5 Ways to Stay Creative in Social Media Marketing

When social media first sprang onto the internet scene, there weren’t many marketers or entrepreneurs who put much stock into it. Social media began almost entirely as a platform for personal use. However, over the years, social networking brands have begun offering commercial entities opportunities to use their services for improving business and marketing. If you’re looking to get the best out of social media marketing but aren’t sure where to begin, these are five ways in which you can jump-start your creativity.

1. Find out what interests your audience. Most people utilize social media as a form of self expression and casual communication with peers. The sad truth is that most people in your target audience won’t immediately be interested in what you have to offer. This is why it’s your job to listen and find out what is important to your audience.

Based on what your audience already posts or follows, develop content that you know they will respond to. This takes a bit of research, but the insight is well worth it.

2. Make sure your content is “share-able.” Right now, the trends in social media sharing are list articles (for example, “21 Fluffy Cats That Will Put a Smile on Your Face”) and memes. People like sharing these types of posts because they are extremely relatable. Use these trends to your advantage by creating similar content that’s also relevant to your product or service.

3. Engage your audience. Even if you’re posting content that is attracting attention and followers, your job doesn’t end there. You should also be engaging your followers. If you make a habit out of posting content or advertisements that fail to evoke discussion, your followers are going to get bored extremely quickly. In turn, they could get annoyed with seeing your posts in general and eventually unfollow you.

Ask your followers questions on a regular basis, and don’t hesitate to jump into the discussion from time to time. Your audience will love the interaction on a personal, casual level.

4. Schedule your posts and use analytics. Rather than living in a state of mystery and wondering what your next post will be, take some time away to plan out your social media content all at once. This way, once your content is scheduled to post, you can use the downtime between them to analyze their performance rather than brainstorm new ideas for future posts. Analytics alone are great tools for determining whether your social media marketing strategy is worth developing further, or not worth the time at all.

5. Lastly, don’t focus your social media marketing strategy entirely on your business or product. Keep in mind that your content doesn’t have to be strictly about your business or product 100% of the time. Mix your content up with unrelated posts to keep things interesting and casual. You can easily find out what else you should be posting by, once again, checking out what else your target audience is interested in. The object is to speak to your followers on a personal, relatable level so that the bond of trust can be tightened even more.

Why Video in Social Media Marketing is a Smart Strategy for 2015

The rapid amount of communication that social networking allows is one of its greatest strengths, but it’s also one of the its greatest obstacles. People tend to jump from one thing to the next as soon as they have finished consuming that content.

This creates a unique challenge. Effective communications must involve information that is not only easy to digest, but also able to grab the audience’s attention.

Video in social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. It can keep a person’s attention while facilitating the proper mental processes to make sales and build relationships with consumers.

How Does Video Work With Social Media Marketing?

Video allows for content to be delivered to an audience in a format that’s easily digestible while retaining an individual’s attention. The best part is that video is often easier and faster to consume than plain text content or images, which means that it is more accessible to the busiest and most desirable of consumers.

The idea behind video in social media marketing is relatively simple. You integrate it just like you would traditional content that you would post on social media platforms, except that you can publish it in multiple places for a greater reach than what most other types of content would acquire.

The effect of video marketing is markedly different from other types of marketing. It creates an accessible connection that allows the person viewing it to quickly form an emotional connection, which in turn allows the story that the video tells to be more complete and compelling in a person’s mind.

The Versatility of Video

For example, say that you have a firm devoted to social media marketing Los Angeles publishing a video for a plumbing business. It details the common problems and preventative measures that owners can take to prevent their pipes from bursting in the cold months of the year.

This content can be published to the business’s website and to other places. It may be published on YouTube to gather interaction from people with Google Plus accounts, placed on Facebook, or published to another site that can host the video directly.

The link can the places where these videos can then be cross-promoted to Twitter and other platforms. It can even be posted to a company’s Google+ profile.

Unlike other forms of content, video does not suffer a penalty when it is posted to multiple places. This makes video versatile for spreading from one platform to the next.

The Interaction with Consumers

The spread of video is something that businesses like Cisco expect to expand quickly. They estimate that more than two-thirds of all consumer traffic will involve video by 2017.

The reason video in social media marketing is so much more powerful than regular content concerns how it can “pop out” to people whom view it. There’s no need to actively try to read words to interpret images, as moving pictures and audio can illustrate a story or present a problem and a solution that someone can view in just one sitting.

The real power of video for social media marketing Los Angeles resides in this unique quality. Video can give users a reason to pause through the rapid influx of messages that most social networks are inundated with so that the consumer hears only your message for a brief time.

This allows you to foster brand recognition, increase customer loyalty, and establish things that will benefit your brand in the long run both digitally and in the real world.

Is 2015 the Year for Video Marketing?

The prevalence of video marketing is on the rise. More consumers will use it in their daily lives. Even mobile device users, which have been one of the most profitable demographics, are increasingly relying on video as broadband wireless connections become increasingly more affordable.

Video will become a part of social media marketing Los Angeles in 2015. While it may not be the dominant form of content for a few years, starting now is the only way to ensure that your customers will follow your brand’s messages.

The best part is that the results of video can be felt as soon as you begin using it.

This makes video marketing a sound investment now, and an even smarter idea for the future.

Five Ways to Engage Your Audience through Social Media Marketing

Social media nowadays is more than just the latest website teens flock to with stories of their lives. It is, instead, a means by which people can connect. By extension, it is a means by which companies can reach their customers while growing their audience. If implemented correctly, social media is an extremely powerful tool that can either make or break your success.

Know the Audience
Before you can even hope to come up with an engaging social media marketing campaign, you have to know who it is for. Different groups of consumers find vastly different things entertaining. In addition, what they find relevant to making a decision also varies widely. The better you know the group you are trying to appeal to, the better you can shape your image and your message. This alone allows you to focus in on the specifics, giving you the power to immediately veto anything that falls outside the realm of acceptable.

Know your Goals
What are you hoping to achieve with the campaign? Wanting to expand your brand requires a far different approach than wanting to maintain the loyalty of your current customers. Take the time to create an extensively detailed list of all of the goals you are hoping to achieve. Once written down, you can isolate the common theme and build from there. Audiences respond much better to organized social media marketing than they do to disjointed collections of shots in the dark.

Know your Customers
This is more than simply being aware of who usually buys your product. This is actually getting to know your customer base. Social media marketing has made it that much easier for people to reach out directly to companies they like or have a problem with. Scouring feeds and forums will yield extensive discussions on both important and not so important topics. Take out the gems and utilize them to make the company better than it currently is. If your customers know that you are listening to their desires, they will be much more inclined to stay.

Know the Metrics
The proof is in the results, but this is impossible if there are no results to pull from. Find a way to quantitatively measure how people respond to certain things. With this collection of data and graphs, you will be able to accurately predict how things will go in the future. Without it, you’re simply flying blind, hoping that what you do yields results.

Know the Value
People love good news no matter how much current media would not want you to believe this. Keep your community active by sharing with them the great things your company has been up to because of them. If they feel responsible for adding to great causes, they will have a much more vested interest in continuing their support of your business.

Customer engagement is far from a hard goal to strive for. Instead of seeing it as a challenging new outlet, look at it as an active collaboration of everyone who wants the best.

Social Media Marketing Tips: The Joy and Cheer Holiday Edition

Read here for Social Media Marketing Tips, Joy, and Cheer!

The holiday season is a phenomenal time to spice up your social media marketing efforts. This is the time of year when people not only are in their best moods, but are actively monitoring companies’ social media profiles for deals and steals. Take advantage of this joyous time of year by giving your social media marketing strategies a major holiday boost. Here are some social media tips that will inspire joy and cheer.

Get an Early Start – Major retailers will begin planning their holiday social media strategy as soon as May. Even if you aren’t a major company like Macy’s or Best Buy, you can still be ahead of the game by getting a head start on your holiday social media strategy. Small businesses would be wise to start planning in early fall.

Be Cheerful! – This is the time of year when cynical consumers who might otherwise roll their eyes at blatant cheeriness are willing to ignore their inner pessimist and get into the holiday spirit. When it comes to your holiday social media efforts, the name of the game is to be cheerful. Bright colors, inspiring text and lots of pep and cheer will be warmly received by your customers this season.

Have Fun, But Be Genuine – Holiday social media marketing needs to be fun, but remember to be genuine. Remember, this is the season where consumers are willing to try retailers that are new to them in the hopes of getting great deals. If your genuine about your product and the specials that you are offering for the holidays, you may win new regular customers. However, if you try to oversell your consumers or are disingenuous about your company’s holiday deals, you might turn away some potential new loyal customers.

Pin, Pin, Pin Away! – Pinterest has really proven itself a worthy competitor to companies like Twitter and Facebook in the social media marketing landscape. Pinterest is also great because it allows you to promote content not necessarily related to your business without seeming sleazy. Feel free to share great holiday recipes and other holiday pins that people will want to spread. Just be sure that your business name and contact information is easily spotted on your Pinterest dashboard.

Focus On Those Great Deals – From Black Friday to post-New Year’s sales, this is a season where consumers are looking to spend. However, the new retail landscape is one where consumers let deals and specials truly influence their purchasing decisions above anything else. Once your have determined your holiday deals, don’t be afraid to spread the word across all of your social media pages. Just remember to do it in a way that is cheery and upbeat.

The holiday season is a great way to promote you brand. Above all else, remember to have fun with it and to get into the holiday spirit yourself. Genuine enthusiasm is attractive to consumers and your customers will be able to feel your excitement and holiday cheer.

Facebook’s New Hyper-Local Ads will Target People within a Mile of a Business

Facebook’s mobile omnipresence and drive for location sharing abilities has manifested with their new launch of super-targeted local advertising and virtual location targeting that’s geared towards getting consumers to visit nearby brick-and-mortar stores. Before long, physical businesses will have the capability to target ads to potential customers that are within a certain distance of their store’s location, which is essentially known as location targeting. Advertisers can predetermine a radius of their location as small as a mile if they wish and their ads will display on consumer’s web browsers or mobile phones. These new and innovative Local Awareness advertisements will be ready for business owners in the U.S. shortly and worldwide over the upcoming months.

Facebook’s hyper-targeted local advertising has been in the works for a while now. It obtained Rel8tion back in January 2011, which already implemented this type of ad targeting. Then, VP Carolyn Everson had the notion in June 2012 that location-conscious mobile phones could possibly one day facilitate hyper-targeted local Facebook ads, and so the plan took root and moved forward. Although the ads are in real-time, ultimately brick-and-mortar businesses could have the ability to pre-bid to hyper located audiences and reveal them to potential customers as they enter the targeted area.

Today, with more than 1 billion mobile phone users, several of which provide Facebook complete access to their specific location along with laptop users who volunteer key information including their location through their IP address and the city they currently live in, has easily provided Facebook all the information it needs to turn hyper local advertising into a reality. Thanks to its latest launch of its ‘Nearby Friends’ feature, Facebook advertising also has real-time location access on people using that particular tool.

Businesses can select an address from their Facebook page or simply key in their address, set up their radius, age range, gender, add a message and photo, and Facebook advertising will route the targeted ads to people close by. They can even choose to add directions in their ad through a unique button that will automatically launch a map app on the user’s mobile phone.

How easy would it be to simply walk down the block and receive an ad for a nearby clothing store or bar-and-grill that’s located right around the corner from where you are? Undoubtedly the ads wouldn’t be as effective if they included the whole city. But by focusing on consumers within just a mile, Facebook advertising can literally drive people to nearby brick-and-mortar businesses leading to actual sales. That’s cutting-edge marketing and something that local businesses are very interested in and currently can’t get anywhere else.

Ultimately, Facebook could potentially combine its ad network and retargeting capabilities with hyper location targeting so that virtually any business you frequent could target you with a relative ad in Facebook or even another kind of app when you’re close by. But for now, that’s in the future. As always, Facebook continues to seek new and better ways to make money.

It’s crucial to stay on top of the latest social media changes in order to successfully stay in the game. Facebook and other social media platforms are constantly changing. Therefore, if you need help effectively managing your social media platform, let Bright Age help.

Social Media Platform Pinterest to Introduce Targeted Advertising and Promoted Pins

Pinterest is relatively new to the social media scene, and it’s making quite an impact, especially with women. It’s knack for advertising products is quite effective. The social media forum will soon be adding more features to enhance the use of Pinterest. Once this happens, it’s expected to grow significantly. Here’s what you can expect of Pinterest as improvements are made.

1. New Conversion Tracking and Audience Targeting

In order to maximize any marketing campaign, they must track conversion rates and also target audiences that are most likely to buy a particular product or service. Companies that actively engage in this type of measurement will spend less on their marketing campaigns because they’ll yield more conversions per dollar spent. This is good news for Pinterest because they had not had this type of capability in the past. Now, they can compete with Facebook and Twitter.

2. Pinterest’s Privacy Policy Has Changed

With the new changes in the privacy policy, Pinterest will begin to collect information that will tell users more about whether certain clicks lead to purchases. It will also reveal the effectiveness of targeted ads. This privacy policy informs the public of how it will be interacting with online advertisers to gather information to assist with future marketing campaigns.

3. Ability to Add a Tracking Pixel to Promoted Pins

Tracking pixels on the Promoted Pins selection will help advertisers collect information about how popular a particular pin is performing. The Tracking Pixels can also be related to and used to track sales conversions. This type of information reported on viewer behavior is can be quite useful. The information will also inform advertisers which Pinterest users will later convert to buyers after viewing Promoted Pins.

4. Pinterest Advertisers Can Now Match Promoted Pins to User Groups

If you want to find out who bought products or services in the past from a Promoted Pin, this new feature will be of assistance. This type of tracking already exists on Facebook and Twitter, but now, Pinterest can use a hash tag as an identifier for certain information such as a customer’s email address.

5. Options for Pinterest Users

There are a lot of new changes being made, but Pinterest users will still have the option to choose not to participate in the personalized targeted ads. This is a relief for some users who don’t yet trust or appreciate the effort.

Pinterest Continues to Test to Determine What Works Best

Pinterest continues to test to determine what works best for the forum. Changes will be continually made until Pinterest is a major competitor of Facebook and Twitter. Until then, it will continue to keep its users informed of the latest developments as they are introduced.

Instagram now being used as a Social Media Marketing Tool

Instagram Is Now Being Used as a Social Media Marketing Tool

Instagram is a mobile photo-sharing site that has high potential as an effective social media marketing tool. Instead of only shared daily experiences passed between friends, Instagram can also alert a business’s customers to new sales specials, events or even how-to information related to a certain niche. Instagram paid advertising is now available for business owners as an option for increasing online visibility.

 

Instagram’s Effect on Social Media Marketing

When it comes to social media marketing Los Angeles, an Instagram account can serve as a localized advertising platform for companies in this city and its surrounding boroughs. The main effect of Instagram on social media marketing is the proof that a strictly image-based rather than a mainly text-based social site can be an effective advertising platform. A well-timed and interesting snapshot can catch visitors’ attention just as well as a typed slogan or comment.

 

How Instagram Reaches Targeted Audiences

Instagram users who follow a business’s profile will receive the latest posts from this company, including images and short video clips. While a good percentage of Instagram users access the site through their smartphones or tablets, a desktop version of the site is now available for potential customers who would like to view it with their web browsers. Just as with other forms of social media promotion, a company’s Instagram posts will reach the highest visitor numbers when those posts arr tightly targeted. Background research about a target market’s preferences, likes and common Instagram habits needs to be a high priority.

 

Benefits of Joining Instagram as a Business

Joining Instagram and building a strong profile allows both small and large businesses to reach a wider online audience with a high number of social media savvy members. Word-of-mouth recommendations through Instagram can carry a great deal of weight with frequent Instagram users who have large numbers of followers. Instagram also has features that allow business owners to build and encourage follower engagement. Some popular examples of engagement on Instagram include hosting photo contests, giving out Instagram-exclusive promo codes and sharing followers’ Instagram posts.

Just as with any social media platform, keeping Instagram followers engaged is the best way to keep those followers. The social photo-sharing site allows behind-the-scenes glances at a company, particularly at conferences and trade shows. Photos customers and fans post and hashtag with a business’s name can be some of the best forms of Instagram advertising.

Instagram Social Media Tool

Instagram Social Media Tool