Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

by | Apr 16, 2018 | Articles, Marketing Automation

Social media marketing can be done well, or done badly. No matter how good you’re doing, it could be really easy for you, or really hard. The easiest way to make sure your social media marketing is both easy and good is to follow the advice of people who have mastered the mediums.

6 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

#1 – Say something valuable.

Seth Godin talks about ‘the trap of social media noise.’ Just because we can say things in so many places, to so many people, it doesn’t mean we should.

“Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.”

– Seth Godin

#2 – Don’t spread too thin.

Every account you set up will cost you, in time, energy, and mental overhead. Ask yourself which accounts are really necessary, and if you should skip one, then do it.

Ashley Kemper wrote a comprehensive overview at Marketing Land comparing each social media platform, with specific guidelines on when these different platforms make sense. Her recommendations are very detailed, so read her article if you have any questions about a specific platform. Her guidelines were:

  • Use Facebook if you want to reach a massive audience with a diverse array of content types.
  • Use Twitter if you have frequent updates or content with a “timeliness” factor.
  • Use YouTube if your business could benefit from product demos, testimonials, or putting a human face to your brand.
  • Use Google+ if you have a physical location and want to appear in local search results.
  • Use LinkedIn if you are in a B2B space, or you want to speak to a more professionally-oriented audience.
  • Use Pinterest if you want to target a female audience and have great visual content.
  • Use Instagram if you can create interesting visual content on a regular basis.
  • Use Foursquare if you have a brick-and-mortar location.

Read her article for more depth on each platform, if you’re not sure whether or not one of them is a good match for you.

#3 – Variety is the spice of social media.

Posting the same thing, all the time, isn’t giong to keep your audience engaged or interested. On the 8Days blog, Jimdo recommends a 70-20-10 formula.

“Don’t be overly promotional: Nobody likes someone who just talks about themselves all the time. 70% of your content should add value for your followers (such as sharing blog posts, coupons, etc.), 20% should be sharing other people’s content (posts from other businesses or highlighting customers), and only 10% should be directly promoting your business (such as “come by our store we have a new shipment of handbags!”).”

Social Media Marketing Formula:

  • 70% adding value
  • 20% sharing other people’s content
  • 10% direct promotion

For every promotional tweet you write, prepare to publish 10x that much content that is for connection and relationship-building.

#4 – Show Them The Wizard Behind the Curtain

Social media marketing is your opportunity to be seen by your audience, really seen. They don’t want to see your products; they want to see you, working at your craft. Share the stories of what it’s like to do what you do.

Ramsay at Blog Tyrant recommends being open on social media to create customer loyalty:

“Social media is a fantastic way to break down the barriers of facelessness. By showing your potential customers the people behind the business you are giving yourself a chance to be different from all the other competition. They will become loyal to you.”

– Ramsay

#5 – Get Popular To Get Seen

Popularity snowballs. The more that people like you, the more they like you, and it’s not just momentum; it’s math.

On the Buffer blog, Alfred Lua gives 10 social media tips, and describes the importance of popularity:

“Social media platform algorithms, such as those on Facebook and Instagram, are prioritizing posts with higher engagement on their feeds due to the belief that users will be more interested in seeing highly engaging content.”

– Alfred Lua

Collect likes, retweets, and shares, and you will rank higher ion the algorithm of social media platforms, and get seen more often.

#6 – Stay Authentic

Most people can sniff a sell-out, and it stinks. A genuine, long-term relationship can be completely derailed by staying in sales mode all the time.

Everybody needs to sell. It is, most often, why we get on a soapbox in the first place. But the only way to keep authenticity is by staying authentic, regularly.

As Timothy Skyes says in 8 Tips On How To Grow Your Social Media on Enterepreneur.com:

“You need to find that balance between popularity and business. You need to have a little bit of both and mix the more fun side that wants popularity with the serious and informative side that boosts the reputation of your business.”

– Timothy Sykes

 

Social Media Setup – Done For You, or DIY

If you need to get your new brand up and running on social media, you can hire Stellar Platforms to do it for you, or you can buy our DIY kit for a tenth of the price, and do it yourself.

 

Social Media Checklist

Social Media Checklist

by | Mar 14, 2018 | DIY

Are you ready to set up all your social media accounts? This social media checklist will give you a step-by-step series of tasks to do, with instructions on how to do each step. Set aside a couple of hours, and when you are done, you will have completely new social media accounts for your brand on all the major platforms.

Social Media Checklist Table of Contents

  1. Decide on your username and password.
  2. Write your Bio
  3. Collect your branding assets.
  4. Create Your Social Media Accounts
  5. Upload your Logo and Cover Photos
  6. Fill out your Bio or Description
  7. Link to all of your social media accounts

Download Workbook

Step 1: Decide on your username and password.

For best results, a universal handle is easiest. When you set up Twitter, you will need to have your handle limited to 15 characters or less. Try and use the same handle for all your accounts. When you set up Twitter, if @yourhandle isn’t available, keep trying until you find a handle that you like, one that you could use anywhere and everywhere.

When I set up social media accounts for Wellness Website Design, the full name of the brand was too long for a Twitter handle. I went with @wellness_web, but on other platforms that allow for longer handles, I selected @wellnesswebsitedesign. This caused some friction later on, and when I have to enter all the social media profiles for this brand, I have to manually look up the link, like some sort of savage.

If there were one universal handle, like @wellwebd, then anytime there was a form to be filled out, or a profile to be completed, filling in the social media account links would be easy and fluid, because they would all end with the exact same handle.

Decide on one secure password in advance, different from all your other passwords, and use that same password for all of your social media accounts. This makes it easy to sign in to any platform; you don’t have to hunt down for the right password, because there is only one password. It also makes going through this social media checklist super easy.

Now, set up a new gmail account with this username and password.You can use a different unified email login for all your accounts (like [email protected]), but you will need this gmail account later for Youtube and Google Plus.

Step 2: Write your Bio

You can write your bio once, and copy and paste it into all of the other profiles. A short, concise paragraph describing who you serve, and what you do, is all you need.

“I help [these people] who [face this problem] by [your awesome solution].”

It can be tempting to skip this step, and write whatever comes to mind, but trust me: don’t.

As Evan LePage says on the HootSuite blog, “Why is your bio so important? In addition to sharing basic information about yourself, adding your website and email address turns any social network bio into a potential source of referral traffic. Especially on company pages, the opportunity to describe your products and link out to an external website makes bios a powerful marketing and sales tool.”

Step 3: Collect your branding assets.

Create a folder on your desktop, and call it ‘Branding Assets.’ This is where you’re going to collect the image files you will need for the rest of this process.

Open up a folder on your computer that has your logo files. If you have a square logo image file that is at least 300px wide, make a copy of it and put it in your Branding Assets folder. If you don’t have a 300px wide version of your logo, make one.

How to Make a Square Image Of Your Logo In 5 Easy Steps

  1. Go to Canva. This is the easiest, most intuitive graphic design tool on the internet. You don’t need to be a graphic designer to use it, and it makes it really easy to make everything look good.
  2. You will need a square version of your logo for most social media profile pictures, and a 300px wide version will work for all of them. Make one by signing into Canva, clicking ‘Use Custom Dimensions’ in the upper right, and put in 300 width x 300 height.
  3. Upload your logo.
  4. Drop it on the square canvas.
  5. Click ‘Download,’ and you’ve got a universal social media profile picture.

Put this 300px wide image of your logo (either .jpg or .png is fine) into your computer’s folder, along with any other visual assets you have that you would like to use.

Pro tip: make sure your logo works with a circle around it. If you have important colors or shapes in the corners, they may get cut off in some platform’s profile pictures.

What is a cover photo?

A cover photo is the second photo you will need for your social media profile. Many profiles allow you to upload a profile photo and a cover photo. The cover photo is the big background, and the profile photo is the smaller one.

To keep you on your toes, every cover photo size is different for every social media platform. Thankfully, Canva makes this easy; with a free account, you can use all their pre-sized templates, and export all the photos you need, at the perfect size.

Do I have to make different cover photos for every platform?

You don’t need to – you could use one high-resolution background photo that you like, and upload it as the cover photo on every platform, as you edit your profile there. But your photo may be cropped at an inconvenient place, and it may be pixellated, because it has to be resized, so it will look fuzzy.

You can select one high-quality stock photo that expresses the visual feeling of your brand, upload it to Canva, and then create cover photos for all your platforms at once. Then, you can export all these photos into your Branding Assets folder on your desktop, along with your 300px wide logo, and you’ll be all ready to get started.

Step 4: Create Your Social Media Accounts

Open this post in an incognito browser, so you can keep your social media checklist handy, and then Ctrl + Click on all these links to open them in new tabs:

Next, one at a time, sign up for accounts. If you are using a new email address, you can have that inbox open for review, or (even better) set that email address to automatically forward to your main email address.

You will need to confirm your accounts with this email address, for every new account you open.

**please note – the exception to this setup is Facebook. (As usual.)

Facebook often has its own rules and requirements, and as the most dominant social media network on the planet, it has earned that right.

For Facebook, you will need a personal account, which will be an admin of your brand’s Facebook Page. So you can sign in to your personal account, and create a Facebook Page with your brand assets. You won’t be able to customize the slug (the part of the URL after facebook.com/ that is) until after your page has 25 likes.

Social Media Setup Pro Tips:

  • Use the same handle, login email, and password for all accounts
  • Use Gmail for this email address, and it will set up your Google and YouTube accounts for you
  • Have the Branding Assets folder open on your desktop while you work
  • Click on all email address confirmations in one sitting

Step 5: Upload your Logo and Cover Photos

This is self-explanatory, but time consuming. You may run into difficulties. One of the platforms may have changed their sizing requirements, or need their file in a different format, or frustrate you for some other reason.

Stay calm. Take deep breaths. Persevere.

When you are done with the social media setup process, you will have branded visual assets on every social profile. It’s worth the challenge here; stick with it.

Pro tip: Canva gives you pre-sized templates for most cover photos.

Step 6: Fill out your Bio or Description

Be sure and include a link to your website on every profile. This is the true SEO benefit of this work; you will receive backlinks from high Page-Rank sites, which legitimizes your website in the eyes of search engines, so don’t skip this step.

Step 7: Link to all of your new accounts

There’s an easy way to do this: set up your personal page on about.me.

When you set up this personal profile page, you can copy and paste the links to all of your profiles here.

Now, whenever you need to access your profile links, just go to your about.me page, control+click on each icon, and you can copy and paste the links.

Other places you can put links to all of your profiles:

  • Your website footer
  • Your website sidebar
  • Your YouTube channel
  • Your personal Facebook profile page
Social Media Setup for Brand New Brands

Social Media Setup for Brand New Brands

by | Jan 12, 2018 | Articles

There are so many social media platforms out there, it can be a challenge to launch your brand-new-brand everywhere across the internet at once. Social Media Setup can be difficult without an easy map. What’s the difference between all these social media platforms? Mark Chandler was good enough to describe the difference – using donuts.

Getting a donut onto all of these platforms can seem like a real chore. But don’t worry – you can set up social media accounts for your business in an afternoon, if you have a good social media checklist, your logo files, a pre-written bio, and a good tutorial.

How To Set Up Social Media Accounts for a Business

Social Media Setup Tip 1:

Use the same login credentials for all of your social media accounts.

Using the same email address and password for all of your new accounts will make it easy to set up (and manage) your social media accounts.

If you create a new email address just for this purpose, like [email protected], then you can even hand off logins for these accounts to someone else securely in the future.

Social Media Setup Tip 2:

Set up all social media accounts in one sitting.

Set aside an hour or two with this tutorial, and give yourself the time and space to do it right, and do it once.

Having multiple browser tabs will make this easy. To use multiple tabs, Ctrl + Click on a link and it will open in a new tab. If you press Cmd + T on a Mac, or Ctrl + T on a PC, you will open a new tab where you can manually type your URL.

Social Media Setup Tip 3:

Use an Incognito browser for setting up your business social media accounts.

If you already have other social media accounts, or a gmail address, then do yourself a favor and use an incognito browser to start fresh. This way, you won’t accidentally login to the wrong account, and connect them in a confusing way.

Using an incognito browser doesn’t make your activity invisible, however. As Heather Parry writes, “Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ might stop Chrome itself from logging your browsing data, but it doesn’t stop your operating system, your router, or the websites themselves from logging that you’re there. When streaming content, whether you’re in ‘Incognito’ mode or not, you open yourself up to data storing, and this mode does not hide your IP address, meaning that information such as your location, your browser, your operating system and even your physical address might still be seen.”

This means that going Incognito does not completely shield your activity, but it does give you the same browsing experience as if you were signed out of all your accounts.

How To Go Into Incognito Mode In Your Browser:

Press Cmd + Shift + N on a Mac, or Ctrl + Shift + N on a PC.

Use our Social Media Checklist to set up your new social media accounts

If you’d like Stellar Platforms to set up your social media accounts for you, we can do that. If you want to do it yourself, we can give you a video tutorial and a step-by-step guide to handle it yourself in an afternoon.

Read the Social Media Setup Checklist