Sofie Andreou

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 14:01:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

In the strategy process, you need to list the key Influencers or Giants in your community. Influencers or Giants are those who will help you distribute your message to their trusting followers. Influencers are critical in growing your followers. Quality Influencers will help your social trust factor and growth. A quality Influencer or giant is someone who is in a complementary, not competitive, business, and has the same target followers as you do.

Having a quality Giants retweet your tweets, share your Facebook Posts, or RePin your posts on Pinterest is the fastest and most effective way to grow. It is speaking to your target market through someone they already trust. For example, if your goal is to be recognized as a leader in leveraging social media for businesses, an industry giant you might look to would be Hootsuite. As their account strives to be a leader in social media news and tips.

After the initial strategy exercise, your Social Media Coordinator should search online for your Influencers as part of their routine. Furthermore, individual departments may have their own unique Giants. Some might overlap. One approach to getting your Influencers’ attention is to mention them when appropriate in your posts. As well, an old fashion approach of picking up the phone and calling them is also effective, asking them if they would look for your posts, and share them when appropriate.

Another creative approach to working with an Influencer is to invite them to your events, and ask them to tweet or do their voodoo while attending! I have heard successful stories of inviting Influencers to events or asking them to share or retweet in exchange for coupons or other VIP treatments.

Who: Social Media ‘Giants’ have many quality followers. They can be individuals with large followers, Business Associations, Media, Local Celebrities, Sports Groups, Vacations spots, industry experts. On the side of the giant's twitter page you will see a list of followers you follow already that also follow this giant. This is useful to make sure you are following the right giant.

What are they contributing: Share or retweet & using consistent keywords if they are commenting on your behalf.

Why are they contributing: Passion, sense of pride, desires to help drive your mandate, and growing their own business or cause.

Criteria:

Measure the impact of your Influencers/Giants

• Increasing numbers of retweets & sharing.

• Increasing use of your selected keywords by these Influencers.

• Increasing number of quality visitors to your website from the Influencers’ shares or retweets.

• Mentions, posts, photos, and videos live from your events.

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 7 - Who Will be Responsible for Measuring and Coordinating Efforts?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 14:31:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 7 - Who Will be Responsible for Measuring and Coordinating Efforts?

Image Source:
http://www.ipsis.nl/media/27480/social-media-icons.gif

The Social Media Co-ordinator

The social media coordinator essentially is the coordinating force behind implementing your social strategy. This person is essential to your social strategy, as this person is the organizational power behind it. The social media coordinator can be responsible for a multitude of different tasks including but not limited to: keeping content creators and ambassadors on track, editing and uploading pictures, Developing and launching Facebook ads and Google ads, creating and observing all posts, and helping contributors understand how to improve their posts. In essence, the social media coordinator will be responsible for implementing your social strategy effectively, from steps 1 through 9.

Overall Social Media Co-ordinator:

The organization overall Social Media co-ordinator shares the strategy and protocols with each of the departmental Social Media co-ordinators. They create the annual Social Media schedule. They also train the departmental Social Media co-ordinators as needed to manage their department’s schedule and contributors.

Departmental Social Media Co-ordinator:

The departmental Social Media co-ordinator shares the strategy and protocols with each of their departmental contributors. They create their departmental annual Social Media schedule and keep their department contributors on track with the monthly schedule.

Who: Your Organizational Staff.

What are they contributing: Ensuring the implementation of the Social Media Strategy & Action Plan.

Why are they contributing: To deliver on the Social Strategy Measures of Success.

Criteria: Expert on all Social Media platforms; training contributors and others on what to say and how to say it. Creating, sharing & monitoring the protocols.

Now that you have where the content is going to come from, and who is going to be responsible for it, try and implement these roles into your organization!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 15:02:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

Once you have listed the topics you are going to post, you should identify the experts that are both outside and inside of your organization, that have the best, most immediate experience access to your topics. They might be clients, staff, suppliers, industry experts, media, staff bloggers, or guest bloggers.

An excellent source for material is experts from outside of your organization who are not seen as competitors to your products or services, but are seen as someone who shares information on topics important to your online purpose. For example, if you are a theatre company, and you have certain performers coming to your theatre, you can share or retweet their appropriate posts to help grow the excitement toward them coming to your location, therefore creating buzz. Strive to spend 15 minutes daily, or at least once a week looking for sources of information. If you are a retailer, often those who you buy you merchandise from have materials you can use to promote your products, however, remember, the best photos and posts are those right from your retail store, capturing the buzz in the store and the personalities of your staff.

Another great tool for finding great content for your organization is through different news feeds. One of my favourite news feeds to use for this purpose is Mashable. This website finds the latest and trending internet stories for you, often times before they go viral. You can search stories based on your industry using the search tool, to find interesting articles to use on your social media!

Contributors are typically subject-matter experts; your employees that have specific mandates or passions. As a part of your strategy, your next step will be to decide if your contributors are going to give their materials to your Social Media co-ordinator to post, or simply post it themselves

Image Source:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/rise-millennials-infographic?ref=popular_posts

The staff contributor is hands-on, feet-on-the-street, in the middle of the action; either with clients or creating your products. For their social efforts to be sustainable, it needs to be an extension of their current role.

What are they contributing: They can be sharing updates, videos photos of experiences with clients or the creation of products.

Why are they contributing: To help deliver on their departmental overall social goals.

Criteria: They need to be trained with which voice to speak in, and what type of material to collect, and how to distribute it.

If they themselves are going to post, instead of giving the material to a central Social Media co-ordinator, they need to be aware of what the agreed to Measures of Success are.

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 15:05:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success?

Before we answer HOW to measure, we need to answer WHY we measure. We measure first to ensure our efforts are meeting our online marketing goals, and second we measure to continuously improve our efforts.

Before beginning measuring, you want to know what you are measuring, here is where we refer back to Step 1: Purpose. We want to have what you are measuring strategically align with the your online marketing goals we set out earlier. For example, if one of your online marketing goals was to be known as an expert in your industry, you could measure how many retweets and shares you've had from industry giants. What is the reasoning behind measuring this? Well, All social media posts should be written to achieve this goal. Some will be shared, retweeted and covered by identified giants. This works to achieve our overall goal of becoming a go-to person for our industry.

Image Source:
http://www.clipartpanda.com/clipart_images/ruler-5080306

Make sure your chosen metric for measuring your success is indeed measurable! Therefore, you need to understand what can be measured, and then list those you will track to measure your success. A “clicked on” in your eNewsletters, Facebook pages, websites, online ads, and landing pages can also be tracked. You can change one word on a post or heading of a blog to see if it is then clicked on more or less often.

Call to Action (CTA)

Whatever online presences you chose, once you have your targets’ eyes on any one online materials; your post, online ad, website, business link, or eNewsletter, in just a few seconds your target audience needs to know what action you’d like them to take, otherwise you will lose their attention and waste the opportunity.

For example, if you wanted your clients to buy tickets to an event, you'd want to have your client be able to identify what you want them to do, and be able to find the link to the tickets very easily, as people online have extremely short attention spans. Knowing what you want them to do makes it possible for you to measure your online success.

Having a clear and intriguing CTA is a good practise in decreasing your bounce rate.

2 Critical Elements to Measuring your Online Marketing

When measuring your online marketing efforts, there are two key variables you want to keep in mind. These two elements are your website traffic and the engagement of your efforts. You want to keep those two variables in mind when measuring your online marketing efforts.

An easy way of tracking your website traffic is through a tool called Google Analytics. Make sure before setting up your Google Analytics account that you use an email that identifies with the company or organization, not your personal email. After getting set up, Google Analytics will generate a code for you to place in your search engine optimization account settings area. After completing that step, analytics will begin to work within 48 hours, and you will be able to view all of Google's analytics reports. When analyzing website or blog traffic, a few key measures you will want to look at include: number of unique visitors, average amount of time on the website, and traffic sources (where your web traffic came from).

When considering the engagement of your online marketing efforts, you want to know what exactly you are using to measure your success. A few great examples of elements you could measure are an increase in quality followers, increase in clicking on links back to your website, increase in number of visitors, or downloading your app. Once you have recognized what you are going to use to measure your success, you can then use various tools to help measure these elements. One great tool that will help is Klout. Klout measures your online marketing efforts across the various social media platforms you allow it, and it gives you a score out of 100. It measure your engagement, likes, comments and overall post quality. You want to aim to have a score of at least above 50.

Now that you have the tools to begin measuring your success, try it out!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 4 - Choosing Your Social Platform

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 01:32:00 +0000

Choosing Your Social Platform

Source of Social Media Demographics:
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-user-demographics_b38095

Which social media platforms is your target market is using? What sorts of content you will be posting. Which platform is best suited for the type of materials you have. Where do you currently see the type of engagement you'd like to initiate with your target audience?

As we've always said, you do not have to choose every social media platform for you company. Just those where your target market is most likely to engage with you. Think of each additional platform as an additional place to engage your current and potential clients.

Facebook Profile

Meant for a human, not a company or organization. Facebook will convert your Profile to a Business Page if you are not a human.
Humans become your "friends". You can limit what people see on your Profile. You approve new friends. You can even limit what friends; categorize friends into different lists who “see” more or less information about you, or who see different posts.
You can have humans subscribe to you (vs. becoming your friends). This means you do not see their updates; they just see your public posts. Celebrities like this feature.
You can have a maximum of 5,000 friends on a Profile account.

Remember! You must have a Facebook
profile to create a Facebook page!

Facebook Page

Businesses or Organizations should not have a Profile account, but indeed a Business Page.
There are two ways to manage Business Pages. First as a Human profile who is an administrator on a Page, or second, as a Business Manager. In both cases there are various levels of administrators' access. A Business Page can have multiple people assigned as administrators. They can post as the page, without their identity being revealed. They sign in through their own human profile account and then switch to use Facebook as the Page, or they sign in directly through the Business Manager account to the Page. Business Manager accounts are relatively new to Facebook, to find out more click here.
Unlimited human profiles and business pages can "Like" your Business Page.
Insights and reports are available to the administrators of your Facebook Page. These insights include statistics on who and how many likes you have, which posts are most engaging, how old and what gender your page’s fan base is, whom your page reaches and more. Insights are free to the Business Page and very valuable.
Pages are indexed by Google.
Boosted Posts - a Page can pay for its posts to be redistributed to a target audience, regardless if your target human has Liked your Page or not. Boosts can be purchased for $1/day. You can target a different audience each boost or the same audience. Boosts have proven to be very effective.
You can Promote a Business Page to increase the number of Likes connected to your Page.
Facebook started suppressing the distribution of Business Page. Only about 5-10% of those who "Like" your Page are sent Page Posts to their Newsfeed. This is why Post engagement and Boosting Posts are critical to increase your Posts' reach. A business can only be effective on Facebook when they master how to engage their audience and Boost their Posts on Facebook.
Remember, people are on Facebook to reconnect with friends and for entertainment.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Profiles are indexed by Google.
There are many quality groups on LinkedIn to join; some are closed and others are open.
There are 259 million business professionals on LinkedIn.
You can Post from your Profile, but the posts are not stored on your Profile like on Facebook or Twitter. Instead when someone visits your LinkedIn Profile, they indeed only see your Profile, they do not see any of your Posts. Posts are sent to the newsfeed of all of you connections.
People come to LinkedIn to Network and read Industry News.
You can add a Company Page to LinkedIn.
You can Post from our Company Page. Posts from your Company Page, like those on Facebook, are there when someone comes to visit your company page. They can see both your company's information and your company's posts. This is an excellent way to share your thought leadership.
Only Profiles can join Groups.
Since historic Posts are not captured on your LinkedIn Profile and only captured on your LinkedIn Company Page, I suggest strongly that you create a LinkedIn Company Page, post there first and then share that to your LinkedIn Profile. Otherwise you loose your archive of brilliance.
The average age on LinkedIn is 48 years.
If a "C" level executive is going to be on any Social Media, they are going to be on LinkedIn.

Twitter

Twitter profiles are indexed by Google.
It is recommended that you customize your header and use your company’s logo as your Twitter Profile photo.
The average age on Twitter is 24 years.
People generally follow retailers for:

68% to find out about discounts
55% to find out about upcoming deal.
45% follow to show support

One email drives one Twitter account. Unlike Facebook, your one Human Profile can indeed create multiple Facebook Business Pages.

YouTube Channels

Videos uploaded to YouTube are indexed by Google.
It is recommended that you customize your YouTube Channel background to match your branding and use your company’s logo as your YouTube Channel Profile photo.
The rate that people are consuming video online is increasing rapidly.

Pinterest

Pinning photos from your blog or website is an excellent way to get traffic back to your blog or website.
80% of the people using Pinterest are women.
We are on Pinterest to share or collect ideas onto a virtual board! Some of the top interests on Pinterest are cooking, design, travel, and decorating.

Each platform must be optimized. In brief, this means to add:

Keywords
Consistent Logos
Consistent Descriptions
Website Addresses

The last thing to think about is selecting your unique social media address on each platform. Why? To make it easier for your followers to find you. Whenever you create an account on any of the social media platforms, you can create a unique address that will link directly to your profile.

Here is a chart, summarizing what I mean by the unique addresses you create on each platform. All behave the same, in that they are all first come first serve.

Social Media Platform	Unique Addresses	Note
Twitter	www.Twitter.com/YourUsername @YourUsername	Refer to as your handle (Mine is @SofieAndreou)
Facebook Page	www.Facebook.com/UniqueName	Cannot change it once you save it. Sometimes you can't create one until after you have 25 "Likes"
YouTube	www.YouTube.com/Username	It's tough to change this Username, careful.
LinkedIn	www.LinkedIn.com/in/UniqueName
LinkedIn Company	www.LinkedIn.com/Compamy/UniqueName
Pinterest	www.Pinterest/Username

It's effective when you are able secure the same Username or unique URL on each of your Company Social Media accounts. It's first come first serve, so, you will need to be creative.

Why is it effective? For both SEO and for your printed marketing materials. Both making it easy for your target market to find you. Here are mine www.Facebook.com/SofieAndreouSeminars and www.Twitter.com/SofieAndreou, www.Pinterest.com/SofieAndreou, https://www.youtube.com/user/SofieAndreouSeminars.

This was a summary of Step 4 .. stay tuned for Step 5!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 9 - Create Your Calendar!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 16:51:00 +0000

Creating and Managing your Social Media Calendar

To complete your Social Strategy, you will need a marketing calendar. In this post, I'll focus on Social Media Calendar tactics. I recommend to my clients' that they merge their traditional and online marketing calendars.

Your Social Media Calendar is most effective when it highlights both the efforts and measures to be tracked. This becomes your both your Online Marketing Plan and Schedule. Initially, it can be developed for one test department or event and then rolled out through your appropriate departments.

The approach is unique for each company. Modified depending on the level of social engagement and content sources. A social media Coordinator oversees the implementation and measures for the entire organization. Many companies now have mini Social Media Coordinators or Contributors in appropriate departments. Contributors have other job responsibilities, however, looking for Social Media content simply becomes a part of their specific job responsibilities in a Social Company.

In a Social Company, looking for Social Media content becomes a part of specific identified people's job responsibilities. These people are called Social Contributors. The Contributors might also post directly to social media or just send their materials to the Social Coordinator. Either way photos and videos must be captured and posted in an authentic and timely fashion.

Ideally, social plans and goals should to be automated, such that alerts and reminders are sent to the Contributors and Coordinators. We suggest using your existing organizational calendar system, versus a separate one if possible. It is easier to sustain when you are not introducing new systems or processes for people to follow.

Of course, for the posting tactics and measurement reports, you'll want to use one of the Social Media management tools we reviewed in earlier blogs. There are many different tools to choose from. Each aimed at different organizational teams structures and sizes. These tools produce a calendar of future posts aimed at helping the Coordinator to see where their gaps are. The Coordinator can, right from some of these tools, send out material requests to the Contributors.

The schedule should capture, at the minimum

(i) What the goal & measure of success will be..

(ii) What topic they will post or gather materials on and where they will get their material.

(iii) How often they will post or gather materials.
(iv) Who the Contributor is who own's gathering this content.

Here is a great example of a social media schedule to get you started in the right direction.

Who	Topic	Frequency	When	Goal/Measure
Chef	Food	Twice a week	Thurs & Fridays at 10am	Goal: "Butts" in seats. Measures: Engagement of the food photos. & Reservations
Sports Director	Team Group Fitness Activities	Twice a week	Tues &Weds at 10AM	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Activity Photos & Request for group activities
Spa Manager	Spa Treatments	Daily	Monday to Fridays at 2pm	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Spa Photos. & Reservations for Spa Treatments
Wedding Coordinator	Wedding Excellence	Twice a week	Twice on Weekends	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Wedding Photos. & An increase in Wedding Packages Enquirers
Social Media Coordinator	Specials	Once a week	Thursdays at 2:30pm	Goal: Boost weekend reservations: Measures: Reservations Clicks

Always remember the posting tips we spoke of in earlier posts. Each target market and Social Media platform has it's own set of thresholds and approaches. They are each different. Apply the appropriate posting best practices to each of your specific social platforms! Spread your posts out appropriately. Be entertaining and educational! Be real.

What is a Social Media Coordinator - And Why You Need One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 15:50:00 +0000

What is a Social Media Coordinator?

The Social Media Coordinator is the glue in your online marketing strategy. The Social Media coordinator shares the strategy and protocols with each of the departmental Social Media coordinators. They create the annual Social Media schedule. They also train the departmental Social Media coordinators as needed to manage their department’s schedule and contributors.

Image Source:
http://blog.aftercollege.com/2013/everything-you-need-know-social-media-manager/

Possible Roles for The Social Media Coordinator

·       Assigns and controls passwords to all of the organization’s Social Media platforms.
·       Accountable for monthly measurement reports showing the organization’s and Leader’s social reach and influence and impact on their goals.
·       Give advice, based on the measures, on how to improve next month’s results.
·       Coordinates the social calendar.
·       Is a member of the Communication’s department or acts as the bridge between the traditional communications and social communications.
·       Aligns the social calendar with the overall organization’s communication’s calendar.
·       Works closely with the IT department ensuring the proper access, security, and privacy settings are in place for those who need it.
·       Continuously improves and grows followers.
·       Identifies & engages distribution giants.
·       Does all the posting or trains and monitors others on how to post properly.
·       Engages in ongoing online marketing training.

Why is a Social Media Coordinator Important in Your Organization?

The Social Media Coordinator is important in an organization as they are responsible for ensuring that the online marketing strategy is being executed as planned. This entails making sure all content is appropriate, and all content contributors are posting relevant, useful content that is aligned with the companies online marketing goals. The social media coordinator is necessary to ensure that the social media strategy is implemented effectively.

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 15:50:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy

Social Media is no longer just nice to have, but it is evolving into a powerful and essential tool for businesses and communities to use to grow. Social Media has shifted how we communicate with staff, clients, community, and suppliers. Moreover, Social Media has truly seeded a culture of social business or social community. That is why it is important to leverage the power of the internet to reach your goals.

Where do you start when looking to build your Social Strategy, and how will we execute it? First we need to select what Social Media platforms we are going to use, you want to choose the one that will suit your goals the best, you can use as many platforms as necessary, and you do not have to use all forms of social media.

Here are the 9 key steps you need to follow when creating your

community or organizational social strategy.

1. Why do you want online followers? State your purpose.

2. Which Keywords or Hashtags will lace your posts?

3. Who is your target audience?

4. What social platforms will you use?

5. How will you measure success?

6. List your possible material creators? (Clients, Staff, Suppliers, Industry Experts, Media)

7. Who will be accountable for measuring and coordinating efforts?

8.   List your Influencers’ possibilities – those giants with a large number of social followers who will retweet or share your posts.

9.   Create your schedule – how often can your organization post? Twice a day, three times a week?

The 9 Steps to Your Social Strategy

Step one to five are your strategy steps. At least annually, you should be starting back at step 1 to review your purpose, keywords, target audience, platforms and measures.

Steps five to nine should be repeated monthly as your implementation guide.

Employee Ontario Grant Details

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:06:00 +0000

A new employee training grant is available for employers till March 31st, 2015 (I understand it's extended.. not sure of the date..).

It called is the Ontario Job and Skills Training Grant.

Companies can access up to $10,000 for each of their employees they would like trained. The deadline to apply is March 31st 2015. As the employer, you pay only one sixth of the training fee if you have less then 50 employees, this Grant pays the balance five sixths.

For example, if your staff needed training that equates to $3,000, you'd only have to pay $500 of it, this Ontario Grant is paying the balance.

Although you can use this training grant for so much, I'm delighted that my online marketing workshops are applicable.

I will customize a program for your staff. I recommend six three hour sessions over a twelve week period for your company.

We would conduct these six three hour workshops over twelve weeks at a time convenient to your staff to ensure minimal disruption to your operations and maximum effectiveness of the learning outcomes.

I recommend the following workshops.

Workshop One: Creating your online marketing strategy. Participates should include your appropriate senior managers and your marketing staff.

Workshop Two: Creating your company's marketing plan, calendar and action plan. Participants for this session should be those implementing the plan, with a 30 minute guest appearance mid way through from the senior manager who participated in Workshop One.

Workshops Three to Six: The last four sessions are hands on. We focus on one platform or management tool for each session. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, various eNewsletters, various video platforms, various measurement or management tools. The platform focused on will be driven by on the outcomes of our initial marketing strategy session. I will help your team excel on the platforms that will most help your company. I will coach your team while we practice, implement and measure the impact of the online marketing efforts during those weeks.

End Certification: In the twelfth week I will personally conduct a verbal test with your employees based on the platforms we have been focusing on. The End Certification will either be a pass or fail of this twelve week program.

Your employees will have access to my available online resources for two months after the end of the workshops. These online resources include my new Coffee Break Learning Online Marketing webinars.

Please connect with me if you would like to apply for this Grant to help your team leverage the Power of Online Marketing.

Tag Up to Ten People on Twitter Without Using Up Your 140 Characters!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 18:47:00 +0000

Want to Make Your Posts Get Seen By The People You Want, But Not Take Up Your 140 Characters?

Twitter recently introduced a new feature excellent feature which allows users to tag up to ten users without having it take up any of your 140 characters. This is a fantastic new tool as it allows users to tweet out to giants, or specific people they want to see the tweet.

Check out our latest video talking about the 5 elements of a good tweet, starting with how to tag or mention up to 10 people on a photo!

How does this new tool work? Well to tag the ten twitter handles you want you just need to add a picture, after adding the picture you can then click who's in this photo, and start adding twitter handles! To make it easier on yourself, it helps if you follow the handles before you start tagging.

This is an effective new tool to reach the users you want to see the tweet! Every user that is tagged in the picture will receive a notification. Using a picture to tag other users is more effective than simply tweeting to them, as you can tag multiple users in the picture! Thus spreading your reach, and leaving you more space to tweet your message effectively!

Happy Tweeting!

www.SofieAndreou.com

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 3 - Your Target Followers & Why They'd Choose YOU!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:46:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 3 - Your Target Followers & Why They'd Choose YOU!

Defining Your Target Followers?

There are six traditional ways to identify your target audience.
1.     Where are they located geographically?
2.     How old are they?
3.     What sex are they?
4.     What is their marital status?
5. Do they have specific interests? ie. Running, Fitness, Nature
6. Income Level?

Knowing the above helps you choose which platforms to share your social messages on. There is an abundance of research available on what various demographic behaviours are on each Social Media platform. It is critically important that you do research to find out what social media platforms your target market is using! Using the graph on the left will get you started, it shows a great breakdown in the age demographics of social media users. You want to analyze who your target market is using these six traditional methods of identifying your target market.

Why will they want to follow YOU?

Image Source:
http://www.delabs.co/home/ideas-of-delabs/tweetphonationisatwitterbespoken

One of the best practises when starting this stage is to ask your best clients, friends or suppliers why they would follow you online. What expertise, advice, experience, news, and knowledge can you bring to your posts that others can't? What is your added value when posting online? Answer the question:

"What are the reasons your followers will want to read and share your posts?"

Once you have your list of reasons to post, it is easy to look around your organization and see who already is on the ground with the most immediate access to that information. Then help them learn how to share it appropriately.

For example if your business was going to be posting about upcoming events in a particular area, you could assign staff members to continuously research for events that are happening in the area, this would include news, events, notable actions in the community and any updates in the community. This is just a simple example of something that has huge potential.

Choose Your Organization's Voice

The last element to this step is choosing a voice for the organization. You want to choose whether you want to be a formal voice, or informal voice. Which voice fits your organization the best? If you choose formal, than all of your pictures, videos and content must be formal to maintain consistency, and the same rule applies to being informal. Generally, informal posts that contain emotion get more engagement than formal posts that can often come off as cold. Equip your staff with WHAT to post, and which voice to use. Don't forget to link back to your website or blog when you can!

Now that you have the tools to define your target followers, you also have to come up with your plan to have followers choose YOU! Try it out!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 2 - Keywords & Hashtags

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:45:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 2 - Keywords & Hashtags

Which Keywords and Hashtags do you want everyone using?

Now that you know how you are going to measure your success, which platforms you are going to use, and who is going to be following you, people need to find your posts, and you need to choose your keywords. Keywords are an important variable in how people find your online world.

Keywords

Image Source:
http://wp2.cdn.brainsins.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/SEO.jpg

We need to figure out what keywords your customers will most likely be using in search engines to find a product or service similar to yours. A great way to find out what keywords you should be using is by simply asking some of your favourite clients what keywords they would use to search for your business in Google. Once you have determined what relevant keywords apply to your business, you can start lacing your keywords in all of your posts, tweets, online descriptions, categories and other searchable elements, whether on websites, in social networking profiles, blogs or other online presences. Your content needs to be keyword rich.

Proper use of keywords, labels and tags are very important for you to be found online. They help the search engines match you up with your target audience. Use the same keywords for your website, landing pages, online ads, online groups, Facebook pages, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, YouTube channels, and online directories.

Now that we have determined what keywords you will be using to make your business found on search engines, it is time to start a Google Adwords campaign! First we need to open up the Google Keyword Planner (if you do not have a gmail account, now is the time to make one). Now you want to sign in and create a campaign, from here you will enter how much you want to spend per day on google's advertising, how much you are willing to pay per click to your website (Google can maximize results for you, or you can manually set this) you will be able to choose where you want your link to appear, and the keywords you want to use to have your ad show up on Google.

For the keywords section of this, Google can suggest similar keywords to the ones you have come up with, or you can stick to your original keywords. When you type in your keywords into the Keywords Planner, it will show you how many times this keyword is searched for in a months time frame.

Hashtags

If you are a local store, and you’ve decided to use Twitter or Instagram as one of your online marketing platforms, you’ll want to find out at least which hashtag your local tourism or twitter community use to identity your city and some hashtags to identify your products or services if appropriate.

In a community, when you all use the same local unique hashtag to identify your location, it makes the collective very powerful online. You can all collectively listen and engage with your current and potential clients. You definitely need to educate your staff to use the correct local hashtag in the appropriate Tweets’ or Instagrams’ you’d like to showcase in your community’s search results.

In the following example, this person tweets how much they enjoyed their meal in London Ontario by using the #LdnOnt hashtag, she mention’s the Café’s handle as well. Immediately the café she mentions gets notified, and they retweet it. Now in addition, the local Tourism or any local London foodie might now also see it and choose to retweet it.

You have the tools now to grow your business and expand your reach, try choosing your own hasthags and keywords that will suit your organization!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 1 - Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:44:00 +0000

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy - Step 1: State your online purpose.

Before your business should start posting you should define why you want to use social media, and why you want followers. Defining your online purpose will then become the perspective you will be doing all of your digital marketing work from.

Here are some great examples of an online purpose:

Increasing sales

To be seen as the "go to" for specific topics

Complimenting traditional customer service

To increase traffic in retail locations

To improve communication between clients, staff or suppliers

Now write down a few ideas for yours, make sure they are attainable!

Now that we have a few ideas for your online marketing social strategy, we are now going to look at why customers would want to follow YOU. For example, if your online purpose was to become an industry expert, once you define the industry you want to be an expert in, you answer why people will want to follow you!

Next, if we want to increase sales or increase traffic to your website or blog, there are effective ways of doing so. To do so, we want to entice your target market to follow you online, we can achieve that by posting relevant information to your industry, you wan this information to essentially be "infotainment". This can come in the form of pictures, videos or articles. Generally you want your posts to also have link going back to your website or blog, these links are called incoming links, as they are leading the customer to your website. A great rule of thumb is that if you were to post six times in a week, five of the posts should be "infotainment", and the sixth post can be more of a hard sell for your product or service.

Image Source:
http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/get-all-the-news-unedited-uncurated/10484/twitter-bird-yelling/

Now that we have laid out the foundation for social media posting we can move on to using social media as a medium for communicating with clients, staff or suppliers. Why would you want this as part of your online marketing purpose? Using social media to communicate effectively to clients, staff or suppliers is basically word of mouth on steroids! How so? Well, as your current followers engage with your posts, everyone who is connected to them witnesses their engagement. If someone states that the article you just forwarded is AWESOME, their followers will see it, and you have a higher possibility of catching their attention. Also, aside from being one the fastest ways for you to communicate with your clients, staff or suppliers, it is also one of the most cost effective ways!

Now that we have covered the basics of defining your online purpose, you should now be able to come up with one for your business or community! After that you will be ready for Step 2 - Determining what Keywords or hashtags you will be using!

3 Month Social Platform Launch Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:35:00 +0000

When implementing a new social media platform in your organization, we suggest using our three month process. The three month process starts with researching that platform for one month, the second month is about platform set up and practice. Finally, the third month we go live and start our communications and growth plan.

Month ONE - 5 steps to researching one platform

http://blog.qmee.com/online-in-60-seconds-infographic-a-year-later/

i.   Search one platform and list what complimentary businesses are posting effectively.

ii.      Summarize which and how many of your targeted potential clients engage on this platform?

iii.    Conclude from the above what kind of material or posts will get you the most engagement on that platform.

iv.    List the key Influencers on this platform who might share your posts to which in turn will help you grow.

v.      List where you’ll get your material from.

Month TWO - Setup & Practice

i.   Mirror your brand on this platform.

ii.   Create a bunch of different covers for various upcoming events, seasons or sales.

iii.    Choose a squared logo to use across all your platforms.

iv. Populate your Timeline with 6 posts which give some context to what your company is all about. On Facebook make them Milestones and back date them, they can include: (i) grand opening, (ii) about you, (iii) about your products, (iv) community involvement, (v) happy customers and
(vi) showcase your staff.

Month THREE - LAUNCH

i. Create your Social Calendar, for example, how many posts of your own and how many posts will you or your staff share of your community’s influencers daily?

ii. On Facebook or Twitter, determine a monthly budget to first promote your account to your target clients to start getting some followers or likes, and secondly to promote individual posts or tweets.

iii. Post your new Social Page URLs in each of your eNewsletters, retail store, website, traditional marketing materials, print, signs, radio, news ads, TV.

iv. Mention and tag the identified influencers who you’ve seen share content like yours. Your hopes are that they’ll share or retweet your content and help you grow. (Offer them incentives to share.)

A great example of a social calendar!

Re-Purpose Traditional Media as Social Media Posts!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:58:00 +0000

Many businesses are not taking advantage of re-purposing their traditional newspaper ads, TV commercials, TV shows, and Radio spots as Social Media Posts. It's VERY effective! We've been helping clients do so, it's fun and POWERFUL!

You've already spent the money to create them, so reuse them! First, it reinforces your message to those on both mediums and second, it captures people who might not be on the traditional medium.

Take a look at Johnson Jeweller's Facebook Page. We re-purpose traditional Television commercials as Posts. https://www.facebook.com/JJsBling?ref=hl

How? John creates the commercial at ChexTV. Then ChexTV saves it for him as a MP4. We download and re-purpose that MP4 as a video Post on his Facebook Page! NICE!!

Here's another approach we take with a client. Take a TV spot, have it saved as an MP4 and then upload it to your YouTube Channel.

From there we use their Video commercial on each of their Website, eNewsletters, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hBTEpeeZao

Here are some other examples, including where we've re-purposed a radio ad! How did we do that? We asked for the radio ad to be saved and sent to us as an MP3 file. Then place the MP3 file overtop a background of photos and text telling a story about an event! Here's a short video where I'm talking about it at a Tech Talk update.

This is one of our favourite services for clients. It extends their investment professionally onto other channels! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hBTEpeeZao

2 Elements Which Drive Retail Sales Through Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 20:05:00 +0000

Social media can drive your target audience into your location versus having them just pass you by. There are two elements to driving people into your store; (i) synchronization of online and offline activities and (ii) localized marketing.

Synchronization of Online & Offline Activities

This new successful sales life cycle starts with your target market engaging with your posts when they are relaxing on Facebook. You are hoping that you have written an engaging post with an eye-catching photo of your product. The outcome you are looking for is that they will stop and engage with it by liking it or commenting on it. Why do you want this? So they will remember it and their Facebook friends will also see your photo posts about your product. This extends your post's reach online from not only those few who Facebook distributes it to, but also to their friends and friends of friends. Essentially creating a ripple effect.

Next, this same extended Facebook group might hear your local radio ad about that same product they all just saw on Facebook. Further, some might even see a Tweet from a local influencer they already follow and trust. An influencer is a local person or local group like a Downtown Business Improvement Area or Tourism Group.

Two things are happening here. First, your online efforts are amplified by online engagement. Second your in-store traditional marketing and your online posts all are in sync. The outcome drives sales and traffic to your store.

You are now TOP of mind. When your target market is in your area, they know about your current sales, and they are more likely to stop in. You are building a richer multi-dimensional relationship.

July 2014 Steve Ladurantaye of Twitter Canada stated that the trends they are currently seeing include people follow retailers for the following reasons:

· 68% to find out about discounts

· 55% to find out about upcoming deals

· 45% follow to show support

Knowing this, if your target market is on Twitter, it should be a criminal offence NOT to have your Twitter handle front and center on your store's doors and other printed materials so passers-by might see it and follow you. For @SosSaveOurSoles, their sign might state something like “We tweet @SOSSaveOurSoles about how we Save Your Soles and our in store DEALS!”

Although they might be following you to find out about deals, remember to engage first, and sell second. Coming across with only hard core “buy buy buy” tweets or posts is tacky and you will notice followers will drop off.

Localized marketing

Localized marketing is obviously very important to retail brick and mortar stores. We hear about localized marketing in the context of paid local ads on Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Those ads are effective, inexpensive, and critical to getting to your target audience when they are online. If you have advertising dollars, you should allocate a portion of those dollars to these new types of online vehicles. You will find them less expensive then the other advertising methods, but just as critical and they all work hand in hand with each other. On all three platforms targets based on local parameters exist. Not only can you promote an online account, website, or location, you can also promote a Facebook Post. For example, say you have an event happening at your location in a specific city on a specific date, you can create an event or just a Post about it and Promote the event, or Boost the Post. If you do not Boost the post, only a maximum of 10% of those who follow you might see the post, and only if they happen to logon within a couple hours of that post or tweet. However, with Boosting the Post, Facebook releases your post to their newsfeed when they log onto Facebook. Not only can you target those who Like your Page you can also target their Friends or set your target audience to people who don't like your page yet, ie women who are 45 to 65 living within 10 miles of a list of cities you choose; each time one of them signs onto Facebook, regardless if they Like your page or not, they will see that event or post.

Localized marketing need to also include finding organic partners to distribute your online messages. We call these people Influencers. You need to identify and understand the local Influencers on your social media platforms of choice. Once identified and understood, you can decide if there is anyway that you can entice them to share, retweet, or repin your material to their local followers. This trusted local Influencer is someone you might mention in your tweet because you believed they might be interested in retweeting your current deal. In the example above, @Ptbo_Canada is a local Influencer with over 11,000 followers. They like to support local activities and businesses. So, if you're right, they will retweet your tweet about the deals or event your tweeting about. The reason you chose them as an Influencer is based on the fact that their followers happen to be your target audience.

Check out your local Media or Business Improvement Area or Tourism Associations and see who they mention to get organic exposure, ie who their local Influencers are. Then see if you happen to already have a relationship with them and what kind of material they like to retweet or share. If you believe you can produce posts or tweets which would help promote you both, then start mentioning them as appropriate or give them an old fashioned phone call to talk about how you can help each other. Many online Media groups, like @Ptbo_Canada here now sell advertising services to local retails. You might approach yours and see about establishing a new online media relationship for your company.

Done properly, your Influencers will be sharing or retweeting your posts or tweets to their followers who are also your target audience and who have happened to have just heard about your deals on the radio and saw the visual products on Facebook.

Aww… such a beautiful synchronous world.

New Twitter Look Now HERE for Everyone

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 03:11:00 +0000

The New twitter look is pretty snazzy. You can now activate yours. Here's how!

Current 2014 Twitter Layout

When you first log into your Twitter account, you'll see a header that asks if you'd like to take a look.

Click on "Take a look". You can take a look and make it permanent or come back to it later.

The new layout eliminates the background and increases the cover. The new cover is 1500x500, maximum of 5MB..

New April 2014 Twitter Layout

New Twitter layout includes a new feature, your visitors can view your tweets with photos. It's a nice view. Click here to see my new Twitter account live www.Twitter.com/SofieAndreou

New Twitter Layout

I created a 7 minute video tutorial to help you switch over to the new look! http://youtu.be/RXRScHQ0Coo

Enjoy! I'm looking forward to seeing YOUR new twitter look!

Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation Summary with your 3 Step Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 21:49:00 +0000

It's effective as of July 1, 2014.

Did you know that you as an individual can be penalized $1 million per violation and an

organization $10 million per violation?

How do you comply? (i) proof of consent for each email or other types of electronic communications (ii) an unsubscribe process in every digital communication and (iii) documented date and type of each consent.

Might sound impossible, but it's not.

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) does not only applies to email but also to SMS and Social Media direct messaging like LinkedIn in-mail, Twitter direct messages and Facebook messaging.

See my 11min video here on the details or see it on YouTube: http://youtu.be/xJMZtz14oSA

CASL focuses on commercial electronic messages (CEMs). However, even if your message is NOT selling anything, but you have an hyperlink back to your website where you do indeed market your products or service, it's considered CEMs.

3 steps to CASL compliance

Divide your emails into three groups: expressed, implied and unknown consent.
Review and tweak all the wording wherever you collect emails.
Review and tweak all your electronic communications for appropriate unsubscribe and identification,

Step One: Your current email lists

Sort your current emails into express, implied and unknown consent.

(i) Expressed consent: list of external emails which you can identify the date you received verbal or written expressed consent and how you received it. You can send appropriate emails to this list forever or until they unsubscribe.

(ii) Implied consent: list external emails from business relationships who have not given your express consent, but to whom you've done business with or have had a prior business relationship with. To this email list you can communicate to up to two years after your last engagement. (Implied also include those who have made an inquiry to you, but, have not purchased, these emails you can use for six months.)

(iii) Unknown consent: those emails where your company cannot identify if you have ever received expressed or implied consent can cause you trouble after July 1, 2014. You can either delete them, or prior to July 1, 2014 send them an email of importance or value or with a clever offer, requesting them to agree to your offer, which will give you your implied consent. OR Requesting them to opt into your emails, which give you your expressed consent.

In both implied or express consent, you'll need to have documented proof.

Step Three: Collecting emails

What's changed? Expressed consent does not include those who give you a card to enter a draw. After July 1, 2014, you must adjust your signage, for example, "thank you for your email, we'll be sending you information monthly on "Blah Blah" as we'll be entering you into this draw."

You can't send an email or promotion that has an "unclick if you DO NOT want to receive our blah Blah". Instead, after July 1st, you must give the user an activity to do in-order to get their expressed consent, like 'check the box" to opt-in and receive our email. The key is to give your promotion real value which will entice people to exchange their email or SMS with you for the value you're offering to them.

Think about your electronic communications a little differently. Start including a share option to encourage those who already trust you and value your communications to share it with their colleges. You'll get more effective growth and conversion rates with your communications when friends or colleges recommend your communications. There are tools to help you do this and to get expressed opt-ins at the same time. I use Constant Contact.

For implied consent emails collected after July 1st you're allowed to communicate with them for two years. Of course, expressed consent emails, you're allowed to communicate with them until they unsubscribe. In both cases you'll need to start documenting the dates and types of communications with all of your different lists. I suggest you incorporate this into your communications calendar after you sort your list.

Step Three: Electronic Communications

Review all of your outgoing communications and tweak them for CALs compliance.

After July 1st all out going communications must contain:

The name of the person sending the email or name of the person the email is being sent on behalf of
Mailing address, either a telephone or someway to access the organization sending the email
An unsubscribe process.

I believe this process should be immediate and automated, but the legislation gives you 10 business days after the unsubscribe has been clicked on to remove them from your lists.

Who's Exempt from this legislation?

Non-Profits fundraising communications
Politicians soliciting contributions
Family & Friends
Communications to members of your organization, club or association
Out of Canada (you must comply with their legislation).
Messages sent over a closed network, such as Blackberry Messenger.
First commercial electronic message that is sent by a person for the purpose of contacting someone following a referral by any individual who indeed has an existing business relationship.

For the full list of who's exempt, click here.

There are a few other aspects to CASL. To see them all, please refer to the resources below. Our three steps in this blog will help you get your organization's email communication CASL compliant.

Resources

Government of Canada CASL Website: http://fightspam.gc.ca/

Copy of the Act: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-1.6/index.html

Who speaks for you online?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 20:51:00 +0000

Everyone in a social organization or a community has a role in contributing to its social success.

I am not saying that ALL of your employees or volunteers must become your official spokespeople. You can't mandate it. However, it can be powerful if everyone knew their role and how to share online appropriately.

As there is so much 'noise' online, people are filtering out what they listen to. They are choosing to listen to posts from a selected few. We're giving our online trust to a select list of friends and organizations. Therefore, social organizations have empowered their staff and volunteers to share their organization's posts appropriately to the people who trust them.

Organizations' posts become both an extension of their staff's online personal brand and one of their most engaging and trusted post distribution channels.

For example, suppliers “mentioning” their clients’ Twitter handles, when appropriate, can strengthen their clients’ credibility and increase their clients’ followers. Imagine taking a photo of your product and client then attaching it to a tweet.

For example, if you were a cheese shop selling to a local restaurant, a fun and effective tweet might be: “Our @CheeseNymphs Smoked Blue Haze will be featured @RareGrill Cheese Desire Platter next week - out of this world!” Attach a photo of course!

Or local entrepreneurs sharing their love for each other's products. "@BriGosselin "Having a studio downtown and being able to visit @CheeseNymphs for treats is bliss!..."

Clients love seeing what is involved in the preparation of an event, food, product, brand and so on. Staff and suppliers sharing in the moment of the excitement are very effective.

Other examples include welcoming new companies to your community or tweeting live from events. A fashion retailer, choosing which lines will be a part of their spring selection can take photos and upload them to Facebook or Pinterest. Genuine passion is catchy. You can't fake it online.

With a social company, everyone associated with your organization needs to know what your strategy is in order to feel a part of the plan, in order to participate, and to keep the engagement building.

However, before you'll feel comfortable flipping the switch for yourself, staff and partners to become an extension of your online marketing, you'll need to clearly understand what your online purpose is. This then becomes the lens you view all your actions; guiding you so you can share consistently and appropriately through your voice, images, online emotion, and online actions supporting your chosen community.

Here are the 9 questions you need to answer when creating your community's or organization's social strategy. Answering these questions will help you enable yourself and your staff to become a social organization.

1. State your online purpose.

2. Who do you want following you and why will they want to follow you?

3. Which platforms are your followers on, therefore,which social platforms will you use?

4. How will you measure online success?

5. Which Keywords and Social Media Platform URLs or handles do you want everyone using?

6. Where will your posts come from? (Clients, Staff, Suppliers, Industry Experts, Media, Yourself.. Taking photos, videos or writing blogs..)

7. Who will be accountable for measuring and coordinating efforts?

8. VERY IMPORTANT.. Identify your possible giants – i.e. Those friendly social giants with a large number of social followers who will welcome and retweet or share your posts.

9. Create your schedule – how often can you post? Twice a day, three times a week?

I have stepped all sizes of organizations through these 9 steps. Of course, each step takes a different length of time depending on the organization's complexity. Trust me, it really works!

Safe and Decent Homes for Everyone!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:21:00 +0000

I believe in a world where everyone has a safe and decent place to live! That's what Habitat for Humanity stands for!

I loved my Habitat for Humanity experience for three reasons. For these three reasons I agreed to try to help this team raise $1,000 in 30 days! Every dollar counts! If you can, please click here to donate.

The first reason I loved my experience was very personal. My father was a home builder. As a child I use to love following him around while he worked. Stepping onto the Habitat for Humanity build site was like stepping back in time; the smell of the wood alone brought back vivid beautiful memories of my dad. I felt like he was building right next to me the entire time. I miss him so much, it felt so real. So many wonderful and safe memories. Fitting feelings, considering we were building a home.

Second, I got to spend the day with "My Girls!" There is a group of special, wonderful women I am blessed to call my friends. We don't get a chance to get together that often any longer, BUT, we managed to gather to help with this build! It was one of our most memorable times together. I'm not sure we've actually been together since, but, I am so happy we experienced this build together.

Finally, the MOST amazing part of the build was two fold, first, the young mother who was going to be moving into the house, worked with us the entire time! Then, Habitat for Humanity invited our team back to meet the family on the day they were presented with the keys to their new home! We all cried with joy as the young couple and their children were presented their keys. Talk about emotional. Better than a Christmas morning. Each of our team presented to them a different gift. I can't express how deeply moved we all were.

So, when the Habitat group asked if I'd be willing to help, I said OF COURSE! 30 women to help raise $30,000 in 30 days. We are each aiming to raise $1,000 in 30 days! I hope you'll share in our passion and help Habitat for Humanity continue to "mobilize volunteers and community partners in building affordable housing and promoting providing home ownership as a means of breaking the cycle of poverty."

If you can, please click here to donate what you can! THANK YOU!

Appealing to Cross Sexes & Generations Online

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 19:59:00 +0000

Businesses, associations, non-profits; actually, ALL professionals, struggle with how to effectively communicate with their different target markets online. One message and the medium does NOT appeal to everyone. I'd like to help you understand, how to take ONE message and repurprose it for various target markets.

I've been asked to speak on this specific topic recently, to prepare I pulled together mountains of statistic about WHERE various ages are online, WHAT they are doing online, WHEN they are online and WHICH mediums they use to access it.

I've become so excited about it this topic that I've decided to write a book on it. I'll be looking at 1,000s of various behaviors through real businesses' online social media platforms and pinpointing which activities cause specific types of engagement from specific demographics. On a side note, if your organization happens to have over 1,000 followers or fans, and you'd like me to analyze your platforms, please let me know, I'd love to include you in my book!

To start, I have included these two charts which show what 75,000 people of different sexes and ages are talking about on Facebook. What they're talking about reflects what they're interested in, listening for and engaging with online. Use these word maps to mold your Posts or Tweets for that target audience. Take one message and present it in a manner that's most appealing to each of your target markets.

What are different SEXs talking about?

University of Pennsylvania researchers analyzed the Facebook status updates of 75,000, found the sexes have a very different vocabulary online.

A wise communicator adjusts their message's language based on way their target audience is interested in or talking about. I suggest you take your primary message, dice it up, then target it. One simple way to target is to boost a Post on Facebook to ONLY females when using language females relate to, and boost a very different Post aimed at males.

For all the details on this chart, you can go to the article itself, Oct 2013, by Business Insider,

Scientists Used Facebook For the Largest Ever Study of Language and Personalit.

What are different age groups talking about on Facebook?

Conversations certainly "evolve" as we age.

Continuing the above approach, adjust your message to embrace what your target audience is speaking of. Learn from these word clouds to modify your message based on age.

For example, if you are targeting age groups between 23 to 29, you are not going to catch their attention with posts about school, homework or family; but, more likely with something to do careers, money & beer!

Allocation of Online Time by Age

To add to the mix, look at WHAT different age groups are doing online?

Well, it's certainly NOT email for the under 24 years old!

Also, notice how long each spends online daily. The under 24 age group is online 3.5 times longer than the over 55 age group. PLUS, the under 24 group is online MUCH later in the evening than the rest of the population (different set of statistics and my own personal experience). So, target your platforms and timing.

On a final note, think about mobility, over 50% of teens, both sexes, use their cell phones as their PRIMARY method to surf the net. So, if your Posts are aimed at youth, the links, videos or photos attached to your Posts must be smart phone friendly.

There's SO much more to cover! Like, the effective use of email, which exact platform, video and texting.. Next time!

Sources:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/10/02/study_most_popular_facebook_keywords_by_age_gender_and_personality.html

http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7704/age-not-gender-drives-most-social-media-use#ixzz2iZhuY6hw

http://readwrite.com/2013/04/08/teenagers-smartphones-how-theyre-changing-the-world#awesm=~oljjTbhZ4Dx4RO

16 reasons your organization MUST use YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 20:04:00 +0000

50% more YouTube watched than last year …

Don’t miss the opportunity to tell your organization’s story using the MOST powerful online tool - YouTube! According to YouTube their most recent Viewership stats are:

· More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month

· Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year

· 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

· 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US

· YouTube is localized in 56 countries and across 61 languages

· According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network

· Millions of subscriptions happen each day, and the number of people subscribing has more than doubled since last year

· Mobile makes up more than 25% of YouTube's global watch time, more than one billion views a day.

Twitter & Facebook, now serving YouTube! How are people finding these videos? Obviously, directly on YouTube and Google, but, also 700 YouTube video links are shared on Twitter every minute & 500 years of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook every day (source: Relevancy Group)!

Benefits to using video include MORE SALES!! According to Website Magazine, visitors are not only staying on a website with videos an average of 2 minutes longer than those without videos, visitors are also 64% MORE LIKLEY to purchase from a site with videos!

JUST as important, we’re finding that when you embed a YouTube video on your Website, your website it improves your Search Engine results! It makes sense that embedding a Google owned property into your website helps Google find your site! Finally, email marketing which include a video have been shown to increase click-through rates by more the 96%.

Finally, it’s now easier than ever to create videos, the equipment exists in more your cell phones at the very least! Video editing software is almost free!

So, don’t delay! Start sharing your story via VIDEO!

7 steps to social media event marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:52:00 +0000

While on vacation I received a 2 page email asking me to help a non-profit raise $1,000s within a few days. One of their committee members who knew they were shy their target by $1,000s thought, "Social Media’s the way to go, I’ll just contact Sofie, get her help to make this happen in a few days". I could have taken her money, but, as they didn't have any followers, I suggested they move their arbitrary date out at least a month and follow the following 7 steps vs. being disappointed. (I still hope to help them.) But this resonated with me more than the multiple other emails received while on vacation, because I really respect this specific person who contacted me, her business strategy and board governance abilities are unmatched, but, I realized that didn't mean a person with that much excellence at planning or running companies and organization for the past 30 years, happened to know how to leverage the power of Social Media as an effective marketing tool.

Aim to create your communication's schedule, have it compliment any emails or print activity you have planned.

First, as a rule of thumb, if you are planning an event, and your organizations has ZERO online followers, you need at the least 6 months to build your followers. Just creating an online presents and posting does absolutely nothing for your event. It's like a sound in the forest when no one is there to hear it. You need to start by sharing your story, your organizations’ story, who are you helping, who is the staff... Share this about with about 3 posts, which include a vibrant video or photo, weekly, plus once a week, talk about the event you have coming up to support your organization’s goals. Paint a completing story of your organization’s mission, ask questions, and create a contest if you Can, create engagement with which will grow your followers. Now, once you have some followers and your organization’s goals are a well-known you can create effective buzz toward your event. I often say, if you have an annual well known event, you should start your online activity toward that event 3 months prior; again, posting 3 to 4 times away about how fun the event is, or the outcomes of the event, or the photos and videos of past events, and once a week a invite to the event itself. Finally, if the event is a monthly recurring event, or just a month away now, you should put up the registration a month or so ahead, offer an early bird registration fee for the first week of registration, if you like, showing again, a couple times a week the compelling benefits or outcomes and stories around the event as well as inviting your target audience to the event as appropriate weekly.

Before you can do the above, ie the buzz and registration or tickets sales toward the event, you need to set up your online elements for the event. In these 7 steps, I am assuming the event is aim at the general public in specific areas. If your aim was business to business, I’d also include LinkedIn in your arsenal.

Create an information webpage with all of the information for the event. The information page often mirrors printed flyers you would have once created for your event. (I call this the event’s landing page.) Branded clearly as your event and organization. Include photos, videos, registration information and location details.
Create an event on your Organization’s Facebook Business Page, if you don’t have an Organizations’ Facebook Business Page, create the event on your own human Facebook Profile, in either case, linking the Facebook event to the information webpage created in step one. Make sure the Facebook event contains link to the information webpage, the dates, registration details, cause and compelling event photo.
On Facebook, post daily or three times a week, posting your organization’s stories in 80 characters or less attaching a compelling event or cause photo or video. Add a weekly contest if you can, this causes engagement from those interested in your cause.
On Facebook Page, once a week, Share the event you created.
On Twitter, as your organization, Tweet your story, as well as Retweet or Mention relevant local Twitter Giants. (Relevant Giants are those who already have large numbers of Twitter followers who might want to support your organization, like local radio, news, tourism, and other organizations.) Those who care about your event and organization and might retweet your tweet to their followers. Become a part of the fabric of your Twitter community.
About a month or so before the event, twice a week, post about the event itself on Twitter, again mentioning Giants, so they see it and hope they'll retweet it to their massive twitter followers.
About a month before, invite all your relevant FB friends to the event you created, asking them to also invite their friends.

I use this process for many different clients' events. One in specific, the Bear's Lair Entrepreneur competition, we saved $10,000s in advertising costs, venue costs, and print costs. We eliminated all print flyers, face to face auditions, and paid advertising. The outcome was we saved $10,000s while doubling the participants, increasing the sponsorship and selling more tickets than ever before. This is the outcome when following the above steps! I hope this helps!

Secret Pinterest Boards - Why & How

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:31:00 +0000

You can create Secret Pinterest boards, which only you have access to, or only those who you have invited have access.

WHY CREATE SECRET BOARDS

We have seen this used by both individuals and businesses who have something visual they need to share with friends, coworkers, or partners.

This is often used by individuals when designing homes or planning weddings; anything that might have a group of people involved in, but, they would like to keep the contents just amongst themselves.

We have seen businesses use this when collaborating with partners on designs. As well as when planning a launch of a new product line they often now create Secret boards first, then convert them to Public boards when ready.

HOW CREATE SECRET BOARDS

Each account can have a maximum of three Secret Boards at anyone one time. You cannot convert a Public board to a Secret Board. Nor can you MOVE an existing Pin to a Secret Board. You can however RePin to a Secret Board.

Secret Boards can be used on both the Company and Personal Pinterest accounts.

Three steps to creating a Secret Board.

1) Clicking on the “Add+” at the top.

2) Click on the “Create a Board”.

3) Finally, to make that Board Secret toggle the Secret option to ON.

To complete the process, Name your Board, Select your Category, invite guest pinners if you like, then click on 'Create Board'.

DONE! Enjoy!

7 Business Benefits of Owners or CEOs Sharing via Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:23:00 +0000

7 Benefits of Being a Social Leader

Brandfog’s, “2012 Social Media CEO & Leadership Survey” had thirteen insightful conclusions, I have summarized the seven which focused on the impact of the Social Leader. In summary, Social Leaders’ engagement outcomes include more sales, more trust, effective crisis management, a competitive advantage, and a more desirable place to work. NOT BAD!

81% of respondents believe that CEOs who engage in social media are better equipped than their peers to lead companies in a web 2.0 world.
78% cited Better Communication and 71% stated Improved Brand Image as the biggest positive benefits.
82% of respondents were more likely or much more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage with social media.
77% of respondents were more likely or much more likely to buy from a company whose values and mission are defined through CEO and executive leadership participation on social media.
93% of respondents believe that CEO engagement in social media helps communicate company values, shape a company’s reputation, and grow and evolve corporate leadership in times of crisis.
94% said that CEOs and an organization’s executive leadership team enhance the brand image by participating on social media.
78% of respondents would prefer to work for a company whose leadership is active on social media.

“The survey results demonstrated that executive engagement in social media raises the brand profile and instills confidence in a company’s leadership team. It builds greater trust, brand loyalty and purchase intent. Respondents overwhelmingly confirmed their belief that C-Suite executives who engage in social media are better equipped to lead a company, communicate values and shape a company’s reputation in today’s changing world. .. .

The most effective leaders throughout history have been great communicators, yet the vast majority of modern day CEOs and C-Suite executives are conspicuously absent from social media channels. As of January 2012, 61% of Fortune 500 brands were engaging with customers via Twitter, but less than 2.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs were actively participating on Twitter.” The BrandFog Survey 2012.
For the full survey results, see: http://www.brandfog.com/CEOSocialMediaSurvey/BRANDfog_2012_CEO_Survey.pdf

Brandfog’s concludes that the “next generation of business leaders will require new talents and a different set of skills to successfully grow their companies. …in order to effectively lead a company, management competencies will have to be reinvented around a new set of Principles, including transparency, integrity, collaboration, and consistent communication with stakeholders about company vision, mission, and values through social media channels.”