Remote social media staff are almost certainly experiencing more stress than they used to be. Their content strategy has been shaken up, and they may be hesitant to meet up to get on the same page about it.

To stay productive, social media managers need to talk through remote work best practices. While many of these are common across roles, some deserve special consideration by social media teams:

Revisit Your Content Calendar

The most important job for your social media team is to publish content for your business. Coordinating content development can be tricky when different time zones, work hours, and social media platforms are involved. Misalignments can be avoided and solved by developing a comprehensive content calendar.

This calendar will show when pieces of content are scheduled for, what topics they cover, and who is in charge of each post. Reducing guesswork minimizes mistakes and makes everyone more productive. 

Use Project Management Software

When working with any sort of remote team, you need to have a central hub to manage deliverables. A project management platform is how the rubber of your content calendar meets the road. 

Use it not just to track projects on specific progress, but to host your content calendar, style guide, team roster, and whatever other documents your team needs to get work done. Set expectations on who’s responsible for updating what fields and when. 

Project management software is critical for communication on remote teams. Activity feeds keep conversations about content accessible to the entire team. These tools also let social media staff share documents and photos, as well as brainstorm new topics and talking points for their campaigns.

Ditch the Timecards

Many managers worry about their remote teams putting in an honest day’s work. Measuring output rather than hours worked takes the stress off of everyone. Instead of worrying about hour logs, let their content’s performance do the talking.

For your social media campaigns, set deadlines to measure progress. Pieces of content should be submitted by a certain time and date. For longer projects, such as channel audits or keyword research, set checkpoints for review and potential pivots.

Provide a Tech Allowance

Not all remote workers have fancy computers and software at home. Most are doing the best they can with whatever is available to them. Make sure their tools don’t hold them back by providing a monthly technology allowance.

Survey your team to find out what they need, and treat this like a gym or health benefit. Perhaps a $50 credit each month is in order.

Don’t be picky about what your social media personnel spend this on. If a pair of noise-cancelling headphones is what they need for a productive setup at home, then so be it. 

Make Meetings More Fun

Your social media team is full of creative minds. Appeal to their right brain by making meetings more fun. 

At least once a week, perhaps at your whole-team meeting, play a game or go through an ice-breaker activity. This will keep team members loose, help them build stronger bonds, and maybe even inspire them to come up with a creative piece of content.

Keep track of the number of meetings you hold. Frequent meetings can be inefficient and increase the risk of employee burnout. Less frequent meetings that are more carefully planned and executed provide greater results. 

Try on New Roles

Does each member of your team fit in their role? Consider whether they might be better suited to do something else while remote.

Roles need not be permanent. For example, you can create roles for ad buying, photo editing, copywriting, and trend research. If team members are skilled in more than one of those areas, you can switch them around to prevent burnout and find the best fit. 

If you do play musical chairs with team roles, make sure you keep roles updated in your project management system. When a team’s members don’t see each other in person every day, it’s easy to get confused. 

Focus on Retention

Finding and training a quality social media team is a task in and of itself. Don’t let the shift to remote work jeopardize the team-building work you’ve done.

Attracting and retaining top talent is tough in the best of times. When everyone is remote, it’s even more time-consuming and expensive to hire, train, and integrate new workers.

Think about your management style. Are you being supportive enough? Perhaps you need to ease up a little with criticisms, or relax restrictions on the hours when team members are expected to be online. Whatever it takes to retain your best team members is worth the effort.

One way or another, you’ll eventually need to fill a role. Get ahead of this challenge by developing a remote onboarding process. Making new hires comfortable as quickly as possible will keep the team firing on all cylinders. 

Make Yourself as Available as Possible

Managing a remote team means balancing a lot of varying work schedules. While you can’t be online 24/7, the best way to take care of everyone is to make yourself as available as possible. 

Be sure to let each team member know when you expect to be online. Encourage them to email or Slack questions even when you’re not. Respond as promptly as possible.

With that said, beware of burning yourself out. If a question can wait until dinner is over, spend the time with your family. While your team might need you at all hours of the day, you can’t neglect your interests and responsibilities at home. 

The good news is, working remotely is something many social media teams have been doing for some time. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking they’ve already mastered its challenges. 

During Covid-19, all of us are re-learning our roles and workflows. That includes your social media staff, and it’s your job to support them along the way. 

The post 8 Tips for Managing Your Social Media Team Remotely appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

It doesn’t matter what new business model or leadership trend emerges, the emphasis on the customer doesn’t change one iota. 

There’s no doubt that the importance of the customer remains a critical element of success. However, the current question facing many leaders is how to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience during a pandemic. With face-to-face meetings difficult and customer service teams working remotely, here are some of the best ways that you can make sure to avoid a customer service slump during the COVID-19 pandemic.

1. Unite Your Customer Service Channels

Once upon a time, a company’s customer service consisted of a few dozen reps in a call center. Now, the modern customer service experience is provided through a number of different channels, including:

• Email.
• On-site chat.
• Phone.
• Text.
• Social media.

With so many different customer service options available — and often more than one utilized by a single customer service department — it’s important that you unite these into a single contact center experience. 

With a global epidemic raging and personnel scattered to the four winds as they work, it’s essential that your various customer service communication channels become as united as possible. It’s wise to focus this unification effort on a cloud-based system that doesn’t require any physical maintenance. Instead, provide a single online location where customer service messages can be collected. This gives your cloud-based contact team easy access to any and every customer communiqué, whether it’s an email, a social post, or any other message.

2. Set Clear Expectations, Goals, and Objectives

Along with uniting your customer service channels as you operate from a distance, you absolutely must set clear expectations for your customer service team. This should include everyone, from phone reps to website development teams. Anyone who is involved in crafting and delivering your company’s customer experience should have a clear idea of what that experience should look like.

This is absolutely critical during a pandemic. The intricate business of weaving together an effective, omnichannel customer experience is already difficult at any time. However, it’s further complicated by the fact that your team is likely operating on a remote basis. The lack of thorough, consistent communication that comes with working in close proximity to one another can quickly lead to a breakdown in uniform collaboration. The solution is for leaders to set clear standards and objectives to serve as a guiding light for their team to work toward.

3. Maintain Clear Internal Communication

Remote work requires complex technology and endless information to be constantly transmitted from remote locations. This makes it essential that you set up and maintain clear communication channels within your customer service department. The specifics should be tailored to each unique situation. However, a few factors should always be considered:

• What hardware and software does your team need to effectively communicate? Does everyone have a good computer, headset, internet connection, and so on?
• What software should your team be using to communicate internally? You may have clear channels set up for outward-facing communication, but does your team have well-established modes of internal communication as well?
• Have you codified communication best practices for your remote teams? It’s important to set clear guidelines and communication norms. For example, you can come up with acronyms (such as NNTR, “no need to respond”), create acceptable response time windows, establish writing style and tone, and avoid sending excessive or unnecessary communications.

By cultivating consistent internal communication standards, you can ensure that your team remains well-informed, in touch, and on the same page at all times.

4. Strive to Stay Human

In a world defined by technology, efficiency, speed, and convenience, the human factor has become a rare customer service commodity. As customer experience consultant Micah Solomon put it, “The human touch…has become the Midas touch.” 

This is more true than ever when providing customer service in the midst of a socially-distanced pandemic. Delivering a human touch encourages customers to engage with your brand. It helps them relax and feel comforted. It speaks to their humanity and can foster trust, respect, and loyalty. As Solomon puts it, it provides a unique “one-size-fits-one” solution that is easily reproducible within your customer service activities. 

As you attempt to maintain efficiency and quality in your customer experience, remember to look for ways to maintain the human touch. This can come through the tone and word choices used with customers. It can also include training representatives to demonstrate critical behaviors, such as active listening and empathy.

5. Embrace a Continuous Learning Approach

Finally, with the coronavirus threatening to drag on for months, it’s important that you make a consistent effort to implement continuous learning in your customer service efforts. This can come in multiple formats. 

For instance, continually learning and implementing new tools or skills is critical to sustained success. This is especially true in a 21st-century business landscape that is perpetually evolving at breakneck speeds. As both leadership and team members acquire new knowledge, they can use it to improve existing activities and innovate new ideas.

In addition, a continuous learning mindset can help to analyze existing behaviors and methods in order to identify errors. This is a critical factor in avoiding a slump as you lean heavily on new things. For instance, you may have recently embraced a fully remote customer service department and cloud-focused customer service solutions. Both the setup and execution of this new system will hardly be flawless. A continuous learning approach can help to refine and perfect the particular system that you choose to implement.There are many ways that you can proactively keep your customer service on point throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. You can unify customer service channels, set clear expectations, tend to internal communication, adopt continuous learning, and maintain a human touch in your team’s interactions. The most important factor of all, though, is that customer service leaders take ownership of their department and search for solutions before a slump takes place. Only then can they avoid the long-term effects of recovering from a dip in customer service quality. Not only that, but their effort will set them up to maintain a cutting-edge position within their industry in the process.

The post 5 Ways to Avoid Customer Service Slumps During a Pandemic appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Mobile optimization matters. If your Facebook videos look like made-for-TV documentaries, they aren’t likely to get many clicks. Because many users view the site on their smartphones, it’s important that your performance videos are made for on-the-go consumption. 

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Facebook supports many different video formats. In reality, high-performing Facebook video ads:

1. Get to the point.
How closely are you actually reading this article? Chances are, you’re not reading it like a legal document; you’re skimming it because you have a dozen other things to do this afternoon.

Approach your Facebook video content the same way. Expect to get about eight seconds of your audience’s attention. Yes, Facebook videos can run up to 240 minutes, but mobile content shouldn’t run more than a minute. Better yet, keep it to 30 seconds or less. Even your most engaged users won’t give you more time than that.

Put the “meat” of your ad at the start of the video. Is it most important for users to know your brand? The use case for your product? Get that message across first, following it with progressively less important information.

2. Plan for portrait.
When you’re riding the bus to work and looking at updates on social media, do you rotate your phone every time you stumble across a landscape video? Probably not. Your video production friends may cringe at the concept of portrait videos, but your audience’s behavior is the one that counts.

Don’t get creative with aspect ratios. Square is a good choice, as are 16:9 and 4:5 rectangular formats. In Facebook’s news feed, square videos get 78% more real estate than landscape ones. More pixels at the same price means more value.

To make sure your content plays well in a small space, think about dimension and framing. Use transitions, zooming, and cropping to make sure even people watching in portrait mode can see what’s going on.

3. Treat audio as an accessory.
Some products call for sound. If you’re a country music star trying to get traction for your latest album, you can’t do it without audio. Unless sound is your product, make sure your ad still makes sense in silence.

Most people don’t carry headphones with them. When they’re scrolling through Facebook in a waiting room or on the train, they shut off the sound. To connect with those users, your video ad has to make sense with visuals alone.

Don’t be afraid to use captions when circumstances call for it. If you have to include a message from your CEO or explain a complex situation, use Facebook’s captioning tool. The social media giant claims captioned ads actually increase view time by 12%.

4. Make the next steps simple.
What do you want people who watch your Facebook video ad to do afterward? Don’t just imply it; outright tell them what to do next. Then, make it as easy as possible for users to take that action from a mobile device.

If you’re hoping to generate revenue, use a simple, imperative, and time-sensitive phrase like “Shop now.” Show users exactly where to click, and most importantly, make sure their destination is mobile-optimized. Nobody’s going to haul out his desktop computer just to reload the page.

Unless you’re an expert on mobile optimization, use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check your site. On top of getting more value from your video ads, you’ll improve your site’s search engine rankings. If you need a fast fix for a page that won’t load on mobile, add a link that lets users pull up the desktop site.

Success with Facebook mobile video ads takes more than strong content. You might have the most riveting material in the world, but you still need to deliver it well. In a busy world, that’s what mobile optimization is all about.

The post How to Make Your Facebook Video Ads Stand Out on Mobile appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Not every niche marketing strategy is so obvious. To develop yours:

1. Check for fresh audiences.
When you’re providing a niche product or service, your knowledge of the market can’t be deep enough. Where do your customers get their news? What are their favorite social media platforms? What do they do in their free time?

Start with low-hanging fruit: your website traffic. When one CBD marketing agency analyzed its site data, it discovered a segment that made up a small portion of visitors but converted at twice the rate of its primary target audience. By refocusing its efforts around that demographic, the agency opened the spigot on a previously invisible audience just waiting to purchase its product. 

If you spot a second audience, don’t try to reach it with your existing marketing materials. Put together a new audience profile. Share a one-pager with your team that describes the audience members’ demographics, psychographics, and key product needs.

2. Own your long-tail keywords.
Pay-per-click campaigns on Google and Facebook have become so popular that generalist companies are scrambling for alternatives. But while PPC campaigns on sites like Quora cost less, they also reach fewer users than those on major platforms.

Fortunately, niche companies don’t need to choose. If your company sells soaps scented like wines from around the world, why bother to target a clown-car keyword like “hand soap”? Not only do you stand a better chance of fighting your way to the top of one like “hand soap that smells like wine” or “wine hand soaps,” but your clicks are far more likely to convert.

While you’re doing the work of targeting certain keywords with PPC, be sure to optimize your site for organic search as well. Build out landing pages for the topics your audience is searching for the most, and be sure to blog on a regular basis.

3. Make inroads with micro-influencers.

Influencer marketing is a hot topic. It’s changed the way we operate on social media and fueled important advances in advertising transparency. But while companies in every sector can use influencers, they’re most effective in specialized areas.

Don’t expect to find a Kardashian in every niche. Instead, look for micro-influencers: personalities who may only have a few thousand followers, but are tightly aligned with your target audience and value proposition. Rather than worry about reach, consider how closely your product fits with the influencer’s audience and content.

Although you could send promotion guidelines and set them loose, why not co-create your content? Then, use social listening tools to understand what sort of splash your collaborations are making online. Expect incremental improvements in engagement rates as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

4. Leave people out.
As a specialty business, you’ll never be everything to everyone. Embrace that. If you insure coin collections, for instance, don’t try to expand into more common lines like home and auto. Not only is that not your area of expertise, but you’re also unlikely to make headway against industry giants like Geico.

Instead, make your customers feel like they’re part of something exclusive. Aside from its name, Not Your Father’s, a brand of flavored beer by Small Town Brewing, does that through content. Its interactive quiz is fun, but more importantly, it communicates to takers that Small Town Brewing caters to people like them: Not Your Father’s drinkers are adventurous, curious, and youthful.
Whoever your target users are, your marketing strategy needs to be as unique as they are. Before you blow your budget on platforms they won’t see, get to know them better. By spending your marketing dollars wisely and staying true to your brand, you can dominate your corner of the market for less than you might think. 

The post Know Your Niche: 4 Ways to Market Your Specialty Business appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

And if you want to fuel the growth of a business, you’ll find few better sources of industry news or pitching tips. Which VCs are worth following? The next time you’re on Twitter, check out:

1. Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson has been in the VC game since 1986, but he still finds time to tweet jokes and opinions almost daily. A co-founder of Union Square Ventures, Fred and his firm support early-stage companies across the industry spectrum. His current investments include Algorand, a digital currency and transactions platform; Scroll, a subscription service that delivers an ad-free experience; and Flip, which helps users find and sublet apartments. Fred uses his Twitter to talk about VC-related topics, but don’t be surprised to also find chocolate chip cookie recipes or chatter about his family mixed in.

2. Phil Stover
An eclectic mix of think pieces, sports news, and shout-outs fill the Twitter feed of Phil Stover, the Los Angeles-based co-founder of Blue Skies Ventures. Covering everything from Capital One’s breach to product development faux pas, Stover’s posts connect closely to his investment interests. Specializing in idea- and some seed-stage startups, Stover’s portfolio includes fast-fashion technology brand FABFAD, esports social media hub PvP.com, wedding planning app Vowla, and Shipsomnia, a music festival cruise experience. Before becoming an entrepreneur and investor, Phil used his marketing MBA to oversee multimillion-dollar sales portfolios and product launches.

3. Eileen Burbidge
As a former product director at Skype and a director of communication products at Yahoo!, Burbidge cut her teeth in the 2000s tech industry. Today, she lives and works in London as a partner at Passion Capital, where she helps fund early-stage tech companies around the world. Since its inception in 2011, the group has funded 70 startups, including Adzuna, a search engine aggregator for classified listings; Burrow, a mortgage company poised to disrupt the real estate sector with automation; and Thread, an online personal fashion stylist service. Her Twitter gives a glimpse into fascinating days, touches on culture and politics, and shares insights on the tech world.

4. Christine Herron

Offering witty gripes, advocacy, and product insights in equal doses, Christine Herron’s Twitter is a great read if you want to stay up-to-date on political news and tech startups. Her post at Intel Capital has her overseeing startups such as Yummly, a personalized recipe recommendation tool and search engine, and Jelli, a programmatic radio advertising platform. Herron also advises the startup accelerator 500 Startups and is on the board of nonprofit StartX. Watch her Twitter closely if you’re a student entrepreneur: You might get the inside scoop on a $9,000 scholarship that includes investor mentorship.

5. Jason Calacanis

With an angel fund of more than $10 million, Calacanis is a leading voice in the world of first-round investments. Six of his early investments, including Uber and Evernote, have posted valuations of $1 billion or more. Despite that, his tweets tend to be humble and focused on world events. One exception is Launch, which he founded; it’s since grown into the largest global conference for startup founders. For Launch members and interested entrepreneurs, Calcanis regularly announces office hours that he spends helping founders solve product-market problems.

Whether you want to understand the business-driving viewpoints of venture capitalists or simply enjoy bad finance jokes, there’s no better place to find it than these VCs’ Twitter pages. And if you’re lucky, you might just come away with some social media ideas of your own.

The post 5 VCs to Follow on Twitter appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What, exactly, are Millennial travelers doing differently? Thanks to social media, they’re:

1. Listening more to peers and less to marketers.

Word of mouth has always been powerful, but Millennials are taking it to a new level. To reach them, Reservations.com’s Mahesh Chaddah recommends influencer marketing. “The best company blog post in the world won’t engage Millennial travelers like suggestions on social media,” warns the online travel agency’s co-founder. “To some of them, a favorite travel influencer’s recommendation means more than one from friends or family.”

Compared to prior generations, Millennials are 54% more likely to make a purchase based on a social media influencer’s recommendation. Just be sure the influencer aligns with your brand: If you’re a carefree resort company, you probably shouldn’t partner with a base-jumping adrenaline junkie. Look for potentially inflammatory posts, too: Millennial travelers tend to have a worldly perspective and don’t appreciate derogatory “jokes.”

2. Picking destinations for the pics.

Not that long ago, vacation pictures were an afterthought. For Millennial travelers, they’re the entire point. The top priority of young adults traveling abroad, travel broker Expedia claims, is how Instagrammable their destination is.

To attract Millennial travelers via Instagram, though, brands need more than beautiful photos. Millennial and lifestyle entrepreneur Andrew Arnold encourages marketers to think like travelers: “To make the most of this, travel related brands must create a presence on Instagram that is sincere and true to their brand,” Arnold argues.

Just look at Hipcamp’s Instagram. Yes, the campsite-sharing site posts shots of pristine lakes and mountain retreats. But more importantly, it shares guests’ own photos. Without user-generated content, Hipcamp’s Instagram would likely be a lot less popular.

3. Booking budget-busting trips.

Fear of missing out is a powerful motivator. Millennials may be the generation most burdened by student debt and high rents, but they’re also the ones most likely to splurge on vacations. Travelport’s latest U.S. Vacation Survey found that one in three young people is willing to pay more than $5,000 for travel experiences.

The best way to get Millennials to spend big with your brand? Sherelle Jacobs, Millennial traveler and Telegraph editor, suggests showcasing travel’s social and educational benefits. “I now have basic competence at salsa (obtained in Havana), and a new national cuisine to butcher at one of my mediocre dinner parties (Colombian),” she says, defending what she calls her “grotesque” overspending.

What’s the best way to promote the experiences your company can offer? Let video tell the story. Social media posts that include videos receive 48% more views than those with only photos or text.

4. Bringing travel agencies back.

To book the faraway adventures they see on social media, Millennials are turning to a service that many in the industry worried they’d wipe out: travel agents. A report by the American Society of Travel Advisors found a stunning 55% of Millennials are inclined to hire travel experts to plan their trips, while just 28% of Baby Boomers say the same. 
Unlike Boomers, however, Millennials are looking for agents in the same place they find their inspiration: online. “Millennials are far less inclined to pick up the phone,” says Simon Russell, CEO of U.K.-based luxury travel agency. “They want to organize and engage digitally and they seek much more instant gratification.”

Although Millennials are hiring agents online, they still want human help if they hit a snag on the road. Consider a hybrid model. Give Millennials the ability to book with a click, but maintain a concierge team they can call in case of last-minute delays or miscommunications.

Social media has shaped Millennials in many ways, but none more strongly than travel. The trips they take, the places they visit, and the activities they do all trace back to one question: What will it look like online?

The post How Social Media Is Changing the Way Millennials Travel appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Starting the Switch

If you see the writing on the wall, don’t suddenly abandon your most loyal viewers; change platforms slowly and steadily. After developing “starter” content on your new social platform of choice, use the following tactics to drive your YouTube fans to it.

1. Take advantage of descriptive text.
The best way to let your audience know you’re active on another platform might also be the simplest: Update the description below each of your YouTube videos to promote your off-site content. Because Instagram and TikTok links won’t show up in a standard Google search, it’s critical to provide URLs for web users trying to find your content.

Especially if you have years’ worth of YouTube videos to update, prioritize by traffic rather than total views. A now-forgotten video that once went viral is unlikely to reach many fans, but a new one that’s gaining steam still may. Remember, too, to choose links according to each YouTube video’s content. If your interests drifted over the years from hiking to whitewater rafting, keep that in mind when revising their descriptions. Context is critical when you’re trying to encourage click-throughs.

2. Trade mentions with other creators.
If you’re a veteran of social video, chances are high that you’ve built relationships with other influencers in your swim lane. Reach out to them: Are they trying to make a similar switch? Perhaps you’re working to build a Facebook following from YouTube, while they’re transitioning in the opposite direction.

Once you’ve found a fit, fight the temptation to be transactional. Instead, ask how you can be helpful: Would pointing your followers toward a certain clip of hers, like an introductory video, work best? Would the influencer prefer you plug her as a person? By tapping into the reciprocity principle, you motivate her to talk you up among her followers as well. And because authenticity shows, especially when it comes to video content, a help-first approach is much more likely to pay off. 

3. Host cross-platform contests.
Mentions by other creators can rope in new viewers and give your content credibility, but they’re not the only growth tactic in town. On certain platforms, contests can be gold mines. On Instagram, for instance, accounts that run regular giveaways and contests grow 70% faster than those that don’t. The key is to use them across platforms: To compete, fans have to hop over to the one you’re trying to grow.

To host a contest, you need a game and a prize. What about a “Where’s Waldo?”-style scavenger hunt that requires viewers to spot small items in the background? How about a mystery, where each clip contains a hint that helps viewers answer a riddle? When it comes to prizes, don’t default to influencer swag or trinkets you can buy at discount chains: Give something unique and free that promotes engagement, like a meet-and-greet with you or an online serenade to the winner.

4. Give yourself a YouTube break.
What if you’re churning out more videos than ever, hosting contests, and trading mentions — yet you still can’t get diehards to use your new channel? Take a break from YouTube. Don’t go cold turkey without telling people, but make it clear that they’ll have to find your freshest content elsewhere.

Should you delete or hide your YouTube channel? Only if you have switched to a totally new subject area and are sure you’ll never go back. Not only do YouTube videos have a shelf life many times longer than content posted to Instagram or Facebook, but they make you more credible to influencer marketers you might want to work with. Even if your interests have changed, there’s no harm in telling people that.

These days, YouTube is far from the only social video platform. If you built your YouTube brand before platforms better suited to your audience and interests sprung up, there’s no shame in switching. Just be sure you bring your most loyal fans along for the ride.

The post 4 Tips for YouTubers Who Want to Switch Social Video Sites appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Those days are gone. Today, every business with a brain has several social media accounts. Consumers engage with brands in Facebook comment sections and follow their favorite companies on Instagram. Businesses have to keep a close eye on their social presence — but, unfortunately, they don’t often get help from their employees.

As valuable as social media managers and marketing teams are, regular employees can make or break a company’s reputation online. Without positive voices from people within the business, brands miss out on incredible opportunities to expand their reach, communicate their values, and engage with prospective customers and employees alike.

Follow these tips to get employees involved in your brand’s social media presence:

1. Aim for Instagrammable

Let’s face it: Your workers aren’t about to post photos of sleepy crowds or concrete walls on their social media accounts. If you want them to brag about your business on Instagram — or Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or even LinkedIn — give them something worth sharing.

“During company events and initiatives, we see a spike in employees tagging Nu Skin and using event specific hashtags on their social platforms,” says Ritch Wood, CEO of Nu Skin. “We strive to develop a culture and provide a great work environment where employees are engaged, excited and proud to work at.”

The result, Wood argues, is that workers organically take and share photos with their followers. Instagrammable moments make for a win-win: Team members get snazzy content for their social accounts, while your company gets an organic boost to its online reputation.

2. Focus on Values

Product information and prices are great for product pages, but they don’t make for exciting social media posts. Instead of asking employees to repost new listings, educate them on company values and encourage them to get involved with causes that matter to them.

Employee advocacy platform EveryoneSocial advises companies to share their mission with employees to encourage natural social media activity. “Similarly to having an accessible social media policy in place, sharing the company’s goals and mission for socially active employees is equally important,” says Todd Kunsman at EveryoneSocial. “Not informing your fellow employees hinders the company culture and could generate mistrust in the overall brand.”

Talk to employees about why their online presence matters. Share transparency and impact reports to demonstrate that the company backs up its claims of good deeds. Give employees reasons to feel personal pride in the company’s work so they don’t perceive social media as another task to mark off.

3. Design a Comprehensive Social Media Guide

Most employees are great on social media, but a few will inevitably cross the line. Ward off potential issues by creating a social media guide that outlines expectations for employees who choose to engage with or promote the brand on their private channels.

“A social media policy outlines how an organization and its employees should conduct themselves online,” says Jimmy Thomson of Hootsuite. “It helps safeguard your brand’s reputation and encourages employees to responsibly share the company’s message.”

Keep it short and sweet so employees don’t feel overwhelmed by rules. Use visuals, graphics, and obvious yes/no indicators so anyone could glance at the information and understand it immediately. Continue to update the sheet as necessary.

“Because social media moves fast, policies that are too rigid can be ineffective in a changing situation,” says Thomson. “Think of your social media policy as a set of guardrails, rather than train tracks. It should be considered a living document. Ongoing updates will be necessary.”

4. Reward Employees for Great Content

Employees who engage with the brand on social media often create their own content to do so. They share personal stories, write up long posts, and put a great deal of effort into their work. Encourage those who go above and beyond by rewarding people for in-depth content, and offer prizes for those who submit personal stories for the company to use on its own accounts.

“Encourage the leaders of different departments to invite their team members to contribute content and participate in other content marketing activities (e.g., brainstorming, sharing),” says Dan Steiner of Content Marketing Institute. “Promote the opportunity in the company-wide newsletter by inviting employees to participate in corporate content creation.”

People love games, so host a contest with prizes for people who submit the best content. Help employees create videos, blog posts, or infographics. Encourage them to share that content on their own channels and engage with commenters. 

Just as consumers love user-contributed content, audiences enjoy it when regular employees share their own stories on social media. Communications from real people feel much more authentic than branded posts, and they help outside parties connect to the brand on a more personal level. By bolstering a social media strategy with a little employee help, brands can boost their engagement, increase their bottom line, and make employees feel like valuable contributors.

The post How Smart Businesses Build In-House Social Media Success appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

People still trust and enjoy content from their favorite influencers, but many are wary of paid endorsements. Most influencer content standbys, such as fashion hauls and travel shots, are now seen as little more than branded advertisements.

Brands still need influencers to connect with consumers on social media. But before you shell out a few grand to send strangers free products or place a simple post, consider these influencer marketing tactics.

1. Turn your audience into the influencers.

Despite how jaded consumers have become, they still trust their peers. Social media gives everyone a voice; in the right context, anyone can be an influencer for 15 minutes.

That’s what Surkus believes. Surkus connects brands and events to audiences by providing special access and offers as incentives for users to engage on social and in-person. Leveraging user data and algorithms, it matches highly interested members with events and brand activations, facilitating authentic social amplification and organic user-generated content along the way.

Almost everyone has some level of social presence these days. Before your next big campaign, build relationships with nano-influencers or get the word-of-mouth ball rolling through other online content.

2. Start with the content, and work your way backward.

Many brands that contract an influencer marketing agency forget that their new partner is constantly reading content. Influencer marketers can tell you what content is trending, which influencers are creating it, and what might be the next hot topic.

If you don’t work with an influencer marketing group, try BuzzSumo. With an easy-to-use dashboard, you can find popular content, track down the influencers sharing it, and discover potential partners based on your keywords. You can even filter influencers by category to get closer to your target audience.

Remember that one popular piece of content does not an influencer make. Plenty of people have created a popular tweet or Instagram post, only to fade into obscurity when the buzz died down. You’ll generally have better luck with smaller influencers who consistently reach niche audiences than you will with one-hit wonders.

3. Measure before, during, and after your partnership.

An influencer with 100,000 followers shared your post — but did anyone read it? Use measurement tools like Kred to identify the reach and engagement of your influencer marketing campaigns.

Kred, a Twitter-specific tool, helps brands evaluate whether influencers’ posts are as popular as they claim. Though it lacks the sophistication of more expensive options, Kred also provides insight into how actively influencers engage with specific online communities. If your influencer claims to be popular with gamers, Kred can confirm whether that’s true.

Without real metrics, you’ll never know whether your influencer campaigns deliver great ROI or just look pretty on paper. Likes and shares are nice, but to get the real story, use third-party tools.

4. Build relationships that go beyond transactions.

No matter how viral, no one post is going to double your customer base or order volume. Rather than make post-by-post transactions, building relationships is key to realizing the true value of influencer marketing.

Instead of negotiating through an email chain and cutting off communication after your post goes live, ask for an even stronger second post. Because the success of a social post depends on so many factors, give a promising partner at least a couple of opportunities to show he or she can deliver.

How can you scale those interactions? Look to an all-in-one influencer tool like NinjaOutreach. Not only does NinjaOutreach let you find well-suited influencers in new niches, but you can also automate your follow-ups to ensure everything goes smoothly. With a built-in CRM, you can draw a direct line between your influencer campaigns and sales.

Authentic influencers may be a little harder to find and engage these days, but you don’t have to base your influencer marketing on costly traditional methods with diminishing returns. The tools outlined here will give you a head start to more efficiently and effectively produce long-term partnerships with a range of influencers who have the ear of your target audience. Continue to evolve your influencer strategy, and you’ll connect with your fans for years to come.

The post Authenticity in the Era of Influencers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Across the United States, consumers’ preferences for local goods and businesses have been consistently on the rise — thanks, in part, to growing distrust around large global brands. Case in point: A.T. Kearney’s 2017 “Global Future Consumer Study” discovered that the number of consumers with little to no confidence in corporations rose from 36% in 2012 to 55% in 2017.

In response, global brands continue to make localization a key focus in their marketing efforts. The hope is that by tailoring their messages to smaller, more unique audiences, they can retain the loyalty and connection with local consumers that smaller chains have cultivated.

Of course, not all regions and audience segments are created equal, so you might be thinking that creating a pathway to localization is easier said than done — or is it?

Redefining ‘Local’

From operations to technology to the structural design of an organization, localization poses an obstacle for brands, at least in theory. But how do modern consumers actually define “local”?

According to Millennial and Generation Z consumers, local commonalities have little correlation to geography. In its “The OmniLocal Consumer” study, public relations firm Mitchell reports that 74% of Millennials and Gen Zers don’t claim their communities based on physical location. In fact, more than half said community really depends on perspectives and interests.

This is likely a result of consumers’ increasing use of digital services. Shopping experiences are a combination of online and offline browsing, and consumers are on the lookout for an experience that feels consistently “local,” whether they’re browsing your social media accounts or scrolling through your app. Sure, local know-how is a plus (“The OmniLocal Consumer” found that 63% of Millennials and Gen Zers are attracted to brands that display local knowledge), but the local experience is more about feeling.

The trick for your brand is to find opportunities to create a consistent experience between touchpoints that creates and maintains that local feeling. A smart, nuanced approach — preferably one that’s easily tailored — is the most appealing path. But what does that path actually look like?

Small Steps, Big Impact

How do you get out of theoretical discussions and into practical applications of local strategies? These martech-enabled strategies should steer you in the right direction:

1. Think micro.

Influencer marketing is a hot commodity these days, with major brands paying $250,000 for a single post on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page — plus tens of thousands of dollars for other influencer posts. But influencer marketing isn’t just about blasting a superstar’s 132 million followers with your branded messaging.

Microinfluencers — social influencers with smaller followings who are more closely intertwined in their interests — are far more valuable for making local connections. Despite reaching fewer people, these more intimate connections lead to greater engagement from fans. Smaller-scale influencers have a 60% higher engagement rate than most celebrities, according to influencer agency HelloSociety. Followers trust these niche experts because their interests are local.

To source microinfluencers, start with a tool such as Followerwonk, which enables you to analyze your Twitter audience and find niche influencers who can reach a new audience. Scrunch supplies similar demographic and interest analyses across social platforms, allowing you to filter by influencer location, interest, and audience size.

Keep in mind that influencer marketing is rooted in its differentiation from blatant advertising. Just as you expect your microinfluencers to do on your behalf, you must first woo them to engage with your brand. Follow their social accounts, and start building relationships. Once you’ve successfully courted them and have your chosen influencers under contract, you can use a self-service marketplace like Tribe to create campaign content together.

2. Partner with the community.

Communities have unique needs that tug at residents’ heartstrings — and no one understands those needs better than local nonprofit organizations. By teaming up with nonprofits, your brand can not only help move an important organization’s mission forward, but also bolster its own credibility among locals.

Natural gas provider Gas South offers a perfect example. Its long-standing partnership with The Salvation Army of Metro Atlanta includes volunteer programs, financial support, and emergency bill-pay assistance. As a result, Gas South has been able to cement its reputation as a community-minded brand while helping local families in need.

Give your regional directors and subsidiaries the authority to forge partnerships with nonprofits in their respective areas, and your brand will receive the local branding boost that comes with doing charitable deeds. Direct your leaders to cause marketing agencies like For Momentum and Engage for Good for free resources and podcasts. Soon, Facebook will allow brands to partner with community groups and nonprofits on its platform. In the meantime, consider a SaaS partner platform like Partnerize to manage any nonprofit partnerships.

3. Cater to the locals.

Though the philanthropic world offers great opportunities for local partnerships, your brand should also extend its support to local businesses. Take modern furniture and home decor brand West Elm. Though the brand has stores that span the nation, it incorporates local flair in each location. When it opened a store in Cleveland last year, West Elm designed the storefront to pay homage to the city’s deep history in manufacturing, and it even stocked goods from eight local brands. Other locations — from Richmond, Virginia, to Los Angeles — got similar treatment.

These art displays make great social media fodder, but they also underscore local loyalty. West Elm’s local art curation offers local assistance beyond store aesthetics. Small business partnerships like this can help you boost your local SEO ranking. When your brand showcases local businesses, you are more likely to build prominence through mentions with backlinks and citations (name, address, and phone number) from those business owners.

Hosting unique events at different branch locations will also afford you plenty of citations. Use local SEO tools like Whitespark and Yext to audit your citations, centralize your data, and improve your local search rankings.

Consumers are on the hunt for local flavor — but that doesn’t mean large brands are confined to the sidelines. By making smaller, more thoughtful connections powered by your martech stack, you can make a huge impact in any market.

The post How to Localize Your Brand for Consumers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Like it or not, social media is a cat-and-mouse chase. Unless brands follow users to new platforms, they risk missing out on social media marketing ROI of up to 1,000 percent.

Top Platforms to Watch

The good news is that your brand doesn’t need to be on every social network. If your audience isn’t there, why bother? Consider whether your target customers might be using these up-and-coming social networks:

1. Mappen
Mappen may be unfamiliar to marketers, but it’s well-known among teens. According to the company’s latest count of its user base, more than 10 percent of Americans ages 14 to 17 use Mappen. Founded to help young people struggling with the emotional consequences of excessive screen time, Mappen brings social networking into the real world. By connecting users with their nearby friends, the network encourages them to “make something happen.” Although Mappen doesn’t allow companies to join, marketers at entertainment and hospitality companies can cater to its audience by promoting their space as a meetup location.

2. TikTok
Known as Douyin in its native China, TikTok is a social network for creating and sharing short-form videos. Despite being initially released in 2016, its user base has exploded since its stable release in February 2019. Influencer marketing agency Mediakix reports that TikTok’s monthly active user base recently hit half a billion — more than twice the number of once-promising video network Vine at its peak. Mediakix points out that TikTok also claims the longest average session duration among social channels, at 294 seconds. Fortunately for marketers with a young, international audience, TikTok recently added ads to its platform.

3. Lasso
Effectively a TikTok competitor, Lasso was launched last November by Facebook. Can’t users already share videos through Facebook? They can, but Facebook knows that only half of teens still used its platform as of May 2018. The social media behemoth is betting that a fresh brand focused on social video can reclaim at least some of them. Although brands can’t directly participate in Lasso yet, they can enlist influencers on the platform. Plus, Lasso videos can be shared through Facebook and Instagram, extending their reach across multiple platforms.

4. Steemit
Perhaps the most unusual network on this list, Steemit is a blockchain-infused social blogging site that rewards engagement with a cryptocurrency called Steem. Intended to be the crypto world’s answer to Reddit, Steemit’s target user is a tech-savvy young male. Despite still being in beta mode, Steemit sees 1.2 million transactions per day. After being Steemit rolled out as an ad-free platform, it has since started testing ads to improve its profitability.

5. Caffeine
To stake their claim in the “social broadcasting” space — or live streaming for gaming and entertainment videos — two former Apple executives launched Caffeine last year. Although it’s still in beta mode, the young streaming service shows promise in taking on its older brother Twitch. Last September, Caffeine got a jolt to the tune of $100 million from 21st Century Fox. As with Lasso, brands can’t currently place ads on the platform, but they can partner with broadcasters — who are also compensated by the platform itself — to reach its young, e-sports-focused user base.

No matter how popular a platform is today, it won’t be big forever. Facebook and Twitter may go the way of MySpace and Bebo, or they may be valuable to brands well into the future. Whatever happens, social media experts’ best bet is — as with most areas of marketing — to follow their audience’s lead.

The post 5 Up-and-Coming Social Networks You Should Know About appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Are they making the right investments?

YouTube Is Your Best Bet

YouTube isn’t a smart investment just because it’s getting less than its share of attention from marketers. YouTube should be at the center of your social media strategy because:

1. Mobile is king.
   If you’re like most consumers, your buyer’s journey usually begins on your smartphone. A study by product content management platform Salsify found that shoppers are more than twice as likely to turn to their smartphones for product research than a salesperson.
   
   Although consumers watch far more than product videos on their phone, 70 percent of YouTube views come from mobile devices. Those aren’t short blips of activity, either. The average mobile viewing session on YouTube now lasts more than 40 minutes. Again, not every view precedes a purchase, but the overlap between product research and video viewership implies many shoppers are making the jump from their smartphones.
   
   
2. The scale of consumption is staggering.
   Even if only a small percentage of YouTube viewers go on to purchase a product they see in a video, the social video platform’s scale translates to a lot of conversions. Believe it or not, consumers watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content each day — more than Netflix and Facebook video combined.
   
   What are all those viewers watching? Even if it’s funny cat videos, they’re seeing YouTube’s TrueView ads. Those who watch a YouTube ad to completion or for at least 30 seconds are 23 times more likely to subscribe to a brand channel, watch additional brand videos, or share the brand’s content. In fact, any amount of exposure to a YouTube ad renders a viewer 10 times more likely to take one or more of the aforementioned actions. Add it all up, and that’s a lot of opportunities for brand engagement.
   
   
3. How-to videos are hot.  
   Ask any content marketer: Actionability is the key to effective content. If a blog post, podcast, or video doesn’t tell the consumer what to do next,  it’s not going to deliver the intended value. Fortunately, searches for how-to videos on YouTube are growing by 70 percent per year.

Admittedly, turning how-to content into sales takes some creativity on marketers’ part. To sell more tents and boots, for instance, an outdoor equipment company could make a video on the basics of backpacking. For its part, an automotive supply company might put together a clip about how consumers can change their own oil.

1. Young people prefer it to traditional television.
   For young people, YouTube isn’t just a platform for tutorials. When digital media firm Defy Media surveyed consumers aged 13 to 24, it discovered that they spend more than half a day each week watching videos on YouTube and other social networks. For point of reference, that’s 150 percent of the time they spend watching traditional television.
   
   Even if your buyers tend to be older, YouTube may be a better investment. Not only is it far more expensive to place television ads, but the trend toward YouTube seems to be here to stay. Just 36 percent of Gen Z and Millennials say they can’t live without traditional TV, while 67 percent said the same about YouTube.
   
   
2. International audiences are watching.
   Social media platform popularity varies massively by country. Viber, Seina Weibo, and YY are popular in Asian countries, for example, but they receive almost no traffic from U.S. consumers. YouTube, by contrast, is popular in the U.S. and abroad. In fact, a larger proportion of internet users in Mexico, Argentina, Vietnam, and about a dozen other countries have used YouTube in the last month than their U.S.-based peers.
   
   YouTube isn’t shy about catering to those audiences. The social video site has launched local versions in at least 91 countries, enabling users to navigate it in 80 languages. In other words, YouTube offers a native experience to more than 95 percent of the world’s online population.

YouTube is far more than a hub for vlogs and music videos. In barely a decade, it’s become the television of the 21st century. No other social platform — including Instagram, despite marketers’ investment, and Facebook, regardless of its user advantage — dominates its type of media to such a degree. If that’s not reason enough to make YouTube the center of your social strategy, what is?

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