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Social Media

Ten Awesome Social Media Automation Tools

In the last decade, developers from famous social media platforms have changed the way we use their applications. Social media platforms are now excellent tools for marketing products and brands—these platforms act as great sources of exposure for small, medium, and even huge businesses.

Here are 10 of the top Social Media Automation Tools, which you can utilize as the first step towards automating your business.

Workflow
Workflow helps you organize a proper system as needed and share content according to plan. It allows you to promote the right content with the right audience at the right time.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite enables you to keep an eye on your competitors and communicate with your audience and users by creating a community dedicated to your business.

Sendible
You can automate replies to the audience’s queries, collaborate with others, generate valuable reports, and schedule updates with Sendible. This multi-purpose tool will help you organize and plan posts so your marketing team can focus on important tasks and activities.

CoSchedule
This automation tool helps you schedule your posts, thereby saving a lot of time and effort. CoSchedule enables you to schedule up to 60 posts at once.

Chatfuel
Chatfuel enables you to create a chatbot that engages customers and provides accurate responses in real-time to enhance customer satisfaction.

Agorapulse
You can schedule your social media posts and track the performance of your posts to make better decisions. You can engage a larger audience using their informative reports. Their social media management features are amazing.

SEMrush
This all-in-one digital marketing automating tool is the best PPC and SEO toolkit. This tool allows you to automate posts, promote campaigns, track results, and generate valuable analytics.

Tailwind
This scheduling tool also helps with analytics. Tailwind will not only help you automate posts, but it provides posting recommendations so you can reach more potential leads.

Later
With 600,000 happy users, you can already assume this tool’s popularity. This tool allows you to manage your social media comments.

Furthermore, it lets you schedule Instagram posts and increase engagement.

Iconosquare
Iconosquare provides personalized information for social media platforms. This way, your business can progress with social media marketing campaigns using informed decisions. Save time with their in-depth analytics and reporting.

Automating your marketing process and method helps minimize errors and understand customer behavior while saving time, effort, and money. You can even schedule the entire campaign and stay ahead of competitors.

So choose the best social media automating tools from the list above and take the first step to business automation.

Social Media: Friend Or Fraud?

Hopefully you’re aware of the risks of fake accounts on social media. Accounts are created to catfish; con people out of money; and for other kinds of exploitation.

But did you know that fake accounts can be created for other services too?

Most of the businesses we interact with now need you to create an account. Think food ordering, online shopping, maybe even for businesses like yours.

But what’s the harm in that, right? These fakes won’t be creating accounts on your website to trick you into anything. They won’t be able to access your products or services for free. Aside from creating spam in your CRM, what’s the problem?

Actually, these fake accounts can result in huge fraud. Recently, for example, the US Secret Service announced it had recovered $2 billion in fraudulent Covid-19 relief claims.

And it’s on the rise, because there are now software tools which automate account creation and mask real identities.

In the world of retail, bots exist to buy up limited edition or highly desired items, aiming to resell them for a higher price.

And the lengths these bots go to in order to make fake email accounts look like real humans is incredible.

They sign up to mailing lists, send emails, watch YouTube videos, all to build up normal email account activity, before creating accounts with the desired retailer, ready for the drop.

When the item is released, these bots are all logged in and checking out at the same time, making it next to impossible for real humans to make a purchase.

While this may not directly affect your business in this way, it’s making it very difficult for all of us to be recognised as real individuals online. It may be only a matter of time before this is recognised as a form of fraud.

Have you considered how fake account fraud could affect your business? Perhaps it’s time to take a look at the way accounts are created to do business with you.

Five Social Media Mistakes Businesses Must Avoid

Social media is an incredible chance for your brand to interact directly with your audience and grow it even further. If you’re not able to manage your social media marketing properly however, you’ll simply waste time and resources, or worse, actually harm your brand’s reputation.

Here are five key social media marketing mistakes that your business must avoid at all costs:

Discussing Hot-Button Topics
Some topics, especially political and religious ones, are simply not worth bringing up. This is especially true in today’s divisive political environment.

You’ll end up dividing your audience and perhaps even bringing negative attention onto your brand. It’s better to avoid these issues altogether and playing it a bit safer with your choice of topics.

Winging It
Social media marketing is the same as any other digital marketing strategy. You need to know what you want to get from it. If you don’t have specific goals for your social media strategies, you’ll never know exactly what to do or when they’re successful.

Take the time to think about what you really want from each social media platform, and brainstorm about what you must do to get there.

Posting For the Sake of It
Research has found that the number of social media posts you need to be making on a daily and weekly basis is quite frequent in order to truly engage with and grow your audience.

On Twitter, for example, you may need to Tweet up to 15 times per day. However, you cannot forego quality for the sake of quantity.

Treating All Platforms the Same
It’s likely that you have a presence on a wide variety of social media platforms. At the very least, Facebook and Twitter, and then probably a couple out of Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. The problem is when you treat all social media platforms the same. The average audience on Facebook and Twitter are much different. People use Instagram differently than they use Pinterest. If you want to truly thrive on social media, you need to understand each platform and what your audience is looking for on it.

Ignoring Negative Activity
It’s critical that you don’t get defensive on social media, but you cannot simply let negative feedback go unanswered. Not only does it further harm the relationship between you and the individual complaining, but it also adds some legitimacy to the complaint for everybody else to see.

After all, if you had a reasonable response to the complaint, why wouldn’t your company voice it? Make sure that you have dedicated customer service resources handling your social media comments in a professional, expedient manner.

By avoiding the key social media marketing mistakes listed above, your business will be in a great position to not only survive on social media platforms, but thrive on them. Your audience will be engaged and energized, and you’ll reach more people than you ever thought possible!

Using Technology to Improve Your Business

In this day and age, small businesses are facing a serious question: keep doing business as usual or try to adopt and incorporate a more relevant way of doing things.

Keeping the status quo may be one of the reasons the business has remained so successful, but it may also be one of the reasons it starts to falter in the future. There is a certain loyalty to small, local businesses, but speed, convenience, and consistence overrules loyalty after a while.

With a few simple changes, it’s possible to keep the business running as usual (on the outside), while streamlining the way it operates from the inside. Ultimately, this provides the customers with the speed, convenience, and consistency they require to remain loyal.

The first change a business can make is to ensure a fast, easy way to accept credit cards as tender. A lot of small business still don’t accept credit cards or debit cards because they simply don’t have the means. Or, they accept these forms of payment, but rely on outdated, and time consuming methods, such as phone lines.

The solution to this is to utilize mobile devices to scan and authorize payments. More and more businesses are using this method and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing.

The second improvement that can be made is with accounting and bookkeeping. Using an accounting program that is not based in the cloud or using a program that the company has used for a decade may have worked in the past. However, as the business grows and taxes, payroll, and the bottom line increases, the business is going to be better off using a program that is constantly updated, constantly backed up, and that can be accessed from anywhere.

You move around a lot — and being able to access these important aspects of your business whenever you want and wherever you go becomes an important tool for managing your business on the go. The third and most important aspect of managing your business is providing your employees and customers with ways to contribute and feel valued.

A great way to do this is to keep an open line of communication with them. Implementing ways to communicate their ideas, thoughts, and feelings about their job and experience is becoming an important variable in employee and customer satisfaction.

In office settings, it can be very helpful to implement an instant messaging program between employees. This provides a way for everyone to communicate easily. In retail settings, employee text messaging groups can be utilized or social media groups can be used to let them feel a part of the team. Feeling a part of the team is crucial and feeling valued is even more important.

Social media can be huge when it’s used to interact with customers. Asking a customer to share their experience on Google or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will always result in more and more people becoming aware of the services and experiences your business can provide.

These three changes can improve the way your business operates on a day to day basis, without having too much overhead costs, and without having to overhaul major aspects of the business. They can improve employee and customer satisfaction, as well as make them all feel included. In the end, the general sense from the customers will be one of “Whatever they changed, I like it, and it works.”

How Can You Use Google Trends For Small Business?

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Google Trends is a tool that has been around for a while, and has great potential for improving exposure and sales for businesses. It is entirely free to use, and its simplicity makes it accessible to virtually anyone with basic computer knowledge.

Here are some specific ways in which you can use Google Trends to enhance your small business practices:

Brainstorming Topics
For instance, if your business website contains a blog, it’s common to quickly run out of content ideas that will not only interest your readers but also tie into the products or services your business offers.

Choose a phrase that describes a broad idea for a blog post, and Google Trends will show you how popular that phrase is and also suggest related topics. With one simple search, you could potentially come up with ideas for dozens of different blog posts, and relevant content is the best way to build your business website. [Read more…] about How Can You Use Google Trends For Small Business?

Social Media Hashtags: What Are They And How To Use Them?

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

As we delve into our social media networks, like Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, it seems that hashtags – or little words and phrases preceded by the # symbol – are permeating everything in our feeds.

This cryptic little symbol can actually make it easy to categorize posts and search for similar content, but more and more people seem to be using it outside of that purpose, which creates confusion about this practice as a whole.

Unlike many internet crazes, the emergence of the hashtag can actually be traced to its very first Tweet.

Back in August 2007, Chris Messena, a former Google employee, wrote on Twitter: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” Granted, this single tweet didn’t revolutionize how we navigate social media all at once, but it eventually did catch on.

[Read more…] about Social Media Hashtags: What Are They And How To Use Them?

Google+ Basics You Need To Know

While Google+ may not boast the same popularity that Facebook enjoys, it is becoming harder to ignore. If you are just getting started on Google+, you need to wrap your head around its workings. Here are some basic features to get you going:

The Stream
This is the main home screen for Google+ where updates from people you are following show up in card-like boxes. To pull up public posts related to the same topic as that of a particular post, click the hash-tag on its upper-right corner.

Circles
These are groups that help you organize and manage your social experience. Whenever you follow someone new, you assign the person to a circle, which could be for friends, family, acquaintances or people you don’t know personally.internet banking

You could also add your own customized circles. With circles, you get to focus on content from the specific group of people you want, although you can also view content from everyone. Circles are also useful for controlling who sees what you post.

Finding people
When you first sign in to Google+, the system walks you through a number of steps to locate people you know and to connect with interesting users you may not yet be acquainted with.

Notifications
Google+ uses notifications to let you know when something happens on the network that is directly relevant to you. You can access your notifications by clicking on the bell at the top-right corner of the screen.

Chats and Hangouts
Google’s Hangout messaging system is integrated into Google+ so you can chat with other users and initiate video calls from within the service. Simply click the “Hangouts” link at the top-right corner of the screen and then click on any contact’s name to open a chat session. Clicking the video camera icon will send the person a video chat request.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)

How To Make Hashtags Work For Social Media

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

On the list of the great rewards of social networking is its capability to reach a huge crowd while spending minimal costs. Making use of the famous hashtag notation (especially for Twitter and Instagram), you are able to spread your products and services across the globe, and reap the benefits of well-liked trends.

A hashtag must be short and simple to recall
Crafting a hashtag that is too unique or special could be risky. As much as possible, come up with a hashtag that is brief and straightforward so it can easily be remembered.

Long hashtags are at risk of getting misspelled and forgotten. Additionally, with the 140 character limit of every Twitter post, longer hashtags only consume needless space. Simple abbreviations frequently are very effective.

A hashtag must be unique and relevant at the same time
The primary goal of using a hashtag is to bring online users to your social media page.

Picking a general hashtag that may gain large numbers of results will lower the probability of getting your desired volume of traffic.

It may only just make your posts wander off in the search results. You must make sure that your hashtags are only sufficiently unique to be able to avoid too few results.Печать

A hashtag must be searched first prior to using it
Even though you are confident that you have put together the ideal hashtag, it is still crucial to look for that hashtag prior to applying it.

This is the only way to make certain that you will not get classified with any messages that you are not related to. An example of a hashtag disaster was when a certain company used the hashtag “#notguilty” to express how their customers’ felt after eating their product.

However, this Twitter update was published during a popular person’s murder trial. The hashtag #notguilty became a trend, but for an entirely different cause.

Hashtags serve an excellent purpose which improves your chances of reaching a wider audience. Make sure that you know how to utilize them well.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)

How To Show Brand Personality

Basic RGBSocial media channels are starting to replace traditional mediums such as radio, print and television when it comes to creating brand awareness.

One good method of showing brand personality on social media is to make such interactions more personal.

How your brand is perceived is greatly influenced by the way you engage with people on social media and making interactions personal will make them feel much more connected to your brand.

This means that you should respond to comments on Twitter and Facebook with dialogue that does not sound generic or scripted.

The more interactions that feel real and personal on social media, the more comfortable and connected people are going to feel with and to your brand.

Don’t hesitate to share personal, but relevant stories, comments and photos. But tie them into your brand to make them resonate with your intended client base.

Using humor can also be a good idea, but keep it simple and, of course, appropriate.

So long as the content is relevant to your industry and likely to resonate with the sense of humor of your target market, there is no good reason why humor should not be embraced on social media.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)

Why Social Networking Is Important For Any Business

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
If you are not currently using social media for your business then chances are that you have fallen behind your competitors.

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+ are great platforms to promote brand awareness, communicate with existing and potential customers, as well as attract new leads.

Up to a quarter of developed nation’s Internet traffic is used on social media and networks. It is free to sign up and use all of these social networks. Why wouldn’t you want to address this market?

Social media sites can help you establish your online presence. Statistics show that over 70% of people trust ads on social networks from friends, while only 10% of people trust advertisements from websites.

Social media is more than just getting your name out there; it establishes trust and lasting relationships with new and existing clients. You can keep in touch in a personal manner, update services that you offer, and offer discounts and coupons on your social sites.

Social networks work like word-of-mouth, but more reliably. Your friends and followers can easily share your content with as many people as they want without interrupting their daily lives.

This is important because if it is a hassle to view your advertising it could be considered a nuisance instead of a promotion.

Instead everyone will check their social sites and see a post from their friend to check out your business. They are already in the mood for reviewing messages, so this is not an inconvenience to read.

Now before you start making a profile on every social site, first consider what you want to get out of social networking. Most businesses could get a Twitter account to share basically anything instantly.

Twitter is great for marketing and reaching many people instantly. Since Twitter is available easily from any smart phone, it is basically like texting all of your followers at once. Your followers can then retweet or share anything that you post.

Facebook is also very popular. It is a publicly trusted location and it performs really well in Google’s search index. This means that if you are having trouble with getting your website to the top results in Google, Facebook can help. Your company’s Facebook page should not take too long to reach the top results if someone is searching for your business.

Each social network is different and attracts different crowds. This can be seen in the usage statistics for each network. This can help you determine which social networks would be best for you to reach your desired audience.

When starting out you want to start slowly. Do not join every social network you can find. It would be best to join Twitter and Facebook at first. Determine who is going to manage the social sites. Then once you have some followers post some polls or special offers to attract more followers.

Once your followers start posting to your page, read their posts and answer them. This will add a lot of value to your business.

You can begin posting articles related to your business to encourage people to spend more time reading your content. Some things to keep in mind would be to not post too often or you may be considered a spammer.

Once you have become familiar with social networks you can expand to other social networks such as Google+ or Pinterest. The most important rule of all is to be patient; you may not see results overnight. However, if you provide quality content, service, and interactions on your social sites you will be successful.

If you would like help determining where you should start or need any help with your existing social networks, give us a call.