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How to Build a Strong Social Media PresenceSocial media marketing may seem like a fairly simple concept. All you have to do is to create an account on different social platforms and post updates every now and then. But the truth is, there’s a whole lot more that goes into building a social media presence and reaching your audience.

Whether you’re a large corporation seeking new ways to improve your online engagement or a new business trying to decide where to focus your social media efforts, there are a lot of ways to boost your social media presence.

Here are some steps you can take to help get you started.

Identify your audience

There are millions of active users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media channels. The first thing you need to do is to identify your target audience and determine which sites they use the most. This will help you narrow down your options and know where your focus will be.

Build a targeted community

As an entrepreneur starting or running your own business or a professional trying to build your online brand, you want to have a good social media presence. But in order to do that, you first need to develop a large following. That means followers and fans on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts.

Engage with everyone

Social media should be less about you and more about your audience. It’s about making connections and having conversations.

Rather than focusing on your promotion, you want to use this opportunity to engage with people. Speak to them. Ask them to take part of the conversation, ask questions and encourage them to submit photos while using your product. People are likely to like, comment and share your content if you have established a relationship with them.

Produce valuable content

There are several types of content you can post on social media. You can post videos, blog posts, client or customer testimonials and others.

Aim for social updates that contain educational content rather than product-focused content. Make sure your Facebook posts, tweets and LinkedIn updates consist of engaging, useful and valuable content.

 

Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience?

Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience?

In order to achieve success with your social media marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are.

Start with the demographics

Demographics are the best place to start when identifying your target audience. Are your typical customers young or old? Are they male or female? What type of job does your target market have? Is your product sold in certain areas of the country?

Answer these questions and use these information to give you a deep and clear understanding of who makes up your target market.

Know where your customers spend their time

With the increasing number of social channels, it would be waste of time and effort to build a presence on each one of them. The best thing you can do is to determine where your audience spends most of their time and focus on that social channel. Use the information you have gathered above to help you select the right networks to reach them.

Linkedin is popular among college graduates. Users of this site are between the ages of 30 to 64. Instagram and Pinterest remain popular among female uses, particularly between the ages 18 to 29. Facebook continues to be the biggest social media site. In fact, 58% of the entire adult population are Facebook users. When in doubt, use Facebook.

Identify industry influencers

According to studies, 92% percent of people trust the recommendations of the people they know – family, friend and influencers. No matter how many times you share your content, people won’t pay attention. Well, that’s until someone they trust asks them to actually read it.

Industry influencers have good online reputation and are often considered as experts. People listen to them and even ask them for advice.  Seek out influencers and engage with them. Once you’ve build a relationship with them, you’ll be able to gain more followers.
Tips to find your target market on social media: Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience? In order to achieve success with your social media marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are.

BIMS_12.29Over the years, I have seen a lot of business owners who have accounts on almost every social networking site. While there’s no harm in maintaining a number of social media accounts, you may notice that you’re not getting the results you want either.

Because it takes time to do social right, it may be best not to be on certain social networks. How do you decide which platforms are best for your needs? Here are some important criteria to consider that will help you determine which channel is right for your business.

Your target audience

Social media activity varies by age, geographic location, profession and more. Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to determine where they spend most of their time online. What’s the point of maintaining an Instagram or Pinterest account if your target audience are not there? That would be a waste of time and resources.

Your goal

People who have clear, measurable goals are 50% more likely to achieve their desired results as compared to those people without goals. Without a clear idea of what you want to achieve, your program may not reach its full potential.

Attract new customers, increase engagement with current customers, drive website traffic and increased conversions are just some of the possible goals for your social media program.

Your budget

Budget is a major concern for small to medium-sized businesses. That said, you need to be very careful where you spend your marketing budget. For starters, a $100 budget could cover social media scheduling, advertising, graphics or photos, sharing buttons and analytics.

Metrics

In order to determine if you are achieving your goals, you need to follow up on your social media efforts. Constantly analyze your metrics to help you identify which social channel gives you favorable results.

 

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Increasing Facebook likes can be a tricky process. With the algorithm changes, Facebook page engagement decreased over time; thus, making it difficult for business owners and marketers to reach their fans.

Since Facebook is one of the biggest and most popular social networks, you should be looking for ways to increase the number of people who like your page. Advertising using Facebook ads is one of them.

Facebook ads are the easiest and most effective ways to increase your likes. If you don’t already have some good Facebook ads strategies, you better get started.

Ability to reach smartphone users

Facebook has about 1.20 billion active mobile users as of December 2014. That’s a lot of people, and the number of users is increasing over time. Because of that, mobile should be your priority. By advertising on Facebook, you’ll be able to reach your audience right at the palm of their hands.

Enhanced audience targeting

There are billions of people on Facebook. That said, you need to make sure that you use at least the most basic of targeting when you set up any ad on Facebook. Otherwise, you’ll end up advertising to the wrong people and waste money in the end.

Facebook advertising allows you to target a specific group of people based on their age, gender, geographical location, interests and more. This gives you the chance to be more precise in your audience targeting. Think about your ideal customer and what they’re interested in. Decide who you want to reach before creating an ad.

Heightened audience engagement

Before, you only needed to come up with great content and wait until you get all the likes you deserve, but all that has changed over the years. Now, you have to promote your content to ensure that your existing and potential customers see it in their newsfeeds.

Your primary goal is to capture the attention of your target audience and get them to engage with your posts. In addition to ads, you need to make sure that your content are interesting because users only see posts from pages they engage with. Build trust with your followers and get them to share, like or comment on your posts.

 

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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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With over 70 million users, Pinterest is considered as one of the fastest growing social networking sites. Armed with that information, it is safe to say that Pinterest is just as important as Twitter and Facebook when using social media to reach your target market.

Since Pinterest is all about graphic images, your goal is to create visual images that your customers would enjoy. The more appealing an image is, the more likely it is to generate attention.

So, how can you use Pinterest to attract and engage customers? Here are some tips to get you started.

Build boards around your products

If you own a restaurant, there’s no better way to attract new customers by showing off your dishes. Be sure to create a collection of boards for each of your specialties. After all, food is the main attraction of your restaurant. So, focus on your menu.

Become an information curator

As an online curator, your job is to gather and organize all the best images related to your topic and present them to your virtual audience. When done the right way, people will see you as an industry expert and will eventually consider you as a go-to source for cool images and content.

Add compelling descriptions

If your goal is to capture the attention of customers, you shouldn’t stop at creating visually compelling content. Adding a description is just as important.

Since you’re using SEO to promote your site, why not use it as well to promote your Pinterest page. Use keywords in your titles, tags and pin boards. This is important as it makes it easier for people to find your content.

Engage with other users

The whole point of social networking is socializing. So, engage with customers, strategic partners and industry vendors by tagging them in your descriptions. Another way to interact with other users is to like their pins. This can be a way of telling them that you appreciate their content. Plus, it can help you build a following and convert fans into buyers.

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Social media marketing is one of the most effective methods of growing your brand. However, it goes beyond creating an account, posting occasional updates and special offers.

To make an impact to your target audience, you need a steady supply of quality content and get them in front of as many leads as possible. One way of doing this is by connecting with influencers in your industry. Even a single tweet from a well-known name in your industry could give you 1,000 visits as compared to the usual 100.

There are several tools you can use to find your desired influencer. Here are some of them.

Keyhole

This tracking tool helps identify influencers and content, especially related to events using a hashtag.

It develops that context by analyzing users who are engaging with your competition and gives you an idea as to who is leading in the conversations at industry events.

Klout

Klout is one of the most popular influencer discovery and engagement tools.

Just type in your desired keyword on the search bar and it will generate a list of top influencers. Here, you will notice a number adjacent to their profile image. This serve as their Klout score. The higher the score is, the more influential they are.

Follower Wonk

Follower Wonk is a strong Twitter analytics tool that can be used for several things. The key feature I recommend is the “Search Twitter bios”. All you have to do is to type in the keywords and it will give you a list of all the Twitter users with the specified keyword in their bios.

You can also track who is following you, analyze and sort followers and compare users by the number of followers they have. You can also add a location filter to find Twitter users within a specific region.

 

 

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There are about 2 billion social network users from all over the world. That number is expected to grow to about 2.5 billion in 2017. So, if you want to reach your target audience more effectively, you need to be active on social media.

In this article, we’ll share with you some methods that have helped us boost our social media engagement. Hopefully, these tips will help you earn more shares, comments, likes and clicks for your social media content.

Ask for their opinion

Business owners should think of their target audience as a pool of unlimited resources. Your current and potential customers will appreciate it if you listen to what they have to say.

Feel free to create a simple survey, ask an open-ended question or a fill-in-the blank type of question. This is advantageous as it will not only increase engagement, you can also use their suggestions to address their needs and requests.

Educate

Business owners and marketers are often stumped as they sit down in front of their computer and attempt to post a status update on their social media accounts.

Remember, your goal is to get your audience to engage with you and your content. To do that, you need to provide them with great content. Write about what you know and what they don’t know. If you do this, people will eventually see you as an industry expert.

Call-to-action

It’s not enough to write quality content, sometimes, it also pays to ask. Always include a great call-to-action in your posts. Ask them to visit your site, answer polls, provide content ideas or simply hit like. People are more likely to act upon it if you tell them what you want from them. As they say, ask and you shall receive.

Share photos

If you are struggling to engage with your target audience through content marketing, you might want to consider including more visuals into your marketing efforts.

According to Social Media Examiner, 87% of the most shared posts on Facebook were photos. Sharing photos are a great way to boost engagement as it can easily capture the attention of people and are easier to digest.

 

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Most people think that sharing content on social media is easy. They expect that their blog posts will be seen by as many people as possible with just a few clicks of a button. While social media can help drive traffic to your blog, a lot of blog owners fail to realize that advertising goes beyond just sharing all your blog posts on social media.

In this article, we’ll give you 3 effective ways to use social media to promote your content. Follow these tips and draw in new readers for your blog.

Identify your target readers

You first need to understand what your target readers are interested in before throwing up a blog post. You can do this by browsing around and visiting top performing blogs in your niche. See what kind of topics get the most engagement, which social platform they use to share their content and also, take note of the comments they get.

Doing this kind of digging will give you an idea about what your audience are interested in and which social media platform they use.

Embrace the visual

It’s no secret that images receive much more engagement on Facebook and Twitter. Even images on LinkedIn get more engagement.

Since the image you use will be the first thing people are going to see, choose a photo that sends a compelling message, sparks emotions and inspires curiosity.

Use the right social media channel

It seems that new social media platforms come out once in a while. While it’s tempting to use them all in the hopes of reaching as much audience as possible, you might not get the results you want if you do so. A better approach would be to determine the best social network for promoting your blog and focus there.

If your target audience is more visual, you might have more potential traffic on Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram. If your blog posts are more geared around business and professional readers, Google+ and LinkedIn are your best bet.

 

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I know a lot of people who would log on to their social media accounts when they wake up in the morning. So, that’s probably one of the best times to post on social media, right?

But wait, I heard that most people also use it in the afternoon to mess around when they get bored at work. Or maybe they spend a few hours browsing through their newsfeeds after business hours. Okay, I’m officially confused.

Determining when to post on social media requires that you consider which platform your target audience is using. Remember, each social network has different users and their activities vary.

If you’re posting a status update when the majority of you audience are not online, then your time and effort goes to waste. Since you’re a busy person, you can’t afford to waste time.

Let’s get into the stats then.

Schedule tweets for lunch time

If your target market is on Twitter, be sure to tweet between 1-3 pm. During lunch break, a lot of people are checking in on Twitter. Traffic starts to build at 11 am, with peak posting days from Monday to Thursday. Avoid posting after 3pm on Friday.

Post Facebook status in the afternoon, when less people want to be at work

Engagement is one of the key considerations to a post’s visibility. An ideal time for engagement is between 1-4 pm.

Most people need some form of entertainment just to get through the afternoon slump, like around that 3:00 pm lull. For a lot of people, that means logging on to Facebook. These numbers hit rock bottom during the weekends, before 8 am and after 8 pm.

No one uses LinkedIn on a Friday

People are less interested in what’s happening on LinkedIn when they are winding up and winding down their work week. That means you shouldn’t bother posting on Monday and Friday. The best time for engagement is between Tuesday to Thursday, particularly before and after business hours.