Social media has become an essential part of how businesses can market themselves online. Although there are multiple social media networks with hundreds of millions of users, many businesses still struggle to find traction with their social media efforts.

One of the reasons social media remains a challenge for so many businesses is they don’t have clear social media objectives. While there’s something to be said for getting started with social media by diving right in, that approach is unlikely to move the needle for a business of any size.

If you want your business to get real results from social media, you need a plan. That’s where social media objectives come into the picture. To help you get started on the right path, we’re going to cover the five things you should evaluate when coming up with these objectives for your business:

1. Start with a Hypothesis

Even though you may be new to using social media for your business, you still know the type of people you’re trying to reach. Based on that knowledge, you can make a hypothesis about which social network is going to be the best fit for your business. Starting with this type of focus will help you make more progress in less time.

2. Know Your KPI

KPI stands for key performance indicator. There are many KPIs related to social media. Followers, shares, clicks and signups are a few of the most common. Since there are many different options, you need to choose the one that matters most to your business. Keep in mind that your primary KPI can change over time. For example, followers may be your KPI for an early campaign, and then you may shift your effort to clicks in the future.

3. Have a Goal

After you’ve identified your KPI, you will want to set a specific goal. The goal you set should be clear and have a specific timeline. It’s generally best to set a goal that’s ambitious but still within reach.

4. Execute, Measure and Analyze

Once all your objectives are defined, you can begin taking action. You will also want to have specific intervals in place to measure how your KPI is progressing in regards to the goal you set for it.

5. Adjust As Needed

While objectives provide a path to follow, they’re not something that’s set in stone. Based on the information you collect, you will want to make adjustments. Gradually improving your social media efforts over time is exactly how you can get to the point of social media having a noticeable impact on your business.

From managing to measuring, learn more about how Send Social Media can help make the pursuit of social media objectives for small business successful.

Branding is a very broad topic. For some people, visual design is the first thing that comes to mind.

Here is Best Practices for Visually Building Your Brand on Social Media

For others, they may view branding with a slightly negative connotation and believe it’s too abstract. While those are all valid thoughts, the right type of branding can be very important for a business. When done correctly, branding helps to define a small business and gives people a reason to connect with it.

One of the ways to move away from the abstractness sometimes associated with branding and focus more on what it can actually do for your business is to look at its most important elements. That’s why we want to cover the essential ingredients to build a brand for your small business:

What’s Your Purpose?

Building a brand starts with defining why your business exists. On the surface, this may seem like a simple question to answer. But as you dig into it, you’ll likely notice that it’s surprisingly complex. Although it can take some time to get a clear and concise answer to this question, doing so will create the foundation for the rest of your branding efforts.

Staying Consistent

A brand is something that makes a promise. The specific promise will vary from one business to the next. Regardless of the specific promise your business makes with its brand, what’s extremely important is to stay consistent with that promise. In terms of how to do that, it’s something that needs to happen at every level of your business. From how you provide customer service to the visual elements you use across the social media for your business, staying consistent will build the type of trust that your business needs in order to grow and thrive.

Involving Employees

Since purpose and consistency are key ingredients of a small business brand, it’s easy to understand why branding isn’t an activity that exists in a silo. For a brand to really mean something, every member of an organization needs to be involved. Another benefit of getting every employee fully on board with your brand is they will help you spread its message.

Building Loyalty

Employees aren’t the only ones who can spread the message of your brand. If you identify your purpose and create an organization where everyone consistently shares that message, you’ll gain loyal customers. These customers will act as evangelists for your brand and help grow it to levels via channels like word of mouth that you could have never done on your own.

Social media continues to be a very important part of building a small business brand. While staying on top of social media can seem quite challenging at times, there are ways to make it easier. Learn more about Send Social Media and how our tool will help streamline your social media efforts.

Although social media usage and influence only continues to increase, plenty of businesses still struggle to stay on top of their social channels. Even after a business clears the initial challenges that often come up when getting started with social, it’s common to feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do. If you want your business to take advantage of everything social media has to offer but worry that you simply don’t have the resources to do so, we want to share four different ways social media automation can help you out:

Efficiently Handling a Large Number of Responses

As you build more momentum for your business through social media, the number of people who interact with your profiles will increase. While this is a good problem to have, it’s still a problem. The last thing you want to do is make potential customers feel ignored or miss a very important message. Since trying to manually go through a large number of responses across multiple platforms can take a lot of time, the ability to aggregate all responses into a single dashboard through social media automation is a huge help.

Identifying the Best Content to Share

There’s an incredible amount of content on the Internet. However, that doesn’t make it any easier to know what you should share through your social profiles. The good news is social media automation can make this decision easier. By automatically collecting analytics about how every post performs, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of what you should be posting. You can also use an integration like RSS to keep your feed interesting. And to top things off, automation gives you the ability to schedule as many posts as you want to share in advance.

Using Social Media for Customer Service

Many of the features that you’ll find on any of the major social media platforms make them ideal for providing customer service. The only downside is if you start getting too many customer service requests, it can overwhelm your current resources and cause your business to drop the ball. The good news is social media automation can solve this dilemma. By bringing all customer service issues into a single location and making it very easy to reply, your business will be able to keep up with this task regardless of the volume you receive.

Engaging with Followers in a Meaningful Way

Engagement is a huge part of social media. So how can you take your interactions with followers beyond quick comments? A great option that’s possible with the help of social media automation is group messaging and/or email marketing. These approaches will allow you to communicate in more depth with your followers.

If you want to overcome common marketing challenges by taking advantage of social media automation, get started today with a free 30-day trial of the Send Social Media Dashboard.

Social media has become an integral part of the work that many agencies do. One of the challenges that agencies often face as they grow is being able to keep up with posting for all clients across multiple platforms. Because this is something that’s obviously too time-consuming to manage manually and is actually too demanding for many social media tools, it’s vital to find a tool that’s built for the specific needs of an agency. Here are the types of features that are essential for a social media management tool used by agencies:

Bulk Scheduling

Not having this feature is a deal breaker. When you want to work on social media content for a client, it’s important for a member of your team to be able to sit down and fill up a queue with lots of posts. Not only is this essential for the sake of efficiency, but it’s also very important for being able to take a strategic approach to social media posting. By choosing a tool that makes it a breeze to queue up plenty of posts, an agency will be able to keep the social profiles active for all its clients without feeling constantly overwhelmed.

Email Integration

Although social media has become an absolutely essential part of online marketing, it hasn’t eliminated email. In fact, as more activity has moved out of people’s inboxes, being able to communicate through this channel is arguably more valuable than ever. That’s why the best agencies know that integrating email into the marketing efforts for their clients is a must. With the right tool, you can easily manage this type of activity. Having this ability is great for using social media as a lead generation tool and then converting those leads into customers.

Ability to Respond

Regardless of the specific platform, social media activity is driven by engagement. If people try to communicate with a profile and never get a response, they’re going to lose interest. Since many agencies handle this type of interaction for their clients, having a tool that pulls all messages into one location and then makes it easy to respond is incredibly useful.

Detailed Analytics

Without analytics, it’s very difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t working as well. With a social media management tool that offers detailed analytics, you’ll be able to use this data for the agency, as well as easily share it with clients on a regular basis.

If you want a social media management tool that you can count on to handle all of your agency’s daily needs, be sure to take a product tour of Send Social Media.

Social Media is critical to your organization’s success, especially going forward as more and more customer connections and engagement are moving there. With millions and millions of people spending more and more time on social sites, it only makes good business sense to be there with them. Just like any business decision, this should be thought out and not jumped into haphazardly. Here are 5 steps for successful social media monitoring with Send Social Media:

Know Your Plan
It is always important to know why and what you are going to do before you do it, otherwise you are being blown by the wind. Identifying which social networks best serve your interests and where your best chances are to make an impact on the public is a first step. Twitter and Facebook are givens, but you may find that SoundCloud is a great fit for you, or Pinterest. The more sites you can use effectively the better, but if you get no engagement from the site, move on. You also need to know what you want to accomplish there. Remember that throwing out links and ads left and right is not good social etiquette, you have to be real and engage.

Listen More, Talk Less
You must seek out your audience by monitoring sites for key words and phrases that relate to your mission. If they are mentioning your name, even better. If you are a company that sells patio grills and accessories, you might search sites for mentions of cooking, grilling, recipes, barbecues, or similar things. Once you find people talking about subjects that relate to what you do, you can follow or friend them and start engaging. Once you do engage, promote yourself, but don’t cram it down their throat. Just be friendly with them, and throw in what you can when it comes up.

Recruit Promoters
Once you are engaged, get your new friends to work for you by issuing campaign challenges, asking questions that people can answer and want to answer (these don’t have to be about your business), etc. You can then turn the conversation to something related to your business and attempt to get feedback. This builds the bond. The more you can create a give and take instead of just a give, the better the chance you can get your people to “like” you, retweet you, and generally become brand evangelists for you.

Social means Social
Again, don’t send out links about your latest promotion every hour. A social media site is exactly that, a place for conversations and casual engagement. If you try to convert your Facebook page to your sales floor, you will lose people quickly. There must be a great deal of tact employed with your engagement, finding the right balance between promotion and conversation. Try to think of it as hanging out with your friend and trying to get them to do something for you. You have to spend a lot more time buttering them up than throwing your sales pitch at them. If the relationship is built right, th rest comes easily.

Measure Success
There are simply too many people you will be exposed to to be able to track them by memory or with ticks on a page with a pencil. You will need a solid piece of social media management software to do the job right. The right dashboard gives you the numbers and analytics you need to effectively track how your engagement is increasing traffic and promoters. After all, it’s all about your ROI, and if you aren’t tracking that, then why are you doing it in the first place?

One of our most popular new features on Send Social Media, is the ability to resell and offer your own version of our social media marketing platform to your clients.

With our white label social media tool, you have the option to manage social media on behalf of your clients, or train them up and allow them to log in themselves and manage their own social media accounts.  Send Social Media is a great tool to help implement a social media strategy for your customers. Why Send Social Media is the perfect Social Media Management Tool for Agencies:

The way the white label site works is as follows:

• We create and host a completely re-branded site for your business/agency – with your own logo, look-and-feel – running on your own website domain, but hosted on our servers.
• We give you a control panel where you can administer your site. From here, you can manage your existing clients and create new logins for your clients.
• Your clients can log in to your white label site themselves and view reports, send social media posts, track mentions etc – or you have the option to manage things for them from your control panel.
• There is a one-off setup fee for the white-label site which includes re-branding and indefinite hosting on our servers.

For more information be sure to contact us

So your company is on Facebook and Twitter and you are sending out posts and Tweets like there is no tomorrow. What are you getting for the effort? Do you know? If you don’t know, then you are burning productivity like my first car burned oil. Measuring social media ROI is just as important as any other area of your business. Some business owners are still unsure as to what they are measuring, however. That’s why we here at Send Social Media are giving you the gift of information with this post. Here are 10 Social Media ROI Metrics your Company Should Monitor:

Leads
You should be tracking click-throughs to your site from social media sites, as well as your “likes”, follows, etc. Also try to be aware of and track any referrals that are sent your way from your existing social media contacts.

Engagement Duration
How much time are your “friends” spending on your Facebook page or using your Facebook app? (you do have one don’t you?) This “stickiness” factor should be improving over time, not staying stagnant or declining.

Bounce Rate
When folks click through from a social media site to your website, are they leaving again right away or do they hang out and see what you have going on there? If they aren’t spending time on your site once they get there, you need to evaluate whether or not your site has relevant, fresh content. The social sites can help get people to your site, but it needs to be a fun or interesting place to be, or they will get out of there like they just walked into the wrong restroom.

Network and Membership Size
For this you want to count the people that actively engage. There are lots of people who will like, follow, friend, or whatever your social presence and then they never mess with it again. You want to know how many are actually reading your posts, commenting, sharing, etc. This number should be growing, as well as the number of new people joining the fun.

Activity Ratio
This is very similar to the previous metric, but it is about the ratio of active to inactive network members instead of just the growth numbers. This ratio should also ideally tilt more and more into the active side as you go along to consider your activity a success.

Conversions
This is big. Business wise this is the most important metric here. You ultimately want to convert your network members into sales, subscriptions, or anything else that can be monetized in one way or another. You are a business, right? Track this very closely and then work on increasing the other metrics with the goal of pushing them into this one.

Mentions
Tracking your mentions on different social sites is one of the best ways to see how pervasive your brand is on the scene. This includes the good and the bad mentions. The good will tell you what you are doing right and how well you are doing it. The bad mentions tell you where you need to improve.

Loyalty
Hand in hand with other metrics, it is important to track how many times your content and links are being shared, if you are getting evangelized by your promoters, and how often they do these things.

The Viral Factor
Extended networks also need to be monitored. In other words, when one of your network members shares a link or post from you to one of their friends that is not on your network, are they resharing it with their friends, and so on. The further you can reach, the better.

Blog Comments
You need a blog. It keeps the web-crawling robots tracking your site and keeps you in thee search results. You also need to have a comments section after each post. You need to reply to comments.  Then you need to track these comments, shares of the blog posts, etc. You also need to make sure that you have buttons by the posts that people can click on to share them on the social sites.

Tracking your social media engagement is just as important as actually being on the social sites. Don’t waste time on the sites if you aren’t going to measure the results. Of course, choosing to abstain from Facebook, Twitter, and the others is as good as hanging out the “closed ” sign for good.

Social Media Motivational Thought of the day!

One of the most common questions businesses have about social media is how they can produce interesting content that’s relevant to what they do and the audience they want to reach. While everyone knows that things like cat pictures perform really well on social media, that’s not content that’s going to be compatible with most businesses. However, that doesn’t mean that businesses won’t be able to produce great social media content. Regardless of the specific industry, there are always ways to come up with content that’s useful and interesting.

To help you get started, let’s take a look at some different ways your business can create social media content that will be well-received:

Use Blogging as the Foundation

If your business is in the early stages of social media marketing, the best place to begin producing content is your blog. The reason this is a good starting point is it provides an easy way to start creating content that can be shared through social media and then bring visitors back to your website. And if you’re worried that your business doesn’t have anything to write about, think about all the questions you receive from potential and current customers. By turning those topics into blog posts, you’ll start plenty of social media discussions, which can then yield additional topics that will make great posts.

Expand on Popular Blog Posts

Because writing a blog post is easier than creating an infographic or producing video content, blogging is a great way to test different ideas. Then when a post does perform really well, you can take the time to expand it into a richer format. By using this strategy, you’ll be able to expand your content into all kind of mediums. Fun facts, case studies, infographics, videos and even e-books are all types of content that can gain a lot of momentum through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Take the Guesswork Out of Producing Great Social Media Content

Following everything we covered above is the best way to start producing great content for your company’s social media channels. While the above strategy will help you come up with interesting pieces, some will perform better than others. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to continue guessing

The easiest way to take the guesswork out of producing content that’s going to perform great is by using the Send Social Media Dashboard. Because our dashboard makes it extremely easy to see all your social media statistics in one place, you can let real data guide your content efforts. Thanks to our easy monitoring, your team will know exactly what kind of content they should focus on producing for your target audience.

Login at: http://dashboard.sendsocialmedia.com/mobile.

You will now also be notified about your new mobile app on the login page at http://dashboard.sendsocialmedia.com/login and mobile visitors will be directed there automatically.

• Manage your Priority Inbox and Streams
• Reply to important posts, mentions and comments on the go.
• Read and respond to mentions
• Read and respond to mentions of your social media monitoring terms or keywords.
• Update all your social networks at once
• Publish content to any of the services linked to your Send Social Media account
• View campaign reports and analytics
• Access your Send Social Media reports and view statistics such as clicks, comments, fan growth and more.
• Manage your clients on the go Easily switch between clients and manage their accounts.