We sat down recently with our Social Media Manager, Tori, to find out exactly how she spends her day. Does she spend it on her phone surfing Instagram and Pinterest? Or, is she busy helping to build a brand, researching trends and changes?

            When asked what she finds to be a best practice and procedure for her job she informed us that ensuring the content she is pushing accurately represents our brand. “You need to do your research ensuring you’re posting viable information your clients or fans will actually care about. You also need to check the hashtags you’re using before using them. Too many brands have made the mistake of incorporating a trending topic into their message without first taking a moment to see what the trending topic is. This can potentially become disastrous.”

            She also touched on the importance of staying current with new social platforms, but knowing which is best for business, what type of content you should put out there and what to do with comments. “You don’t want to jump into something without knowing how, or if, it will benefit your brand or business. You don’t need to be on every social network. You need to be spending time on the networks the work best for you. Just because it’s available doesn’t mean it’s right for your brand. We follow the 80/20 rule. The social web is about educating, informing, entertaining first and selling second. You have to engage with your audience before trying to sell something. 80% of your updates should be about engagement and the other 20% can be posts about selling. As far as comments are concerned, no one will believe if you only have 5 star reviews. Either, you’re faking it or deleting negative feedback. Turn the negative into a learning and growing experience. Don’t try to bury it, respond to it. Offer help and find a solution to the issue.”

            Tori is often faced with questions of ‘what do you do all day? Do you just sit on your Facebook account or Twitter?’ She took the time to clear up a few misconceptions. “The biggest misconception of my job is that I sit all day and play on Facebook and Twitter. I’d really like to clear this up, I don’t. Both of these platforms have separate accounts that house all your advertising so there’s days where I don’t spend a single second on any of my personal accounts. Like other jobs, mine has highs and lows. I’m given the ability to think outside the box and think of some really creative and fun campaigns to help increase engagement and customer retention. The lows? When a social network is down, and panic ensues.”

            This is just a glimmer of what she faces when she walks through the door each morning. Tori has many more tricks and tips up her sleeve that she constantly brings to the table.

            If you found this to be interesting and useful, contact us today so that we can help you with your digital and social needs! 

While Twitter never grew to truly rival Facebook, it has affected our communication and our culture in the same way. People use Twitter for marketing, to connect with like-minded individuals, network professionally, broadcast news, and discuss anything and everything going on in the world.

The most powerful part of this is that everything is public. Meaning anyone has the potential to reach millions of people and grow an audience, if their content is worthy.

In this post, I'll give you the starter guide you need to use Twitter as a platform to grow in your industry through simply following and engaging with the right people.

Discover and Implement Industry Hashtags

One of the greatest things about Twitter is that, despite being a single giant community, it can be used as a way to connect with individuals with similar professional and personal interests.

The way this is achieved on a site with billions of public messages each day is through hashtags.

Hashtags are words (or an unspaced phrases) used to group or categorize messages on Twitter. (Other sites have since adopted the features. It was originally inspired by IRC networks, which used the hash symbol (#) to organize chats by topic.)

Let’s say you wanted to get involved in the SEO community on Twitter. The easiest way to do so would be to use the "#SEO" hashtag, but you might get lost in the noise, as it's a popular hashtag.

Using Twitter analysis tool, Hashtagify, we can find hashtags that are related to #SEO to stand out a bit more. A few examples might be #ContentMarketing, #Blogging, or #Content.

You can also explore these hashtags directly on Twitter to discover others that people are using. The more hashtags you integrate into your tweets, the more people you'll reach.

Once you've got a good list put together, start implementing them. If you tweet a post of blogging tips, be sure to add the hashtag #Blogging so the community can better discover your content. A user with zero followers can build from nothing by simply utilizing hashtags properly.

Start Following and Engaging with Related Users

Now that you've got an idea of how to get more involved in industry discussion on Twitter, it's time to start following influential and active users in your industry.

If you know a few of the most influential people in your industry, you obviously want to follow them first. But the next step is to see who they follow, and also who follows them. By doing this, you'll discover more influential people, and perhaps users who are looking to break into the scene.

Not every single person will follow back, but you can follow 1,000 people a day. The issue here is, if you don't have 2000 followers, Twitter won't let you follow more than 2000 people until you get to 2000 followers.

You have to follow the right people, engage, and get noticed.

Your goal should be to reach out to all types of users, not just the most influential. Those who get hundreds of messages each week aren't likely to notice you, but someone with only a few hundred or thousand followers will.

Make separate Twitter lists for influential and active industry users to ensure you're getting tweets from both sides. This also ensures their messages don't get lost in the noise of Twitter.

So go out and retweet their best links, reply to their questions, and generally make people notice you!

Take Time to Personalize, But Work on Automation

Twitter can suck up a lot of your spare time, if you let it. You could easily find yourself spending hours each day searching for great content to post and replying to other users.

Instead of spending a ton of time overthinking Twitter, work on automating as much of the process as possible. This means using a tool like HootSuite or Buffer to schedule tweets out in advance. 

Whether that means articles you've read, tips, quotes, or questions, it saves you the time and effort of having to interrupt your daily routine to tweet.

Of course, you should set time aside to retweet, reply, and follow new users each day. This should take less than 15 minutes of your time, so you can accomplish it consistently during a mid-day break.

Final Thoughts

Anyone can build a follower base on Twitter. But numbers mean nothing without engagement behind it. Don't let follower counts distract you from your true mission: networking.

You can build a name for yourself and rub shoulders with people you would have otherwise never been able to meet in person. It's a powerful tool when used correctly, and can open up opportunities you didn't know existed!

This post originally appeared on Wikimotive's blog on March 2, 2015. 

So you have successfully launched your dealership's website, updated your blog with fresh content, and started all of the necessary social media sites in an effort to expand your customer base. While your online community continues to grow, you may notice a lack of customer engagement. No matter how large your online community may be, your dealership's digital marketing efforts will not reach their full potential if without quality customer engagement. When customers interact with your business online, your brand gains a positive reputation, as well as validity within the industry. Quality customer engagement produces leads which ultimately means a boost in revenue for your dealership. For those who are new to digital marketing, there are several ways to increase your brand's customer engagement. 

Be More Personable - Make social media posts that will appeal to your target audience. Learn what they care about and what motivates them, and then post content that is relevant to those things. By reaching your audience on a more personal level, they will be willing and more likely to engage with you. When interacting with your online community, be sure to have QUALITY conversations. It is easy to get caught up in the moment and lose focus, but the more quality conversations you have the better they are for your business. 

In -Person Networking - Get out in your local community. The more present you are, the more people you will meet. Once customers see that you are invested in the community you serve, they will communicate with you more regularly. Additionally, they more people learn about you, the more information they have to pass on to their friends. Remember, no matter how much technology advances, word of mouth is still one of the best forms of marketing. 

Digital marketing can be extremely tedious when you add up the time that many tasks take to complete. On top of big projects like audits, copywriting, and promotional work, smaller tasks can add stress to days otherwise occupied by fulfilling work.

Finding ways to get tedious tasks done faster, such as using digital marketing tools, will save you from that stress and give you more time to concentrate on creative projects that drive results.

Whether you work in-house at a business, or manage many different clients for an agency, here are four examples of digital marketing takes you can automate.

Social Media Scheduling

Managing a business's social media activity might not be the most time-consuming task on your to-do list, but if you're not taking advantage of scheduling tools, you might be wasting time.

To improve your efficiency, use HootSuite or Buffer to avoid having to copy/paste messages that are going across multiple social networks.  These tools allow you to sync up accounts and schedule posts with one simple action.

And if you want to go the extra mile, try to set time aside to schedule at least a week's worth of social media content out at a time. This way you don't have to rush to fit it into your daily routine, you can create even better content, and you're better able to concentrate on other tasks afterward.

Reputation Management

While online reputation management is still in its early days, businesses do need to be taking advantage of their ability to monitor and respond to online reviews, feedback, and other comments. 

Online reviews are where people turn before making purchasing decisions, so it's important to take a proactive approach to managing what they find out about your business.

A study from Bazaarvoice reports that shoppers who see a business's response to a negative review are 116% more likely to make a purchase. That means five minutes of your time now could make a huge difference in sales later.

By using a review management service like ReviewPush, you can gather most of the major review sources into one place to make monitoring and responding a breeze.

Site Reports

For SEOs, reporting results can mean a lot of digging through analytics and time spent in Excel. But with the help of automated reports, which come as a part of services like Raven Tools, you can let software create those, and have them automatically emailed to any number of people.

So if you meet with your boss or client each month, you can set the report to be sent to them ahead of time in order to give them a chance to look it over and familiarize themselves with recent developments.

Once you set it up, you don't have to worry about it moving forward.

Citation Research

Successful local SEO campaigns rely a lot on citations. Finding new sources and editing outdated or incorrect listings, however, can take a lot of time if you're just doing searches for your business name, address, and phone number in hopes of uncovering everything.

Instead of going at it alone, sign up for WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder. It allows you to quickly find listings that feature the information you provide so you can discover which sites have the right information, which sites have the wrong information, and which sites you need to create a listing on.

You can also do research on your competition to find out how well your citation profile is in comparison. That's also a great way to discover sites they've secured listings on that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks.

What are some of the tools you're using to automate your digital marketing tasks? Is there a certain task you're struggling with? Leave a comment below!

While a blog is a great place to talk about your business and build valuable search engine authority, it can also help you gain a loyal following of customers and admirers that will help you see steady growth for a long time to come.

A blog builds trust with customers, allowing people to better connect with your business. That does not come overnight, and may not come at all, but there's a formula for successful blogging that can help you tackle this new, powerful type of marketing.

One example of a business that embraces blogging and content marketing is Moz (formerly SEOMoz). The software company has no sales staff, puts an extreme emphasis on content and community, and provides truly in-depth industry reports for free. Through all of that, they've built a huge following and have been able to consistently grow Moz as a business because of it.

Sure, Moz has always been a unique company, but there's nothing stopping your business from following in their footsteps.

Want in on their secret formula? Keep reading.

Be Honest and Helpful

When a lot of businesses start blogging, they seem to think that means they need to literally blog about their business. The problem there? Nobody cares about what's going on with your business unless you're one of the world's largest companies or you give them good reason to care. I don't say that to be mean, but it's an absolute truth.

So how do you get people to care about your business? Be selfless.

Give out information like candy on Halloween. But instead of giving out crap from an assorted bag like all of the other houses, give out full-size candy. I bet you'd remember who gave you that and immediately forget about the crap givers, right?

It's the same way with content. We visit sites like Moz, QuickSprout, Buffer, and CopyBlogger because we can count on their content being honest and helpful. In case you weren't following the analogy, those sites give out full-size candy.

Create a Schedule and Stick to It

If you're going to blog, you need to do it regularly. If you let your audience know when you'll have new content (whether directly or indirectly), there's a greater chance that they'll become return visitors.

The only thing you have to do is hold up your end of the bargain and more and more readers will return each time you create new content.

And you don't have to post every single day to be successful, but you do need to deliver great content. When creating your posting schedule, think of how long you need to craft those great posts so you don't feel rushed or overworked.

Create Regular Features/Columns

An easy way to start your blog off on the right foot is to create regular features or columns to encourage readers to come back for similar stories. Moz's Whiteboard Friday is a great example of this, and provides Moz with tons of consistent traffic, links (like the one here), and general buzz about their digital marketing knowledge.

Think of a way you could implement a regular feature into your blog while providing entertainment for your readers. You can always change it up as you and your business evolve; the key is to get started!

Be Extremely Active on Social Media

On both your personal and business accounts, it's important to be extremely active when you're trying to grow your blog's audience. Follow and connect with influential bloggers, be a cool source for industry news, and give people a reason to follow your business.

It's also important to note that you can buy exposure on social media to help throw these efforts into overdrive. With ads that can target only the type of consumer you want to attract, allocating some of your online ad spend to social media is an extremely effective method to grow your business's blog.

Conclusion

The goal for your business's blog is to attract people that will allow you to market to them. By providing them with something of value for their clicks and time, they'll give you permission to be a business without running for the hills.

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Rank higher in search results with this guide to SEO and content building supremacy Google is not only the number one search engine in the world, it is also the number one website in the world. Only 5 percent of site visitors search past the first page of Google, so if you're not in those top ten results, you are essentially invisible. Winning the Game of Googleopoly is the ultimate roadmap to Page One Domination. The POD strategy is what gets you on that super-critical first page of Google results by increasing your page views. You'll learn how to shape your online presence for Search Engine Optimization, effectively speaking Google's language to become one of the top results returned for relevant queries. This invaluable resource provides a plan that is universal to any business in any industry, and provides expert guidance on tailoring the strategy to best suit your organization. Coverage includes an explanation of the mechanics of a search, and how to tie your website, paid ads, online reputation, social media, content, images, and video into a winning SEO strategy that pushes you to the front of the line. The Page One Domination strategy incorporates all the ways in which you can beef up your Internet presence and online reputation. This book is a clear, straightforward guide that will knock down the silos of the Internet and teach you exactly how to integrate all aspects of content creation into a synergistic, SEO strategy. Understand how search engines return results Design an effective, all-encompassing SEO strategy Create the content that gets page views and improves rank Optimize social media and video as part of an overall SEO plan The rules of SEO are always changing, and following outdated rules can actually work against you, burying you at the bottom of the pile. This book will spark a paradigm shift in how you think about SEO and gives you the tools you need to craft a strategy tailored to your specific market. To be successful, you need to be on page one of Google, and Winning the Game of Googleopoly can show you how to get there.

The most amazing part about the internet and social media is that it has opened up communication between people and businesses that was never possible before. We now have the ability to talk to our customers and for them to talk to us in an interactive fashion, allowing for clear lines of engagement that can be both public and private.

For car dealers, this has translated into an incredible way for them to broadcast their messages and get feedback in real time. On Facebook, people can like, comment on, or share their posts when they appreciate them... and even when they do not. The world is completely different than it was a decade ago when the most powerful method of online communication, the email, was still relegated to being private.

This all means that dealers can receive interaction, but it also means that they're required to deliver interaction right back at their customers. Every day, we see dealers who are not taking advantage of this. People will comment on their Facebook posts, talk about them on Twitter, or respond to their blog posts and YouTube videos, but we then see many of the interactions going one way. The people are talking to the dealers but the dealers aren't always replying.

This is a big mistake because proper two-way communication breeds more communication. When people see your posts and also see that you're replying to the people that are commenting, it makes it more likely that they'll want to comment even more.

It also creates a proper feedback mechanism. A lot of dealers are doing this best practice on review sites, but then the same dealers are failing to engage on social media. When you allow social media to be a way for people to engage in a proper discussion on automotive topics, you're allowing them to help you get more reach for your messages.

The more you comment back, the more new comments you'll get. The more new comments you get, the more people will see the posts that are getting the comments. It's a great way to increase your message exposure.

Perhaps the most important reason to reply to everyone who comments on your posts is that it's simply proper manners. If someone says "hi" to you in the grocery store, you'll usually say "hi" right back at them even if you don't know them. It's good form to reply to those who talk to you and that carries over to your social media interactions.

Dealers that are doing this well can take it to the next level. They can get involved with other conversations of a general interest to the local community and start to really express the dealership's personality. This is key on social media. After all, part of being "social" is interacting with as many people as possible.

The streets in the social media world run in both directions. Savvy dealers are making sure that they're not just seeking engagement from others but that they're being engaging as well.

A lot can be said about the power of gratitude and humility. In the automotive industry, we are thankful for our customers and often humbled by the attention they give to us during this important aspect of their lives. It's not like they're buying a car every day, right?

In this video from Jim Ziegler's Internet Battle Plan in Seattle, I discuss the importance of having the right type of focus when operating your social media for the dealership.

Social media emerged as the ultimate place to reach people when it first started taking off in the automotive industry back in 2009. Unfortunately, by the time that many dealerships and marketers started figuring out how to take advantage of it the right way, the rules changed to a pay-to-play model.

This is the best thing that happened for automotive social media. The spam once kept great posts from being seen has all but vanished. Now, those who invest a little money into exposing their message are rewarded with views. The only casualty - good engagement for high-quality organic posts. Everything comes at a cost.

All of this is fine, but the real value that dealers can get from their social media presence is actually something that very, very few are doing. In fact, we're finding that very few even know it exists. The power of unpublished posts on Facebook that utilize buyer data (as well as other forms of targeting) is where the true ROI of social media can be maximized.

By putting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time, you'll be able to drive real buyers to your website. It's the ultimate way to sell cars on social media and so few are taking advantage of it. Here's an example:

The fact that we're taking potential used vehicle buyers within driving distance of the dealership and sending them to the search results page of the dealer's website should be enough to convince you that this is the way to go. These are people who have indicated that they intend to buy a used vehicle in the near future.

Think of it as highly-targeted pay-per-click, except much cheaper than anything you can get from Google, Bing, or Yahoo. In this case, 173 used car buyers in the local area were driven to the website at $0.51 a pop. It's a no-brainer. Unfortunately, most are still focused on getting more likes to their Facebook page.

Of course, perhaps that's not unfortunate at all. Maybe it's a great thing that so few are doing it. I know that we're ecstatic that there's pretty much no competition out there for this type of action.

There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.

Okay, so that’s not really original. Any opportunity to plug in a line from Gladiator, I’ll take it. Despite the overly serious tone of the quote, it plays well with the dream that was social media. The idea of having a set of free venues through which businesses could interact with consumers and the consumers could interact back presented itself as a grand concept to be desired and cherished. Unfortunately, the dream is dead. Success on modern social media requires one of two things: serious fame or cash invested.

Unless you’re Justin Bieber, your brand needs money in order to be relevant on sites like Facebook. There’s no other way to look at it. Even Twitter gets exponentially more useful when a little money is applied to it. LinkedIn, YouTube, and possibly Pinterest and Instagram are all heading down the road of pay-to-play if you really want to find success.

It’s not the evil plan of social media sites come through to their end game. In fact, most of the social sites outside of YouTube went in with the hopes of not having to apply advertising as a primary source of revenue, at least not in the formats they’re presenting themselves in today. “Advertising” was a dirty word in social media startup circles just four or five years ago. Today, they’ve accepted that their dreams of making money through networking and data are simply no long realistic. As their dreams died, so did ours.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the cost of playing the game right is, for now, extremely low when compared to the potential results. For a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords or display advertising, campaigns can be set up through social media that bring in similar results. In some cases, depending on the goals and campaigns, the results can actually be better despite the lower spend. Let’s take a look at the recent past, the way it works today, and the near future:

It All Blew Up

For better or for worse, the people muscled out the businesses. On Facebook, for example, the feedback from users was that they simply weren’t interested in seeing as many posts from pages as from profiles. They might like the show Game of Thrones and they might not mind occasionally seeing updates posted on their news feed, but for the most part they go to Facebook to see videos of little nephew Timmy sliding into 3rd base. Facebook obliged recently (and really, for a long time they’ve been creeping in this direction) and made it less likely that posts from pages were visible in news feeds.

There’s a silver lining to this, though. While users were not as accepting of posts in their news feeds from pages that showed up organically, they’ve demonstrated a tolerance for sponsored posts. In essence, they know instinctively that they have these services for free and that Facebook is a business. As long as they have some sense of control over what they’re presented, they don’t mind ads on Facebook any more than they mind television commercials. They tolerate them. At least on Facebook, they have the ability to let Facebook know which posts they don’t want to see on their news feeds.

Social media blew up. It got too big for brands, at least from an organic perspective. On Facebook and Twitter in particular, the feeds are too cluttered with personal posts to allow the business posts to come through naturally. That’s okay. We should be paying. If anything, this makes it to where the aggressive businesses can take advantage of the exceptionally low cost of entry without being muscled out by popular pages with their organic reach.

Today

Now that we know that organic reach is dead, we can move forward with the benefits of this. Facebook has done a terrible job at educating businesses about their advertising powers and Twitter has done even worse. Google+ – don’t get me started there. This is bad for them. It’s great for us. It’s great for companies that are starting to take advantage of it.

There are caveats, most notably that the ad types used to bring people to the table and try advertising are the worst ones. On Facebook, the “Boost” and “Promote Your Page” buttons are the easiest to get you started and the worst at achieving results.

Data. That’s the power of social media. Unfortunately, both of the basic types of advertising have trouble thinking about scratching the surface of the data components. This isn’t the place to go into details about how the data works, but suffice to say that it’s extremely powerful when used appropriately.

That’s today. Get involved and use the data that you have as well as the data that Facebook has. With that understood, what will the future look like?

Shifting Towards Mobile First

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

It cannot be overstated and it doesn’t matter where you put the emphasis. Mobile will eclipse desktop soon for nearly all forms of internet browsing. It already does with social media. This is why, no matter what you think about social media, you must make sure that your digital marketing strategy focuses on mobile first and allows the desktop experience to happen as a secondary course. That’s not to say that desktops are dying or that they don’t need to be considered. They simply need to reside in a mobile world as if they’re big mobile devices without the touchscreen. Heck, there are plenty of desktops and laptops that already do have touchscreens.

As social media continues to evolve and mobile grows in eyeball share, so too do the advertising strategies need to match appropriately.

Social media is no longer organic, at least not for businesses. To move ahead, you have to either use social media from a defensive posture or go full force with the advertising component. The in-between strategies will do nothing more than waste time and energy.

Sometimes Social Media seems complicated, but with four simple M’s Social Media can be made simple and still beneficial to your business. The first thing you need to do with social media is monitor it. Checking your social media platforms can be time consuming, so first, connect your social media accounts to a platform that will track your traffic. This will leave you more time to monitor your competitors, to see what you can do to make your own social media platforms better.

 Next, you need to manage. After you’ve posted something on social media, manage the post according to the reactions it is receiving. Take the feedback from the post and improve your posts accordingly. After, you must measure. You must measure the amount of likes, shares, favorites, etc. It’s important to know how well your post is doing, and what you can do to make it better.

 Finally, you must monetize. Technology is growing, making social media a huge asset to sales. There is a way to sync transactions to a social media post. This will allow your business to expand, and your sales to grow.

 Social media will allow your business to expand, and allow your sales to grow. If you remember these four M’s, you are sure to make your social media platforms successful!

For a decade now, businesses and marketers have attempted to decipher the jumbled mess of social media and turn it into a true ROI generator. Hundreds of thousands of Ponce de Leóns have explored the social media countryside in search of the ultimate prize - tangible benefit from social media marketing.

Thankfully, it's not as mythical as the Fountain of Youth. Most are getting minor benefits from social media as long as they're sticking with it and applying some basic strategies. A few are getting real results from the branding and communication components of social media that are achievable by nearly anyone who tries hard enough and invests a little money into the endeavor.

For those who are really wanting to make a dramatic impact on their social media presence, the key is in storytelling. This is hard. That's not one of those feigned discouragements that marketers often use to dissuade businesses from trying to do it themselves. It truly is extremely difficult to take the mundane aspects of most businesses and turn them into something truly special that people are willing to passionately follow.

With social media storytelling, it's not about telling lies. It's definitely not about looking for the thunder in a bottle that some companies have been able to find through a combination of luck and some viral secret sauce that eludes the rest of humanity; how many tried to duplicate what Oreo did at the Super Bowl? Lastly, it's not about manufacturing buzz where it doesn't exist.

Storytelling requires finding those creative elements that are present in any business (regardless of how mundane the industry might seem) and forming them into a strategy that yields a path to success. It only takes one sentence to describe it but one could write a book on the actual strategy behind it. We'll try to keep it shorter here.

The story itself can be about nearly anything as long as it's relevant to the business in some way. It doesn't even have to be a direct attachment. It can be about customers. It can be about employees. It can be the journey that was taken to arrive at a particular product or service launch.

Think about it like making a movie. It isn't about the end result of the movie itself, but rather the Blue-Ray extras and behind the scenes shots. Taking us through the process can be as fun (or more fun) than watching the end result itself. As humans, we have a tendency to enjoy watching things as they unfold.

A pretty good (not great, but good) example of this was when Pepsi MAX worked with NBA star Kyrie Irving to put the Uncle Drew series together for YouTube. The reasons that it was good is because it was able to tell stories that were interesting enough to get millions of views, was sustainable for a few posts to make it a series, and gave the behind-the-scenes view that we love. The reason that it wasn't great is because it had very little to do with the product itself with only occasional views.

A much better example is a Thai Pantene commercial from a few years ago. It told a compelling story and had all of the right elements but it did not let the product get in the way. In fact, you'll have no idea it's a Pantene commercial until the end. One thing that most will definitely notice is that during the concert, the main character has absolutely incredible hair. When the Pantene logo is shown at the end with the tagline, "You can shine," it all comes together for the viewer.

These are both big productions that most businesses cannot duplicate, but that doesn't mean that you can't draw inspiration from their creativity. The key is to make it last. It doesn't have to revolve around a video, either. A friend, , did an excellent job of using social media to tell the story of her new job. She had a countdown of the top 5 reasons to be excited about her new job. It kept anticipation high, friends (and potential clients) guessing, and showed that even individuals have the ability to tell the right stories about their business.

To succeed at social media marketing, businesses and marketers must embrace the right strategies and couple them with incredible stories. This post itself is an example of this as we will be rolling out stories of our own very soon for our clients. Stay tuned!

Using social media in a business setting is important. Social media allows you to reach certain audiences, gain a following, and bring traffic to your websites. It’s necessary that you know just how to use social media, and how to improve it as well. If you’re having trouble understanding social media, and struggling with ways to see if your social media platforms are successfully reaching your target audiences, there’s a few things you can look into.

 There are a handful of free resources for you to acquire your social media data from. For example, “Twitonomy” allows Twitter users to see how often they tweet, how many links they tweet, how many replies they receive, how many re-tweets they get, and how many favorites. This resource also allows users to see what hash tag is most popularly used. Knowing this information can help you figure out whom your tweets are reaching, what you can do to reach other audiences, and which hashtags seem to be getting you the most attention. This information can be used strategically to ensure that your social media skills improve.

 If your business uses multiple social media platforms, you can link all of them to “SumAll” and receive emails containing information about all of your social media statistics. This is a good tool because it groups everything together, allowing you to obtain information on all of your social media platforms in one place.

 Social media is becoming a huge part of the business world, and it’s important that you know exactly what you’re doing and how to continuously make your platforms stronger for your audiences.

Many people have the common thought that if they are not good at writing they are good at math and vice versa. While this is not a fact, it is said quite often. However, what people who think this fail to realize is math and their big social media marketing campaigns are related. If you are a business on a larger scale, this especially applies.

The proper way to use economics in social media is to identify which specific posts or investments are resulting in the greatest number of engagement. You can figure out how to reach the greatest number of people in doing so. By knowing which activities increase results you will know how much money you need to spend or how many posts or words you need in a post to reach the amount of people you want in your target audience. Instead of guessing how you can receive more social shares, calculate it. If you are marketing and seeing results you are using math. If you are not, you need to start applying it to your social media marketing efforts today.

For more information, check out the original article here.

Typically we love to find a solid article to share with you and compliment it with our thoughts, but for this podcast we decided to take a different approach. We have been hearing numerous reports of the possibility that Twitter will become a paid platform. There are many positive and negative  ways this could go. Listen now as the  social media team sounds off on our thoughts and of course, we would love to hear your thoughts as well.

PODCAST - Paying For Twitter

For those of you who are not familiar with the word ”automation”, it’s the act of setting something up to respond naturally to a matter change.  So in the terms of social media, it would be the option of setting up content to be posted at the change of the clock. Give us a second… we’ll make more sense of it. The purpose of social media is still, and always will be, to engage with customers, but now there are options to have engaging content appear on your fans newsfeeds, all while you’re cooking dinner. Automation is a feature built into Facebook, but is lacking on most other social platforms.  Fortunately websites like Hootsuite,  SproutSocial, Fanpilot, and others exist to allow a streamline automation process.  It is definitely a pro for businesses to be able to schedule when posts go out, especially when a business finds their “sweet spot.” Let’s check out the pros and cons of social media automation and then you can be the judge of whether this is good for your business or not.

 Pros: You save A LOT of time. If you have multiple clients like we do here at Dealer Synergy, each client deserves the same amount of attention. Automation allows us to prepare each post ahead of time and give the proper amount of time of research to each client before scheduling a post in advance. And If you use a social media management app (like Hootsuite, SproutSocial, etc.) You do not have to log into each social network individually.

Cons: There is no human touch, and managers that use automation have a higher chance of missing direct interactions and risk losing a customer. Sometimes scheduling too far in advance can cause you to miss things that are very relevant at a specific moment.

 In our opinion it should be a combination of both. What do you think? For more of the “Good, Bad and Ugly” you can check out more in the original article here. Good, Bad and Ugly

If you read our blog post from Tuesday (if you haven’t yet, you should) you had a chance to get familiar with native advertising. To recap it is basically just a form of advertising that is used to promote your ad without your audience knowing it is an ad. Essentially it is an ad that blends into your newsfeed, twitter feed, or instafeed by looking like a picture a friend of yours would post.  Typically this form of advertising is paid for in order to reach more people, but content and creation are key. In today’s podcast we take an in-depth look into what this form of advertising is and why it is so great!  We break down the essential facts into numbers and try to convince you, it's something you should be looking into.

Also, we clear up some of the confusion for those of you who have a spinning head right now. Enjoy, and if you want to read further into this topic you can check out the sources for this podcast here. http://ow.ly/zxcHE http://ow.ly/zxcLB

PODCAST - Native Marketing