DIGITAL - How to Avoid Social Media Marketing Mistakes

It doesn’t matter if you’re a novice at social media or have lots of experience, there’s always more to learn.

The speed at which digital media is growing and evolving makes it particularly challenging.

One way to learn is from your mistakes, but wouldn’t it be great to avoid as many as you can?

Marketo is offering a free webinar - 8 Biggest Mistakes Social Media Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them - on March 15th.

Lisa Marcyes, Sr. Social Media Marketing Manager at Marketo, will be discussing the top eight social media marketing mistakes - from strategy, to content, to metrics - and how you can avoid them.

Sign up for the seminar to learn:

• How to develop a winning social media marketing strategy
• Which social media accounts really matter
• How to identify metrics that indicate success

Another tool available to help keep your social media marketing on track is Simply Measured’s Social Attribution 101: The Beginner’s Guide.

With social attribution, you can prove how much revenue or response is driven by your social campaigns.

Download the guide to learn:

• Which attribution model fits your specific needs
• Why attribution is the answer to proving your Social ROI
• Different challenges with social attribution, and how to overcome them.

DIGITAL - 2017 Social Marketing Planning Guide

As you plan 2017 are you looking for some guidance to set you up for social marketing success?

Social, digital, mobile - they are all vital to business success today and even more in the future.

Simply Measured has created a 2017 Social Marketing Planning Guide that takes a look back at the trends of 2016, including what is on its way out and what is on its way in, and planning tips for this year.

The guide includes:                               

• A roster of which trends will and won’t survive 2016
• An exploration of fresh trends you should think about in 2017
• A checklist to help you get started with your planning today
• Some examples of common social objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for major brands
• A list of resources to consider as you put together your 2017 plan.

While you may know that ad-blocker usage has been growing through 2016, showing more resistance to traditional “billboard” style ads, what does that mean to your social marketing plan?

According to the guide:                                    

“Digital marketing, and social in particular, is where your brand can get creative, disseminate well-made content, startle audiences into paying attention, and experiment with strategies on a more temporary basis. Unless your brand is clearly spreading spam or worthless, offensive content on social, you likely will not be blocked by your target users. This is the digital and social marketer’s advantage.”

Traditional TV viewership is declining especially among teenagers and young adults, making social media video even more important going forward.

Dark Social refers to the sharing done through non-public channels like Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, Slack, or even text message and email and is something that many social marketers have been ignoring.

There’s a lot of sharing going on behind the scenes that can be taken advantage of and the guide shares some tips on how to do so - like using hash fragments.

Not enough visuals, too many "salesy" posts and too much automation are passé this year.

One of the highlights of the guide is the resource section.

If you are interested in the top LinkedIn groups to join or people to follow for social marketing trends, there’s a list.

The best Twitter lists, blogs and email lists are also included to get your social marketing to the next level.

Download the guide to learn more.

DIGITAL - Running a Successful Social Media Contest

Have you run social media contests in the past without successfully building your email list? Or are you thinking about running your first contest?

A recent blog post by Simply Measured may have all the answers you need to make your next social media contest a success.

Choosing the right prize is at the top of the to-do list. A generic prize, such as a trendy piece of electronics - think iPad or digital camera - may be very popular and generate a lot of entries.

But are they from entrants who are interested in your business that you can convert to customers? Probably not.

Choose a prize that is relevant to your demographic. In the animal business, an electronic device for pets such an automatic feeder or GPS enabled tag might work.

Step two is to make sure the contest is mobile-friendly. More and more contest entries are coming via mobile and tablet.

Third on the list is to enlist your fans to promote the contest - share options should be prominent and metadata needs to be set up properly.

The blog post gives an example of a very successful contest run by the Prepared Pantry and why it worked so well.

Plus there’s a checklist to help develop a contest plan.

Read the full article here.

DIGITAL - 24 Ways to Test Your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Content

If social media marketers don’t test the effectiveness of their posts, they won’t know what works, what doesn’t and what could work better.

Simply Measured has created a free guide with 24 social media tests specific to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

On Instragram you can measure the best time of day to post to your specific audience, if posts are more effective if a product is featured or no product, and tags versus followers.

With over 1.44 billion users worldwide, nearly one million of whom log in each day, Facebook has an unprecedented audience. The number of brands you have to compete with on Facebook is almost as staggering as the opportunity.

The guide includes Facebook tests to measure the effectiveness of custom calls to action, posts with offers as opposed to posts without, serious versus not serious, video views versus views to 95% and more.

If you want your Tweets to have more impact, test the time of day, frequency and number of posts and rate of decay.

Clear guidelines for every test keeps things simple and straightforward for marketers to use and improve their marketing strategy.

Download your free guide here.