3 Obsolete Practices All Social Media Marketers Need To Stop

21Feb

It’s 2018– let’s market like it. Social media marketing has been around for quite a few years now and as we’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are always new strategies that should be incorporated. On the other hand, there are also tactics that should be erased and left in the archives.

You should always make sure your brand is competitive and staying in-tune with the times. As a result, certain antiquated strategies may age your strategy.

Here are three techniques we recommend you should stop using and what we would recommend to do instead:

1. #Overload. For some time, many marketers felt the more hashtags the better. #As #a #result, #some #posts #looked #like #this. While you should ALWAYS use hashtags, you don’t want to clutter your content. Obviously, you don’t want to do that. No only does it saturate your content, but it annoys your readers. Additionally, it misses the point of hashtags, which is to incorporate searchable and vital keywords. You should chose 2-3 for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and 7-10 for Instagram.

2. Is that a blog or a novel? Let’s face it — people’s attention spans are not getting any longer. With that in mind, you should make your blogs shorter. Some marketers see blogs as an excuse to share extremely long articles. Even though these pieces may prove to be helpful, you’re likely to exhaust your reader and instead of getting a take away out of the blog, they’ll be annoyed. If you have a very long piece of writing you’re excited to send out, we recommend breaking it up into a series of blogs. That way you can share your thoughts without cutting down the copy. You will also engage your customers by promising the next installment in your series.

3. Making a tweet a party. Are you mentioning another social media user? Tag them! Are you mentioning them and the magazine they were just referenced in? Tag the magazine too! But after that, you should probably stop. Unfortunately, some people didn’t get the “three’s company” memo and waste their space with a ton of tagging. Not only will this annoy the people you’ve tagged, but your content’s quality will suffer greatly. We have seen this happen a lot when someone who is overly eager to get followers will tag everyone that had followed them recently. The result is a list of 10-15 tags per tweet, and with the new 280 character limit, it could be worse. If you feel inclined to engage with every person who follows you– an act we would not recommend– a simple private message is sufficient.

When social media first started, it was a bit like the Wild Wild West. There may have been rules, but not many followed them. As a result, you saw content like above. Make 2018 your year for professional content, writing that follows the rules of the web. Trust us, your customer engagement will come back to life if you avoid the above ideas.

At The Go! Agency, we are constantly restructuring our strategy to stay modern and in touch with the most effective marketing methods of today. We would love to work with you and give your brand a competitive edge.

Click here to learn how we can help: http://ow.ly/Qw4w30iqrhm

Click Here to Subscribe

At The Drawing Board: Learning About Facebook Ad Objectives

By Christopher Tompkins

Copy of Go! Blog Image Templates (900x350) (1)

26Apr

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

In the last post in our At The Drawing Board series, I wrote about deciding on a marketing strategy. In this post, I’m going to talk about the first part of our strategy: Facebook Ads.

We decided that Facebook Ads would be a good way to bring leads into our funnel and raise awareness of our company and services. From our ads, we’d collect email addresses so that we could stay in contact with leads via email marketing.

But just deciding to use Facebook Ads is the easy part. Planning Facebook Ads is a whole different ball game.

Facebook Ads come in many types, which are ever changing. The type you choose is based on the objective you want to complete.

In our case, our objective was to collect email addresses, which gave us a few options:

Conversions – An ad run with the objective of converting users. The ad pushes a user towards your website with the aim of the user completing a specific action. (Such as, in our case, filling in our email form.)
Traffic – This type of ad aims to push users towards a particular website. (In our case, it could be a landing page for our email list.)
Lead Generation – An ad that collects contact information from users directly within Facebook, providing you with a list of people that signed up.

There are a few other objectives that didn’t seem like they would be as relevant to us:

Brand awareness – Making more people aware of a Facebook page and brand.
Reach – Showing an ad to the maximum number of people
Engagement – Getting people to engage with a Facebook page’s posts. (Increasing reactions, comments, likes, etc.)
Video views – Getting people to view a video.
App Installs – Having users buy and install an app.
Product sales – Aiming to get people to buy products from an online store.
Store visits – Having people visit your real world location.

Many of these ad types seem similar but have small differences beneath.

So what are the main differences between ad types?

The options are given for how the ad looks and works. Since each ad is based on a certain objective, each one looks different. A video views ad will consist of a video and text, while an engagement ad will only show a post from your Facebook Page. Some ads show a button, while others like the lead generation ad are unique and contain forms that can be filled in.
How the ads optimize. Once you run an ad for a certain amount of time, Facebook can automatically optimize it in the background so that your objective is more easily obtained. With that in mind, it needs to know what you want from your ad so it can help you get there.

With all of this in mind, since we were looking to collect email addresses, we decided to start off with a conversions ad.

Our basic plan was that our ad would direct users to a page where they would enter their contact details. Those who entered their details would have converted, which was the main goal we wanted to strive for.

However, we could have used other types of ads too. Any good Facebook Ads campaign will try out some ad types to find the one that works best and completes an objective for the least amount of money.

At the Drawing Board: Deciding on a Marketing Strategy

By Christopher Tompkins

12Apr

Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Marketing

In our last post in the At the Drawing Board series, I discussed the very first stages of one of our marketing campaigns. Myself, Chris (our CEO) and Dale (our VP) met to discuss a goal for our campaign. In the end, we decided we wanted to promote our Facebook Ads service as we believe it’s something we excel at.

During the meeting, I took down all of our ideas and later tried to form them into a concrete plan.

To do this, I first wrote down:

The goal for our campaign. What we wanted from it. This we settled on as bringing more clients in for Facebook Ads Consultancy.
Who our campaign was going to be targeted to. In this case, local businesses seemed a good starting point as they would most benefit from using Facebook Ads.
How people would find out about our campaign. Such as on social media, through our emails or (mainly) through running Facebook Ads.
What options we had for turning potential clients into actual clients. Our blog, social media, email marketing and customer service.

Once these were written down, we could easily form a small funnel to visualize the bare bones of our campaign.

At the top of our funnel, people would become aware of us and our services. From there they would become a prospective client, which would eventually turn into a consultation.

Creating this diagram allowed us to think more about how we would turn people aware of our service into clients.

We already knew our first step, where we made people aware of our service would be done through the use of Facebook Ads. But how would we turn people that had seen our ads into clients?

Possible options were:

Create a drip fed email marketing campaign that would send emails automatically to people on a mailing list to build their trust, before pitching our services to them in an email.
Capture phone numbers of potential customers and call them up to work out whether they could use our services.
Pass people on to our website or social media in the hope they’ll start to follow us and eventually decide to use our services.
Capture physical addresses and send them marketing materials through the mail.

Chris and I decided a drip fed email campaign would be the best option, as it would mostly run itself once set up, it would keep us in contact with people in our sales funnel and allow us to market to them. This allowed us to change our diagram:

With this diagram in place, we had a strategy that we could work on, and our campaign was starting to take shape. This gave us some tasks that we would need to do next:

Think up a Facebook Ads campaign that allowed us to collect the email address of people interested in our service.
Write and create an email marketing campaign based around our theme of Facebook Ads consultation.
Plan a timeline for our campaign showing us when it would start and when the content would need to be created for.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the first stage of our funnel, the Facebook Ads campaign. How we expanded on our ideas to create something more substantial. Meeting with our Copywriters and Social Media Managers for input to create a campaign map.

The 5 Lists That Every Social Media Marketer Needs

By Christopher Tompkins

20Oct

Advertising, Business, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Local Marketing, Marketing, Periscope, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Social Media, Social networking, Uncategorized

Lists are great, aren’t they? They help us keep track of what to do, what to buy, where to go, what to avoid, and which events to remember. Every aspect of our lives improves with well-developed lists. A social media marketer’s strategy is no exception.

Since social media marketing has multiple aspects to it, a successful marketer will need multiple lists. Take some time out and compose the following sets of material!

1. Competitors. Which businesses are your competition? Is it just locals or are there national brands to watch out for? Start writing down these companies so you can monitor their social media marketing activity.

2. Leads. It’s time to do some research. Compose a list of businesses or consumers that would potentially utilize your services or products. Follow them and open up the avenues of communication. This is a major part of a social media marketer’s position.

3. Industry Influencers. Who are the BIG names in your industry? Whether it’s a hugely successful company or it’s an influential individual, you should not only know who these people are, but you should follow them and study their strategy.

4. Reliable Sources. The best marketers share relevant, newsworthy, and engaging content with their social media following. Don’t go searching every time you’re writing a set of updates. Make a list of the best places to find news and articles.

5. Buzzwords. Some words are bland and tasteless while others jump off the page and pull in the reader. Each industry has their own unique and diverse vocabulary. Set up your list of buzzwords so your arsenal of engaging copy is handy!

Get to writing! These five lists are invaluable tools that will help you when you’re stuck with marketing.

Did you know we make these lists for each of our clients? We specially craft every single social media marketing campaign so it reaches maximum potential. Contact us today to learn more!

The Best Brands Use This Content. Does Yours?

By Christopher Tompkins

11Oct

Advertising, Email Marketing, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Live Video, Local Marketing, Marketing, Snapchat, Social Media, Social networking, Tailwind, Twitter, Uncategorized, YouTube

Think of the various categories of your social media content as gadgets in your “social media utility belt”. Each one is unique but serves the ultimate purpose – brand engagement and increased brand awareness. But to get to those goals, you need to learn which tools work and which don’t.

Diversity is absolutely essential for a successful social media marketing campaign. To achieve the right mix, try the following types of updates:

– Interviews. Whether The New Yorker just interviewed the owner of your company or you want to spotlight a new employee, interviews will bring a face to your brand. This humanizes your business and strengthens your approachability.

– Professional Material. Has your company created ebooks, blogs, online courses, etc.? Promote it! Sharing your material through your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter is a surefire way to put your brand in a professional light. Are you looking to make some professional material? The Go! Agency has your back!

– FAQ samples. Do you notice some questions many customers ask quite often? Address the issue in the form of a social media post.

– Q&As- Hosting an open question and answer session can open the floodgates of questions to your brand. Get your answers ready and be quick about it! Despite them being fast paced, Q&A sessions are marketing gold.

– Preparation Steps – Helping your customers prepare for an important process can be very helpful and will show the caring side of your brand. Senior living facilities can post about moving in processes or Medicare applications. Mechanics can give tips on how to winterize your vehicle. You get the picture. It’s free advice that shows you want your customers to succeed, be safe, and stay informed.

Get ready! These five types of content will bring humanity and better communication to your brand. Consider adding these ideas to your strategy!

Contact The Go! Agency to learn how we can take advantage of social media marketing together!

Click Here to Subscribe

4 Steps To Awesome Facebook Visuals

By Christopher Tompkins

19Sep

Facebook, Graphic Design, Social Media

With all the content that’s online, how are readers supposed to remember your message? The answer lies in images. When visuals accompany Facebook posts, users retain 65% more of that message for the following three days. Striking imagery allows people to learn and remember information longer than mere words. Here are the best ways to use eye-catching, and memorable images in your social media!

– Infographics. Images, texts… why not both? With infographics, you can have the best of both worlds, as viewers learn information in an understandable and creative way. The internet has turned infographics into a hugely popular form, so don’t miss out on this method!

– Colors. Your Facebook posts need to stand out. The images you use need vibrant, noticeable colors. People are 80% more likely to engage with content that has bright colors!

– Bold text. If your images incorporate text in any way, make sure it’s big, bold, and readable. Don’t force readers to decipher your words.

– Consistency. Because posts with related imagery are 94% more likely to receive engagement and views, you need to be consistent. It has become a new industry standard to add images to every Facebook post to achieve better performance.

This is your chance to create a strong online presence. Make it count by incorporating photography, graphics, and infographics into your Facebook content! Here at The Go! Agency, our graphic designers and social media managers work hard to create beautiful and exciting visuals that readers remember!

Does your Facebook page look like a bleak landscape? Contact us to bring new life into your social media marketing!

Click Here to Subscribe

The Dying Art Of Facebook Organic Reach

By Christopher Tompkins

13Sep

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

At the risk of sounding old – back in the day, Facebook was a very different place for marketers. Posts had a better chance of reaching the right people organically without boosts. Sure, advertising was still around, but it wasn’t the life force of the platform. Now, it seems like selecting the right avenue in the Ads Manager is almost as important as writing the content itself.

Advertising has become an essential element to Facebook marketing. At the center of this issue is updated algorithms. As you might have noticed, what appears in your timeline is what Facebook thinks you want to see the most, not necessarily what is most recent. Yes, the option of changing the feed results is available, but not many people know or bother with it. The pages you visit the most, the people you converse with often, and topics you like alter your results. This can be good and bad for consumers, but it’s a challenge for marketers, especially those who are just starting out with Facebook.

While advertising’s grasp is hard to escape, marketers can ensure that their content is willing to do some heavy lifting. Appealing visuals, popular hashtags, and interesting news articles can help fight back. In the end, though, Facebook’s infrastructure leaves little choice to marketers. Even if it’s only a few dollars, companies will have to to pay something.

There is a good side to this. Once you decide that advertising is necessary, your page will benefit. It’s not a scam. Your marketing team will be happy with what Facebook does for your content. Once Mark Zuckerberg’s people have a bit of dough, they will take care of you. Not only will your numbers be what organic reach used to be able to do, but you will also have a unique advantage. We see advertising’s growth for various reasons, yet the most significant is that the platforms understand that businesses are thriving due to their social media efforts. With literally billions of people watching, it’s easy to make an impact. For it to keep being easy, they need a little bit of payment.

What do you think of Facebook advertising? Comment below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Facebook Messenger’s Live Video Chat Gets a Revamp

By Christopher Tompkins

8Sep

Facebook, Live Video, Social Media

For those aware of social media trends, Facebook’s recent update should come as no surprise. Video, more specifically LIVE video, continues to shake the social media industry to its core, and Facebook once again takes note from Snapchat. Facebook has recently revamped their Messenger app’s live video chat feature. While an option that rivaled Skype has previously existed inside the software’s infrastructure for some time, this new update allows people to multitask just like, you guessed it, Snapchat. Users can connect through a live video chat while still reading other messages and checking out content.

While this may be a simple update, it speaks volumes. This is the third change from Facebook’s HQ in recent months that is very similar to a Snapchat feature. Check the other two out:

Instagram Stories – If any social media platform is a rival to Snapchat, it’s Instagram. They are both heavily based in the mobile world and operate solely with imagery-based content. However, Snapchat had an advantage with their “Stories” feature, which allowed people to view a friend’s recent updates from the last 24 hours. Facebook-owned Instagram had to fight back with their own version of Stories. Now, you will see a nice row of circular profile pictures encased in rainbow auras on your Instagram homepage.

Lifestage – A brand new mobile platform by Facebook that’s eerily similar to Snapchat in function and design. The only difference between Lifestage and Snapchat is its audience. It’s entirely for teenagers. Besides the age restriction, Lifestage has many similar qualities, including filters and video options.

With this new video tweak, we’re curious just how much Snapchat is impacting Facebook’s numbers. Regardless, we don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about anytime soon. Almost 2 billion people and companies use the site for networking and communication. Yet it does show just how powerful video is for social media. If the platforms are adapting, so must marketers.

What do you think of Facebook and Snapchat’s growing competition? Share below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Social Media Multitasking: Why One Profile Isn’t Enough

By Christopher Tompkins

29Aug

Social Media

In the beginning, there was MySpace. That was consumed by Facebook, which had internet rule for a while. Then rose Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Weibo, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine, Swarm, Tumblr, Foursquare, Meerkat, Periscope, Snapchat, Stacks, Stumbleupon, and Reddit. Whew! There are too many platforms to count, and while it’s impossible to successfully manage accounts on all of them, your company shouldn’t be satisfied with a single profile.

Each platform brings a plethora of different perks. Yes, the primary goals are communication and brand awareness, but how you do this varies substantially on the site you choose. This is why you need to learn to multitask on social media. Having multiple profiles will help you spread your word via different avenues. You can use the varied features of these sites to showcase specific areas of your business!

Each site covers a different aspect of social media. For example, platforms such as Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and Periscope heavily rely on visuals, whether it’s a photo or video. This type of content is a must! You can’t simply post a line of text and expect engagement. Instead, get your creativity hat on (or hire a marketer who has one) and be ready to send out some artistic pieces of marketing.

Twitter is about the NOW. Second by second news can be shared through this popular platform. This is great for content such as everyday updates to press releases. Since you’re limited to 140 characters, you need to harness your other social media profiles and share links to more substantial content.

Facebook has a nice combination of text and visuals. It tweaks what users see based on their interests. This makes Facebook one of the most powerful and challenging of the social media profiles.

LinkedIn is strictly for business. Professionals come to network, promote, and find employment opportunities. You can also share longer articles that you have created. This is the place to develop real world connections.

Balance is the name of the game. As a business marketer, start with a Facebook and Twitter. Depending on your industry, upgrade to an Instagram and LinkedIn in time. Don’t bother too much with Vine, Tumblr, or some of the smaller platforms without having a firm grasp on social media marketing.

Additionally, do your research and find out where your audience likes to hang out. Younger people typically use Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit. Business-oriented adults like Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook is still the social media golden boy that house over 1.65 billion users. Different people utilize different sites for connecting with their favorite people and content.

When you do make multiple accounts, be sure to have consistent branding. Have a singular logo and banner, but be sure to adhere to site specifications. Overall, make sure your tone stays the same no matter what medium you’re using.

So, what’s it going to be? Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat? Take your pick and take your time when deciding how you want to spread your marketing power!

What social media platforms do you use? Share below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Why Facebook’s Ad Preferences Works In Marketers’ Favor

By Christopher Tompkins

21Aug

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

An advertisement has to be really well made and relevant for the average social media user to pay attention to it. If it looks like spam or is pushing a product we have absolutely no interest in, we ignore it like the plague. Facebook knows this and is giving more power to the consumer by introducing ad preferences. However, this isn’t doomsday for social media marketers. Instead, it’s actually good news.

In Facebook’s announcement, they explained that the new ad preferences feature allows its 1.6 billion users to narrow down the type of ads they receive. With just a few clicks (or taps for mobile users), users can weed through some annoying subjects and narrow down their interests and hobbies. Imagine that, ads you actually enjoy!

At the first sight of this news, marketers may begin to sweat bullets. They gave consumers the ability to control the ads? What kind of chaos is this? Yet in truth, this will help deliver the right message to the right person. When companies create a Facebook ad, they already have the ability to specifically pick and choose who gets to see the ad. From a marketer’s standpoint, there are plenty of options so the right person sees your message. Ad preferences will allow that scope to be even narrower, which only leaves the people who would buy your product or service to see it. There’s no point in wasting time, some people just won’t be interested. You might be thinking that a smaller scope is a bad thing. While your reach will be narrower, the possibility of someone actually clicking on the ad will be greater. It’s about quality leads over quantity.

Because of this further filtering, Facebook has another treat. Ad Blocks no longer work on Facebook’s desktop version. Since users have the option to see content they enjoy, there isn’t an excuse anymore to not see ads. Once again, social media marketers should be cheering.

Facebook has never denied that they need advertising to live. It’s what makes their employees happy and their websites free. Without ads, there would be trouble on the horizon for marketer and consumers alike. No one wants a Facebook monthly fee. Because of that, ads will always be a necessary element to all social media platforms. Now, the required experience of advertising seems to be a little less painful.

What do you think of ad preferences? Comment below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Tag : facebook for business

So what are the main differences between ad types?