’s drawing them to you, and change accordingly.

Twitter Profile Frequently Asked Questions

We see a lot of people getting hung up during the process of creating their Twitter profile, so we thought we’d share some of the most common related questions here to help you get started.

If you’re just getting started, keep in mind that you’re starting from scratch so there’s room to make mistakes. Don’t let the fear of making a mistake prevent you from creating your profile. After all, experience is the best teacher.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

What are the 6 components of a Twitter profile?

The six components of a Twitter profile include the following:

Display name – your public-facing name
Username or handle – unique to your account
Profile picture – a visual representation of your identity.
Bio – a brief description of yourself
Header image – adds personality to your profile
Pinned tweet – an opportunity to highlight a specific message or content at the top of your feed.

Should I use my real name for Twitter?

Whether you should use your real name on Twitter depends on your purpose and comfort level. If you’re using Twitter professionally, connecting with colleagues, or promoting your work, your real name or business name can lend credibility and authenticity.

What should I put in my Twitter bio?

You should showcase your personality and interests in a concise way. Include a mix of personal and professional details, emojis for flair, and relevant hashtags. Aim for authenticity and don’t forget to add a call-to-action, inviting others to connect with you.

Does putting hashtags in a Twitter bio do anything?

Including hashtags in your Twitter bio can be beneficial as they help categorize your interests and make your profile more discoverable to others with similar interests. While hashtags in bios aren’t directly searchable like they are in tweets, they still give users an idea of what topics you’re passionate about and can encourage like-minded individuals to follow or engage with you.

What should your first tweet be?

Your first tweet should briefly express your purpose for joining Twitter and mention your interests. Use emojis for visual appeal, and consider including a hashtag or two. Engage followers by posing a question or inviting them to connect. Make it friendly and genuine.

What changes will you be making to your Twitter profile to make it better? Share them with me in the comments below or follow us on Twitter.

Tags Twitter profile

Social Media

How to Build an Impressive LinkedIn Profile to Get You Noticed

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date July 3, 2017
No Comments on How to Build an Impressive LinkedIn Profile to Get You Noticed

LinkedIn is a powerful social network, and not just for those in the B2B space. LinkedIn users are more likely to actually visit your homepage, and have higher conversion rates compared to other social media platforms.If you want to make the most of your time and effort spent connecting with others there, it all starts with a stellar profile. The thing with LinkedIn, though, is you can’t treat it the same way you’d treat a personal Facebook profile. Yes, it takes time and effort to get it done right, but anything worth doing is worth doing the correct way, wouldn’t you agree?

A Good Profile Picture

LinkedIn isn’t the place for a cutesy photo of you and your dog. Here, you need to have a professional photo of yourself. If you haven’t taken the time to have professional headshots taken, add that to your to-do list and make it a priority. Until then, use the cleanest, most professional shot you have. Whatever you use, make sure you’re smiling, because this photo could easily be your first impression with potential employers or clients.

A Stand Out Headline

When you first create a LinkedIn profile, your headline will be your job title and current company. But, you don’t have to, and really shouldn’t, leave it that way. Instead, list your specialty, and use the space to speak directly to your audience.

It’s a good idea to include keywords in that space to ensure your profile is searchable – more about that in the next point – but if that’s not a priority for you, you may want to avoid using industry jargon. This can help your profile stand out. The best headlines are about 10 words, so do your best to limit it to that.

Optimized for LinkedIn and Search Engines

There are billions of searches done on LinkedIn every year, and if you’re not using keywords appropriately, you could be missing out on new business. Research keywords using Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what you should be using on your profile and in your group discussions.

The most important keywords should be featured in your profile title and your summary. Include the top keywords in skills and expertise, as well as the interests section.

It’s always a good idea to consistently make new connections on LinkedIn because those first degree connections will appear first in the search engines.

Sign out of your Google account. Then go to Google.com and enter your keywords. Use the auto populated suggestions for searches so you know what people are searching for most often. Use that to your advantage as you’re crafting your profile content.

Answers the Important Questions

LinkedIn comes off like it would be an online resume, but that’s not what people are looking for. If they were, they’d just email you and ask for it. Instead, they want to know who you are, what you do, and why you’re the go to person for the product or service you provide. And they want to know that information as quickly as possible. We all have the same number of hours every, and we want to be as efficient with our time as possible. Think about how annoyed you’d be if you couldn’t find the information you were looking for. You’d probably complain for a second and then move onto the next person in your list.

If you want to use LinkedIn to connect with people for any professional purpose, you’d better make it easy for them. That means answering the critical points, succinctly.

What I Do: Say how you help your target audience.
Who I Work With: Describe your target audience. What job titles do they have?
Why It Works: Describe benefits of partnering with your company. Showcase real numbers and achievements here.
What Makes Me Different?: Answer that question, again with hard numbers if possible. How are you different than the competition? What kind of experience do you have? Do you have certifications or anything else that makes you unique compared to similar vendors?
What Others Say: Include two to three testimonials here. Make them specific to the product or service you’re offering, and include the full name and company of the person who left the testimonial.
How it Works: Explain your process. Do you start with a free evaluation or consultation? What is the end result? About how long does it take to get there?
Call to Action: Then include your call to action – more on that below – that suggests people who are interested get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Keep it Organized

Honestly, there’s a lot of fields to fill out when you’re completing your LinkedIn profile, so unless you’re making it a point to keep things short as you go along, it can add up quickly. The best way to approach it is to keep it scannable. Bullet points are your friend.

Harness the Power of Recommendations and Endorsements

Recommendations are essentially testimonials from others on LinkedIn, that you’ve worked with in some capacity or another. You can include a few of them in the “what others say” section I talked about above, but I like to reserve that for testimonials from customers I’m not connected to on LinkedIn.

There’s an entire section of recommendations on your profile, so you can easily display them. Yes, there’s an automated feature within LinkedIn that allows you to ask for recommendations, but I say you should avoid that. Ask in person when possible, and if not, write them a personal email that lets them know what their recommendation would mean to you.

If you’ve taken the time to ask for recommendations from people in your network, you should expect to leave some in return. After all, it is a social platform where interaction and engagement are important.

Endorsements are quick and easy to give, and are votes of confidence from others in your network about your knowledge in a certain skill. This helps establish your credibility, so when you notice that someone has taken the time to endorse you in any skill, take a few moments to endorse them in their relevant skills, too.

Add Media to Your Experience

If you can, add media files to your experience. Adding images lets you create a visual portfolio alongside the slew of text in your profile. Visual content is a cornerstone of online marketing, as Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Tweets with images get 1.5 times more retweets than those without. The point is, people will pay more attention to images than they will text. Beyond photos, you can share videos, presentations, links, PDFs, and more. The more creative you can get with how you showcase your work, the more you will stand out against your competition.

Fill Out As Much of the Profile As Possible

Get the profile as complete as you possibly can. Include your skills, volunteer organizations, education, and so on. Use the space to include all the awesome stuff that doesn’t fit on your traditional resume, but shows that you are a well-rounded individual. If your volunteer experience is directly related to your job search, you should include it in your work history. This way it is in the relevant section, rather than down at the bottom of your profile.

Use Status Updates

Using status updates allows you to share industry-relevant content, so you can show recruiters you’re up-to-date on what’s going on in your industry. And if you’re not using LinkedIn to find a job, you can use the status updates to share content that originates with your company, as well as curated content that will resonate with your potential clients and customers.

Link to Relevant Sites

If you have any kind of online portfolio or blog related to your work, make use of the three URLs you’re allowed to include on your profile and link to it. Fight the urge to link to cat videos and the blog chronicling your child’s life, though. If it doesn’t’ relate to your work or your end goals for using LinkedIn, skip it. You can also use the links to direct people to other places you can be found online.

Network with LinkedIn Groups

The groups you participate in are displayed on your profile, and will demonstrate your interests to prospective clients and employers. But more so than that, they are a great way to connect with people in your industry and build relationships. Just make sure you’re there for the right reasons – to connect with and learn from people – rather than spamming them with your products and services.

If you find that you are struggling with a problem and you don’t know how to fix it, you can reach out to people in the group and get help. There are hundreds of thousands of groups on the LinkedIn platform. I recommend searching and finding groups that are not necessarily the largest ones available – but at least active on a regular basis. The size of the group matters far less than the activity in the group. If you post a question or comment for a group of 10,000 people, but it takes months to get an answer, is it worth it? Not exactly.

Actively participate in your groups – ask for help when you need it, but don’t forget to offer help when you’re able. It’s those interactions that will help you build connections and relationships with people, and you never know when you’ll find value in any one of your connections.

Use a Good Call to Action

A call to action is an important part of your summary if you’re willing to speak to recruiters or potential clients. Encourage the people who are visiting your profile to get in touch with you. If you are however, not wiling to speak to them, you can still encourage them to connect via email.

Include Contact Information

Make sure you include some form of contact information, whether it’s an email address or phone number, so that people can connect with you outside of LinkedIn, too. The point of the network is to get to know people, so neglecting to provide contact methods is detrimental to the success of your profile. You can include your email using a format like email address AT domain DOT com to avoid the likelihood of spam from bots.

Edit Accordingly

Just because your LinkedIn profile is stellar right now, doesn’t mean it’s a set and forget type thing. You’ll want to go back and look at it from time to time to make sure the information is accurate and up to date. If you want to be sure you’re on the right track, ask a trusted friend or colleague to look over it for you. Another set of eyes can be a good way to catch typos and grammar issues that may turn some prospects off.

Having a great LinkedIn profile can make or break you as an online marketer. If it’s terrible, you will likely still be able to land deals, but those deals wouldn’t come as easily or be as big as if the ones you’d be able to get if you’d focused more effort on creating a profile that resonates with your target audience.

Are there any other tips you’d like to add? Share them in the comments below.

Tags linkedin

Social Media

Finding Where Social Media Fits Into Your Sales Funnel

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date June 21, 2017
No Comments on Finding Where Social Media Fits Into Your Sales Funnel

Social media is a beast of its own, and There are so many different types of social media interactions that it’s hard to say exactly where any of these fit into your sales funnel. As such, there are multiple schools of thought about where it fits into your sales funnel. Some will say it fits in each stage. Others will say it belongs in the brand awareness and discovery phase, and still others will say it deserves its own separate funnel. The right answer for you depends heavily on a number of factors, such as: what you’re selling, the kind of following you have on social media, and how much time and money you have available for marketing.

Because I believe social media belongs in all stages of the sales funnel, since it covers the entire spectrum of the buying process, I’m going to focus this article on how to build social media into your current funnel, or how to align your social media efforts with your sales funnel. I’ve already talked about how to build your sales funnel – so put these together, and you’ll be unstoppable.

Remember the Purpose of Social Media

Yes, it’s true people make a living off of social media. But it’s not about constantly selling. If you’re using social media that way, chances are you’re not highly successful, and that’s because you’re using it wrong.

People come to social media to connect with one another. They want to check in with friends and family, and maybe even see what their old high school flame is up to these days. And while people are willing to follow the brands they know and love, and use it to discover new ones to fall in love with, they’re not there to listen to your sales pitch.

Social at the Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

This one is easy – you obviously use social media to bring traffic to your website, and bring them into the sales funnel from there with an email opt-in. Here, you focus on building a following of people who fit your target audience, and engaging them with content that educates them about your brand and the products and services you offer. To bring these leads in via social media, create your customer personas, based on statistics about who your customers are – and even taking the time to interview your most valuable customers.

At the top of the funnel, you’ll share blog posts, articles, infographics, podcasts, videos, and slideshow presentations. Remember to curate a good portion of your content, so you avoid becoming a constant sales pitch. Share content from others that your audience will also find useful, and they’ll see you as a credible, trustworthy source.

To see how well social is working for you here, you’ll need to choose key performance indicators (KPIs) for this stage of the funnel. These will help you in determining how well your strategy is working to help you reach your goals and making sure you’re getting a good return on investment (ROI) on the resources you’re spending. Common KPIs for TOFU include: social reach, traffic sources, visits and social shares, growth in traffic, and email click through rate.

Social at the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

At the middle of the funnel, you’ve got people who are aware of your brand and possibly interested in your products or services. They’re not ready to buy yet, but with the right level of nurturing from you, they can be. These people are already on your email list, so you’re connecting with them on multiple channels, including social media.

At this point, you’ll share things like guides and eBooks, interviews with experts, white papers, case studies, use cases, webinars, and analyst reports. You’re trying to continue the education process, but also show people how what you have to offer solves a problem for them – and you need to prove that it has worked for others in the past, because social proof helps convince people to buy.

You’ll also want to have a bit of customer service here, as well. Just because they are not your customers yet doesn’t mean they won’t have questions or concerns that need addressing before they are willing to buy your product. If they reach out to you on social media and you don’t answer them, you risk losing them as a customer. Nearly half of consumers expect a response on social media within an hour, and more than ¾ aren’t willing to wait more than 24 hours.

You’ll need to establish a different set of KPIs here to determine how well the strategy you’re using here is working. Because you still need to keep social media activity for the top of the funnel moving, this gives you a chance to provide variety in the content you create and share, so as to appeal to all followers, regardless of where they are in your sales funnel. Common KPIs for this stage include: social engagement, lead generation and conversion, bounce rate and time on page, and visitor to lead ratio.

Social at the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

At the bottom of the funnel, you’ve created customers. They’re ready to convert, you just need to push them over the edge so they become a paying customer. You can do this by sharing a variety of customer testimonials and endorsements – more of that social proof – and demos of your products and services, so they can experience everything first hand. The only real KPI you need here is sales.

Social Media After the Sale

Because it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to market to an existing one, and because repeat customers are more valuable than first-time buyers, it literally pays to continue nurturing your customers after the sale. 40% of an ecommerce store’s revenue is created by 8% of its customers, after all.

JetBlue Airways is a great example of using social media after the sale. Sure, it’s easy to use Twitter to push promotional offers and fare discounts, but instead, they focus on providing customer service. One look at their profile, and you’ll see the majority of the activity is @ replies. They’re showing people they are listening and will take the time to reply, which is helping them build a reputation among consumers, and making them more appealing.

Every Buyer’s Journey is Unique

As much as we’ve come to rely on the funnel model to describe the customer journey, the reality is, for many customers, the journey is anything but. Some customers may find you and make a purchase on their first visit because of a recommendation from a friend or family member. Some customers may move through the “funnel” only to hesitate on a purchase because of a financial emergency. Just because you have a plan to bring customers in at the top and push them through to the bottom to convert them, doesn’t mean you’ll get customers that follow that path exactly.

And that’s okay. It doesn’t matter how your customers get to you. What matters is that they get what they need from you. A product or service that solves one of their major problems, at a price they are willing (and can afford) to pay; with stellar customer service that keeps them not only coming back for more, but sending their friends and family to you as well.

How do you align social media with your sales funnel? Do you have a completely separate funnel for social media activity? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

Tags sales funnel

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