No business, whether big or small, can escape marketing. While large businesses earmark big budgets for their marketing campaigns, small businesses have no other option but to forego that luxury and manage their marketing campaigns with relatively small budgets.

It is needless to say that small businesses need to be extra careful about the type of marketing strategies they adopt as they are mostly constrained by a small budget. They need to invest every penny wisely so that they derive the value for money and keep their businesses going.

To deal with the pressures of small budgets, small businesses can adopt the social media route to effectively market their products and services to bring in revenues.

It is due to efficiency and effectiveness; around 97 percent of the small businesses today prefer to market their products and services online through social media platforms. Social media for business has become a crucial marketing tool in today’s throat-cutting competition.

The emergence of a large number of social media companies is a sufficient indicator of the growing popularity of social media marketing among businesses, regardless of the size.

Enabling effective marketing without incurring heavy expenditure is not the only benefit of using social media by small businesses. Many other benefits make social media marketing a must for all small businesses. The following are some of the benefits:

 Presence of Your Customers

With more and more people spending considerable time on social media channels, you are likely to find most of your target audience on the channels. Also, newcomers to social media channels are increasing day by day.

Forecasts show that by 2021, more than 3 billion people worldwide will be using social media platforms. And, that has created lucrative opportunities for businesses, small as well as big, to promote their products and services online through social media channels.

Amazingly, there is no need for the audience to come to you, but on the contrary, you can go directly to your target audience to showcase your products and services using social media.

So, if you are yet out of social media to get in immediately, or else you will be missing out on the great opportunities of marketing your business offerings effectively and easily.

More Customer Engagement

Social media allows you to show the personalized aspects of your brand to your audience. So, they are likely to be more receptive to your messages.

On social media platforms, you have the freedom to be more conversational so you can speak more on your brand to your target audience. You can connect directly to your leads on social media channels rather than delivering one-way messages.

When you post valuable and informative content on social media, you will find an increasing number of people following your brand; and that throws an opportunity for you to pitch them for your products and services. You will also find people discussing your products and services on social media, enabling you to pick up valuable insights.

Social media engagement allows you to connect with your target audience in a personal way, and that helps you to sell your business offerings with ease.

Increase in Brand Recognition

Prompting your target audience to recognize your brand is an important marketing strategy. It works wonders. Enhancing your brand visibility, social media increases your brand recognition. Social media allows you to post compelling content to make your brand more familiar to your leads as well as existing customers.

Seeing your compelling content on social media platforms, people become aware of your brand and the associated unique selling propositions. As more and more people become acquainted with your business the chances of your products and services getting sold increase more than ever.

Increase in Inbound Traffic

Helping to get more inbound traffic to your business website, social media marketing has a direct impact on your search engine optimization efforts.

Your postings on social media help in bringing in more visitors to your website. You should, therefore, post quality content on social media platforms so that you can engage new leads to direct them to your website.

When new visitors get onto your website, you get the opportunity to convert them. So, keep on posting informative content on social media that adds value to your target audience.

Reaching Specific Audiences

Through social media marketing, you can target specific audiences strategically. Rather than posting a common message, you can post special messages targeting specific audiences.

To successfully post tailored messages, you need to firstly create a comprehensive list of your target audience, in terms of their age, gender, location, interest and so on.

Knowing these, you can create mind provoking content targeting specific people on social media. And that will help you in effectively reaching your target audience and driving more and more qualified leads to your website. It is due to the relevant traffic, you are likely to see increased conversion rates.

Cost-Effectiveness

Marketing through social media enables you to derive results even by cutting marketing costs—and this is one of the most notable advantages of social media marketing. For small businesses, it is a boon. Since, you only need to post content and converse with your target audience, investing lesser time might also give you valuable results.

You do not need to maintain expensive marketing teams to run your social media marketing campaigns. Regardless of the size of your budget, you can effectively run social media marketing campaigns to generate as well as convert new leads.

Improves Search Engine Rankings

Your social media presence is a big factor for search engines to consider your website in the search ranking. You should have a strong social media presence so that search engines find your website trustworthy as well as valuable, and the chances of search engines ranking your website higher in search results become high.

Having an active social media presence does not only help you increase the visibility of your website in search engine results but also enhances the likelihood of your social media profiles showing up on the first page of Google whenever visitors search for your brand.

Make sure that you publish informative and valuable content on social media to draw the interest of the visitors.

Improves Brand Loyalty

Small businesses, often constraint by budget, can leverage the power of social media to build brand loyalty among their target audiences.

You can effectively build relationships with your leads as well as customers to derive their trust and loyalty for your brand. The more you engage with your customers and prospects over social media, the more loyalty you will enjoy from them.

As the strength of your relationship with your customers as well as prospects increases, you can easily educate them about how your business is different from your competitors in terms of value. By working a bit on social media, you can turn them into loyal customers.

Spreads Word of Mouth Marketing

In many ways, social media has become an ideal platform for the word to mouth marketing. Nowadays, brands encourage people to leave behind their reviews and recommend their products and services to others. And such, recommendation helps businesses as consumers prefer buying from recommended brands.

Therefore, you should encourage your customers to leave behind their recommendations as well as reviews on social media to generate valuable word-of-mouth marketing to positively impact your sales. It helps you to build trust in your brand in your leads.

Knowing Customer Insights

Knowing the interests of your customers is very important for you to drive your business. And for small businesses, knowledge is particularly useful to develop prudent marketing strategies within a small budget. Social media is a powerful tool for you to gain such insights.

If you observe what your customers say on social media, you will become pretty acquainted with their likes as well as dislikes. You can also come to know the challenges your customers face and their concerns regarding your brand. You can use this information to improve the satisfaction of your customers.

Besides, you can also use social media analytics to know what type of content is popular within your target audience so that you can understand what type of content you should post to better engage them on social media.

Knowing the Competition

All businesses, whether small or big, should be aware of the competition level due to a simple reason—surviving in business. Social media provides you a reliable as well as a convenient platform to monitor the prevailing competition as almost all your competitors are likely to be present on social media.

This allows you to showcase your brand among the consumers and to educate them about the values your brand carries.

Besides, you can also project your brand as the best among all your competitors through influential social media content. Being present on social media helps you to generate more online traffic for your business website.

Targeting New Customers

Social media marketing has proved to be a boon to acquire new customers especially for small businesses, which usually do not have large marketing budgets. One of the good ways of connecting with consumers who do not know that your business exists is Social Listening.

By following the trending topics on social media related to your industry and checking out who is taking part in the conversation, you can easily figure out whom you can pitch for selling your products and services.

Also, you can engage industry influencers to recommend your products and services on social media so that consumers become aware of your brand and that will help you to acquire new customers.

Higher Conversion Rates

Using social media, you have a terrific advantage of connecting with your leads continuously by posting informative and valuable content.

And that improves the credibility of your brand and at the same time, it also improves your brand loyalty among your target audience. Posting informative, as well as compelling content on social media, allows you to build relationships with your target audience.

And that helps in more and more leads getting converted. Since social media is also a place for socializing as well as networking; it allows businesses to post conversational content, promoting their brands.

Quick Customer Service

Gone are the days when customers allow you a long time to solve problems related to your products and services. Nowadays, they want a quick solution to problems.

Staying active on social media is an effective way to understand the problems your customers face so that you can quickly initiate the necessary steps to solve the problems.

Most customers prefer to post the problems they face with products and services they purchase on social media. In this way, you can keep your customers happy and your brand positive.

Conclusion

By now, you have understood why social media marketing is indispensable especially for small businesses, which are usually limited by budgets. But, the other aspect you should know is the art of social media marketing and that is not as easy as it seems to be.

Running successful social media marketing campaigns requires prudence, skill, and experience; which you might not possess. As such, your social media marketing campaigns are not going to work, if you work on your own.

You, therefore, should avail of the top quality social media marketing services offered by a reliable company, such as TIS India. With a long history of offering top-notch social media marketing services, TIS India is the best choice for you to consider as your reliable  + partner.

The post Why Marketing through Social Media is a Must for Every Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Social media has radically altered the way consumers are able to interact with content. Hence, after social media, consumers want a comparably similar, intuitive, and interactive experience on the websites they visit.

This has led to a transformation in how “a good web design” is defined and hence how websites are now being designed.

Here are the “top 7” transformations in web design brought about by social media.

1.  Social Share Icons

Before social media, brand visibility and link building was the domain of online directories, forums, creating lead magnets, paid strategies, and direct blogging among others.

Now, social media has become one of the most important platforms for increasing brand awareness, generating qualified traffic, and consumer engagement.

As a result, social share icon have taken a prominent role in website design. The proper placement of the social icons, and the design of the social shares themselves can affect engagement and amount of qualified traffic to your social media pages.

2. Interactive Design for Social Media Pages

Before social media, website design limited how consumer could access content and how they interacted with other people. Social media revolutionized how content could be accessed, consumed, and shared, and how people interacted with one another.

This has affected how consumers perceive and judge a business. People expect similar type of content, interactivity, and experience when they visit other websites. Hence, you have to focus on creating quality design for your social media pages.

You have to create social profiles that grab the attention of your target audience, hooks them with your content, connects them to your message, and makes it easier for them to find further information about your business and follow it.

If your social media pages do not offer the same level of engagement, do not offer relevant information or content, or make it harder to follow your business, you will lose valuable leads.

3. Scrolling and Swiping

Before social media, long-from content was often the hot bed for over the fold ads and hence bad user experience. Hence, long-form page design was becoming a boon to visitors because it meant that a lot of content had to consumed/passed-over before they could get to the meat of the material.

Additionally, scrolling was seen as the failure of the website to readily communicate its message to the visitor. As a result, websites were designed to break the content into chunks, and hence multiple pages.

After social media and thanks to responsive website designs that re-align content (and font size) to make them viewable on devices, scrolling and swiping have become an essential part of the user experience. Coupled with parallax design, websites can now continue to keep their audience and visitor engaged longer.

4. More Visual Content Is Needed

Before social media, visual content (unique high-res images and videos) were rarely seen as essential components of engaging visitors. Stock images were readily used on website pages and in shareable content.

Social media engagement has fundamentally changed the structure of any content. Unique, high-resolution images and videos have become integral to the success of any piece of content. This places additional pressure on the website to:

• Readily load on the user’s device of choice,
• Scale the visual content so that it adapts to the screen size without reducing the user experience (a focus on responsive images and video embeds) and,
• Backend programming or installation of plugins that will load the content when it is required (for instance the popularity of lazy load plugins that prevents the page from loading all the images to increase loading speed).

As a result, websites have to be designed to be light on the user-side and heavy on the server-side, allowing faster loading times and richer user experience.

5. Greater User Interactivity

Before social media, consumers were dependent on how a website organized content and allowed interaction with that content. As a result, consumers did not have a single, standardized “sense” of what a good user experience and interaction meant. Hence, content organization and page and navigation design were primarily the domain of the business.

Social media has made access to information very easy. Simpler menus, content cards, intuitive interaction with content, and ready availability of multiple forms of content have made seamless interaction with content a core expectation on any other website.

Now web design has to focus more on the presentation of not just content but the controls that can be used to access the content available on site. This places a lot of focus on the design of the navigation pane and how menus are arranged and how each menu is categorized with further sub heads.

6. Non-intrusive ads

Before social media, website designs could easily remain ad-friendly and leverage their useful content to display ads over the fold and use intrusive ads.

After social media, website designs can no longer prioritize ad-displays and instead must prioritize user experience on their pages. Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.) are designed to be effectively used on smartphones.

How ads are displayed on these platforms has radically altered how consumers expect to see ads on any business website. As a result, the traditional obtrusive ads only increase bounce rates, forcing the website to focus more on designs that put content first and ads second.

7. Responsive Website Design

Facebook reported in June 2015 that on average, 844 million users were accessing its platform through mobile, daily. Facebook, along with other social media platforms are catering their mobile users by tailoring their apps so that their content is always displayed without compromising engagement or user experience as they migrate between devices.

They achieve this through responsive web design. A responsive web site uses fluid grid systems that allow them to sense the screen size of the device and automatically adjust their size and content so that the user can easily interact with it.

As a result, after social media customers expect websites to be responsive, automatically sense and readjust to their device’s screen size and hence offer them a seamless user experience across devices.

The post How Web Design Has Been Transformed By Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

A consistent social media presence is crucial for increasing brand awareness and visibility, establishing and sustaining relations with customers, and building authority and loyal following. This requires regularly engaging with your target audience — with relevant and meaningful content. It also requires remaining abreast of the social landscape and competition.

With the explosive growth and expanding reach of social media, all of this is not possible manually. Here are 7 primary aspects of your social media marketing presence and associated tools for enhancing it.

1.Know Who’s Talking About You and Your Brand with Mention

Go for Mention, an easy to use better alternative for Google Alerts. Unlike Google Alerts that rank the mentions and may not let you know the results immediately, Mention alerts you the moment you receive a mention!

Generally, Google Alerts works by sending you an email when it detects new web pages, articles, and blogs in the top 20 Google Web Search, or the top ten results in either Google News or Google Blog Search for a query. Hence, as long as there is no different in the top results, notifications are sent. This limits your access to less ranked mentions you may be receiving on the web or social media.

With Mention, the alerts are generated whenever you receive a mention. Furthermore, you can monitor a range of platforms including Web, Forums, Videos, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, News, and Images among others. Then there is the robust reporting feature that lets you monitor the spikes in your online presence, to whom the spikes are attributed to, and how well have they worked in your favor.

2.Track and Monitor your Social Presence Oktopost

Don’t forget Oktopost, an all-round social media management dashboard. It intuitively displays and groups social messages, making it a lot easier to monitor the content. Some of the best features of this tool include:

• Tracking conversions on your social media posts, going back as early as 3 months back at the time of your sign up. Hence, even as you set up you already have previous data to look at.
• Robust analytics tools for social campaigns
• The ability to capture information on your social leads

This tool also allows you to easily share content with your audience. As soon you create a social content, the tool automatically creates campaigns for each content letting you track the progress and see the associated metrics for that.

3.Automate all your social platforms with Rignite

In a short time period, Rignite has become the mother of all dashboards for monitoring multiple accounts. It allows you to monitor and control multiple social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) from a single dashboard. Within Rignite platform, you can also remotely collaborate with your social media team without any hassle.

Do you have the content and want to schedule the next whole month in advance? Start with the “schedule Profile Groups” feature that lets your schedule multiple social media posts for all your platforms. Do you want to remain abreast of interesting content? Automate the curation process by connecting with Feedly.

The biggest highlight is the Campaigns feature that lets you set up New Campaign where you can schedule a range of activities including series of posts, promotions, discounts, contests, growing your email lists, and more!

In addition, we have the in-built analytics that measure what’s working on your profiles and what’s not. It allows you to easily monitor and measure different trends on those media channels.

4.Remain Abreast of the Firehose with Topsy

A twitter stream nearly 9 thousand tweets per second through its very own content pipeline it calls the Firehose. Making sense of the millions of tweets that stack up during the day becomes hard. This is where Topsy comes into play.

Topsy is a free analytics tool for twitter that allows you to search, analyze, and monitors tweets. It allows you to easily tweets, shares, links, videos, and photos for specific person and topics. This data is crucial for deciphering the trends and enhancing your outreach campaigns with blogger.

5.Compare Your Facebook Page with That of your competition with LikeAnalyzer

Remain abreast of your Facebook page and that of your competition with LikeAnalyzer. The tool lets you analyze any Facebook page and give you a score out of 100. Whichever page you choose, the tool offers valuable information, including:

• Posts by Page — Reports the post history; their timing; number; length; shares, comments, and likes per post; and level of curiosity it generates, among others.
• Posts by Others — Measures the effectiveness of your/brand’s handling of fan response to each post
• Page Performance — The overall performance of the page in terms of the audience size, likes, and other metrics needed to be successful

The end report is a treasure-trove of information and insights about how well your page is doing. What’s more is that the report suggests improvements. When done on a competitor’s page, it offers business intelligence that you can leverage to make your page better.

6.Find the exceptional content that your audience will love with Sway

Sway is a handy and powerful tool for automating your search for quality content. Simply add the topics of your interest, or relevant to your niche, and submit. The tool will scour the web, curate the best content, and bring you a daily dose of this content for sharing with your audience. The single dashboard comes free, but if you want to manage multiple accounts from a single place then the paid plan starts at $9 for two dashboard/per month.

7.Find out what is Trending, and the influencers sharing them.

Use BuzzSumo to find what type of content is being shared by people,, for researching your competition, trending topics and more. The platform is geared to find and weed out the pieces of content that are being shared the most, and who is sharing them! This is a great method of finding the influencers in your nice. Prominent features of the tool include:

• Content Discovery and Curation — Leveraging social search it tells about the content that is trending, will trend, and will resonate with your audience. Lets you easily curate and share it
• Content Alerts — Let’s you remain abreast of the trending content (set-up for competitors, authors, keywords, and even domains)
• Influencers and Outreach — Because using influencer is mutual, and better than paid ads
• Content Insights — Analytics reports for the trending content, and performance of your content
• Research and Planning — Offers tools for faster and better research and planning of content and your competitors

It is a great tool for remaining abreast of the market — content, competition, audience, and your performance amidst it all!

These tools will immensely help you to enhance your social media presence. However, it is always a good idea to take help from social media marketing agencies if you want more professionalism and effectiveness in your marketing strategy.

The post 7 Effective Social Media Marketing Tools to Enhance Your Social Presence appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

First comes the text messaging, then email and now social media platforms seem to take the control of the internet world due to which the social media marketing has completely revolutionized the concept of digital marketing in the past few years. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have become popular names in the world of social networks for driving loyal customers and leads towards your website. Simultaneously, the growing popularity of mobile phones and tablets has increased the use of mobile internet extensively among the younger generation.

Hence, the mobile digital marketing and mobile SEO concept has also grown in significance as they offer an enhanced user engagement experience to the audience from anywhere and anytime. It means you cannot afford to overlook the increasing trend of mobile social campaigns because your audience’s spectrum has expanded from the desktop and laptop world to the mobile world. You have to concentrate on driving mobile traffic as well, which has given birth to “Mobile Social Campaigns”.

Is There Any Need for Creating Mobile Social Campaigns?

While social media sites have groomed their monetization schemes, social advertisement practices are also evolving at a faster rate. Facebook records one billion active mobile phone users daily, which has forced this social media giant to use its full potential for unlocking the overall revenue by the means of enhanced visibility via mobile news feeds, since everyone loves to spend their time on reading news feeds.

With people showing more inclination towards Smartphones, tablets, iPads, and iPhones, social media platforms are also modifying the way digital marketing is carried online. In such cases, it becomes mandatory for the social media marketers to devise effective mobile social campaigns for ensuring maximum revenue through both desktop traffic and mobile traffic.

As a social media marketer, you must consider every smartphone consumer as an opportunity for you because you never know when you can reach a potential buyer through the mobile medium. While best practices for mobile social campaigning might be unclear for many of us, but checking or evaluating if these campaigning is going as per our expectations is a bit complex process.

Meeting Expectations Via Mobile Social Media Campaigns

While measuring or evaluating the social media campaign is not an easy task, but we can take the help of Google Analytics, which give us key insights of our website’s traffic via different sources, including, desktop searches, direct traffic, social media traffic, and mobile traffic as well. Being a social media marketer, you can also use the data of Google Analytics for shaping effective mobile social media campaigns to impress and drive better mobile traffic on your website.

It is not always necessary that your mobile social media campaigns will always yield results as per your expectations. However, there are some important metrics, which will help you in evaluating your mobile traffic generated through social media campaigns. The Google Analytics metrics will help in proving why your mobile social media campaigns matters.

Check Your Mobile Engagement Using Google Analytics Metrics

You must have a clear picture of how mobile your customers are and then only, you will be able to develop an effective mobile social campaign for your website. Checking the percentage of your website visitors in desktop vs. mobile will help you in understanding, whether your mobile social media marketing efforts are meeting our expectations or not?

• For this you must specify your website data range at the top of Google Analytics dashboard.
• Select Overview option of the Mobile section under Audience in the left bard of Analytics dashboard.

You can see the breakdown of your website traffic including mobile traffic, desktop traffic and tablet traffic, as shown in the figure:

You can compare bounce rate, session durations for examining the insights of your target audience and if you find bounce rate is higher for your mobile audience, then you can recreate your mobile social media campaigns for ensuring improved lead generation through mobile traffic.

Using Web Analytics for Understanding Key Takeaways of Social Data

You can easily parse and evaluate the mobile and desktop social data with Web Analytics. You can also understand about the latest trends followed in social media campaigning process and so that you can push your own mobile social media campaigns for branding your business.

The key takeaways of social media platforms across both desktop and mobile social data are:

• Social media platforms help in offering enhanced customer retention rate, thus improving the chances for long term public relationship development, re-targeting and customer support.
• Social media sites offer ‘soft value’ to the digital marketers which include better user engagement experience, loyalty of customers and awareness of their business brands across different platforms.
• Twitter is one of the popular social channels that move the traffic on the top of the funnel, hence devising mobile social media campaigns taking care of the Twitter lead generation rate can help you significantly in maximizing the chances of revenue generation.
• Facebook videos are also becoming popular and most of the social media marketers are leveraging Facebook insights for measuring the performance. Employing this technique helps them in revising their mobile social media campaigning efforts for better outcomes.
• Here is an example of Adobe Creative Team, which has conducted an evaluation on one of its mobile social media campaign for driving leads for the CC product and the numbers display a major difference between the consumers rate engaged through social and non social.

Social media marketers can also use the website re-targeting technique in its mobile social media campaigning process for reaching across various social platforms. An example of this is the Facebook exchange (FBX), which can bring back the customers on your website via cookie-based re-targeting.

Best Examples of Successful Mobile Social Campaign Brands

1.Burger Chain of Milwaukee

This popular burger chain efficiently improved its weekly sales by 60% since it has successfully created 24K followers over its Twitter account where it displays channel inclined offers to its customers.

2. General Mills- Hello Cereal Lovers

Hello, Cereal Lovers is a popular social media campaign launched by General Motors in an effort to improve their lagging cereal sales this campaign covers a large social presence across different social platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

This campaign was successful in driving significant traffic through both desktop and mobile mediums to their websites, which eventually results in better leads and sales for them.

3. Breaking Bad –Name Lab

This critically acclaimed social media campaign over Facebook has not only dominated the airwaves, but it has resulted in huge success of a Facebook app, which has successfully garnered over 4.1 million impressions. The success of this campaign has proved that this type of user engagement works really well for ensuring success of your business over the internet.

Checking these experiences, you can also analyze your mobile social campaigns to see if the results are meeting your expectations or not. If your results are not up to the mark, you can rethink and recreate your social media campaigns to remain aligned with your other social media competitors. Mobile social media marketing has evolved recently and it is not going to see any type of downfall in the imminent years, hence, maximize your opportunities to gain maximum profit through effective mobile social campaigns.

The post Mobile Social Campaigns- Is Your Social Media Campaign Mobile Friendly? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Social media is a quite valuable tool for promoting blog content. In this age of the social web, getting people to notice your content is like asking them to spot a needle in a haystack. With thousands of posts per minute on social networking sites, it is a bit difficult for audience to find your content. One question must be popping in your mind that how can I cut through the noise and make my blog content better for social media? After in-depth research work, I have discovered efficient ways that will definitely make your content better for social media and help in effective social media marketing strategy.

Tips for writing valuable content for social media

For writing quality content to promote your business, 80/20 rule is followed by most business owners. 80/20 rule means 80% of the content you post on social media should be entertaining or informational, and 20% of content should be about business promotions, updates and events. This content marketing strategy is popular because if you share quality and informative content, your followers will be more willing to engage with your business-related posts.

It is easy to create 20% of business-related content, but the main problem comes when you write that 80% informative content. I have mentioned eight important points that you can consider to develop your content plan:

1. Know your target audience:

Before planning blog content, you should know your target audience and get answer of few questions like:

• What questions do your customers ask about your industry?
• What topics of interest do your customers share in common with them?
• What problems do your customers have that you can solve?

Answer of these questions will definitely help you in writing relevant and informative content and engage your audience to read your content.

2. Magnetize your article titles

By magnetizing your blog title, I mean it is important to make the titles unique so that it can pull people into your content. Do not write boring titles and make sure that the headlines you use are interesting, eye-catching, and clearly indicate what the content will be about.

Keep in mind that your article title should be short, crisp and catchy. Certain social media websites, like Twitter, limit the number of characters that can be used in a post. When people share articles, they often like to include their own commentary with it.

3. Give your content life with photos, graphics and videos

According to MDG Advertising, blog posts consist with images receive a whopping 94 percent more views than those without. Therefore, it is quite necessary to add fascinating, yet meaningful and informative photos in your content. You can find free photos on websites like CreativeCommons.org or Compfight.com and if you want to purchase photos, you can go to CanStockPhoto.com or Getty Images.

People love behind-the-scenes glimpses into other peoples’ lives, which is also true in business promotion content. If you writing business related content, you can share inner workings of your business’s life with photos and videos that give followers a better sense of your staff, your inspirations and your process. It is also a great way to share your content in Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and other visually-oriented social channels.

4. Add fascinating meta-descriptions

When you share a blog post on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+, they automatically pull in a description of the post. Most sites generate this description from the URL’s meta-description. These meta-descriptions are also very helpful for social media optimization, though they have no longer use in search engine optimization. Make sure that each blog post, web page, and landing page includes an enticing meta-description to attract social media users to check out your content.

5. Add social sharing buttons

As per recent study from BrightEdge Technologies, sites that include social sharing buttons generate 7x more mentions than those that do not include these buttons. If you add social sharing buttons for sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+, it will encourage your website visitors to share your content in social media. You can add these buttons to every landing page, blog article, web page, and other piece of content you create.

If you want people to share your content, you should position social share buttons right where any reader will find them. I typically like to put these social sharing buttons at the top or on the side (scrolling with the content) so they are hard to miss.

6. Create meaningful and strong quotes within the content

When you have something meaningful or interesting to say, you can make it easy for the readers to share the quote by offering a “click to tweet” link. This is one of the best ways to optimize your blog post. As this trick does not require a lot of work for the audience and it easily draws attention to the sharing option, readers are more likely to tweet your post. You can do this following ways:

• Go to ClicktoTweet.com and create your tweet. Generate and copy your link to incorporate it into your content.
• You can install Click to Tweet by Todaymade plugin onto your WordPress website. In the CMS, you can click on the Twitter icon in edit bar. After that, input the text you want people to tweet, and the plugin will create a box with your input text in it and a “Click to Tweet” link.

These quotes are not only helpful for getting audience to tweet your content, but also can be used as a marketing tool to capture readers’ attention.

7. Include a Call-to-Action

It is one of the effective ways to increase exposure of blog content on social media. You can ask people to share your content, but do not simply say, “Please share my post!” Instead, you should connect with your readers and make them want to share your blog post by focusing on how they feel or have felt reading your piece of content.

You can tell your reader exactly what to do by mentioning which social media platform to share on so you do not leave them with too many options. Here are some good examples calls-to-action:

• Loved these thoughts? Let everyone know these thoughts by liking this post on Facebook
• Do you share same views? Tell the world by sharing this post on Facebook
• Rise to the challenge and help spread the word by sharing this post on Facebook

8. Showcase Customer Quotes and Accolades

Social media networks are one of the best forums for word-of-mouth recommendations. If you are getting customers’ feedback via online review sites, email, or in person, you can highlight these comments on social media (if your customers are not sharing their feedback there already).

In addition to this, you can brag about accolades and an award you receive from other organizations and tag those organizations in your posts that will give you opportunity to be re-shared as well, which can get your business even more exposure.

The Bottom Line

Put some of these strategies to the test and I am sure you will see your engagement metrics improve in no time! Just try out these tips and let us know how these tips are able to make your blog content better. The possibilities for successful social media marketing through content are endless. If you want to enhance social media optimization of your content in a professional and effective manner that too in less time, I recommend you to hire experienced social media experts.

The post 8 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Content for Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

New technology is constant inspiration for filmmakers. It isn’t just the technology itself that is featured in various movies. Often the filmmakers focus on how new technology is changing our society, or they focus on how technology might change our society in the future. It comes as no surprise that there are many films featuring social media, since social media affect our society so deeply.

Movies about social media can be a lot of fun, featuring inside jokes and also teaching us a little about the people who actually created these technologies. From these movies we learn what makes us love social media so much and why they have become so popular in a society where they didn’t exist until a few years ago. We also get to see how social media might be negatively affecting our lives and future.

Below, we have a list of the top 20 movies that feature social media:

1. TRON

This movie was released in 1982 and wowed the whole world with its original concept. The plot is about a computer genius who creates his own artificial reality and winds up living in it. Well before the birth of facebook and Google, the movie is almost prophetic about how many people would end up truly living most of their lives through computers in the future.

2. The Social Network

A rather freeform depiction of Facebook’s founding by Zuckerberg, The Social Network shows us an inside view of Zuckerberg’s life during the time he was creating facebook. His passion to make facebook succeed as a business causes him to lose some of his closest friends. The movie is all about a man that created a social network that helps people make friends, while losing his own friends.

3. We Live In Public

In this documentary we see part of the life of former billionaire Josh Harris, who lost his fortune during Web 2.0. The film includes many of his highly controversial experiments on how technology can affect the lives of various individuals.

4. #chicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator

This is the story of a teenage girl that assisted the Syria revolution through the use of social networks from her home in Chicago. This movie is all about the power of social media and human passion.

5. The Matrix

In the Matrix, a young computer hacker suddenly realizes that the whole world is just an illusion created by monstrous machines and that he is actually living in a virtual reality. He then decides to become the liberator of humanity and start a revolution against the mechanical oppressors.

6. The Pirates of Silicon Valley

Without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs there would be no social media as we know them today. This is why viewing this biography of the computer genius duo is a must for every social media lover.

7. UnFRIEND

This drama portrays how social media can become a weapon in the hand of a socially frustrated teenage boy. The movie is all about how tools like social media can be used for extreme harm, instead of entertainment when in the wrong hands.

8. Terms and Conditions May Apply

If you ever wondered what’s at stake when you press an “I Agree” button on the internet, then this movie is a must watch for you. In Terms and Conditions may Apply you get a clear inside view of what companies like facebook and Google do with the information you freely offer them.

9. #140 Characters: A Documentary about Twitter

This is as the title says an in depth documentary about the extremely popular social media: Twitter. In the movie we see how Twitter marketing has changes the world in the few years it exists and how people are affected by its use and existence.

10. Adoration

In this film, a French teacher makes her student lie about his past, while the whole class watches. The story is so breathtaking that the boy decides to bring a whole internet audience to watch him recite it. From then on the plot thickens and dark secrets about the truth are revealed.

11. Startup.com

A movie that’s a “must see” for people considering to create their own startup site. In Startup.com you get to follow what happened to the eCommerce website govWorks during the time when the internet market dropped significantly. This is a good view of the beginning and end of the dot com startup phenomenon.

12. State of Play

This breathtaking film is all about the suspicious murder of a government official’s girlfriend. After a lot of intrigue and detective work, two reporters manage to reveal a very dark story. The movie is all about the cost of the privatization of homeland security, as well as the differences between blog journalism and traditional media.

13. Hard Candy

This shocking thriller is all about a 32 year old man who tries to seduce a 14 year old girl through an online chat. What he didn’t know is that this is no ordinary teenage girl, but a dangerous vigilante who seeks to take revenge for the sexual assault of a little girl. At the end the 32 year old pedophile gets more than he bargained for.

14. Catfish

In Catfish we get an in depth look at the unique online relationship of a man named Nev and a woman named Angela. Angela used over 15 different facebook profiles to promote her own dream of becoming an artist through deceit. This documentary is all about how the anonymity of the internet can affect our better judgment and honesty.

15. The Internship

The Internship is a very fun comedy about two men who cheat their way into a Google internship. Surrounded by geniuses and specialists, they manage to add their own flair to the project, while also getting into a few tight spots.

16. Generation Social: A Social Media Film

In this documentary we get to see firsthand how our social nature is driving social media to expand and determine our future. Through three speakers we get to see about the technology, the concepts and the marketing that goes on around every social media we encounter.

17. Disconnect

In Disconnect we see how the wrong use of social media can create immense problems in the everyday lives of normal individuals. We see how using the internet can ruin relationships, destroy privacy and even decimate lives. This is a solemn reminder that social media are tools which have to be used ethically and carefully.

18. Julie and Julia

Julia is a young cook in the 50’s who tries to write her own cookbook while she also studies French cooking at “Le Cordon Blue”. Julie’s story happens half a century later, when her dead end job drives her to cook every single recipe of Julia’s book and write a blog about it. The highlight of the movie is when Julie’s Blog and Julia’s book makes them both famous.

19. You’ve Got Mail

In this classical movie, we have two officer coworkers who despise each other in real life, but steadily form a romantic interest for each other through emails. The movie features the old AOL system, which once was extremely popular for mailing. It is an optimistic movie about how social media might give us a different viewpoint society.

20. InRealLife

This is a documentary about teenagers and children who begin using social media from a very tender age. The movie shows all the downsides and problems that might occur when juveniles spend too much of their life online.

The post 20 Most Popular Movies About Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

It is crystal clear in 2014 that social media now plays as significant or more a role in Google’s search engine ranking algorithms, as other commonly used traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as back-linking. However, due to the complexity and secrecy surrounding the vast amount of search engine algorithm updates that major search engines, such as Google have performed over the past year or two, including the Hummingbird, Penguin and Panda updates in 2013, it makes it just about impossible to know the exact amount of weight that social signals, such as Facebook likes, shares; Google + 1’s and Twitter Retweets and Shares are given in determining how high your website is ranked on Google’s SERP’s. That said, there have been numerous studies performed by top social media metrics and SEO firms, such as Quick Sprout (www.quicksprout.com) and Social Metrics Pro (www.socialmetricspro.com) where they have found that Facebook Likes/Shares, Twitter Shares/Retweets and Google + 1’s have the greatest impact on website’s SERP rankings. Nonetheless, in what follows I will explain the top 5 ways that you can leverage your businesses social media accounts to improve SERP rankings in 2014.

Use Google Plus, Google Plus Local & Google Places For Business To Increase Your SERP Rankings And Visibility

Since Google is the largest search engine on earth it is not surprising that Google +’s main social signals (i.e. Google page/post + 1’s) rank highly in their SERP’s. For instance, as Quick Sprout CEO, Neil Patel illustrated in a recent Social Signals Experiment Quick Sprout performed on six similar businesses in a medium sized city; one of the businesses surveyed showed a 14.63 % boost in their SERP rankings, due to obtaining 100 Google + followers. Whereas, Facebook Likes, Shares and Tweets accounted for significantly less increases in the six businesses SERP rankings. For example, one of the businesses surveyed in the Social Signals Experiment received 70 Facebook Shares and 50 Likes, which resulted in an increase of 6.9% in their SERP rankings. Moreover, Patel (2014) asserts that Facebook Likes/Shares, Twitter Retweets and Google + 1’s make a significant impact on increasing your businesses SERP rankings for low competition keywords.

In addition, having a professional and complete Google + Local business page is important for increasing your website’s SERP rankings, and especially if you are a local business owner, since Google reported recently on its Google Places Stats and Facts page that “20% of all Google searches are location based”. And also according to a recent study done by ComScore in 2013, 56% of mobile phone owner’s use their phones for local searches.

Furthermore, if you own a business that has a physical location you should definitely sign up for a free Google Places For Business account so that your customers can easily find information about your business, regardless of the device (mobile or desktop) or platform (Google + Local, Google Search or Google Maps, etc.), which they are searching on (see image below for example).

Businesses Should Focus On Sharing High Quality Multimedia Rich Content

Today with the ever-increasing use of social media apps, websites and increased importance of social signals influencing businesses SERP’s, it is absolutely crucial that businesses create high quality, multimedia rich content which is catered to their core customer base. For instance, I recently signed up for SEO website, Quick Sprout’s newsletter, in which they send me their latest SEO blog posts about every day or two, and which are typically very informative and media rich (i.e. including info-graphics, images, etc.). For example, Quick Sprout CEO, Neil Patel’s latest article How Social Signals Impact Search Engine Rankings (2014), which has a variety of informative and interesting looking gifo-graphics to demonstrate to the user what social signals have the greatest impact on SERP rankings and how best to optimize your businesses use of social media to enhance your SERP rankings. For instance, Patel (2014) asserts that “adding images to your social media posts increases your brand’s chance of social media engagement by 200% and that creating a contest will increase your chances of obtaining social engagement by 39%”.

Use High Quality Social Media Management / Analytics Tools

Using high quality social media management and analytics tools, such as Hootsuite in which you can manage and track the results of multiple social media accounts simultaneously on all of the main social media networks, including Facebook, Google +, Twitter and LinkedIn. And which in turn allows you to plan and efficiently promote your businesses key social media messages and content by automating your social media messages. Thus, allowing you to spend more time focusing on other more important aspects of your business, while still promoting your brand’s products and services on social media. And in turn, will if done in a strategic way, significantly boost your business website’s SERP rankings.

Take Advantage Of Facebook Graph Search and Twitter Search to Discover, Refine New Target Audiences

The introduction of Facebook’s powerful new Social Graph search feature in early 2013, allows social media marketers, online advertisers and business website owners to discover new target audiences by searching for more specific local, national, international businesses, interests, people, or combining certain Facebook Interest pages or people who like certain pages to come up with new and interesting target audiences for their social media marketing and advertising campaigns. For instance, instead of just targeting one certain group of people, based on their age and interests, such as Conservative 18-24 year-old Catholics from the United States, you could search for Catholic Conservative And 18-24 years old from the United States And University of Harvard Graduates. Thus, this clearly would give you an entirely different set of people than just Catholic Conservative 18 to 24 year olds from the United States.

Consider Using Photo-Based Social Media Services For Your Business

Although the active user base’s of Pinterest (over 70 million active users) and Instagram (150 million active users) are still relatively low compared to the main social media networks, such as Facebook (1.2 billion active users), Google + (300 million active users) and Twitter (over 259 million active users), these social media platforms can still have a significant impact on increasing your businesses brand awareness and sales via referral traffic to your website. For instance, according to a recent article by Craig Smith on Expandedramblings.com entitled (January 2014) By The Numbers: 50 Amazing Pinterest Stats : “the total number of Pinterest social referrals to commerce websites was 20%, as of September 2013”, which is pretty significant. However, as Smith (2014) points out: most Pinterest users (80%) are women and reside in the U.S. (60%), so unless your business target audience includes women from inside of the U.S; perhaps it would be more efficient for you to use other social media networks such as, Facebook, Twitter and Google + to enhance your business website’s SERP rankings on major search engines such as, Google.

Conclusion

Clearly in 2014 social media signals are playing an increasingly significant role in determining how the main search engine algorithms, such as Google’s Hummingbird algorithm rank businesses and individual’s websites on their SERP’s. However, as Patel (2014) and Yu (2013) point out; not all social media signals and authors are valued the same by Google. In fact there seems to be a growing consensus among SEO and social media experts, such as Patel (2014) and Yu (2013) that Google + 1’s of Google pages, Facebook likes, shares and Twitter shares and retweets are among the most highly valued social signals in determining websites SERP rankings on Google. Nonetheless, depending on the target audience of your current core customer base and the types of products and services you are selling, it is also definitely worth checking out Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest to see if they are the right fit for your business.

The post 5 Social Media Marketing Strategies To Improve SERP Rankings in 2014 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Although I am sure there are many different templates and techniques that Social Media Marketers use when creating social media plans for their clients, I strongly believe from years of social media marketing experience that any well-planned and effective social media campaign starts with the following five essential ingredients, to ensure that it is as successful as possible. And thus, that the client receives a great ROI from the Social Media Marketer who they have recently hired to manage and plan their social media campaign or manage their businesses social media accounts in general.

1. Do Your Research

   Prior to meeting with the client that you are supposed to create a social media marketing plan for, a great habit to begin (if you have not already done so) is to do some preliminary research on your client’s current social media accounts, such as, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc; so that you can get a good idea of the types of social media campaign messages, techniques they have used in the past and how many Twitter followers and Facebook friends they currently have. This way you show your client right from the start that you are a professional Digital Marketer and that you are serious about helping them develop an effective social media campaign that will garner great results for their business, including increased brand awareness, social reach, sales leads and sales.
   

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask Tough Questions During Your Initial Client Meeting

   Asking and preparing key questions related to developing a professional and strategic social media plan is crucial, since in order for you to write a detailed and professional social media marketing plan for your client, you will need to know as much about their business as possible so that the social media work you complete for them is as successful as possible and reaches the key goals that the client intends to reach, such as increased brand awareness via social media likes, follows, shares, mentions, retweets and engagement on their businesses main social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google + and Instagram. Furthermore, do not be afraid to ask difficult questions during the initial meeting with your client. For instance, you can ask them questions such as, What social media marketing techniques and strategies have you employed in the past? What are your main objectives for this social media campaign? Have you ever used Facebook advertising in the past, or if not, would you consider using Facebook advertising to increase your brand awareness, sales leads and sales for your business website?
   

3. Keep Your Client’s Key Social Media Campaign Messages To A Maximum Of 3 Messages/Campaign

   Aiming to keep your client’s key social media campaign messages to a maximum of three key messages per social media campaign will not only make it easier for you to remember these key messages, but also will make it more memorable in the hearts and minds of your client’s target audience. For instance, from May to July of 2013 I helped create a social media marketing campaign for a local Non-Profit organization based in London, Canada  and for this campaign (i.e. Conversation Club), which was a social media campaign primarily devised to increase awareness about the Conversation Club for Newcomer Canadians and post-secondary volunteers. And moreover, to increase volunteer enrollment in the Conversation Club by post-secondary graduates. So me and the Marketing Coordinator decided to stick to two main social media campaign messages, since the main target audience was only post-secondary volunteers and Newcomer Canadians. The key social media campaign messages included:

   • “Live Together, Learn Together”
   • “Make a BIG Impact by Joining Conversation Club Today!”

4. Employ A Variety Of Effective Social Media Campaign Tactics To Keep Your Target Audience Engaged

   Using a variety of social media campaign messaging tactics, including posting viral videos, info-graphics, facts, and inspirational quotes to your client’s social media accounts is essential in keeping your client’s key target audience interested and engaged. For instance, as part of Non-Profit organization Charity Water’s social media campaign for World Water Day, on March 22 2013, they used this call to action (shown below) to get people in India to support their campaign, which seemed to be quite effective with this tweet alone receiving 164 retweets and 21 favourites.

5. Create A Detailed Mock Up Social Media Campaign Schedule

   Another great way for Digital Marketers and Social Media Marketers in particular to impress their clients, is to create a detailed and custom-tailored social media mock up campaign schedule. The social media campaign schedule should be at least fifteen days long, so that your client can get a good idea of the caliber of creative and targeted social media messages that you are capable of creating for their social media campaign. And not only will it likely impress the client’s that you are working with on creating a social media campaign, but it will save you and your client a great deal of planning and discussion time later on when you might not have the time to come up with new social media messages for all of your client’s social media accounts. That said, I highly recommend that you use this social media campaign schedule as sort of a rough road map when you are working on your client’s social media campaign, as it is likely that you or your client might want to modify some of the campaign messages to better grab the attention of your client’s key target audience.

Conclusion

Although it would seem to many that there is not much planning or thinking involved in creating a successful social media campaign; the truth is that an effective and professional social media campaign takes quite a bit of planning, knowledge and research to ensure that your client’s main social media marketing campaign objectives and expectations are either met or better yet, exceeded. And one excellent way to better ensure that your client’s social media campaign objectives are met or exceeded is to create a well-planned, targeted and concise social media marketing plan and campaign schedule.

The post 5 Key Ingredients For Creating A Professional Social Media Marketing Plan appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

So Watch out these 5 trends compiled by our Social media marketing team to ensure you make the most out of it (social media) in FY-2014!!  Join hands with us in a journey that talks about everything from Video Advertising & Promoted Tweets to Content Marketing & Sponsored Media !!

1)      An Active Twitter User is worth 100 dollars –

Yes, Twitter is back to top again & we owe all Gratitude to Twitter Ads!! So if you mean money, we would strongly suggest training your social media advertising experts to point their fingers at Twitter advertisements. Just try flooding your network with Twitter Ads & see the magical spellbound on your audience. Injecting the right combination of resources into the ads platform is a prerequisite for all social media advertising experts who are looking to pile up Gold Coins for their clients in 2014. Whilst Twitter is already on a grandprix with Facebook , Linkedin & other social media platforms to evolve their advertising concept in a big way ; the heat on Conversion Rate, Click Through Rate & ROI is still steaming up top business players in the market .

So let’s take a quick look on the exquisite newly yet to come features of Twitter, a whole different ballgame that is set to turn the table altogether this fiscal year.

a) Lead Generation Card, the new ace recently added to the deck of Twitter Cards in 2013, is going to expand even more in 2014 allowing  fields additional to just the client’s username & email address. This will no doubt save whole of your social media advertising expert team from casting arrows in the dark and facilitating exponential hikes in your revenues in a jiffy !!

b) Gradual evolution of the promoted tweet ad units through “call to action” feature will come as a whipped cream on your Brand  Icecream. So those who are still apprehensive of Twitter Ads are sure to miss out on a lion’s share of Easy Revenue!! Seriously !!

c) Tracking the conversion rate will be the main focus & this will definitely map ROI Prediction in a much much better way !!

Don’t forget to keep a vulture’s eye on the IPO statistics frequently to make sure you are not sleeping under a rock while competitors are busy strategising to increase their footfall.

 2)    Video Advertising will be the next epidemic in 2014

This is evident from what USA today reported on 3^rd Jan, 2014 – “Twitter shares are back on the rise on renewed optimism for its digital video advertising plans”.

Winds of change in the online trends has brought about a new business model & that’s Video advertising. Both the topmost Social Media Platforms Facebook & Twitter are striving hard to promise visual delight to their customers by airing content that not only leaves an everlasting impact on the targeted audience but also bounds them to share it amongst friends & colleagues present within their community. Facebook’s idea of selling Video ads in 2013 is likely to be implemented in 2014 with full on desire to give bullhorn competition to You Tube Advertising concept as well. Hitting the subconscious of the targeted audience by mapping relevant video ads after rigorous demographic study is all that our Social Media Advertising Expert Team has to say!! Thus, the growth in the revenue comes naturally along with the thrilling eye feeds promised by Video Advertisements.

3)    Google+ Ad Campaign – the Forthcoming Monster of Social Media Advertising

Google+ Platform introduced ads which can please audience in a way that can take Brands to the zenith. Showcasing its new ad unit “+Post”  Ads Concept, the newest monetization effort put forth by Google is all set to display ads with the expandable features running around the Google Display Network. The ad image can be clicked by users to have a broader look along with the comments thereby incrementing the Click Through Rates (CTR)  launching your Brand even more quickly.  Google+ advertising campaigns run by your Social Media Advertising expert team can boost up the success rate of your business to 30% more than what it might take with just focusing on Twitter & Facebook alone. It is always clever to play your cards right by ruling out the possibility of failure in every outcome that must lead to success.

4)   Branded Content Marketing & Sharing  

When it comes to sharing & posting, forgetting Content Marketing for your Brand is a Blunder. Make sure you don’t indulge in that rude crime with your ROI by establishing a kinship like relationship with your content marketing team. The void between your web traffic & the conversion rate can only be filled by keeping constant focus on what content you create & share. 2013 already depicted a tremendous loss in terms of revenue to the traditional search engine optimizers & this trend of SEO is likely to see a complete downturn this year in 2014. That’s where a complete new concept of Branded content marketing comes into picture. From Keynotes, articles to guest posts & Press Releases, share everything on the Social Media Platforms that helps you build that repo with your customers which influences them to take purchasing decisions.

5)    Rise in Sponsored Advertising   & Head on Collision between Paid & Organic Reach

In an endeavour to constantly maximize engagement with targeted audience, social media advertising experts are all set to shell out money for sponsored advertising. Paid Media topped all lists of surveys conducted in 2013 & will continue to set the bar in 2014 with beefy statistics compared to Organic media. Concepts like Facebook’s Promoted Posts & Twitter’s Promoted Tweets are likely to slam Organic tactics in 2014 that are being followed previously by most of the social media advertising experts there by affecting the Brand Reputation in a direct proportion.

So for those social media advertising experts  who are still planning  to advertise without keeping in mind the above mentioned  trends, are indeed putting their online business niche at stake !!  Thankfully, the whole world being on a Digital Spree, you need not burn a hole in your pocket for opting out that costliest yet cheap marketing way – Ah !! Guessed that right; that’s Print Media !!

The post Top 5 Predictions for Social Media Success in 2014 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Every business has its own niche, target audience and competitors. This diversity demands that every business should model its own social media marketing strategy. However, all of the social media tactics are based on a few basic questions.

• Which is the best social media platform for your business?
• Is one platform enough or you need to focus on multiple social media websites at a single time?
• How you should target your audience?
• Who are your target audience?
• How often should you post updates?

Keeping in mind all of these questions, here is a strategy that will cater to  the needs of most of the small businesses.

Identify Your Goals:

The ultimate marketing goal of any business is to earn more and more profit. But when it comes to  social media marketing, before thinking of profits, you have to think of your customers and your business. The goals that you will need to achieve include:

• Consistent online presence
• Engaging posts to keep your audience loyal to your page
• Long term audience
• Back links
• Sharing and more sharing

Once you have identified your goals, the next step is to use all of your wits to achieve them. For this purpose, social media offers you a wonderful opportunity to  create brand awareness so that most of the people know what you are offering them. Other things that you can do through the social media sites  include protecting your reputation, creating online rapport with your audience and enhancing your PR.

Identify Your Target Audience:

How would you plan your strategy if you do not know who are your target audience? Simple as that, before making your social media strategy, make a profile of your target audience. In this profile, include everything from age,  gender, demographics, profession, interests, necessities, local or international market and any other information that might look relevant to your business.

Identify Most Appropriate Social Media Platform for Your Business:

Most of the marketers jump to this step directly when they start their social media marketing for small business. However, what they do not realize is that unless you know all about above mentioned two important factors, you cannot decide, which social media platform is most suitable for your business. Moreover, it is not necessary that you should start with one platform at a time or you should go with all of the major platforms at once. Keeping in mind your goal and target audience, you should format a strategy and priorities on the basis of your needs instead of current trends. Major social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube.

Define Your Unique Selling Proposition:

Unique Selling Propositions or USP is the ultimate defining feature that will distinguish your business from rest of the online businesses. Your USP should be designed keeping in mind your target audience and the business goals. The information collected at this step will help you finalize not just your social media marketing plan but it will also help you at the time of creating a brand.

Your Own Editorial Calendar:

Editorial calendars are not just for content marketing. They could also be used as an amazing tool to synchronize your social media marketing. With the help of an editorial calendar you can prioritize what you should be sharing this week. You can also create a column for the topics that mostly generate tremendous output from your audience and they could also be used to keep material to start conversations and monthly themes.

Tracking the Progress:

Last but not the least there should be a plan that helps you trace your marketing campaign over the period of time. Google Analytics is an excellent tool to measure success of social media marketing for small businesses. With the help of this tool, and other similar tools, you can track your progress, catch loopholes and can devise counter strategies if the strategy fails to achieve target goal.

The post What Steps Should be Taken to Determine the Perfect Social Media Strategy appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.