Tag: social media

10 Twitter Marketing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making | Business News Daily

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Social media is a great free tool that businesses can — and should — take advantage of. Twitter, especially, is one of the best platforms for actively engaging with your brand’s audience, but if you make the wrong moves, you could find yourself tweeting into the void, or worse, offending potential customers.

Business News Daily asked social media experts about the 10 worst things brands and businesses can do on Twitter. Tweet your way to the top by avoiding these major mistakes.

1. Don’t oversell your brand.

“One of the biggest mistakes that brands can make on Twitter is being too brand-centric in their messaging, and forgetting what social media is about — community! Though it may seem counterintuitive to increasing brand awareness, the most successful social media marketing programs focus more on sharing third-party articles and building relationships within communities, rather than only sharing your brand’s messaging and driving [traffic] to your website. A good rule of thumb is to stick to 80 percent third-party content/community engagement, and 20 percent brand-related posts.” – Ginny Torok, social media consultant and digital marketing director, IDMD

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Fake and Overused Weather Photos: Avoid Sharing These Images | Weather.com

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Social media has been a beneficial tool for weather forecasters in the 21st century. It allows meteorologists to give the public advance warning about a dangerous weather event, and, once the event begins, news gatherers use social media to quickly share images and video of a damaging storm system.

Conversely, social media has also made it easier to spread a lie. All it takes is one person to find an old picture or video, rebrand it as current and share it to Facebook or Twitter. Then it has the potential to go viral all over again.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and winter storms give these fake photos a high-profile platform to resurface. The image above, posted after a deadly tornado hit the Tulsa, Oklahoma, metro area on March 25, 2015, seems to look real. But as soon as it began to make the rounds on social media, locals immediately knew it was a fake.

Before you share the next striking, unbelievable image during a severe weather event, we want you to know how to recognize a phony. Spotting fake photos isn’t easy, but it’s slightly simpler when abiding by one maxim: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. As for recycled weather photos that came from a past event, websites like Tineye and Google Image Search can help pick out reused images that were posted on the Internet long ago. To use Tineye or Google Image Search, just save the photo in question and upload it to either site. They will tell you if that photo has been previously shared on social media.

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Your Followers Got Purged – Now What? | BusinessTips.com

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downloadThe end of last year, and the beginning of this year, was rocky for businesses on social media. Instagram and Twitter dumped a bunch of fake accounts, and Facebook changed its policy so that inactive accounts would longer be including in a page’s total fans. Of course ostensibly this is a good thing – why would you want to market to a bunch of fake and inactive followers – but as most people know, higher follower counts on social media do help to boost a business’s credibility online. Losing a ton of people, then, can feel like a real shock. But don’t panic; there are a few things you can do.

Figure out why

Now, if you bought followers and, one day, they all disappeared, you know why. But a lot of small business owners never saw the point to buying fans, and they still occasionally see drastic dips in their follower totals. If you count yourself among them, there are few things that may have happened. The first is that you simply haven’t done very much in a while.

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Fast Food Social Media Strategies Tell Restaurant Brand Stories | QSR magazine

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Q: What are the best kinds of posts to share on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

A: There are a lot of ways to generate “likes” and “shares” on social media, but to use it to build a sustaining brand, you should align your social content with your brand strategy.

Videos of cute cats and aphorisms like “life is better with bacon” may get shared widely and boost your brand exposure, but they don’t do anything to build your brand equity. If you only care about the number of retweets or favorites you get, you’re missing the opportunity to tell your brand story and create a compelling narrative on social media.

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How to Master the Two Key Parts of Your Online Presence | Entrepreneur

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download (1)In his book Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Mitch Meyerson introduces you to 22 innovators who have redefined the developing landscape of online marketing. In this edited excerpt, contributing author and founder of Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch explains why email is the key to building your online presence and what you should really be using social media for.

There’s a hierarchy in the world of building a total web presence for your business, and mastering things like Facebook and Pinterest fall somewhere far behind getting your email marketing machine oiled and ready for prime time.

One thousand responsive email followers trumps 25,000 Twitter followers every day when it comes to actually promoting the things that make your money. Focus on building a list of email subscribers that want to hear from you, and social media will become a tool set to help you do more of that. While this may sound shocking and hard to hear, you should ditch social media for now and focus on email marketing first.

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Stressed Out? Social Media May Help Women Cope | Live Science

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Face it, ladies: your DIY projects rarely turn out like the ones you see on Pinterest, and your Facebook posts aren’t universally “liked.” But a new survey suggests that despite such woes, social networking is still good for you.

The survey found that women who frequently use social media, along with other technologies, to connect with friends and family report feeling less stressed than women who connect less often.

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5 PR Tips For Startups And Growing Brands Leveraging Social Media For Growth | Adrants

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Social media transformed classic PR and is offering startups and growing brands endless new possibilities to drive traffic to their digital and physical storefronts. It sounds like the best of all worlds; blending new media with old media, right? Any startup has the ability to set up a Twitter account or Facebook page, yet you still must follow traditional public relations rules on these channels.

Issues may come up as businesses rely too heavily on social media at the expense of proven public relations strategies. All too often, we have seen first-hand during the dawn of social media the horrific (and hilarious) errors which were made as clients jumped in too fast.

Murray Newlands, along with Drew Hendricks, has authored a new book, How to get PR for your Startup: Traction which includes 5 guidelines for avoiding typical pitfalls.

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3 Overhyped Marketing Trends | Fast Company

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It’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in the hype of the latest trends in technology, mobile apps, social media, and the like. Many breakthroughs in these areas are indeed valuable for small businesses, particularly those that do all or most of their business online. However, much of what you hear on these fronts is hyped way out of proportion.

Sometimes, the person promoting the new trend has a vested interest. Just as often, people get enthusiastic about the latest bright and shiny thing. To help put this into perspective, here are a few overrated leading tech trends:

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  Wham, Bam, Thank you SPAM. #entrepreneurfail | Getentrepreneurial.com

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As alluring as social media is, it is fleeting and many people never see the posts more than once if at all.

Email provides one of the highest conversions in online marketing because everyone checks their emails – even if only looking at the subject line, and it is always in their inbox until deletion. Catching folks on social media is hit-or- miss.

Unfortunately, the state of email marketing generally consists of the following:
Too much email
Not enough email
Unclear calls to action
Irrelevant information
Too selly sell

The way to combat the “Wham bam, fear of SPAM” blues, here are some tips and tricks to nurture your email subscribers, and not be an entrepreneur fail:

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8 Exciting Things Happening Right Now in Social Media | Allbusiness.com

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March 2014 has proven to be another busy month for the world of social media. Whilst there hasn’t been a specific event to dominate headlines, several stories emerged which hint at the future of the industry. The implications for the business world are intriguing, and suggest creativity, and a degree of restraint, may form marketing campaigns of the future. What’s clear from certain stories is many businesses are attempting to quell growing fears of privacy concerns. For companies who rely heavily on online interaction, it’s a crucial stage to maintain customer faith.

Here are eight of the most intriguing moments, and how they could shape the future of the business world.

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