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BIMSThe holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. According to the National Retail Federation, the average American adult usually spends about $810 during the holiday season. Because of that, retailers and brands are fighting for consumer’s attention to drive up their sales.

Incorporate the excitement and spirit of the holidays into your social media campaigns. Here are some tips on how to take advantage of the holidays with the help of social media.

Help your customers get into the holiday spirit

Most people are sprucing up their homes and putting up lights and ornaments around their home. Why don’t you do the same and add some seasonal touches to your website and social media pages? Update your Facebook cover photos, Youtube channels, Google+ images and Twitter backgrounds where possible.

Holiday promotions

While the shopping season usually starts in September, most people don’t start until November. Others would wait until the first week of December before they start shopping. It’s never too late to capture a holiday shopper.

Share holiday promotions with your followers and give them something to look forward to.  Take advantage of social media advertising options such as Twitter sponsored tweets and Facebook offers if you really want to bank on your sale.

Give back to the community

Truly get into the spirit of giving by adding a charitable element to your holiday campaign. Use your platform as a business leader to draw attention to a cause. Get your employees on board and give back to your local community.

Give away prizes

The holiday season is a time for giving. Since people interact with businesses more frequently during the holiday season, this is also the best time to run a contest.

Contests and giveaways are a great way to create buzz around your product. They also help increase social sharing, engagement and fan base. Ask for shares and likes for entries into the contest for a chance to win. The monetary value of the prize is totally up to you, but make sure that you provide them something they will value and appreciate.

 

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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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Business owners know that holding events are one of the best ways to get customer through the door. If your goal is to get as many people interested in your event, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be an excellent way to spread the word to your customer base, followers, family members and friends.

This week, we’ll give you 4 easy ways to use social media to create a buzz-worthy event and increase the number of attendees.

Engage

Social media is an ideal channel for initiating conversations. But before anything else, you want to identify your target audience and the types of people you’re trying to reach.

Post your event on Facebook and encourage engagement. With over 1 billion users worldwide, it is an ideal place to interact with potential attendees and speakers.

Promote early. The earlier you promote the event, the greater your chances are for success.

Hashtag properly

This is an important element of your event marketing strategy. When creating a hashtag, be sure to keep it short, unique and relevant. Don’t forget to do your research so as to make sure that it hasn’t been used previously.

The hashtag is a great way for attendees to follow conversations about your event, engage with speakers and each other. So, be sure to use it every time you post something about the event.

Create buzz

Create buzz by highlighting your greatest assets, your guests of honor. Considering that these people are admired in their industry, they already have loyal fans. This makes it a lot easier for you to get people to attend the event. You can also mention them in your tweets, in the hopes that their followers would see it too.

Be sure to incorporate the official hashtag and call to action at the end, urging people to register or buy tickets.

Updates

Set up a blog and post short updates to give attendees an idea about what to expect. Include photos and videos in your blog post to build traffic and engage your audience.

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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.

 

1: Turn a Pinned Tweet Into a Feature Box

The Feature Box is an email form you place at the top of your homepage, which offers your website visitors a freebie in exchange for signing up for your email list.You can add a similar feature to your Twitter profile page by combining two of Twitter’s native features: a lead generation card and a pinned tweet. Simply create a Lead Generation Card that includes an incentive for people to opt in. Offer regular email updates, a special freebie or a subscribers-only discount. Pin the tweet to the top of your Twitter profile and you’re all set.

2: Communicate Less and Tweet More Links

A recent study by Dan Zarrella looked at the “reply rates” of about 130,000 random Twitter users and discovered that highly followed accounts tend to converse less. Keep in mind, the study results don’t suggest that Twitter conversations have a negative effect on your following, just that conversations aren’t what motivate people to follow you on Twitter. According to another study by Dan Zarrella, the way to get more followers is to invest more time tweeting relevant links to your followers, rather than communicating directly with them.

3: Ask Twitter Influencers for Help

According to BuzzSumo who recently studied the share counts of more than 100 million articles, when influencers share your content, the reach increases substantially. If one influencer shares a piece of content, it will get 38.8% more social shares. Three influencers double the social shares and five influencers quadruple them. It’s crucial to network with influencers and develop relationships with them. Then, when you have an important piece of content you’d like to get seen, you can ask the influencers you know to share it.

4: Use Twitter’s Recommend Feature

Recommend is a new feature of Twitter’s tweet button that many people don’t pay attention to. After a visitor tweets an article from your blog, the window recommends they follow you on Twitter, if they don’t follow you already. This is an excellent way to grow your Twitter account, since people who just tweeted your article are likely to want to follow you. Look at the code of your tweet button and make sure the recommend field contains your Twitter username. To double-check you’ve set up the feature correctly, ask a friend to unfollow you on Twitter and then tweet an article from your blog. If the recommend field contains your Twitter username, you’re all set.

5: Repeat Article Tweets

According to a study by Wisemetrics, the second tweet of an article gets as much as 86% of the performance as the first tweet. Clearly the performance will fade with each new tweet, but considering your followers are probably in different time zones, you still need to tweet your most valuable content more than once. Your new followers will appreciate it, since the content will be new for them.

 

In today’s technological world, visual marketing is becoming a very popular trend. Marketers have begun to use visual marketing to their advantage through social media. Strengthen your business by catching the eye of your consumer with visual content. Below are a list of the most popular social media platforms for visual marketing and how to use it effectively:

Twitter:

What many people don’t know is that Twitter is not limited to 140 characteristics to get a message across. In fact, you can add up to four images in just one tweet, making Twitter a great platform for using visual content. This is a great way to showcase an event or tell a story that would be difficult to do with only one picture. Using an inforgraphic is also a great way to add visuals to the message you’re trying to get across through twitter. Some tools to create infographics are Visualize, Easel.ly, and Piktochart. Videos are also a great way to catch the attention of your consumer. Time-lapse videos in particular are a great way to tell a story or show a product in just a short amount of time. The Hyperlapse app allows you to create time-lapse videos in a simple manner. Once you’re done with your video, you can upload it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.images

 

Instagram:

With Instagram, it’s more about the quality of your photos than how many you’re posting. With each Instagram, it is crucial to make sure they are capturing your consumers’ eye in a creative way that will make them want to learn more about your business. The 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by the Social Media Examiner found that over time, marketers with more experience prefer Instagram when it comes to visual content marketing. Using hashtags can have a huge impact on your growth. But, knowing the right words to hashtag is crucial in making sure you’re reaching your target market. There are many tools that help you find the perfect hashtags to use. Webstagram helps you find find the most popular hashtags and with the search feature you can find more relevant hashtags to your post. Also, using Populagram can help you find the popular hashtags, filters and people which you can follow to stay on top of Instagram community.

 

Facebook:

Facebook can be used for visual marketing in a variety of ways. What makes Facebook so great is that you aren’t as limited when posting content as you would be on other social media platforms. A great feature of Facebook is that you can upload video directly to your posts. Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income recently did an experiment comparing views and engagement of natively embedded Facebook video versus embedded YouTube video and he found that Facebook performs better overall. Facebook is also a powerful tool for graphics. You can create a graphic and then upload it to Facebook including the post URL in your caption, or you can share a link directly to Facebook. No matter which way you choose to use it, Facebook is a MUST for businesses who are trying to reach their consumers through visual marketing.

As Social Media sites are growing, so is the use of the hashtag. If you didn’t already know, a hashtag is a word or a group of words after the # sign. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc., hashtags are popping every everywhere. On Twitter especially, the hashtag has proven to be an extremely powerful tool for marketing businesses. But, how do we use this strategy properly? Hashtagging can either help you reach your target market and expand your business, or it could be a waste of your time. It is crucial to learn the power of this social media marketing tool and how to use it properly. Here are some useful tips:

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Tip#1: Defining Your Brand

The first major step to using Twitter and hashtags effectively is defining your brand or business in a few specific words. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media sources, so you want to make sure your posts are being seen by the right people. Your central business tag should be a word that is unique to your business. You can make it your company name or a tagline that people will know about your business. For example, Red Bull uses #givesyouwings which is their company slogan. Doing this will help your business become recognized.

 Tip #2: Use Trending Hashtags

It is also important to understand trending hashtags. A trending hashtag is a topic that has become very popular. Keeping an eye out for trending hashtags that have to do with your business is a great way for your posts to get noticed. This can help your post be seen by a large audience, but still focuses on your business. Your content can be seen by more than just your followers, so it’s important to get yourself out there by using a trending hashtag. Trends on Twitter can be found on the left hand side of your computer Twitter feed.

Tip #3: Use Content Tags Properly

Lastly, using the right content hashtags is another crucial step for your business success on Twitter. These tags are not branded, and aren’t necessarily popular or trending, they are just simply unique to your business. Using these enable you to get seen by your consumers who are searching for those specific hashtags. One of the biggest mistakes people make when using hashtags is not being specific enough to your business. For example, using #food if you run a catering business will end up working against your favor. Millions of people a day use #food and that is never an acknowledgeable hashtag for a business. Instead, using something more specific like #foodcatering will get your post noticed by your consumer. Finding common hashtags by checking out what tags are being used by your followers and your competition is a great way to make sure you’re using them effectively.

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Choosing the right channels to reach your target market is a crucial decision. It is important that you know where your prospects and customers are spending their time online.

With Twitter, Instagram and Facebook leading the pack, most businesses are tempted to use more channels and to have a presence on multiple social media platforms. Of course, the more social media sites you use, the more customers you can reach. But it also increases cost. If building presence in multiple channels does not bring about extra sales, then you’ll end up spending more for little or no benefit.

Here’s a quick set of considerations as you select the right social networks to reach the right market.

Twitter

You should use this channel if are looking to reach younger men and women. Since Twitter appeals to information junkies, it is also a great choice if your business lends itself to the provision of timely insights or topic-based news.  It is also a two-way platform wherein you can engage and interact with your followers.

LinkedIn

If you are seeking to make business connections or are in B2B and you wish to provide useful insights to people thinking about their work, then LinkedIn is right for you.

It is optimal for industry-specific information and peer networking since most users are in work mode on LinkedIn. Given the educational levels and high income of the average LinkedIn users, this channel offers a distinct audience worth targeting.

Facebook

If you are looking to reach as broad a network as possible or wish to build a community presence, then Facebook is right for you.

Despite the introduction of new social media sites, Facebook is still one of the most popular sites, with more than 70% of online adults actively participating. However, since most people use this platform to connect with their family and friends, it may not be the best channel to reach your target market.

Instagram

If you have a visual aspect to what you do and what your customers are interested in, then Instagram is the right channel for you. Given its popularity among urbanites and its appeal to specific ethnic segments, Instagram can also be a good choice for certain market targets.

No one is perfect. And sometimes, we have bad habits that we would like to get rid of. But while you’re trying to change how you do things and get too occupied, falling back into these old habits happens sooner than you might have expected. While some of these habits do not have an overall impact, some may have a negative impact, especially on your business.

There’s a good chance that you have visited a page that has done some of the things listed below. Make it a mission not to repeat them.

Overcompensating for inactivity

When you’re just starting and you don’t have someone to manage all your online accounts, your page may remain inactive for a few days. That in itself is a problem. However, some people make the mistake of overcompensating for being off the radar for a few days by posting numerous updates in one day.

While inactivity is not a good thing, keep in mind that there are only a few people who would choose to unfollow you due to lack of activity. However, if you bombard them with numerous updates and tweets, which is quite annoying, they are more likely to unfollow you.

Hashtag overload

Hashtags are a great way of categorizing content, providing context and curating information to help you reach your target audience. However, some people tend to abuse it by using like a dozen hashtags in a single tweet.

Depending on the platform, 2 to 4 hashtags are acceptable: 2 for twitter and a maximum of 4 for Instagram.

Asking for shares or retweets

Not only does it come across as demanding, it’s not also engaging. As a result, it does nothing for your cause.

If you post something like this, the only people who are going to enthusiastically oblige are your family and close friends. Everyone else will most likely ignore your post. Even if people did share it, it’s not because they believe in what you’re saying, but because you begged them to do so.

Posting only about your company

Social media may be comparable to phone conversation – it has to go both ways.

Creating great content for your page is important, but you also have to talk about something else other than your business. Find ways to engage with your audience and interact with them.

Make sure to share a variety of content from time to time. This would capture the attention of your audience and keep in them interested. Share inspirational quotes and images, updates from online sources or contents from fans.

Staying on top of social media marketing can be difficult for business owners, especially as new networks pop up daily. Here is a great graphic to help you choose which of the top social media networks your business should pursue!

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As always, please contact the BIMS Team to let us know how we can help!