How I Manage a Social Media Platform of Over 11 Million Followers Every Day

Big or small, influencer or newcomer, everyone looking to get more followers and more likes on social media—more engagement, period—seeks out strategies that work.

And what works with a platform of 11 million followers tends to work for platforms with 100, too.

Social media is a moving ocean of posts, images, tools, ideas, and content that flows at a fast pace. You can find success by building your own social media strategy and keeping it fluid by checking and rechecking what’s working.

I’ve had the chance to check and recheck dozens of different social media strategies in managing a social media platform of 11 million. How do I do everything that I do? And what do I do, specifically? Well, I’d love to share the details with you!

My network of 11 million

I’ve had the privilege to assist Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist at Canva and former evangelist at Apple, on his social media marketing, and I’ve worked on building a social media following for myself.

I manage a huge social media platform across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. I started at zero on all my accounts, just like you, and I’m not a celebrity or household name. This is how I’ve worked to build a great social platform – and you can too!

What I manage:

• An audience of 10,637,540 for Guy
• An audience of 935,793 for me

Total: an audience of 11.5 million people

I’ve had the opportunity to take the skills and tricks I’ve learned along the way, managing my own social media platform and applying it to Guy’s social media and for clients we work with, and implement them in some exciting ways. Fortunately, a lot of the strategies have worked! And if things aren’t working, I find a different way to do them.

What is social strategy?

Your social strategy is the plan that’s going to make your social media work.

It’s a combination of content creation, content curation, creativity, and organization.

Random acts of social media won’t do a darn thing to help people find you or to be known for a topic area. To build your authority in your niche, you need to create a solid social strategy that will help people find out who you are, what you do, and most importantly how you can help them.

Answer these questions before you begin the work on your social strategy:

1. What need will you fill for the people who will follow you?
2. Why should they follow you?
3. What will you consistently provide to them?

Let’s use the Buffer blog as an example since their wildly popular blog helped put them on the technology tool map. (Here’s a look back at the blog in late 2013.)

First they created their great product, Buffer, then they started their blog to help get the word out. Leo Widrich started early awareness for Buffer with an extensive guest blogging plan; this was before Buffer had a big team. They’ve since moved to an in-house blogging method with a team of great writers and a social media plan to get their message to as many people as possible.

Their goal was to find people to use Buffer. What they did to achieve that strategy was guest blogging with social media to boost it and they’ve scaled it to match their growth.

You’ll need to be willing to grind it out to make your social media strategy work. Nothing works unless you do.

There are different elements to the social strategy I work with. I’ll go more in depth into each of these:

1. Content creation
2. Content curation
3. Social media amplification
4. Social media conversations
5. Social media listening

Content creation & content curation

What is the difference between creation and curation?

Content creation is creating your media in the form of writing, graphics, design work, video, or any combination of these together.

Creating the media to share and express your blog or brand is very important to help build awareness and trust with your targeted audience.

Content curation is finding content that other people have created to share on your social media accounts.

From Buffer’s Complete Guide to Content Curation:

Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.

You’ll want to find content that matches the message that you’re presenting with your own content creation. Your curated content should boost your created content and work together. This is what you use to feed the content monster every day – a mixture of your own content and your curated content.

If you’re an artist, you might want to share curated content about art, creativity, and being an entrepreneur. The items that you curate and share are woven into your own social message so what you share is as important as what you create.

There are three ways I’ve found to make creation and curation as efficient and effective as possible:

1. Be organized
2. Load your tool belt
3. Automate what you can

1. Be organized

Organization is the most important cog in the wheel of your social strategy – a world of planning means nothing without implementation. Keep this in mind when choosing what to do so you can plan time in your schedule to get it all done. Being realistic in your time, motivations, and ability to implement is key.

2. Load your tool belt

• Buffer – Social media scheduling
• Canva – Quick and easy image creation
• Tailwind – Pinterest management
• Feedly – RSS
• Zapier – Automation
• Pinterest

This screen shot is from Feedly. I’ve set up my Feedly profile so I can batch process my content curation and easily find content for different accounts. For example, the highlighted accounts show Guy’s LinkedIn. I have RSS feeds set up to go into Guy’s LinkedIn folder based on the appropriate content for his LinkedIn account. You can choose an article, read it in Feedly and quickly send it to Buffer.

One key to great curation is to not share things all at once – let Buffer work for you by filling it in batches and sharing at the most optimal times.

Chrome extensions are invaluable to me. They are quick and efficient allowing you to do more in less time. A few of my must-have extensions:

• Buffer
• Bitly
• Eye Dropper Tool
• Pinterest Pin it Button
• Awesome Screenshot App

3. Automate what you can

• Big list of IFTTT recipes to grab:
• Big list of Zaps from Zapier

Using IFTTT or Zapier to streamline repetitive tasks can save you time. Both of these services link other app services together. My favorite IFTTT recipe shares my Instagram photos to Twitter with the image. If you don’t use this to share images from Instagram to Twitter, it will tweet but without the image.

My favorite Zapier zap posts my pins from Pinterest to my Buffer account. Once they are in Buffer, I can edit the description to customize it for a tweet and add a hashtag. I don’t want all my pins to go to Twitter so this gives me a chance to select them or I can edit the Zap to share only pins that I post to a certain board.

Creating your own social media shortcuts with IFTTT or Zapier can save time but make sure that you’re vigilant and check what is being processed on your social media accounts to make sure everything is going smoothly. You don’t want to share suboptimal content to save time. Quality is always important when posting.

Engagement [Social Media Conversations]

The wind beneath your wings for your social content.

A big part of the social media magic happens in the comments and conversations that take place on social media channels. When you post on social media, be prepared to have conversations with people. Scheduling your content frees you up to do other work and provides you with time to respond to tweets and posts.

Automating your content isn’t a free pass to be offline and unavailable. People will notice. While you don’t have to be online all day long unless you’re a social media pro or community manager, make sure that you plan several times a day to check your social media.

When you post new blog content, you want to make sure you’re available at that time to respond especially succinctly to comments or discussions that pop up around your new article.

Typically, I like to respond on each social platform. If you like to streamline tasks further, find a way to see and respond to the comments on each social platform that you use. A few that I like:

• Tailwind for Pinterest
• Hootsuite for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+
• Iconosquare for Instagram

Cleaning house [Social Media Comments]

While you’re busy checking your comments, make sure that you take the time to sweep out all the spam comments from your posts. These come in different forms by platform.

• LinkedIn published posts are being plagued by the LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) spamming the comments with “invitations to connect.” Remove these comments from your posts to keep it clean for real comments and thoughts.
• Facebook posts get spam in post comments leaving requests to like their page or some other off-topic link.
• Instagram spammers leave their messages and requests to visit their page and follow them.

Keeping your community spam and profanity free makes it nice for other people to be there as well as encourages positive commenting. This is a daily, on-going task that shouldn’t be ignored.

Build a reciprocal network [Social Media Amplification]

A big part of my overall social media strategy is to post great content that people will love to share whether I write it or share someone else’s content. I feel that this creates a social media presence that people will love to follow and look to for great content to share.

I don’t advocate begging people to share content or bugging influencers to share your content. Simply share great content and people will find it. I have a solid distribution process for sharing my own content and don’t ask others to share it.

I use the Social Warfare plugin on my blog because how things are shared when I’m not there to do it are important! It takes time to load the images into the plugin but it’s worth it for fantastic social sharing and it reduces the load time of the page since the images are behind the scenes.

This is a little of what I do when I publish new blog content. Guy calls this “Pegging a post.”

1. Create images for social sharing:
   > Pinterest 735 x 1102 pixels
   > Facebook 940 x 788 pixels
   > Twitter 1024 x 512 pixels
   > Instagram 640 x 640
2. Create blog graphics (560 x 315) for Open graph sharing
3. Pin blog post on Pinterest first
4. Share on Twitter with an image
5. Schedule later in the day for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+
6. Schedule tweets to go out on future dates for more traffic
7. Add relevant hashtags to content based on the social platform and what’s acceptable.
8. My posts go automatically into Triberr
9. I also use Comment Luv on my blog so my latest blog post is shared when I comment on blogs.
10. Add click to tweets into Social Warfare with quotes from the blog post

It’s important to customize the text and style on each social media platform. Dumping a link everywhere at the same time won’t get you social conversation or blog traffic.

Final step: Lather, rinse, repeat.

Being consistent with your social media and blogging is essential to success. I publish once a week on my blog and every day on all the social platforms that I’m active on.

Getting started on social media may seem like a big task but that’s just the beginning. Sticking with it and sharing great content every day is what creates social media platforms worth talking about.

Over to you

I hope this peek into what I do every day gives you some ideas to boost your social media efforts. If you want more, grab a copy of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users and really get serious.

Have you tried some of these tips with your social media strategy? What would you add to the list here that’s worked for you? It’d be great to hear from you in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, UnSplash, IconFinder, Wayback Machine

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Track Every Important Conversation: 6 Simple Ways to Build a Social Listening Dashboard

What happens when you tweet at a company, asking for help with their product?

What’s been your experience with mentioning or tagging someone with a large following, looking to connect or engage?

In order for companies and brands to excel at responding to their audience in a genuine way, they must first excel at social listening. They tune in to the right conversations, by using the right tools, and then are able to respond, engage, and delight.

Having the right tools can be key—as well as knowing how to use them. I’m happy to share some ideas on how to build a social listening dashboard so you can track the right conversations and key words and get involved in all the conversations that matter to you!

What is social listening?

Social listening allows you to watch people’s feedback, questions, conversations or comments in order to discover opportunities or curate interesting content for those audiences.

It’s a combination of paying attention and knowing the best way to respond and act.

Rion Martin of Infegy has a helpful definition also:

The practice of tracking online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand. A social listening platform provides the basic capability of systematically collecting online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand and is able to provide some degree of insights through the analysis of those conversations.

What’s the difference between social listening and social media monitoring?

The line can often be a little blurry between monitoring and listening, and for understandable reasons: Both terms involve heavy doses of finding and joining important conversations online.

One of the best ways I’ve found to describe the difference is this, from Dan Neely of Marketing Profs:

Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.

This analogy from Dan sheds even more light:

To borrow an analogy from public health, imagine that a mysterious illness has struck your city. The equivalent of a monitoring solution is to find as many sick people as you can and treat them. You could “monitor,” going door to door, checking each person for signs of sickness and then treating each one. You would have an effect, but it would take many doctors and nurses—and a lot of time. And if you don’t get at the root cause, another outbreak could occur across town.

The listening analytics approach looks for themes and patterns in the data. A listening approach would discover what caused the illness—”Aha! They all were exposed to the leak!”—how it spreads, which treatments are working, and (perhaps) how to prevent it in the future.

The key with social listening—just like listening in real life—is to identify and analyze the meaningful parts of a discussion.

Monitoring takes a scrape and dump approach, which can be helpful for collecting any and every mention. Listening takes a reflect-and-analyze approach, helping to notice patterns and insights, things like sentiment (how do people feel when they talk about me?) and channels (where are the conversations happening?).

Social listening is not a metric (though social metrics are very important!), social listening is an art. It is a delicate balance between listening and connecting with people in a valuable and meaningful way.

Why is social listening important?

You can use listening to spark new conversations, gain valuable audience insight, identify advocates or influencers, build affinity for your brand, or find customer support and sales opportunities in real-time.

The support gurus over at the Provide Support Blog have an interesting statistic when it comes to social media:

9 out of 10 consumers expect to receive a consistent experience over multiple contact channels

Bottom line, your audiences are talking all over the internet and if they’re talking to you, they are expecting a response. And they’re not just expecting a canned response! They want you to make them feel listened to as is evident by this mind-blowing fact:

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated.

I guess you know what they say: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar!

Nurturing the conversations, questions, comments that you find online is a great way to organically build a community of happy people.

How to set up a social listening strategy

For A3, aim for less ego-centric #bufferchat http://ift.tt/1Jm3fXl

— Simon Kemp (@eskimon) July 9, 2014

The above tweet from Simon Kemp of We Are Social was included in the social media monitoring #bufferchat (along with tons of other great tips and tools). There’s a host of great getting-started resources there, as well as in Courtney’s post about finding keywords and phrases to monitor.

To get started with social listening, choose a few brands (including your own) or keyword phrases that you want to listen to.

• Are you looking for customer service opportunities?
• Are you looking to identify influencers?
• Do you have a phrase or hashtag that you’d like to watch?

For example, you could want to listen for people talking about your product or service, so you might have a keyword phrase like this:

A helpful tip: You don’t need to include the “@” symbol when setting up an alert to watch the mentions of you or your brand. Many people forget to @-mention the company or they don’t necessarily want to mention you directly, for example:

Buffer help their staff use the right language with customers. Love it! Every support team should have one: http://t.co/B3KL8uGIPN#itsm

— Dave O’Reardon (@Silversix_Dave) March 28, 2015

Or you might want to keep an eye on a conversation that’s relevant to your industry and in that case you might want to monitor a keyword phrase or hashtag like this:

The more you diversify the topics you listen for, the more likely you are to find insights or opportunities for all of the above!

How to set up a social listening dashboard

1. The Mention + Feedly dashboard

Step 1: Build keyword phrase alerts in Mention.

Now that you have your list of keyword phrases, you can set up streams to watch using the free tool Mention, which also integrates with your Buffer account!

To start setting up alerts, click on the “Create a new alert” callout in the bottom-left corner of your Mention dashboard.

Once the new alert opens up, name your alert, I recommend using the same keyword phrase you intend to watch, then wait for your keyword phrase to populate in the “Keyword” field. When you’re done, click the “Next step” button in the bottom-right corner.

In this next step, you can select the social media channels you’d like to monitor as well as enter websites that you’d like to block from your results, and if you choose to keep the “Priority” filter activated, it will identify mentions coming from influential sites! Once you are done customizing your alert, click on the “Create my alert” button in the bottom-right.

Helpful tip: Connect your Buffer profile to your Mention account in the “Settings” of your dashboard to be able to respond or schedule content via your Buffer account.

Step 2: Import Your Mention updates into Feedly.

To pull your Mention alerts into Feedly, click on the RSS icon in your Mention account, found in the “Settings” section under “Manage my alerts.” Copy the URL from the popup.

Next, go into your Feedly account and click the “Add Content” button on the left-hand menu, then paste the URL in the field provided.

Once you’ve added your Mention feed, you can organize it under one of your Feedly categories.

Now you have a centralized location to view and share the content and social mentions you want to be listening to!

2. Email notifications

All major social networks offer to send you updates with any mentions or valuable content. In most cases, you can customize the emails you receive so that you’re getting the ones that fit your listening strategy best.

For Twitter, click on your profile picture in the top right corner and choose Settings from the drop-down list. Then click Email Notifications from the left menu.

Or you can click here.

One unique thing about Twitter is that it has a bit of a built-in listening service in that you can choose whether to be emailed any time an activity occurs or in a Tailored for you way, which customizes (and can significantly minimize) the emails you receive.

Here’s one way to set up an email notifications dashboard for Twitter emails:

For Facebook, click the small down-arrow in the top right corner and choose Settings from the drop-down list. Then click Notifications from the left menu and Email from the next page.

Or you can click here.

Among the Facebook email settings, a few that could be useful for adding to a listening dashboard include comments on your links and weekly page updates.

A similar setting is available for page admins by going to your page and clicking Settings > Notifications.

3. Your best combo of Google Alerts, Talkwalker, and Mention

Each of the above options does an excellent job of searching the web for mentions of your brand name and keywords. Each can deliver the results to your inbox, at the frequency you choose, and you can filter and sort the results from there.

Interestingly, some variation occurs from service to service. Results may vary, so to speak, which is why some people swear by Google Alerts and others Talkwalker and others Mention.

Feel free to play around with the right combination for you.

4. Slack channel or chat room

With a big assist from IFTTT or Zapier, you can connect a huge variety of services to post to your Slack chat room when new notifications come in.

For instance, here are some of the neat integrations between IFTTT and Slack.

• If you’re mentioned on Twitter, post a message in Slack
• If you receive a Google Alert, post a message in Slack
• If a new item comes into Feedly (like the Feedly + Mention dashboard shown above), post a message in Slack

5. Sparkcentral all-in-one dashboard

Some brands find great value in being able to find and respond to conversations all in the same place. Buffer, for example, uses Sparkcentral as its tool for handling all Twitter engagement, everything from @-mentions and direct messages to keyword searches.

Solutions like these make it pretty easy to set up and dive in. Many also come at a price. Sparkcentral and others are enterprise solutions with a monthly subscription.

Here are some other tools in the mold of Sparkcentral:

• Spider
• Brand24
• Salesforce
• Simply Measured
• Meltwater

6. Custom Tweetdeck dashboard

For social listening on Twitter specifically, there are many great Twitter tools that help surface mentions and hashtags that are valuable to you.

One of the best—and most official (it’s owned by Twitter!)—is Tweetdeck, which lets you build horizontal columns of notifications and activity, completely customized to your tastes.

Here’s a simple workflow for building a smart listening column for notifications and for searches.

For notifications:

1. Add a new column. Select “Mentions” from the column list. Add to your dashboard.
2. In the top right corner of your new Mentions column, click to open the settings.
3. For “Content,” you can clean up the results in the column by filtering out retweets or including tweets with a certain media type (video, GIF, etc.).
4. If you get a lot of @-mentions on the content you write, you can attempt to filter some of these results out in order to highlight conversational tweets by adding “via by” to the “excluding” setting.

For searches:

1. Click the search icon from the left menu.
2. Enter a search for your name or company name.
3. If you have an @-mention dashboard set up, you can exclude your username from the results (e.g., @caerleyhill).
4. For the Engagement setting, you can choose to show results that have a certain number of retweets, favorites, or replies.
5. When finished, click Add Column to add to your dashboard.

For content curation:

1. Add a new column for a favorite Twitter list or search.
2. For the Content setting, choose to show only tweets with links.

Summary: Always remember, listen & reply with care!

However you’re planning on structuring your communities, it’s important to remember that the content you are curating and responding with should be in-line with the existing conversation or add value to it.

A good rule of thumb I like to remember is that people don’t enjoy being “talked at,” this is “Human to Human” contact that you’re creating. People will respond to the way you make them feel, so make them feel listened to!

What social listening tips have you found to be most useful for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Image source: Pablo, IconFinder, UnSplash, Irina Blok

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10 Marketing Techniques I Learned from Instagram Models

Do you use Instagram? If you do, you probably notice a ton of pictures of half-naked models.

Most people react negatively to these images; for example, they think that these models have nothing going for them other than their looks. Or even worse, most people assume these models aren’t intelligent.

I’ve known a handful of these Instagram models for a few years now, and the one thing I can say about them is that they are really creative marketers. I’ve learned a few tricks from them that would help you grow your social media accounts.

Here are 10 marketing techniques you can learn from Instagram models: 

Technique #1: Shout for shout

On any social network, there are users who are popular. But whether you are popular or not, you want more followers.

To get more followers, you should network with other users and approach them to cross-promote each of your profiles. You can tell your followers to follow another member in the same space, and that other member can do the same for you.

By doing this, you can grow your account as long as you are continually employing this technique with other members each and every week. And it doesn’t just work for Instagram—you can leverage it for Twitter, Facebook, and any other social network.

Technique #2: Cross-promote your profiles

Chances are you have profiles across multiple social networks. From Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter, you’re on a lot of social networks.

And I bet that your profiles don’t have all of the same friends and followers. So why wouldn’t you cross-promote? For example, you can post on Facebook a few times a month, telling people to follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn.

And on Twitter, you can tell people to add you as a friend on Facebook. When doing this, just make sure you don’t cross-promote more than one network at a time as you’ll see a diminishing return.

In other words, if you told people on Facebook to follow you on both Twitter and LinkedIn, it wouldn’t be as effective as if you asked them to follow you on just one of those networks.

Technique #3: Time your posts

You can’t post on these social networks whenever you want. Why? Because your followers may not be there when you are posting, which means they won’t see your status updates or posts.

So, when should you post? Well, you shouldn’t just rely on generic data, telling you that 8 a.m. or 3 p.m. is the best time to post.

Instead, you should use the following free tools by Simply Measured to determine when most of your followers are online. From Google Plus to Twitter and Instagram, they will analyze all of your social profiles and tell you when to post.

Once you have the data from Simply Measured, you will know when to post. This is why you are seeing a lot of these Instagram models posting at certain times, e.g., 6 p.m. It’s not because that is when they are free—it’s because they figured out that the majority of their followers are on that social network during that time.

Technique #4: Post multiple times a day

You can’t expect to post once a week or once a day and get the most traffic. I know some people say you get better engagement if you spread out your posts. And although that’s true, it doesn’t really matter if the content you are posting is exceptionally good.

Just look at these models: they are only posting content that their followers want to see. In addition to that, they are posting the content multiple times a day as it helps them get more engagement faster.

Spend the time to curate great content. If you are pushing out great information, more people will want to follow you.

Technique #5: Show some love

Have you noticed that these Instagram models show a lot of love to their fans? They have contests that allow their followers to win a Skype date with them. To enter, all their followers need to do is post an image of the model on their accounts and tell their own followers to follow the model.

It works wonders for them when it comes to follower growth. You too can do similar things.

For example, Gary Vaynerchuk has an Ask Gary Vee show, allowing people who want his advice to tweet at him.

He then selects some of the tweets and answers the questions in a video format. This has helped him grow his follower count to over a million.

You too can do something similar. Just make sure that whatever you offer your followers is valuable to them.

Technique #6: Participate in the community

This one is simple, but most people forget to do it…even I forget at times.

You have to participate if you want to build a loyal community. Respond to comments and messages, and help out your followers when you can. If you show that you care about them, they will reciprocate.

Social media is all about being social. So, don’t just post on these social sites and expect people to buy all of the products and services you are selling without participating.

Technique #7: Don’t forget about the stats

What’s interesting with these models is that the good ones don’t put naked pictures of themselves on Instagram. Why? Because they have found that showing too much skin slows down your follower count (plus Instagram bans nude images).

By leaving some things to the imagination, these girls generate more engagement per post, which causes them to pick up more followers and fame.

So, what does this mean for you? Well, you need to experiment. You have to analyze your status updates and tweets to see what performs the best. This will give you some insights into what you should be posting about and what you shouldn’t.

It’s just like how these girls figured out that they shouldn’t post naked pictures—leaving something to the imagination works better.

Without analyzing your social media updates, however, you won’t know what your audience is craving.

Technique #8: Focus your energy

Besides Instagram, what other social networks do most of these Instagram models use? It’s Snapchat.

Sure, they may have a Twitter or a Facebook profile, but they focus over 90% of their time on Instagram and Snapchat. Why? Because they know that there isn’t enough time to be on every social network.

If you want to be big on the social web, pick a network or two. You can expand into a third or a forth later on, but first focus your time and attention on a couple.

Once you’ve built up your popularity, you can then use your following to cross-promote other social networks like I described in Technique #2.

Technique #9: Have fun

This is probably the simplest technique, but you probably don’t see it this way. When you look at social media, you probably see it as a chore. It’s something that you have to be on because of work or financial or marketing reasons.

But what would happen if you actually enjoyed being on these social sites? Your content would get better; people would want to read your updates; and you’d gain more followers.

Don’t make social media a chore. It should be something you are passionate about and are having fun with. If you aren’t, then you need to rethink your strategy.

These Instagram models love their jobs and truly enjoy posting pictures all over the social web. That’s one of the main reasons they are blowing up.

Technique #10: Don’t fight fire with fire

As you can imagine, these Instagram models are loved by a lot of people. But at the same time, they are also hated by thousands of people too. And many of those haters are more vocal than their passionate fans.

What should you do when people start bashing you? You could start bashing them back, but that would just create a feud.

Instead, embrace criticism. Try to learn from it…and if you don’t have anything positive to say, don’t say it. Let your fans defend you…which they naturally will as you build up your following.

Conclusion

You can learn something from everyone in this world. From kids to flight attendants to even Instagram models, the possibilities are endless.

Sure, you may already know some of the tactics I mentioned above, but I bet you are not leveraging all of them. Just try them out for 30 days, and I promise you’ll see a world of difference.

How else can you grow your social media following?

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How Much Money Should You Invest In Facebook Ads?

This is definitely one question that we cannot answer for you since it is something that is quite subjective. However, we should highlight some facts that you do have to take into account in order to make a smart decision for your business. When you create your financial business plan, you surely have an advertising budget that is included. You will use a part of it on Facebook but we have to recommend that you only use a percentage based on the goals that you have in the future. Always analyze results and adapt your expenditure based on what brings in the best results.

Increasing Page Likes

You want to be sure that the page likes you get are completely relevant. It is hard to make a cold sale on Facebook but you can sell quite well to the people that did choose to see the content you share in news feeds. With this in mind, you do want to increase relevant page likes but you have to be 100% sure that everything is relevant. Do not focus on the irrelevant countries only in order to get more likes.

As a simple rule of thumb, we can say that a relevant like can cost anywhere between 25 cents and 1 dollar based on your industry. You do not have to spend everything on page likes but if your budget is under one hundred dollars, you should focus most of it on increasing page likes.

Post Promotion

If you want to promote posts, you want to promote those that drive people to a website or to a page that will convert something. Many brands do not have such a priority and are just interested in being sure that fans see content. Everything varies from one business to the next but you should never use the boost post button. Focus on promoting posts with these goals:

• Reach the fans that missed your posts organically


• Reach people that are not fans but are relevant

Generally speaking, marketers expect to reach around twenty percent of the page fans with this type of ad. This is a good assessment that you can take into account. The optimized CPM that you can expect in this case is around $5.

Buying Website Traffic

This is similar with Promoted Posts but the focus is a little different. We are basically referring to the domain sponsored stories. The only problem with this strategy is that it is quite difficult to assess CPM. However, you can expect it to be up to 4 dollars and a minimum of 1 dollar. In this case, you want to target non-fans but you have to be careful with targeting so that you can reach specific interests and get something properly done. It is difficult if you do not know much about Facebook advertising.

Promote Services And Products

Consider this only in the event that you still have budget after you considered the options above. You can easily promote items like:

• Webinars


• Business services


• Virtual products


• Webinars


• Sign-ups for newsletters

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A Guide to Leveraging Social Media on Your Website

A few years ago, businesses could get away with not integrating social media into the design of their website. The same can’t be said for today. Social media is a vital part of making your brand visible and driving conversions, and those who fail to jump on board fail to keep up with their competitors. If you want to make the most out of your website traffic, you’ll learn to leverage social media. Use these four tips to get you started.

1. Integrate Sharing Plugins

Social media is one of the largest hubs of activity in the world. Almost everyone has some form of social media account, and if you learn to control that market, your website can gain worldwide attention. Getting social media followers in some form is easy if you integrate sharing plugins into your website.

The trick is finding the right plugins for you. Many use a CMS to build their website, such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, and each of these systems has unique sharing plugins for your website. For example, Adam Connell of Blogging Wizard explored many different WordPress plugins in this blog post, and he concludes: “Whether it’s adding social share buttons, follower counts, encouraging social shares, or monitoring social shares…there’s a plugin for you.” It’s just a matter of determining the kind of plugin you want and finding the one that will work best for your purposes.

Once you’ve found the sharing plugins that work for you, make sure they’re visible. Avoid shoving them into the middle of a busy website. Best practices indicate placing these buttons near the top, bottom, or side of a web page; consumers will know to look there based off of traditional webpage setup. There’s not much point investing in social plugins if your consumer can’t find them with ease.

2. Combine Social and Email Marketing

Email marketing is as much of an important part of building and defining your online business as social media marketing, so it makes perfect sense to marry the two into one effective unit. In your social posts, invite your followers to subscribe to your weekly newsletters or specials, and in your emails include sharing buttons to enable easy sharing.

This will do two things: grow your audience and expand the reach of your brand. If your content for both the posts and emails are good, you’ll quickly gain a more devoted following and reach further than you ever have before when it comes to brand visibility.

3. Learn from Social Signals and Analysis

Gaining data and insights from your current strategies is the only way you can hope to improve your marketing schemes, and there are several tools you can use to do that. Websites, such as SproutSocial for example, offer users a comparison of both web analytics and social signals to help determine how you’re doing in your social campaign. The information you gather will help you to establish your goals more clearly and identify areas where you need to improve.

4. Offer Social Sign In

When consumers visit your website, give them a minute to get grounded in your content, and then offer a pop-up that asks if they would like to sign into any social media platforms while they’re there. Though many will say no, many others will say yes, and they’re the ones who are more likely to spend both time and money on your site, according to research from Search Engine Land.

Just be sure that the sign in will keep information private. If consumers’ social media accounts are hacked because of an unsecure site, you’ll be under fire.

Staying on top of social media integration is the best habit you can develop for a healthy website. Use some of these tips and watch your web traffic and conversions grow.

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3 Proven Ways to Use Visuals in Your Social Media Strategy

Social media posts that include visual elements are inherently more engaging than those that don’t.

If you’re looking for ways to drive more customer interaction with your social accounts, we’ve found three ways that you can up your visual game.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to be on every network to achieve results. Based on your type of business, decide which channels are right for you and go from there!

Infographics and Flow Charts

Due to their popularity, infographics are some of the most shareable content on the Web. Their clever cartoon figures and rapidly digestible graphs and charts harness the largely visual nature of digital interaction. This is useful for spreading information and building awareness about your business, since the majority of the population learns visually.

While it certainly adds value to your social accounts for you to share others’ infographics, why not go a step further and make your own?

Social Media Examiner has a helpful guide that shows you how to identify a good topic, gather reliable information, parcel it out into sections, and get it promoted. The more people you have sharing your infographic (which should have your online contact info at the bottom), the more traffic you can drive back to your web presence. Online generators like Infogram can help you get started.

Another value-adding informational medium is the flow chart, which you can create using Microsoft Office or a program such as draw.io.

Flow charts are great for giving your customers a guided thought process about how to use or purchase your products and services. It is extremely easy for these charts to get complex and muddled, especially if more and more ideas start cropping up. Nevertheless, a flowchart that answers questions with a crisp design to boot is a surefire way to get people interacting. Be sure and use it in a blog post so people can comment!

Images in Posts

You need images in your posts. Not necessarily for every single blog entry or tweet; that might be a little overwhelming. But with all the statistics that show how much more engagement posts with images get, more than half of your posts should probably have a visual supplement. They don’t have to be fancy or under an exclusive license. You can find hundreds of royalty-free images through Creative Commons, Compfight, and Pixabay, to name a few. All these should cost you is the space needed to credit the original photographer or artist (and some don’t even require that).

Once your site’s articles are snazzily accessorized with their very own leading image, posting them to your business’s social media accounts will be a breeze, since the main picture of a webpage usually shows up in its link preview (though you will need to attach an image separately in a tweet). The same applies to others’ articles that you choose to share. Jeff Bullas, in his reflections on the early days of Instagram (back when people still put the word “app” in quotes), uses an infographic to explain why visuals are so important. His points — that pictures increase page views, heighten trust in a product, strengthen the reader’s connection to the material — still hold true today.

If you’re going to use imagery to take your posts from good to great, be sure you know what resources are at your disposal. Buffer’s guide to awesome visual content provides a wealth of statistics on why photos are important (in case you still weren’t convinced). It also demonstrates how to evaluate the mathematical aesthetics of a picture you want to use, pick the right content for your post, and tweak it until it’s just right. Follow their tips and you’ll probably be having way more fun than you should be allowed while working.

Optimized Image Dimensions for Avatars and Headers

The simplest rule of thumb is “the higher the resolution, the better.” However, there’s more to picking the right image size than that. Your business’s social channels don’t look very professional when caught unprepared after a network updates its header size, or if different devices show different amounts of the image. That’s why we’re thankful for tools like this guide to social media image dimensions. That one covers headers for almost all the major social networks, and squeezes in a few helpful hints about the size of the pictures in your feed as well.

Many blogging platforms, like WordPress and Tumblr, have varying header sizes depending on the theme you choose. Make some time to test out a few options until you find one that looks good. If you’re having trouble, contact the theme developer for sizing recommendations.

As with the individual posts, you can find free images online to use as your header, or you could make your own. (It’s a good idea to hire a designer to do this if you don’t have much experience in graphic design.) If you’re going the custom route, make sure you take into account your branding and content goals along with the image size.

Got any other tips for us on optimizing your web presence with images? Share your thoughts below!

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hiQ Labs Revolutionizing Businesses with “Machine Learning”

“I believe that when the robots rise up, ATMs will lead the charge,” quipped The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper. You don’t have to be a genius physicist (arguably on the autism spectrum) to have a theory about “machine learning”, but the reality is it’s not as scary as screenwriters, novelists, and Hollywood makes it out to be.

In fact, it might just be revolutionizing businesses that have accepted subpar figures—like the travel industry, for example. Did you know just one percent of visitors to a travel site will actually make a booking? In any other industry or other type of website, that would be a red flag that something either needs to be fixed or the business is sinking fast.

However, when economists met machine learning, something magical happened. Say what you will about economists (They’re right about as often as the local weather man, their academic outlook is rampant with tunnel vision, or they’re clueless about the reality of business? They’ve heard all that before). Just like everything else in the digital era, economics is undergoing a much-needed growth spurt. It’s enjoying a revolution. Their new mission? Fix their client’s troubles (like those pesky travel sites) with real solutions, and it’s all starting in Silicon Valley.

hiQ(uality) on the Horizon

Taking the travel site example, it’s easy to see some patterns that show how likely that one percent is (no, not that one percent) to actually book. For example, the faster a person can click, the happier they’ll be—but that doesn’t equate to more sales. With travel, the longer a person stays on the page, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Unless they just left the window open and went to make a sandwich, of course. How many times a person has visited before, where they’re located, what time of day they visit, and other big data gold can also help figure out how likely they are to buy.

By creating an algorithm, you can see how likely someone is to become a buyer. Then, algorithms can figure out gains and risks of revenues and how they relate to advertisements. In fact, it takes less than a second to introduce these algorithms that lead to machine learning and ultimately, a stronger website.

It’s all about pinpointing patterns floating around in an ocean of data, which is challenging according to astrophysicist cum data scientist Genevieve Graves. Her background is in studying galaxy data at Princeton, but today she’s the Chief Data Scientist for hiQ Labs, the latest promising startup in San Francisco. Her approach? Machine learning.

Rise for the Machines

The concept of machine learning was actually coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel—which basically means creating computers that can teach themselves. The programmer commands a computer to keep repeating the same task over and over, and successes are measured. Kind of like with A/B testing, a slight change is made to the command, and the computer must note whether the change led to a better or worse result. That’s how it “learns”. Machine learning has been used in helicopter flights, spam filtering, and even for recording voices. Why not to optimize a website?

For hiQ Labs, machine learning is a perfect match to change business for the better. For example, what if a firm knew ahead of time which of their employees was most likely to give notice? Graves used data from one company (including job titles, pay scales, etc.) and compared it to other companies in the same industry. It led to pretty solid data on who would quit while giving insights that humans just couldn’t pick up. With this information, thanks to machine learning, managers have advance notice to either speed up the process or try to save the defector.

Challenges with the New Economics

According to Stanford economics PhD Scott Nicholson, figuring out those buried types like buyers, content, etc. is one of the biggest hurdles in the new landscape of economics. He’s an advisor for hiQ, and says newer firms are learning grounds—and also a meat market for sellers and buyers. He’s worked with LinkedIn and large-scale health companies figuring out a “customer’s type” so they’ll be best matched with their links. Just like some people’s “types” are tanned blondes while others prefer lanky, tall dark and handsome, matching customers with their preferred links (and other matchmaking skills) is crucial for a website.

“Linking”, beyond actual links on a website, is the foundation for business success. For example, a retail chain could link all their tills together via computer to see who’s performing best. However, a brand new platform is a tough sell—and the Airbnb head of economics Riley Newman agrees. As you probably know, this company connects “hosts” with “guests” around the country. However, it was tough to match up supply and demand. Facebook ads geo-targeted helped up supply where demand was too big. Google Ads, on the other hand, increased demand. However, with a little data crunching the company figured out why some hosts, regardless of location, were doing so well: They had better photos. Today, Airbnb offers complimentary photography services.

All in all, this is economics at work. How is it working for your business?

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