Mediaboss Marketing

Everybody uses social media, theres no avoiding it. Its our number one place to stay connected to friends, family, colleagues, news, and, most importantly to marketers, companies and brands.

There are now more than 2.3 billion active social media users, which makes social media an unavoidable part of your marketing strategy. Unlike the past where marketers blindly advertised and hoped for the best, social media provides your company the opportunity to engage with customers in real time. Customer complaint? You can solve it. Positive customer review? You can thank the user and offer a gift or promotion.

Simply being there isnt enough. Your company needs to engage and interact to grow a loyal following.

The most important aspect of any social media marketing strategy is to set S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) goals. Posting blindly and expecting to achieve massive amounts of new sales would be like cooking without the right ingredients and expecting perfection. By setting goals before you begin, its easier to measure success or failure. These goals arent always focused on money or return on investment, and they shouldnt be. Social media marketing is more about engagement and providing solutions to problems rather than selling.

Brand awareness is all about your brand becoming relevant to potential buyers. This means posting content regularly that answers the questions your customers are asking. That content includes links to blog posts, infographics, statistics, and relevant articles. But dont forget to show the world who your brand is by posting photos of employees, the office, and company events. You can also post humorous, relevant memes that support your brand. This will help build a connection with customers.

Analytics to Track:

Example of S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

Gain 1,000 Twitter followers by the end of the month.

By following your companys mentions, you can find out what customers are saying about your brand, and respond to complaints in a timely manner. In fact, according to Social Media Today, when companies engage and respond to customer service requests over social media, those customers end up spending 20% 40% more with the company. Responding quickly and solving problems allows you to stay ahead of large-scale complaints and create brand loyalty. This type of engagement is easier by using tools such as a Unified Social Inbox.

Analytics to Track:

Example of S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

Gain 10 5-Star Reviews on Google in three months.

Brand loyalty has always been one of the most important factors in long term growth. In the past, companies relied on word of mouth. Now, social media provides an entirely new platform where brand loyalty can be shared with thousands of people in real time.

For instance, as the amount of photos of food increases on social media, restaurants are offering promotions and discounts for those that post pictures of their food on social media. That provides the restaurant with exposure and the customer feels connected.

Analytics to Track:

Example of S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

Achieve 10 mentions a week on Twitter within three months.

By constantly engaging with customers, your company can stay up to date on the problems theyre facing and develop solutions. Just as importantly, follow your competitors on social media to see how they engage their customers, if theyre facing any complaints, and if theyre rolling out any promotions or new products. A great way to track competitors is using eClinchers Custom Search Feeds, where you can create and save feeds based on specific keywords.

Analytics to Track:

Example of S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

Engage 10 customers a month on various social media channels about problems for three months.

If youre not leveraging social media to acquire leads and generate sales, youre not using social media properly. This is what most companies strive for first, but fail to realize that without time spent on the first four goals, its unlikely that sales will grow.

Social media provides the perfect opportunity to interact with potential customers, both on a personal level and an organizational level, to gauge their pain points, and to understand their basic corporate culture. This knowledge allows for a warm call when you first engage, as opposed to a cold call.

Aspects to Track:

Example of S.M.A.R.T. Goal:

Average 5% Click Through Rate on Tweets by end of year.

Social media marketing is a multi-faceted approach that, when used properly, can help grow your business by creating brand awareness, engaging with customers, and finding new customers. It is, however, impossible to be everywhere, which is why you need to find the social media channels that are right for your company and your brand. For instance, 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35. But even if thats your target market, it still doesnt mean Instagram is the right channel for your brand.

Your organization needs to set S.M.A.R.T. goals so successes and failures can be measured properly. More often than not, especially in the beginning, it is better to focus on engagement and building a presence. If you jump right into selling, you may lose traction before getting started. Use your knowledge and expertise to provide solutions to problems, and you will present your company as a trusted advisor that people want to buy from.

For more advice, continue reading about the 4 Tips for Better Engagement on Social Media. Also, learn how you can track your goals and KPIs using eClinchers Analytics Dashboard.

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5 Goals of Social Media Marketing - eClincher

HONG KONG, Feb. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --The world is at a crisis point, and while politicians battle over how to deal with climate change, charities and other environmental organizations worldwide struggle to get the support they need to provide the environmental conservation that is desperately needed. Traditional charity donation plans are too slow, and are simply not working. Charities rely on volunteers who are overworked and lose motivation. The giving industry has become stagnant.

With this and the sobering realities about climate change in mind, entrepreneurs Johannes Bergstrom and Friso Poldervaart have developed Oxygen, a Cause Based Social Marketing company that offers a way for environmental conscious entrepreneurs and home-business aficionados to make a living by selling acres of rain forest protection, and to fund tree-planting and reforestation projects worldwide. Poldervaart and Bergstrom have a target of 1 million distributors by 2020, with the potential to provide funding to rain forest protection trusts that would cover an area the size of Belgium.

Oxygen uses the power of social direct marketing to connect concerned individuals with local trusts and conservation organizations worldwide. Rather than start a charity that would compete with established trusts and conservation organizations, Oxygen partners with these organizations by providing funding for verifiable projects, and uses multi-level marketing distribution to generate funds for these conservation organizations, incentifying the sale of rain forest protection acres and planted trees with commissions and bonuses to the network membership.

"It is now possible to make a change for a better world, and make money while doing it," says Poldervaart. "This is a tipping-point moment in human history. Oxygen is able to do what volunteering and charities are unable to do: turn environmental protection into a sustainable business model."

Transparency and Compliance

Oxygen is a for-profit company that is making a real impact in the world. Built and designed to be fully compliant with U.S., Canadian and European standards for social and multi-level marketing, Oxygen uses the power of entrepreneurial business to achieve environmental conservation goals.

Financial transactions done by Oxygen and local conservation partners and trusts are done using Blockchain technology, ensuring that all transactions are transparent and trackable. Funds are held in escrow until the environmental conservation actions promised by each trust is actually fulfilled. Bergstrom explains, "One of the big obstacles for many people is one of transparency. When people invest money into a conservation project they want to know that the money is going where it is supposed to go. Blockchain technology provides a way to ensure that all funds gowhere they were intended, as every transaction is trackable, and the money doesn't get paid to the local trust or tree-planting program until the project can be verified. This is an exciting new development in the giving industry. We are not only funding great conservation projects; we are providing an opportunity for home-business entrepreneurs to sell a product they can be proud of, and truly believe in."

For more information:

http://www.oxygenglobal.netinfo@oxygenglobal.net/ http://www.facebook.com/OxygenGlobalOfficial

Related Images

oxygen-global-founders-johannes.jpg Oxygen Global founders Johannes Bergstrom and Friso Poldervaart Oxygen Founders during a expedition

the-lungs-of-the-earth-are.jpg The Lungs of the earth are disappearing

the-oxygen-platform.jpg The Oxygen Platform

Related Links

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SOURCE Oxygen Global

https://www.oxygenglobal.net

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Oxygen Launching World's First Cause-Based Social ...

Thank you to all of our attendees, presenters and sponsors who made the 2018 USF Social Marketing Conference a success!

Join us for The 25th Social Marketing Conference at theSheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach, Florida

Training Academy: Wednesday & Thursday, June 27-28, 2018

Environmental Training Academy Track: Wednesday & Thursday, June 27-28, 2018

Advanced Training Academy: Thursday, June 28, 2018

Main Conference: Friday & Saturday, June 29-30, 2018

#SMC2018 will arm participants with the tools and techniques to develop effective behavior change programs and campaigns.As well as expert speakers, cutting edge content and lively discussions, you can look forward to great networking.

Delegates attend from across North America and beyond, finding this conference to be among the best for helpful, down to earth advice and information that they can use to make their programs a success.

Additionally, at each conference, we honor some of the best upcoming and established practitioners and agencies in our field. You can learn more about the the five awards here.

So, escape the office and find inspiration.

Provided by:

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2018 USF Social Marketing Conference | Clearwater, FL

I dont think I need to tell you how big social media is.

Social media isthe fastest growing trend in the history of the world.

This sector has grown faster than the Internet itself.

Within the first ten years of being publicly available, the Internet managed to gather roughly 1 billion users.

If you think reaching nearly one in six people on the planet within ten years is fast, then I agree with you.

But, how about reaching one in five within nine years?

Since opening up for everyone to sign up on September 26, 2006, Facebook just crossed 2 billionmonthly active users as of quarter two of 2017.

Even though the world population has grown to over 7.5billion, by now, one out of every fourhumans on this planet has a Facebook account.

Facebook, quite literally, is beginning to take over the world. 62% of people in North Americause the platform, and the percentages for similar countries are equally staggering.

In some ways, Facebook is a country of its own. Its larger than any other country in the world, and one could even argue that its more connected.

And thats just Facebook.

We havent even taken into account the usership on all the other platforms.

By the end of that analysis, wed likely have trouble keeping count.

But dont mistakenly believe that people are only using these platforms once a month just because thats how most people go about measuring the stats.

In reality, people are using these platforms every single day. And they use them not just once per day, but multiple times.

People check, check, and check again.

In fact, were so addicted to our mobile phones and the social media apps on them that theres now a word for our obsession.

Nomophobia is the fear of not being near your mobile phone.

With such widespread use, social media presents an incredible marketing opportunity.

If youre not using social media marketing already, youll either have to learn it now or lose in the long run.

In this social media marketing guide, Im going to walk you through the 12most popular platforms.

Ill give you an overview of each one, show you how to build a successful social media strategy for them, and point you to some of the best places to learn even more.

Below is a table of contents, so you can quickly jump to whichever platform interests you the most.

But first, lets go over some definitions.

As usual, Wikipedia is a disappointment when trying to define social media marketing.It simply says, Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.

Wow, who wouldve thought, right?

Id like to take a swing at defining social media marketing myself:

Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing.

You gaining traffic is only the result of social media marketing. What do you do to get that result? Create content that works well on each platform.

Naturally, however, each platform is different. On one, blog content is the master. On another, video dominates. And on another still, pictures win the day.

Thats why Im going to show you the differences between the top 12 platformsand how you can leverage each.

As youll see, each platform requires a slightly different strategy.

Because heres the thing: Everyone wants their content to go viral.

But, to do that, the content must be engaging so that people want to share it. Your content must be so good that it makes the user want to tell all of his or her friends about it.

Otherwise, your social media strategy will fail.

Youll have no shares, no viral content, and no traffic back to your site.

Even though you hear about the same few social networks all of the time, that doesnt mean there arent any others out there.

Wikipedia alone lists over 200 of them.

This great graphic called The Conversation Prismgives a good overview.

While this list is fairly up to date, it may come as a surprise to you that its entirely different from the first version of this graphic from 2008.

All versions aggregate around 200 services, but from version to version (which they usually update every 2-3 years), the creators remove over 100 social media platforms and add another 100.

The world of social media is changing incredibly fast. So when youre just starting out, start with the ones that have been around for years.

Betting on the next big thing can pay off if youre right. But, if youre just getting started on a social media strategy, you cant afford to not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account since weve already seen how effective they are.

Lets look at some key social media terms.

Content: Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, something to pin on a board on Pinterest, and so on.

The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and that you need to custom-tailor it to each platform. Whats even more important than content, though, is context.

Context: Gary Vaynerchuk said that if content is king, then context is god. You can have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, very few people will see it. On Twitter, however, that same joke as a tweet might crush it.

And, the opposite is also true. Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead. And that brings us to hashtags.

Hashtags: By now, theyre a very common form that people use to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtagsto let you describe the topic of your content or mark it as part of current trends.

They make your content easy for users to discover and therefore more likely that theyll share it.

Shares: Shares are the currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media.

People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates, and potential reach. But none of these tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.

When people engage and interact with your content, thats good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.

A great tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content is BuzzSumo:

The more shares, the more people love your content. Its the best form of engagement that people can have with it.

Engagement: This is ageneral term that means that people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a recommend, a comment, or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where its at.

Now that weve covered some definitions, lets take a look at some social media marketing trends for 2018.

The social media world changes faster than any other online space.

And keeping up with it isnt an easy task.

So here are a few trends youll want to keep in mind. Most likely, these trends will impact not just 2018, but also the future years to come.

Heres what they are.

Organic reach is down

Once upon a time, a social media user could post compelling content and easily grow their social media following.

After a few months, theyd receive loads of friend requests, comments, shares, and likes, all because of their amazing content.

But today, thats not so much the case.

In fact, most social media platforms are making it increasingly difficult to build an organic following.

And its not unintentional.

Heres why. As the ability for organic superstars to shine goes down, something else goes up.

You guessed it: ad spend.

Of course, thats just Facebook. But the truth is that its the same for every social media platform. They make it more difficult for users to grow their own organic platform so that businesses spend more money on advertisements.

In fact, one change that Facebook made caused a 52% drop in organic reachper post in just a few months.

Remember: Social media platforms are businesses.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and every single other social media space wants to make money.

And they do that by connecting you with paying customers. Ideally, they do that well. But ultimately, they are each in it for the money. So you have to watch out and measure your own efforts to see what works and what doesnt.

Social is becoming more pay to play

As organic reach becomes more difficult, businesses have to pay to play.

They can no longer trust savvy content marketing efforts to build a following.

The more that social media algorithms prioritize advertisements, the more that businesses are willing to pay.

This is why social media ad spend is on the way up. Advertising budgets for social media doubled from 2014 to 2016.

Thats not very surprising, really.

It makes sense when you find out that social media companies make practically all of their money from advertisements.

In other words, social media is only free for users because advertisers are paying loads of money to reach those users.

The user is the product.

But to reach them, you have to pay.

Fortunately, if you choose the right social media platform for your business to invest money into, that wont be too big of a problem.

Most social media sites still have very reasonable advertising costs, particularly if you have thought through your advertisements well.

After all, the better your ads, the less youll spend.

Channels are merging

As entrepreneurs create social media websites, the possibilities become increasingly endless.

And that trend isnt slowing down. As new ways of communicating, reaching customers, and pulling leads develop, so do strategies that are equally innovative.

Take, for instance, cart abandonment emails.

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Social Media Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Holiday season is the perfect time for some marketing on social media. This Holiday season, MTA experts share some of the top social media marketing tips to help you bring your A-game in 2019.

Social media is an active channel for companies to build their brand, establish thought leadership, and interact with their community. Since we are a couple of weeks away from 2019, almost every marketer will be busy planning for their next year's social media strategy.

An updated GreenZone, few additional features evaluated and here comes the refreshed Buyer's Guide no SMB can afford to miss!

In this article, we bring five social media marketing tips from MTA experts to help you prepare for the coming year.

Before coming to the strategic and tactical part of your social media plan, evaluate the performance of your content for the current year as this will allow you to set the tone for the next year.

Go through the analytics/insights section of your social media profiles to see the effectiveness of your content. Understand what type of content resonates with your different personas. While doing so, you will also come to know the ideal time and day to post different types of content.

Paul Herrera, Co-Founder and COO of Maven recommends the following 3-step framework:

Also Read: Dont Let a Limited Budget Hinder Your Social Media Campaign

If you are running your marketing plans through guesswork, you are doing it wrong. Modern marketing is data-driven where you can virtually measure the impact of every single activity. Despite this, many marketers commit the dire mistake of not setting up any goals and measuring anything. In such cases, youd find marketers saying, Well, we stopped doing social media because it didn't work us."

To avoid this, start by setting the right goals and metrics, choosing the right audience, and using it as a foundation to create your strategy.

While addressing the social media mistakes to avoid, Neel Sinha, Founder, MyLnk, says, "To get success in social media, marketing strategy should have well-defined goals, the target audience must be identified, tactics to be employed should be implemented, the right amount of time should be invested, and proficient workforce should be employed to perform the tasks."

Also Read: What Are the 4 Key Metric Types for Social Marketing Automation?

This leads to different communication strategies and messaging for different channels, in the end confusing the audience. To indeed ace customer engagement in 2019, marketers must approach marketing as a whole rather than siloing it.

Jitesh Banga, Product Marketing Strategy, Adeptia says, A smoother symbiosis between all social channels can help propel new horizons and innovation. Enterprises can set up a unified interaction center, counteract many scale issues, and swiftly deal with silos that prevent teams from boosting business loyalty and improving social engagement.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Turn Social Media Interactions Into Actionable Sales Leads

In the early days, marketers used social media as a one-way communication channel but successfully evolved into using it as a platform to build and manage a community of their brand.

Eric Meyerson, Head of Marketing, Sensai, emphasizes on the importance of listening to your audience. Even if you dont spend a dime on sponsored posts or Facebook ads, it can still be useful to use Facebook or other social platforms as a listening tool to keep a finger on the pulse of public opinion. You might glean insights just from listening that can help you improve your customer experience or head off the next public relations snafu, he adds.

Also Read: 10 Ways to Ace Social Media Marketing In 2020 And Beyond

AI and machine learning have already made giant strides through content curation, chatbots, email personalization, voice search, etc. to name a few. Since social media is a densely populated space, it doesn't take much time to turn a minor mess up into a major disaster. Thankfully, AI can be of a huge help by implementing the right damage control practices.

Pritha Bose, Marketing Content Specialist, Aritic informs, Brands can find themselves in a sudden nightmare if product hoax stories or product disasters or trolls from competitors make way into social media. Luckily, AI is on its way to curating conversation flows and content to manage such fiascos. Using various filtering systems, AI systems are capable of monitoring millions of user comments across a large range of platforms and predict an emergency long before it occurs in real-time.

We hope these expert tips will guide you towards the right path in planning your social media activities for 2019.

If you have any questions about social media marketing, feel free to drop them in the comments below!

Also, dont forget to share this article on your social media handles, and tag us!

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Ace 2019 with 5 Expert Social Media Marketing Tips