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4 Things We All Need to Stop Doing on Social Media

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The growth of social media continues to expand. Facebook has over 1 billion users; while Twitter and Instagram has over 280 million and 200 million active users respectively.

Many of us flock to these popular social media sites to give and receive the latest scoop on pretty much everything. We all love to post different events in our lives to let everyone know what is going on, but some people gets overboard when it comes to using social media.

Whether you’re using social media for professional or personal use, here are 4 things you should stop doing.

Oversharing

You probably have a friend who updates their status every 15 minutes or so. It can get irritating sometimes, especially since your news feeds is full of their postings. We hate to break it to you, but no one wants to be that clued in about your life.

Using more hashtags than words

Hashtags are great for giving your campaigns their own special theme, finding and jumping into conversations and categorizing your posts, but piling on the hashtags just looks desperate. Please keep your hashtag usage in check.

Automated messages

It may seem like a good idea to send a thank you message to users who follow you, but I’m willing to bet that some people consider it as spam.

While there are some people who say that sending automated messages has helped grow their follower count, it may come off as detached, lazy and out of touch for some. Remember, genuineness wins when it comes to earning the trust of your target audience.

Adding people to groups without their permission

Groups are a great place to talk to people with the same interests as yours. Just because you created a group for golfers, doesn’t give you the right to add your golfer friends to the group without their permission. If you think some of your friends would be interested to be a part of the group, consider sending them a message and tell them what it’s all about.

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How to Motivate Customers to Buy Your Product

BIMS_8.4.15If you have social media buttons on your product page, we’re guessing that you added them because you wanted people to share your products through different social channels. After all, more shares mean more publicity, and more publicity can lead to more sales. But you also have to understand that people don’t just buy things they see online. They need a reason to visit your store or website and buy your products.

Here are 3 simple ways to motivate customers to want to purchase from you rather than your competitor.

Understand your customers

To increase sales, you have to understand the psychology behind how people make their buying decision. It would be extremely difficult for you to motivate them to buy if you don’t know their wants and needs.

Identify your target market and conduct a survey to help you find out the types of products they’re interested in or if your current products meet their expectations and some products suggestions that they would like to see in you sell in the future.

Feel good products

During the times of economic stress, the sales of non-essential items decrease significantly except for one: lipstick.

While people are looking for ways to put food on the table, lipstick sales were still skyrocketing. Why? For women, these tubes of colored wax are more than just cosmetics. When they’re feeling blue, lipstick provides confidence and represents happiness, hope and opportunity. If you think of it that way, then $8 is just a small price to pay as compared to the benefits they can get out of it.

Sell the benefits

You have probably heard of this a dozen of times before. When creating a product, be sure that it solves a problem. Most customers buy a product to solve a specific problem.

After a long day at work, this man found out that his dog chewed off his favorite pair of shoes. Now, he’s looking to buy a new pair of shoes. Now that you have a potential customer, the best thing you can do is to promote the benefits of your product. Don’t just stop at describing the product; provide them with additional information such as the price, features, awards etc.

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5 Ways to Promote Your Blog on Social Media

bims_7.21So you have a great blog. You regularly post relevant and informative content, and that’s great. However, it will do you no good if you don’t have traffic coming your blog’s way. Without readers, your content will never maximize its reach.

For many bloggers, getting the word out about their newest venture can seem like a big challenge. But by promoting your blog on social media, you’re potentially exposing yourself or your business to millions of people from all over the world.

This week, we’re going to shed some light on how to promote your blog on social media. Keep reading for tips on how to drive traffic to your blog.

Add photos

Studies suggest that social media posts that include images get 12% more engagement as compared to those with no photos. So be sure to use full-sized images to get more likes, shares, comments and generate more traffic to your blog.

Share your blog posts on social media

If readers are not coming to your site, go to them instead. Give your fans and followers a taste of your blog by sharing your blog posts on social media.

Include the link to your status post, but be sure to delete it in your text before posting it. Your update will have a clickable image, which will direct users to your blog.

Use the right social channels

Considering that you know your target audience, we’re assuming that you know where they hang out. Concentrate your efforts where you audience spend their time on. If your target audience is foodies, you might want to spend more time on Pinterest. If your audience is the C-suite executives, LinkedIn might be their preferred social platform. Don’t waste your time on social channels that do not appeal to your audience.

Keep it short

Keep your posts short, clear and intriguing. People’s attention spans are short and they won’t be interested to slog through tons of information. Limit your posts to one sentence. If possible, keep it under 140 characters. Remember, short and witty updates generate the most engagement and click throughs.

Use conversation starters

Ask intriguing questions to the readers and direct them to your blog for answers. In order for them to get the answer to this specific question, they’ll need to click the link and read through your blog post. Now that you have captured their attention, write more interesting and informative blog posts to keep them coming back for more.

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Tips for Connecting with Industry Influencers on Social Media

BimsBlog 2.3.15Whether you’re running a small business or a big brand, you can reap great benefits when a highly influential person talks about your business. It can help you drive traffic to your site, increase your SEO and build your online social standing.

You need to be efficient with your time and even more effective with whom you choose to connect with. You want to be able to connect with industry influencers – people who have a success story, speak at conventions, widely published and well respected.

Here are a few tips for connecting with industry influencers on social media. Read on for a simple system you can immediately deploy.

Find your influencers

The first thing you need to do is to find your influencers. Industry influencers are industry experts and thought leaders that have a following that is similar to what you want to achieve. When looking at an influencer, take into account their search engine ranking, Klout score and number of followers.

Interact with them actively

Keep an eye out for influencers for chances to reach out. Interact with them through contents they are sharing. Feel free to ask a question if you think a particular point they’re making requires further explanation, show your appreciation for an article they have written or share their work through social media. Whatever you do, be genuine.

Nurture the relationship

Once you’ve engaged with an influencer, be sure to keep the lines of communication open and reach out to them once in a while. Take the initiative to strike up a conversation. Send them an email to let them know about a campaign you’re running or invite them to events you’re hosting. If you see you can provide assistance, do it. This can help grow your relationship and build trust with the influencer.

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Social Media Marketing Tactics You’re Wasting Your Time On

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A few years ago, social media was considered as a new and unchartered territory. But with the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, business owners knew that they needed to cope up in order to stay relevant.

If you want your business to stay afloat and thrive, be sure to avoid these social media marketing tactics.

Buying Facebook fans

Having thousands of followers may help validate your business’ social proof, but you also have to understand that social media sites have algorithms that are designed to track and analyze interaction and engagement. Buying fans will reduce the amount of organic reach you do get.

Instead of paying for fake followers, you might want to focus on building genuine relationship with your target audience.

Spamming your audience

Posting one content after another is a great strategy if you want to turn off your followers. Create a regular posting schedule and space out posts and tweets for optimal sharing times. Also, make sure you have a solid content strategy each time you post.

You are always selling

The best content tells stories – stories that tell how you help your customers, what you can offer them and what it’s like to do business your company. But if all you write about is how awesome your products are, it’s not story telling. You call it advertising. We guarantee you your fans and followers won’t like it.

Creating accounts on too many platforms

If you think it’s wise to be everywhere; you’re wrong. Many companies create accounts on different social media platforms, despite their ability to engage with their followers and post quality content.

When users visit your profile and only finds 10 status posts or tweets within the past year, they may think that you don’t care or you’re disorganized. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Keep your focus on one platform at a time, and then branch out from there.

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Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List


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A mailing list is the preferred method of communication and cultivating long-term relationships with customers of smart and creative business owners. In fact, it is one of the most heavily used channels of communication to date.

As a marketer, it is your job to add fresh contacts to your email list on a regular basis. How exactly do you do that? We have heaps of ideas that can help you grow your email list. Read on to grow your audience, generate more leads and bring more business.

Make it easy to subscribe

Keep your offers upfront and be sure to include call-to-action buttons on about every page of your website. Don’t make people dig around your site. Put those sign up forms where visitors can easily see them.

Collect email addresses at in-person events

Collect email address at events such as educational panels, hackathons, conferences, meet ups etc. Just having a sign up form at events isn’t enough. You should train your people to collect email addresses at registration. Be sure to send them a welcome email that confirms their opt-in to your list.

Use social media

Promote an offer that requires an email submission on your Facebook page. Make it easy for people to join your list by adding a sign up form to your Facebook page. You can also create twitter campaign to promote one of your lead generation offers to your followers.

Give away something valuable

Think of building your email list as an exchange. Potential customers give you their email address, and in return, you provide them with something that is of value to them.

Everyone likes free stuff. So be sure to attach something valuable to your email sign up form. It can be an ebook, early access to new features, private blog content, video, cheat sheet etc. This is a surefire way to pique people’s interest and get them to sign the form.

 

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How to Maximize Your Content Shareability

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While it is impossible to tell whether or not your post will go viral, there are things you can do to increase its shareability and engagement factor. Here are some of them.

Write more in-depth posts

Not only is great content an important foundation of your website, it is the driving force for online engagement.

Useful and informative content gets the most number of shares. Another factor to consider is the uniqueness of your content. People are more likely to share your content if they find it interesting and fresh. Share your knowledge by offering how-tos FAQs, tutorials and user guides.

Make content easy to share

In order to increase the shareability of your content, you need to make it easy for your audience to share it. If there is a share button, things are as easy as clicking it. Plus, it is a subtle way of telling your visitors to share the content. It’s as if you’re saying, “Hey, did you like what you just read? Why not pass it along?”

Use images

Visual content is a fantastic marketing weapon. A great image can capture the attention of people and increase clickthroughs to your content. That said, you need to put extra care into choosing images for your blog content.

Keep in mind that images that look good on your site will not necessarily look good on social media. So be sure to determine the best image dimensions for every social network.

Captivating headline

We all know the importance of a great headline in getting people’s attention. Research shows that most people do not only scan the content’s body, they also scan the headline. If you want to increase the chances of your article getting read, it is best to limit your headline to 6 words.

When writing titles and headlines, it is also important to keep keywords in mind. This will not only help you stay visible in the feed, but to users who are interested on the said topic as well.

 

 

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How to Improve the Visibility of Your LinkedIn Profile

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In today’s corporate world, you’re not somebody until you can be found in LinkedIn. As more and more professionals and business owners create an account on this site, getting noticed requires a deep well of connections and some site-specific SEO magic.

If you have already created a profile on LinkedIn, you might want to revisit it and refresh your presence. Here are some tips to improve your visibility and get the most out of the world’s largest professional networking site.

Fill out your profile completely

When other users land on your page, they’ll see a box that displays your profile highlights. If you are a business owner or a professional, you wouldn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to build a relationship with potential clients, customers and partners. This is your chance to make a great impression. So, make sure that the information in your profile box is complete, up-to-date and optimized.

Include relevant search keywords

If you want people to find you, you need to apply effective SEO techniques. This is especially important on the “Headline” field. Instead of just describing your current position, it would be best if you could optimize your job title slightly and include relevant keywords.

Expand your network

LinkedIn is the perfect platform for connecting with colleagues. So go ahead and connect with people, especially those who share your professional interests and qualifications. It’s also a good idea to connect with your past clients, managers, co-workers and other colleagues. You can further improve your LinkedIn search presence by doing this step.

Be an active participant

Like major search engines, LinkedIn rewards users who actively engage with others. Joining and participating in groups is beneficial as it not only helps in expanding your network, it also improves your profile’s SEO.

LinkedIn allows users to join up to 50 groups, but if you do, you’ll have a difficult time keeping up with all the conversations. Focus on 3 to 5 groups and make it a point to participate in group discussions. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to build influence.

 

 

 

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Handling Negative Comments on Social Media

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Social media is a powerful tool for businesses of all types. It helps you engage and connect with your audience and eventually establish a relationship with them. In addition to that, it also helps increase traffic to your website, increase brand awareness and ultimately, increase sales. However, social media is not perfect.

We live in a world where everyone has a voice. People can talk about their experiences, whether it’s positive or negative, with your business and post them online. Unless you’re perfect, you’ll have to deal with negative comments or feedbacks sooner or later. What should you do when negative reviews come in?

Here are 4 principles to guide the way you deal with negative comments on social media.

Do not delay

Negative comments and feedbacks should be addressed as soon as possible. Mind you, words travel swiftly on social network. This can damage your reputation so be sure to act fast.

Most people post negative comments online because they believe that no one wants to listen to them. Show your customers that you care for them and you’re willing to listen by responding quickly. Also, reassure them that you are willing to set things straight and solve the issue in the soonest possible time.

Own up to your mistake

We are humans, and we all make mistakes. If someone is complaining about your products or services, do not be afraid to say you’re sorry. Recognize the complaint, apologize publicly and then settle things privately.

Offer an incentive

Sometimes, offering a discount, free merchandize or business service can help calm the situation. If your product failed, replace it and offer discount on their next purchase. If it was a dining experience, refund their check. Try to make things right, even if it costs you. This is a great way of showing your customers how much you value them.

 

 

 

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