How to Rock Twitter in 2015

Rock Twitter 2

Revamp your profile

Twitter is not static and it should be revisited every now and then. Visuals such as your header and profile images need to be up-to-date, compelling, polished and optimized to reflect your brand and what you tweet about. One of the most important element of your Twitter profile your Twitter bio. It is one the first things your potential followers see, which makes it a unique opportunity for you to present yourself and your brand, grow your Twitter audience and build a stronger online presence.This means that you need to make sure you make the most out of these 160 characters with keywords, links and smart copy.

Tweet Smart

In Tweeting smart can help you increase your brand’s awareness on Twitter and build an audience in a more effective way. But what does smart tweeting mean? Using hashtags that are relevant to your content and the audience you’re targeting, knowing when it’s best for you to tweet to maximize your reach and of course tweeting often. You can use tools such as Social Bro that creates a report and lets you know when are the best times to tweet. Part of your content plan is also your tweeting frequency. A good starting point is sending out three to five tweets throughout a day. Obviously, you need to experiment with different tweeting frequencies to see what resonates best with your audience and discover when it’s best for you to tweet.

Split test your marketing on Twitter

Twitter is a great platform for split testing your marketing and gathering feedback. You can use Twitter to test the subject lines of your email marketing campaigns, blog topics and titles as well as social media copy.

Engage

It is important to remember that Twitter is not just a a tool for you to share your press releases promotions and content about how awesome you are. First and foremost Twitter is a social platform that calls for interaction with other users.
Answer questions, participate in conversations and retweet your followers. Building relationships with your audience and influencers in your field and being part of conversations not only helps you boost your brand’s visibility but also it is how you develop trust and establish yourself as an authority.

Use #hashtags

When you think of Twitter, you think of hashtags. Hashtags originated from Twitter and they have been adopted by different platforms as an easy way to label and categorize content.Using the right hashtags on Twitter can help you generate engagement and amplifying your message to specific audiences outside your group of followers and possibly generating leads. Using the right hashtags will help you target the right audience for your brand, be part of their Twitter conversations and start building relationships.

Go visual

Tweets that include videos and images have proven to drive more engagement than other tweets. As a result, many successful brands such as Oreo use a mix of GIFs, Vines, videos and images in their tweets on a regular basis with a positive impact on their engagement rates.

Twitter monitoring and analytics

Your Twitter strategy wouldn’t be complete without constantly evaluating and refining your tactics. This is the reason why you need to keep a close eye to your audience and engagement metrics and search for answers on what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, it is important to also focus on monitoring your brand and your competitors for a better understanding of what you need to change in your approach and where you should focus your efforts

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Measuring Social Media Success (Part 1)

So you have social media profiles, followers and you are on your way to social media success. So how do you know If you’re doing a good job? There are certain metrics that you need to measure that will tell the tale. The first set of Social media metrics to measure are:

Likes, Shares, Comments, Retweets, Mentions and Favorites

Retweets are your Tweets forwarded by people who follow you to their own network of followers. This gives you the opportunity to reach more people who may think your content is valuable. That new network of Twitter users who are exposed to your Tweets can become a part of your primary network if they come back and follow you.

mentions

@ followed by username is a way to tag/mention people in a post

Mentions refers to any Tweets in which your Twitter handle, or any keyword you are tracking, is used. When you have a high number of mentions, your Twitter audience is telling you that you are adding value with the content you are sharing.

Favorites mean that someone has marked your post as one of their favorite Tweets. That post then gets added to the user’s list of favorite Tweets and is
open for anyone to see.

Likes are a way for people to show that they find what you posted interesting.

Comments left by users are a direct way for people to engage with your posts and start a conversation. Comments are great to track customer feedback and insight to your customer’s perspective, opinions and even suggestions, especially if your posts ask open ended questions.

Shares take your content to the next level by spreading it across networks that you are not directly connected to. This allows you to increase social media engagement and brand awareness.

 

 

There are several tools that measure these metrics, that we will cover in another post, but you can get these statistics from the platforms themselves through their native analytics20140812-144010-52810966.jpg

The 3 things you MUST do to maximize the NEW Twitter Features

Twitter Tips

Twitter will begin rolling out the new change to Profile Pages to users over the next few weeks. Here are some tips to help get you started to maximize the new features:

 

  1. Plan Your New Profile and Cover Images: Twitter recommends dimensions for header photo of 1500px in width × 500px in height. Now is the time to plan your cover photo image look and feel. The larger profile image on the new version of Twitter gives users more real estate to set the tone of their page. Consider changing profile photos on an ongoing basis to help keep users coming back.

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2.Offer Specials with Pinned Tweets: You now have the opportunity to feature a specific tweet a the top of your profile page to let new visitors get a better sense of who you are and what your profile is all about. One thing for brands to consider is featuring a tweet that offers an exclusive piece of content to visitors. Good ideas are white papers, eBooks and Infographic…these are hot trends for brand recognition.

3. Use the Mobile Features for Photo Sharing: Tagging multiple people and posting multiple photos is a great way for brands to better engage with their audience. Consider posting multiple photos that illustrate a story or message to your audience and tag individuals that you think would appreciate the message, interact with it and share it to a wider audience. This new version of Twitter places a deep emphasis on photos and video. Publish photos that are bold and catch peoples attention. This will help to increase engagement when visitors choose to filter your tweets using the photo/video filter.

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Contact info@socialmediafuse.com to get your Social Media Marketing optimised

Visit us http://www.socialmediafuse.com

Follow us on twitter @socialmfuse

Fundamentals of a Social Media Plan

There are a few basic steps that you must take to implement a social media marketing plan for your brand. As with everything in life, planning goes a long way, and having a road map that can be tweaked saves us from being haphazard in our execution. Here are some of the things you should do before taking that leap.

20131019-235706.jpg1. Have a clear goal: Before you venture out on a social media marketing plan you have to determine what your objective is. Different brands have different purposes. Some want to build awareness while others want to drive traffic and generate sales. Perhaps you are heavy on customer service and you want to invite your clients to have another point of contact so you can provide after sales service or answer questions they may have. Having clearly defined goals can help you to best implement your plan.

2. Know your target audience: In addition to knowing the demographic makeup of this group and their interests, you need to have a general understanding of where your audience hangs out online. This is key in finding them or deciding how to target them.

3. Select the right platforms: Naturally, you need to first understand who your ideal customer to know where he or she is most likely to spend his or her time online. To best help you make this decision you can do some research on your target demographic and cross reference that with the typical users on each social media platform

20131019-235911.jpgDefine your selling and value proposition and how you will create a key point of difference. This will help you to come up with relevant keywords that your target audience would likely type into a search engine to arrive at your website. you can use keyword researcher determine the right phrases to use

Create a content calendar.

Last but not least, this is your final step and one of the most important for a successful campaign.This calendar should also indicate which social media channels the content will be published on and the topics for the content. This can help you to better keep track of how often you are publishing content and how frequently you are utilizing th different social media channels. Using a tool like Google docs, teemd.com or other collaborative apps can allow your entire team to access and update this calendar, and chime in on content ideas

Contact: info@socialmediafuse.com to ignite your business

Act now to lock in our “FALL Special” Deal. Mention “Fall Social” in the subject line!

Social Media Metrics Explained

Social Media Marketing is never easy. You dont just click some buttons to create a profile and just start posting. You can post great content but if no one see it or  interacts with it, the essentially it is useless…like the proverbial tree falling in a forest. There is an intricate science to being effective. As with all things marketing, there are ways to measure efficacy in social media. The terminology, however can be very daunting to the Social Media Newbie. We are here to explain what these terms mean before we can move out to explaining how we make things work:

computer reachFans Reached.

This is the average number of fans who receive your content. This is different from your actual number of fans/ likes…here is why:  Facebook shares your content with a small percentage of fans unless you have a very engaged community. The key to increasing this figure is having a community that comments, likes or shares your posts. Facebook then ramps up your Edgerank, which increases your reach.

Quick Tip: (One of the main reasons is that most people don’t see your posts and some posts may not resonate with your audience, so you need to post frequently to figure out what works for your fan base.)

Engagement

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Engagement: Who started or joined the conversation

This is the average percentage of users who’ve seen your post and then either liked, commented, shared or clicked on the post. This is why it increases your metrics when you share “Clickable content such as videos/ polls etc).  If you focus on increasing this figure, it will help your Page significantly.

People Talking About. ( PTAT ) This is similar to engagement, but doesn’t include people who clicked on the post, so it will always be lower than engagement.

Negative Feedback

Face it: There will be people that wont  like your brand anymore for various reasons. This metric is the average percentage of users who gave negative feedback by hiding a single post, hiding all Page posts or reporting a post as spam.

Quick Tip: Know your audience and always be appropriate

Viral Reach

This is when people who are not fans get to see the content you shared. This could be because the content gets shared out by your fans to their friends.

Organic Reach

This is the average percentage of fans and non-fans who see your content when it’s posted.

Click-Through Rate

Click Through

Click Through

This is the average number of people who interacted with your posts by watching a video, clicking on a photo or listening to an audio file.

Impressions

An impression is a measure of the number of times an ad is displayed, whether it is clicked on or not.  Each time an ad displays it is counted as one impression

These are some of the terms that marketers use to measure Social Media efficacy outside of the know metrics such as “fans” “friends” or “likes” Now you can speak intelligently about social media and make an impression.

Social Media Fuse Inc generates analytics reorts for thier clients and give feedback on ths=ese metrics across different platforms. COntact us today for a free Social Media Audit : Info@socialmediafuse.com or visit us on the web at http://www.socialmediafuse.com We would love to hear from you.

Why you should use Location Based Marketing

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Are you capitalizing on Geo-Tagging?

Following up on our post about mobile websites, we thought it would be           appropriate to tell about location based marketing which can be a huge traffic driver   for physical retail locations. We are all mobile and most of us have smart phones. Apps such as Foursquare and loopt. Twitter and Facebook have a fun feature where you can check in to a physical location.

 Quick Tip: If your company is not registered as a location that fans can check into, you need to do this now. This is the first step.

Once you are live then you are ready to use the marketing tools that encourage check ins.

You may ask what the benefit of check-ins are. Marketing 101 states that the best form of marketing is word of mouth. If a person checks in at your location and has 500 friends, the the possible amount of people seeing this check in is 500. Do this for each person that checks in and this multiplies your reach exponentially.

 So how do you encourage check ins?

This is another marketing opportunity. By offering incentives for check ins such as coupons, contest entry and sweepstakes, customers will check in. Who doesn’t love a bargain?

Some examples are:

discounts

  •  Discounts:  Offer a discount to an individual for simply checking in
  •  Loyalty:  Discount or freebie for Multiple checkins
  •  Bulk Check-ins: Offer a Deal to groups of friends who check-in together

Fans can know about deals through facebook posts ( Sponsored or organic) , Signage outside of a physical  location or advertisements on traditional media. Social Media Fuse can do all your Geo- marketing as a part of their integrated Social Media Marketing. All you have to do is sit back and count the traffic. Once the fans come in, the rest is up to you!

Upwards Mobility

Mobile statistics are staggering. Ask yourself what percentage of your time is spent on your desktop/laptop vs your smart phone/tablet and you will see what I mean.

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What is the difference between a tablet and a laptop? The simplest answer is this:

Laptops are best for creating content while tablets and mobile are perfect for consuming it. If you are a Business then you probably spend equal amounts of time both consuming and creating content ( Including curation of shareable content for your Social Media Marketing) If you are on the consumer side then…you are consuming consuming and then consuming.

66 percent of those smartphone users surveyed said a good mobile site would make them more likely to make a purchase, while 74 percent said they would be more likely to return to that site. half of mobile device users surveyed said even if they like a business, they would visit its website less often if it didn’t work well with their smartphone. Google wants more mobile websites, more businesses will start moving that way. This simply means that of your web site is not optimized for mobile than you are being left behind.

261058-holiday-with-tabletFortunately for us, Social media platforms are optimized for mobile and as a content creation agency, Social Media Fuse Inc creates and updates a significant amount of content through or mobile tools. There are also guidelines for mobile compatibility that we use when creating content, since we know that the majority of our fan base for our clients will be viewing our content on tablets and smartphones. this is one less thing for you to worry about when you hire a social media marketing agency such as ours to elevate your content.

Contact us today for a free Social Media Audit for your Company or Brand

Tweet Tweet!

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

In our introductory post we explained that social Media is the

New Normal

There are a plethora of sites from Facebook, Pinterest, Digg and Delicious and not every Social Media Platform suits every business model.

Twitter is a different beast from Facebook in many ways but it is an equally powerful tool if used right.

Many people find it complicated at first, but once you grasp the concept of tweeting, retweeting, following and hashtags you will recognise the power of the little bird…

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Here are some key uses of Twitter for business:

Business Intelligence:

Every company has competitors and if you follow your competitors on twitter you can see what types of information they are sharing.

Not only can you see what they share but you can also see who is following them and usually, these are companies and individuals from your industry.

Gain Klout!

You gain loyal followers who like what you have to say and what you share ( articles, blogs, videos etc. ) This is why it is important to have a unique and consistent voice. This can ultimately translate into new business

Customer Service:

Twitter is a direct link to your customers and a tool to give in the moment customer service or just answer simple questions in real time.

If your business is not on twitter you should create a profile now . To get started, remember that your tweets are limited to 140 characters. When you share links they are usually automatically shortened or you can use bit.ly. In your profile, you can use your logo as a profile pic, put a brief synopsis of your business and a link to your web site.

This blog will share in-depth tips and tricks in future post, but we urge you to get started on twitter today.

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Social Media 101

You know that “Social” is “The New Media” and you know that your brand needs to be on board with this. You know that there are potential clients among the 800 million Facebook users but you are not sure how to reach them. You also know that Facebook is not the only platform and wonder if you should also be using Twitter, Pinterest, Google plus and a host of other platforms. You are also not sure how to design your page and to create the content that will drive your brand identity.

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   These are some of the daunting feelings that small and large businesses alike go through. You can search the web but sometimes the information is not straight forward enough and there are steps you must take in order to have an online presence that works for your brand.

   Through our series of 101’s we will take you through the necessary steps so that you can learn to navigate the landscape.

Before you can ace Social Media Marketing, it is necessary to understand each platform, and the benefits of using it. Facebook is very consumer-oriented, while LinkedIn focuses on building business relationships. Twitter offers the opportunity to connect with both types of audiences.

Social media marketing can prove very lucrative for companies willing to invest the time and energy. There are numerous social media tools that you will learn about in this blog that can reduce the investment required to be successful. In this post we will inform you about the King of the Social Media platforms: Facebook

facebook_128Facebook

This is a huge market of over 800 Million Users. Users share information such as Articles, Videos, and Pictures etc. As a brand you want to do the same as well, and then take it a step further. When it comes to Facebook, it is all about news feed marketing. You want to can get your brand and your content on as many people’s news feed as possible.

You gather “Fans” through Facebook’s robust advertising platform and also from linking through other platforms and your brand website through plug-ins. Most, if not all web hosting sites offer this service. If they do not, you can incorporate a widget through ADD THIS. It is east to get the code and embed in your web site. Some ideas of what to do on your page are:

  • Encouraging posts on your wall
  • Having a contest or offering sweepstakes
  • Promoting events and specials
  • Creating Custom Tabs to showcase products events and contests and integrate other social sites
  • Give real Time Customer Service

Social Media Marketing is a very effective too to add to your marketing strategy. Contact Social Media Fuse Inc. for a free Social Media Marketing analysis today.