DIGITAL - Social Media: Best Practices for Pet Stores

(World Pet Association / SuperZoo)

World Pet Association has released a whitepaper to help pet businesses with digital marketing.

Social Media: Best Practices for Pet Stores was compiled by Crystal Vilkaitis, social media expert and SuperZoo speaker.

“Social media has become an indispensable tool for retailers and we recognize they’re hungry for information to ensure they’re optimizing their accounts,” WPA President Doug Poindexter said.

“By providing a whitepaper focused on this hot topic, we’re giving retailers access to actionable ways to improve their businesses.”

The content doesn’t just apply to pet stores, all pet businesses can apply the information in the paper.

With a focus on the social selling mindset, created by Crystal Media, the document is packed with best practices - everything from which channels to focus on to the best mix of video, photos and graphics, along with advertising strategy.

Also included is a case study of The Pet Authority, a company who dumped traditional radio ads for social media, resulting in cost savings and increased sales.

Download a copy of the whitepaper from World Pet Association.

DIGITAL - Cool Tools for Social Media Marketers

Looking for tools or apps that can correct your grammar and spelling, create motion graphics, provide 'caller ID' for email, or create graphics of your Google Analytics data?

Social Media Examiner has come up with 23 Cool Tools for social media professionals.

Everyone has hit publish on a post without realizing there was a spelling or grammar error - sometimes only learning about the blunder when a reader makes a negative comment.

You can prevent those embarrassing mistakes by using Grammarly.

Grammarly, which has free and paid versions, is software as well as a browser extension so you can drop documents to be reviewed or have it correct as you type on the web.

If you are looking for an editor, Editorr has a team of them who will take your press release or post and polish it.

The first 100 words are free, after that you pay for words as you go.

Google Data Studio will take the data from Google Analytics and lay it out in a dashboard with components of your choosing.

Pie charts, bar charts, geomapping - they are all available to step up your social media reports.

Motion graphics are made simple with Ripl which allows moving text, captions, and video.

Want to know the details of a person sending you an email without looking them up? Use Senders.

Senders will give you the person’s name, title, and bio, along with links to his or her Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts.

It shares last tweets, their Twitter follower count, links to the Google search for that person and is free.

You can have some fun with FUNIPICA - a lens you can clip onto your laptop, computer or smartphone which gives you a super-wide lens with a slight fisheye effect.

Want to get close up and personal? Unscrew the top of the FUNIPICA and it turns into a 15x macro.

There are cool tools in the Social Media Examiner post that will publish to Instagram and Twitter, send meeting invitations that include available meeting times pulled directly from your Google Calendar, manage an overload of tabs on your browser and much more.

Read the entire article.

DIGITAL - 20 Free Stock Photo Sites

Challenge for a social media marketer: Finding the perfect image for a social media post or campaign.

(StockSnap)

Big challenge: Finding an image that is free.

Bigger challenge: Understanding different licenses and copyrights of images.

Happily, Hootsuite posted a list of 20 free stock photo sites that will save time and energy in a quest for the perfect picture.

The list includes sites that have Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licensed images.

The CC0 license “enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.”

Gratisography contains quirky images by photographer Ryan McGuire.

IM Free offers not only free social media images, but is a “curated collection of free web design resources, all for commercial use.”

Pixabay offers over 490,000 free images for both your personal and commercial use and includes illustrations and vector graphics.

The Morguefile was created in 1996, and offers photographs available free for the use in creative projects with a request to credit the artist.

New Old Stock provide the ultimate “Throwback Thursday” content with their hundreds of vintage photos from the public archives.

StockSnap curates stock photos from around the web and also uploads photos from select photographers in their network.

Visit the Hootsuite blog for the complete list.

DIGITAL - Instagram Advertising is Growing, Take Advantage

Engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter.

So it’s not surprising Instagram is becoming a key player in online advertising.

To help companies create effective ads, AdRoll has created The Performance Advertiser’s Guide to Instagram.

The free download includes:

• Guidelines for Instagram ad formats
• 17 Essential tips for Instagram advertising success
• How to track the performance of your campaigns
• How other companies have used Instagram to grow their business.

Social Media Examiner’s podcast - Instagram Ads: What Marketers Need to Know - goes into detail about Instagram ad features and tips.

Guest Jenn Herman, a social media consultant and Instagram expert, also discusses the differences between Facebook and Instagram ads and how to run successful ad campaigns.

Instagram is a great medium to target Millennials - with over 90 percent of users younger than 35 years old.

The social media channel has shown massive growth over the past years - from 30 million users when it was purchased by Facebook in 2012, to over 500 million users today.

Instagram’s global mobile ad revenue is predicted to reach $2.81 billion in 2017.

DIGITAL - Companies Stay Connected with Facebook's Workplace

It used to be that “Facebook” was the ultimate f-word at the office.  Now bosses are encouraging employees to Like, follow trending stories and join groups.

But there’s a catch: they are not referring to baby pictures and YouTube videos. They are talking about Facebook’s new service called Workplace.

While it is built to look like a user’s personal Facebook page, Workplace is open only to members at a specific company.

It’s easy to use, as many employees are among the 1.7 billion people logging onto the traditional Facebook site each month, and it caters to mobile workers who aren’t always tethered to their desks.

Employees and management can post information, have group discussions about projects or issues, track News Feed items, and use the voice and video calling feature, all on a secure system.

Workplace also features Multi-Company Groups that allow employees from different companies to connect when working together on a project.

The service has been in beta testing for a year and there are more than 1,000 organizations worldwide, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, Danone and Starbucks, using Workplace.

On October 10, 2016, Facebook announced that Workplace is now available to anyone and everyone.

But unlike Facebook, Workplace isn’t free.

The company would pay a monthly fee based on the number of users accessing the service: $3 per user for the first 1,000 users and $2 per user for between 1,001 and 10,000 users and $1 for any users above that.

But for Workplace officials, the goal is more geared toward adoption that to make a ton of money.

"We want to grow to have hundreds of millions of people using it and then just as we've done for Instagram and Messenger, we will care about monetization," Julian Cordoniou, director of Workplace, said in an interview with CNN.

Facebook has tapped into the workplace social media market and despite competition from existing communications services like Slack and Yammer, it is poised to dominate the market with the new Workplace service.

By Rennay McLean
Rennay is a freelance writer and editor, animal lover, mom, and Gryffindor. She has written nonfiction books, corporate communications, blog posts, magazine articles and newspaper pieces on topics including caring for your pets, animal rescue agencies, the economic outlook of Alberta, archeological digs, and spa getaways.