Social Media has Come a Long Way, Baby
by Shannon Kinney
I started using social media a long time ago, and have been fortunate enough to see many of these channels evolve into true game-changers in terms of how people communicate and share information. It’s an excellent tool to become more relevant to your customers, establish your expertise, serve your customers, build brand awareness and grow your business.
But, as we all know, the channels and platforms keep changing at a rapid pace. So, what’s new with some of the social media channels?
The time spent on Facebook dwarfs even network television, and nearly every business needs to have a presence there. It’s become tougher and tougher to build engagement and optimize posts to show up well in the news feed. We’ve found that to get the best results we’ve needed to mix organic posts with boosted posts, and paid ad options. One new ad unit we really love is custom audiences, which allows you to upload a mailing list (needs to be more than 400 to be truly effective) and it will help you target your message to more users like those in your mailing list.
Twitter has also added the opportunity to upload mailing lists to build custom audiences, and allows several targeting options with paid promotions. We like Twitter best for it’s power to distribute a message across a broad community, and the opportunity to listen for purchase intent and customer leads. It’s also one of the best tools for customer service! Users expect that they will receive responses within minutes, however, so if you use Twitter, be ready to respond!
The business to business powerhouse has recently released revamped user profiles, more sophisticated targeting of paid promotions, and new opportunities for content marketing and establishing expertise through LinkedIn Publisher. Don’t forget LinkedIn also owns slideshare.com, and you can optimize slideshare posts for LinkedIn. They also have a very useful YouTube channel with how to videos and tips on how to maximize the value of the platform. We have word that next up from this team will be new tools to help you sell using the platform. We can’t wait!
Foursquare and Swarm
Foursquare, the leading location-based network has recently introduced a new brand, and is splitting into two separate apps – Foursquare and Swarm. Swarm is the app you will use for your check ins, and Foursquare is the app for discovery of what’s around you. The two work seamlessly together and their push notifications are becoming more sophisticated which work well for advertisers.
Keeping up with all of these changes is difficult for any business. If you need help maximizing the value of them for your business, Dream Local Digital can help! Contact us today to get started.
