Evolution of Contests in the Social Media Era

Contests have adapted to digital while they’ve retained their core appeal. Brands like Starbucks with their “White Cup Contest” leveraged user-generated content, inviting customers to doodle on their cups and share their designs online. This both fostered creativity and amplified the coffee brand’s visibility across its social platforms. Similarly, Dove’s “Real Beauty Should Be Shared” campaign on Facebook encouraged users to tell stories about their friends, blending emotional engagement with social sharing. GoPro also leveraged social media contests by encouraging users to upload adventurous videos they captured with their cameras, effectively turning customers into brand ambassadors. These examples show how social media has expanded the scope and reach of contests in ways that enable you to engage with a broader audience, foster community, and forge some viral marketing opportunities while you gather valuable consumer insights and content.

The Role of Social Media Automation in Contest Strategies

Automation can be critical to streamlining and enhancing your marketing strategies. Automation tools like dlvr.it can help you manage the potentially complex details of contest campaigns across various platforms. They can enable you to schedule and publish accurate contest-related posts consistently in a way that can maximize your visibility at peak engagement times. Automating your distribution of contest announcements, reminders, and updates can reduce the time you’d devote to those tasks so you can focus on creative aspects and real-time engagement. These tools can give you invaluable analytics and insights into how contest participants behave and how your contests campaigns perform. This data-driven approach can help you fine-tune your contest strategies so they resonate more with your target audience. When you integrate social media automation into your contest planning, you can efficiently manage large-scale contest campaigns, maintain target engagement, and ultimately drive successful outcomes with reduced operational overhead.

Five Reliable Types of Social Media Contests That Get Effective Results

Contests are a reliable tactic for engaging audiences and achieving brand objectives on your social media platforms. Five types of contests stand out for their reliability and effectiveness:

1. User-generated content contests can be a goldmine for brands seeking authentic engagement. By encouraging users to create content that resonates with their personal experiences, brands like GoPro have successfully leveraged this strategy. GoPro’s Photo of the Day challenge is a prime example, inviting users to submit their best photos captured with GoPro cameras. This not only generates a wealth of original content but also fosters a sense of community among users.
2. Giveaway contests are straightforward, highly effective ways to engage audiences on social media. With their Ultimate Fan Experience contest, beauty retailer Sephora invited its followers to win exclusive beauty products or a personalized shopping experience by following Sephora, liking the contest post, and tagging a friend in the comments. This approach both increased Sephora’s social media engagement and expanded its reach to potential new customers through the tagging. The simplicity of entry combined with the allure of high-value prizes made this contest a successful method for boosting Sephora’s online presence and customer interaction.
3. Creative challenge contests can push participants to think outside the box. LEGO’s fan design contests, for instance, invite enthusiasts to submit their unique LEGO creations. This type of contest not only stimulates creativity but also deeply involves participants in the brand’s world, turning them into active contributors rather than passive consumers.
4. Trivia and quiz contests are excellent for engaging and educating audiences. National Geographic’s Instagram trivia contests are a testament to this, combining engagement with educational content, thereby reinforcing the brand’s authority in geography and nature.
5. Skill-based competitions on social media platforms invite participants to showcase their talents or expertise in specific areas, creating a highly engaging and interactive environment. Adobe’s Creative Jam contests, conducted on platforms like Instagram, challenge designers and creatives to showcase their skills using Adobe software. Participants are often given a theme or a specific task, and their creations are shared on social media where the audience can view and engage with the submissions. This type of contest highlights individual talents and aligns with Adobe’s brand identity as a leader in creative software. They foster a community of skilled individuals, encourage learning and sharing, and create a buzz around the brand by showcasing practical applications of its products. Skill-based contests engage both participants and spectators, which makes them valuable tools for brands that want to showcase their community’s talent and creativity.

Six Strategic Tips for Effective Social Media Contests

• Understand your audience. To create a successful social media contest, it’s essential understand your audience deeply. That means knowing their preferences, behaviors, and the type of social media content that resonates with them. Tailoring your contest to align with audience interests increases participation and engagement–a beauty brand might run a makeup tutorial contest while a travel agency could solicit best travel photos. This alignment ensures that your contest has direct appeal in order to create more relevant interaction.
• Generate engaging contest content. The content of your contest needs to engage and be shareable. It should spark curiosity and encourage people to share with their networks. You can do this through creative challenges, compelling visuals, and intriguing prompts. The goal is to create content that engages your current audience and can go viral to reach a wider audience.
• Refine your timing and frequency. Timing and frequency are both critical for maximizing participation in your contests. Consider launching contests during holidays or special events when your audience is more active online. Try to be balanced with your contest frequency–too many contests can lead to audience fatigue, while too few might not keep your audience engaged with your brand.
• Use automation for consistency. Social media automation tools like dlvr.it can help you ensure consistent and timely posting of your contest content. Automation can help you schedule your posts for optimal times, ensuring your contest reaches the maximum number of people. Posting consistency also keeps your audience engaged throughout the duration of your contest.
• Monitor and analyze your contests’ performance. Using analytics tools to monitor your contests’ performance is vital. This involves tracking engagement metrics, participant feedback, and overall reach. Analyzing this data can help you understand what’s working, letting you both make real-time adjustments and improve tactics for future contests.
• Integrate contests into your broader marketing efforts. Contests shouldn’t just be one-off events. When you integrate them into your strategy, you can ensure that each contest supports your overall brand goals like increasing awareness, launching a product, or driving sales.

Bottom line

Strategically implementing contests on your social media platforms can significantly help enhance how your audience engages with your brand. Your contests need to align with both your brand’s identity and your audience’s interests. Each contest type can convert audience interaction into tangible results. When you integrate contests with social media automation tools like dlvr.it, you can keep the engagement consistent and monitor the performance of each campaign. When you thoughtfully plan and execute contests, you’re able to both grab existing audience attention, attract new followers, and strengthen your overall presence on the platform. Contests aren’t about short-term gains, but building lasting follower relationships and a loyal customer base. Learn how dlvr.it can free you from posting tasks and keep you focused on bringing relevant contests to your audience.

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How Your Brand Can Benefit from Social Listening

Incorporating social listening into your brand strategy can upgrade your understanding of the market and improve your engagement with customers. It can give you a multifaceted view of your brand’s social presence, along with critical insights that can inform your decisions and planning. Social listening can help you:
Understand customer sentiment better. Social listening delves into the emotions and opinions expressed by customers, offering a clear perspective on how they experience your brand. This is useful as you tailor your tactics to the current state of your market.

• Get competitive analysis and market intelligence. When you monitor competitors and industry trends as part of your social listening, you get valuable insights into market gaps and opportunities that can inform the way you position and differentiate in the market.
• Manage crises and protect your brand. Social listening lets you detect potential issues or negative sentiment early, manage your brand’s reputation proactively, and respond swiftly to emerging crises.
• Inform your product development and innovation. Customer feedback and discussions reveal their unmet needs and preferences. That can help guide your product enhancements and innovation, and stay ahead of market demands and customer expectations.
• Improve customer engagement and loyalty. When you understand the desires and pain points of your audience you can create more relevant and engaging social media content. Doing so strengthens audience connections, fosters customer loyalty, and creates long-term relationships.

Each of these benefits can help you understand your brand’s market position more comprehensively, and stay relevant, competitive, and closely connected with your audience.

Data Types You Can Glean from Social Listening

Social listening yields a rich trove of data and diverse insights into various aspects of brand and market dynamics. The primary data type is customer sentiment and feedback, which reveals how customers view your brand, its products, or services. This data includes emotional reactions and opinions that can give you a detailed picture of both customer satisfaction and areas for improvement.
Another crucial data type is trend analysis, which involves identifying and understanding emerging patterns in consumer behavior, preferences, and market shifts. This analysis can help your brand stay ahead of the curve by adapting to new trends. Social listening also gathers competitor insights that offer a view into competitor strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and enable you to position your brand more effectively in the market.
Lastly, social listening can track brand health metrics, like share of voice, engagement rates, and brand mentions. These metrics can offer a quantitative assessment of your brand’s visibility, reputation, and overall health.

Social Listening Tactics for Immediate Implementation

Implementing social listening tactics can help you respond proactively to market changes, tailor your content more effectively, and build stronger relationships with your audience. Here are some key tactics that you can start executing right away:

• Keyword monitoring. Track specific brand-related keywords, hashtags, and industry terms to stay informed about relevant conversations. Doing that can help you understand how often and in what context people mention your brand, and help you understand public perception and areas for strategic focus. In 2018, Starbucks monitored keywords on Twitter and Instagram to track public response to their holiday cup designs to understand customer sentiment and enhance their holiday marketing efforts.
• Influencer collaboration. Use social listening to identify key influencers whose audience aligns with your brand’s target demographic. Collaborating with these influencers can extend your brand’s reach and enhance your brand’s credibility.
• Optimizing customer service. Monitor social media for customer complaints or queries, and respond promptly and effectively—preferably with a solution at hand. This improves customer satisfaction and loyalty, turning potential crises into opportunities for positive engagement.
• Content strategy development. Base your content strategy on insights from social listening. Getting a grasp on popular topics, concerns, and preferences helps create engaging and relevant content that resonates with your audience. For instance, Netflix often creates content and memes based on trending topics and discussions related to their shows, identified through social listening.
• Crisis alert and response. Detect negative sentiment spikes or emerging issues to manage potential crises. When you respond quickly with useful information, you can protect and even boost your brand’s reputation in challenging situations. In one classic example, KFC’s response to their chicken shortage crisis in the UK used social listening to quickly speak to customer dissatisfaction with a clever, apologetic response that turned a potential PR disaster into a brand win.

Putting social media tactics to work can make your social media strategy more responsive, relevant, and engaging. By staying on top of the conversation on your platforms, you can maintain an impactful presence for your brand.

The Role of Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools are vital for brands to navigate the complexities of online conversations and market dynamics. Each tool offers unique features that cater to different aspects of social listening. Here are some examples:

• Real-time analytics: Tools like Brandwatch can provide real-time insights into current trends and conversations that can enable you to react swiftly and stay relevant on your social media platforms.
• Comprehensive data aggregation: Hootsuite Insights is known for its extensive capability to collect data from a wide range of social platforms, which can give you a comprehensive view of your online presence and audience interactions.
• Advanced sentiment analysis: Sprout Social offers deep sentiment analysis that interprets the tone and nuances of social conversations. This can help you understand not just what your audience says, but also their underlying emotions and attitudes.
• Integrative market research: Meltwater combines social listening with broader market research to give you a holistic view that includes both social insights and traditional market data. That kind of integration can help you understand the market better and make decisions more strategically.

Each of these tools can play a crucial role in a brand’s social listening strategy, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the market and enabling informed, strategic decisions. By leveraging these tools, brands can effectively interpret the moods of their audience and market, turning insights into actionable strategy.

Integrating Social Media Automation with Social Listening

When combined with social listening, social media automation can help bring your brand’s social media strategy to the next level. Automation platforms like dlvr.it streamline content distribution across your social channels, ensuring timely, targeted, relevant, and consistent engagement with your audience. Social listening insights can inform how you create and schedule your posts so they’re relevant to current trends, audience sentiments, and emerging conversations. Automated posting ensures that your brand remains active and engaged, while social listening data can provide direction that makes each post resonate with the audience. The combination can save you time and resources, and boost the power of your campaigns to increase engagement, loyalty, and the impact of your brand presence on social.

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These developments underscored how constantly the social landscape changes, as we redefine how brands connect with their audience. Of course, understanding what may come next on a strategic level can help your brand maintain relevance and engagement with your target audience, which are key to growth. Twenty-twenty four is here, and it’s important to anticipate the changes and adapt accordingly. Here are six possibilities:

1. The Surge of AI-Driven Content Creation
Content creation driven by artificial intelligence platforms is now a norm that can transform social media marketing. AI enables social media marketers to create personalized and relevant content with unheard-of efficiency, ensuring a larger volume of messaging gets out to the target audience. While this can streamline social media content creation, the key is in how well marketers can prompt AI content-generators to deliver consistently resonant and impactful messaging that’s shaped to fit each target audience in each specific platform. The danger will lie in marketers not intervening enough editorially, which could result in too much published social media content reading in a homogenous “AI-ese” tone. While AI can be a great help in brainstorming concepts and content to be edited, it’s not necessarily a platform from which to simply copy and paste into your social media channels.

2. Increased Regulation and Compliance
Navigating new regulation and compliance measures in social media may become increasingly critical for brands. In 2023, the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into effect, imposing stricter content moderation requirements and transparency obligations on digital platforms. Also, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was amended to enhance consumer data privacy rights, which can affect how companies collect and use user data. It can be a bellwether for how other states address the issue. In 2024 data privacy regulations are expected to expand globally, similar to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will require brands to be more diligent in how they handle user data worldwide. On the artificial intelligence front, regulations will likely start targeting deepfake technology to curb the spread of AI-generated false information. Brands will have to go proactive in the face of these evolving regulations, ensuring compliance while maintaining effective and engaging social media marketing strategies. Adapting to these changes will be critical to safeguarding your brand reputation and building trust with your audiences.

3. The Rise of Niche Platforms
Along with alternative general social media channels like Bluesky and Mastodon, emerging niche platforms like Threads, WeAre8, and Supernova are becoming increasingly important in social media marketing. Threads, a new platform that emphasizes more intimate and meaningful interactions, offers a space for deeper, thread-based conversations that can let brands connect more authentically with their audience. Supernova, which empowers users to support brands and causes they care about, can let companies align their marketing efforts with social impact and resonate with socially conscious consumers. WeAre8, a platform focusing on short-form video content, taps into the growing demand for quick, engaging visual stories, perfect for brands that want to capture audience attention in creative and dynamic ways. These platforms can help you explore fresh, targeted approaches to engage with specific communities. By including these emerging platforms in your strategy, you can stay ahead of the curve, and ensure your messages resonate with evolving consumer preferences.

4. Embracing Social Commerce Evolution
2024 is set to witness a significant evolution in social commerce, a trend that seamlessly blends social media engagement with e-commerce capabilities. For example, brands ranging from Nike to home accesorizer Snowe to shoe retailer Allbirds effectively utilize Instagram’s shoppable posts to let users buy products directly from their feed, seamlessly integrating shopping with social browsing. Another example, Sephora, leverages Facebook Shops to create a virtual storefront where customers can explore and buy products without leaving the platform. This integration of e-commerce into social media provides a convenient and immersive shopping experience that encourages more spontaneous purchases directly from social interactions. This approach both simplifies buying and leverages the impulsive nature of social media, turning every post and interaction into a potential sales opportunity. Marketers need to create compelling, shoppable content that resonates with the audience’s lifestyle and preferences. They also need to use social media automation tools to schedule these posts at times that find maximum exposure with the target audience.

5. Focus on Authenticity and Transparency
In 2024, the emphasis on authenticity and transparency in social media continues to be a key trend, as evidenced by the approach taken by brands like Patagonia in 2023. This outdoor clothing company has long been recognized for its commitment to environmental activism and ethical practices. In 2023, they took this a step further by openly sharing their journey towards sustainability. Through social media, Patagonia provided insights into its supply chain, the environmental impact of its products, and its efforts to improve. This level of transparency not only bolstered their brand authenticity but also deeply resonated with their environmentally conscious audience. For other brands, this trend underscores the importance of honest communication and showing a genuine commitment to their values. By embracing transparency, brands can foster a stronger connection with their audience, leading to increased trust, loyalty, and engagement in an era where consumers value sincerity over the sales pitch.

6. More User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content will continue to wield impact going forward a powerful way to build community and authenticity. UGC refers to any content—be it text, videos, images, reviews, etc.—created by people instead than brands. Users perceive it as more genuine and relatable, often leading to higher engagement rates. Brands like GoPro have excelled in this area by encouraging their users to share their adventure experiences using GoPro cameras. This provides the brand with authentic and diverse content while it fosters a strong sense of community among its users. Brands that want to work with UGC need to create campaigns that motivate and reward users for sharing their experiences with the brand. This approach enhances content authenticity and significantly extends the reach and impact of brand messaging, as users tend to trust and value the recommendations of their peers over traditional advertising.

7. Interactive Live Streaming Expands
The explosion of interactive live streaming on social media platforms has emerged as a significant trend that offers your brand a new way to engage in real time. In the post-pandemic era, people are tuning in to live video streams regularly, interacting directly with hosts, participating in Q&A sessions, and even influencing the content as it unfolds. A prime example is the rise of live shopping events on Instagram and Facebook, where brands showcase products through live demonstrations and directly engage with prospective customers, answering questions and offering exclusive deals in real-time. Going further, brands like L’Oréal have utilized AR filters during live streams to let viewers virtually try on makeup products, significantly enhancing user engagement and personalizing the shopping experience.

Getting to More Future-Ready Social Media Strategies
Lots of these developments signal a shift towards more personalized, authentic, and interactive brand experiences. Building those experiences takes the most precious resource we’ve got—time. There’s never enough. But tools like social media automation can help increase the agility, efficiency, and time you need to leverage these developments effectively. Automation can help make your social media marketing strategy more adaptable and attuned to the evolving preferences of your target audience, and set the stage for better growth and engagement in 2024.

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Unlike its counterparts, Mastodon operates through a network of servers, each hosting distinct user communities with their own rules and cultures. This structure gives users both greater control over their experience and a sense of belonging and engagement that the other platforms lack. Mastodon’s growth will establish it as a fresh, dynamic arena for users and brands alike, and will likely reshape how we think about digital interaction and community building in social.

The Rise of Mastodon: A New Avenue for Brands

Mastodon’s ascent marks a significant shift that offers brands a new avenue to engage with audiences. Unlike traditional platforms dominated by algorithm-driven content, Mastodon can foster a more organic and community-focused environment that has both intrigued users and caught the attention of forward-thinking brands. But what makes Mastodon a viable option for your brand, especially when compared to giants like Twitter?

One key distinction is its user-controlled spaces, known as “instances”. Each instance operates independently, cultivating niche communities around specific interests or themes. This can offer your brand opportunities to engage directly with highly targeted audiences versus the broader, more generalized approach on Twitter.

The growing disillusionment users have with most social media platforms is real and based on concerns over privacy, content control, and the increasing prevalence of algorithmic biases. Brands that can leverage Mastodon’s user-centric model early can tap into a market of truly engaged and responsive users who value authenticity and community engagement over mere consumption.

Brands have shifted towards Mastodon and similar platforms not just to exploit new territory, but to align with how user expectations and values have evolved. If you play it smart, you can forge loyal connections between your brand and users who want more meaningful and transparent online interactions. Mastodon reflects the way that user trust and community engagement can drive brand growth.

Six Effective Brand Strategies on Mastodon

The Mastodon environment requires deep understanding of its community-centric dynamic that’s distinct from other social media platforms. Establishing a presence on the platform requires you to think through your strategy in a way that emphasizes real engagement over traditional advertising methods.

• Build a community-centric presence. Mastodon’s core is its close-knit communities. Your brand can build relationships within these groups by actively participating in conversations and providing value. But you need to shift from conventional marketing tactics to more authentic interactions that cultivate belonging and engage effectively with these micro-communities?
• Keep your content authentic and transparent. Content authenticity is critical on Mastodon. You need to message to prospects in a way that resonates with the platform’s ethos—think transparent, honest, and genuine. Users will be super skeptical seeing content that’s too promotional or insincere. Share stories, insights, and valuable information to help establish trust and credibility.
• Leverage niche audiences. Because Mastodon’s instance structure is based on specific interests, it offers you unique opportunities to target your social media marketing. You can find and engage with instances that align with your industry or values, try out more focused and relevant marketing tactics, and maximize your impact over time.
• Encourage participation and feedback. Content that invites user participation can be particularly effective on Mastodon. Try strategies that encourage feedback, discussion, and community involvement—it boosts engagement and also provides valuable insights into your prospects’ preferences and behaviors.
• Proffer consistent brand messaging across platforms. To adapt to Mastodon’s unique environment, it’s critical that you maintain a consistent voice and messaging across all platforms. That consistency will help reinforce your brand’s identity and ensure a cohesive user experience.
• Use social media tools on Mastodon. Incorporating social media tools, including automation, can enhance your brand’s presence on Mastodon. The right tools can help you schedule posts, analyze engagement with your content, and manage your interactions efficiently. The key is to balance automation with personalization to maintain the authentic feel that’s vital on Mastodon.

Your successful brand strategy on Mastodon will rely on how well you understand and respect the platform’s community-driven nature. By focusing on authenticity, targeted engagement, and thoughtful use of relevant tools, your brand can engage effectively in this unique social space.

Maximizing Mastodon with Social Media Automation

When you integrate social media automation into your Mastodon strategy, you can afford yourself a powerful way to enhance your brand’s presence. A tool like dlvr.it can enable you to streamline the way you distribute your content and ensure that your messaging reaches the right audience at the right time. By scheduling posts in advance, your brand can maintain a consistent presence on Mastodon that can help build and sustain solid engagement going forward. Automating the initial sharing of content can free up time for you to engage personally in conversations and community interactions on the platform as well. This approach ensures that you benefit from the efficiency and maintain the authentic, user-focused engagement that’s central to Mastodon’s appeal.

The Bottom Line

Mastodon represents a significant shift in social media and offers new opportunities for your brand to connect more meaningfully with your target audiences. It challenges marketers to think creatively, emphasizing the value of community, authenticity, and direct engagement. As social continues to evolve, it’s not simply about keeping up with trends—it’s about recognizing and adapting to the changing preferences of users. Mastodon offers you fertile ground to build lasting relationships with a loyal community around their message. Learn how dlvr.it posting and scheduling can get you started with your brand’s presence on Mastodon.

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Start With What You’ve Got: Instagram and Tik Tok In-App Editors

Your best bet might reside in your Instagram and Tik Tok accounts themselves. The in-app editors of Instagram and TikTok can be powerful tools as you build your brand. Instagram’s in-app editor offers a convenient array of intuitive tools right where you need them, enabling you to create and publish content swiftly. It’s got features like a vast audio library, diverse stickers, and VR filters, so it’s designed for speed and ease, which lets you jump on trending topics that can engage your audience.

TikTok’s editor is a pretty creative resource as well. Its user-friendly interface helps you simplify your video content creation process, giving you time to potentially post multiple times a day. With unique effects, easy-to-add soundtracks, and a range of filters, TikTok’s editor enables you to craft videos that resonate with your audience.

Both editors streamline your process and help ensure that your videos align with the latest social media trends, which can make them indispensable to your digital marketing arsenal.

Four Free Video Editing Apps for Social Media

1. Canva sports a versatile, user-friendly video editing app as part of its web-based graphic design toolkit, with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it accessible to users of all skill levels.
Benefits:

• Wide range of customizable templates for social media
• Intuitive design tools for adding text, animations, and branding elements
• Huge library of free images, videos, and music tracks
• Easy sharing and downloading options for various social media platforms

2. InShot is a popular downloadable choice for quick and effective video editing. It offers a suite of tools that are designed for social media content, specifically Instagram and TikTok. InShot also features a Pro Unlimited subscription tier for access to premium editing features
Benefits::

• User-friendly interface for trimming, splitting, and merging videos
• Rich collection of filters, music, and sound effects
• Speed control for creating dynamic video effects
• Aspect ratio adjustments suitable for different social media platforms

3. CapCut stands out for its comprehensive editing features that let you create professional-looking videos quickly. The downloadable app also features a text-to-speech function that’s compatible with nearly 93 languages, along with an encrypted secure editing environment.
Benefits::

• Advanced editing options like frame-by-frame trimming and merging
• Extensive library of music and sound effects
• High-quality filters and effects, including Chroma Key
• Easy export and sharing options for social media

4. Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) offers quick and efficient video editing solutions that help you create impactful social media content on the go.
Benefits::

• Streamlined interface for fast and easy video editing
• Thousands of professional-looking templates and design assets
• Integration with other Adobe products for enhanced flexibility
• High-quality export options for clear and crisp video output—plus instant GIFs

Four Paid Video Editing Apps for Enhanced Branding

1. Adobe Premiere Rush offers a comprehensive set of editing tools, ideal for marketers seeking advanced control and creative flexibility. Its cross-device functionality can help make your workflow more efficient.
Benefits::

• Multi-track timeline for complex editing projects
• Built-in camera functionality for high-quality video capture
• Extensive collection of motion graphics templates
• Seamless integration with Adobe Creative Cloud services

2. KineMaster is a robust app designed for detailed and professional-grade video editing, offering a wide range of advanced features like color grading, blending modes, animation, and more.
Benefits::

• Multi-layer editing for videos, images, stickers, text, and handwriting
• Instant preview feature for on-the-fly adjustments
• Voice recording and background music options
• Keyframe animation tool for adding motion to layers

3. Filmora is known for its intuitive interface and powerful editing capabilities, making it suitable whether you’re a beginner editor or an expert cutter. It renders video extremely quickly, and sports a very competitive subscription rate.
Benefits:

• Advanced video effects, including filters, overlays, and transitions
• Audio separation and noise removal tools
• 4K support for high-resolution video editing
• Dual timeline for easy navigation and editing

4. Pinnacle Studio is for you if you want a set of precision and professional-level editing tools, with sophisticated features for high-quality video production.
Benefits:

• Precise frame-by-frame editing with a timeline-based interface
• 360-degree video editing capabilities.
• Wide range of effects, transitions, and templates
• Multi-camera editing for combining footage from different sources

How Social Media Automation Can Be Part of the Mix

Integrating video editing with social media automation represents a strategic approach to amplify your brand. The synergy between refined video content and automated social media scheduling can help you take your online presence to the next level. When you use automation to schedule and distribute your video content, it ensures consistent engagement with your brand and helps extend your reach to your target audience. Automation platforms like dlvr.it let you schedule posts at optimal times to help you maximize your brand’s visibility. This combination of simple video editing and automated posting both streamlines your content creation process, and leverages analytics to understand your audience’s preferences, which can help you produce more targeted and effective campaigns. Ultimately, this integration is key to building a strong digital footprint, driving engagement, and fostering brand loyalty.

The Bottom Line

Establishing a good, quick video editing workflow can be essential to executing on your video marketing strategy. When combined with the efficiency of social media automation well-crafted videos represent a formidable tool for boosting your brand presence and engagement.. Using an agile video editing app can help you produce content that resonates with your audience, tells your brand’s story effectively, and stands out in the crowded social media space. When you add strategic scheduling and automation to the mix, you ensure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time, making video editing an indispensable part of your social media marketing strategy. Learn how dlvr.it can help you boost your video strategy on your social media platforms.

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About the Bluesky Platform

Bluesky was started by Twitter’s former founder Jack Dorsey, and it includes many similar functions. It has one of the smaller user bases among competing platforms because it’s still pretty new. But when Elon Musk hinted that Twitter was possibly going to start charging its users, Bluesky daily visitors spiked significantly, and now has over 2 million users, with about the same number on the waiting list.

Bluesky represents a significant shift in the social media landscape. It stands out from mainstream social networks as a decentralized, currently invite-only platform. (You likely know someone who has a spare invitation for you–just put out a call asking for one on any of your social platforms.) Its foundation is the AT Protocol, an open-source framework that promotes transparency and user autonomy. Unlike centralized platforms where decisions and data control are in the hands of a few, Bluesky lets users retain control over their content and interactions. This decentralization means users can experience a more personalized and less algorithm-driven social media environment.

The platform’s structure also fosters a sense of community and individuality. Users can create unique identifiers, like custom domain-based usernames, a feature that offers personal branding opportunities. Bluesky’s user interface, which is reminiscent of Twitter, offers familiarity while introducing new elements like enhanced content moderation tools and account portability. This feature lets you transfer your profiles and followers to other platforms seamlessly, reducing the risk of platform lock-in and giving you unprecedented control over your digital presence.

Although the platform is still invite-only as of this writing, Bluesky has just announced that it’s set to add a public web interface, which means users will be able to view posts without being logged in on an account. According to Mashable, will soon add features like push notifications for your phone, user lists, suggested follows, email 24A verification, more thread sorting preferences, improved loading time, and accessibility upgrades including improved alt text, screen flashing, and component labels.

Bluesky’s approach to social networking isn’t just about connecting people—it’s about redefining the power dynamics of social media. By prioritizing user control and transparency, Bluesky offers a fresh perspective on how social networks can operate, making it an intriguing option for brands that want to diversify their social media strategy.

Leveraging Bluesky for Brand Strategy

Incorporating Bluesky into your digital strategy can offer you a unique opportunity to engage with audiences in new and impactful ways. The platform’s decentralized nature and user-centric features provide a fresh canvas for brands to craft their narratives and connect with their audience.

• The importance of early adoption. Being an early adopter of emerging platforms like Bluesky can be a strategic move for your brand. It lets you establish a presence before the platform becomes saturated, making it easier to stand out and capture the attention of early users, who are often more engaged and influential. You can leverage this early presence to build a loyal follower base, setting the stage for long-term engagement and brand loyalty.
• Engaging with niche communities. Bluesky’s structure allows the formation of niche communities into which you can tap to try various content formats and engage with highly targeted audiences. By participating in relevant conversations and sharing content that resonates with these groups, you can build credibility and foster a sense of community around your products or services.
• Thought leadership and content sharing. Bluesky’s emphasis on user-generated content and open communication channels makes it ideal for establishing thought leadership. You can share insightful content, industry trends, and thought-provoking ideas to position yourself as an authority in your field. This can both enhance your brand credibility and encourage user interaction and content sharing, which can subsequently extend the reach of your brand.
• Connecting with media and influencers. Bluesky’s growing user base includes media personalities and influencers. You can leverage these connections for collaborative opportunities like sponsored content or joint campaigns. These collaborations can increase your brand’s visibility and give you access to new audiences.

Using Bluesky strategically can help you create a more personalized and engaging online presence. Features like decentralized control and custom domain usernames let you offer innovative ways to showcase your brand’s identity and key values. As Bluesky grows, its value as a brand strategy tool also grows, making it a worthwhile addition to any brand’s social media toolkit.

Integrating dlvr.it with Bluesky for Enhanced Brand Presence

dlvr.it’s integration with Bluesky presents a powerful combination for optimizing your social media strategy. dlvr.it’s efficiency in automating social media posts complements Bluesky’s unique platform features, creating a synergy that can significantly enhance your online presence.

• • Automating Social Posting: The primary advantage of using dlvr.it with Bluesky is the automation of social media content. Automation enables you to schedule your posts in advance, ensuring your consistent and timely presence on the platform and maintaining regular engagement with your audiences. dlvr.it’s social media scheduling capabilities ensure that you can keep your followers updated without the need for constant manual intervention. This can free up valuable time for you to focus on other aspects of your digital strategy.
  • Benefits of Automation: Lots of benefits come from integrating dlvr.it for automated posting on Bluesky. Firstly, it ensures that your brand voice and messaging remain consistent. You can plan scheduled posts in line with your content calendar, ensuring that messaging is coherent and aligned with overall marketing objectives. Secondly, it enables you to manage your time more effectively. You can create and schedule content batches, optimizing your workflow and ensuring a steady stream of content into your Bluesky account.
  • Analyzing and Refining Strategies: Another significant advantage of using dlvr.it with Bluesky is that you’re able to analyze the performance of your posts. dlvr.it gives you insights into how your content is performing, letting you understand what resonates with your audience. This data is invaluable for refining your content strategy and making informed decisions about future posts.

• Enhancing Engagement and Reach: Automated posting can also help you enhance engagement. By scheduling posts for optimal times, you can ensure maximum visibility and engagement. dlvr.it analytics can help identify the best times to post, based on when audiences are most active, leading to increased reach and engagement.

The Bottom Line

dlvr.it’s integration with Bluesky can give you a distinct strategic advantage in the marketplace. It combines the innovative features of Bluesky with the efficiency and analytical prowess of dlvr.it to create a potent tool that lets you extend your brand presence, boost engagement, and ultimately, enable success for your social media campaigns. Learn how dlvr.it posting and scheduling can get you started with your brand’s presence on Bluesky.

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Understanding the Influencer: Pre-Internet vs. Present

Long before social media, influencers shaped culture, fashion, and purchasing decisions. These early influencers—who included celebrities, authors, and other public figures—wielded their influence through television, radio, literature, and live performances. Marilyn Monroe, for instance, became an iconic figure in the world of fashion and cinema, influencing trends and products associated with her image. Similarly, renowned authors like Ernest Hemingway influenced readers not just with their literary works, but also their personal lifestyles and choices.

Since then, the definition of an influencer has truly expanded. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have borne new types of influencers who curate their content niches and engage directly with their followers. These influencers—like fitness enthusiast Kayla Itsines or gamer PewDiePie—don’t just entertain us. They’re pivotal in influencing the purchasing decisions of their millions of loyal followers which, of course, makes them valuable assets for brands.

The Mechanics of Influencer Partnerships

Influencer partnerships aren’t simply transactional. They are strategic collaborations that merge your brand objectives with an influencer’s voice and audience. When done right, these partnerships can create a marketing story that reaches audiences in authentic and organic ways.

Of course, these collaborations are also mutually beneficial. Brands get to access a dedicated audience that trusts the influencer’s recommendations, while influencers get compensation, products, or unique experiences to share with their followers. Consider the partnership between athletic wear brand Gymshark and fitness influencers like bodybuilder Ethan Payne and trainer Nikki Blackketter. Instead of just sending products for promotion, Gymshark often involves influencers in product design or event hosting, ensuring both parties are deeply invested in the collaboration’s success.

Another striking example is the Glam Bag X collaboration between beauty brand IPSY and beauty influencer and entrepreneur Huda Kattan of Huda Beauty. This partnership extended beyond simple product promotions. It was about sharing makeup techniques, tutorials, and insights that benefitted IPSY’s audience and aligned perfectly with Kattan’s expertise.

Watch brand Daniel Wellington also notably maximized influencer partnerships by collaborating with a wide range of influencers with smaller audiences. Their strategy was less about product placement than integrating the watch into influencers’ daily lifestyles, making it a must-have accessory. Such collaborations emphasize authenticity, with influencers showcasing the brand organically, making it appealing to their audiences.

But it can be a real challenge to ensure that your influencer partnership stands out in the ocean of social media content. That’s where social media automation tools can come into play. By scheduling posts, automating engagement, and analyzing performance metrics, you can use these tools to help maximize the visibility and impact of the content you generate with these partnerships. For instance, when you partner with an influencer for a product launch, you can use an automation tool to ensure that the right messaging gets posted at peak times across different platforms to reach your maximum audience.

Engagement is key to any successful influencer partnership. Your brand needs to choose influencers whose values align with yours. An organic fit ensures that your promotional content doesn’t feel forced, and resonates more effectively with your audience. It’s not just about the number of followers an influencer has, but the quality of engagement they foster.

Influencer partnerships need to meld strategy and authenticity in effective ways. Brands and influencers need to work in tandem, leveraging each other’s strengths to create compelling content that captures and converts their shared audience.

Tactics to Forge Successful Influencer Partnerships

To create an effective influencer partnership for your brand, you need to do more than just find that popular face or personality on social media. You need to create strategic alignment, communicate effectively, and evaluate your strategy constantly. Here are some key tactics that brands can adopt to ensure their influencer collaborations are both authentic and impactful:

• Identify the right fit for your brand. Regardless of their follower count, not all influencers in your realm will be the right fit for your brand. You need to look beyond numbers and assess an influencer’s audience demographics, engagement quality, and content style before getting your brand involved.
• Communicate and negotiate effectively. True partnerships require open communication channels. Discuss expectations, compensation, and deliverables before formalizing any agreement with your influencer. You might consider drafting a clear influencer agreement that outlines all terms, from posting frequency to usage rights.
• Set clear KPIs and monitor your results. As with any campaign, you should establish specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like engagement rates, conversion rates, or brand mentions to evaluate your influencer campaign’s success. Social media automation tools offer invaluable analytics for tracking these metrics.
• Leverage social media automation for consistent engagement. Social media automation enables you to post your influencer’s content across all of your platforms at peak engagement times. Automation can also help you repost this content across various brand-owned platforms, amplifying its reach.
• Collaborate to create your content—and post consistently. Brands that hand a script to influencers to create content miss the point. Whether it’s a behind-the-scenes look or an interactive Q&A session, your audience wants the real thing. Working with influencers to truly co-create content ensures that it reflects their unique voice and connects with their audience. And working with a tool that automates social media scheduling ensures that posts reach that audience during peak times.
• Keep it compliant and authentic. With regulations around sponsored content becoming stringent, brands and influencers need to be transparent about their partnerships. Using tags like #sponsored or #ad both keeps collaborations compliant and fosters trust with the audience. Genuine influencer endorsements always resonate better than forced promotions.

By adopting sensible tactics and emphasizing genuine relationships over mere transactions, you can leverage influencer marketing to create meaningful connections with your target audience.

The Future of Influencer Partnerships

Influencer partnerships have become a mainstay in brand strategies due to the authentic way they connect brands and consumers. These partnerships will continue to evolve and adapt to new platforms, technologies, and audience preferences. Micro- and nano-influencers who have smaller followings but deeper engagements indicate a shift towards quality over quantity. Advancements in analytics and AI will give brands insights that can help them tailor collaborations more effectively. But successful influencer partnerships will always hinge on authenticity. True collaborations in this realm are less about reach than relevance, and aim to forge genuine connections that benefit brands, influencers, and audiences alike. Those connections also require consistent content posting across all your social media platforms. Using dlvr.it to automate your  posting as part of your influencer partnership strategy can help you build your audience and maximize your reach. Learn how dlvr can free you from posting tasks and keep you focused on the quality of your social media content.

The post Influencer Partnerships: Collaborating for Social Media Success appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

Overview: What CRM Tools Do

Customer Relationship Management focuses strategically on managing your customer interactions. CRM tools have been developed to compile information from channels that include your website, emails, phone calls, live chats, and social media. The goal is to centralize customer data and streamline sales, marketing, and customer service processes. When paired with social media scheduling tools, CRM lets you harness this information to post social media content when your audience is most active and receptive.

The sheer power and versatility of CRM tools make them far more than just a storage space for contact details. These systems can analyze customer interactions in ways that help you understand your audience’s behavior, preferences, and needs. For example, a CRM can tell you which customers interacted with one of your social media posts, bought one of your offerings, or opened one of your promotional emails. This kind of data lets you view your customer base holistically, make better-informed marketing decisions, and adjust your online strategy. But how can these tools optimize your customers’ experience and drive engagement when they’re integrated into your social media?

The Intersection of CRM and Social Media

Social media has made customer interactions dynamic in the way it enables real-time engagement and feedback. But the huge volume of interactions can make it challenging for you to track every comment, like, or share. CRM tools used in conjunction with social media automation can ensure effective responses in your social media that contain content tailored to individual customer preferences.

CRM tools can centralize social media interactions so that they give you a comprehensive view of your customers’ activity. Whether a customer tweets about your product or comments on an Instagram post, CRM tools in tandem with automation systems can schedule timely follow-up content or promotions, enhancing engagement and potential conversions.

CRM tools can also enable you to segment your audience. Instead of broadcasting generic messaging to all your followers, you can use automation to target messaging based on customers’ social media behavior. For example, if a group of customers consistently engages with posts about a new feature, you can schedule specific promotions or feature-related content to post automatically during their peak online hours.

Lastly, integrating CRM tools with social media can help boost your operational efficiency. Automatic alerts combined with scheduled responses ensure you’re always prompt, relevant, and on-point with your engagements. CRM system integration with social media lets you foster better relationships, drive more meaningful engagements, and enhance your online strategy.

Practical Applications: Examples of CRM and Automation in Social Media Strategy

Incorporating CRM tools in tandem with automated posting capacity into your social media strategy can optimize your efforts in ways you might not have considered. The insights and automation they afford can help you tap the full potential of your platforms. Here are a few applications that highlight the CRM-social media synergy:

• • Targeted Ad Campaigns: Think about being able to know which customers showed interest in a product on your website, then showcasing a related ad to them on their Facebook feed. You can combine CRM data insights with scheduled ads for laser-focused campaigns. If a customer views a product on your website, you can automate a related ad on their social media during their peak activity times.
  • Improved Customer Support: A complaint on Twitter can trigger an automated yet personalized response based on the CRM’s stored customer data, ensuring immediacy without losing the personal touch.
  • Effective Content Distribution: Use the interactions and preferences stored in the CRM to determine what content resonates, then lean on automation tools to schedule and distribute this content at optimal times.
  • Real-time Feedback Loop: During your product launches or live sessions, you can use CRM data to gauge who’s most engaged and automate tailored follow-up content or special offers to this segment.
  • Loyalty Programs and Campaigns: You can use CRM to identify your most engaged social media followers, and then use automation tools to schedule loyalty rewards or exclusive content for them, fostering goodwill and encouraging further engagement.

In short, CRM integration into your social media strategy can help you optimize your online presence, and ensure that each post, ad, or interaction is data-driven, personalized, and effective.

Enhancing Your Strategy: Tips for Using CRM Along With Automation on Social Media

Using CRM tools alongside automation solutions in your social media strategy is about much more than collecting data and posting effectively. It’s about leveraging the data and post scheduling capacity to foster genuine, impactful connections with your audience. If you want to level up your social media game, here are some practical tips to integrate CRM and automation tools effectively:

• • • Choose the right CRM and automation tools for your needs. With lots of available options for these solution types, the challenge is to select the ones that align with your business goals and the platforms you use. Look for features that use automated social listening or sentiment analysis.
    • Prioritize data privacy and security. As you collect and analyze customer data, ensuring their privacy becomes your primary mandate. Make sure your chosen CRM tool complies with data protection regulations, and that it communicates transparently with customers about how their data is used.
    • Maintain training. Both CRM methodology and automation tools keep changing and adding functionality. Regular training sessions can help your team stay updated on the latest features, and use the tool’s full potential.
    • Monitor and adjust your strategies regularly. One-size-fits-all approaches don’t work in social media. Use the insights from your CRM tool to continuously analyze the performance of your posts, campaigns, and ads. Regularly refine your automated posting strategies based on this feedback.
    • Encourage team collaboration. A well-integrated CRM system can serve as a central hub for marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams. When these teams collaborate, everyone can access the insights and contribute to the overarching social media strategy.
    • Segment your audience thoughtfully. As noted previously, you can use the rich data that CRM provides to segment your audience based not just on demographics but also on behaviors, preferences, and past interactions. This lets you create hyper-personalized content and campaigns fueled by posting automation and strategic post scheduling.
    • Set clear goals and key performance indicators. Before diving into CRM-driven social media strategies, outline clear objectives. Whether it’s increasing engagement rates, boosting conversions, or enhancing customer loyalty, having defined KPIs will guide your efforts and provide a metric for success.

The key factor here is to deploy the tools and strategies in the CRM/social media realm that you find the most suitable to connect and serve your customers better. With the right approach and a commitment to genuine engagement, incorporating CRM tools into your social media strategy can be a game-changer.

The bottom line

With CRM tools and social media automation working hand-in-hand, businesses can navigate the complex waters of online interactions with precision and relevance. Beyond mere data collection, this union empowers businesses to craft human-centric, timely, and impactful engagements. It’s not just about making noise online, but about ensuring every automated post, informed by CRM insights, resonates and fosters genuine connections.

Marrying CRM capabilities with the vast reach and dynamic nature of social media automation can foster customer relationships that don’t just drive business growth but also enrich the customer experience, making every like, share, comment, and tweet count. This approach doesn’t just drive growth—it’s where the potential lies to transform your social media marketing strategy and the very essence of your customer relationships. Using dlvr.it to automate your social content management and posting in conjunction with your CRM solution can help you build consistent engagement with minimal hassle. Learn how dlvr.it can work with your CRM on your social platforms.

The post Using CRM Tools to Help Optimize Customer Relationships on Social Media appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

A well-defined social media strategy can be integral to your company’s growth. It’s simply not enough to just be present on the right social media platforms. You also need to determine how effectively you’re reaching your goals. That’s where KPIs come into play.

As social media marketing evolves, automation plays a pivotal role. How can automated social media posting and scheduling transform the way you manage and optimize your social media efforts? How can social media automation help you get to your KPIs with efficiency and precision?

Let’s find out, starting with…

A List of Social Media Strategy KPIs

To successfully gauge the effectiveness of your social media strategy, it’s essential to have a comprehensive set of KPIs that align with your specific goals. Here’s a list of social media KPIs to consider when measuring your strategic performance:

1. Reach: The number of unique users who have seen your content.
2. Engagement: The total interactions (likes, comments, shares) your content receives.
3. Comments: The number of user-generated comments on your posts.
4. Clicks: The number of clicks on links or calls to action within your content.
5. Shares: The number of times your content is shared with others.
6. Mentions: How often people mention your brand or content.
7. Applause Rate: The percentage of people who engage with your content by liking or applauding it.
8. Average Engagement Rate: The average percentage of engagement across your posts.
9. Amplification Rate: The rate at which your content is shared compared to your overall reach.
10. Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who take a desired action, such as signing up or making a purchase.
11. Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click on a link in your content.
12. Bounce Rate: The rate at which users leave your website after viewing only one page.
13. Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost incurred per click on your ads or promoted content.
14. Cost Per Mille (CPM): The cost of 1,000 impressions of your ads.
15. Revenue: The direct income generated from your social media efforts.
16. Customer Testimonials: The number of positive reviews or testimonials received.
17. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): User satisfaction scores based on surveys.
18. Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer loyalty and advocacy.
19. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total value a customer brings to your business over their lifetime.

By tracking and analyzing these social media KPIs, you can gain a holistic understanding of your social media strategy’s impact on your business objectives. Tailor your KPI selection to align with your specific goals, ensuring that your social media efforts are both measurable and tailored to your audience’s needs. In the next section, we will explore how automated social media posting and scheduling can enhance your ability to achieve these KPIs efficiently and effectively.

Defining Your Social Media Strategy KPIs

When you recognize what KPIs mean to your social media strategy, the next crucial step is to define them. It’s not enough to know vaguely what success means in the social media sphere—it pays to be precise and strategic in setting your goals.

Align your KPIs with your business objectives.

What are you trying to achieve with your social media efforts? Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales, your KPIs should relate directly to these goals. For instance, if your objective is to enhance brand visibility, your KPI might focus on reach or impressions.

Understand your audience.

Consider your target audience and what matters to them. Your social media KPIs should reflect the metrics that resonate most with your followers. For instance, if you cater to a highly engaged audience, tracking metrics like likes, shares, and comments might be more meaningful than just looking at website traffic.

Make it specific and measurable.

Ensure that the criteria you use to define KPIs are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Instead of setting a vague goal like “increase engagement,” make it specific: “Increase our rate of engagement with posts by 20% within the next quarter.”

Consider platform differences.

Different social media platforms may require different KPIs. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn have distinct user behaviors and strengths. Tailor your KPIs to the platform on which you’re focusing, and keep in mind the unique ways that each of them operates.

When you define your social media KPIs precisely and relevantly, you set up a strategy that’s both goal-oriented and adaptable to the evolving dynamics of social media marketing. Once you delve more deeply into setting SMART KPIs and name them effectively, you can start measuring your progress towards achieving them.

Setting SMART KPIs

Setting KPIs in social media strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. To ensure your KPIs are effective and actionable, make them adhere to the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

1. Specific

Your KPIs should be clear and leave no room for ambiguity. Instead of a vague goal like “increase engagement,” specify precisely what you want to accomplish. For instance, “Increase Instagram post likes by 20% in the next quarter” is specific. This clarity guides your efforts and clarifies expectations.

2. Measurable

To gauge progress and success, your must be able to quantify your KPIs. You should be able to track and measure them easily. For example, “Get 5,000 website visits from Facebook per month” is measurable, and allows you to monitor your performance precisely.

3. Achievable

It’s good to aim high, but when you set unattainable KPIs, you can end up frustrated and demotivated. Assess the feasibility of your goals based on available resources, past performance, and industry benchmarks. Ensure that your team can realistically meet these targets.

4. Relevant

Each KPI should directly relate to your social media strategy and business objectives. Avoid setting KPIs simply because they seem trendy or are easy to measure. They should have a meaningful impact on your overall goals. If increasing website traffic isn’t relevant to your current objectives, focus on KPIs that are.

5. Time-bound

Setting a timeframe creates urgency and accountability. Define when you intend to achieve your KPIs. For example, “Reach 10,000 Twitter followers within six months” sets a clear deadline for your goal.

By adhering to the SMART criteria, you don’t just ensure that your KPIs are well-defined—you also increase the likelihood of success. You can make SMART KPIs the basis on which you can build your social media strategy. The next step is to designate and share your KPIs effectively, so that your team can align with your objectives and realize the path to success.

Naming and Sharing Your KPIs

After you define your SMART KPIs for your social media strategy, you need to give them clear and actionable names, and then communicate them to your social media team and stakeholders.

Clear and Actionable Names

The names of your KPIs should be self-explanatory and easy to understand. It’s best to explain jargon and acronyms thoroughly before using them to avoid confusing team members who aren’t intimately familiar with your strategy. This clarity ensures that everyone knows precisely what each KPI represents.

Link to Strategy Objectives

When naming your KPIs, clarify explicitly how each connects to your overarching social media strategy and business objectives. Doing this can reinforce that each KPI has a purpose and contributes to the bigger picture. For instance, if your strategy aims to boost brand awareness, you might label a KPI “brand impressions.”

Document and Share

After you name your KPIs, document them clearly and make the doc accessible. Create a KPI guide as a team reference point that outlines each KPI, its definition, how it’s measured, and why it’s essential.

Communication and Training

Make sure that your social media team fully understands what each KPI is about and how their work contributes to hitting these metrics. Regular training and communication sessions can help your team members grasp the importance of their roles in reaching these goals.

Transparency and Accountability

Make your KPIs visible and accessible to all relevant team members. Use dashboards and reporting tools to track progress in real time. Transparency fosters a sense of accountability and encourages team members to take ownership of their tasks.

When you name your KPIs clearly and share them effectively, you create a common language within your team and ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding your social media strategy objectives. These practices also enable the practical aspects of tracking and analyzing your KPIs, so that you can make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategy for success.

Tracking Social Media KPIs

Tracking your social media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is where the rubber meets the road regarding how effective your social media strategy is. Tracking is where data-driven decisions come to life, and where you can continually refine your approach for optimal results.

Data Analytics Tools

To track your social media KPIs effectively, it pays to invest in solutions that include data analytics tools. These tools offer insights into specific metrics like engagement, reach, and click-through rates. Also, third-party analytics tools can provide a more comprehensive view across multiple platforms and campaigns.

Real-Time Monitoring

You can set up alerts and notifications to instantly inform you of significant shifts in your social media KPIs. This lets you respond promptly to positive developments and address issues before they escalate.

Regular Reporting

Develop a routine for reporting on your social media KPIs. Create weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports that highlight trends, successes, and areas that require attention. Regular reporting keeps all stakeholders informed and can inform your decision-making.
[CAPTION Regular reporting keeps all stakeholders informed and can inform your decision-making.]

Benchmarking

You can compare your social media KPIs against industry benchmarks and your own historical data. Benchmarking helps you understand where you stand relative to competitors, and whether your performance is improving over time.

Segmentation

You can analyze your social media KPIs by segmenting your data. For example, you can scrutinize how different types of content, posting times, or audience demographics impact your KPIs. Doing this can unveil valuable insights for refining your strategy.

A/B Testing

Testing can be vital to optimizing your social media strategy. Conduct A/B tests to assess how variations in your content, messaging, or posting schedules affect your KPIs. This kind of approach lets you fine-tune your strategy based on what resonates most with your audience.

Data Integrity

Ensure the accuracy and integrity of your data. Audit your tracking methods and data sources regularly to identify and rectify any discrepancies. Reliable data is essential for making informed decisions.

Tracking your social media KPIs can help you adapt and optimize your strategy in real time. The insights you gather through tracking let you make data-driven decisions, refine your social media content and engagement strategies, and ultimately drive better outcomes for your social media efforts. Once that happens, you can analyze these tracked KPIs, and convert that raw data into actionable insights.

Analyzing Your KPIs

It’s essential to track your social media KPIs, but the true value lies in how you analyze the resulting data. Effective analysis can help transform your raw numbers into actionable insights that drive your social media strategy forward. Here’s how to dig deep into your KPIs and extract meaningful information:

Identify Trends

Start by identifying trends within your KPI data. Look for patterns that emerge over time. For example, you might notice that engagement rates spike during specific days of the week, or that certain types of content consistently outperform others. These trends can inform your content strategy and posting schedule.

Analyze Variances

Pay attention to variances from your established benchmarks and goals. If a specific KPI falls short of expectations, investigate the reasons behind it—and celebrate and replicate strategies that lead to KPIs surpassing targets.

Segment Your Audience

Segmentation is a powerful way to analyze your social media KPIs. Break down your audience into different categories based on demographics, behavior, or other relevant factors. When you analyze how different segments interact with your content, you can find out what resonates with each group.

Attribution Modeling

It pays to understand the customer journey and how different touchpoints contribute to your KPIs. Attribution modeling for social media KPIs can help you allocate credit to specific marketing efforts, and optimize your resources for maximum impact.

Competitor Analysis

Put your social media KPIs up against your competitors. Analyzing their performance can reveal gaps in your strategy or opportunities to improve. Learn from their successes and challenges to refine your approach.

Iterative Improvement

You can use your KPI analysis to experiment with changes to your social media strategy based on the insights you gain. It’s an ideal way to continuously refine your content, posting schedule, and engagement tactics to align with what your data shows is effective.

Actionable Insights

Ultimately, the goal of analyzing your social media KPIs is to get actionable insights. How can your data help guide your next steps? Whether it’s refining your content strategy, adjusting your targeting, or reallocating your resources, your analysis should inform concrete actions.

Analyzing your KPI data lets you fine-tune your social media strategy to get better results. These insights help inform your decisions, adapt to changing trends, and ultimately drive greater success in reaching your social media goals.

Automating Social Media Content to Achieve Your KPIs

Consistency and timing are key to achieving your social media KPIs. That’s where automated social media content posting and scheduling become invaluable.

Efficient Content Distribution

Automation tools let you plan and schedule your social media posts in advance, ensuring a consistent flow of content to your audience. This consistency is critical for KPIs like engagement and reach, as it keeps your audience engaged and informed.

Optimal Timing

Different social media platforms have peak times when your audience is most active. Automation tools enable you to schedule posts for these optimal time slots, increasing the chances of your content reaching a larger audience and boosting engagement.

Content Variety

To meet diverse KPIs like engagement, click-through rates, and conversions, you need a mix of content types. Automation enables you to plan and diversify your content strategy, incorporating videos, images, articles, and interactive posts strategically.

Data-Driven Decisions

As noted above, most automation tools provide analytics features that let you track various performance metrics for your posts and KPIs in real-time. This data empowers you to make informed adjustments to your strategy, refining your approach to better align with your goals.

Focus on Strategy

By automating your routine posting tasks, you free up valuable time for your social media team to concentrate on strategic activities, such as analyzing data, brainstorming creative content ideas, and engaging with your audience.

Automated social media posting and scheduling tools can serve as force-multipliers for achieving your KPIs. They can streamline your workflow, enhance your strategic capabilities, and ensure that your social media strategy is both efficient and effective.

The bottom line

As social media marketing continues to evolve, your success will hinge on your ability to define, track, and optimize KPIs that align with your business goals. The process is ongoing as you continuously adapt, learn from your data, and refine your approach to meet the constant challenges of refining your social media strategy. With the right KPIs and a data-informed decisions, you can achieve significant results in your social media marketing. Using dlvr.it to automate your social content management and posting capabilities can help you build consistent engagement with minimal hassle. Learn how dlvr.it can help you create engagement consistently on your social platforms.

The post How to Set and Track KPIs for Your Social Media Management Strategy appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

What is a brand community?

A brand community is a cohesive group of individuals who resonate with a brand, and can be characterized by shared values, rituals, traditions, and a mutual sense of responsibility. In essence, a brand community is the nexus of a brand’s loyal customer base. It can range from a Facebook group, to an interactive segment on the brand’s website, to an enticing rewards or loyalty program that facilitates customer interaction. Today’s leading brands leverage their dedicated brand communities to enhance loyalty, engagement, and innovation.

Although these communities were initially offline and established through in-person gatherings or word-of-mouth, the social media age has transitioned many brand communities online. Now, they manifest in various forms, from fan pages to group chats to comment sections on prominent social media posts.

These communities offer a space for customers to express their genuine opinions about the brand or its offerings. They can bond over shared interests, exchange brand anecdotes, provide insights, or admire the newest product releases. While communities do naturally evolve around their shared interests, brands themselves have taken an active role in fostering them, as seen by initiatives like community events, loyalty schemes, and reward systems, to name a few.

The power of brand communities

Brand communities enable brands to engage deeply with their most devoted customers, bolstering customer retention but also cultivating brand ambassadors. By establishing a brand community and fostering connections with these customers, brands can further incentivize brand promotion. This could range from simple gestures like resharing their brand-tagged social media posts, to intricate loyalty programs offering rewards for various engagements.

For many reputable brands, an inherent community already thrives. The challenge lies in locating and nurturing connections with these ardent followers. Social media platforms often serve as an ideal starting point, enabling brands to set up a space for interaction.

For consumers, brand communities provide a place for people with shared interests to exchange insights and maximize their product experience. Also, these communities enhance the allure of membership with enticing incentives, such as rewards, exclusive access, or special events.

Brands reap a ton of benefits, as seen by studies that note that 8 in 10 consumers say that being part of an online brand community makes them more likely to purchase new products or services from that brand. Brand communities also help:

• Amplify brand visibility
• Boost both online and offline sales
• Increase online engagement (including website traffic, as noted by 80% of marketers)
• Offer up customer insights
• Reinforce brand authority to a diverse customer base
• Form brand values, especially for emerging brands

Brand communities let brands connect with their clientele, which serves to strengthen existing customer relationships, elevate the brand’s stature, broaden its reach, and solidify its market credibility.

Building your brand community on social media

Your brand community can offer lots of benefits to your brand. But building one doesn’t happen overnight. Whether you’re tapping into an existing online community or creating one from scratch, you can take a few key steps to maximize outcomes for your business.

1. Establish your brand’s identity and goals

Before you create your brand community, you need to ensure that you’ve clearly defined your brand’s objectives, whether that’s increasing service sign-ups, fostering authentic user-generated content, or amplifying product awareness. These goals depend on the platforms and tactics you employ, and it’s critical to ensure these align with your overarching business aims. You connect best with your audience when your brand has a distinct identity that resonates with values with which they can empathize. Beyond the products you offer, your brand’s ethos embodies truly matters. So crafting your distinctive brand persona and ensuring all branded social media content accentuates this image is vital for genuine consumer engagement.

Adidas, for instance, has successfully leveraged its brand identity of performance and passion in sports to build a community around its products. Through campaigns like #heretocreate, Adidas has celebrated individuality and creativity, resonating with its audience and fostering a sense of belonging among its community members.

When considering brand communities, your brand’s essence becomes the linchpin for genuine consumer connections. It’s not merely about the tangible products but the values, ethos, and narratives your brand champions. When consumers are presented with two identical products from different brands, they instinctively gravitate towards the brand they feel a deeper connection with. This underscores the importance of a robust and memorable brand identity. Every piece of content, every campaign, and every interaction should consistently reflect this identity, ensuring that both current and potential customers perceive and resonate with the brand’s core values and vision.

2. Choose your social media platforms

Choosing the right social media channels for your business is crucial for an effective social media marketing strategy. Your decision should factor in the target audience’s demographics and preferences, your overall marketing goals, available resources, existing content types, and insights from competitors’ social media usage. Different platforms cater to different demographics and content types—for instance, Instagram is visually driven and popular among younger audiences, while LinkedIn is a hub for professional networking and B2B marketing. On the other hand, platforms like TikTok and YouTube keep growing rapidly, offering businesses opportunities for video content.
Whichever platforms you choose, automated social media posting can play a pivotal role in your social media marketing strategy. Given the diverse range of platforms and the unique content demands of each, automation helps you maintain a consistent online presence without overwhelming your resources. It ensures timely posting, which is especially crucial for platforms like Twitter, where content lifespan is short. Moreover, automation can help you tap into optimal posting times for different platforms, increasing engagement and reach. But while automation helps you disseminate content, you should remain engaged with your audience, responding promptly to comments and feedback to maintain a genuine online presence.

3. Interact with your audience and make the community useful to them

Once you clarify your brand goals and choose your brand community platforms, engagement is the next pivotal step. Effective communication within brand communities can help solidify them as sanctuaries for genuine brand enthusiasts. Instead of simply starting the community with promotions or incentives, you might take cues from the community’s pulse. Listen to their discussions, queries, and interactions. Successful brands foster trust and stimulate engagement by resonating with the community’s vernacular, promptly addressing posts, and answering queries.

One example of this is Red Bull’s The Red Bulletin. This platform, which started as a magazine and expanded into a digital community, focuses on stories beyond the ordinary, from sports to lifestyle and culture. Members can engage with content that showcases extreme sports, interviews with athletes, and behind-the-scenes looks at events sponsored by Red Bull. Through The Red Bulletin, Red Bull has extended its brand beyond just an energy drink, creating a space where enthusiasts of extreme sports and adventurous lifestyles can connect, share, and be inspired.

Your brand community works best when it stays relevant and useful to your customers. Regardless of brand, if your community seems superficial, your customers will disregard it or find it irrelevant—so understanding your customer base is vital. Use social media and web analytics to see their preferences, and make sure the community aligns with their interests. For instance, a tech-centric audience might appreciate a community centered around new tech explorations, reviews, and tutorials. Conversely, a musically inclined audience might resonate with a community connected to Spotify, where playlist creation and sharing are encouraged. The main point in crafting a brand community is to make it pertinent to both current and potential customers.

4. Actively nurture your brand community

After establishing a brand community, it’s essential to remain proactive, ensuring its continued relevance and vibrancy. Effective community management is a continuous endeavor. Appoint dedicated moderators to oversee the community’s activities and foster engagement. To bolster interaction within your brand community, consider the following strategies:

• Start discussions on relevant subjects
• Respond to comments and participate in dialogues
• Organize polls, quizzes, or contests to captivate members
• Incorporate gamification to create a dynamic experience
• Answer questions, guide discussions, and be visible and active

Automated social media posting can be crucial to nurturing your brand community. By scheduling and automating posts, you can keep your online presence consistent, and ensure that your community stays engaged and informed. This keeps the brand top-of-mind for community members, and also allows for timely updates, promotions, and announcements. Also, automation tools can offer analytics that let you measure engagement and adjust yourr strategies based on what resonates most with the community. In essence, automated social media posting ensures that the brand’s voice remains active and relevant, fostering a deeper connection with community members.

Making Your Brand Community Thrive

Cultivating a vibrant brand community in your social media platforms requires a blend of strategic initiatives and genuine engagement. Here are some tactics that can guide your brand towards creating a thriving online presence and community.

5. Team up

Collaboration is key to making your brand community succeed and grow it with social media. Bring your community management team and social media marketers together to forge a unified message and experience. While your social media marketer might focus on metrics like follower count and engagement rates, your community manager could prioritize membership growth, event sign-ups, and user-generated content. But both will be interested in how many social media followers convert to community members. Depending on your community’s objectives, roping in social media marketing, content marketing, and customer support teams might be beneficial.

6. Identify and empower your thought leaders

Activating thought leaders and experts can elevate your community’s exclusivity and appeal. Original insights from these people don’t just enrich the community—you can also repurpose those insights for platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter, so that they attract more followers.

7. Find your advocates

To entice social media followers into your community, it’s essential to recognize and engage your brand advocates. These are individuals who ardently follow, share, and appreciate your brand’s content. By offering them exclusive perks, such as access to VIP events or beta testing opportunities, you can deepen their connection to your brand.

Lush Cosmetics, known for its handmade and cruelty-free products, has effectively deepened connections with its advocates. By promoting user-generated content, hosting community events, and spotlighting loyal customers on their social media platforms, Lush has created a sense of belonging and appreciation among its most passionate followers.

8. Create connections

The linchpin of a thriving community is the strength of its connections. A brand like MySpace, which once dominated the social media landscape, waned due to weak member connections and competition. To make your community flourish, you need to foster robust relationships, becoming indispensable to its members. In the community’s nascent stages, proactive engagement strategies, such as member spotlights, networking events, and expert panels, can be instrumental in cementing these connections.

9. Automate your social media strategy

In this social media era, consistency is key to keep your brand community engaged and thriving. Automated social media posts ensure that your brand maintains a steady presence, offering fresh content and updates to your audience without fail. This keeps the community engaged but also allows for optimal timing for your posts to reach the maximum audience. Automation tools can also give you valuable insights into the performance of your posts, and help you refine your content strategy based on real-time feedback. Automating your social media doesn’t just streamline your operations—it helps you keep your brand community vibrant, informed, and engaged.

Final Thoughts

Companies can’t afford to underestimate the potency of brand communities. Brands need to deepen their connections with audiences, and that’s where social media strategy becomes essential. To create a space where consumers feel seen, heard, and valued, brands need to commit to the kind of content consistency that social media automation brings. These communities deserve nothing less, and your social media teams deserve the efficiency and time savings that automation brings.Learn how dlvr.it can enable you to use consistent automated content posting and scheduling to help build brand community on your social platforms.

The post 9 Steps to Building and Nurturing Your Brand Community on Social Media appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

Social media automation refers to the use of tools and software that streamline and automate various tasks related to managing social media accounts. By leveraging automation, businesses can save valuable time and focus on other important aspects of their operations.

What Social Media Pain Points Can Automation Resolve?

Social media teams face a myriad of daily challenges that regular usage of automation tools can help mitigate, enabling teammates to pursue more strategic tasks that contribute to the bottom line. Here are just a few:

• Overwhelming post volume. It can be a hassle to have to navigate the maze of posting on multiple social media platforms every day, especially since each platform requires different formatting, timing, and engagement. Social media automation tools can help you schedule and format these posts, which can in turn ensure consistent brand messaging, and save you precious time and resources.
• Content-generation burnout. Having to post content on your socials about the content you just added to your site or blog compounds your task list. And generating new social media content during crunch times in other parts of your operations can increase task fatigue and reduce team morale.
• Analytics overload. If you’re trying to expand your brand online while continuing to operate and deliver, sifting through detailed analytics can be a challenge. Automated tools can transform complex data into digestible reports, spotlighting what truly matters.
• Branding inconsistenty. It’s essential for your brand that you strive for a unified voice across platforms. Social media automation helps you retain your brand voice, and shield the brand from inconsistency and confusion.

• 

Why Inefficiency is Kryptonite for Your Social Media Strategy

In the fast-moving environment of social media, inefficiency isn’t just a setback—it can be a potential death knell. Every moment counts, and a delayed response to a prospect or customer can translate into a lost opportunity. An inconsistent post can weaken or damage your brand identity. Imagine painstakingly creating content only to post it at a time when your audience isn’t active. That’s not simply a wasted post, but wasted effort, resources, and potential engagement. Inefficiency on social media is about lost time and the kind of missed opportunities no business can really afford. And that’s exactly where automated social media posting becomes invaluable, turning inefficiencies into strengths.

Saving Time: An Imperative for Social Media Teams

The stakes are high for enterprise social media teams. These teams don’t just manage a singular brand voice; they’re curating multiple narratives across diverse product lines, geographies, and audience segments. Every minute they spend on manual posting tasks is a minute diverted from strategic initiatives that can genuinely drive brand growth.

By adopting posting automation, these teams can free themselves to focus on high-impact activities. With the newfound time, they can deep dive into audience analytics, crafting more personalized engagement strategies. They can innovate content formats, test new engagement channels, or refine their brand’s voice based on real-time feedback. They can also put time into proactive crisis management, preparing for potential PR challenges. Social media automation also gives teams bandwidth to explore emerging platforms or technologies, ensuring the brand remains at the forefront of digital innovation. In essence, while posting is foundational, automation ensures it doesn’t overshadow the strategic undertakings that can catalyze brand evolution on social platforms.

6 Time-Saving Features of Automated Social Media Management

1. 1. Scheduled Posting: Planning ahead is the first step toward managing your time more efficiently. Automated tools let businesses draft content and schedule it to post during peak engagement times. Instead of scrambling daily to create posts, you can strategize a month or even longer in advance. It not only ensures consistency but also frees up your time for other pressing tasks.
   2. Bulk Uploading: You’ll remember how time-consuming and tedious to upload each of your social media posts individually. Once you start automating your social media posting, you can conveniently prepare several weeks’ or months’ worth of content and upload it all at once. It minimizes the repetitive tasks and ensures that your social media presence remains active and engaging.
   3. Integrated Platforms: Jumping between different platforms is a time-drain and a potential source of errors. With automation, businesses can manage multiple platforms from one central hub. This integration means a single post can be formatted and scheduled for various platforms seamlessly. Efficiency and consistency combined!
   4. Automated Sharing: It shouldn’t be an extra manual task to post on your social accounts about new content on your website, blog, or other social networks. With dlvr.it, you can set auto-posting about that content via RSS. It can either go out immediately or get added to a queue and be sent out on a schedule.
   5. Recycling Posts: During extremely busy parts of your business cycle, you don’t need to carve out time that you don’t have to generate new content. Features like EverQueue on the dlvr.it platform enable you to automatically reuse your best posts fill the gaps and keep driving traffic to your site.
   6. Performance Insights: Delving deep into metrics can be a prolonged process. Automation tools present these insights in an actionable, user-friendly manner. No more getting lost in a sea of numbers. Instead, businesses get clear guidance on what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus their efforts next.

   

2. Using the right tools to leverage the digital shift

   The constantly evolving realm of social media demands adaptability, precision, and timeliness, and automation tools let you navigate these demands. The equation is simple: integrating automation means you get to change your social media approach from reactive to proactive. Businesses—including your competitors—aren’t just saving time with these tools but reclaiming it, and engaging more deeply with their audiences. Automation enables you to innovate, strategize, and genuinely connect. The tools that empower businesses to be more present, more responsive, and more strategic are nothing less than necessary for sustainable growth. Harnessing the power of social media automation ensures that you don’t just survive the digital shift, but thrive in it.

The post 6 Ways that Automated Social Media Management Can Save You Time
 appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

Defining Your Brand Persona

Simply put, a brand persona is the personality and image your business portrays to the world. It combines your values, beliefs, and characteristics in a way that makes your brand unique and relatable. In pre-digital times, companies tended to build the equivalent of their brand personas in the form of symbolic mascots like Betty Crocker, Mr. Clean, or Tony the Tiger. With social media, brand personas have become less about mascots than attitudes projected via content. Think of a brand persona as simply a humanized version of your company that connects with your audience on a deep level.

Brand Persona Strategies in the Social Media Era

Social media has transformed the way companies build their brand personas. Here are a few strategies that have emerged on the platforms:

• Authenticity and Transparency:
  Social media branding has enabled businesses to project a “realness” that seeks to transcend traditional marketing and help forge personal connections with their audience. For example, when Burger King tweets a message like “making a BK run, lmk what y’all want?” as part of their Twitter strategy, it creates an instant and authentic closeness with its target.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Social media has given rise to user-generated content, which enables customers to become brand advocates and contribute to brand persona development. For example, Airbnb has successfully leveraged user-generated content to build its brand persona centered around travel experiences. Hashtags like #AirbnbExperiences build social proof by letting users share photos and stories of their unique stays on Instagram, providing social proof and inspiring others to embark on similar adventures.
• Community Building and Social Listening: Social media lets companies build online communities centered around their brand through which they can share content, actively listen to their audience, and refine their brand personas accordingly. For example, fitness tech company Peloton uses their social channels to share workout advice, get users to share tips and achievements with each other, and hear their customers’ needs and preferences.
• Influencer Marketing: Social media influencers have become powerful conduits for
  businesses to build their brand personas, leveraging the influence of individuals whose values align with their brand. Of course, brands like Nike pioneered the practice, resonating with the aspirations of its target audience by collaborating with personalities like Michael Jordan. More recently, Fenty Beauty has featured influencers from diverse backgrounds and skin tones to showcase what’s behind its tagline “beauty for all”.

  

• Micro-Influencers and Niche Targeting: Social media lets brands collaborate with micro-influencers who have smaller but highly engaged and loyal followings. This allows brands to target their ideal audience and create a more personalized and relatable brand persona. For one example, activewear brand Outdoor Voices works with fitness enthusiasts, yogis, and outdoor adventurers who resonate with their target audience, ultimately fostering a vibrant community around an active and healthy lifestyle.
• Interactive Storytelling: Interactive features like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, and TikTok challenges let brands tell engaging stories in immersive ways. National Geographic uses features like Facebook 360 photos and Instagram carousels to bring followers up close to the wonders of nature and cultural heritage, which reinforces its brand persona as an authoritative source of knowledge, adventure, and environmental conservation.

Social Media Management Tactics for Building Your Brand Persona:

Building a strong brand persona on social media requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. Here are a few tactics toward creating, developing, and nurturing that persona:

1. Define it
   Clearly define the values, voice, identity, and personality traits that represent your brand. It’s better to at least have an idea of this before you start executing campaigns instead of learning as you go. Determine whether you want to be playful, professional, eco-friendly, or any other defining characteristic. Understanding your brand’s essence will guide your content creation and engagement strategy.
2. Develop a consistent visual identity
   Use a cohesive color palette, typography, and design elements that align with your online brand persona. For instance, if your brand persona is energetic and youthful, use vibrant colors and dynamic visuals that reflect that spirit. Visual consistency builds recognition and reinforces your brand identity.
3. Engage with your audience
   Social media can be a direct connection to your key demographics. Engage in meaningful conversations with your targets. Respond promptly to comments, messages, and mentions. Show genuine interest, ask questions, and encourage dialogue. When you actively engage with your audience, you humanize your brand and strengthen relationships.
4. Use live video to tell stories
   Live video lets you connect with your audience more personally, and create an authentic and interactive experience. Host live Q&A sessions, behind-the-scenes glimpses, product launches, or tutorials. Integrating narrative elements into your live videos can help bring your brand persona to life and foster a sense of connection and exclusivity.
5. Listen…and analyze the sentiment
   Pay attention to what your audience says about your brand on social media. Use social listening tools like Sprout Social to monitor mentions, hashtags, and conversations related to your brand. Then try sentiment analysis via Idiomatic or Reputation to understand how your brand is perceived. When you actively listen to your audience’s feedback, you can address concerns, respond to trends, and refine your brand persona accordingly.
6. Monitor and adapt
   Monitor your social media analytics as regularly as possible to get insights into what content resonates with your audience. Analyze engagement metrics, audience demographics, and reach. Use these insights to refine your content strategy, make data-driven decisions, and tailor your approach. Stay adaptable and open to feedback from your followers. For instance, if you notice that your audience engages more with video content, focus on creating more of it in the future.

Building a brand identity and persona on social media is an ongoing process. It will pay off to continuously evaluate your strategies, adapt to evolving trends and audience preferences, and stay true to your brand’s values. These strategies can enable you to nurture a compelling brand persona that resonates with your target audience and drives long-term success.

Your brand persona can be key to an overall optimized social media marketing strategy, along with the automated content management and posting capabilities that dlvr.it provides. Learn how dlvr.it can help you take the next step.

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Driving social media referral traffic starts with increasing reach and engagement. This means using best practices to increase followers, likes, shares, comments, etc. on each platform. It’s important that you use the built-in tools available on each platform to track engagement and website traffic. Additionally, using a URL shortener can help you track different links you post on social media so that you can monitor your results and understand what works best with your audience.

One of the things I enjoy doing is meeting with our customers. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with a small business owner of a local coffee shop. He said that social media was paralyzing to him. He didn’t know what to do next. Sound familiar?

Realize that regardless of the small business category your business may fall under, social media goals remain the same:

• Increase awareness of your business
• Engage followers on social media
• Boost website traffic

Once you understand the goals, it’s easy to walk away with an action plan to solve the paralyzing “what do I do next” question.

Are You On Top of Your Social Media Traffic?

Social media traffic is essential for any successful marketing campaign. It can help to increase website visits and generate more leads for businesses. To boost social media traffic, you need to create a strong presence on social media channels – not just waiting and hoping that someone will see your post and repost it for you. This includes creating content that resonates with your target audience and engaging with followers regularly. Paid advertising on social media can also be used to increase website visitors, but it’s important to have an effective plan in place for managing website visitors from these channels.

1. Inspire Your Audience With Visuals

Visuals are a powerful tool for inspiring your audience and driving engagement. They can be used to draw attention to your social media posts, product videos, and demos. Studies have shown that 85% of customers are more likely to make a buying decision when they watch demos or product videos. Visuals help make sure customers’ purchasing decisions are valid and that they understand what they’re buying.

In addition, visuals can also help you reach traffic goals by encouraging people to share your content. People are more likely to share social media posts that have visuals, so it’s important to put thought into creating original and inspiring visuals that will draw attention and trigger a response from viewers. Whether it’s an infographic, video, or image, visuals should be used strategically in order to maximize their impact on your audience. By using visuals effectively, you can inspire your audience and drive engagement with your content.

2. Make Your Content Easily Shareable

Making your content easily shareable is essential for success in the digital age. With 65% of time spent on social media being through mobile devices, it is important to make sure that share buttons are present and accessible for users to share content from any device. The easier it is for audiences to share the content, the more likely they will do it. Content sharing can help reach more customers and increase brand awareness. To encourage social sharing, content should have compelling call-to-action, enticing headlines/captions, valuable content, and appealing visuals.

Not only does making your content easily shareable help with marketing efforts, but potential clients and employers will check your social media profiles to get an idea of who you are and what you do. Optimizing social media profiles and content around visuals is essential for SEO success as visuals help process information quicker and are retained better than text-based materials. When incorporating images into posts, optimize them by adding relevant keywords to the file name before posting them online.

3. Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of any online marketing strategy. It helps to increase your website visibility, generate more sales and leads, and strengthen your brand authority. Data shows that on average, nearly 72% of searches lead to a page one click, while pages two and three usually garner less than 6% of clicks. Therefore, it is essential to optimize your SEO best practices in order to rank higher in search engine results and increase website traffic.

Improving your SEO is essential for driving more traffic to your website. To do this, you should focus on optimizing your content with relevant keywords and phrases, as well as creating high-quality content that is engaging and informative. Additionally, you should also ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, as most searches are now done on mobile devices.

4. Know When Your Audience Is Listening

It’s not enough to simply post on social media; you need to know when your audience is listening (and especially when someone mentions your company or products) in order to maximize your reach potential. Knowing when your audience is most active can help you create more effective posts that will be seen by the right people.

With the right strategies in place, businesses can generate more social media traffic and reach their goals. There are several easy ways to do this, such as making content easy to share, investing in social advertising, writing better call-to-actions, and engaging with industry influencers. Additionally, creating shareable content and visuals can help entice people to click on your links.

It’s also important to post when your target audience is active and interact with them using calls-to-action (more on this below). Investing in social advertisement and engaging with influencers can help you gain more visibility with hashtags. Installing a customer service chatbot can also be beneficial as it allows you to catch your audience when they’re most active.

5. Interact with Your Audience

Interacting with your audience is an important part of building relationships and increasing engagement. It helps to show followers that you value their feedback and are willing to take the time to respond to them. An excellent example of this is Buffer’s response to a follower who commented positively on their post. They thanked them for their kind words and posed a new question, further engaging with them. This type of interaction builds trust between you and your followers, as it shows that you are humanistic and care about what they have to say.

To encourage interaction, try posting questions in your posts or replying to comments on social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram. Additionally, answering direct messages promptly will show users that their feedback is valued and appreciated. Interacting personally with your audience can be a great way to build relationships and increase engagement.

6. Invest in Social Advertising

Social media advertising is an effective way to reach a larger audience and drive more traffic to your website. It allows businesses to target posts that already have high engagement from their current target audience, creating hyper-targeted campaigns that reach the most relevant people. Investing in story ads can also be beneficial, as they often get more engagement than infeed ads since they appear as native content.

School Year Abroad is a great example of how investing in social advertising can pay off. After implementing social media advertising, they saw a 51.5% increase in website sessions. This proves that social media advertising can provide great ROI and cost-effective traffic for businesses. Therefore, it’s important for your business to invest in social advertising if you want to gain more audience and traffic.

7. Write Better Calls-to-Action

Writing better calls-to-action in captions can be a great way to get your readers to interact with a link from your site. A good call-to-action should guide the reader’s action and make them feel compelled to take the desired action. Testing different phrases can help you find which works best for your audience. For example, Signable uses the phrase “check out which tunes the team listens to while they work” as their call-to-action.

Responding to all comments on social posts is also an effective way of making your audience feel valued and appreciated. Being responsive can give you an edge over the competition, even if they have a larger budget or better content. Incorporating customer service into your social media strategy is also important in order to appeal to potential customers and create good experiences for existing ones. By using these tactics, you will be able to write better calls-to-action that will encourage more interaction with your site.

8. Engage with Industry Influencers

Engaging with industry influencers is an effective way to drive traffic and gain exposure for your business. By featuring them in your content, you can create an organic connection that will help you build relationships with these influential people. Tactics like interviews, expert roundup posts, or covering their stories are great ways to engage with influencers and get them to share your post. Creating articles featuring influencers can be a powerful way to get them to share your content as well.

Asking influencers to share your content is another great way to get seen by their followers and increase the reach of your message. Having influencers share your content will result in more website traffic and referral rates, which can lead to increased sales and brand awareness. It’s important to remember that engaging with industry influencers should be done in a genuine manner – don’t just ask for favors without offering something in return. Building relationships with these influential people takes time and effort, but it can pay off in the long run.

9. Use Hashtags to Increase Visibility

Hashtags are an effective way to increase visibility and bring more traffic to your website. By utilizing trending conversations on social media, or popular industry-specific hashtags, you can reach a larger audience and draw attention to your content.

Hashtags can be found on most social media platforms, giving you the opportunity to research user conversations related to your brand. Including hashtags in your posts increases the chances of interested circles discovering your content. However, it is important not to overuse them as this can diminish the effectiveness and impact of your post. With careful research and strategic use of hashtags, you can maximize the visibility of your content and gain more followers.

Additional Social Media Traffic Boosting Tips:

Engage Your Audience

Engaging with your audience is essential for any successful business. It helps to build trust and makes them more likely to purchase from you. Creating content that appeals to your target audience and is valuable to them is key in order to boosting engagement. This can be done by asking open-ended questions, organizing interactive quizzes, or awarding prizes to winners.

It’s also important to reply to comments, post questions, and answer messages in a timely manner in order to increase user trust. Showing your humanistic side will make followers feel more connected to your brand as well. You can do this by sharing stories about yourself or your team members, or even just responding with a friendly comment when someone leaves feedback on one of your posts. Engagement is an important part of building relationships with customers and potential customers alike, so it’s worth investing time and effort into creating engaging content that resonates with them.v

Install a Customer Service Chatbot

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in customer service, as they provide an efficient and cost-effective way to interact with customers. With Sprout Social Bot Builder, businesses can easily set up rules-based chatbots that provide timely responses and solutions to customers. This helps ensure that customers get the answers they need quickly and without having to wait for a human representative.

Chatbots can also direct users toward relevant guides or pages on your site, helping increase traffic and engagement. For example, if a customer has a question about a product or service, the chatbot can direct them to the appropriate page on your website. Additionally, you can view a Twitter chatbot in action that directs users toward a relevant answer or solution.

Make Share Buttons Obvious

Making share buttons obvious is an important part of encouraging user sharing. This can be done by making sure that the share buttons are easily visible and recognizable, as well as easy to use. Additionally, including an ongoing count of the number of shares on the share button can provide proof that others have found your content valuable. Customizing social media buttons has both its pros and cons, so it is important to consider which option works best for your website.

Focus on the Social Media Platforms that Drive the Most Web Traffic

Social media is an essential tool for driving web traffic and should not be overlooked. With 72% of Americans using social media, it’s a valuable source for website traffic. Research shows that Facebook is the best platform for driving web traffic, but other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn can also help. GrowthBadger’s research indicates that focusing on the right platform will yield better results than spreading resources too thin.

When done right, social media traffic can turn into leads, conversions, and revenue. It’s important to focus on the platforms that drive the most web traffic in order to maximize your efforts and get the most out of your investment. Social media is a great way to build an audience and gain success in the digital world. It’s important to create content that resonates with your target audience and engage with them regularly in order to increase website visits from social media sources.

Include Referral Links on Your Social Media Profiles

Social media profiles are a great way to promote your website and increase traffic. By including referral links on your social media profiles, you can direct followers to your website for more information. Depending on the platform, you can include multiple links or just one single link to your website.

Sharing content via social media groups is another great way to target interested readers. You can join relevant groups and engage with users in conversations about topics related to your business or website. This will help facilitate traffic to your website by introducing potential customers to what you have to offer. Popular platforms for this type of promotion include Facebook, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. With the right strategy, you can use these platforms to reach a wide audience and increase visibility for your business or website.

Add Links to Your Social Media Posts to Drive Traffic

Adding links to your social media posts is an effective way to drive more traffic. It can be used to direct users to a website, blog post, or other online content. Different platforms allow you to add links in different ways, such as captions, popups, end screens and carousels. Snapchat and TikTok stories are great for sharing a link with followers, but unfortunately you cannot add clickable links to TikTok videos without buying ads.

Almost 90% of marketers agree that social media is an effective way to increase web traffic. There are various strategies that can be used to drive traffic from social media sources. Examples of tactics include optimizing content for certain platforms, using redirect URLs, and using shareable and descriptive images. These strategies can help you reach a wider audience and increase the chances of people clicking on your link. Additionally, it’s important to use relevant hashtags when posting so that your content is seen by the right people. By following these tips5. Review your post frequency strategy to maximize website traffic

Post on a Regular Basis

Post frequency is an important factor in driving website traffic – and using dlvr.it as a social media scheduler will make the entire process much easier for you. It is essential to understand how different social media algorithms work and use them to your advantage. For example, The Economist’s “link in bio” feature drove millions of referrals to their website and resulted in an increase in subscriptions and registrations. To maximize website traffic, a comprehensive approach should be taken that includes paid ad campaigns, social media engagement, contests and giveaways, influencers, content marketing, SEO optimization and more.

Knowing your target audience should help you decide which tactics best fit your business needs to successfully convert the generated traffic into sales.  Additionally, it is important to review your post frequency strategy regularly to ensure that you are getting the most out of each post by reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.

Summary: How Do You Increase Social Media Traffic?

By focusing on increasing reach and engagement first, you will be able to build a strong foundation for driving more website traffic from social media. Once this is established, you can then move on to more advanced tactics – such as running ads or creating better content. No matter what tactics you choose to use, it’s important to always keep an eye on your metrics in order to ensure that your efforts are paying off.

Sharing links in social media groups is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Popular platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and LinkedIn all have group features that allow you to share content with those likely interested in it. You can also use your profile page on these platforms to promote yourself and include link(s) to your website.

In conclusion, there are many ways to boost social media traffic and improving SEO is one of the best methods. By creating original visuals, making content easily shareable, and optimizing content with relevant keywords and phrases, you can increase website visibility and generate more sales and leads. Additionally, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is essential for success in the digital age. With the right strategies in place, you can reach your traffic goals and build a strong online presence.

The post 9 Ways to Boost Social Media Traffic appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

More than likely, though, if you’re a marketing team of one, retweeting falls to the bottom of your to-do list.

And when you do find time, you probably Retweet in rapid fire. Unfortunately, rapid-fire Retweeting not only annoys your followers but weakens the effectiveness of sending a favorite tweet in the first place.

Fortunately, we’ve found a scalable solution to this problem: Scheduled Retweets

Being able to schedule retweets gives you the opportunity to:

• Take full advantage of the power of the retweet
• Create a better follower experience for your Twitter Users
• Have plenty of content to engage readers

What is a Retweet?

Business Coach, Alicia Orre captures the true meaning of the Retweet.

The act of ReTweeting is when you take someone else’s tweet and forward it to your followers while crediting the source.

This RT is seen by you, the person who sent the original message and your followers.

That means their tweet is seen by an entirely new audience. You extend their reach in the Twitterverse, and it paves the way for them to connect with other like-minded tweeters.

You likely have seen the new Retweet icon appear in your Twitter feed highlighted by the green ‘recycling’ looking button.

The old-style retweet is just as effective. The difference is the style. It starts with the “via” or “RT:” followed by the Twitter handle of the author – @twitterhandle

The Business Case for Retweeting

When people retweet you, it usually means they think the content of your previous tweet is useful. Therefore, they believe it would also benefit their Twitter followers. By retweeting you, they’ve said “take a look,” and exposed you to all their followers, giving your earlier tweets a greater reach.

With retweets: You can earn new followers, increase your web traffic, better your engagement, increase your brand awareness, and up your direct sales.

In a nutshell, a Retweet is:

1 – A hat tip or high-five to the author (“I like what you wrote.”)

2 – Free PR (you have to earn it!)

3 – A way to get someone’s attention (Twitter alerts the author that you retweeted their tweet)

How to Boost Your Retweets

To increase the probability that you will be Retweeted, there are certain words that you should NOT include in your tweets. Social media scientist Dan Zarrella studied Tweets that get the most retweets.

The list below shows words in Tweet content that got the LEAST retweets:

• game
• going
• haha
• lol
• but
• watching
• work
• home
• night
• bed
• well
• sleep
• gonna
• hey
• tomorrow
• tired
• some
• back
• bored
• listening

Tweets that included the following words and phrases got the MOST retweets (powerful twitter engagement technique):

• you
• twitter
• please
• retweet
• post
• blog
• social
• free
• media
• help
• please retweet
• great
• social media
• follow
• how to
• top
• blog post
• check out
• new blog post

Other Smart Tactics to Boost Your Retweets:

• Time your tweets to go out when they will get the most visibility: Most retweets happen at 5 PM EST
• Tweet Image Links: Image Links engagement is 200% higher
• Put retweet buttons throughout your blog posts so readers can tweet certain phrases they find interesting
• Add links in your tweets: 56.69% of retweets contain links
• Quote tweets – Twitter users that tweet quotes have over 40% more followers.
• Leverage popular hashtags – search for hashtags on Hashtagify

For some time, there has been a debate on whether or not to ask for a retweet.

Social media strategist, Brent Carnduff studied the effects of adding a call-to-action (CTA) in a retweet. His study looked at three things:

• No Call-to-Action (control group)
• CTA – ‘Please Retweet’
• CTA – ‘Please RT’

The study concluded: Tweets that included the ‘retweet’ CTAs collected 72.5% of all retweets.

Retweet Etiquette

We return to social media scientist Dan Zarrella to provide insight into Retweet etiquette in this informative video.

Here are some good rules of thumb to follow when Retweeting:

• Problem: You just annoyed your followers.Solution: Get the dlvr.it browser add-on and in one click, comment, Retweet and schedule Tweets without leaving Twitter.Step 1. Install the browser add-on. **You will need a dlvr.it account to schedule Retweets.Step 2. Start reading your Twitter feed. You will now see a (little) ‘d’ icon appears below each Tweet. When you find a Tweet to retweet, click the: ‘d’Step 3. Prepare the Retweet(A) Comment on the Tweet and add “RT: @twitterhandle”(B) Select your Twitter account.(C) Click Add to Queue >> Schedule Post(D) Schedule the Retweet for a future date. The Retweet will appear in your dlvr.it Queue. Next, find a few more awesome Tweets to Retweet and schedule.
  

  Method #2: RSS to Retweet (fastest)

  We discovered a convenient (and FREE) tool to gather a group of Tweets using a Twitter search: Queryfeed.

  With Queryfeed, you can search on a specific hashtag, create an RSS feed from that search, and start scheduling Retweets. Let’s walk through the steps.

  Step 1. Go to Queryfeed and search on a hashtag, Twitter handle or keyword. Click ‘Grab Twitter’ to generate the RSS feed URL.

  For our example, we are searching for public Tweets that contain the hashtag: #socialmedia

  The RSS feed URL looks like this: https://queryfeed.net/tw?q=%23socialmedia

  Copy the URL.

  Step 2. Create a dlvr.it account or log in.

  Step 3. Click the Curate Tab

  Step 4. Add the Queryfeed RSS feed to the search box

  Step 5. Click the ‘+’symbol

  Once dlvr.it pulls the feed; you will see a list of Retweet-Worthy Tweets.

  Step 6. Click the right arrow on a Tweet you would like to schedule.

  (A) Comment on the Tweet and add “RT: @twitterhandle”

  (B) Select your Twitter account.

  (C) Click ‘Add to Queue’ >> Schedule Post

  ***Note: To delete a Tweet, scroll over the top. A delete icon will appear in the upper right.

  Step 7. Schedule the Retweet for a future date. The Retweet will appear in your dlvr.it Queue.

  Next, find a few more Tweets to Retweet and schedule.

FAQ Checklist – Schedule Retweets

When it comes to social media marketing, scheduling retweets is one of those things that people either love or hate. If you’re like me, you probably fall into the former camp. I’m always looking for ways to automate my Twitter account and make sure that I’m sharing relevant information at the most opportune times.

The good news is that there are some pretty simple tools that allow you to do exactly that. Here’s a step-by-step list to schedule your retweets at the perfect time.

1. Create a Tweet Planner

First thing first—you’ll want to set up a planner. This tool helps you decide when you’re going to send out your scheduled tweets. There are plenty of options here, including ones that let you choose whether you’d rather share once per hour, once every few hours, or once per day.

2. Choose Your Tweets

Now that you’ve got a plan, it’s time to start tweeting. Once you’ve selected the type of tweet you want to share, you’ll be able to pick from different types of tweets. These include original tweets, re-tweets, quotes, images, videos, GIFs, polls, and more. You can also add hashtags to each tweet.

3. Pick Your Posting Schedule and Scheduling Options

You have two main choices when it comes to timing: Scheduled and Manual. Scheduled means that you can select a certain time to post, while manual lets you choose whenever you want to post.

4. Set Up a User Account

After you’ve picked your tweets, it’s time to get started. First, sign in to your Twitter account. Then, click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your screen. Finally, click the blue button next to the name of your Twitter account. Twitter settings are actually very easy to use.

5. Edit Your Profile

After you’ve logged in to your profile, you’ll need to edit your settings. Scroll down until you see “Schedule” under “Tweet” in the search column. Click the dropdown menu and select “Scheduled” to begin setting up your timeline.

6. Twitter Scheduling

Now that you’ve created your plan, it’s time for you to start scheduling your Twitter Retweets. Simply go through the steps above again, but instead of selecting “Manual,” select “Scheduled.”

Schedule Retweets Easily From Your Phone with Twitter Apps

Twitter recently introduced native retweeting, letting you schedule tweets from any application on your phone. You can do this by tapping Retweet from within the Tweet screen, selecting the app you wish to use, and choosing how many days ahead you’d like to schedule it. Once scheduled, the tweet will show up in your timeline as soon as it’s posted.

If you don’t want to view all the replies to your initial tweet, you can choose to hide those replies when you schedule your tweet. To do this, tap “Hide Replies,” and select the number of days you’d like to hide replies. Afterward, the reply count will display 0.

The feature is available on both iPhone OS 8 and later and Android KitKat and later versions.

Recap: Scheduling Retweets

So now that you know how to schedule retweets, what should you do? Well, if you’re looking to increase engagement with your followers, then you might consider setting up a preset schedule through dlvr.it for scheduling them throughout the week. If you’re trying to boost brand awareness, then you may want to schedule them during peak times. Either way, you’ll find that scheduling retweets is an incredibly useful tool.

The post How to Schedule Retweets To Grow Your Audience appeared first on dlvr.it | blog.

Why Do I Need Pinterest For My Business?

Pinterest is a fast-growing platform that year-over-year expands its user base among both men and women. Pinterest is stereotypically associated with women (over 75%), which is understandable since that is the primary user base. Yes, photo-based social media is not just for Instagram anymore. There are quite a few things that you can do with your Pinterest to make it more relevant, and some of these things can be done in only an hour!

Pinterest is also one of the fastest revenue-generating platforms out there. Shopify partnered with Pinterest to gather data about product purchase habits of Pinterest users. They found that “98% of people polled by the brand say they try new things based on what they find on Pinterest, male Generation Z pinners are up 40% year over year, US millennial pinners are up 35% year over year, and 45% of all pinners have household incomes of more than $100,000 annually”.

Your Pinterest Business Account: Getting Started

The first step when setting up a new business account is to choose a username. The name should reflect your company and/or brand. The difference between a business and a personal profile is pretty straightforward. A business profile gives you more control over what kind of content you share.

You’ll also have to fill out an application. Here, you’ll answer questions about your company, such as its purpose, products, services, and target audience.

After creating your account and choosing an appropriate profile picture, you’ll want to create at least one board. These are collections of pins that help you categorize your content. For example, if you sell jewelry, you might create a board called “Jewelry” or “Women’s Jewelry.” You can then add product pins directly to those boards.

Creating Your Business Marketing Strategy

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms used by businesses today, with over 478 million active users. But it doesn’t mean you don’t need a strategy to use it effectively. If you want to maximize your return on investment (ROI), you’ll need to know what works best for your brand and what doesn’t.

To start, you need to understand why people are using Pinterest. What do they like about it? Why do they engage there? How does it help them accomplish their goals? Once you’ve answered those questions, you’re ready to develop a Pinterest social media marketing strategy.

A good strategy starts with understanding your audience. Who are they? Where do they live? What age group? What type of products or services do they buy? Once you’ve got that information, you can begin building out your strategy. Here are some things to consider when creating yours.

Types of Content

• Make sure you include relevant keywords that align with your product or service. You want to make sure people searching for your niche find you.

• Include pinnable images (with a clickable link) that show off your products or services. This makes it easier for visitors to imagine themselves using your offerings.

• Successful campaigns use hashtags to increase visibility. Hashtags allow people to easily follow topics related to your industry. They also give you another way to connect with potential customers.

• Promote pins that are relevant to your audience on relevant boards. Don’t just post anything. Be selective about what you share. Help the user experience with appropriate pin descriptions.

Pinterest Business Profile: Getting Started

If you’re thinking about setting up a business account on Pinterest, it might seem like a good idea. After all, there are millions of businesses out there already using social network. But before you jump into the world of business accounts, make sure you understand what you’re getting yourself into. Here’s how to set up a business account on the popular photo-sharing site.

Create a Username

The very first thing you’ll need to do is choose a username for your business account. This represents your brand online, so pick something catchy and memorable. Remember, you won’t be able to change this later.

Choose a Password

Next, you’ll need to decide on a password for your business account. Make sure it’s strong enough to protect your personal data. Don’t use anything obvious such as “business123,” because anyone could easily guess it. Instead, try something unique by combining numbers, letters and words not used as passwords on your other websites.

Set up your Email Address

Pinterest requires you to provide an email address for your business account. Just enter one here, and remember to check it regularly. You’ll receive important notifications regarding your account via email.

Why Use Pinterest for Business?

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms used by people looking for information about products and services. In fact, according to Statista, 90% of Pinners say they use Pinterest to make a buying decision. And when it comes to making those purchasing decisions, they’re not seeking out specific brands. Instead, they’re just browsing around, finding inspiration, and getting ideas.

In other words, Pinterest is great for driving traffic to your website. If you want to promote your brand, there are many ways to do that. You could post images of your product to attract potential customers. Or you could advertise your brand directly within the app itself. But what about automated posting?

Automated posting lets you schedule posts to Pinterest based on keywords, hashtags, interests, location, etc., without having to manually type each piece of data into the app. This makes it easier to manage multiple accounts and automate campaigns across different platforms.

And since 70% of Pinner’s use Pinterest to find inspiration, automating your pins helps ensure your brand stays front and center throughout the day.

1. Add your logo to your business Pinterest account

Setting up your business Pinterest account is the first step in this process. If you become a verified business through Pinterest, this can add a lot of goodwill and trust in the community. Not only can this add goodwill and trust, but it can offer opportunities that aren’t available in personal Pinterest accounts. The most important of these opportunities is Rich Pins. These Pins can provide information about your product right in the Pin.

Adding a logo as a picture in your profile can also add an air of legitimacy to your Pinterest posts. If you need a logo, there are many tools that can help you build a logo. I’ve always personally been partial to Canva due to their library of templates to get you started. However, there are other tools that can help in this arena. Once you have your logo created, you can use the steps that Pinterest has provided to get this added to your profile.

2. Make sure all your Pins are active and functional

This is probably the most important check to perform of all. After all, your Pinterest account will probably not be super helpful if it doesn’t direct back to functional content. Shockingly, VentureBeat reports that 50% of top Pins on Pinterestlink back to outdated links that no longer function!

There are a number of tools out there that can help to perform this check. You can start with Boardbooster’s Pin Doctor. They require a monthly plan and they will also ask that you pay per Pin that you check, however, this is the fastest option to keep your business Pinterest as functional as it can be. Pin4Ever also provides an excellent suite of tools that not only backs up your Pinterest, but also checks the functionality of your Pins.

If you prefer to avoid paying for these checks, you can perform more manual processes that will help you check out these links. The ScreamingFrog SEO Spider tool will help you check your links manually. You can also use a broken link checker to make sure that your links are functional.

3. Add a Pinterest follow button to your website

A great method to link your business Pinterest account front and center is to create a follow button or widget to your website. These buttons can link directly back to your Pinterest profile and help your users follow the content that pertains exactly to what they’re reading. If they see these links on your website, you are setting a direct pipeline to your users that can provide them with everything that they need to know about your business.

Also, if you have an RSS Feed that is generated with your website, you can link this directly to your dlvr.it account so that your content is automatically published to your Pinterest account. This option will help you optimize your Pinterest publishing for the best dates and times.

4. Add your keywords to your Pinterest username

This suggestion really has to do with SEO. Yoursearch engine optimization depends on your ability to make your desired keywords front and center in your content. To become the Google authority on a subject, placing this keyword front and center in your title is key in making sure that Google picks this up. It’s much easier for Google to find a subject if it is placed within the headers in a website, and placing those keywords in your title is doing just that.

5. Promote your Pinterest boards on Facebook, Twitter and all your Social Media Pages

Why would I want to use my other social media content? In order to promote all of your social media accounts, you must consider that all of them can be linked together. Your other social media accounts can benefit from your SEO that is implemented from your Pins. All of your business Pinterest content can lead back to your other content on your social media accounts. That being the case, linking your social media accounts to each other can only benefit you.

But posting each of your pins to your other social media pages and profiles can be a pain, particularly if you’re limited on time.

If you are looking to save time, try dlvr.it’s social media automation service to effortlessly share your pins to your Facebook pages, Twitter profile and more. Just connect Pinterest board to dlvr.it and add your social media pages and profiles. dlvr.it automatically posts your new pins across your social media pages.

How Do I Connect Pinterest to My Other Social Media Accounts?

dlvr.it provides many options to link your content directly to your Pinterest account along with many other Socials. Pinterest only states that you can directly link your Facebook and Twitter, while dlvr.it offers the options to send content simultaneously to Tumblr, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Company pages, and more.

Another great reason to use a service like dlvr.it to link your content to your Social Media accounts is that the content will appear more Curated. This means that if you have an RSS Feed that is more suited for Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, but your other Feeds may only be suited for Pinterest and Facebook, you will be publishing your content to the appropriate Social Media channels.

If, however, you would like to do this through Pinterest, Pinterest has created a tutorial to help you add your business Pinterest account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

If you find some extra time after sifting through your Evergreen content, take some time to comment on the Pins of others that tie into your content. It will help to direct potential followers back to your content.

To automate the cross-posting of the latest blog posts to Pinterest, try dlvr.it’s social media automation service.

6. Re-pin Some of your Evergreen Content

Pinterest has recently been publishing a string of what they consider important to consider when using their platform. One of the most important aspects of their anticipation of success is publishing Evergreen content. Unlike other platforms, Evergreen content is vital to your Pinterest success.

The reason for Evergreen content to be at the forefront of your strategy lies in the content itself. By nature, Pinterest content is around forever, and because of this, your content should be relevant to all audiences for a long period of time. Things like tutorials, infographics, and recipes last forever and Pinterest will make sure that they are found.

dlvr.it’s EverQueue service helps you re-pin the Evergreen content that you find the most appealing. All you have to do is import the content that you want to republish automatically, set your Pinterest account to re-pin, and then let dlvr.it do the rest! This service cuts down on the time that you spend re-pinning even further.

How Should I Choose My Evergreen Content?

Finding your most popular content is a great start to locating your best Evergreen content. Once you’ve located the most valuable content, you can determine the most relevant content. Since it’s your content, you probably know it best. Find those pieces of content that will be the most timeless. “How-tos”, educational content, and informational content, and tutorials are the most Pinterest-friendly content.

When you create a new blog post, share your featured image and link to your Pinterest page. Take advantage of Pinterest’s vast audience to promote your blog. It’s easy to pin your new blog post page to your Pinterest board – be sure to use an attractive and compelling featured image with your post to grab the attention of your Pinterest audience.

7. Turn Off Your Search Engine Privacy

Why would I want to turn off my search engine privacy? In short, this privacy setting has the potential to be a game changer in your Pinterest traffic. The search engine privacy setting functions to protect people from finding your content on Google. Pinterest is a unique social media platform in that it allows your Pins to be Google search results. Because this is the case, if this privacy setting is activated, you’re throwing away the traffic that could come from Google.

In essence, the traffic that comes in from Google is the most important traffic that has the potential to be retrieved. Because Google uses Pinterest to populate a lot of search results, you can steal this traffic right out from under your competitors.

How Do I turn off Search Engine Privacy in Pinterest?

Turning off this setting couldn’t be easier. Pinterest has made a tutorial that will help you instantly launch yourself into Google’s search engine.

If you find yourself with a little bit of extra time during the week, you can hone your search engine craft. The best way to do this is to use a search engine optimization tool. Using these tools can help you select the most important keywords for your company’s interests. This can help to skyrocket your Pins to the top of Google’s results. Check out our blog post that will help you find the best search engine optimization tools.

8. Make Sure You Finish Your Profile Description

Why would I want to finish my profile? Isn’t a picture enough? In many ways, no. Not finishing your profile makes you seem lazy and uninterested in optimization. Not only is this another opportunity to make an impression, but it is another opportunity for SEO. You must think about Pinterest as an SEO machine to generate money for your endeavors. The platform will only work for you if you put your effort into it.

When you remember that Pinterest is a direct venue to Google, you understand that every word that you put into Pinterest is important. All things Pinterest feed into your SEO directly, and therefore, your profile is extremely important to making that impression that you need on your business Pinterest account.

9. Rename Your Board Titles

Renaming your boards can help to improve your SEO immensely. There is a school of thought that discourages renaming Pinterest boards, however, if you are having trouble with your Google results, the only direction that you can go is up. As long as you’re remaining on topic with one focused category, your SEO will only improve. You can’t afford not to change these titles if you’re not optimized for search engine results.

How Do I Rename My Boards?

This is another quick and easy edit to your Pinterest boards. It’s simply a matter of accessing the edit panel and changing the name of the board.

10. Use a Popular Pin as Your Profile Photo

Why is using a popular Pin important for your board’s cover? This cover photo is the first impression that you can make with your users. It is an 800 x 800 pixel space to convey exactly what your users can expect in your boards. This gives you the opportunity to place your branding front and center in every board and make an impression with all that you have available in your boards.

The best reason to use this is that it is dramatically underutilized. The cover photo being the first impression for lots of traffic. This first impression can lead to additional followers of your Pinterest boards, and thus, convert a lot of traffic into money for your products and services.

img source: smitten kitchen Pinterest

How Do I Change the Pin for My Cover Photo?

This is also a quick and easy process. Business Pinterest users spend most of their time finding the most important Pin to use, but I recommend using the most popular Pin on that board. User feedback in the form of Pins and views are the most valuable information that you can use to determine the content that you want as a lasting impression.

Pinterest for Business: The Basics

Pinterest is one of those social media platforms that everyone knows about – even though it’s still relatively young. But what many don’t know is how effective it can be for businesses. In fact, according to Hubspot, over half of B2C companies use Pinterest to market themselves. If you want to learn more about how to leverage Pinterest for your business, here are some tips to help you get started.

Define Your Audience

Before you start creating pins, you need to define who you’re targeting. Are you looking to attract customers who already love your brand? Or do you want to reach out to potential clients who might not be familiar with you? Either way, you’ll need to decide whether you want to focus on a specific audience or just try to build up a following across different niches.

Set Up Boards

Once you’ve figured out who you’re trying to target, you can set up boards to organize your pins. Each board represents a category or topic, such as “Home Improvement” or “Food.” To make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck, you can group related boards together into folders. For example, you could create a folder called “Healthy Recipes,” which contains subfolders like “Breakfast” and “Snacks.” This allows you to easily find recipes that fit your needs while keeping things organized.

Pin Images and Videos

The best thing about Pinterest is that it’s easy to add pictures and videos to your posts. When someone hovers over an image, a pop-up box appears, allowing them to either save the picture directly or choose to view it on full screen. And because there’s no text associated with a pinned post, you can include lots of information without worrying about breaking the rules.

Make Your Pinterest “Pinnable”

Pinterest introduced the Save button in June 2016. This feature lets you add a “Save” button to your site so that visitors can easily pin your images straight to their boards. You can choose whether to display the button on every page of your site, just certain pages like about us, contact info, etc., or just specific pages like your blog posts.

Tracking Metrics

Pinterest Analytics lets you know exactly what works and what doesn’t work on your account. You’ll see how many people are pinning your pins, where they’re coming from, and how much traffic each post gets. This tool helps you make better decisions about your marketing strategy.

Important Pinterest business Phrases

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms out there. If you’re looking to grow your audience, reach potential customers, or build relationships with influencers, here are some important Pinterest for business terms you need to know.

Business Account vs Personal Profile

A business account allows you to manage multiple profiles. You’ll want to set up a separate business profile for each client or project. A personal profile, however, is free and lets you keep track of your interests and hobbies.

Create a Pinboard & Board

Pinboards are collections of related Pins. Boards are where you organize your Pins by category. For example, you could create a board called “Business Ideas.” Then, you’d add all the ideas you’ve had for businesses over the course of your life.

Create Your First Pin

To start off, you’ll want to make a basic pin. Click on the “+ New Pin” button near the top left corner of your screen. From there, type in a short description of your idea and select a location. Once you’re done adding information, click on the “Share” button.

Bringing it All Together

Pinterest is a tool that can provide so much insight into your business, and convert a lot of cash for you. It is a direct marketing platform that has proven to be extremely valuable. By putting just a little bit of time and effort into your business Pinterest account, you can turn your followers into customers. This tool is too valuable to ignore, and it’s not just for crafters anymore.

Amending a Personal Account to a Business Profile

Converting to a business from a personal account is a simple step-by-step process. To do this, follow these steps:

Step 1: Log into your personal account

Step 2: Select Settings

Step 3: Under the General tab, click on Convert to Business

Step 4: Fill out the form

Once you’ve converted your account, you’ll no longer be able to view any of your private content. However, you will now be able to access your boards, pinboards, and other settings.

Summary: Business Strategies For Using Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms out there. With over 500 million monthly active users, it’s no wonder why. But despite being such a huge success, many companies are still struggling to figure out how to best utilize this platform to grow their businesses.

Create Quality Pins

Quality pins are what really set you apart from the competition. They help you build trust with potential customers, and they help you stand out among the crowd. So, how do you create great pins? Start by taking your product photos seriously. Make sure they look good, and try to avoid blurry images. Then, add descriptive captions to each pin. Finally, include keywords related to your niche. These three things will increase the chances that someone will find your pins relevant, interesting, and useful.

Grow Your Audience

If you want to grow your following, start by making sure your profile looks professional. Add a description that includes your location, industry, and expertise. Include hashtags that relate to your niche, and consider adding a link to your website. This way, people will see that you’re legit. And don’t forget to follow other accounts that might be interested in your products. When you do this, you’ll be able to connect with influencers like yourself, and eventually turn those followers into buyers.

Promote Your Brand

Promoting your brand on Pinterest isn’t as easy as promoting your blog or Facebook page. That’s because Pinterest is all about visuals. So, instead of writing long descriptions, you should focus on including beautiful images. The goal here is to get people to click on your image so that they can learn more about your company. To do this, you should post at least five times per week.

Recap: Setting up Your Pinterest Business Account

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms for marketers today. If you want to start promoting your brand on the site, it helps to know what accounts you need to sign up for. There are three types of accounts: personal, business, and team. Each type offers different benefits. To learn how to set up each account, read on.

Personal Account

This is the account you use to follow people and pin things. You’ll need to provide some basic information about yourself, including your name, email address, phone number, and mailing address. You don’t need to verify your identity, but if you do, you’ll receive verification emails every time someone tries to log into your account. This makes it easier for you to keep track of your activity.

Business Account

A business account is needed if you are considering ever advertising your products or services on Pinterest. Business accounts come with additional features, such as tracking your performance metrics like impressions, reach, and clicks. They also give you access to analytics tools, allowing you to see how many people clicked on your pins.

Team Account

A team account lets you manage multiple business accounts under one roof. Your teammates can view and edit data for each individual account, making it easy to coordinate marketing efforts across several brands. Team accounts offer similar features to business accounts, plus they allow you to add team members.

Complete Your Business Profile by Inserting Your Company Information

Your business profile includes basic information about who you are, what you do and where you’re based. You’ll also want to link your LinkedIn account to your Business Profile, so you can use the same profile across multiple platforms.

Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms in use today. In fact, according to Statista, over 478 million active monthly users. And while many businesses are already familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc., Pinterest is still relatively unknown territory for many companies. But don’t let that stop you from getting involved and reaching your marketing goals.

Creative Strategies for Your Business Goals

Use Images

The best way to engage people on Pinterest is to provide compelling visual imagery. This includes photos, videos, infographics, quotes, memes, etc. You can even use animated GIFs. People love being able to see things visually, especially when it relates to something they care about.

Be Consistent

You don’t want to post every day, but you don’t want to miss out on opportunities either. Posting once per week is ideal.

Pin Relevant Information

If you’re posting about your product, make sure you pin related products too. For example, if you sell shoes, you might pin different types of shoes, like sandals, boots, sneakers, etc. Also, include pictures of your customers wearing your products.

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