Planning Your Social Media Strategy

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A solid Social Media strategy has become a key component for any successful digital marketing campaign. With Social Media sites steadily gaining popularity, major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing have no choice but to take them into consideration when displaying relevant search results.

Posts on Instagram and Facebook or even tweets on Twitter don’t necessarily rank well in search results but Social Media brand pages and profile pages definitely do.

How should you decide which Social Media sites to focus on for your business? We will walk you through some steps to help determine which sites will make the biggest impact on your Social Media strategy.

 

What Social Media strategy compliments your business

A good starting point when planning your Social Media strategy is deciding on whether or not a particular social medium is one that you actually want your business to be found on. Essentially, does the Social Media site fit the image you are trying to convey for your business or brand, does it reach the audience you’re trying to target.

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide a number of easily accessible ways to market your brand and business to your followers but other Social Media sites can be more of a challenge to generate similar results.

It’s important to consider how the Social Media site is perceived by your intended audience and to make sure it’s in line with the image you would like to convey for your business or brand.

 

What Social Media sites do your target audience use

It’s important to know which Social Media sites your target audience use, as different people are more active on specific Social Media sites. Developing an understanding of your target audience’s Social Media habits will require some due diligence but your extra efforts will definitely pay off.

If you have a primarily young audience you will typically achieve the best results focusing on Social Media sites like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Tumblr. However if your business mainly provides services to other businesses then you will want to establish a strong presence on Linkedin.

 

Social Media every business should use

Currently there is one social medium that shouldn’t be ignored regardless of the type of business you operate, Facebook. Why? Let’s take a look at some numbers.

Every month, Facebook has approximately 1.5 billion active users. 1.5 billion users translates to roughly 20% of the world’s population using Facebook every month. This incredible amount of traffic means that no matter what your target audience is, they are going to be active in some form on Facebook.

 

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Every business should have their own Facebook page and whenever you create a new blog post or new content it should be shared on Facebook. This allows all of your Facebook Page’s followers to see what you’re sharing in their timeline.

If your website is built on WordPress you can easily set it up to automate the process of sharing new content for you. Your followers will be able to share, like or comment on your new posts increasing the overall exposure to your content.

In summary, it’s easy for a business to waste resources on their Social Media strategy by not taking the time to plan their strategy properly and by focusing on the wrong goals. When planning your Social Media strategy ask yourself what target audience are you trying to reach, what Social Media site’s are inline with the image your business would like to convey and which Social Media sites can you reach your target audience on.

 

 

 

How Instagram Benefits Your Business

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How can Instagram benefit my business?

Whether you’re a small start up or a large enterprise business, you should be taking advantage of the 300 million active users on Instagram.

 

 

Interact with your customers

When asked about interaction and engagement with customers online, most people are quick to put Facebook and twitter at the top of their list so it may come as a surprise to learn that Instagram currently has more user engagement per follower than Twitter.

A recent study found that the average follower on Instagram produces 120 times more engagement than the average follower on Twitter.

This higher level of customer engagement makes Instagram a great platform for interacting with your customers, whether it’s building relationships, listening to feedback or just being part of the conversations.

Instagram allows you to share an image for your new product and get real time feedback, you can even give a preview for a new product and get valuable insight before launching it.

 

Understand what your customers like

Without you being aware of it, your customers may already be sharing images and discussing your product or services through Instagram.

A good example is restaurants, some of the most commonly shared images on Instagram are of food. People love sharing pictures of their favorite meals. Instagram allows a user to share an image of their favorite dish with their followers and even tag the location so that their followers can see the restaurant they’re eating at.

This scenario isn’t limited to restaurants, Instagram users love to share photos with tagged locations and if they tag the location of your business they are indirectly marketing on your behalf to potential customers.

Curious to see if anyone has shared images tagged to your location? You can take a picture at your business and tag it’s location. Once your picture has been shared, you will have access to a link above the picture that will allow you to see every picture that has been shared for your business location.

This information can be extremely useful, you will be able to see what Instagram users are sharing about you and even what they like about your business.

 

Connect with new audiences

Hashtags are one of the most popular ways for Instagram users to discover new content. Hashtags on Instagram operate very similarly to other social media networks, if a hashtag is included on an Instagram post, it associates it with all other images that have been shared with that hashtag. This allows an Instagram user to see all of the other images that have been shared using that hashtag.

Instagram also has a feature called “Discovery”, this is a tab which is used to assist new Instagram users in connecting with relevant users and images related to their unique interests.

 

Increase your sales

Instagram has made the process of integrating engaging display advertisements that feature your product or service simpler and more cost effective than ever.

Instagram isn’t just great for increasing user engagement, it’s also great at generating leads & sales. A recent e-commerce study concluded Instagram was the new king of average social media sale price, boasting an impressive average sale of $65 compared to Facebook at $55 and Twitter at $46.

Even though Instagram is a great tool for increasing sales, it’s important not to fill your page with obvious advertisements and instead focus on finding clever ways to blend them naturally with your page’s content.

 

Things You Need to Know About Social Media & SEO

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Over the past few years the state of SEO has changed dramatically thanks to several massive algorithm updates from Google, this has resulted in a shift towards content becoming the new SEO king. In the past ranking for a particular search query could be as simple as focusing on singular keywords but now it’s far more important to focus on keyword intent and the search user’s needs using long tail searches.

In a marketing report published by Econsultancy entitled the State of Search Marketing, it mentions that 82% of agencies and 72% of companies surveyed stated social media marketing is an intricate part of their SEO & digital marketing strategy. Ironically, shortly after Econsultancy published the data from it’s report, Google released a video claiming that social signal metrics (Twitter followers, Facebook Shares/likes, etc) are not currently used to determine search engine rankings.

This claim by Google came as a bit of a shock to most marketers as there seemed to be a mutual assumption that social signals were in fact a significant factor used in determining search engine rankings as they help to reflect a companies trust and quality.

 

Some Things to Consider On The Impact of Social Media on SEO

 

Links on Social Media Sites Can Still Boost Your Search Rank

Many internet marketers believe that backlinks to your website from social media accounts do in fact have a significant impact on your rankings. Developing unique content and linking to your content from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media sites provides search engines more information that can be used to help determine a website’s credibility and how relevant they are for a particular search query.

 

Profiles on Social Media Sites Rank Well

Even though social signals, shares, likes, etc might not impact your website’s search engine ranking, social profiles most certainly do. Social Media profiles are typically among the top search results when searching for a company name or brand. When a person is researching businesses they’re not familiar with they will commonly go straight to their twitter or facebook page, so accordingly if a social media profile is among the top results they’re just as likely to click on the profile as they would be for the businesses actual website.

Social profiles make a difference with Google and also to the people who are trying to find your business online. Marketers should definitely take into consideration the fact that a Google+ profile is commonly one of the first things someone will see when searching for a business online and as a result it is important to not only have a Google+ page but also to ensure that it is current and populated with rich engaging content.

 

Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines

In today’s internet it’s common for someone to skip Google and Bing completely and perform their search query directly from a social media site to try and find what they’re looking for. As such your SEO strategy should include focusing on the searches that happen directly on social media search engines. If someone wants to get a good feel for what your company is about, the average person will perform a quick search on Facebook or twitter to determine what type of online presence your business has.