Mediaboss Marketing

Content marketing and social media seem like they were made for each other. There are currently over 2 billion social media users worldwide. Quality content is what makes social media tick. Unfortunately, most brands have a social media voice that is mostly detached from their content marketing strategy.

If content marketing is a high priority for you, squeezing the last drop out of social media is critical. Ultimately, the goal is to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible, and for that, social media is perhaps the best way to expand your reach and generate more traffic.

That said, its much more than just a tool to help gain exposure. Along with a myriad of business benefits, it serves as a direct channel for your brand where you can incorporate offers, live updates and customer service.

The key to using social media to boost awareness for your website is by engaging viewers with useful, relevant material when they need it, as opposed to when you create it. This task is a lot harder than it seems.

Keep in mind, the stream of information on social media moves very, very quickly. The last thing you want is for your message to get buried and lost before anyone has had a chance to see it.

Lets take a look at how you can take your content marketing efforts to the next level.

The best social media marketers dont start by posting. They start by listening. Social monitoring (or listening) is a great way to gauge how your target audience feels about a particular subject or industry.

Did you know that Facebook users collectively generate around 3.2 billion likes and comments every day? Monitoring what people are liking and commenting on is crucial to finding out whats currently trending.

Sure, manually checking up on your industry across all the social media platforms can be tedious. Luckily, plenty of tools are out there that enable you to track what the masses are saying so that you can learn about their interests, perceptions and concerns.

Brandwatch is one that will give you data-driven insights as to what your customers and influencers in your industry are talking about including the competition. Identifying the most pressing questions or concerns can help gear your messaging to popular demand.

With that knowledge, you can create content that provides true value to your target audience. For instance, if you run an industry blog, you can use these social insights to determine relevant topics to write about and to create catchy headlines to draw in visitors.

BuzzFeed is the quintessential example of this. Their casual, yet informative platform is constantly producing high-quality content that touches on an array of relevant topics in the field of news, entertainment and general interest. As of this writing, theyve had over 550 million global visits in the last 30 days.

To use social monitoring to find topics to gear your content toward, youll want to brainstorm a list of key terms and phrases relevant to your brand and industry. This will work to pinpoint the interests of your target community so you can design content to fit their needs.

Content built around these terms can then go to multiple channels in multiple formats and eventually be routed back to social media for sharing.

While your usual social media management tools like Hootsuite and Twitters own TweetDeck offer good collaboration opportunities for the purpose of posting and scheduling, companies with cross-channel marketing departments can look toward objective-focused task management tools. WorkZone or Brightpod, for instance, can help you manage interdepartmental communications or track the effectiveness of integrated marketing campaigns.

The ultimate purpose of content creation is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. The beauty of social media is that once your content is out there, there are few limits to where it can reach.

Encouraging users to share content can be done in many ways. First off, the overall look of a piece matters a lot. As a general rule of thumb, think visually with each post. Visual content gets more views, clicks, shares and likes than text-based material. For instance, on Facebook and Twitter, photos get 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs.

If you produce blog content, you need to go beyond just placing easy-to-find social share buttons all over your page. Try things like Click to Tweet in your next article. Choose the tweet the way youd choose a headline; embed things like interesting quotes, facts or images within your content in a compelling way so the reader is inclined to post it.

Content is meant to be shared. Social media is the perfect vehicle to get your material noticed with a chance to go viral.

Finding the perfect influencer on social media can be a game-changer that skyrockets your content marketing efforts. The right influencer can generate more than double the sales of paid advertising and increase client retention.

A simple retweet or share by an individual with a large social following can do wonders for your content as it is exposed to a vastly wider audience than usual. Why do you think companies pay celebrities tons of money to tweet about brands or products? The math goes beyond just how many followers they have. Its about the level of engagement they have with their fans.

One of my favorite influencer marketing campaigns was Adidass #MyNeoShoot, where they recruited Selena Gomez to promote their Neo line. Gomez invited users to take pictures of themselves and apply to be the next Adidas model. By the time the campaign ended, Adidas had gained 12,000 entries, 71,000 brand mentions and 41,000 new Instagram followers.

Locating influencers on social media can take a bit of digging. Look into your industry and identify the key figures. This could be anyone like a blogger, a journalist, a political figure, or even another business owner.

Tools like Klout allow you to measure influencer scores to determine the best ones to pursue in your field. While you shouldnt take such scores by their face value, they offer a good place to start your identification and outreach process.

Forming a relationship with a good influencer could be the best business move you ever make.

Social media should be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Chances are, youre already spending hours of your time researching and crafting awesome content. All of your hard work deserves to get as much attention as possible.

Tweaking your social media presence with a purpose is the key to effectively distributing your content and increasing the reach of your brand messaging.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Read more:
Using social media to jump-start your content marketing strategy - Marketing Land

Forbes

The Social Potential Failure Threatening Companies Everywhere Forbes Agile Adoption of Tech & Trends. ROI Positive Social Marketing. Real-time responsiveness. According to a recent report by Altimeter Group, the most mature social businesses are both more profitable and have more loyal customers, each by a 77 ...

Read this article:
The Social Potential Failure Threatening Companies Everywhere - Forbes

Columbia University is the oldest university in New York, and the fifth oldest institution for higher education in the United States. Its School of Professional Studies offers 14 master's degree programs across a range of disciplines, and social media is a big part of connecting with new students, nurturing the alumni network and keeping the various programs aligned in their communications strategy.

But how can you bring social media to the forefront of communications in an institution that was founded in 1754? And how do you help entire faculties get comfortable with using social media as part of their everyday routine? I caught up with Caroline Henley, social media specialist at Columbias School of Professional Studies, to find out how shes been using social to make waves in the academic world.

What are some of the biggest challenges youve experienced using social in a higher education setting?

If youre in a school with a wide variety of programs, things can quickly become chaotic on social if you dont find a way to manage things effectively. Maybe a school has 60 different channels, and you have several people trying to log in to every account to post suddenly youre on a constant hunt for passwords or for the right person to help you.

When I came on board at Columbia SPS, I immediately brought on a social media management platform. With Falcon.io, we have the chance to connect everything in one place, and to make the process of becoming active on social easy and accessible. It creates home for a school that might be delving into bioethics on one hand, actuarial science on the other, and it unifies a lot of programs that wouldnt be connected otherwise.

Connecting and unifying channels might sounds simple, but a lot of higher ed orgs are very traditional institutions, and they arent necessarily ahead in the digital curve. When youre on campus, sometimes you rely on running around into different buildings, and just knowing who people are. And so sometimes the marketing/digital team isn't quite as in the loop as they might be in a more digitally-driven company. Unifying people onto digital through a platform was just huge for us.

How was social managed before you used Falcon?

There was no social hire before me, no one person responsible for overseeing all social activity. There was one team member sort of handling social as a side task, but there wasnt sufficient investment for it to be a priority.

When I came on, I used the Falcon platform to inspire the different masters programs to include me more. I showed them what listening could do for their outreach. I showed them how they could schedule posts in Publish and how they could keep all their passwords in one place. For the first time this brought all the programs together for social, and this enabled me to get a level of control over the overall brand voice for the first time.

What objectives does SPS have for social?

My title is social media specialist. I was initially brought on to get the deans social and online presence going. But it was clear there was more of a need for the school brand as well. So the strategy has been to dive into both, using the dean as the mouthpiece for the leadership of the school, giving students access to his office and highlight the strategic initiatives the school is building.

Were now using social in more areas than ever. Its been a great tool for opening up the channels of communication for our students, prospective students, alumni, faculty and staff. These people could be living across the country, all over the world (Columbia is one of the most international schools in the US) so we need to unite our community across a worldwide stage.

Social is also a way for us to break down the walls of the Ivy League. We live-tweet and livestream guest lectures, all the interesting insights from the top scholars and practitioners speaking at our events, and our social community has access to it whereas they could not before. What I love about my job is that I get to make all of this accessible to a wider audience.

Our chief academic officer, Dr Sharyn OHalloran, recently launched a new fintech model to help implement new standards in finance, and we hosted a panel of speakers from across fintech and the finance industry to discuss it. This is an event that the Columbia community was invited to, but we could also broadcast it through social, which allows a greater access to our work, and offers a fascinating look into this intersection of university research and the needs of the market.

How do you use social to engage prospective students?

We host online info sessions where prospective students can can sign up to ask questions directly to the director of their chosen program. I promote these across our social channels.

Then theres also the brand awareness, content marketing side of things we promote our faculty when a program is mentioned in the press. We run alumni profiles to talk about how they're using their degrees in the real world. And we shine a light on the contents of our programs, so people researching can get an understanding of the student experience.

Suffice to say, theres a ton going on, with new innovations, initiatives and events happening all the time. Im just one social media person trying to unite it all, and this is where the Falcon platform is a huge help. With our various programs prioritizing what needs to be broadcast, having the platform at the center of everything makes it much easier and incredibly enjoyable to keep our schools various social efforts unified and on brand.

Manita Dosanjh is PR and communications executive at Falcon IO

See more here:
How Columbia University unified a fragmented social marketing setup - The Drum

Invoicing can be a daunting experience, especially when many entrepreneurs and freelancers are busy juggling their main work: social media marketing.

However difficult it may seem, invoices are crucial for getting positive cash flow, the real metric to determining the health and longevity of your social marketing endeavor.

In order to help you increase your monthly cash flow and boost your social marketing business, well look at 5 tried and true ways to make your invoicing smarter.

One of the most important things for social media marketers to do when it comes to managing their invoices is to set very clear, direct general policies or Terms and Conditions.

When you create your T&Cs, you are actually giving yourself and your clients a reference point to how your invoicing processes should be going. These are general points that cover all your clients and will discuss the base payment and invoicing issues.

Its important to mention here that these T&Cs are not just client-facing, but inward-facing as well, so that you can keep yourself accountable and be stricter in the way you deal with clients when it comes to invoicing.

Your T&Cs should include the following points:

Setting these up clearly will allow you to point to all your clients what can be expected of you and from them when it comes to payment. This will help you to clarify many issues and avoid any problems later on.

As a social media marketer or manager, you are probably aware of the power of automation. Social media management usually revolves around a few key tools that help you to automate a lot of your daily tasks so that you can focus on other parts of the job.

However, very few social marketers connect this aspect with their invoicing. Instead, they go about the business of manually entering a lot of repetitive information about their clients. This usually means they have to sift through lots of emails to get the specific contact details or to decide what the next unique invoicing number should be.

Manual invoicing can be fine, especially with invoicing templates. However, online invoicing software was created to help small businesses and freelancers automate as much of their invoicing process as possible, giving them more time to focus on their main tasks.

This includes things like saved contact details and job descriptions, prices, etc. It also includes recurring invoicing (when you send similar invoices to the same client on a regular basis), expense tracking, and other features.

Webcast, February 28th: Sales Automation Made Easy

In this digital world, it should be a given that anytime you can automate something, you should do it. That way, you can focus on providing the best service to your clients and growing your business.

As opposed to your general policies from above, you still need to provide a specific job proposal to your social marketing clients.

This is the space where you can clearly help settle your clients expectations. Be sure to answer the following questions:

By addressing these issues clearly in your proposal or quote/estimate, youll be able to further avoid any confusion, delay, or outright payment refusal when it comes time to have your invoices paid.

One thing that affects a lot of entrepreneurs, but freelancers especially, is the energy drain that accompanies a completed task. This happens when you are trying your hardest to complete a project or reach a goal in the waning days or hours of the agreed timeframe. With the amount of energy spent on that, there is great relief in having it done and notifying your client.

However, right after that, many social marketers want to just take a breakfor an hour, a day, a week. And this energy drain then naturally leads to procrastination, where you should have sent the invoice out two weeks ago and still havent started on it.

This is one of the biggest reasons for not getting paid on timesimply, its because you didnt send your invoices out on time.

One great way to fight against that is to use, online invoicing software. You could probably do your whole invoice, from start to finish, in less than a minute. Or, with regular customers and regular prices, setting up recurring invoicing would mean that you wouldnt need to do anything at all. The software will do it for you.

Beyond that, its important to start putting your invoices together even before youve completed the task or the month is finished. This way, you can have a rolling invoice that you update for each itemized job so that you wont have to do it all in one day.

The biggest reason that social marketers dont have their invoices paid faster is because the clients just arent paying them on time. This happens a lot more than you think, and it can cause serious cash flow problems.

One reason that clients pay late is that they are busy and have simply forgotten. Another reason could be that they are holding off payment until their cash flow problems ease up. Either way, its your responsibility to remind them of their obligation to pay you on time.

The best thing to do is to send out a payment reminder to your client before the payment is actually due. The best payment terms is 14 days, and not the standard 30 days. So, for example, if it is day number 13, I will send a quick, polite email reminder that the payment will be due the following day.

If that payment isnt delivered on the 14th day, I will send another email reminder on the 15th day. These emails are all polite, of course. However, that doesnt mean they cant be strict and direct. With the second payment reminder, the client should be able to provide payment or inform you when payment will be made.

For the rare case when there are further delays, you should skip the email and place a personal phone call. Direct interaction with the client will be enough to jolt him or her to recognize their obligations to provide payment for your completed services.

In general, the most important takeaway here is that smarter invoicing is possible if you follow these steps. Not only will you see better revenues and boosts in your social marketing business. Youll also find that the relationships with your clients are improved and more professional.

Uwe is the Founder and CEO of InvoiceBerry. The online invoicing softwarehelps small businesses and freelancers to create, send and manage their invoices online. He's been in the tech scene since over 15 years with companies ranging from FinTech to AdTech and games publishing. Viewfullprofile

The rest is here:
5 Ways Smarter Invoicing Can Boost Your Social Marketing Business - Business 2 Community

Vancouver-based Hootsuite has announced that it has acquired New York-based LiftMetrix, which offers a tool to measure the return on investments on social media platforms. This marks Hootsuites second acquisition this month.

The addition of LiftMetrix will allow Hootsuites users to create more effective marketing campaigns as they will gain insights into the return on investment (ROI) of their paid, earned, and owned social media marketing campaigns. With access to LiftMetrixs tools, social media marketers will be able to monitor and drive the impact of their campaigns through social-to-web conversion tracking, content recommendations and insights, and social data-warehousing and integration with business intelligent tools.

Its critical for marketers today to prove the impact of social advertising on the companys bottom line, said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite. LiftMetrix offers easy-to-use analytics solutions that helps our customers make sense of data to maximize social marketing results. LiftMetrix will be a fantastic complement to the Hootsuite platform.

This deal comes two weeks after Hootsuite announced the acquisition of AdEspresso, which allows small and medium-sized businesses to split test every aspect of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

By joining Hootsuite, we will be able to offer increased value to our existing enterprise customers around their paid, earned, and owned social initiatives, said Nik Pai, co-founder and CEO of LiftMetrix. Its exciting to be a part of a company with Hootsuites velocity and trajectory.

LiftMetrix and Hootsuite have previously worked together through Hootsuites ecosystem of partners and applications. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Go here to see the original:
Hootsuite acquires New York-based LiftMetrix to help customers measure social marketing ROI - BetaKit