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5Jul

6 Ways to Engage with Social Media Influencers

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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Want to take your social media to the next level? Then it’s time to start working with influencers!

Social media influencers are people with an established social media audience who can recommend your product to their audience, quickly building your reputation and reaching a broad network of consumers. More and more companies are turning to social media influencers as consumers become increasingly immune to the bombardment of radio ads, billboards, and television commercials. Using these six steps, you’ll become a pro at finding and engaging with social media influencers.

1. Identify Your Company Goals

You need an influencer with a very specific audience, one which will fit well with your message and what you’re trying to sell. If your company sells handmade soaps and lotions, an influencer whose audience loves her for her fashion blogging is not going to fit the bill. To find the right influencers, you need to know exactly what your company needs. Sit down and figure out who your target audience is and why exactly they will want to buy your product. You’re going to want an influencer whose audience is similar, so that his or her fans will instantly be open to your product. While you’re at it, come up with a list of hashtags related to your company, which will help you in finding the perfect influencers. For example, a soap and lotion company’s hashtags might be #handmadesoap, #naturalskincare, etc.


2. Find Your Influencers

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The key to working with a social media influencer is finding one who has  a lot of influence, not just a lot of followers. Check out these tips on what to look for in an influencer. Platforms such as SocialRank and BuzzSumo can help bring you together with potential influencers. BuzzSumo lets you look for key influencers and the most shared content, while SocialRank shows you which of your Twitter followers are most active and popular. In addition, you can use monitoring tools to help you track mentions of your brand or related keywords and find dedicated fans who might be influencers. Here’s where the hashtags you came up with earlier will come in handy. Track the hashtags on Twitter or your other social networks of choice and keep an eye on which names come up again and again.

3. Get to Know the Influencer

The first key to remember is give, give and give! You need to promote influencers on several levels before they will even consider working with you. Once you’ve found an influencer who matches up with your company goals and audience, take some time to get to know them. You don’t want to just email your influencer without knowing anything about them. Sign up for their email list, if they have one. Monitor their social media accounts so you’re notified when they post something. Spend some time on their blog familiarizing yourself with their way of doing things and think of how you can add value to their brand and business

4. Build a Relationship

Influencer marketing is essentially a relationship between you and the influencer and between the influencer and their audience. Building a relationship takes time and so you want to do it well ahead of time, before you need the assistance of the influencer. Like their Facebook page, leave a comment about how much you enjoy the content they provide. Follow them on Twitter and retweet, like or comment their tweets about things relevant to your company. If they like or comment on one of your posts, always like or comment back on one of theirs. Look here for more specific ways to build a relationship with influencers on various social networks. Remember just like anything the goal is to create a solid relationship and that starts by interacting and by a mutual exchange of value for both parties.

5. Give Them the Whole Experience

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You want your influencers to genuinely love your product and want to share it with their followers. Authenticity is key. If you have a company that sells hand-made soaps and lotions, you would send your influencer a sampling of your best scents or varieties. Once your influencer tried your product, ideally they would love it and blog or tweet about it, letting their followers know about this awesome new handmade soap they just tried. But be prepared to pay for this as well, influencers have a million pitches a day. How are you and your company different? Remember to stand out and be as authentic as possible.

6. Compensate Them

Social media influencer marketing is all about the relationships, and relationships are all about making sure that everyone gets something out of the encounter. You want your influencers to feel like you’re helping them out too, not like they’re doing you a favor by promoting your work to their followers. This compensation doesn’t need to be monetary, although it can be. The goal is to make your influencer feel loved, appreciated and acknowledged. You can do this in a variety of ways, by promoting their work to your followers, offering them swag or other perks, by giving them shout-outs and linking to their blog, or by sending them more samples of your work as a thank you.

Social media influencers are a valuable and increasingly utilized aspect of online marketing. If done rightly, engaging with social media influencers will give your company a boost in exposure and popularity. By following the steps in this list, you’ll have the tools you need to start looking for the perfect influencers for your company. Now get out there and start engaging!

Guest post by Felicity Fedoryka

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8Mar

How to Use Youtube to Market Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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With over 30 million unique visitors per day and thousands of hours of videos uploaded every day, Youtube is the world’s largest video search engine. In fact, Youtube is currently the world’s second largest search engine for online content in general. What does this mean for your business?

It means that if you can find a way to harness Youtube, you can drive a ton of traffic to your business, increase your industry relevance, and become a go-to resource and well-known authority in your niche.

However, like any platform, it takes time, effort, commitment, and more importantly, knowledge of the right strategies to enjoy significant success on the platform. We’ll discuss a few tips here to get you started.

Find Popular Videos and Mirror Their Content

They say that imitation is the finest form of flattery. Well, you’ll have to do the same here. We’re not saying that you should go and duplicate existing content — that would be unethical. But we are saying that you need to learn everything you can about the competition. If someone has tried to do the same kind of thing you’re considering in your own marketing, find out who’s done it before and how. If they did something that worked, find out how. If they did something that didn’t, find out why. And whatever they did, do a better job, whether it’s through the tactics of the medium or the quality of the content.

To do that, therefore, do a search for the most popular channels in your industry and Youtube in general. See what they are doing, and take copious notes of their methods. Some of those videos may not have any direct correlation to your industry, but you could learn a thing or two from the concepts. For instance, if you own a plumbing business, instead of just creating how-tos, you could create a series of videos about funny or worst job experiences. This will grow your brand and popularity on the platform.

Optimize Your Videos and Channels

Create a fully optimized and branded Youtube account. To do this, use target keywords in the name of your channel, and always optimize all your videos with the appropriate keywords so that they benefit from high visibility in Youtube and Google searches.

Create short videos, just a few minute long at the most. Most people are now averse to watching videos that are 20+mins in length. Instead of just creating one long video, create four 5min videos, upload them to Youtube, and create a playlist so that people can watch them one after the other if they want that 20 minute Youtube experience.

Produce Top-Notch Content

Nothing works better on Youtube than creating excellent content. You may not need to hire a professional film crew to accomplish this. Just get comfortable with the camera and remember that all the entertainment and education your video may offer is meant to be part of a dialogue with your audience, and simply have that conversation with the camera.

For those who are too camera-shy, and for those niches that support it, you can use screen-recording software and record a voice-over for it. This can illustrate what a person could do, say, with a software product you may be trying to showcase.

In case you want to interact more with your audience, you can create interactive Q&A sessions using Google Hangouts or Live Events, which you can make available to people and list as part of your content.

Find Leading Influencers in Your Niche and Engage Them

There are often leading influencers on Youtube that you can get to promote your business if you’re so inclined. If you don’t want to go the long route of building an authority niche and are willing to spend some money, you could locate some of these influencers and get them to promote your business on their channels and videos. Whether you do this manually or through a simplified service like NeoReach’s social media influencer marketing platform, you can find established personalities on Youtube that can support your brand and marketing efforts by lending your business their reach.

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15Dec

5 Social Media Questions You Need to Be Asking

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Advice Social Media
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social media question

 

 

 

The goal of social media is to elevate your brand and your business. The best way to this is by having a consistent brand image and connecting with your audience, but are you following all the rules of engagement on social media? Here are 5 social media questions you should be asking.

 

1. Are my social media posts as successful as they could be? 

Being self aware of how your social media platform is performing is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your brand. You must be able to recognize how successful your posts are and how you can improve them to make them even more successful. Thankfully, there are specialized analytics platforms at your disposal to use to determine how your social media accounts are stacking up. Use these to your advantage to stay ahead of the game!

 

2. Does my content add value to my audience?

 

The main reason you created your business and brand in the first place was to bring something new and fresh to an existing market. Your audience relies on you for quality content that means something to them so you absolutely have to make sure that your content is always adding value to your audience. You don’t want to become the boring brand or the annoying brand.


3. What opportunities am I missing out on with social media?

 

There are so many different opportunities for you to capitalize on when it comes to your social media platforms so its important to keep track of the ones your successfully using and the ones you may be missing out on. Keep informed and up to date with the popular trends on social media to make sure you’re using the right hashtags, Twitter chats, or advertising to methods to remain connected with your audience. If you’re interacting and posting in the wrong places, no one will be able to find you and promote your brand.

 

4. What social media network is the top referring channel to your website?

 

 

Knowing how your audience is getting to your website is very important so that you know where to devote the majority of your time. By using Google Analytics you can determine which social media network provides the majority of traffic to your website; by doing this you can figure out which network to be more focused on. If you aren’t getting any traffic from your Facebook page, you obviously don’t need to devote a lot of time towards that channel. If the majority of your traffic comes from Twitter, it would be wise to spend more time with your Twitter profile and interacting with your audience there.

 

 

5. Are there brands you can cross promote with on social media? 

 

The odds are that there are plenty of other brands or businesses out there in the same boat as you, so why not team up with them and benefit both of you at the same time? Joining forces with another brand helps you reach a different audience than you usually do and shows that you are willing to do what it takes to be successful. Additionally, this can also be a great learning experience and you may pick up on some helpful tools or tricks from someone else that will make you more successful in the long run. Finally, by forming social media partnerships you will have other brands you can rely on for assistance and promotion for many years to come.

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9Dec

How to Find the Right Influencers to Grow Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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As social media becomes an increasingly stable part of our lives and business, it makes sense to look for ways to benefit from it. Advertising using social media platforms has its huge benefits.

Not only is comparatively cheaper to launch a social media campaign, the returns on investment in terms of capital, brand visibility and loyalty can be quite huge. If this is something that appeals to you, then you should consider hiring influencers –social or otherwise- to help promote your business and make your brand more popular.

Just in case you don’t know what social influencers are, it’s simply a select group of individuals with a lot of following on social media. Some of these people aren’t even celebs in the real sense of the word.

People just like them and want to be associated with them because of the value that they bring to the table. Lucky for you, there are quite a few of them out there in various niches and industry. You’ll need to know how to find them, though. The following tips should help you do just that.

Use Social Influencer Platforms

This is fastest and easiest way to find influencers in your niche or related niches. You can either decide to do this manually –which can take up so much of your time- or use platforms like Neoreach which essentially brings brands and social influencers together for mutually rewarding partnerships.

Other tools you can try using include Buzzsumo, Hootsuite and Google Alerts. But none provides the direct access that Neoreach has to social influencers.

Look for Popular Relevant Bloggers and Pitch them

Look for popular bloggers in your niche and see if they would be interested in promoting your brand and business to their followers. Please note that you might also want to ensure that the popular bloggers actually have a following and a tribe.

This is important because there are bloggers who are popular for junk –Perez Hilton comes to mind- and have an audience that contribute no meaningful thing to their blogs.

For popular bloggers like this, chances are you won’t get manyreturns on your investment. Instead, check out blogs with considerable and valuable interactions among its audience and administrators.

Consider Reach and Engagement Frequency

These two are more important than anything. It’s not enough to have an influencer with 500,000 followers but can’t seem to generate up to 1,000 likes, shares or retweets for whatever they share.

You want one that has both the reach and engagement. The perfect social influencer can get the word out on your products and you’ll notice increased engagement, traffic, leads, sales and revenues from just that campaign.

How Authentic Are the Influencers

Most people would rather hear from an influencer who posts only when there’s something valuable to share, than someone who posts every junk he or she sees. People trust the former more than they do the latter.

So, look for authenticity, value and rabid engagement on their posts. For instance, you could have an influencer with 5 million followers that posts only once a week and generates as much as 2,000-10,000 comments, and over 50,000 likes.

These are the perfect influencers that you ought to do business with. They are more likely to help you grow your business and explode your brand. Please note that they may be a tad pricey, but rest assured that you will recoup every investment and then some.

Ability to Trigger Positive Action from their Audience

You need an influencer that’s able to rally or elicit some response from their audience. These influencers are often in the habit of consistently offering value to their audience. As a result, their audiences have grown to trust and engage with them. Look for influencers like this because they will generate a healthy ROI for you.

Guest Post by Oscar King

Oscar King, a small business owner and freelance writer shares articles and insights into effective marketing. If you would like to learn more about Oscar, you can check out his google+ profile.

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30Sep

10 Social Media Analytics Tools to Manage Your Brand

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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social meda analytic tools

 

The most important aspect of managing any social media accounts is being able to collect, interpret, and analyze the data that comes from your page to learn how to improve your tactics with your social media analytic tools.  Luckily, there are many platforms that you can use to analyze your social media analytics. Here are the top 10 social media analytics tools that you should be using to improve your brand.

 

1. eClincher

eClincher is the ultimate user-friendly social media management system, scheduling software, and analytics insights platform. eClincher is centered around “social media management made easy” with a very easy to use platform to manage, organize, and analyze all of your different social media accounts in one single place. eClincher is also the best place to track the most popular trends and conversations to allow you to stay on the top of the social media game. eClincher is quite possibly the most complete platform for your social media analyzing and tracking needs.

 

2. Quintly

Quintly’s main objectives are to help you track your social media accounts, benchmark, and optimize the way you run each account. Quintly will combine the information from any and all social media accounts you have to review in one single analytics page. Quintly also offers you the option of benchmarking your social media performance against your competitors to see how you stack up.

3. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is the key place to go for all of the data analytics you would want for your Facebook page. Offered to page Admins right on the Facebook site you can view things like an overview of your page, number of likes, reach, visits, posts, and information on your audience. Facebook Insights is a key tool for Facebook users to utilize because the information provided is highly useful for you to improve your page.

 

4. Twitter Analytics 

Twitter Analytics gives you a complete 28-day overview of your profile and how your tweets have made an impression. The page shows data for all engagement types including: mentions, favorites, clicks and retweets. Twitter Analytics also gives you the option to break down every individual tweet and see the impression it made on your followers. Additionally, Twitter Analytics allows you to export the data for yourself.

 

5. Pinterest Analytics 

Like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest Analytics offers a comprehensive page to analyze the data from your Pinterest page. The dashboard on the analytics page will show you the impressions of your Pins, audience data, followers, and website engagement. Additionally, for each of these individual statistics you can view an even more detailed report. The Pinterest Analytics page is highly useful in determining which posts or boards on your page are better than others and have a bigger impact on your audience.

 

6. Google Analytics

Google Analytics’ main use is for analyzing your website traffic. It will help you find out the top referring social media networks to your website and how effective your social media efforts are, including: how much traffic your content is specifically gaining, and which tweets, Facebook posts, or blog posts are the most popular. Google Analytics is the one of the best ways you can get a complete overview of your audience and learn how to best serve them.  

 

5. Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest only tool that helps you run your Pinterest page in the best way possible. Tailwind will tell you many different things about your profile like which content is most popular with your followers and how many times your content is being shared on Pinterest. Tailwind can also help you set a pinning schedule that lines up with when your audience is the most engaged. Tailwind is a great tool for Pinterest users to help you maximize both your efficiency and influence on Pinterest.

 

6. Sumall

Sumall is a great tool to view the analytics for all of your major social media accounts in one location. Sumall will pull the analytics from your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Etsy, and more social media platforms, and send you daily or weekly reports about how the traffic on your page is progressing. By having a single dashboard in which to view and track your social media accounts progress you can maximize your efficiency in organizing and managing your social media.

 

7. Beevolve

Beevolve is free platform that helps you with lots of different social media strategies in an efficient manner. Beevolve can help you schedule your social media postings to keep a consistent platform and then help you produce that content. You can then track any brand mentions you receive and measure the engagement received for your postings. Beevolve is a great platform to help you get started in organizing and monitoring your social media.  

 

8. Crowdbooster 

Crowdbooster is dedicated to improving your online presence via your social media accounts. Crowdbooster provides the tools to help you make “data-driven decisions” about your social media, using actual information to determine how you handle your social media. Crowdbooster provides reports detailing your performance metrics as well as highlighting your most engaged followers, informing you the best ways to interact with them and how to improve the content you’re providing them. Crowdbooster is one of the greatest tools to use for building your audience and improving your engagement.  

 

9. HowSociable

HowSociable is a quick and easy way to measure your influence via your social media platforms. HowSociable allows you to enter in your brand name on their website and they quickly provide you with a “social score”. The social score is a numerical measurement of the level of activity on your social media account during any given week. The score goes from 0 to 10 – 0 meaning your brand had no influence on social media, 10 equaling a complete domination of social media influence. This is a great way to quickly see the influence your brand may or may not be having on your accounts.

 

10. Mention

Mention is a social media monitoring platform to help you analyze each of your social media accounts. Mention can do a wide range of things like tracking social media campaigns to point out any opportunities for new coverage, track how much of an impression your brand has, create buzz and awareness for your brand, and help you engage with your audience in order to build your brand’s online presence. Mention is a very broad analytics tool that can help you with just about anything and is a great resource to have.

Having access to a platform to analyze the data from your social media accounts is very useful. Not only can you learn more about the your audience and how to best serve them, but you can also use the information to create better content that will make your brand more successful overall. Hopefully using one of these tools will help you find a great amount of success with your social media accounts.  

Want more info on how to make use of the data you find? Check out my article on Social Media Examiner “How to Use Social Media Insights to Improve Your Marketing.”

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29Sep

Social Media Video Tip: Comment on Blogs

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Blogging Social Media
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http://katieleimkuehler.com/social-media-video-tip-dont-post-too-much-or-too-often/

Start Interacting Online with Blog Comments

Are you looking to expand your social media presence? Then it’s time to think outside the box and start commenting on blogs of other people and brands. To grow your brand you need to create interaction and engagement with other businesses, people and markets. If you found someone’s blog post or video helpful–comment on their posts and let them know! It’s great way to jump start an online relationship.

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