Categories
Social Media

Outsource Social Media Marketing – Six Reasons Why

Running a business of any size involves a lot of research and planning and, you likely don’t have time to manage all those social networks yourself. You probably don’t even have time to manage even one channel. So, should you try to manage it yourself? Or should you outsource social media marketing?
[su_box title=”Outsourcing in 2019″ style=”default” box_color=”#333333″ title_color=”#FFFFFF” radius=”3″ class=”” id=””]52 Per cent of Small Businesses Plan to Outsource in 2019, Most Ordinarily for Accounting, IT Services, and Digital Marketing Tasks[/su_box]
Many businesses are reluctant to waive their marketing to third parties since they think – and rightly so – that this is a vital function to guarantee the achievement and growth of their enterprise. Because of this, they wind up failing or restricting this essential function because of insufficient time, tools or abilities.

Below are some reasons that one should opt for outsourcing social media marketing:-

GAINING UNTAPPED EXPERTISE AND SKILLS

Outsourcing sociable networking into a skilled way they know how companies can use the platforms to market, examine new ideas and make new connections daily. Additionally, they probably understand how to quantify and enhance the Company operation of social websites. Outsourcing your project can help you gain a lot of knowledge unknown to you.

Essential duties of a social media manager include developing the content topic in such a way that it cost-effectively reaches the target audience by creating and creating all social media content (images, videos, written, audio etc.)

Utilizing an outside Digital Marketing Company provides you with the chance to concentrate on what you do: your job. An expert takes over and deals with the strategic and technical sides of your digital marketing program. He guides and guides. You specify the plan together, and you keep control. Then you delegate the implementation with confidence.

You could also train them to make use of third party marketing tools like CreatorKit which frees up your time further.

This is especially critical when you want to diversify your marketing into multiple channels. How you design your Instagram profile is going to be different from how you work on Facebook, Snapchat or other platforms. The kind of content you develop too is going to be different across each of these platforms. Learning how each platform works is going to take a lot of time and effort that can be better utilized in growing your business. You can hire agencies that specialize in these various channels in order to better streamline your operations.

WAY INTO THE TOOLS OF TECHNOLOGY

Not many SME owners take some opportunity to examine how their opponents communicate, furthermore, what the real expectations of the clients are. Plus they have very little time to trace the growth of technology, tools, and press.

On the flip side, it’s the essential work of any specialist Digital Marketing Company: to remain alert, to decode the tendencies and also to examine the newest tools to have the ability to counsel to the best of its clientele.

Outsourced digital marketing accounts additionally contribute to efficiencies in higher funding allocation resulting from information analytics and re-allocation of funding foundation efficacy of yield on advertising spent.

CREATIVE CONTENT MARKETING

A social media manager have the basic to expert knowledge on how to curate and assemble the content. The primary purpose of any business that is conducting social media shouldn’t only be restricted to posting the material, to make the audience aware about the brand, it is crucial to have proper know-how on

  • When to post?
  • What to post?
  • Why this content?
  • How to make strategies to make the engagement boost your sales?

Outsourcing your Digital Marketing Company compels you to think creatively of the above factors on the part of digital manager due to the outside service provider have decent operating expertise to have a fresh look at your company. It presents new ideas and provides options to enhance your communicating and reconnect connections with your clients. It may even help you to find new prospecting leads.

SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation is the critical goal of any business, but how one can adequately implement the social media marketing strategy?

Outsourcing marketing is the chance to control prices. You specify the magnitude of outsourced services depending on the budget spent on promoting your organization based on days. It will let you prioritize the assignments of the outside adviser.

These are all aspects of an increasingly intricate marketing mix that has to be mastered, coordinated and integrated to raise the visibility of its company and develop its actions. For example, did you know that there are seven different types of ads just with Instagram?

This suggests a mastery of these stations and techniques in addition to a functional analysis of the outcomes to guarantee the effectiveness of those activities.

FILLS THE GAP BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND VISION

And that works great when that technical purpose like online marketing isn’t cored to your small business but is an enabler. And also the longer duration has one individual in your staff who assembles captive wisdom and additionally coordinated and operates together with the outsourced business to handle these electronic initiatives. Additionally, this reduces hiring concerns, prices or retention challenges for your organization.
If you outsource your electronic marketing, you hope to boost your entire marketing campaigns with specialist advice that you get on automated approach from the outsourced agency that are specialists working on projects across businesses for numerous customers.

Your outsourced digital marketing spouse includes a Great Deal of expertise that may complement your thinking and strategy, leading to better outcomes.

It communicates your manifestation. It alleviates your groups by taking charge, inside your organization or of tasks associated with marketing: commercial documentation, site, marketing visuals, client communications, media relations, direct marketing, etc.

COST REDUCTION AND EFFECTIVENESS

Based on the expertise level of this social networking management service you employ, how big your company? The package of services that you need? And also a lot of different facets, professional social networking marketing may price you anywhere from $1,000 a month to $20,000 a month.

Digital Marketing, in itself, is considerably less costly than conventional types of marketing. A time slot on TV, distance on a small hoarding or possibly just a tiny ad in the paper (or even a front-page advertisement) will provide you with a bomb.

Possessing a freelancer or a contractor who knows entries and exists of social media for longer duration makes it possible to save money as digital marketing demands the ideal experience, knowledge and expertise to handle media planning and buying and assisting in savings there.

Conclusion

The critical need to remain upgraded on the ever-changing electronic marketing world goes off once you’ve got a perfect partner to whom you’ve outsourced your job. Being in the know of everything that occurs in the electronic world across mediums and platforms is an extremely time-consuming undertaking. That can certainly take its toll if it’s managed in house. So outsourcing helps manufacturers have a spouse who assists the brand be upgraded without spending the effort and time demanded this.

Categories
Social Media

Instagram Hashtags Not Getting You Likes? Here's What You Can Do

Hashtags are a popular phenomenon across a number of different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even LinkedIn. Yet, it is on Instagram where hashtags play a central role in the way the app is used.

Instagram lets users follow hashtags on your timeline. For instance, if you are an interior designer, you could follow a hashtag like #interiordesign to stay updated on the latest trends and styles in this industry.

Find the right hashtags

Picking the right hashtag is thus half the battle. Going back the example of hashtags related to interior design, a search on Kicksta’s hashtag generator  lists the following hashtags as having more than a million posts each.Instagram Hashtag Generator

Quite clearly, these are the most popular hashtags related to this industry. Posting content with these hashtags should help you reach the maximum number of users. Right?

Not necessarily. Popular hashtags like these are also the most competitive. With over a million posts made with a hashtag like #interiordesign, chances are that your post with this hashtag could get drowned among several other posts that get made with yours.

Pick niche hashtags

There is another factor to consider here. A topic like “interior design” is pretty broad. What interests one user and fetches likes and engagement may not interest another user.

In other words, when you use broad hashtags, then your post reaches a good number of users who are not particularly interested in what you have posted. Instagram’s ranking algorithm places a lot of emphasis on user engagement. So when that does not happen, Instagram tends to rank your posts lower and lower.

Here’s the fix -try to include hashtags that are highly relevant to what you post. For example, if you are posting about books on interior design, you could use a hashtag like #interiordesignbooks. If your design incorporates a certain element of styling, then use hashtags relevant to this style may be used.

While this does help you reach your targeted users better, this does not solve your purpose always. Niche hashtags don’t tend to be followed as often  as broad hashtags are. Consequently, while engagement stays high with such hashtags, they reach a vastly lower number of people.

Increase hashtag count

It is here that your hashtag count is useful. Instagram lets user add up to 30 hashtags for each of their posts. While many marketing gurus recommend limiting hashtags to around five or six per post, you can maximize reach by maximizing your use of hashtags.

The recommendation to lower the number of hashtags is not without merit though. Hashtags do not contribute directly to the conversation you are making with your followers. As such, cluttering your description field with hashtags can seem excessive and spammy.

One way to maximize the use of hashtags while keeping it clutter-free is by using multiple line spaces between your description and the hashtags. Some users also tend to include hashtags as part of a comment and not within the description.

Trending hashtags

Another problem with hashtags is that new trends emerge all the time. Using the same hashtags for each of your posts can bring down the engagement on your posts over time.

One way to work around this is through competitive analysis. The process here is straight-forward – pick a popular competitor in your industry and look up the hashtags that users tag this company with in their posts. Here is a quick guide on Instagram search from Mentionlytics that explains this process.

  • Enter the name of a competitor you want to monitor
  • Configure the data source for your monitoring and set it to Instagram
  • Sort the results by top trending hashtags to view all the emerging hashtags against your competitor.

Of course, not all of this may be applicable to your business. But if you notice a sharp rise in the number of followers to a relevant hashtag in your industry, it is a good idea to start using this in your posts as well.

Competitive analysis of hashtags

What is your competitor doing that is working for them? A competitive analysis of their Instagram submissions can go a long way in giving you insights to increase your likes as well.

You do this by building a large list of Instagram accounts that cater to your target group – only include those accounts that are fairly large (at least 40,000 followers) and have a highly engaging comments section.

Next, identify patterns in the kind of content they publish. Once you have an idea of what works, produce similar content of your own that can be posted on your Instagram feed. Have at least 30 of such posts ready for submission.

Third, go through the list of popular Instagram accounts again and prepare a list of hashtags that are in the ‘medium popular’ category – that is, about 20K to 200K posts containing them. You may also have a similar list of ‘highly popular’ hashtags – those with over 500K posts.

Finally, schedule your Instagram posts with 30 of these hashtags included in each of them. Generously rotate these hashtags across these posts and schedule not more than 2 per day.

This strategy is helpful in two ways. One, it helps you efficiently replicate the success of your competitors. Also, shuffling your hashtags gives you better insights on which hashtags work and which ones don’t. You can now steadily bring down your hashtags count to ones that work most effectively and stick with them.

 

Categories
Social Media

How Will Instagram Checkout Change ECommerce

Last month, Instagram announced the launch of Checkout, a new feature that will allow users to check out products from brands from within the app and even make purchases without ever having to leave the app.

The feature works quite smoothly on the limited number of accounts that it is now available on. For instance, if you visit the @NikeTraining Instagram page now, you will find a number of posts with a ‘shopping bag’ icon. These are posts with products that you can purchase.

Hitting any one of these posts will take you to the image with a ‘Tap to view products’ message. You may pick the product you like, and then also customize your purchase based on size, color, etc. and make the purchase. Instagram users outside the US are now displayed a ‘Visit Website’ option instead to make purchases directly from the brand’s website.

From a business perspective, this is a huge step for Instagram as it builds a sustainable business model around its current visual social networking platform. The potential is huge. Instagram could, in theory, open this feature to everyone, and this could make way for influencers to make affiliate commissions for products they refer on the app. Today, Instagram does not have a way to monetize the huge influencer marketing ecosystem, which will change with this new feature.

So what does all this mean for the eCommerce ecosystem at large? Although the feature is in closed-beta right now, we expect the Checkout feature to be available to all businesses in the next six to twelve months. When that does happen, we are likely to see a huge churn in the way eCommerce businesses operate.

Think of the small-time retailer selling fashion accessories online. Today, most of them have a store on eCommerce platforms like Magento or BigCommerce. Customer acquisition is a huge pain given that most buyers head to Amazon online. Given that Search engine is no longer a viable channel for these small time stores, most of them head to social media to attract eyeballs to their stores.

Alternately, most of these small time stores who do not sell products that is a good fit for social media (think auto spare parts) choose to list themselves on Amazon instead. After all, if Amazon outranks your website on Google for every conceivable query, it is a good idea to join them rather than fight them.

But with Instagram Checkout in place, store owners no longer have an incentive to run their own store. They may, as well, list their products on Amazon, Facebook (which already has a Store feature), Instagram and every other customer acquisition channel and monetize directly instead of having to bring customers to their website and then translating them into sales. Selling on Instagram has lesser friction than acquiring traffic from this channel and converting on the site.

That does not mean stores will not have a website presence at all. Instead, most store owners might choose to use websites purely for marketing purposes like content marketing or to build a mailing list. Spending on a store may seem like an unnecessary expense.

That could however not be the case if the various stakeholders in the ecosystem adapt suitably. Should Instagram charge users a monthly fee based on the number of products they have listed, that could make the platform less attractive to sellers.

At the same time, should platforms like BigCommerce move away from a subscription model to a model based purely on processing fee, it increases the likelihood for sellers to continue selling on these web platforms while using Instagram as an alternative source. After all, selling on your own store gives you a level of control that would never be possible over third party platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

But from a buyers’ perspective, Instagram Checkout is more user-friendly. Imagine coming across a new seller you want to buy from. If you were to land on their website, you will be required to go through the entire checkout process like entering your billing and shipping details manually each time. With Instagram, all this is a one-time process. You may buy from new stores with just a click of a button without any of the checkout hassles.

In some ways then, Instagram Checkout could do to eCommerce stores what Reddit did to message boards – why sign up on new boards each time you had a question when you could simply ask the same question on the relevant subreddit?

It will be interesting to see how eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce change their models to take on the new eCommerce platform in town. Will this mean an end to a subscription model? Will that mean a fundamental shift in the way customers buy?

Categories
Social Media

Is The Internet Getting Increasingly Sinister?

Can you call yourself a geek or a techie without having a Facebook or a Google account? Not many teenagers have been able to successfully dodge the array of social games like Farmville forced upon them by their friends on Facebook. No wonder then that our internet liberties are wholly tied today to how these big web companies choose to treat their customers. Google’s recent privacy policy announcement just gave its users a glimpse of what could happen if the company were ever exploit its dominance. Check out this infographic to see why our dependence on Facebook and Google in the internet could be getting us closer and closer to virtual slavery.

Categories
Social Media

How Many Mothers Are On Facebook? Here Are The Numbers

Is your mom already on Facebook? According to the latest report from eMarketer, there is a 69% possibility if she is an internet user in the United States. The report provides some really interesting numbers that show that the number of online moms who access Facebook will grow from 62% in 2010 to well over 73% in 2013. In absolute terms, this means a rise of nearly 4 million users from 20.6 million to 24.5 million. What do these numbers mean? Click on the arrow on the top of this article to read more.

Categories
Google Social Media

Google Plus – User Demographics : Gender, Occupation, Cities & Countries

It has barely been weeks since Google launched their new social network – the Google+. Despite its earlier failures at getting their social strategy right, Google appears to have cracked the social code this time around. The company has already announced the registration of 10 million members – a far cry from the 750 million users that throng Facebook, but still a huge base considering that the service is very much in invite-only mode and is limited primarily among the geeks in the Silicon valley and other major cities.

But 10 million is still a large enough number to make a general picture of what the social network now looks like. Thanks to work from FindPeopleOnPlus, here find the most important data about the demographics of Google Plus.

First, view the Gender Distribution on Google+


Categories
Social Media

Most Accessed Social Network From Mobile Phones

A couple of years back, people “networked” with friends on Facebook and “updated their status” over Twitter. At least, that was the original idea that Twitter was built upon. However, as usage as proliferated, the use-case scenarios have changed too. Today, Facebook is the network people use more for status-updates. Twitter has mostly become a thought-sharing or link-sharing service.

So what does this mean to social network access from mobile phones. As a status update tool, Facebook today finds more usage among the mobile phone population than Twitter. That, along with the fact that Facebook enjoys a user base of over 500 million, has meant that Facebook is used by close to twice the number of mobile phone users as Twitter. Here is the % of mobile phone users accessing the various popular social networks

Facebook : 52%
Twitter : 24%
FourSquare : 5%
MySpace : 2%

Categories
Social Media

Time Spent On Social Networks – Countries With The Heaviest Social Networkers

United States has the largest number of users on Facebook – the world’s largest social network. Yet, the US is not even in the top 10 list when it comes to the list of countries with the heaviest social networkers. A recent study from Comscore has shown that Russia leads the world when it comes to social network engagement and Yandex, the country’s top social network is the place where most Russians hang out. Only two countries from the English speaking world are in the top 10 and that’s UK and Canada. Speak about the opportunities available for the vernacular networks.

Here are the top 10 countries ranked on the basis of the average number of hours spent per visitor per month.

1. Russia : 9.8
2. Israel : 9.2
3. Turkey : 7.6
4. UK : 7.3
5. Philippines : 6.2
6. Canada : 5.8
7. Indonesia : 5.3
8. Finland : 5.0
9. Spain : 5.0
10. Puerto Rico : 4.9

Worldwide : 4.5

Categories
Social Media

User Demographics Of Location Sharing Services

Over the past one year, location sharing services have proliferated quite a bit – at least in parts of United States and Europe. Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla primarily incentivize people for frequently “checking into” locations by offering them “badges“. While this may appear to be a futile exercise at the outset, companies are also realizing the impact that such services can have on the businesses. For example, some businesses offer discounts to the ‘Mayor‘ on FourSquare – a badge given to the user who has checked in the highest number of times thus incentivizing people to check in more often. Facebook has recently come up with their own location sharing service that is not only good for users to check out friends in the neighborhood, but also helps in finding deals at businesses in the vicinity.

A recent study by Pew has summarized the user demographics of services like FourSquare and Gowalla that you can find below. All numbers are as percentage of internet users in the United States

Gender
Male : 6%
Female : 3%

Race
White : 3%
Black : 5%
Hispanic : 10%

Age
18-29 : 8%
30-49 : 4%
50-64 : 2%
65+ : 1%

Annual Household Income
< $30,000 : 3%
$30,000 – $49,999 : 6%
$50,000-$74,999 : 6%
$75,000+ : 4%

Education
Less than High School : 5%
High School : 3%
Some college : 4%
College + : 5%

Categories
Social Media

Twitter Engagement Study – How Retweets Happen

An important part of social media marketing is the way marketers exploit the retweeting functionality on Twitter. This is because marketing campaigns over Twitter or any other social medium are pretty much dependent on how viral the message spread and on Twitter, retweets enable users to spread any message to their own followers setting up the virality in motion.

Sysomos has conducted a study of retweets the crux of which is presented below. If you are a social media marketer, you can compare your own results with the average numbers presented here to analyze the success of your social engagement.

Number of tweets that are retweeted : 6%

Number of retweets in

the first hour : 92.4%
the second hour : 1.63%
the third hour : 0.94%

Of course your results are bound to be a lot different from the average results since messages from corporate accounts tend to have a lot more retweet potential. Nevertheless, this is a study, the results of which are pretty interesting.