The holiday shopping season is well underway, with “Black Friday” sales already appearing even though it’s only Wednesday! I’ve been getting inundated with emails today from retailers and other small businesses touting their deals.
Marketers also plan to use social media this holiday season. If you’re one of them, here are a few key points to keep in mind from ShortStack regarding your holiday campaign:
If you’re over 30, you may not have heard of Snapchat. I’m certainly in that age category, (darnnit!), but I learned about Snapchat from my 21-year-old daughter who has used it to talk with friends. This direct messaging app has been around since 2011, but it’s only been in the past year that marketers have started getting on board, thanks to Snapchat’s amazing growth. The company has 30 million users, most of whom are between 18 and 25 years old.
Mashable reports that Snapchat will start offering ads, TV and movie clips and news articles this fall. Brands like Taco Bell and McDonald’s have already launched accounts on Snapchat to reach the app’s young demographic. But does that mean you need to get on board too?
Small business owners in particular can get overwhelmed with social media, considering the many different platforms out there, like Facebook, Twitter, and lately, Instagram. If you’re not sure whether you should be on Snapchat, this handy infographic quiz from Flightpath should help.
A Facebook Page administrator recently asked me how she could “like” her customers’ Facebook pages. She didn’t want to personally like these pages, mind you. She wanted her Business page to “like” them. The only way to do this is to use Facebook AS a business page. In the following video, I walk you through just how to do that, and how to then, go about liking another page.
Does your business use social media for customer service? If not, you’re doing your company and your customers a disservice. Recently, I had issues with my cable company that also provided internet service. When I had trouble resolving my issue, I tweeted them. Thankfully, they were responsive. But there are plenty of other companies who wind up with a corporate “black eye” because they don’t respond to customer complaints in a timely fashion. Social media is an efficient way to do that.
Content curation is an essential aspect of social media marketing. Whether you focus on one social network or many, one thing is certain: you need a lot of content. What you don’t have—or at least I don’t—is a lot of time. The good news is that you don’t need much time when you use a few minutes here and there for curating content from your smartphone. Here are my top five apps for content curation.
1. Pocket – This app is an absolute lifesaver when paired with the browser extensions. When you read an interesting article or blog post on your
I have been using a few new online marketing tools lately that have really made a big difference in my business, so I thought this would be a good time to share them with you, along with a few other oldies but goodies!
Here are my current favorite online marketing tools, in no particular order:
1. Quozio – OMG! Where has this app been all my business life? Have you ever pinned an image containing a motivational quote to a Pinterest board, or shared one on Facebook? If you’d like to create images like this yourself, Quozio is the tool for you. They provide a bookmarklet, so anytime you see a great quote online, you click the Quozio link on your toolbar, type in the quote and who said it, and then you have your choice of about two dozen backgrounds with different font styles. You can then pin the image to Pinterest, tweet it out on Twitter, or post it on Facebook. You can also email it or save it to your desktop. Easy-peasie!
I recently wrote how Facebook has tweaked its news feed algorithm. As a result, plain status updates don’t get the news feed reach that they once did. I’ve found that reach has been down across the board, no matter what type of post I share – link, photo or status update.
But there is hope. I tried a couple of strategies recently that did increase the reach. One involved sharing the following post on my personal Facebook page:
Facebook has tweaked its news feed algorithm… again. This time, the change should benefit Page Admins by increasing engagement with their fans.
The social networking giant has been studying how people interact with status updates. They found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook from their friends, they write more status updates themselves. But that wasn’t the case with text status updates from pages.
As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends.
Facebook has realized that posts from Pages behave differently than posts from friends in the news feed. So, the company is working to improve its ranking algorithms to do a better job of differentiating between the two types.
If you’re going to engage in internet marketing to promote your company’s products and services, you need commitment, flexibility and patience. Characteristics that also come in handy if you’re training for a marathon. I speak from experience. Last Sunday, I completed the 2014 Walt Disney World Marathon.
I didn’t finish in the top ten. Heck, I didn’t even finish in the top 1,000. I was out on that course for over 8 hours (counting the 45 minutes waiting in the corral to start the race!) but I finished. And more importantly, I raised more than $1700 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, got my Mickey Mouse medal, and basked in the pain and glory of joining an elite group of people who have completed multiple marathons. (Yep, I’m a glutton for punishment. This was my 2nd marathon.)
How many times have you said to yourself, “THIS is the year my business will finally take off?”
But time flies, and life gets in the way. Unproductive days can turn into weeks and months of a business that flounders or flatlines.
But THIS YEAR WILL BE DIFFERENT FOR YOU AND YOUR BIZ when you start it off right–by listening to 21 experts share their very best secrets to building a profitable business without sacrificing your sanity and your personal life.
No travel required. Listen and learn from wherever you are by phone or computer.