What is Social Media? Social Media Guide for Business

Welcome to the Social Media Guide!

Whether you’re new to social media or just want to bridge a few knowledge gaps, I’m so glad you looked at this post.

By now we’ve all heard how valuable – even necessary – social media can be. Social media is now in the middle of our lives.

Of course, we do not question how true or false this is.

What we will do in this guide is to discover how essential social media is for your business and how you can use it.

There are so many social media networks today, and all of them are developing and growing day by day.

They unveil a new feature every day and sometimes you can feel very unfamiliar with that network if you miss it.

But don’t be afraid! The biggest reason we created this guide is to help you with it!

Because social media has started to have an incredible power today and using this power has become a must for brands in marketing.

Reaching a significant segment of potential customers in the market through social media networks pushes brands and businesses to have accounts, especially on social media networks.

We hope this guide will help and love your work as one of the most comprehensive social media resources available. Whatever your skill level, we’ve gathered everything that will move you forward on social media accounts in this guide for you.

When you look inside these titles, you can see what you should do in each of them, sample achievements, tools you should use, and more.

In this guide, you will first discover what social media is. 

Are you excited? Then get your coffee and notepads ready because here we go!

First, we will explore why social media holds such power. Most importantly, we will examine why brands should engage in social media.

In the next sections of this guide, we will focus on the most important social media channels one by one. We have outlined each step, from what to do on these networks to what to pay attention to. Additionally, we will show you the power of these networks with success examples for each platform.

Part 1: What is Social Media?

Entrance

Social media is one of the most effective ways people communicate and interact online today. Over the past 10 years, we have seen an increase in the number and popularity of social media sites. These sites are called social media because they allow users to interact through conversations, comments, and other user-generated content.

The importance of social media grew quickly as it became competitive with real life. Publishing content has become easier in recent years, which has affected social media usage. Non-technical users can now easily create content on various platforms, including hosted communities, networks like blogs, and third-party social networks. This has made the social media landscape more complex. Today, social media is something everyone uses, and we love it.

For businesses, the rise in internet consumption and social media presents both opportunities and responsibilities. The vast amount of data customers share on social media has become valuable for marketers. This has excited businesses and brands.

The real opportunity lies in building lasting relationships with your customer base through social media. This is where your online responsibility to customers begins. Just as customer behavior has changed, their expectations for your business have evolved. Customers are already talking about your business. Isn’t it better to join the conversation?

It certainly is!

Is Social Media Temporary?

In recent years, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest have grown rapidly. The era of social media has just begun, and the need for it in business will only grow stronger. The world has seen the impact of adopting social media tactics, and the rising statistics are proof of this. If you think social media is temporary, you are mistaken.

The widespread use of the internet and easy access through mobile devices show that social media is here to stay. But there is an even more important factor driving social media’s success: people.

Why people? Look at the apps on your phone. How many social media apps have you downloaded and used? How many of them have accounts created by your family members, like your mother or even your grandmother?

This is the key proof that social media is not a passing trend. People have made social media an essential part of their daily lives and can’t live without it. This transforms social media from a temporary trend into a lasting future.

Why Does My Company Need Social Media?

Whether you’re running a small, local transaction or tracking a global, enterprise-level event, the statistics above make it clear: Your customers are online!

They interact with friends, colleagues and other brands on social channels for information, advice and entertainment. If your company isn’t about to respond, a competitor will. In doing so, your competitor will most likely knock out the customer while listening to anyone else.

To add value – even for pleasure! – and there are tons of opportunities to make that connection, to help build a person’s relationship with a company, brand or representative. These relationships form the foundation of what may eventually become one of your greatest marketing assets: customer advocacy.

If you ever find yourself in trouble, your advocates will help remind the rest of the world how they’ve taken root. Advocacy is not something you can intervene or buy. Advocacy is earned over time in a continuous and positive relationship with your client base. It is earned through satisfying experiences and the delivery of the highest class of customer service.

Advocacy is the nirvana of social media, and it’s advocacy when your efforts really start to scale and grow. It shows that your brand is doing such a great job: Your customers are shouting about your brand from the rooftops, sharing their ideas and experiences with their networks. This posting is the best marketing a brand could ask for.

Identifying potential advocates is a good first step. You can use social tools (many of which are outlined in the rest of this guide), site data, customer data, and even your own observations to help you identify which customers are most likely to bump into your brand. You will want to find out what is most important to these potential advocates.

What are they looking for? Do they fish for recognition? Are they excited by exclusive access to news and/or content?

Find out what kinds of advocates your brand attracts and ways to get to know them for their advocacy. However, it is important to note that many of the greatest community relationships will be formed organically. Relationships take time, while your research and brand knowledge encourages people and helps you take the right steps.

The shift from a passive to an interactive network has changed how individuals connect and how businesses operate. At this point, having an internet presence is crucial for business success. Ignoring your customers’ online conversations or avoiding them will prevent you from getting ahead. Take this opportunity to connect with your target audience more closely than ever. Reach more people in an authentic way, drive higher quality site traffic, increase your brand’s authority, engage with influencers, and gather valuable data to make informed business decisions.

Maybe a better question would be why wouldn’t your company need a social media account!

How Does Social Media Act as a Springboard for Other Marketing Channels?

Never, ever forget one thing. Neither your customers’ experience nor your brand started with Twitter, Facebook or your blog. Social media should take your existing brand and consolidate, revitalize and support it. Your efforts on social media should be an extension of everything you do in all parts of your company. Capturing your company’s voice and sharing it with the world via social media will open up unique opportunities across all other marketing channels, including SEO, branding, PR, sales, and more.

Relationships

To get the most out of social media, make relationships with it your ultimate goal. This may sound a little utopian to anyone who relies on more traditional and concrete business metrics and metrics, but take a step back from the bottom line, ROI-seeking aspect to look at the big picture for a minute. Relationships with customers are the foundations on which other aspects of your business can and will flourish.

Relationships thrive when you develop them, and no other field offers you the opportunity to do so like social media. Social channels have broken down the walls between individuals at an unprecedented rate.

In 2011, Facebook released data showing that its users are, on average, 3.74 degrees apart, connecting them almost like Kevin Bacon’s in other parts of Hollywood.

Since these works this network has only continued to grow. That’s pretty surprising, and the best I can say is: Social media is pretty much credited with making this happen.

Some of the most successful SEOs and PR professionals build their reputation through relationships. They excel at their work, but strong relationships amplify their efforts. The relationships you build with customers support your brand in both good and bad times. These connections represent an investment that will remain valuable on nearly any platform.

Feedback

Information spreads quickly through social media. Users increasingly share information in real time. This often comes in the form of opinions. If you listen to your audience, social media becomes a valuable source of insight and feedback. Social listening in product development can act as an early warning system. It can also save on customer service costs, provide feedback, and help identify ideal beta testers at little expense.

Integration

Social media is not something you can “get over” for the rest of your marketing, branding, PR and advertising efforts; must be a fully integrated part of the mix. In doing so, you can create a cohesive and scalable experience for your customers. Think of it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Also, it is not as difficult as it seems.

Instead of waiting until the end of a planning cycle, integrate social media into your marketing efforts early. Doing so will help grow and solidify your business. A clear social presence from the start will benefit your branding. It will create additional customer touchpoints, increase PR exposure, and improve reach. Customer service will also be able to listen and act proactively when needed.

As you can see, a social presence can have far-reaching impact for your organization when executed authentically and thoughtfully. By making social engagement a part of your activities rather than an afterthought, you have a better chance of making full use of its power.

Part 2: The Value of Social Media

Building a Community and Engaging

The greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to support and engage with a community. Engagement is at the heart of social media. Without it, you’re left with a megaphone and no one to hear you. You can interact with customers from all over the world, including those nearby. If a current or prospective customer has something to say, you can respond quickly.

Beyond communication, brands can build relationships with customers outside of normal transactions. These relationships keep customers loyal and encourage repeat business. When customers defend your brand and spread positive word-of-mouth, you’ll see incredible returns.

By engaging with your community and creating valuable resources for your niche, you establish authority in your industry. Your customers will trust your brand and turn to you for solutions to their challenges.

You may even help competitors in unexpected ways. All brands start in an unknown place, and the more you give, the more authority you gain. A great example is REI. They sell outdoor gear but are also a go-to resource for tips on hiking, snowshoeing, and other outdoor activities.

In the meantime, we recommend you to read the zombie attack survival kit. whatever happens 🙂

Moving From Just “Like” to “Love” and “Protect”

Any community member’s feelings towards your brand can range from anger to admiration and beyond. We’ll cover negative emotions later; The people we want to concentrate on now are the ones we hope to carry you across a spectrum from fully “loving” you to being willing to defend you and your brand.

Facebook

The first step is to get people to like easily on Facebook, by word of mouth or by others. People who like you consistently live up to your expectations. This often feels transactional with a low level of engagement, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

As with any relationship, creating the bonds that will take you to the next level depends on the needs of both your brand and the people you interact with. You will want to build these bonds on positive experiences that benefit both of you.

Twitter

Bonds can form through boredom, but a positive Twitter exchange is better than complaints about product malfunctions.

For example, Kotex started their Pinterest account by selecting 50 female users. They sent unique packages based on these users’ Pinterest boards. These women were surprised and happy with the packages. They shared their experiences on Kotex’s social networks. This helped Kotex create a warm, user-friendly image with their followers.

Here is another level where this warm relationship deepens.
When a customer is willing to defend your brand, you will realize that you have reached the most important level.

This final “willingness to defend” stage is brand and social nirvana, because community members not only often engage and advise, but also defend your work and defend you from brand detectors. This makes you a truly user-friendly brand.

Your fans are forming and you already have a social media army(!).

You can never expect your community to deal with 100% of customer service issues or questions that come up.

They won’t be fully equipped, and it’s not their job.

However, after your initial investment and implementation, you can expect some community members to start stepping up and helping whenever it’s convenient.

This is a good time to think about how to recognize and even reward your most active participants.

When this happens, you begin to see how your efforts begin to scale as you continue to scale up your community engagement efforts. It forces you to work on other deals, and as you can imagine, an advocate standing up for a brand is much stronger than a brand standing up for itself. There is also a level of authenticity built into this type of user-to-user interaction.

It’s Not Just About Marketing

The community engagement that social media provides is beneficial for almost every part of your organization, from the product team to HR and more. As an added bonus, working with more colleagues will lighten your load. To start, here are a few areas that see the most obvious value.

Creating Content

Using your search traffic data, on-site contracts, and social listening efforts, your social media presence can help you identify what people are searching for and create content that meets their needs. (I’m not talking about telling you a great way to share this content once it’s available.) Topics for content will most likely fall into one of three buckets:

Learning and Developing

This type of content is designed to optimize your customers’ tasks or workflow. You are trying to improve their lives by using your product more (feature training etc.) or even offering help. The main purpose of this content type is to build authority, maintain links and increase engagement.

Discover

Customers who want to be creative and find new ways to use your product are looking for this type of content. For this group, building relationships will be crucial; These relationships will give birth to thought and community. However, the content that you will create in this style will collect much more traffic and interest.

Question and answer

This type of content serves to meet customer support needs. Something went wrong and customers want a solution. This can range from a detailed forum thread on resolving a technical issue to an answer to a simple question and how to return the item. Your main goal is to direct answers.

Also, don’t overlook content that can be created in your own community. User-generated content can be surprising. It may even be much better than what you can create. Your users can help write what your target audience finds interesting, relevant, and useful. The possibilities are endless, keep that in mind.

Using analytics tools like SimplyMeasured, True Social Metrics, as well as the networks’ own tools, you can measure conversations you’ve had on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even YouTube for content creation ideas.

Using analytics tools like SimplyMeasured, True Social Metrics, as well as the networks’ own tools, you can measure conversations you’ve had on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even YouTube for content creation ideas.

Important point: Members of your community will talk openly about what they want. To see the benefits of this talk, all you have to do is listen. It’s pretty easy to get meaningful insights when looking at the right places.

Customer service

Complaining when something isn’t right is a very natural human reaction. In the past, we may have shared our disappointment with a few friends. But now is the era of social media! It’s clear what we do for these types of complaints. We are on Twitter and Facebook.

A much larger audience listens to us there; it has an audience that is not limited by geography and can easily raise any complaint. As a company, when individuals use their social channels to complain about you, it can be intimidating at first. You may feel like you’ve been attacked, and most importantly, like you’re out of control in this situation. But these are even opportunities to improve customers’ experience with your brand, to truly resolve and rectify the situation. Remember, every crisis can actually create an opportunity for you.

However, not all clients will address you directly, so it helps to listen. Make sure it’s always clear and easy for people to contact you easily. It can help prevent a Twitter rant or a sad Facebook update.

Some customers are ready to deal with questions, concerns, or complaints, and it’s your job to be there. But you don’t have to do it alone. As you engage your community in meaningful relationships, they will be ready to defend you.

You need to put in the effort, but eventually, you’ll see your community helping each other on your behalf.

With training and consistent focus, other customer service departments can also manage social engagement. When social responsibility is shared across the company, not just by a social media marketing professional, you’ll better serve your customers and run an efficient business.

Product development

At no other time in history have businesses had more access to customers than now, and product development continues to benefit, perhaps more than any other group. Input from social media can be both a blessing and a curse, as people don’t know exactly what they’re thinking or wanting. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses”.

It’s easy to make the mistake of treating all customer entries as gospel. Feedback is incredibly important, but that being said, you should take it in the context of everything you know about your product and brand. A few complaints may not necessarily represent your entire user base, so the feedback you see may not fully support the truth. There are several tactics you can use to make sure you get all the right benefits from this customer feedback without the artificial weight.

Create beta / tester communities

This can be done in a number of ways. You can export a list of community members that will be most helpful – the social web, the list of enthusiast bloggers to an affiliate group via email posts, a Facebook group, or some other social mechanism. You can also create private restricted areas in your forum-based communities where these expert users can chat, interact, and network while participating in conversations you create. This exclusive access can be used as a reward for these community members and can provide incredibly useful information for you and your brand.

Listen to your competition

When listening to product feedback, you want to analyze sentiment, research specific issues, and see what the larger community has to say about your competitors. Conversations around your competition’s products or offerings can provide an endless amount of insight into your own efforts.

Measurement

Just as you can gather in-depth information about your products by examining your web analytics, you can get similar clues by monitoring and measuring the performance of your social channels. Do posts about one product outperform similar posts about another? Your customers may be telling you something they like more.

Human Resources

Social media can also play a great role in human resources: encouraging employee engagement, finding and connecting with new recruiters, and even helping with recruiting efforts are just a few of its functions.

About management

Depending on the culture in your organization, your HR department may need to be involved in any social media app, and no matter the culture, it’s always a good idea to get their involvement.
Working with your HR professionals during the development of your social media policies and governance can help protect your organization from risk while empowering your employees. Definitely communicate with other employees before giving your efforts to them; this is an area where you would ask permission instead of asking for forgiveness.

Beyond these governance considerations, social media can be a remarkable tool for HR professionals. Some of the areas where you can increase your efforts in HR include:

1. Recruitment

Social channels are the perfect place to reach new candidates. People are searching for job postings online and it’s a fact that some of them already “like” you. Why not find them in the area where they spend most of their time? Given its relevance, your community would be more apt to share these vulnerabilities with their networks. In other words, your networks will be the ideal area for you in recruitment.

2.Internal Social Network

There are social networks designed to work and serve within a company, organization. Some use Chatter, some use Basecamp, some use Jive. Regardless of which of them you choose, these social networking tools, which are used as part of your company’s system, help you to share information easily and quickly within the company. Moreover, thanks to its functionality, it keeps common calendars and allows you to announce important meetings to all employees. Internal social networks are also becoming an invaluable resource for management and company policy awareness.

3.Career Development

Being active and fully aware of the “how and what” of social media is fast becoming a mandatory skill in today’s workforce. This skill cannot be ignored, especially for human resources professionals.
Social media can be used to network online and learn about trending topics in a particular field, so you can explore new areas of opportunity for businesses that may include niche communities for related professions.

Social media is not just something that should be used by any team within a company. Ideally, the entire organization deals with some aspects of the company’s social media and has a deep understanding of its customers through engagement. Deploying the social media effort in a cross-functional way also ensures that the right people take the helm at the right time.

At the same time, it’s important to establish a consistent voice and brand for every aspect of your company’s social efforts, so you’ll want to at least create a set of basic guidelines for everyone involved.

⭐Wow impressive! Well I’m a marketer. What does all this mean for me?

As more people in your organization understand the benefits of social media, you will be able to focus your efforts on marketing these areas rather than using your social media networks as a help desk or service.
Additionally, you will have the advantage of scaling some of the costs associated with social responsibility, and you will have a team of multiple people on your side to help you along the way rather than just going it alone. This is the foundation of success.

How to Obtain Social Media Participation Rights

You will need to show value to your leadership or your customers while putting your standing for your brand’s social media efforts. The good news is that with a little analysis, the data will be on your side. Let’s expand this a little more with you and create a business plan.

You know your organization better than anyone, so trust your instincts. If you’re worried about being pushed back, you can run small-scale tests to see how it goes and create a plot file for your efforts.

In safe hands, i.e. where you can play around without taking too much risk and form the foundation of your business case, give it a try that addresses some of the most pressing issues your organization is facing, or you may find you can’t prove it. Of course, in this case, the point we need to look at will be the effect of social media in these areas. You can even look at your competitors for some good examples. Once these tests yield results, present your new data to those who need to provide the social signature. This strategy of starting small helps you purchase the permission and confidence you will need to work towards some more difficult outcomes.

If you’ve tried opening a business case file and are still met with resistance, don’t give up. Create many plots that will help you in this regard and make you feel what kind of result you will encounter when you reach your goal. If you have an opportunity to start small and dive in with minimal risk, your results can be voluminous. When you have something new to show, you can revisit and strengthen your business case. It will be difficult to argue with data.

Part 3: Social Media Best Practices

What Kind of Content Will You Post and Share?

A common (and understandable) mistake many people make when diving into social engagement is to limit their content to promotional updates. This is a reflection of the traditional marketing world where all outgoing messaging is just right, but everything is changing; we now build our marketing efforts on trust, engagement and community.

Sure, there’s a time and place for marketing and promotional messages, but don’t limit yourself. Consider broadening your scope a bit. This will make your content more attractive and reduce the burden of creation. Some options for update types may include:

Adjoining content

It  ‘s a pretty safe bet that if someone is following you, they’ll be interested in what you have to offer. It’s a safer bet to say their interests don’t end there. Share tangentially relevant content about your business or something of common interest to your audience. For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, you might post beauty trends or news from a major beauty designer. These topics likely align directly with your audience’s interests.

Tips and tricks

Add value to the conversation by sharing content that will make your customers’ lives easier (bonus points for tips and tricks to help them use your products or services).

Answers

Not every update has to come from your original ideas; you can amplify and use ideas that other people have already posted. Social media relies on conversations, so get in and be a part of them. You can dive into threads by searching for Twitter chats about your brand. (This is a good way to get your account and brand more visibility.)

Non-promotional company information

 If your  company does volunteer work in your community, feel free to share it! If there’s a pretty impressive show at the New Year’s Eve party, you’ll definitely want to share it. A sneak peek at the culture and community within an organization goes a long way in humanizing the brand and building relationships. Social media provides a great way to go about it.

Job postings

Social skills can be an incredibly productive place to find new talent and advertise job postings. Job seekers use social media as a way to learn about companies and their vacancies; The internet has become an endless pool of opportunities for this. Find out what matters and use that power well.

Jokes

This is somewhat unpredictable and more of a branding issue than anything else. First, know what your brand is and what kind of personality it contains. If humor isn’t part of it, you can avoid this type of approach. And you should even avoid it. This approach can backfire and have an incredibly awkward effect. It can damage your brand identity.

If you’re going to try humor, you should prioritize safety first! Make sure you don’t unintentionally share something that might be offensive by testing it out among your coworkers, friends, or even family. You should always be careful with sensitive matters; A disaster can be truly painful. Once you’ve made sure the humor is acceptable, make sure it’s actually funny, because a bad joke is just embarrassing.

How Do You Share and Publish Your Content?

Frequency of Updates

“How often do I need to update my account?” It is a common question and there is no right or wrong answer here. Don’t be fooled by people telling you to post at these times and these days. Although these judgments were true a few years ago, now each social media account has its own unique statistics and correct timing. It can act as a general guide for some research on this topic; but as with most things, it’s best to test and see what works best for you and your audience on each platform. It is very important to control your data, track it and see when your followers interact with you.

A universal truth is that social media status updates don’t last long. For example, the broadcast life of a tweet is about 18 minutes for most users. This time doesn’t mean you have to post often, but rather understanding that updating doesn’t mean it will stay visible for a significant amount of time.

Users are moving to newer items in their news feed very quickly. The key here is to pay attention to how engaging and sharing your users are. More than anything, it shows the quality of your content.

Imagine. Haven’t you ever seen a tweet posted days ago on your timeline? If the post gets interaction, people share and talk to it, the life of this post will be much longer than you think.

Still, it all depends on what’s right for your organization. For example, one or more updates a day from news outlets or media outlets can easily be expected, while a clothing retailer can be expected to run out of business due to this rhythm and thus shut down users.

You certainly don’t want to talk just for the sake of talking; If you have nothing of value to add, don’t submit an update just to meet a quota. However, you should ensure that your account is updated regularly to entice users to follow. You want them to know they’re missing out on some good stuff if they don’t.

Interaction

Increasing engagement as a brand comes in two different ways. The first of these can be counted as users’ mentions, questions and comments. At the start of a community’s development, it’s crucial for a brand to be very up-to-date and active, and that means answering most user comments and all their questions. The volume at this stage in the game should be pretty manageable for most.

The second side of interaction is the result from a solid data-driven content strategy. By looking at things like search queries and social conversations, you can begin to lay the foundation for a solid content strategy. When sharing this content in your community, you should collect data on how your audience reacts to and interacts with it. Take all this data as feedback on how you’re doing. You can reevaluate the timing of your updates, the format or sentence structure you use (asking questions, making bold statements, etc.), and even the type of media you use.

Ask for help

Do you want your community to help or participate in a certain way? Sometimes asking is the simplest and most effective of all. If you value and invest in the interaction and earn their loyalty, you can ask for survey participation, product feedback or whatever else you need. Maybe you need help supporting or sharing a new show or piece of content. If you’ve invested in interaction, you’re usually welcome.

Watch and listen

Watch  social channels as often as possible. Use services that can get you notifications easily, so you can make sure you don’t miss important conversations online. There are countless applications (SocialEngage, HootSuite, TweetDeck) you can use for Twitter and Facebook, and you can also set alerts that are important to you in these tools (Fresh Web Explorer, IFTTT). Typically, the admin tools of various platforms have this functionality built in. While watching, he really listens to what your customers are telling you. Social listening data provides endless information to brands and companies willing to listen. This can be your product feedback channel, user experience consulting, or even your early warning system when things go wrong.

Keep it simple

Too many options sometimes may not be an option in your situation. If your audience isn’t on a particular network, why are you posting on that network? Conversely, if your main focus is B2B (if you’re a business-oriented firm), you may not need to include Pinterest as a sharing option. Look at your social audience and match your offers with their behavior. Perhaps the best network for you might be LinkedIn.

Cross-promotion for discoverability

There is nothing worse for a user than not being able to find your content, and cross-promotion is an easy way to prevent that from happening. Make sure your blog is linked to your social property. Keep all your profile names the same across all social channels (use a service like KnowEm to be proactive about this) and cross-promote your accounts. This point is very important: Develop and sell a unique value proposition for each account. Imagine! Why would a customer want to follow you on Twitter if they already follow you on Facebook? You need to give them a reason to follow each of your social media accounts. Why would people follow them all if you share the same thing on all of them?

Gamify

People enjoy competition and like to be rewarded for achievements. Adding game-like elements to your marketing mix can help motivate a community. Foursquare is an effective example of this, passing its users over the mayor and badges. You can make your brand fun by defining ways to encourage your own community in ways that align with your business goals.
This can be a great way to increase the number of responses your community provides in a help forum; Add levels and achievements to answer questions, for high quality answers, or to share unanswered questions. Match behavior and goals with reward systems. These efforts can increase your existing social marketing, increased sentiment, retention and loyalty while reducing complexity, purchasing expense and customer service costs.

Consistent Marking and Noise Reproduction

There are many words that go into your brand definition. These can consist of many things, such as the promises you make to your customers. You describe the experiences your product offering is trying to fulfill.
A “brand” can feel like a very awkward concept; but keep in mind that your company’s brand helps add tangible value to the organization and, when properly managed, can help protect investments in the business over time. How one truly determines the value of a brand is a rather complex endeavor.

Most of us are not trying to compete with the most popular global brands. However, there is much you can learn from these global companies.

1. If you don’t have advanced brand guidelines  yet, you’ll want to start there with your marketing team.

Once you’re done with these, you’ll want to consider how they’ve been translated into social media. Most of the visual components (logos, colors , etc.) will remain the same, but you may want to ensure that users who set up your social profiles have access to the relevant creatives.

For more inspiration, see the Cambridge Identity Guidelines and MailChimp guidelines. For most small and medium businesses, these will likely feel overly jealous (they probably are), but you can be inspired by parts that make sense to you. If you have a graphic design team, they can help you with that too.

Example Rules

1. How your logo will be represented
2. What fonts and colors can be used and in what way
3. A complete brand description and what it means
4. Situations where the brand can and cannot be used
5. Tone, voice and style rules
6. Other topographical and structural elements (especially for advertisers)

2. Know your audience. 

Be a brand, but be relevant to the environment you work in. Your target audience or the social platform you engage with can slightly change your tone and voice from your brand guidelines. This is where it’s important to have a really solid understanding so you can adapt as needed. It’s not vital to be absolutely consistent across platforms, but demonstrating consistency is vital.

3. Be relevant to people. 

It probably sounds obvious, but that’s the purpose of social media. Engaging people is where the magic is, and keeping this in mind as you develop your brand will help you create not only a solid and consistent voice, but one that users can relate to and relate to. You know, like real people. 🙂

4. Integrate your campaigns. 

Integrating your campaigns across all of your social profiles can help solidify your brand and boost your efforts. Using similar visual elements across all of your profiles will help your messaging and bring home appropriate and platform specific and specific ways.

Your social presence is just an extension of your brand, allowing that brand to reach more people than their networking experience. This can be both risk and opportunity, so the time you spend deciding and defining what your brand will be in social media is important, as inconsistency in this area can result in a disjointed customer experience (or even negative blow). Important questions to answer are:

• What is your brand’s voice and personality?
• What do you represent and what do you stand behind?
• What are your values ​​and what differentiates you?
• What are your defined visual brand personalities (logo, font, colors)?

If you don’t answer these questions first, your social presence may tend towards one of two extremes: Your communication will come across as harsh and corporate and the people you care about will feel like you’re dealing with a robot, or your community manager will use his own voice in your communication and lead to an inconsistent or even unfounded experience.

Providing a cohesive, branded customer experience that is completely site, network, or location-agnostic will help further increase your community’s understanding, memory, and hopefully preference for your brand.

How to Gain Familiarity, Trust, and Similarity in Your Community

Building a reputation around these three qualities is part of what goes into relationship building. We’re all trying to achieve great things for our business in this social media spat, but let’s step back for a minute – let’s think about it differently. How do you build relationships offline or in person? Getting them online for your brand isn’t all that different.

To appear.  

It’s that simple; just being present is the first step. But it doesn’t end there. You have to keep showing. Give people a reason to invest in the relationship. Unless you can at least prove that you’re going to hang out or pop on a bit of a regular basis, they don’t have any reason to hook up with you in the first place.

Act human. Show kindness. Stay realistic. Keep fun in the mix. Show respect. Demonstrate empathy. Reflect everything you expect from others in every interaction. No one can easily resist a soft personality. If your efforts feel automatic and heartless, you’re not going to look so nice. It’s also worth remembering: When communicating with someone on social channels, it’s best to assume all interactions are purely public.

Don’t be exclusionary.  

This creates a balance in their relationship. You don’t want to treat a chosen few people so special that strangers new to your brand or account feel like they’re looking out. It makes every person you influence and the audience feel special and part of the crowd.

Be off topic. 

Closely related to being human, it’s absolutely okay to be out of topic from time to time. If every tweet or Facebook post is just your marketing, people quickly get tired and leave.
Every once in a while you need to turn off your marketing language. Post something relevant, but maybe just tangentially. Celebrate special occasions, holidays or world events. No one likes to be constantly marketed and that’s not where the magic happens!

To add value.  

Sure, you can show up and make friends just by acting appropriately, but you’re a brand. You want more than just “friend”. You are building a network and trying to establish your company here. Adding value helps you appear helpful and credible, ultimately making you a desired part of the community. Offer help, answer questions, and get in the way of making someone’s life easier or brighter.

Enforce etiquette.  

Do not spam hashtags. Brands have gotten in trouble for this in the past, and it can show your brand in a disrespectful and distasteful light. Do not be too aggressive or advanced; You want to make a good first impression.

Be informed about current events. 

In important times, natural disasters, tragedies, terrorist incidents, etc. You definitely want to turn off your marketing messages.
If you use a scheduling service to publish content for you, shut it down immediately at the first sign of any catastrophic event. Your timing will be seen as incredibly insensitive and can cause serious backlash against your brand.

None of this will happen in your social media planning for you overnight. An investment in these relationships is a long-term investment in your community and brand. Go ahead and be patient; The more you invest, the more you get back.

Crisis management

We never expect to encounter a crisis in business, and social media can add an extra layer of complication to such a situation. A real-world event can be magnified by social networks, everything you say can be cast a shadow, and customer service issues can spread more easily and quickly on social platforms. At the same time, social networks can be a great way to enforce transparency, as clarity is the best way to fight chaos. Buffer, a social networking app, exemplified this type of response when it was hacked in late 2013. Their blog and the comments below are a testament to the benefits of open communication through social channels.

When thinking about crisis management, all companies should always be in one of the following four phases:

• Preparation: Understanding risks, establishing escalation processes, response templates, roles and responsibilities, training, etc.
• Response and measurement: Respond as needed, track, measure and monitor reach, volume, etc. To watch.
• Recovery: Typically consists of more measurement, follow-up, case studies, and knowledge sharing across the enterprise.
• Prevention: Analyzing the crisis and current procedures, identifying opportunities for improvement, and identifying what is working.

When in crisis mode, first understand the level of severity, identify potential risks and work to escalate accordingly. Work through the crisis by listening carefully, showing empathy, transparency, and a willingness to right anything wrong.
After this situation, examining the impact and drawing insight from the situation can enable the organization to recover, move forward and gain traction for a strong preventative stance.

Recommended Tools

Keeping track of data takes action; it’s hard to think or argue that this is wrong. Conversely, what we do must be measured, or evidence must be sought that it works.

There are really three big buckets for social media analytics. Some data points will pass between buckets and others may even fall out of them, but for most businesses, these three main categories should meet your social data needs.

Measurement

Account growth and competitive development will fall into this bucket. We’re really talking about hard data points in this bucket. Growth in followers and likes, reach and CTRs are examples of metrics data.

Listening and predictions

Social media gives us unprecedented access to conversations. Listening tools help you capture large volumes of information and remove meaningful bits. Your insights will inform you about key customer issues, competitive opportunities, and even general brand sentiment.

Monitoring and response

To be a little more tactical, marketers need to have the ability to monitor all that social conversation to take effective action. These tools typically have workflow functionality built in, so you empower not only to find but also to act. This is not limited to reactive sending either. Unless you’re doing it directly from each platform, these tools act as your primary content delivery tool.

Some vehicles may serve one or more of these needs. They can vary wildly in price and functionality, so be very careful about what type of data and shape you need to help you pay more than you need.

Chapter 4: Social Media Metrics and ROI

Part of the beauty of online marketing is that you can measure everything you do.
However, before diving into social media, measurement will definitely give you a significant advantage if you only know what to measure and what to measure. If you do not know how to do this, it will be impossible to understand what you gain or lose from everything you do.

After all, we try to measure the return on investment (ROI). But keep in mind that you must have an I to measure ROI. Without a serious investment of resources, you may never find the return you seek. Measuring ROI can look very different for different campaigns and opening a dashboard the day after starting a social presence doesn’t provide any useful insight.

For some, goals are as simple as driving traffic and measuring conversions. But for many, things are much more complicated. Your return on investment may come in the form of cost savings from handling customer service issues on Twitter, not over the phone. Maybe you can track their increased traffic from a Foursquare promotion or Yelp campaign.

But one thing is certain: Measuring useful data leads to action and (perhaps more importantly) budget. Solid data is what makes your business case attractive; without it, you base decisions and foundations on assumptions and instincts. These can be helpful, but you can take your story to the next level by measuring first.

If you’re asking how it is, would you upset the balance? The key is to find the right things for your organization to measure and ultimately report on.
When trying to figure out what these are, keep in mind that you will have two types of data.

Quantitative

Quantitative data are generally numerical and can be used in real scientific analysis with dimensions that include statistical significance and reproducible results.

Followers/fans

This is one of the most common metrics brands follow. Make sure you don’t put too much weight on it. It can be gratifying to see growth, but if it’s not tied to something more meaningful, it’s just a number. The end result is that with an empty and bloated growth, your number of fans can increase, and it will definitely be a useless increase.

Interaction

An incredibly important metric is engagement. It is perhaps one of the most important in measuring your own success and efforts. Interaction can actually measure a number of different items depending on the channel. All these different metrics come together to give you an idea of ​​how well your target audience is responding to your content.

For a blog post, this could be the number of shares and comments per post. On Twitter, this could be the number of mentions, retweets, favorites, and replies. Engagement tells you how well you’re doing while chatting with your community and whether the content you’re creating is engaging.

Timing

Take a look at the timing of your community’s activities and your own. You want to make sure they are active when. This is often overlooked as most accounts are only managed during business hours, but this is not always the case when your customers are listening.

You can get a general sense by looking at the timestamps of your audience’s comments (and other activities) while they’re online, but you’ll get a better idea if you use a tool that can analyze the entire audience.

Click-through rate (CTR): Click-through rate is a familiar metric for most Internet marketers and can be socially valuable as well – especially if one of your goals is driving traffic to your website. Think of it as a kind of social transformation that you can work towards optimizing.

Qualitative

Qualitative data are based on observations and often take the form of hypotheses resulting from smaller sample sizes than would be required for a normal scientific study. These hypotheses can then be tested using quantitative data.

Effect

This is somewhat controversial. Everyone wants to find influencers in their community, but there is currently no universal standard for measuring influence or finding these people.

There are several tools that offer “impact scores”. (Klout and our own Social Authority are popular ones.) Even if you choose to use such a tool, you should have a good understanding of how it determines the score; You’ll want to make sure it aligns with what you’re trying to measure. Beyond tools, also consider looking at Twitter and Google rankings for influencers on a particular topic. If you have access to a relevant forum and its data (perhaps your own), look for influencers there as well. This can help you target people who will be the audience you want to reach. Our own Twitter tool, Followerwonk, can also be a great resource for this type of research.

Sentiment

Sentiment analysis attempts to measure the tone and tenor of speech around a stated topic or item. On social media, this is used to tell whether people love your brand or your campaigns, they can’t stand still, or they’re neutral. Most sentiment measurement tools are automated these days, and if you choose to go this route, you’ll want to make sure you understand the methodology behind the tool (especially the margin of error) to help you understand the content of the reports. There are also manual sentiment analysis tools out there to use. However, these have many drawbacks, including labor costs and your time. Not to mention that a really great manual solution can be much more expensive than an automated solution.

Conversation routers

With the  right tools we can look at pretty much any platform (or all for that matter) and see what people are talking about. When it comes to your brand, you’ll want to know the topics and content of the conversation about you, your competition, and your niche. This incredibly useful information can tell you, for example, what your customers see as your closest competition, what they share about your product, what they share about their concerns.

Tip

With all the data you collect, whether quantitative or qualitative, the most important things to ask yourself are “What can I do with it?” and “What are my insights?” If you can’t do anything with your data and get actionable business action from it, you need to question why you’re measuring it in the first place.

A better understanding of the tools you use and how they work will give context to the numbers you see. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, dig deeper, and challenge how things have been done in the past.

Chapter 5: Finding the Right Social Media Platform for You

Deciding where to focus your social media energy can be a confusing process as time is short and resources are limited. It’s easy to be distracted by the vibration and articles that bring out the next big thing brands “must do.”

As with any marketing channel, the more thought and strategy you put into your execution plans, the better your chances of success will be. You can avoid being overwhelmed by stepping back and starting with your own business goals, product offerings, and target consumers.

What Are the Different Types of Social Channels?

Not all social media sites and platforms are created equal, and not every social channel always works the same way to help users achieve their goals. It helps you organize your social options into categories while browsing online. By looking at groups of channels with common themes, it’s easier to make decisions about when, where, who and how best engage your community online.

The easiest way to separate categories is to think of them as owned, rented, and busy. Here’s a look at how each of these categories splits:

Owned Properties

Owned properties may include blogs, forums or self-aggregated social networks, which may be internal or external. The main difference in this category is that you literally own the channel instead of occupying a page on a platform owned by someone else. It may be on your primary site or another domain, but it’s completely under your control.

Rented Properties

Like renting an apartment, a user occupies part of a channel with the owner’s permission. Sometimes, it comes at a cost, but in the world of social media that doesn’t quite happen. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr fall into this category. Facebook owns the site and you manage a presence on it. You can make an official claim to the page, but not say you don’t have a claim on the platform itself or how it might change.

Occupied Properties

This category is the most out of your control. Your company may have an official representative handling an occupied property but without ownership, and these channels can change at any time. Reddit, for example, is one such platform, as is sourdough in Turkey. Employees may participate in forums or community sites, formally or informally, but always on behalf of the company.

Consumer conversations happen across all three social channel categories. However, before engaging in any of them, take time to reflect on your channel management and engagement strategies.

Smaller brands with limited resources might choose a site based on the high engagement they can achieve before expanding to multiple channels. As your brand’s representative, you can add unique value in choosing the best channel for your organization.

Which Network Should I Sign Up For First?

This question has no answer. Each business needs different answers to this question. A good first step for any organization is to visit KnowEm.com. This site allows you to register your brand name over 500+ social networks. This will help ensure that whatever platform you decide is the right one for your brand, your name is registered where it should be.

Your brand name is protected from squeaks, as they may not be needed right away. As a result, KnowEm also has one of the most comprehensive lists of all social networks on the internet, so it’s obviously also a good place to search for networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

However, to say that almost everyone should have a Facebook page is a point that cannot be overlooked. On this network, which has more than 1.19 billion monthly active users, you can probably find your customers in a healthy way. The same can be said for Twitter and, recently, for Instagram.

Another tool to help you narrow down the “where” of your social strategy is to take a listening journey. Use one of the many social listening tools to find where your customers and your larger industry are having relevant conversations. This insight should help discover where it makes the most sense to establish your presence.

Single and Multiple Accounts

Whether or not to have more than one account on a social network is a pretty big question. Especially if you are a business with a franchise system.

So what is the answer to this? It depends. While some large companies like Nordstrom have corporate Twitter accounts, most of their stores have their own. This allows them to deliver highly specific and relevant information to their regional followers while maintaining company accounts for news, promotions and announcements. However, the important thing here is that all of them meet at a common point.

That is, all accounts must speak the same language as each other. It makes sense in this case, based on their proposals to divide the conversations by audience and product rather than geography. Nike, Comcast, and Delta Airlines are good examples of brands that have successfully implemented multiple accounts for multiple purposes.

⭐The most important thing to consider when deciding whether it makes sense to segment your profiles across these networks is whether you can add value to the customer and conversation. Can you better meet your customer needs in one account, or are there regional considerations that make this more difficult?

You should also carefully consider your ability to manage multiple accounts. Tools like HootSuite, Sprout Social and SocialEngage make it easier to manage multiple accounts from no dashboard.

How to get started

⭐What is the first thing you should do?

Ask yourself a few questions:

• What behavior am I trying to drive and what’s the end of it?
• Which of the social channels out there lend themselves to the particular products and/or services I offer?
• Who are my target customers and what do I know about their online behavior?

Setting your own goals will help you decide which type of social media channel will make the most sense for your efforts, and clarifying the desired behaviors of your community members will help you define how you will deal with them. For example, are you trying to increase brand awareness? If so, consider marketing activities that include collecting and sharing customer testimonials, highly shareable content, and buzz-worthy interactions. Are you shooting for more traffic and conversions? Look for opportunities to engage interested customers who are ready to pull the “buy” trigger. The key is to match your engagement efforts with the results you want to see.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine running a growing beauty products company with big national and global aspirations. Here is a step-by-step roadmap for choosing the right social platform for the job:

⭐Hint: Don’t limit your thinking vertically.

Explore horizontally.

Of course, your customers are interested in your products, but what are their other interests and topics, such as their indirect interest in you? For example, say you are a salesman of sailboats and equipment. There are certainly some sailing-related communities that are perfect for you to approach, but your clients are likely to also have a strong interest in travel, other outdoor activities, or even food and wine. Think about how you can join these horizontal communities and say hello to a huge audience!

Focus on What’s Most Important to Your Community, Rather Than What’s Most Popular

Once you start socializing, it’s easy to get distracted. There are new apps, tools, and networks that pop up almost daily, and you can easily spend your entire day just checking them all out. However, the idea is to strike a balance between obsessive marketing and being an ostrich with its head in the sand. It is better to do less effective things than many ineffective ones. However, you should keep your eyes and ears open for future social trends; There will be a time when it makes sense to jump into it. Here’s what you should pay attention to:

• See platform functionalities that work with your product offering or marketplace. For example, clothing retailers are well placed for popular social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.
• New technologies and/or functionality that allow you to communicate and share with your community in new ways.
• Additionally, look out for technologies and sites that have the potential to reach new demographics within the scope of your target audience or influencers.

When all else fails, keep your eye on your goals, but don’t be afraid to dip your toes in the water and test and test again and test again. Invest enough energy so you can get a meaningful response and use it as a guiding light on whether to dig deeper.

As New Networks Emerge, How Do You Launch a New Presence?

There are some facts and norms on social media. Once you apply them to your business to launch a presence on one network, you will quickly find that they are portable on almost any other network. The rules of engagement may differ slightly from site to site, perhaps like the semantics, but the fundamentals will remain unchanged regardless of platform and will always be the best place to start branching out.

Goals and measurement

Setting your  new channel’s goals should be something you’ve considered from the very beginning. Why are you joining this new channel? What are you trying to get out of this? Once you have set your goals, you must decide how you will measure your success. For emerging platforms, this may take some time depending on what analytics tools are available in the market and how the platform’s API is built. (You can always create your own method if it’s clear enough and you have your own resources.)

Branding

Your  social authority is vital, and effective branding can go a long way in establishing your authority as a brand. Social channels also offer exciting possibilities for expressing your brand and increasing brand impressions. Make sure your profile images are in place and your bio parts are translated and get your first impression!

Content seeding

There’s nothing more upsetting than visiting a social profile page you’re interested in and finding absolutely nothing. Before you start following people or actively driving traffic to your new profile, be sure to post content for a few days. This reassures visitors that there is something worth watching.

Influential link

Once you’ve got your branding through and your content flagged, it’s time to start looking for people you can interact with. Start looking for people you identify as influencers from other platforms. You’ve probably had a relationship with them and relationships can be ported across platforms. Use this. Look for more people relevant to your field in your followers as you interact with them. Before long it should be the foundation of a nice little mesh.

Discovery

Once you’ve determined that this new network is a place where you plan to invest time and energy, add links from relevant places to help your customers discover your new presence. Write interesting content about what you do and highlight it on your blog. Cross-post from your other social channels to raise awareness.

Content calendar / posting

As  with any other channel you create, it is important to keep a content or broadcast calendar. You can do some content planning with existing tools like HootSuite, Spout Social, and SocialEngage. Planning a content calendar can be as complex as making a built-in add-on to your content management system, or as simple as using an Excel spreadsheet. It’s really about what works for you, and planning ahead helps you fully optimize events, promotions and interests for your target audience.

When you’re ready to get started, so much can happen that it seems overwhelming. The great thing about social is that once you’ve got the basics down, many of the new sites you want to try are transferable. These best practices will help you prepare for success socially, regardless of your size or platform.

Chapter 6: Facebook

When Facebook started in 2004, it was a simple social network focused on connecting college students. Fifteen years and Billions of active users Facebook has become the most widely used social network to date and has shaped online interaction as we know it. From connecting distant friends and family members to bridging the gap between brands and their communities, Facebook has taken online interaction to a whole new level.

Key Statistics and Demographics

How Do People Use Facebook?

Since its inception, Facebook has become an integral part of people’s online social presence. For many, Facebook is simply an online social networking contributor, although contributors vary by user spectrum. From those who check the network periodically throughout the week to those who are almost necessarily active, the main driver of engagement is connectivity: connecting with colleagues, old and new friends, alumni networks and an increasing percentage of users, even professional connections.

The network itself has evolved into a system with highly customizable privacy and visibility settings. Users can see their sights down to spots that are almost invisible on the platform. They can choose which posts or updates can appear and to whom. Conversely, users who have chosen a more comprehensive approach can leave everything from their tagged images to their active streams on Spotify completely public.

Features go beyond the individual user’s page to brand pages, events, groups and now a so-called standalone messaging service.

• Groups are user-created and have varying levels of privacy and security, as do individual profiles. Users can organize groups around any topic or event they love. From professionally related groups to groups organized by special interests such as nutrition, diversity is limited only by the interests of users. These groups have undoubtedly become a nice and sticky addition to the platform over time.
• Events allow users to organize at a point in time. The security here is highly customizable allowing for public, private and events in between. The most important feature here is the ability to export your Facebook events to other calendars, no doubt relying on this feature that blends users’ increased personal use and professional life.
• Business pages have been an evolutionary product for Facebook. Over the years they have taken several different forms, although they are quite balanced today. Like other types of pages, the feature set is changing as the brand makes more contributions to meet the needs of the marketers behind its efforts. Facebook has recently added more features in terms of analytics, reporting, security and reach, increasing the wealth available for those who want to dive into Facebook ads.

• Facebook Messenger is a new way to combine email, instant messaging and Facebook messages. When new standalone group messaging services launched in 2010 and 2011, Facebook clearly saw an opportunity and acquired one of the more popular group messaging apps known as Beluga. They have since rebranded this app as Facebook Messenger. On iOS, Blackberry, and Android devices, this is a stand-alone app, but also integrates with the Facebook app and web experiences.

Today, it provides services within the body of Facebook on Instagram and Whatsapp. The coexistence of the three most important social networks in the world right now is certainly an important point.

As users increasingly rely on social platforms, these social networks will grow and respond just like Facebook did. While there is still great opportunity in this space, Facebook provides flexibility for privacy and visibility, giving its users the best choice for many aspects of their lives. As users continue to adopt new behaviors and ultimately expectations, Facebook will need to continue adapting to stay at the top of the social stack, so expect change and evolution to continue. This change is necessary and helpful, but it can be frustrating from a marketing standpoint.

Strategies and Tactics for Success

As more and more people and brands take to Facebook, the noise level for individual users increases. While Facebook’s News Feed algorithm helps noise level by showing users what the most relevant content looks like, to truly stand out from the crowd, brands need to be eye-catching, interesting, and add value.

To get your content seen, you need to consider and optimize Facebook-specific functionality.

Content

Everything you post on Facebook is content. As we now know from the News Feed algorithm, how users interact with this content matters. Consider any piece of content where you offer an opportunity for greater and more exclusive engagement and where you’re not afraid to have some fun. Take a look at these examples from Delta and GE. When they’re totally on brand, you can find that they’re a little unexpected and show that they’re not afraid to show their human side. Plus, images are incredibly effective on Facebook; Posts with photos receive 39% more engagement on average.

Post timing

It’s also about the content of your content, when and how you post it. Make sure to keep track of the time of day when your fans are most active. Focusing on your mission during these times will help you grow your community.

Also, be sure to pay attention to topics such as sentence structure, phrases, and types of posts that are particularly interesting to your audience. Many Facebook users check out the site during their lunch break and after dinner, and while the latter is out of normal business hours, it’s worth testing out if it’s time for your audience to search for content.

Moderation

Brands have increased levels of responsibility for user-generated content posted on their walls or in their comments. You’ll want to proactively think about your stance on inappropriate content on your Facebook page, and your best practice would be to make that stance public. This allows your community to know what you will and won’t allow, reduce the chance of surprise and create a sense of security and set expectations.

Because Facebook is an open and public space, you can’t control everything people say.

• Examples where it is appropriate to remove user content: advertising content, harassment and abuse, derogatory or offensive language, threatening text, and posts containing sensitive information (credit card numbers, addresses, etc.).
• Examples where you should address reviews rather than removing them include: customer complaints, negative reviews, and critical statements. You may not always like what people have to say, but socially you always have to listen.

Engagement

Because we build something based on relationships, you can take full advantage of engaging in conversations with your customers. They want to interact with your brand and go out of their way to do so. be honored.

The type of speech will determine the pace and rhythm of your response. It also largely depends on your product; For example, an airline’s response rates to customer service issues need to be fairly quick, as its customers’ needs are probably much more sensitive to time in another industry. Only you can determine what’s right for your organization and product, but at least in the early stages of building a community, it’s better to look next to faster answers.

Community

Get to know your audience’s experience on Facebook and their connections, not conversion rates, rather than your CTR. Concentrate on them and you will succeed. Your audience will grow into a community that fascinates, grows and supports each other. By engaging the audience, you can move towards advocacy from customers, helping to increase the level of stickiness and interest they can have for the brand.

User flow

While the page environment Facebook gives brands is mostly set up, you want to make sure you direct your users where you want them to go. If I’m a user looking for support or help, will I know where to go?

As you do when designing landing pages for your website, consider the goals of your Facebook page. What do you want users to do when they come to your page? What information do they need to access easily? Make sure these items are front and center.

You can easily change the order of the apps and even optimize the icons used to display these apps for visibility. JetBlue is a great example of a clear user flow.

Reliability

A large part of your brand is built on trust, and the foundation of this trust is your credibility. Grammar and spelling are universally important and every effort should be made for correct use.

It is very important that you consult the fact-check resources and news before sharing them on your networks. Keep your users safe by not sharing links to malicious sites. Basically, make sure you don’t give your community a reason to believe there is something different from you.

Success Examples

There are millions of companies using Facebook to promote their brands and interact with their communities, but a few stand out from the crowd. Take a look at how these leaders are doing in Facebook marketing:

Squarespace

This relatively young company has already built a substantial following, and digging through their pages gives you a few reasons why. Regular updates with the perfect mix of content and a team that responds quickly to users’ comments are a winning combination in the B2B world.

People on Facebook like rich media content, images, links, videos, etc. They run at a much higher speed with and Burberry is getting it.

You immediately feel immersed in their world. Fascinating images pop up and beg you to keep scrolling. Their apps add a great deal of value rather than simply offering additional marketing content.

Julep

There are little people who like attention more. Julep, a Nail Salon chain and a membership-based subscription to monthly nail polish and other beauty supplies, has had tremendous success creating “Fan #NOTD” (re: Nail of the Day).

They highlight the creativity of their community with their products by rewarding the most impressive customers and sharing their user-generated photos.

ESPN

Face the ESPN Fan Chat is a regular series of interactive content hosted by the sports network on Facebook via an app.

This live stream content does a great job of integrating more traditional content for a socially engaged audience. This fan engagement is nothing new to them, but taking it to Facebook is reaching an entirely new demographic.

Etiquette, Tips and What You Can Do

Like offline social interactions, Facebook has its own unwritten processes and don’ts for users to follow. Facebook is first and foremost a social network created to help users stay connected with each other.

It has also become a platform for businesses to interact with their customers. This hierarchy is important to keep in mind and means you need to know the ropes before you take the plunge.

Here are a few tips to get you started with the right Facebook rules:

Spam spamming

This is a big no through all marketing. Always be meticulous, stylish and don’t spam. This includes sending group event invitations, message pages, and invitations to like your brand pages from your personal account. Spamming isn’t impossible as a business page either, but Facebook’s functionality blocks most of it.

Reply to

Response times will vary depending on the topic and the product in question, but timeliness on social media is key. Users expect it to be much faster with social channels than with more traditional web channels like email. In most cases, same-day responses are required. Never let your community feel forgotten.

Say no to clustered updates

Avoid making multiple updates in a short time, except for important picture albums. Beyond the algorithmic concerns of the News Feed, it’s annoying for your followers. Your signal-to-noise ratio drops and you may lose the long-term interest of your viewers.

@ Name

If you want to call out another public Facebook page or user, you can directly link to Facebook pages that let them know you’re talking about them by putting an @ followed by their name. (Facebook helps you make your choice in a drop-down menu.) It also makes it clear who you’re referring to. Note that private users cannot be used this way unless you reply to a comment they left on your page.

Highlight important posts

Your brand has very important updates; purchases, sales or features, for example, in news articles; you can highlight them on your page’s timeline. This expands the post to both columns and can further add these important updates to people’s News Feeds.

Messages

People can send private messages to your page. You will find that most of these messages will be customer service related, so be sure to check them out. The Messages section works like an email inbox.

Notifications

The notifications box shows the latest likes, comments, wall posts, and more on your brand’s page. Depending on the volume of incoming activity, this administrative section can be useful when monitoring activity by your community. Due to Facebook’s focus on recent activity, you’ll likely only get comments and likes on recent posts, but notifications can help track activity on older posts.

Favorites page

You can  mark other brand pages as favorites on your business page. This is a useful way to introduce partners, good causes, or others with whom you tie your business together.

Posting

While many social media tools allow you to post from Facebook, you will get the best results by posting directly from Facebook to Facebook. Facebook’s algorithm tends towards the post originating from its interface. However, social management software allows you to moderate replies and comments seamlessly.

Scheduling

Fortunately, Facebook lets you schedule messages directly on their interface. If you are sharing linked content, you must ensure it has been published online; this can be difficult for those scheduling unpublished blog posts or other content. Scheduled posts will only be visible to moderators in the “Event Log”. However, keep in mind that engagement is a primary goal and you will want to be around responses to your scheduled posts.

Recommended Tools

Facebook for Business

A useful portal for business page owners that offers support for page creation, ad campaign management, and other platform resources. If you are already a social media marketer or a Social Media expert , this portal will be one of the places you use the most.

SimplyMetrics, Unmetric, Unified, Crowdbooster, and True Social Metrics are incredible resources for competitive analysis and benchmarking across industries, along with deep analytics for Facebook measurement and your brand pages.

Facebook Studio

Facebook has recently launched its studio on its platform, which highlights great marketing and campaign work. Here you’ll find case studies, awards, and examples of great work that inspire your work.

Facebook Page Insights (available in the admin panel of any business page)

This tool offers an increasing amount of data specific to your brand page. While this won’t give you any sense of competition, this panel will tell you who your fans are, where they are, and how engaged they are with your page and individual posts. Much of this information can be downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

Facebook Brand

Like any good organization, Facebook enforces rules for using its own brand materials. This page gives you everything you need to know about official logos, images, and how to mention Facebook without raising a brow from Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook Ads

If your brand has the resources, you can speed up your content by purchasing ads on Facebook. These ads can be tailored to the precise social graph of your target customers.

Chapter 7: Twitter

Founded in 2006, Twitter’s 140-character bite-size updates have transformed the world’s access to real-time information. This character limit has now increased to 280. Its simple interface lets you share everything from breaking news to sports to great content and world politics.

At a time when we’re oversaturated with media, Twitter also gives us access to what we need to know. Most of the reports from the Arab Spring uprisings were made directly on Twitter.

Thanks to all this, brands join the network not only to promote their message, but also to meet their customers’ needs quickly and accurately.

Key Statistics and Demographics

How Do People Use Twitter?

Twitter has become a tool for everything from facilitating the collapse of governments to showing off your newborn. Thanks to Twitter, athletes had the opportunity to voice the sideline commentary and Hollywood dramas surfaced. Consumers have come to use this social networking service to share and find content. For many, Twitter has replaced RSS subscriptions and traditional news media.

Because of its exposure to the general public, Twitter’s strongest use is connecting people. The platform allows strangers to come together on common interests and ideas and participate in conversations from the relatively mundane to the incredibly important.

• Engage in Twitter conversations about the interests of your brand’s customers. You will find thoughtful people to help expand your network.
• Save searches for common interests or popular hashtags to find people talking about these topics.
• Use tools like Followerwonk or Twellow to find like-minded users. Plus, see who they’re interacting with and engaging with those communities.
• Tools like Xobni and Rapportive integrate with Outlook and Gmail to help you uncover the social profiles of people you already know.
• Twitter’s Discover experience can help you dive into different conversations. Also, check out Twitter Categories, which lets you browse the best accounts on a wide variety of topics.

Some users may choose to live-tweet their day mainly, while others may limit their contribution primarily to content sharing. Your goal is to identify what types of users you are looking for and are of interest to, and to understand how and why they use the tool. By understanding the motivations behind using the site, you can better target your efforts and content in meaningful ways.

Strategies and Tactics for Success

Your success on Twitter will of course depend on your specific goals, but there are some universally applicable strategies that can get you started on the right track. By constantly keeping these tactics in mind, you can accelerate your progress towards your own goals.

Brand and voice

Being aware of who you are and who you are not is very important on Twitter. You only have 280 characters to convey your thoughts, so every word counts. Your company’s brand and voice go into every passive or active interaction you have here. As you grow up, you’ll naturally get a good sense of who the idealized brand representative should be.

How do they communicate? How might they respond to conflict? What is their sense of humor like? Questions like these may seem silly at first, but it’s better to answer them ahead of time than to formulate answers based on your mood or the amount of sleep or coffee you have at a particular moment.

Consistency of voice is important because people want to know what to expect in their interactions with you. Over time, this consistency helps you build trust and confidence with your audience.

It is also very important to ensure that your account name and profile are populated according to your brand guidelines. Think of these areas as your “first impression”. Many people only visit a Twitter profile once to decide if they want to follow you. 

Your bio should be clear and concise, while your sleeve should be appropriately branded. Make sure your location reflects where you are accurately.

Additionally, your follower count can also play a role in this. Checking your follower:following rate can help you further establish credibility by showing that you care enough about backtracking your community members.

Use tracking and variables on all your shared links.  This will help you better assess the success of individual pieces of content. Look at the day and time your audience is most active, the types of content they’re most interested in, and the style and tone of your language. From there, you can better understand how to share and interact with your community.

Be interesting:  There’s nothing worse than boring tweets. “Boring” is understandably subjective, but you should try to be engaging to your target audience. Streams that constantly push promotional messaging get old fast. How do you determine brand loyalty when all you have to say is “Here’s 50% off [something]”? There must be more than you can say about your business, and if not, you may need a new lens to view your organization.

Adding value

It’s important to be constantly present, but tweeting to hear yourself talking isn’t all that tangible. Every tweet you post should add value in some way. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself why you would want to see this information if you were a follower.

Responsiveness

Due to the condensed format and Twitter’s fast pace, it’s critical that you respond to your community as quickly as possible. The platform makes it easy for people to find your brand, and we’re sure you get lots of customer service requests that need immediate attention. If you ignore a critical tweet for too long, you may find that a person’s voice is soon amplified by their followers.

Also, don’t just respond to emergencies or questions; also be sure to say hello and respond to compliments for your brand. As you get older you’re going to have to figure out how much scale there is, but tweeting too much is a big deal.

Measurement

The  beauty of Twitter is that data is plentiful; The tricky part is setting these measurement frameworks and dashboards to be as close as possible to your business goals and objectives. Data is what really influences your bottom line on your social network; It helps you tell your own story and find both opportunities and achievements.

Success Examples

Developing hordes of followers is no small feat, and providing enough value to keep them engaged can be difficult. Companies that consistently gain the attention of the Twitterverse are worth keeping an eye on; Here are some impressive examples:

Taco Bell

The fast-food chain is fast gaining a reputation (no pun intended) for its spicy snakes. Consistently funny, engaging, and sometimes a little disrespectful, Taco Bell is totally brand-name and works pretty well for them. From a content development perspective, give them a following and how they reach and engage their audiences.

Wholefoods

Whole Foods, an organic grocery chain, uses Twitter to truly engage and engage their consumers with relevant content and interests. Not just about their in-store experience, but also about their experience with food in general. Take a look at the weekly Twitter chats that use the hashtag #WFMdish, where the topic changes weekly, but focuses on healthy food and cooking. This is a great example of expanding your thinking about content and thinking, not just vertical.

Charity

Water , a wildly popular nonprofit movement, has gained massive traction on Twitter. In three years, they’ve raised more than $15 million to bring clean water to people around the world. Helpfulness: Su relies heavily on engaging content to get their message across. This includes video, compelling images, and consistent branding on Twitter backgrounds and profile pictures. By deftly telling their stories and connecting audiences to their mission, they created real momentum and support.

Etiquette, Tips and What You Can Do

Like any social interaction, Twitter has best practices to follow to succeed. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Don’t spam

This should be a rule of thumb for all of your marketing efforts, but it’s repetitive here. There are many new accounts with the best intentions behind marketers, but no matter how you slice it. Jumping into irrelevant tags to market your product is useless. Likewise, incessant mentions of each person in your feed to draw their attention to a content or offer is typically considered annoying. Make sure your tweets are relevant, helpful to your followers, and spam-free.

Direct messages

DMs are perfect when you need specific information like a shipping address. Traditionally, you can only find DM people who follow you and vice versa. If you have a verified account on Twitter, you can choose a custom setting to allow anyone to influence you. However, you cannot reply via DM unless the person DMing you follows you.

• Do not send automated DMs as it is spam . Under no circumstances automatically DM your followers. Automated messages are uninteresting and you can’t get personal contact with them. If you want to reach every single person who decides to follow you, do so in a personalized and unique way.
• @ replies:  When you start a tweet with an @ username, only users who follow both you and the @ username will see your tweet. Put a period or other marker in front of the username if you want more people to see it. Or you can always rearrange your sentence.
• Hashtags:  By using #hashtags, you are exposing yourself to a wider audience. Many people follow conversations using various hashtags, but they probably won’t follow you. Hashtags are a shortcut used to describe what your tweet contains or to show that you are part of a conversation or event. If your brand is jumping into a hashtag, you need to make sure you add value to the conversation rather than just promoting your business.

• Retweet (RT):  There are two ways to RT, either manually or via Twitter’s native RT function. RT encourages members of your community to increase their content, make them feel good, and “you’re awesome!” A great way to say it. If there’s a link you want to follow or grammar/spelling issues you want to fix before RT’ing, you can edit the tweet and say, “RT @ username: Pups are cute!” You can send it as
• Update scheduling:  Various tools allow people to schedule tweets. Scheduling updates is a community manager’s best friend as you aren’t always online or otherwise available to update Twitter when needed. You compose the tweet, set the time and date, select the account you want to send it to and schedule it. Scheduling allows you to post content when your community is most active.
• Make sure to watch your scheduled broadcasts.  Chart sticks can be an incredibly useful tool that allows you to scale your energy. However, pre-planned tweets can be used during times of crisis, e.g. global disasters, national tragedies, etc. It can be harmful for you. Even if these crises are not directly related to your brand, it is important to close scheduled posts quickly; Global events can explode, creating an inevitable environment for off-topic content. Worse still, your messages can inadvertently become the source of arguments during a crisis. For example, from LiveNation Twitter, during a terrible accident at the RadioHead concert, the process for which they were responsible went horribly wrong. Be you, make sure to keep an eye on your scheduled releases.
• Shortening links:  Twitter now automatically shortens your links; however, you should consider using a separate shortening service with built-in analytics so that you can track clicks on your content that doesn’t display your own web features. Bit.ly, Buffer, and HootSuite are all good options. You might even consider purchasing a customized shortened domain.

• Twitter lists:  Making a list of users can aid your targeting efforts as the industry tries to reach influencers or engage in conversations based on your niche. If you’re making a public list, remember to be empathetic to people who aren’t on it; It’s best to stay away from listings that qualify or rate people or their services. Making lists private avoids this problem.
• Use Twitter handles: If  you’re talking about someone who’s on Twitter, use @usernames. It’s just polite and your community wants to know when to talk to them because it’s an easy ego boost. It also encourages those people to share what you’ve posted or engage more with your community.

Recommended Tools

• Followerwonk:  Admittedly, we’re a little biased about our own tool. Followerwonk has taken a data-driven approach to measuring an account’s audience, but that aside, we think you’ll love it too. This tool helps you let you know demographics, growth, interests, when your followers are most active, and even which audience members you share with competitors. Followerwonk helps you explore the social graph and truly understand who Twitter users are.
• HootSuite, Social Engage, and Sprout Social: These apps allow users to manage their Twitter accounts more effectively. With varying degrees of control and functionality, you want to browse around and find what works best for your needs and your team. All of these tools do the same thing: they help you engage, measure engagement, and engage your Twitter followers in ways that sometimes make the web interface difficult.
• Crowdbooster: Depending on the size and number of accounts you’re following, this could be a free tool. It offers a quick and light view of what’s working in terms of growth and content.
• IFTTT:  “If so, this” lets you set rules for your online activity. Basically, macros that work to create conditional triggers for events running on your social accounts or even on your website. Useful for many activities outside of Twitter.
• Twitter for Business:  Twitter’s one-stop shop to hit the ground running with your business. A great resource for newbies to the platform.
• Simply Measured: This rich analytics tool lets you determine your follower growth, engagement, reach, and even who your influencers are.

• Twitter Cards:  By organizing your internet content with the right metadata, you can make rich content appear every time someone tweets their link. There are many types of cards currently available, including templates for articles, photo galleries, apps, and even products.

Additionally, Twitter has launched Lead Generating Cards, which go an extra mile in helping businesses increase conversions. It includes rich content and a clear call-to-action, allowing new customers to engage with your content with a single click.

Chapter 8: LinkedIn

The world’s largest professional social network enables community development and content sharing, while connecting businesses with colleagues, with each other and with current and potential employees. LinkedIn’s potential is in building authority, building thought leadership, and building a solid network.

Although many see LinkedIn as a social media network that has just started to gain strength, this is mainly true for our country. This widely used social media network is the most popular platform for companies and individuals offering products and services, especially in B2B businesses.

LinkedIn, which is also the place where people create their live résumés and transfer their business contacts online, has become an incredibly effective place today with brands having their own pages.

Especially the job seeker can reach many job postings all over the world through this social media and can see how consistent the information in this job posting and their resumes are. This enables job seekers to use this network frequently to meet all their needs, while also allowing brands to reach these people much more easily.

Undoubtedly, another advantageous side for brands is that they can easily reach real people in their sector. Since people use this social media purely for business matters, the information on their page also hosts enough information about which sector they are in. In addition, they connect with people in their own industry and follow pages and brands that are relevant to their industry.

In this case, brands can reach their main target audiences very easily and comfortably. The most important feature of LinkedIn ads is its full targeting, which has a very high rate.

Key Statistics and Demographics

If you’ve briefly explored the social media network that the business world thrives on, it’s time to examine it in more detail.

Let’s start by taking a look behind the scenes to determine if LinkedIn fits your business.

How Do People Use LinkedIn?

Your water cooler, your networking event, your business card holder, and Rolodex took them and put them together and put it under one hood. That’s LinkedIn!

People create their profiles to showcase their professional background and résumé. They can connect with people they know or work with, give each other advice and find new connections.

LinkedIn can also be a great place to seek and find work, as it benefits job boards and contributes to the human connections that are invaluable to finding the right position.

For companies, especially employees, this is just the beginning. Business professionals created their profiles and received recommendations from their colleagues; making it a solid choice for brands looking to acquire new talent. LinkedIn allows hiring managers to search and filter candidates based on multiple factors, and users can join groups based on their professional interests.

Beyond recruiting efforts, LinkedIn is the perfect place for a variety of useful social activities to promote your business.

Business development : LinkedIn is a great platform for generating B2B leads with about three times the conversion rate of Facebook or Twitter. Your mileage may vary, but this is definitely a sign that the platform is coming with great opportunity. Some tips:

• Keep your company page up to date
• Use the product and service spotlight
• Ask for recommendations for your products

Establishing thought leadership: Establishing yourself and your brand as an authority in your area of ​​focus will help build authority and trust among your current and future customers. In addition to building a business presence and sharing company news, LinkedIn’s feature set can help brands stay current on users’ professional networks.

Add your blog’s RSS feed to a widget that will automatically pull the feed and display it to your company page followers.

Although groups are only open to individuals and not companies, they are a great place to offer professional help and advice.

Building customer advocates: Be careful not to get promoted. Advocacy and word of mouth magic happen through a positive relationship. When brands engage customers and build strong relationships based on respect and trust, customers will “like” and perhaps even love the brand. LinkedIn makes it easy to be both personal and private. You know a lot about the person you are interacting with, so use this knowledge.

LinkedIn increases business value because it is based on the user’s professional interests. This provides an open and natural fit to share brand-based updates, news and information; as well as driving traffic to company-oriented websites

Strategies and Tactics for Success

Personal Use

• Complete your personal profile thoroughly and honestly.
• Find and reach your connections. Once in a while, pick someone you haven’t talked to recently and send them a note without needing anything, just to say hello or share something interesting you think they’ll like.
• Link to your profile from your blog, Facebook and/or Twitter accounts to help people find your profile. (Actually, if the shared content is relevant, return to these pages from your LinkedIn profile. However, keep in mind that these links can draw hiring managers to these relevant pages.)
• Join groups. Your personal authority and confidence can be increased, which can lead to new opportunities, leads and connections. Note that this functionality is currently only available for individuals.

As LinkedIn continues to be a place where people can share quality content, we will see more engagement around that content.

Be part of this movement: Share your own content and share high-quality content from others.

Business Use

• Fill out your company page and make sure it’s always up to date. If you change your structure or have company news to share, be sure to update your LinkedIn page on LinkedIn. This will also find its way into your followers’ news feeds and people will see it.
• When core updates happen at your company, make your LinkedIn page part of the update process.
• Be sure to respond to your posts, reviews, and questions. If a user leaves a product review, thank them. If they have complaints, address them. Answer questions and provide advice and assistance.

LinkedIn can be an incredible source of competitive intelligence for your business. Follow your competitors’ pages and monitor their news, updates and employee changes. Some exits and job openings can provide insight into strategic direction.

Success Examples

Companies that have found ways to cultivate professional communities have seen the most success on LinkedIn. This task requires more than just publishing valuable content. LinkedIn’s superstars have found ways to facilitate meaningful interaction within their networks. How would you like to review a few of the highlights together?

• Teach for America: The Teach for America team openly recognizes that LinkedIn is a valuable and potentially high platform for recruiting efforts. They have a very advanced page that takes advantage of all the features available. This creates a deep experience that adds to the authority they have built here. They not only share the gaps they are trying to fill, but also try to start conversations through the content they share. Additionally, they have worked to build and display testimonials on their company pages, adding a confidence to their presence.
• Bridgespan Group’s LinkedIn Groups:  Bridgespan builds and supports relationships with nonprofits and has taken a somewhat unconventional approach when it comes to community-based engagement. Where many companies will attempt to create and maintain their own domain forums, they have chosen to curate their communities with nine separate, functionally distinct LinkedIn Groups on LinkedIn. They break up communities in a meaningful way for community members, thus providing valuable conversations.
• SAP:  Companies can also have their own Groups focused on their products, offerings and related topics. This can be a great opportunity to host discussions, such as hosting a networking event. SAP Group on LinkedIn allows the company to post targeted jobs and hire new employees with data and demo information about the group that helps employers narrow their search.

Etiquette, Tips and What You Can Do

Connecting with professionals on social media requires a thoughtful and even graceful process back and forth; It’s easy to come across as insincere, or even spam. The best relationships are developed when communication progresses naturally and carefully. Pay attention to social cues and you can avoid many things that could result in a complete social train wreck.

• A business card isn’t a boring invitation: We’ve all seen it happen: the business card-stock eraser. A high-speed tree like a roaming Roomba is a room that wants to collect and distribute as many business cards as possible. LinkedIn requests are sent immediately, possibly without a personalized email, and invitations are sent for a group of groups, events, or even to download their eBooks. Please don’t be that person. 🙂
• Cold mail: You can find someone you want to connect with on LinkedIn. If you do, use a personalized approach and give context to the email you send. Let them know who they are and why they want to connect. (Your “why” is that you should never sell because you have something to sell.)
• @ replies: While LinkedIn doesn’t have smart user alerting, using the @ name when replying to comments on your Page or Groups is good practice to keep the conversation flow consistent and directed. However, LinkedIn has recently started to issue an activity alert; instead of just emails, it now tells people when conversations they’re part of are updated.
• Fix broken windows: You want to make sure you clean up spam in your LinkedIn Groups. Members – especially those who need new business or other types of promotions – can sometimes run into an issue with spam and low-quality posts as you need them to engage and grow your community. Be kind and empathetic, but be mindful of the rules by which you can pass your group on for comments.
• Be original: Be as yourself as you can in every interaction on LinkedIn. When connecting to someone else, avoid posting the “I want to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” standard. Not only are you less likely to be accepted, you won’t be able to send future link requests, even being marked as spam. Personalized interactions make other people feel valued and valued and cared for.

• Recommendations: LinkedIn recommendations can be an incredibly powerful thing, but they should only be requested from people you know well and are familiar with your work. The suggestion will be much better for him. If you make a request, don’t hesitate to tell the person you approached about a specific goal you might have for suggestion. You don’t want to do it the hard way, but you can get a more helpful suggestion and it can make their life easier too, as they will have a predetermined focus area.
• Sharing content: Not all of your content needs to be shared on LinkedIn, because what you post here can very easily reflect on your professional reputation or appear impregnated. Avoid tools that automatically transfer messages from other platforms. Above all, be conscious and aware of what you’re sharing, and try not to share too much – LinkedIn is a place where you don’t want people to hide from their posts because links are so important.
• Discussions: The LinkedIn Group event “Choose Your View: Latest Discussions” and “What’s Happening?” There are ways to view it in the “Discussions” section below. “What’s Happening” shows discussions of recent events so you can keep tabs on current conversations. “Latest Discussions” shows the most recently published discussions.

Recommended Tools

Building a professional community can be a very different experience from business to business; so finding the right features and functionality that works for you is an important step towards success. Here are some of the more useful tools to help you customize your LinkedIn experience:

• LinkedIn for Business: If you use Outlook, this tool brings your professional network straight to your mailbox. It also scans your Outlook contacts and finds new connections for you on LinkedIn. Having this information in your inbox can help you better track and communicate with your contacts.
• Buffer: Competing with millions of users in less than three years, this app will help you schedule posts and provide basic click/reach analytics for all posts on your company page, groups, and individual profiles.
• TrueSocialMetrics: For analytics buffs, TrueSocialMetrics provides a wealth of data on applause and engagement on your LinkedIn page.
• LinkedIn Maps:  Brought to you by LinkedIn Labs, this nifty tool lets you log in with your LinkedIn credentials and visualize your network on a map.

Chapter 9: Youtube and Pinterest

Youtube

From its humble beginnings in 2005, YouTube has become more than just a place to watch cat videos. Eight years later, YouTube has grown into the world’s second largest search engine, an online culture driver, and a springboard to Internet fame. There are plenty of cat videos to browse, but YouTube has views for bigger and better ideas.

Youtube has now become a career in itself. Many Youtubers have created a brand by building their careers thanks to this social media network. Thanks to these brands, they signed great deals.

In addition to the fact that these names are brands, brands found their place in this field and started to work with Youtubers. This started to attract an incredible amount of traffic and attention. Naturally, both Youtubers and brands started to profit from this interaction.

From product promotions to complaint videos… Everything you can think of finds its place on this social network. In fact, brands have taken over this social media so much that they started to be sponsor brands in Youtube videos, just like a TV series or a movie sponsor.

Let’s get to know YouTube better, which has such a big world.

📜Even if you don’t use Youtube, you can browse our Youtube ads service to make your voice heard with ads on this platform.

Key Statistics and Demographics

• YouTube sees over a billion unique visits each month
• Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month
• 100 hours of video uploaded every minute
• Mobile devices have over 1 billion views every day
• According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network
• Thousands of YouTube channels make six figures a year

How is the Network Used by Consumers?

In a word, sharing.

Content is uploaded and shared at record rates on YouTube. Users can follow channels (which over the years have further improved in their design and functionality), upload their own content, comment and discuss videos, and watch other users’ content.

Thanks to its ability to link or embed videos directly, YouTube has become a primary source of video entertainment for users on the internet. The ability to monetize with ads for both itself and its users adds a layer of financial sustainability.

Strategies and Tactics for Success

Engagement:  Comments on YouTube are notorious as a kind of wasteland. Many are pointless and often come from trolls. Many brands have closed their comments for good reasons. You can choose to leave a comment to see what kind of relationship you have and that’s fine too. What is not recommended is to leave them on and ignore them; Either you are in this endless garden or you disappear from it completely. You can also see powerful results by choosing to engage with your audience.

Content Strategy: Help content and other how-tos: For some products, tutorials and how-tos will be incredibly valuable. Help your audience learn how to use your product better, including ideas for how to use your product in new ways. Help them learn how to do things that are not directly related to your product but highly relevant to their interests.

For example, a nail polish brand may occasionally highlight how it’s done for special hair. This is incredibly relevant to their audience, but not directly related to their product. This is a tactic we talked about earlier: think horizontally.

Exclusive content:  This could be in the form of early access to new products, channel-exclusive promotional deals, or even company insider news.

Providing this limited audience with exclusive access to different types of content will make them feel honored and “familiar”.

Also, creating channel-specific content will give each individual a reason to follow you on multiple channels and increase the depth of their relationship.

Encourage participation:  Get your community to create content and share it across their networks on your behalf.

You can then curate it based on the hashtag or a central repository (for example, a blog post with YouTube content) or find another way to help draw attention and link to user stories.

This event can raise awareness of your presence and help engage the audience while reducing the amount of work required of you.

Measurement:  Like your other marketing efforts, knowing what success looks like is imperative. Tailor your efforts (content, engagement, etc.) to initiatives that help you move the needle and prove your success by measuring progress against the goals you set.

Success Examples

• Old Spice: You can hardly talk about YouTube marketing campaigns without mentioning what Old Spice did in 2010. They replaced the game with personalized response campaigns, and the results proved to be working. Their secret sauce was to take something that worked and resonated with their audience and made it more engaging and interactive. More recently, REI has used the channel in a similarly responsive and agile manner throughout a holiday effort.
• Zillow: Using Zillow’s tools to market houses, this online real estate company is a great example of how to think outside the box when it comes to YouTube.

Etiquette, Tips And What You Can Do

• Embrace responsibly: If you’ve enabled comments on your videos, make sure you moderate them and stay engaged, as YouTube is more prone to spammy comments than other platforms. You want to make sure your channel continues to provide value. If you find yourself in the presence of trolls (and the sun isn’t out to turn them to stone), remember to stay cool; You act on behalf of your brand in a public forum.

• Comment wisely: There may be times when you need (or want) to comment on your videos, whether you have comments enabled or not, other topics, and videos. The standard advice applies here too: don’t yell at people, don’t check your spelling and grammar, use your brand voice, and never leave spam comments yourself.
• Advertise with confidence: This is not a decision to be taken lightly. It can be revenue-generating for high-volume channels, but this needs to be weighed against brand impact and customers’ experience with your content.
• Add to favorites and subscribe: If you like a video, it will also be shown on your profile page as a video that you have added to your favorites and shared with your friends and subscribers. Subscribing to someone’s channel means you’ll see all of their latest uploads and favorites in the feed on your page. This is the equivalent of following someone on Twitter.
• Video upload: Fortunately, YouTube takes every video format under the sun. Uploading the video is the easy part, filling in the information about the video is the main task. You want to make sure your description is SEO and people-optimized, your title and keywords are targeted, your videos are categorized appropriately, and (if possible) you provide a transcript of each video. Any information on any topic you can include in your YouTube upload gives you more opportunities for people to find your video, and makes it accessible to all users and search bots.

Recommended Tools

• YouTube TestTube: This is very similar to Gmail Labs. For those who want to stay up to date on potential, new YouTube features (even accessing some neat stuff), you’ll want to check out TestTube from time to time and see what they have to offer.
• YouTube Analytics: This offers the equivalent of Facebook Insights for your videos. You’ll find numbers related to engagement, discovery, and demographics.
• YouTube Advertisers: This is a central hub where you can get an idea of ​​what other brands are doing for inspiration, as well as a portal with a lot of content on advertising solutions.
• YouTube Charts: A list of videos sorted by most views, popularity, comments, or other criteria. Looking for content ideas? This is a great place.

Pinterest

Thanks to its beautiful images and easy-to-use “pinning”, this website has taken the online community by storm. After its beta launch in 2010, Pinterest provided a way for users to easily share and create collections of images for hobbies, style, businesses, and more.

Whether you’re a business owner that connects with your users with images, or you’re looking to DIY redecorate your home, Pinterest has something for just about everyone. For some reason many people think it’s not a place like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, but Pinterest is a social media network that has it all and more.

The most important feature of Pinterest is that when creating your homepage, it meets you with a personalized page that is completely suitable for you.

This network can instantly change the contents of the feed page by collecting information from your pins on your dashboard and your recent searches.

This helps the user to maximize their experience. With this feature, it is the social media area where many users spend the most time.

For example, the person searched for something related to “make-up”. The next time he returns to the homepage stream, he will gradually begin to see the posts about makeup.

When he clicks on an image, he will be able to see both the image and the text written under it, and most importantly, the link of the site to which he provides traffic.

Another part that is not known to everyone but provides a lot of interaction is the comments under the images.

This area may be overlooked by everyone, but it is a very important area especially for brands.

By taking advantage of all these features of Pinterest, a brand can provide traffic to content that will attract the attention of its real target audience, and in this way, it can lay the foundations of brand loyalty and love.

If you’re ready, let’s dive deep into Pinterest!

Key Statistics and Demographics

• Pinterest has 20 million active users (70 million registered users)
• More than 50 million unique visitors per month
• 5 million “article pins” are made daily
• Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest
• Pinterest users in the US spend about an hour on the site each month
• Shoppers spend more on their shopping when they are recommended on Pinterest. That’s roughly double the referrals from Facebook and Twitter
• Pinterest uses more referral traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

How People Use Pinterest

Image-based sharing is becoming increasingly important to both brands and consumers. The effectiveness of imagery has caused sites like Pinterest and Instagram to quickly become new staples in everyday digital life. In a world where people don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time reading, rich media helps users share, communicate and consume stories in meaningful ways quickly and easily.

Strategies and Tactics for Success

Engagement: The  Pinterest community is growing fast and can be very busy. Make sure to pay attention to your comments for an opportunity to speak, as this is a great opportunity for your consumers to interact with you. They may be asking questions or simply offering words of praise or concern. Using a tool like PinAlerts or Pinterest’s analytics to track where and how your content is shared can help you seize opportunities that don’t come directly to you.

Content Strategy

Highlight customers: Highlight  customers who use your product, the content they create, and even their stories. Their acceptance and inclusion will appeal to their natural desires. It also allows them to feel that they add value to their community and instill a sense of ownership.

Behind the scenes : Give your audience a look behind the scenes by showing them behind-the-scenes pictures. This increase the feeling of receiving exclusive, limited content, which enhances the relevance to your brand.

Community engagements: If your business participates in community or charity activities, share it with your audience. You may feel this comes off as bragging, but you can present it in a humble and unselfish way.

Your customers follow you because they invest in you and what you do, and your efforts outside the office are an extension of that relationship. You can even include them!

Know your audience: Know everything about your audience and give them what they want to see.

Humor works particularly well in video, and beautiful images of all kinds tend to work incredibly well on Pinterest, for example.

You can even try to get to know people by spending time on the platform in your personal profiles.

You can use this to know what’s working out there and how people are sharing and communicating.

Discoverability:  Set up your site to share socially on Pinterest. Make sure the social sharing buttons on your content pages are easy to find and use.

Directing people’s attention to your Pinterest page will also help them find and share your content in new ways.

Also, don’t forget to use proper monitoring so you know how well these work!

Success Examples

• Sony Electronics: There’s a lot to do with what Sony does on Pinterest. From highlighting vintage products to a collection of brand new products, and selling products all the way, we’re utilizing a mix of content for fans of their own brand. Sony also uses its ads as points of interest as content points, but don’t be afraid of more off-topic boards, too. They nailed the content.
• Starbucks Beautiful Objects: The social media-savvy brand has increased its chances of reaching Pinterest. One of the boards is just a little bit into coffee and shows that Pinterest doesn’t have to be all about your product images. Go a little off topic, but be relevant.
• Nordstrom: From naming social team members on the page to regularly posting on boards ranging from “Totally Throwback,” “Nautical Vibes,” and “Beach Wedding Ideas,” a store that knows how to pop these pins. And with over 4.4 million followers, their strategy clearly works. Nordstrom is adding “Most Compressed Items” shows to its stores, earning bonus points for getting their social integrations full circle.

Etiquette, Tips And What You Can Do

Give credit: Sharing other people’s content is at the heart of Pinterest, so giving proper credit is crucial.

Ideally, fix everything from its original source, even if it requires spending a bit to find it.

You want to provide the best possible user experience and if you pin content directly from a Google Image SERP, for example, users will link back to that SERP instead of the page from which the image originated.

Subtitling : Reposting is not like retweeting on Twitter. Be sure to update the post to make your own. It should represent you and your brand and be relevant to your community. Remember to use the target keywords your audience is searching for so they can find your pins easily.

Don’t suddenly flood your shares. Pin throughout the day for the best results, and use tools to schedule your pins ahead of time.

If you pin all your content at once, you will overflow your followers’ streams and may annoy them enough that they don’t follow your brand.

Organize : Keep your boards organized as people will follow them for certain content.

A user who subscribes to a “recipes” board does not want to see pictures of luxury cars or interesting furniture. If you want to share new types of content, create new boards.

Group boards:  Group boards allow multiple users to pin to a board. You can collaborate with partner companies, colleagues, and anyone you want to collaborate on unique and interesting content. You will definitely want to have a strategy and purpose behind a joint board.

Private boards : This is probably not a feature you will use for your brand, but you can create boards that are shared with a limited group of people and invite them to pin as well.

Verify your site:  To have a verified account and have Pinterest Analytics for your site, you must verify your site. Pinterest’s Analytics show you statistics on how many pins are pinned from your site, what kind of traffic Pinterest drives to your site, and more.

Recommended Tools

• Pinterest’s Blog: They feature various users and brands and showcase interesting news. Check out this blog to keep up to date with the changes and also as an inspiration for users doing interesting things.
• Postris: helps you find the most popular boards, pins and people on Pinterest.
• Viraltag: Bulk scheduler for Pinterest helps you avoid overwhelming your audience and upload several pins at a time. Viraltag also has analytics features and allows you to upload to multiple Pinterest accounts.
• Curate: This tool helps you measure board and pin connectivity, generate traffic, find advocates, and more, depending on the pricing package. It also helps with Instagram.
• PinAlerts: You can basically use Google Alerts for your website’s content on Pinterest, among other measurement features.
• Rich Pins: Pinterest has made it possible for your products to show more than just photos. By crafting your site with the right meta tags, you can add rich content like prices and reviews to other people’s pins of your content.

Chapter 10: Blog

First of all, this chapter certainly doesn’t go anywhere near a comprehensive guide to blogging.

There are dozens of good books written about creating, growing, and maintaining a blog, and if you’re interested in going that route, we recommend finding a few you love.

However, we hope this section provides enough background to provide a solid understanding of whether it is the right effort for you.

As internet publishing has gotten easier, blogs have become more common.

People with little or no technical experience can start and run a blog using any number of different platforms.

Consumers are reading blogs more than ever before.

No matter how common it is to find exact numbers and how common blogging is, more than 33 million new posts are created each month using WordPress alone.

How Do People Use Blogs?

Every blog has its own unique goals. Some are combined by individuals, some by companies, some by both. While you can find a blog that covers just about anything, there are a lot of general buckets they usually fall into:

• Corporate: These blogs are written by a company for its consumers or stakeholders. These are usually located on the parent company’s website or in a dedicated subdirectory/subdomain there. (Note: there is good evidence to say that a subreddit is a better choice than a subdomain) Topics can range from news and announcements to product launch information and even community relations efforts.
• Personal/diary : Bloggers who keep a personal journal online may be willing to develop them in other types of blogs, but their primary function is to share their lives and experiences and often target existing friends and family.
• Hobby or interest: These blogs are focused on one theme. It can be professional in nature (tech blogs often fall under this banner) or purely personal (like fashion, beauty, sports).
• Professional: These folks exist to make a profit. They base their income on advertisements or even sales, or they may have other income; The important thing is that these blogs earn paychecks.
• Community/community: This category looks like what is often called hyper-local news. A local Seattle blog, the West Seattle Blog, is a great example of this work. The blog includes news about its neighborhood and often has rich user forums that make up the bulk of the content.

Strategies and Tactics for Success

Successful blogging is another way of saying that you have a lot of work and attention.

It can involve any number of people, depending on what success means to you and your company. Marketers and product managers are just the beginning for these people.

A blog is an opportunity to showcase your company’s culture and personality while shedding light on the products you offer.

Authority: Use your blog to build authority by creating content that adds value to your industry as a whole.

However, the way you set up your blog can affect authority in certain niches.

A self-hosted blog will be the safest bet for anyone.

Consider it an extension of your website, and handle it with the same professionalism.

Content: Depending on your industry and how often you publish, creating content can feel overwhelming. The key is to stay creative and think like your users.

What type of information will they find valuable? How can your products improve their experience or simplify their daily tasks? What kind of content will capture their interest or provide entertainment?

You can get to the bottom of most of these questions by looking at your site analytics data.

At Google, it’s a little harder to mask the search keywords of people with “(not provided)” on Google’s dashboards, but there are many valuable sources of information about your users.

If you use Google Ads, you will still have access to some keyword data.

You can also look at your competitors’ sites, social chats, incoming questions and answers, customer service requests, and any other feedback channels you have.

You just have to look around and find other ideas. Another idea is to open the conversation up for group work with your colleagues or even the clients themselves.

⭐By the way, we provide Google Ads ad management service in our agency , if you think about it, you can take a look at our service page and learn the details.

Creating a content calendar where you can organize these ideas will try to keep you on track and keep you from losing any of these great ideas.

Timing:  Timing isn’t really everything, but it’s definitely an important piece of the puzzle. It is especially important today, when we receive a constant flood of information from social channels.

The perfect timing will depend on your audience.

Ideally, you want to find the time and day when your community is most available and be willing to receive and share your content.

This will be a time when they are very active, but not so active that your message is lost in the noise. Try experimenting with different times of the day until you get an idea of ​​what the “best” time is for you.

Tools like Followerwonk can help.

You’ll also want to bring attention to industry developments, news, and other important events that may affect the attention and appetite of your community.

Style: Blogs provide an opportunity to step outside the confines of heavily validated copy on the rest of your site and truly enhance your company’s brand voice.

Take advantage of this opportunity and don’t be afraid to show the world who you are.

At the same time, make sure your choices are deliberate. Get a good understanding of what the sound sounds like before using it and stick with it. This does not mean that individual writers or even individual posts cannot have different tones, but they should all come from a single primary brand voice.

While this may seem limiting, it makes content creation easier because you have a good idea of ​​how your brand staff will approach a particular topic or situation. There is only text to be understood. Isn’t that the easy part? 🙂

Frequency: The only thing worse than not blogging at all is keeping that effort and not keeping it. As a visitor to a company’s blog, it is very sad to see that the last post is from a few months ago.

This does not give the visitor any reason to subscribe or join.

You definitely don’t need to blog about it every day or even every week. Find an achievable goal, set expectations with your audience, and stick to it. Maybe you just do a monthly industry roundup. Very cool. Let people know in advance so they know what to expect.

Engagement:  As we mentioned earlier, engagement is where the real magic happens. Posts really come alive when you start seeing comments and conversations from viewers. Engagement is also where a community begins to take shape.

The biggest key is how you control it.

Unmoderated comments are a golden ticket for spammers who scan the Internet for opportunities to leave links.

Don’t allow trolls. There are several good ways to moderate comments on your blog, depending on your goals.

Some people choose to have an approval process, but the more popular a blog is, the more labor intensive this strategy becomes.

Some may choose to have a site-specific login and profile, but this may reduce engagement for those who don’t want to take the time to create one.

It’s up to you and your own workflow to determine what the right strategy is for you.

Beyond comment moderation, there’s a lot of work you can go into responding to comments and interacting with viewers on your blog.

The same basic facts we’ve outlined for social networks also apply to your blog. Be respectful, fast, honest and charming. Don’t give trolls a chance. 🙂

As your community grows, consider creating a “reader’s bill of rights” for your blog.

This document should state what the standards for your community engagement are, including what the behavioral expectations are for both your community members and your employees.

It not only keeps you honest, but also brings a sense of justice and faith to your audience.

At the highest level, it may be the “True North” that you will point to in times of conflict.

Success Examples

Successful blogs establish a reputation as reputable and entertaining sources of information by regularly delivering valuable content, which earns the trust and appreciation of their readers.

But valuable content can take different forms for different people.

Take a look at these success stories for a few examples.

• West Seattle Blog:  Probably one of the most famous hyperblogging blogs, the West Seattle Blog represents a small but civic active neighborhood in Seattle. The blog started when the neighborhood power outage sparked the need for an immediate and neighborhood-specific news source. From there, it just grew .It now has an enthusiastic community forum, with the site regularly featured on the front page of the blog and sometimes even on the front pages of the evening news, with an average of around half a million visits each month.The West Seattle Blog is a regular resource for journalists in the area and “first thing in the morning” for most residents in West Seattle and beyond.
• Moz Blog: Born in 2004 as a venue for Rand Fishkin’s SEO teaching, thoughts, challenges, and exploration, Moz Blog has expanded its scope with its parent company. Today, the blog is a hub for thought leaders in the inbound marketing industry, with an average of one page page per month and Many publications that have collected more than 100 reviews. With a focus on educational content that pushes readers to make effective decisions, the Moz Blog has become a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about inbound marketing.

• OkCupid: The dating site hit gold when she flipped the lens inward to turn it inward. She pulled back the curtain and showcased the data behind its users’ behavior, something that many sites like theirs couldn’t do. It paid serious dividends. Their blog alone has more than 38,000 backlinks from 900 link domains, and even though they stopped posting a long time ago, they still stand as an example of success even today.

Recommended Tools

• WordPress:  One of the most popular blogging platforms in existence, WordPress is a free and open source tool that can be hosted on WordPress or any other domain of your choice. Incredibly flexible and easy to use, this system is the default option for advanced and new bloggers alike. Custom themes for WordPress and There is an industry built around the creation and selling of skins, making the otherwise templated platform more personal and customizable.WordPress can also be used with existing sites, making it a frequent choice for businesses and consumers alike.

• Blogger:  A free blogging platform created by Google. This tool is pretty similar to WordPress in theory, but without a lot of features and flexibility. Blogs here can be self hosted or left on blogger.com. Much more suitable for the casual personal blogger than a business or professional blogger.
• Google Analytics:  A must if you’re interested in tracking your progress against business goals (which you really should). Google Analytics (GA) is a free analytics tool that gives insight into user behavior, traffic, and social behavior on your website. it can provide tons of useful data to help you know how you can serve them better.

• Comment Plugins:  Most blogging platforms have commenting features built in, but for one reason or another someone may choose to go with a different tool (usually because of spam, features, sharing, or concerns). Some of the most popular are Disqus, Facebook, and IntenseDebate.
• Google Alerts:  Another free Google tool, this tool helps you take a look at your online reputation on the web. You can freely program the tool to send you an alert via email whenever it finds mention of a keyword or keyword phrase you specify. You can even set it up for your competitors.When you put some muscle behind certain content, it’s also a good idea to create a Google Alert for that post’s name. This will help you identify the extensions of the conversation you want to join.It’s also a useful tool in protecting your content, as it can help you identify when your work has been stolen or scrapped.
• Linktant:  You can track the conversation by noting when people link to your blog. People will often read a blog and then start a conversation on their site, often with the original spark – linking to your blog. By joining the conversation on the new site, you can create and interact with a generally circular traffic flow that drives your readership, traffic and links. This tool will alert you via email when someone returns to your site and help you uncover these opportunities.

Chapter 11: Social Media Doesn’t End Here

Besides the most popular social networking sites we know and love, there are many other places around the web for users to interact and companies to build relationships with. Here are a few of our favourites.

• Forums:  Forums are perhaps one of the most mature forms of social media. In fact, most of the features related to our more modern social networks such as threads, discussions, and PMs (private messages) started in forums. Forums consist of various boards filled with user comments and individual topics of conversations. They are customizable, private or public, and can be hosted on almost any website. Some stand alone, while others may live in a subdomain.
• Instagram: Now owned by Facebook, Instagram is the . With over 150 million monthly active users, the network has an incredibly active and vibrant user base with over 55 million views per day on posts. Users can subscribe to pages curated by their friends and brands they like. With the “Search” function, users can view the most popular videos and images on the network and search using keywords and tags. The app has lightweight editing features that allow users to creatively modify their images before sharing. The maximum length of videos is 15 seconds, so creativity is key. Instagram allows users to post their videos and pictures to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr,
• Vine: Vine is a Twitter product very similar to an Instagram video. Creativity reigns on Vine, where users create short 7-second looping videos in the app and share them on Twitter or other networks. The biggest difference is that Vine stands as a standalone product, while Instagram video integrates into the Instagram experience. Users must create Vine content within the app, whereas they can upload Instagram content to the platform. The popularity and adoption of Vine are growing.

• Tumblr:  Tumblr is a web and mobile-based micro-blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, and other content on their blogs, both publicly and privately. Users can follow each other and then reblog (share content from someone they follow). The platform has more than 140 million blogs and over 65 billion blog posts. Yahoo! now owns this popular platform and may update or change it as the purchase continues
• Quora:  Quora is a question and answer based social network that started in mid-2009. Users follow each other to interact and can even follow topics of interest. The platform encourages them to participate and answer questions through various points and voting mechanisms. These same mechanisms also help ensure that answers to questions are of high quality, authoritative and relevant. Quora is not alone in the question and answer website space; Yahoo! Answers, AOL Answers, Forms and Google’s Baraza are protecting the company.
• Reddit: One of the few social networks to feature a special event hosted by President Barack Obama, Reddit is a social news and content network where Reddit is truly the “front page of the Internet.” Users can submit their own posts or links, and topics vary wildly. The community can then vote the post up or down so it can determine its placement or proximity to the front page. Comment threads on posts have become a big part of the community and entertainment value. One of Reddit’s popular features is Ask Me Anything (AMA). US President Barack Obama, comedian Louis CK, Jeopardy! Ken Jennings and internet celebrity The Oatmeal were in attendance. Reddit is on its way to becoming an incredible social network.

Social Media Goes Global

There is no doubt that Facebook and Twitter are the current biggest players in the social media space.

However, if you have a global presence, there are other important places to spend your time – especially if you work in parts of the world where Twitter or Facebook may be censored.

In many countries, these two important social media networks are censored.

For this reason, in states that put forward their own social media networks, these networks have quite a lot of traffic.

However, countries such as South Korea that are highly developed in the field of technology and internet have their own search engines, social networks and messaging applications.

While using the mainstream social media, their own social media channels are used quite a lot.

If you are wondering what all these important social media are, here are the others that are considered important in the world:

Qzone:  Created by Tencent in 2005, this social site allows users to blog, share photos and listen to music.

It’s highly customizable (like the old Myspace) and has paid engagement elements.

Key markets:  China and South Korea

Users: more than 600 million

RenRen:  Known as the “Chinese Facebook,” this site is especially popular with college students.

Key markets:  China

Users: more than 194 million

Badoo: Founded in 2006, Badoo is a social discovery site focused on dating. The site operates in 180 countries.

Key markets:  Spain, France, Italy and Latin America

Users: over 195 million

Kontakte (VK): This site is very similar to Facebook in terms of design and functionality. Note that they knew there was a spam issue lately, possibly bloating user numbers.

Key markets:  Russia and former Soviet republics including Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Moldova

Users: 79 million

Odnoklassniki : Most similar to Classmates.com (actually translated to Classmates), the site was founded in 2006. Most of its users tend to be under the age of 35.

Key markets:  Russia and former Soviet republics including Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Moldova

Users: 65 million

Mixi : Launched in 2004, Mixi focuses on making fun-oriented connections based on common interests through community forums and microblogs.

Key markets:  Japan

Users: 14.5 million

Daum : Beginning in 1995, Daum is the primary community forum, blog service, email provider and search engine for South Korea.

Key markets:  South Korea

Users: 38 million

Orkut : Started in 2004 and now owned by Google, Orkut focuses on connecting you with friends and sharing videos, photos and microblogs much like Facebook.

Key markets:  Brazil, India and Japan

Users: Unknown (Google hasn’t released any official numbers recently)

Cloob:  Created in 2004, Cloob has managed to work within Iranian law to bring social networks to Iran. To stay on the site the site contains censorship.

Key markets:  Iran

Users : Probably 1 million or more

Line : Founded in 2011, Line has taken social sharing by storm through instant messaging, photos, video, and audio and video conferencing.

Line, which also provides service in Turkey today, is highly appreciated especially with its different applications.

At the same time, thanks to the use of username, you can message in groups that can receive close to 1000 users without giving your number to anyone.

Key markets:  Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Spain and more

Users:  230 million and growing fast

let’s wrap up

Yes, we have come to the end of the most comprehensive social media guide you can find on the internet.

Understanding and using social media, which is growing day by day and turning into an endless search for treasure, will always take you one step ahead.

The biggest reason for this is that people care about their lives on social media as much as they do in the real world.

The fact that they reflect everything they do every day on their social media accounts, that they spend hours a day in these areas, and that they even celebrate the birthdays of their loved ones here clearly shows that social media has a very important place in people’s lives.

At the same time, it is expanding its functions as a career center day by day.

Social media networks, which were used only by job seekers at first, are a business in themselves these days. The biggest examples of this are Instagram and Youtube.

In particular, Instagram influencers convey their lives to their followers by sharing and filling their stories every day.

He doesn’t have anything to do with Youtube.

Even Youtube has become a giant in itself. Many Youtubers today appear as people with brands.

These Youtubers, who work in make-up companies, clothing, stationery and more sectors, are also becoming a different power by taking their place on Instagram. We don’t even say that his Instagram followers have switched to Youtube.

This is where brands come into play.

The Most Important Pillar of Marketing

Social media is becoming so important that it becomes the most important pillar of marketing strategies.

Brands reach their customers and potential customers, especially by taking their place in social media networks.

Thanks to these networks, it can solve crises much faster and create a warmer image.
At the same time, it takes the fast and effective trump card in the field of marketing.

One of the most important features of social media is paid advertising and it is becoming an important weapon for brands to use.

In this guide, we have examined in detail why a brand should take its place in social media channels. Afterwards, we learned about these social media by dwelling on them one by one.

In the light of the information you have learned here, you can draw a path for your brand by taking the right steps on social media networks. This will help you take big steps in the marketing game.

If you don’t have a page on a social media network yet, you might want to think that your competitors have one and that they have already reached the potential customers you might have.

Then what are you waiting for?

Create a social media strategy right now and create accounts for yourself and your brand in the networks you need to enter.

If you want to keep this guide where you can reach at any time, it will be enough to add it to the bookmarks.

If you like this article, you can share it with your friends on Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn , you can help me.

That’s it from us then! We welcome your comments and stories. 🙂