If you’re reading our blog posts, you’ve likely at least dabbled in social media, including facebook. It’s a fairly easy thing to understand; by having creative, funny, and relevant content, you are further bolstering your business presence online. You can also see through the likes and shares of how many people engaged with your post.

We’ll go into this topic with the underlying assumption that you’re familiar with terms such as “Likes”, “Shares”, and “Reach”, and what they mean.

Facebook insights, is a tool that facebook uses to allow business owners to measure their success online, through a series of metrics. Facebook insights can only be accessed if the page has accumulated more than 30 likes. Otherwise, it won’t appear. If you’ve met that criteria, the “insights’ button appears at the top of the page next to “publishing tools”.

With Insights active, you can see not only who liked your page, but also several other metrics such as overall reach, post engagements, actions on page, and even videos.

There are a lot of data points that facebook provides, all of which can be important, depending upon what you are trying to measure. A good rule of thumb is to pay attention to not only the reach, but the engagement or actions on the page (likes, unlikes, shares, and comments). A highly shared and liked post is likely something that fans of your page liked. On the other side of things, if a post has reached a lot of people but received relatively little interaction, it probably wasn’t as good of a post.

All of this can be seen on the overview tab. There are 12 tabs in total, all located on the left hand side of the insights page. Each of these will display different statistics. As a marketer, it is important to familiarize yourself with all of these and what they mean. For example, you can look at demographics and get a glimpse of what your audience looks like.

Using insights as a tool, and understanding it’s usefulness, is important for any marketer or small business. For more information, from one of the foremost experts on Facebook, check out this website.

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet

Innovation Simple has compiled this short list of things you should do before uploading your video onto your channel to help maximize the traffic your channel will get.

1. Write a Long Description

YouTube descriptions help both Google and YouTube searches to find your videos among the millions of others on the web.

This may seem a little counter intuitive, especially nowadays when people’s attention spans are so short, but it is very important to have a long description. This is because unlike your target audience, Google and YouTube can’t determine whether your content is good by listening to it. Google and YouTube rely heavily on these descriptions to determine if your video is important or not. Many different SEO specialist say that it is important to have at least a 200 word description if not more for your video.

1. Use Key Words

Keywords for YouTube are much like your typical keywords for blogs or articles online. Be sure to do your normal keyword research before your decide what your video’s title, file name and description should be based around. Determining these keywords will help determine if your video becomes a viral success or a monumental flop. Do your homework now, and it will pay off in the end.

1. Do a Google Search

One last important thing to do before you publish your video on you channel is to do a Google search of your video’s subject matter to see if there are any videos that pop up on the first page. Google reserves a lot of space on the first page for videos if they are deemed as conducive or primary in conveying that subject matter. Not all topics will save space for this, so it is important for you to do a little digging before you decide on what keyword to use. There are sites that give lists of keywords that are commonly associated with videos, so poke around before you decide your video’s title.

The Digital Marketing landscape seems to be changing constantly. It is a battle for digital marketers to keep up with the newest and latest techniques that will help your company or your clients to exceed expectations in the digital realm. That’s why at Innovation Simple we try to keep you updated on the latest trends that you need to know about to stay on top.

One of the most important things to realize for 2016 is that desktop friendly websites are have begun to take a back seat to the mobile friendly website. Americans spend an outrageous amount of time on their phones surfing the web, texting and checking social media. This is why it is so important for B2C companies to not only optimize their desktop websites, but their mobile sites as well.

Many people will make purchases, shop online and check their favorite websites while waiting in lines or in a down moment when they can just hop on their phone and get stuff done. By making your site more mobile friendly, you will be sure to have people stay longer on your site and engage more with your content or buy more of your products.

So, be sure to spend as much time optimizing your mobile website as you do your desktop website. Americans are beginning to spend more time surfing the web on their phones than they do on their laptops or desktop computers. This is an important investment for you to make for 2016 and beyond. So get started now if you haven’t already, and remember that you can always give Innovation Simple a call and we will help you get started today.

Funny Meme

Making someone laugh is a sure way to get them to share something on their profile or on another friend’s wall or feed. So, look at what is trending in the meme world and different funny videos that are making the rounds on social media, and then go and make your own! By doing this, you will have novel content that is relevant to what is happening in the digital world.

Have a Call to Action

Having great content is one thing, but unless you have a solid call to action, it will be hard to have your content shared with others. Make sure you always invite your followers to share and like your content. Ask questions to have them comment or reply to your posts. Doing these small things will help you to have a great call to action to go along with your awesome content you’ve produced.

Give Them a Reason to Share

Every once and a while it is fun to do some sort of contest. Whether you give away some free product or a trip to Hawaii, people are going to be sure to like, share, retweet or comment to get a shot at that four night trip to Waikiki Beach. And by doing this, you will be able to increase your reach and improve your following on social media.

Finding a Target Audience

By identifying your target audience, you will be able to analyze the ways they respond to different messages. Whether your company is big on SEO, PPC or Social Media, you can use the information your gain from “knowing” your audience to determine how they will respond to different digital marketing techniques. Different strategies work better for different demographics.

Determine what message you have for that audience

After determining how your audience will respond to different digital marketing techniques, it is important to understand how your audience will respond to different messages. By deciding what message will resound best with the target audience you’ve identified, you will be able to know how to design a message that will make them more likely to interact with your brand in a positive way.

Structure your message in a way that it can be applicable on multiple platforms

Finally, after you have identified your audience, the digital marketing method to best reach them, and the message that they will best respond to, it is time to structure that message over a wide variety of platforms while still maintaining the original style behind the message you’re trying to convey. If you can do this, then you will begin to create continuity in your voice as a company and help cement your message in the minds of your target audiences.

If you do all of these things, you will be sure to build up the voice of your brand and create a message that is unique to your business.

Mobile Optimization

Here are some of the things that your business should be doing in its 2016 digital marketing campaigns:

Mobile Optimization

According to Smartinsights.com, mobile traffic generated more than laptop and desktop searches. This shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone seeing as people always have their smart phones with them and are able to Google anything they need in a few seconds. Something that might not be as intuitive is how important mobile apps are becoming. According to the same article, 52% of time spent online on a mobile devices was spent on apps. This is because they tend to be easier to use than websites, even when they have a mobile site.

Social media continues to evolve each year, and it is important to note the growth that many of these platforms have had in the last year. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest have been developing ways for businesses to better sell their products by including links to buy goods right there on the spot. By keeping up your social media presence, you will definitely see big benefits in the year 2016.

Revamping Optimization Tactics

Optimization for Virtual Assistants

With new “Virtual Assistants” like Siri and Cortana, businesses need to look at how they can better optimize their sites to be found through AI tools that can find information easily and give it to their users. Entreprenuer.com mentions that in 2016 this will be one of the biggest areas for companies to continuing to develop when it comes to SEO and PPC content.

Instagram is quickly becoming one of the best social media platforms for sharing your content. It is a nice visual platform that your business can use to showcase products, services and goods that it has to offer the world. But, if you are trying to start your brand’s Instagram account, it can be kind of difficult to get a following at first. That’s why we’re gonna let you in on a little secret about one of the best ways to grow your company’s presence on Instagram.

The Hashtag

Hashtags are not unique to Instagram, but they have quickly become one of the most important aspects of it. Being able to label your photos and videos with these tags will put them out there for everyone in the Instagram world to see. Essentially people will come looking for you! Imagine that, no longer having to seek people out, but having them come find you; that’s pretty much the greatest marketing dream for companies. Well, now there is a great way to do so with little to no effort. By adding Hashtags to your post directly or in the comments section, you are adding your photos to related topics. It’s almost like putting your post in a bunch of different files for people to see.

Now, if you already are familiar with the hashtag, you already know everything we’ve said to this point. But, have you done research on what the top hashtags are for the day, week, year or even all time? By adding relevant hashtags that have a large popularity, you will be able to get your post in front of the eyes of millions of uses.

 Top Ten Hashtags on Instagram

Here are some of the top hashtags we’ve found:

If your post fits into one of these categories, then make sure you add it in. By doing this you will increase your posts reach dramatically.

1. According to a study by Wiselytics.com, repeated tweets increase dramatically in how many people see your tweet. So if your first tweet doesn’t perform as well as you would have liked, don’t be afraid to tweet the same information out again a couple of hours later or even repeat yourself in the days to come. This is a great way to keep your brand in the feed of your followers, and to help those who weren’t online during your original breaking tweet to stay caught up on all of the new developments with your brand.
2. Another important thing is to share more tweets that are engaging and relevant to your followers. Check out this article by socialmediaexaminer.com to learn the important steps of curating material on your twitter account. You will be surprised with the amount of success you can have by sharing good content.
3. Make sure you get your content in front of as many people as possible. Don’t be afraid to ask people to retweet your content to get in front of more followers. That’s the great thing about twitter, it isn’t uncommon to tweet at people who you don’t follow you and you don’t follow them, so be engaging with users who have a similar interest as your company and get them to help spread the word!
4. Use hashtags. Using hashtags dramatically increases your searchability for those who are looking for content like yours. Hashtags automatically put your post about cars in with rest of the posts about cars, so that those looking for cars can find your tweet! Do you see the importance now?
5. Tweet pictures. According to Bufferapp.com, tweets with pictures are clicked on 18% more often than those that lack pictures, favorited 89% more often, and retweeted 150% more often as well. That’s quite a big difference! Tweet pictures, ‘Nuff said.

If you missed our last post about where your business should look to expand its social media presence, you should go read it

Both Snapchat and Instagram are very visual platforms.

The cool thing about Snapchat and Instagram is that they are very visually based. This means it’s an awesome way to showcase your company’s products with awesome photos, or super short videos. The Millennial generation loves taking high quality photos and putting them on Instagram for their followers to see. Some will spend hours on their posts, so make sure your photos or videos look professional and are of a high quality.

Snapchat is a little different from Instagram. Snapchat is a new social media platform that is really starting to define itself for bigger and better things than teens and millennials taking weird duck faced selfies. Buzzfeed, ESPN, and host of other companies use Snapchat to give users a daily update. By using this sort of platform, you can keep people entertained. By creating content that is able to capture their attention in a few seconds, you will increase the amount of traffic on your channel and ultimately on your website. Learn how to tell your story in a few seconds or less and you will be able to use Snapchat to increase your traffic online.

Learn How to Tell a Story

Anybody in the marketing or advertising business that has worked to produce online ads will tell you that people are becoming harder and harder to captivate through advertisements. As businesses, we have to learn how to tell a story that will capture the attention of our audience in a few seconds. By learning how to do this, businesses can open the doors to a whole new demographic by doing this on Instagram and Snapchat.

The pros about Instagram are that it is more established as a social media than Snapchat, and may be easier to use. Be creative and experiment with different videos, pictures and even memes that will captivate, motivate, or make your audience laugh. Regardless of what industry your business is in, if you are looking to increase the presence in the public sphere, there are cool stories and funny incidents that will catch the eye of Instagram users if you can just learn how to convey them.

Now as previously stated, Snapchat is still in a state of liquidity and is changing how the messaging service is used by normal users as well as businesses. But at the same time, so is Facebook and any other social media. Since Snapchat is recently new, you have the freedom to try new things and set your own definition of what your business will do with it. Don’t be afraid to try new things and to tell stories in non-traditional ways. You are limited on time when using Snapchat, but if you can capture the attention of your viewers in 10 seconds or less, then you will be able to drive them to your blog or website where they can find out more information on your business and what it stands for.

It Is an Investment, Don’t Give Up

Remember, both Instagram and Snapchat are two of the most used social media platforms used by the Millennial generation. Both college students and teenagers will be the newest group of consumers in the next 5-10 years so it is well worth building your Instagram and Snapchat followings to help create new lifelong customers who will help your business grow in the future. It may be hard to tell how people best react to your business, but keep trying and soon your following will grow and produce loyal customers in the years to come.