Top 8 reasons why you should absolutely use Twitter for your business
Twitter is an excellent communication tool that enables you to build relevant business strategies for your business. With its short messages, supported with links, photos or videos, you can create a great community. Twitter is one of the most fastest social media where followers are engaged and actively participate by retweeting.
So let’s take a look at the reasons why you should ABSOLUTELY use Twitter for your business.
A monitoring tool
Twitter’s primary function is to communicate and interact in real time with your followers but you can also consider it as a source of information to keep you up to date of all the latest news, trends and what’s happening on the web.
So if you choose to follow your competitors of the industry you’re interested in, you will be kept informed in real time of each of their moves.
You can also follow specific hashtags and thus, easily receive all the information you need. Twitter search is a great feature as well to start a strategic monitoring on a specific topic.
Increase your website traffic
There are several ways to generate traffic to your website with a tweet.You can put links in your bio, that refers to an article from your blog or website, which will drive your followers to your website. If you’re often sharing new and engaging content, people will see you as a great source of information and thus will become regular readers of your content.
Going viral on Twitter
Twitter gives you the opportunity to express yourself freely and to spread your information. When Tweeting, you should optimize your posts with links, appropriate hashtags, photos and videos. You will, then, get more and more followers, go viral and even create a buzz .
Manage your online reputation
Whether your company is on Twitter or not, your customers, your competitors will talk about you at some point.
While you have no control over these talks, you can still change how they see you by participating in these conversations.
For example, the lack of reaction to criticism from a unhappy customer would have a negative impact on your company’s image and reputation. Twitter will allow you to quickly respond to it and at the same time give you the opportunity to show that you are listening to your customers and that you are coming up with solutions to their problems.
A way to interact with your audience
On Twitter, you can inform about your products or services but it’s provides you, also, another way to engage, interact and discover your followers/clients - their preferences, what they like, dislike and their thoughts about you and even resolve their problems. If you are a small business, Twitter represents an excellent opportunity to find potential new customers.
Having your customers’ feedback is crucial for your business to build up a better social media marketing strategy with in order to improve, expand and make your brand more successful.
A customer support
On Twitter, everything happens in quickly and in real time, so having an account on this platform i an excellent advantage to handle customer support.
Indeed, you can to track what people are referring to your brand and if you run across negative responses or opinions from clients, you can fix it quickly to not let the situation becoming worse.
Share your events
When you organize an event, do not hesitate to do a Live Tweet. This allows everyone to participate remotely in real time. Your communication will be more dynamic. You can chat live with your followers and reply individually to each of them.
Meeting influencers who will make promote your business
Everyone is accessible on twitter, you can contact anyone you want. So it’s a great way to build relationship with leaders who have influence in your industry - influencers or journalists. You should begin engaging with them by curating their content, citing and retweet them in your posts. If you create a connection through Twitter they will make you look good and make your audience even bigger.
So, to conclude, Twitter is not a social media that you should set aside. It will definitely help you to boost your website traffic and generate leads. It will allow you to interact in real time with your audience but also to monitor your competitors and what your followers think about you.
After reading all these reasons, are you convinced ?
6 reasons to integrate Pinterest to your social media strategy ?
For those who don’t know Pinterest, it can be summarized as a social network that allows you to pin inspiring ideas and images in a board.
This easy and simple social media can have a huge impact on your business.
Whether you are an entrepreneur, a craftsman or a head of a company, it is essential to choose the right social media to communicate. Many choose Facebook, Instagram or Twitter while other social media may be more relevant and effective. Pinterest, often set aside, can be the right choice to make.
Here are 6 reasons why you should integrate Pinterest in your social media strategy.
1- A great way to highlight your products
Pinterest’s concept is to pin images. If your aiming to show your products or services, this is a social media made for you!
As the links to your products or services are displayed as images, you can highlight your products very easily and in an aesthetic way. Whether you are a sports coach, a designer, architect, or any other profession that can be highlighted visually, it may be interesting for you to use Pinterest. Even if your are working in B2B , you can also use it by putting your services via infographics for example.
This platform can also be a productive method to initiate brand performance. You can show and teach your customers how to use your products or services. Often written or video instruction manual are boring and everybody ignore them. Pinterest offers you the opportunity to provide product training in an enjoyable and educational way that your customers will appreciate to see.
2. Improves your SEO & drives traffic
On Pinterest, each pin has a title and a description. To optimize this, you can insert hashtags, inspired by the keywords offered by the social media.
So this improves the chances for your images to be found by your target audience. Especially since Pinterest is based on sharing content, your pin has a longer lifespan than a message on other social media like Twitter or Facebook.
With each new pin, you get a link to your website. Thanks to these backlinks, your website receives organic traffic, which leads to a better referencing on search engines. Eventually, these pins will continue to generate traffic on your website automatically and thus increase your leads and sales.
3. Pinterest users are willing to buy your products
Users are coming on Pinterest in order to find inspiration, ideas and discover new products, new brands thanks to promoted pins. So they are already in a purchasing perspective.
Thanks to the “shop the look” feature, you can indicate exactly where the product is in the image. A point is then displayed, which allows users to either be redirected to the product page on your website, or then directly to buy via Pinterest. It’s a really efficient shopping feature to increase your sales.
4. Stay up to date about your competitors
Thanks to its various features, Pinterest is also a great curation tool. Once you have created your account, you can subscribe to other users' accounts. Then can see their images pinned, and re-spin them to your own board. Using Pinterest for your business is therefore also a good way to perform competitive intelligence. In this way, you stay informed about your competitors and your expertise field’s latest trends.
You can invite your team members to join you on a collaborative board. This way, you can benefit from each other findings. If you want your work to be shared only with the users you choose, you can also choose a board in “secret mode”.
5. Stay up to date about your audience
You can see your competitors but also your followers, and so discover what they like.
Pinterest is a good social media to explore latest trends, to find what users share and use this information to rank your products.. To know more about your followers and what influence them, you can simply follow them.
6. Time saving
One of Pinterest biggest advantage, is that all your actions can be automated. From pins to board creation, everything can be done automatic thanks to 2 plugins, really easy to use, called Tailwind and Boardbooster. They can help you save your time if you’re aiming to develop your activity on this social media.
That are 6 good reasons for using Pinterest. This social media is not to be set aside. For some activities, this may even be the most relevant choice. It offers you the opportunity to boost your ROI, drive traffic, leads and sales.
3 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs Social Media
Whatever it is, one thing is sure: not taking advantage of social media is a huge loss for smaller companies.
Despite the fact that it’s been proven by numerous studies, you will still find small business owners that are not using the power of social media. Indeed, almost 30% companies do not use them. The profile of those firms is SME.
But here are the significant reasons why you, as a small business, you should use social media.
For your business visibility
Many entrepreneurs think that only the perfect product or services matter to succeed. In fact, you also must think in your business plan about a strategy to attract your customers. Otherwise, your company will fail. You must look after your potential clients. This is why you must implement a social media strategy. It is the easiest and cheapest way to increase your visibility. This “Inbound marketing” consists in publishing content so that more visitors go to your website and increase your visibility, especially on the google search bar.
You must present the services and values of your company. This strategy is also applied by large corporate. For example, Dove is very famous for its campaign #Realbeauty. It promotes beauty whatever your body and reach the 70% of women that did not feel represented in advertising. Dove was a pioneer for self esteem and no retouch photographies. The brand called Ogilvy, an advertising agency to achieve the campaign. They spent a huge budget but they were elected as one of the best ads in the world and it increased their profits by $3B in three years.
Credit to Dove's Real Beauty Campaign
You do not have to spend a huge budget but you can ask for community and social media management services that fit with your budget and advisers that help you to find the best strategy for your company.
It creates engagement
Your presence on social media will make you gain trust among potential clients. If you nurture a link between your audience and your brand by commenting, liking, answering to questions, sharing content, you will have a better engagement rate. If you show that, behind your company, there are humanity and values, it will boost your sales.
Studies also show that it is harder for a brand to gain a new client than keeping a current one. So it is relevant to prioritize and manage your clients’ engagement.
Increase your website traffic and sales
You should prefer the quality over the quantity of your content. Patience is the key of success because you must nurture your audience before you succeed in transforming it into clients.
You should study the different opportunities that offer social media. For example, Instagram is the most effective social network to boost your traffic. Instagram has a traffic growth increasing by 114% per year (from leading social networks to US websites) while it has only improved by 9% on Facebook.
So in e-commerce, Instagram seems to have more opportunities for your business. Indeed, in this social media, you can add tags on your pictures that are directly link to a product in your website. It represents a source of information for the client. Once trust is acquired you will convert it into sales.
Today, the competition is so big that you need to take every opportunity into account. Social Media is one of the key for success so you should not neglect it.
5 Essential Tips to generate Leads on LinkedIn
Have you already received a cold message on LinkedIn from a vague contact that looks like more a spam to you? You have here the perfect example of Don’t to prospect on LinkedIn. So what are the solutions to generate leads?
1. Target your audience
LinkedIn has a huge resource of executives with 590 million users. Moreover the social media provides detailed information about the person’s background but also about a company or a job advertisement. The coding system of LinkedIn also allows you to maximize your research and to offer you a concrete content and contacts with common factors. A lead is an established contact that could be transformed into a potential client. But it can be difficult to create a real commitment with your audience and you can often be disappointed by your return on investment. You must be active and develop a true marketing strategy to generate leads. Many business developers think they must gain as many connections as possible by adding people without checking if it has an interest. So you must target particular prospects to generate more leads.
2.Use tools for research
Once you have targeted the profile of your audience, you can use the LinkedIn search features. It represents a great opportunity as you can select different criteria. For a person, you can choose the name of his company, his location, his job and see shared connections. For a company, you can search by sectors or following the employees working here.
Added to this tool, you can also use the LinkedIn sale navigator which was especially created for sales teams. With this tool you can add your list of leads and use further research filters. LinkedIn also provides you prospects’ suggestions, a dashboard of your deals and news.
3. Optimize your profile and content
Your LinkedIn page must appear credible for your contacts. It is important to provide a maximum of information about your activity. Your account must also be active. It is relevant to create content, articles that answer the questions and issues of your audience. Your content can show the different events in which you were involved. Do not hesitate to engage with your contacts. For example, you can like, comment or share similar posts of your contact. In your post, you can tag recommended people to attract more leads.
4. Create and maintain a relationship with your leads.
When you meet a new potential client, instead of giving a visit card that has huge chance to get lost, you can give your linkedin QR code of the app. It is the icon on the right of the search features.
Once you have a connection with him you can try to contact him. Too often people send to their leads an informal message which is only a copy paste addressed to thousands of them. It has no interest to send an email immediately after a connection established. On the contrary, you should personalize your message. For example, you can begin it such as : “Hello (Name), I saw that you are working at (Name of the company)”. Once the client has answered, you need to evaluate if he is ready or not for a meeting. Do not relaunch too frequently, no more than twice a year.
5. Use sponsored content and inMail
Sponsored content is posts that appear on the news feed of the user, without being connected to the author. LinkedIn has expanded the functionality to mail. This option can send to a targeted audience a personalized message. For example, you can send them invitation for an event or a sales promotion.
These advices represent a basic and easy method to generate Leads. It is the most optimized way to gain clients so now let’s try it!
The end of Facebook likes ?
Likes counts could soon disappear from all social media. This experiment is already underway on Instagram and is being considered by Facebook.
Jane Manchun Wong is an engineer specialized in data app research. In one of her last blog post, she was guessing that Facebook is considering removing Likes after finding out, within the Android app, code allowing to hide the number of likes of a post to the users. The screenshot below, published on her Twitter, shows that the person who created a post can still see names of people and their emojis reaction but a number won’t be revealed anymore. Instead, it would be written “liked by [friend’s name] and others”. For Wong, these moves “indicates that Facebook/Instagram have confidence the pros of hiding like counts outweigh the cons".
(Image credit: Jane Manchun Wong on Twitter)
Mirroring Instagram's test
After being contacted by TechCrunch, Facebook recently confirmed Jane Manchun Wong’s speculation and is considering launching Likes-removal trials. A couple of months ago, the group already tested a similar approach on Instagram in several countries : Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. These actions are aiming to make users to be more focus on sharing experience and no longer on competition.
Improve mental health issues
Just like for Instagram, Facebook wants to improve well being of its users. Some of them, especially younger ones, are always looking for likes and fame on social media.There is a huge amount of studies, showing how these platforms can have an impact on mental health and even lead to depression or anxiety.
In 2018, a study published by Pew Research Center revealed that 37% of teens sharing social content feel pressure about having a lot of likes and comments. To overcome these mental health issues, hiding likes counts might be a solution.
How can Instagram help you to boost your brand?
Instagram has currently a growth superior to Facebook. This social network represents a great opportunity for business as 71% of companies are already using it whatever their sectors. It is important to acquire some tips to maximize your visibility.
Create a certified professional account for more credibility
It allows to have access to insights about your account performance and statistics. For example, you can see data on your audience or graphics about your popularity. But on the other side, you must make public your phone number, email and address.
Create engagement with the users
Engagement is the key of the relationship with the users. It means that your brand is capable of interacting with the social media members through for example likes, comments or share. This variable can be taken into account by the social media since Instagram does not show publication on your news feed chronologically but following the engagement rate. For example, you can repost publication from the users of your brand, ask or answer questions to your subscribers. The purpose is to create a close relationship to involve the users. You can also create a hashtag with a motto that people could subscribe.
Present the real identity and values of your business
Your account must reflect the story and values of your brand. You should prefer the quality of your publication instead of the quantity. Each publication must be an exclusive content. Ideally you should publish once per day. Be careful of the aesthetic of your account: a high quality of picture is absolutely necessary. You can also define the theme and the tone of your filter. You can also follow, comment and share similar business and contents to increase your visibility. People could share publication with your services or products.
Share your news
Instagram helps you to inform your clients of your company’s different events such as sales period for example. It is important to take care of the content: we are not talking about a newsletter here. Posting stories is a good way to transcribe your event in live or not, with an attractive way. You can more easily show who you are and what you are doing through this way. You will also look more accessible to your subscribers.
Sponsored Publication
You can buy sponsored publication (appearing on a news feed) or a sponsored story. You can schedule at which hour it will be published and target a specific audience (following its age or its location). The prices are based on a bidding system in CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per one thousand of impression).
Better than a collaboration with another brand, you can call on an influencer. This person will publish a sponsored publication on his account and your services will appear to a wide audience with a direct link to your account. Be careful to choose an influencer which fits with your brand identity.
These tips will help you to find the right combination, it is your turn to create your account!
The best 7 Graphic Design tools for non-designers
Here is the situation. You are running a small business, you need a graphic designer for your social media campaign but you can’t afford one. In this kind of environment, each team members should wear different hats. Which basically means that you have to take care of the design part for yourself. But the graphic design notion can sounds terrifying, mostly when you literally have zero experience in this field…
You need to create professional-looking visuals but you’re not a designer? No problem !
Here are the 7 bests Graphic Design tools you can easily use without any technical know-how.
1. Canva
With more than 15 million of active users per month, Canva is THE graphic design tool for non-designers. This free web and mobile application gives the opportunity for beginners to create professional-looking visuals in few minutes.
Providing millions of images, hundreds of pre-sized templates, icons, shapes and other design assets, it also allows you to create your own visuals by uploading your personal images and logos.Business card, flyers, newsletters, social media visuals, photo editing, infographics, everything is possible with Canva.
But if you want to go deeper and learn some tips and tricks about creating stunning visuals, you can to their Design School; they will freely teach you through tutorials and articles.
Although, Canva has wide collection of free templates and images, others are cost $1 each. You can upgrade your account to have more features.
Besides all those services, they developed Canva Pro allowing teams to work, collaborate and comment on designs. You can also schedule your social posts, save all your designs, create your own templates to reuse them afterwards. With the mobile app, you are able to access your team templates at any time. This premium plan starts at $12.95 monthly and $9.95 annually.
2. Snappa
Snappa simplifies each steps of your visual creation !
You don’t need any design experience to create professional content. Snappa provides hundred of pre-made templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
You can also have access to a wide selection of high quality photos and customize your design with effects, shapes, fonts and vectors.
You can select the platform you want to post your work on - emails, social media, blogs- and it will resize it to perfectly fit the dimensions required.
Snappa offers 3 different packages : a free version with access to more than 5 000 templates and more than 1 millions photos. The paid version start from $10 per month and you can choose the Team version to collaborate on the same project with your colleagues.
Finally you can publish your creation within Snappa or by connecting your Buffer account to organize your posts.
3. Pixlr
Some people compare Pixlr at Photoshop but in much more simpler and free version.
This sophisticated tool is not made for people looking for really simple photos editors but more for those willing to learn photo modification and spend time on it. Some tutorials and blog articles are available on its website if you want to discover more.
With Pixlr you can freely edit photos, create own visuals at any dimensions - whether for Facebook, Twitter, for a banner or a blog - but also upload your own pictures and fonts.
You can use this graphic tool on your desktop but it comes as mobile app as well; enabling you to use Pixlr Express and to design what you have in mind in few minutes.
4. PicMonkey
PicMonkey allows to create social media illustrations helping non-designers to communicate better on their platforms. You will be able to design from scratch but also to edit your pictures, to create collages. It includes many choice of fonts, filters, templates and overlays.
This program is available on desktop as well as on mobile making it easy to retouch, improve and publish a picture from your phone. PicMonkey comes with a free trial allowing you to use their services for 7 days. You can level up and sign up to paid version starting from $7.99 per month.
5. Over
Over, only available as a mobile app, allows you to create simple, professional looking and trendy social media graphics. Intuitive and easy to use, it offers basics templates that you customize by changing colors, the font style, the size or uploading your on photos from your camera. The app separates every elements, making it easier for you to add your personal touch.
Over is free to download however there are many in-app purchases to make. So, to have access to unlimited features, you have to subscribe to the Pro version for $16 or $106 per year.
Like Canva and Snappa, the app has an option for teams collaboration. Indeed, with Over Teams, you have access to all templates, illustrations, icons and you can interact with your colleagues. It allows a group of person to comment in real time, to work on the same design and save it as a template. Subscriptions for this service cost $67 per month and give the ability to include as many members as you want - no need to pay for each person.
6. Pablo
Available on desktop but also as a mobile application and Chrome extension, Pablo is a free image editor simple and easy-to-use; especially for those who already worked on Buffer. If you want to create minimalist image for your social media, this tool is ideal. For more sophisticated, complex or creative design, we won’t recommend it.
Pablo provides royalty free images, but you can upload yours. You have the option to crop them at the right dimensions based on the platform you want (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter). Finally you can add texts, logos and filters.
7. Stencil
After reviewing 6 different tools to create your own visuals, is Stencil really different from the others ?
Well, it is different because if you’re aiming to have more engaged prospects on your social media, Stencil is what you need !
Thanks to Stencil, you are easily able to create ad graphics, social media posts and images that will generates involvement from everyone.
To do so, it offers templates and fonts that you can easily customize to include your personal touch, as well as graphics and icons. It also provides over a million of images and illustrations - they add thousands new ones every day.
In addition, you can specify which social media you want to post on and it will instantly resize your visual according to the platform requirements. Finally, you don’t need to use another tool to put your creation online since Stencil gives you the option to schedule and publish it.
The program has both a free and paid version which starts from $10. With the free one, you can use 10 images per month and a limited amount of templates and icons. The Team version, at $12 per month, will ease your team collaboration.
To sum up
Back in the days, graphic design could only be done by highly trained graphic designers. Nowadays, with internet, creating visuals, infographics and editing pictures is within reach of anyone.
No matter which types of business you are running, those tools can help you to improve your social media campaigns or even to start them.
You no longer need to hire professional but you just need to choose the right tool that will boost your social media.
With all those tools, and many others, graphic design becomes easy !
The end of Autoplay video?
Have you already seen on your Iphone the statistics of your screen time? You will be certainly chocked by the results and especially when you will realize that scrolling social networks represents your main screen time. To avoid this addictive behavior, the Senate in the US wants to ban autoplay video on social media. The UK is also following it. More generally are we facing the end of autoplay video?
How Policy-driven restrict autoplay video on social network?
On July 30, the Republican US Senator Josh Hawley offers a bill called The Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act to forbid autoplay video and infinite scroll on social platform. Social media refer here to Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter. This bill was taken after many controversies about the compulsive behaviors of social media’s users. Indeed, the screen time keeps increasing. Top managing teams of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have even admitted that they did not use on a private sphere their social media because of the existing risks. This bill points at the fact that these technologies have strongly decrypted the human psychology to exploit their loopholes. Autoplay video consists to launch a video without the agreement of the user. Following the collected data of the visitor, Facebook prepares a playlist of videos that will scroll automatically after one video finished. The purpose is to improve the engagement of the user meaning that he stays as long as possible on the social network. By studying human psychologies, these platforms know how to attract him. Thus, this bill wants to prevent abusive behaviors by limited these technologies. This could give ideas to other countries and extend this law.
But what about autoplay ads videos?
However, this bill leaves apart advertising video content. Over the last decades, ads videos have flourished all over the internet. This has been the best technology to increase the revenue of advertisers by 20% to 50%. Even if the user is generally annoyed by these ads, it is still the most relevant method. Advertising Autoplay is when video ads are launched automatically. In May 2018, Google Chrome banned autoplay video with sounds on. Ads with sounds on were used to attract visitors towards the ad visual or as a signal. This shows that change are happening commonly. So social media have to evolve. For example, Instagram turns the sound of an ad on only if the user clicks on the video. Moreover, ads videos are still a huge source of revenue for social media which represented $6.81 billion in 2018.
How to re think new sizes of videos?
Autoplay videos are not ready to disappear at least for ads. But the perspectives could be reduced, so advertisers should already think of their evolution. First, ever more countries are in favor of a limitation of autoplay videos. For example, the US bill wants to constraint social media to a neutral presentation of the video. The button “delete this video” should be highlighted in the same way as the button “play”. Also even if it remains the most attractive ads technology, consumers become less and less receptive to autoplay video. So agencies need to think about a more targeted and catchy content. For example, some advertisers privilege Gifs size which are short animated content. It tends to be very trendy among millennials and could differ from ads competitors.
So even if the spread of autoplay video seems limited, there is still a huge opportunity for video content that you need to follow. In fact in 2020, 80% of the screen time will be on video content, so press play!