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.

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.

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. Continue reading →