Saturday, 30 May 2015

Twitter Audience Insights: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Twitter Unveils Audience Insights Dashboard: “With audience insights, you can easily discover valuable insights about your followers and […]

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Friday, 29 May 2015

Twitter Marketing: How Smart Marketers Are Succeeding

Do you use Twitter for your business? Want to discover how to use the latest Twitter updates? To learn more about Twitter marketing, I interview Joel Comm. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners […]

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Thursday, 28 May 2015

6 Ways to Grow Your Blog Audience

Do you want to attract more readers to your blog? Looking for ways to keep visitors coming back for more? Creating great blog posts won’t get you results unless you have an audience that reads and engages with them. In this article I’ll share six ways to grow your blog audience and turn first-time visitors […]

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Wednesday, 27 May 2015

7 Ways to Use Social Media for Online Reputation Management

Social-Reputation-Management-01

When my grandfather couldn’t get his Internet issue resolved with the cable company, I took to social media to get the matter escalated, knowing the company cared about its online reputation and maintained an account dedicated to solving customers’ problems. After just one Tweet, my grandfather’s issue was resolved.

Social media has become a huge part of every stage in the buyer’s journey. However, many businesses are still not taking advantage of it for maximum benefits and profitability. For example, some may be unaware that you can use social media to boost your online reputation management efforts. Use these tips to jumpstart your company’s own reputation and visibility.

1. Get Customers to Share Positive Reviews & Experiences

You can do this with a simple, gentle reminder or request, such as “Did we exceed your expectations today? Please share your positive experience!” You can place this on the bottom of a receipt, various webpages or on a sign in your establishment. Many customers are quick to share a negative comment or complaint, but most don’t think about voicing appreciation or offering props for good service. It’s important to note that this works best if you do it in advance of negative reviews. In other words, don’t wait until there’s a problem before you begin working on your reputation.

2. Connect With Consumers & Solve Problems

This can demonstrate how your company is adding value to their lives. As mentioned, many large companies have created special social media accounts specifically to address consumer complaints. When customers see that you care and are working to have a positive effect on their lives, it can be quite a boost to your reputation.

3. Find Creative Ways to Tell Your Company’s Story

One of the best ways to do this is with your content. You can give consumers a more personal connection with your company by revealing your history—mistakes and all. You can also use real-life examples of how your product or service has helped someone. Remember to use a friendly, conversational tone instead of spouting corporate speak and confusing jargon. This can all humanize your company and allow you to better relate to consumers, which will enable you to jump ahead of competitors who don’t.

4. Monitor Your Presence & Direct the Conversation

Even if you’re not posting about your company, rest assured that others are, and you should know what they’re saying. For example, customers could be taking to social media in droves to complain about your customer service. If you were unaware of this, you wouldn’t realize how much the issue was affecting your reputation or that you needed to make improvements.

sprout-social-911-guide-pullquote-1-640x3305. Give Your Employees an Avenue to Share Content

It seems like every week there’s another news story about some employee somewhere using the company social media account for an offensive Tweet or ill-conceived comment. This can make your company a national laughingstock and damage your brand for weeks or longer. It’s great when employees have something wonderful to share about your company, and they should feel welcome to do so, but this must be accompanied by a clear set of rules, management oversight and consequences for any misbehavior. Give your employees an easy way to share curated content through a platform designed for advocacy.

6. Rethink How You Use Social Media

You can use it for more than just adding your two cents to a trending topic or directing followers to your latest YouTube video. With so many people checking in on social media so often and others listing it as their preferred method of communication, you may want to expand how you use it. You can use it to post announcements, deliver crisis communication responses and provide information that will help you position your company as a thought leader in your industry.

7. Remember the Power of Social Media

Now that Google has re-established its agreement with Twitter, allowing Tweets to appear in search results, social media can have an even bigger effect on your reputation. For example, if there are just a few negative comments about your company, that may be the first thing prospects see when they Google your company name, instead of the all the good news you wish to share. Increasingly, news media are also picking up on social media posts. It’s clear that your social media posts are not just for a chosen few; potentially everyone could see them, so what you say on these platforms matters to your company, your reputation and your profitability.

The Right Resources for Reputation Management

This can be a lot for any company to take on alone; it may be best to find a qualified PR firm to help you craft exciting content, create inventive campaigns and develop a comprehensive social media strategy that will improve your reputation and boost sales. The right social media tools will help too.

For more insights into online reputation management—including how to stop a social blowup—download the free guide below.

The post 7 Ways to Use Social Media for Online Reputation Management appeared first on Sprout Social.



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Social Media Marketing Trends Gaining Traction in 2015: New Research

Do you track social media marketing trends? Are you wondering whether predictions for 2015 are proving true? In this article you’ll discover findings from recent studies to help you gauge whether your social media marketing choices are on track. #1: Sales Through Social Media Are Rising For years now, marketers have reported their greatest social […]

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Tuesday, 26 May 2015

2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Do you wonder how your peers are using social media? Wondering if you should focus on Pinterest, Instagram or SlideShare? Thinking of getting into podcasting? In our seventh annual social media study, more than 3700 marketers reveal where they focus their social media activities. This industry report also shows you which social tactics are most […]

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9 Tips for Becoming a Social Media Influencer

Do you want people to come to you for social media advice? Are you trying to become a social media influencer? Publishing on social media is a great way to share expert knowledge and develop your influencer status. In this article I’ll share nine tips that can help you become a social media influencer. #1: […]

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6 Unique Ways to Target Your Facebook Ads

Do you use Facebook ads to their full potential? Interested in reaching highly specific groups of people? Facebook ad targeting offers businesses many ways to serve the right ad to the right user at the right time. In this article I’ll share six ways to target Facebook users with your ads, many you’ve likely not considered. […]

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7 Ways to Build an Engaged Instagram Following

Do you have an Instagram account? Want to get more engagement from your followers? If you want to drive engagement on Instagram, there’s plenty you can do to increase your company’s visibility to get more likes, comments and followers. In this article I’ll share seven tips for building an engaged Instagram following. #1: Include Clear […]

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Cinematic Pins from Pinterest: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Pinterest Announces Cinematic Pins: Pinterest unveils its “newest, most beautiful type of Promoted Pin. Controlled through scrolling, these […]

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Stand Out: How to Build a Following That Matters

Are you wondering how to stand out in the noisy online world? Want to build your status as a thought leader? To discover new ways how to stand out, I interview Dorie Clark. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to […]

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How to Improve the Visibility of Your LinkedIn Profile

Do you use LinkedIn to market yourself? Want to make it easier for people to find you in Internet searches? With a few tweaks, you can improve the chances of the right people finding your LinkedIn public profile. In this article you’ll discover how to create visibility for your LinkedIn public profile. What Is Your […]

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How to Use Twitter Direct Messages for Customer Service

Do you use Twitter for business? Want to improve communication with customers? Twitter’s recent tweaks to its direct message feature make it easier for users to reach you directly. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Twitter’s updated direct messages feature to improve communication with your customers. How Twitter’s Direct Messages Work With Twitter’s […]

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2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Do you wonder how your peers are using social media? Wondering if you should focus on Pinterest, Instagram or SlideShare? Thinking of getting into podcasting? In our seventh annual social media study, more than 3700 marketers reveal where they focus their social media activities. This industry report also shows you which social tactics are most […]

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9 Tips for Becoming a Social Media Influencer

Do you want people to come to you for social media advice? Are you trying to become a social media influencer? Publishing on social media is a great way to share expert knowledge and develop your influencer status. In this article I’ll share nine tips that can help you become a social media influencer. #1: […]

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Monday, 25 May 2015

6 Unique Ways to Target Your Facebook Ads

Do you use Facebook ads to their full potential? Interested in reaching highly specific groups of people? Facebook ad targeting offers businesses many ways to serve the right ad to the right user at the right time. In this article I’ll share six ways to target Facebook users with your ads, many you’ve likely not considered. […]

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7 Ways to Build an Engaged Instagram Following

Do you have an Instagram account? Want to get more engagement from your followers? If you want to drive engagement on Instagram, there’s plenty you can do to increase your company’s visibility to get more likes, comments and followers. In this article I’ll share seven tips for building an engaged Instagram following. #1: Include Clear […]

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Saturday, 23 May 2015

Cinematic Pins from Pinterest: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Pinterest Announces Cinematic Pins: Pinterest unveils its “newest, most beautiful type of Promoted Pin. Controlled through scrolling, these […]

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Friday, 22 May 2015

4 Agency Leaders on How to Get Client Buy-In

7-Reasons-Clients-Not-Buying-01

Getting clients to go big—especially on social—remains a Sisyphean task. But if you’re consistently having trouble pushing your best ideas forward, maybe it’s time to take a look at yourself.

With some self-reflection, you and your team can take the corrective action needed to start securing client buy-in for your high-risk but high-reward social campaigns (the ones you’ve tucked away in file folders for years).

To help with that process, we asked four agency leaders for their time-tested methods of getting movement on their most out-there creative concepts. Follow the advice of the agencies below, and your next pitch is sure to be a hit.

7-Reasons-Clients-Not-Buying-06

Get to Know Your Client

It all starts with understanding the brand’s voice, goals and pain points. As Bohlsen Group CEO Vicki Bohlsen says, your creative social strategy must align with the client’s most immediate business objectives.

“Just because an idea has a ‘wow’ factor doesn’t mean it’s good, as a campaign is only as good as how brand centric it is,” Bohlsen said.

To determine pertinent details, the Bohlsen Group conducts interviews to understand how receptive the client will be and whether the proposed social campaign will meet the brand’s goals.

Sell Your Skills & Expertise

Trust should be the foundation of any client-agency relationship. All our experts agreed that this is the crux of getting clients to step outside of their comfort zones.

“For a new client, there’s typically a lack of trust at the beginning of the relationship,” Bohlsen said. “They don’t know us, and we don’t know everything about them yet. We have to build it so the clients feel comfortable implementing a high-risk campaign.”

This isn’t the time to hold back either. If you have a history of big social wins, make sure your client knows about them. After all, they are investing considerable time and money into your services.

“We use our past success to ease fear,” WebDiner CEO Matt Harper said. “Also, two words we train clients to listen to: ‘Trust us.’”

When clients see what’s in your roster—backed by metrics-driven objectives—they will have an easier time opening up and seeing your vision.

7-Reasons-Clients-Not-Buying-02

Set the Right Tone

Not every business will want to go to the cutting edge with you, so it’s important to gauge a client’s comfort level right from the start.

“I’d say about 50% of clients are looking for innovation,” said Tom Geary, Founder and Creative Director of School of Thought. “Too bad. It should be more.”

Harper echoed this experience.

“Clients rarely come into a meeting requesting something original,” he said, chalking that up to “lack of understanding your customer—what they want—and lack of understanding what is possible with technology and art.”

So, rather than setting a high-octane tone across all brands, Harper’s agency adjusts to clients’ attitudes.

“My sales team and project managers don’t push too hard if the client is uneasy and doesn’t understand the benefit to expanding their marketing comfort zone,” he said. “We have plenty of clients who do understand and want to jump in with both feet. When those timid clients are ready, we will be ready to help.”

Still, that doesn’t mean you should save your best social ideas for the most adventurous clients, Geary says.

“Never present ideas that aren’t going to move the needle,” he said. “That safe, predictable campaign, when it’s produced and generating little to no return, you will absolutely regret including in the mix.”

7-Reasons-Clients-Not-Buying-03

Ask Questions on the Front End

Harper’s team at WebDiner does plenty of legwork before ever making the client pitch, thus making the entire process much smoother.

“We don’t ask a question or present an idea that we don’t already know the answer to and/or their reaction,” Harper said.

WebDiner also is conscious of the final audience as well as the client.

“Zero in on the end customer,” Harper said. “Age, gender, personality, spending habits and expectation are all important in crafting the most impactful marketing campaign.”

Bohlsen’s team takes a similar approach of investigating the brand’s history for guidance on the pitch.

“At the end of the day, we’re providing a solution to an existing issue,” Bohlsen said. “The idea and the visual may be great, but if it doesn’t drive the result your client is seeking, it’s not effective. Ask questions and understand what the problem is so you can create the best solution.”

Geary agreed that nothing will happen without an understanding of goals, especially with a high-risk social idea.

“We always try to start by getting people to focus on the goals by defining success,” he said. “If awareness and engagement and pass-along are critical to getting them there, safe isn’t going to do it.”

Involve Your Client as Much as Possible

Casey Fisk, Content Strategist at boogie, said that many of her agency’s big successes happen when the client is brought into the brainstorming sessions.

“Get the client in a creative atmosphere where big ideas are flying around the room,” she said. “Get clients’ ideas into the mix; they know their brand the best, so their perspective will be golden.”

This will ensure that clients feel their voices are being heard. Then, when it comes time to make the pitch, they will have more of an investment in your big ideas.

“Clients feed off your energy,” Fisk said.

Bringing good energy into the meeting can help the client feel good about your entire presentation and get them to see your way of thinking, even on a potentially risky idea.

“It’s always a transparent conversation, and our clients know we’re willing and able to amend and revise strategy based on their preferences, what’s best for business and our expert opinion,” Fisk said. “Don’t try to be a swindler.”

7-Reasons-Clients-Not-Buying-04

Think Like an Executive

While concerns over budget might seem like the most pressing matter—especially when risk-taking is involved—our experts unanimously agreed that fear of the unknown is the biggest stumbling block.

“People have this perception that social media is some new, untested phenomena,” Geary said. “It’s not. It’s about creating content that is compelling enough to make people want to share it.”

That’s not to say nobody will ask you about money.

“Most executives are concerned with exact data and ROI of a strategy, so our goal when introducing a new idea that may get pushback is to dispel any uncertainty by providing proof of concepts and data/research to back up our pitch,” Fisk said.

Arm Yourself With a Backup Plan

A high-risk social campaign will likely spark worries about public reaction. In one instance, the Bohlsen Group led a project for Conquor Paralysis Now with a social campaign called “I Can’t Stand.” The goal was to educate the public on the realities of spinal cord injuries and paralysis, including sharing unsettling images and text that conveyed the frustration of being unable to move. This was a challenging topic that could make people uncomfortable.

I Can't Stand Sex

“We understood the ‘I Can’t Stand’ images would start an unsettling dialogue about what it really means to be paralyzed,” Bohlsen said. “We knew there would be initial pushback and not every response would be positive.”

That said, Bohlsen’s team understood that realistic depictions of paralysis were crucial to achieving the client’s goals.

“We did our research, anticipated what the negative reactions would be and built a crisis communication plan with responses designed to educate the public and further Conquer Paralysis Now’s exposure,” Bohlsen said. “The client felt comfortable launching the campaign because it was well planned and they knew we’d thought through every detail.”

The extra work and preparation paid off. Despite those initial concerns, “I Can’t Stand” generated a positive sentiment of 81%. More than 90% of its interactions were on brand and included the campaign hashtag.

“We did our research, anticipated what the negative reactions would be and built a crisis communication plan.”
—Vicki Bohlsen, The Bohlsen Group

Go Big or Go Home

The social world is a busy and crowded place, so standing out and getting a win will take big thinking from both you and your clients. Set the right tone, do your research and build trust—and you will deliver a campaign everyone can be proud of.

The post 4 Agency Leaders on How to Get Client Buy-In appeared first on Sprout Social.



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Stand Out: How to Build a Following That Matters

Are you wondering how to stand out in the noisy online world? Want to build your status as a thought leader? To discover new ways how to stand out, I interview Dorie Clark. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to […]

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Thursday, 21 May 2015

How to Improve the Visibility of Your LinkedIn Profile

Do you use LinkedIn to market yourself? Want to make it easier for people to find you in Internet searches? With a few tweaks, you can improve the chances of the right people finding your LinkedIn public profile. In this article you’ll discover how to create visibility for your LinkedIn public profile. What Is Your […]

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Wednesday, 20 May 2015

5 Ways You Can Boost Social Media Productivity With a Smart Inbox

Smart-Inbox-5-Boost-Productivity-01

As summer kicks off, it’s time for a vacation. But between you and the open air lies a whole slew of social tasks that need completing—most especially, questions from your customers. To help you address their needs (and get out the door) faster, here are five ways to use Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox for improved workload efficiency.

1. Scroll Through Messages With Keyboard Shortcuts

Let your fingers do the walking. These keyboard shortcuts within Sprout’s Smart Inbox will maximize your message management prowess:

  • Up/down arrows: to scroll through messages
  • R: to reply
  • T: to task social messages to a team member
  • C: to mark a message as complete
  • N: to compose a new message
  • S: to search

Keyboard-Shortcuts-(Release-Notes)

2. Reply/Reply All to a Tweet With Just One Click

If you are replying all to a Tweet, there’s no need to remember all the handles mentioned. Just click R, and the handles will populate automatically in the reply box. Use the backspace to delete any handles that you don’t want to receive your reply.

Smart-Inbox-5-Boost-Productivity-02

3. Focus on What Is Important With Isolation Mode

Tune out the noise. Use the Smart Inbox navigation menu to filter specific profiles, networks, message types or keywords. Then, work through messages to clear out the inbox. Work even smarter by clicking on words instead of the checkbox to turn off everything else and show only messages from that filter.

monitoring-feature-inbox-screen2crop

4. See What Messages Still Need to Be Addressed

Use the Smart Inbox bar chart to see what messages are still left. Select a time frame, then scroll over on the corresponding bar to see how many messages have not been marked as complete. Click on any bar to go to a stream of those messages. As you mark messages as complete, the chart updates to reflect what’s remaining.

Smart-Inbox-Chart-Animation2

5. Achieve Inbox 0 by Marking Messages as Complete

Messages stream into the Smart Inbox all day across all networks. Use the Mark as Complete function to clear out messages you have already responded to or that don’t require a response. Coupled with the Hide Completed Items checkbox, messages that have been completed are removed from the inbox so you can focus on the next thing that needs your attention.

Smart-Inbox-Mark-Complete-Animation

The post 5 Ways You Can Boost Social Media Productivity With a Smart Inbox appeared first on Sprout Social.



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How to Use Twitter Direct Messages for Customer Service

Do you use Twitter for business? Want to improve communication with customers? Twitter’s recent tweaks to its direct message feature make it easier for users to reach you directly. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Twitter’s updated direct messages feature to improve communication with your customers. How Twitter’s Direct Messages Work With Twitter’s […]

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Tuesday, 19 May 2015

How to Start a Business Blog: Seven Essentials for Success

Are you interested in starting a blog for your business? Want to know how to set it up to get the best results? There are lots of design and functionality options to consider when setting up your business blog. However, only a few make a vital difference in your blog’s success. In this article you’ll […]

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How to Handle a Social Media Crisis

Have you ever had to deal with a social media crisis? Do you have a crisis plan? In the age of social media, even the slightest predicament can quickly gain momentum and get out of control. If you are prepared, it’s much easier to manage your company’s reputation and come through a crisis unharmed. In […]

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Monday, 18 May 2015

How to Cross Promote Your Social Profiles With Facebook

Are you active on multiple social platforms? Are you using your Facebook page to grow followings on other platforms? Promoting links to all your social profiles on Facebook lets your fans know where else they can find you. In this article you’ll discover six ways to promote your social profiles on your Facebook page. #1: […]

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How to Create a LinkedIn Company Page to Promote Your Business

Do you use LinkedIn to market your business? Interested in setting up a company page? LinkedIn company pages help build brand awareness by providing a channel to promote your products and services to customers and prospects. In this article you’ll find out how to create a LinkedIn company page to promote your business. #1: Fill […]

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Saturday, 16 May 2015

Facebook Carousel Ads for Mobile: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Carousel Ad Format is Now Available for Mobile: “Given the success of carousel link ads”, Facebook is extending the […]

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Friday, 15 May 2015

Experiences: How to Stand Out in a New Age of Marketing

Are you looking for a competitive advantage? Have you thought about creating experiences for your audience? To learn how to create experiences and why they are essential to stand out in this noisy world, I interview Robert Rose. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social […]

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Thursday, 14 May 2015

Avid 365 Times More Engaging Than the Average Company on LinkedIn

With more than 364 million users, LinkedIn has become a publishing platform of unprecedented magnitude for B2B communication. But with so many professionals—from HR head hunters to industry thought leaders—clamoring for attention, how do you ensure your message breaks through to reach the right people at the right time?

Avid, the world’s leading provider of audio and video technology, has found the answer—though it’s no tightly held secret. In fact, any organization with a Company Page on LinkedIn can employ Targeted Status Updates to speak directly to specific segments within a larger following.

Smart Targeting

By employing a smart segmentation strategy on LinkedIn—one focused on engagement rather than impressions—Avid has experienced exponential growth, resulting in 33,000 followers who are highly invested in its social activity.

“My concern is making sure that the content posted on LinkedIn is the right fit for the audience,” said Adam Kranitz, Senior Manager of Worldwide Marketing at Avid. “The benefit for us isn’t making sure that one piece of content is better than the other but rather that it’s reaching the right people.”

Like Kranitz, any LinkedIn Company Page administrator can target specific segments, using five key filters:

LinkedIn-Post-Targeting-Options-Chart

A few caveats: In order for this to work, you need at least 100 people in your targeted group. Also, any organic targeted post you publish will be visible to followers and LinkedIn members who visit your Company Page directly. The targeting only impacts which followers will have it pushed to their homepage feeds.

“My concern is making sure that the content posted on LinkedIn is the right fit for the audience.”
—Adam Kranitz, Senior Manager of Worldwide Marketing at Avid

Kranitz uses these five filters to speak directly to Avid’s core constituent groups, including:

  • 12% professionals in the music industry
  • 10% professionals in broadcast media
  • 10% professionals in computer software
  • 7% professionals in media production

The rest of the company’s LinkedIn followers are spread out over a variety of industries.

Some updates, around branding and corporate history, are shared with all. But to ensure a healthy balance of content, Avid targets updates about product launches, feature updates and events to key groups.

“When people feel that content is speaking directly to them, they’re more likely to take action, resulting in higher engagement and interest for your business,” Kranitz said.

Reaching the Right People

According to Forrester, LinkedIn Company Page updates see an average engagement rate of 0.054%. That might seem like a modest figure, but consider why people use the platform in the first place. According to LinkedIn:

Simply put, LinkedIn isn’t where people go for casual conversation, so engagement can be lower than on some other platforms. That’s why targeting is so important. With LinkedIn members being well educated, highly skilled and competitively driven, content curators must deliver relevant information that either solves a business challenge or provides a career opportunity.

Avid used the former tactic to help video editors tell a better story and, as a result, saw a spike in engagement. In targeting 5,829 followers by industry and job function, the company received 82 engagements on 4,166 impressions.

Avid engagement LinkedIn

Compare that with the same post on Facebook. The Facebook version was published worldwide (no language or geography filters) and received 118 engagements on 9,764 impressions.

Avid engagement Facebook

While more people saw the Facebook version—the natural corollary of having 158,000 Facebook Fans—the LinkedIn post was deemed more relevant. In all, Avid received 1.97% engagement on LinkedIn compared with 1.20% engagement on Facebook. Moreover, benchmarked against the average company update on LinkedIn, Avid’s targeted post was considered 365 times more engaging. This higher engagement score speaks to more relevant, actionable content.

People who clicked through to the article would see a quote from the featured editor, Paddy Bird, praising Avid’s Media Composer tool—a product endorsement intended to drive sales.

“Our SVP of Worldwide Sales recently asked me to publish even more targeted content on LinkedIn,” Kranitz said. “His reps love sharing from the Avid Company Page. It helps to establish solution-based selling, with Avid as a trusted partner rather than a commodity vendor.”

Say Yes to Targeted Status Updates

LinkedIn’s use case is no longer singular. Updates are now being delivered by more than one department within fully integrated social companies. But be mindful: Marketing, sales and HR may be publishing Company Page updates that, without a diligent approach to segmentation, reach the wrong audiences at the wrong time.

From a sales perspective, Targeted Status Updates certainly make sense. Broadcasting to all of your followers may be acceptable when you have a small product line or serve a niche market, but if you have hundreds of products or distinct customer segments, you don’t want to irritate your followers with hundreds of irrelevant updates.

Gated content, for instance, is an invaluable resource for marketing and sales teams, but there’s not a lot of value in a marketing manager signing up for a white paper intended for chief information officers.

For human resources, talking with industry peers and colleagues is very different from talking with customers. Your goal isn’t to sell a product but rather to recruit the best talent. Meanwhile, job seekers first and foremost want to learn about your company’s history, culture and employment opportunities.

Discovering the different subsets within your following is key, and LinkedIn makes that easy. To see a breakdown of your followers, visit the analytics tab for your Company Page. There, you will find a demographic overview of your audience, broken down by seniority, industry, job function, company size and more.

LinkedIn Company Page demographics

Whether you’re looking to network with people in your industry or find new business, Targeted Status Updates can help you get there. If you’re unsure about the benefits of targeting your updates, Kranitz recommends giving it a spin—after all, it’s completely free.

“LinkedIn’s Company Page targeting (the only social network that offers industry targeting for organic posts) gives us the granularity we need in our content marketing to reach customers with messages that match their interests,” Kranitz said. “And with Sprout Social adding new capabilities in this area all the time, we couldn’t have made a better choice for our social media management platform.”

Look at the targeting options, and ask yourself how you can make your messages hyper specific whenever possible, Kranitz advises. For instance, if you know that your targeting options are based around a CIO’s title, do an A/B test and focus your updates on just those individuals. Then, see how that impacts your click-through rate over time.

“Watch if your engagement increases or decreases, because that’s ultimately going to determine whether targeting will be successful,” Kranitz said.

Learn More

What’s the best way for you to target your LinkedIn Company Page updates? For specific use cases that will help you hone your segmentation strategy and align with your overall business objectives, download the LinkedIn Targeting Guide below.

The post Avid 365 Times More Engaging Than the Average Company on LinkedIn appeared first on Sprout Social.



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How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

Do you want to make personal connections with your customers on social media? Interested in better ways to address their wants and needs? The key to engaging with your audience on a more personal level is to focus on the right customer, at the right time and with the right employees. In this article you’ll […]

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Wednesday, 13 May 2015

Meet Team Sprout: James, Web Team Manager

As a member of Sprout Social’s talent team, I hear one question all the time: “What’s the best part of working at Sprout?”

My colleagues say they can tell when someone has asked this question over the phone, because they hear me offer the same enthusiastic response: “It’s the people!”

Behind the scenes at Sprout, there’s a dedicated team working hard to make our software better, our customers happier and our days more fulfilling. We wanted you to get to know our community better, which is why we are launching this new series, entitled Meet Team Sprout.

First up is a member of our engineering team. A skilled developer and mentor, James Basco leads the web team that worked on our recent Compose window redesign and LinkedIn targeting integration. He has spoken at Chicago Code Camp and elsewhere about developing software along with a career. From his technical skills to his emphasis on personal growth, James exemplifies the kind of manager who moves Team Sprout forward.

Name: James Basco
Department: Engineering
Started at Sprout: May 2014

Explain what a Web Team Manager does.

I work on the front end of the website with the publishing team. As a Web Team Manager, I’m there to provide a little more leadership and one-on-one feedback to some of the other front-end developers.

What are you working on right now?

We actually just finished up a full redesign of the Compose window, complete with an updated profile picker and a new workflow for targeting messages. The highlight of the new targeting workflow is the addition of LinkedIn targeting, which gives users the ability to focus their audience to several categories, such as industry and job function. I’m very proud of our work on this and other features that help customers reach the right audiences.

How would you describe your approach to leadership?

I try to bring a lot of soft skills like empathy to my work. Whether you’re dealing with other developers, talking to people in other parts of the organization or analyzing a solution, empathy helps you communicate with people in ways they understand. It’s also important to have confidence and to be willing to speak up and say what needs to be said.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Keeping up with the other developers, because they are ridiculously smart. They’re so good! I’m stronger in soft skills, and some of these guys are leaps and bounds ahead of me in programming.

And the most rewarding?

Being able to produce something that I couldn’t have made by myself. I find it incredibly rewarding to be part of a team and produce something of the highest quality, something that we can all be really proud of.

How have you grown throughout your career?

Becoming more humble is the biggest factor that has really changed my career. There’s a stereotype that engineers can be kind of full of themselves, and over time, I’ve learned to trust other people, to ask for help and to never be arrogant or take too much individual pride in my work.

I see trusting other people as going hand in hand with humility, and the level of trust at Sprout is unbelievable. I have absolute faith in all the people I work with here. When you don’t have faith in everybody you work with, it erodes the foundation of what you can do together. Here, I know I can trust everyone to help me and to give good feedback. That’s made a huge impact.

What advice would you give someone who wants to join Team Sprout?

The most important thing for being successful, at least on my team, is enthusiasm and passion. That’s what we all have in common—we’re really passionate about the work that we’re doing and the work that everyone else is doing at Sprout. I’ve been interviewing candidates, and that’s the clear delineator. The people who stand out are the ones who come in and are excited and want to talk about their work. You spend half the interview talking about their side projects. That level of dedication to engineering, in and outside of the office, is what separates a Sprout employee from someone who’s not a good fit.

So what do you like to do outside of work?

I play a lot of video games, ride my motorcycle, walk my giant bulldog and hang out with friends. “Borderlands” is my favorite game.

Have you read any good books recently?

“The Martian” by Andy Weir. It’s set about 20 years from now and is about what happens after we send our third manned mission to Mars. There’s an accident, and the team’s engineer is left behind. It’s about how he survives on Mars.

If you were stranded on Mars, what Chicago food would you be craving most?

I love Xoco. Or maybe Kuma’s Corner, the original. The High on Fire burger is my favorite. Or the mac and cheese.

Back on planet earth, what are two places you need to see?

Probably Germany and Austria. Those are at the top of my list—some place with lots of beer and sausage.

Finally, what’s something people might not know about you?

I was a certified barbecue judge for five years.

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Pinterest Set to Surge in 2016: New Research

Is Pinterest part of your social marketing mix? Are your customers on Pinterest? Research reveals that there are 47 million people using Pinterest and the audience is expected to grow. In this article you’ll discover the most recent insights from industry experts on Pinterest’s potential as a marketing platform. The Pinterest Advantage Pinterest’s unique setup […]

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Tuesday, 12 May 2015

Introducing Sprout’s Redesigned Compose Window With LinkedIn Targeting & More

Target LinkedIn Company Page Status Updates in the New Compose Window

With more than 364 million members in over 200 countries, LinkedIn is the world’s largest digital professional network. What’s more, according to a LinkedIn study, 80% of LinkedIn members say they want to connect with companies on the platform. These statistics are strong indicators that LinkedIn Company Pages are an important channel for communicating with existing and potential customers, job candidates and your broader professional network.

To that end, we’re pleased to introduce new LinkedIn targeting functionality—as well as comprehensive design updates—to Sprout’s publishing tools to help facilitate more effective social communication between your business and your professional community.

Deliver Relevant Content to Your LinkedIn Audience

Deliver Relevant Content to Your LinkedIn Audience

You can now target your LinkedIn Company Page updates by company size, industry, function, seniority and geography. Targeting your updates allows you to communicate with your LinkedIn followers in a more relevant and personal way. In turn, by sharing content that is tailored specifically to your intended audience, your targeted LinkedIn status updates are likely to garner more engagement. Some examples of effective targeted update strategies include:

  • Sharing job opportunities with relevant candidates with seniority or job function targeting.
  • Posting updates about local events or regional company news with geography targeting.
  • Publishing thought-leadership articles and other topical content to a tailored audience with industry or company size targeting.

It’s important to note that in order to publish a targeted status update on your LinkedIn Company Page, you must have at least 100 followers in the targeted segment. As you apply more targeting criteria across the various target segments, you will be narrowing in on a more refined subset of your followers. Whether you’re publishing to one LinkedIn Company Page or several, the Follower Counts tray will help you understand if your chosen targeting segments meet the 100 follower minimum.

Target your LinkedIn Company Page Updates

We’ve also redesigned the entire user-flow for targeting posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The new flow is super intuitive and will make targeting network specific and syndicated posts a seamless process.

A Brand-New Compose Experience

In addition to the new targeting user-flow, we’ve revamped the Compose window. It’s now easier than ever to schedule and post messages to multiple networks simultaneously and leverage unique targeting options for each individual network—all from a single intuitive Compose window.

A Brand-New Compose Experience

We’ve cleaned up the profile-picker menu and repositioned the icons for targeting, image attachment and character count. These updates all make room for a larger text input area so you can focus on the task at hand: composing a great message to share with your audience. Also, when creating lengthier posts for Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn Company Pages, the entire Compose window now expands as you type, allowing you to view more of your message without having to scroll.

By continually improving our social publishing tools, Sprout is able to enhance and refine your social publishing process—saving you time, boosting engagement and ultimately providing a platform to more effectively power social communication.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

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How to Create Social Media Images That Connect With Your Audience

Are you sharing visual content on social media? Do your images stand out? Creating and curating clever visual content can engage your audience on a personal level. The more consumers relate to you and your company, the more likely they will invest in your social media presence and your brand. In this article you’ll discover […]

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How to Use Facebook Advanced Location Targeting for More Engagement

Do you advertise on Facebook? Looking for ways to get your ads in front of the right people? With Facebook, you can set up location ad targeting for a specific address. You can then refine that audience to people who live in, have recently been to or are traveling in that area. In this article […]

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Monday, 11 May 2015

We’re Always Working to Make Sprout Quicker

page speed graphic sprout social

If you stay current with our product updates, you know the Sprout Social product team is always adding and improving product features. We constantly release improvements, big and small, often more than once daily. Many changes aren’t included in even our more granular release notes. For example, the other week, we released about 70 commits (units of code change) to the web application app.sproutsocial.com. Moreover, about 20 commits were released to our API, the lifeblood of our web application and mobile apps, and many, many more to those mobile apps, and the myriad backend services that comprise all that is Sprout’s technology.

These unannounced changes include some of what you’d expect: bug fixes, visual cleanup, code cleanup (to allow us to build faster). We also release dark features: things Sprout employees can try and provide feedback on before being released to customers. Another category of product changes, and the subject at hand, is web performance improvements.

Our engineering team uses a number of tools to monitor the health and performance of our systems. We’re always watching to spot issues or to measure performance changes. I thought I’d share some of the charts we stare at, which reveal nice improvements since the start of 2015 to our page load times. These charts represent “real” (i.e., RUM) times, which is a best attempt to measure what the user perceives.

First up, here’s our average load time from January 1, 2015, through April 28. Were you able to zoom in prior to April 16, you would see the average was 2.7 seconds. Since then, it has dropped to 1.7 seconds. Visually, that’s represented by the drop-off on the right-hand side. That means when you visit any of our webpages, you are getting the information you need faster.


browser page load time screenshotThose averages are based on load times from around the globe. Some of the our changes have the largest effect outside of the US. For example, here are page load times from Australia. The improvement there has been of about 1.6 seconds.
australia page load time screenshot
That’s not to say it pages don’t load faster in the US too, where things are 0.7 seconds faster.
united states page load time screenshot
And here’s a pair of charts for the stats geeks. One of the most impactful changes was deployed late on April 16. Here you see average, median and 95th percentile page load times. Note the sharp change in pattern. The second chart singles out the median, adjusting the scale to better visualize the difference.
browser percentile screenshot browser percentile screenshot 2

So What Contributed to These Improvements?

Here’s a technical summary of the most significant:

  1. Recently, we made Sprout available in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. During this project, we made the change to serve language files, which we had prior for English, via the Amazon CloudFront CDN. These also end up in browser caches due to cache-control headers. In a nutshell, the browser cache obviates needing to re-download something, and the best way to do something quickly is to not need to do it at all! That saved about 20KB per page load, and making our page sizes smaller means they download faster.
  2. We use a number of font files for typography and icons. We deployed the necessary CORS configuration to serve and cache these via CloudFront rather than serving them directly from AWS S3. Put simply, our font files get to users via a global network, giving faster download times.
  3. Mustache is our templating library. We compile those templates to Javascript, using Twitter’s Hogan library. Previously, these were served with our DOM, making up about 80% of the bytes. These are now fetched independently, again via  CloudFront, enabling them to be cached on the edge and, again, in browsers. In simple terms, we made our page sizes smaller, so naturally they download faster.
  4. Recently, I shared a simple but impactful tweak to our outbound TCP configuration: increasing the initial congestion window to 10. Check out my previous post for a more thorough explanation.

Shameless Hiring Plug

Are you passionate about Web performance? We’re always looking for engineers like you who want to make any layer in the stack faster, from CSS to Javascript to HTTP/TCP to server-side code, caching, databases, linux kernels and hardware. Please apply to one of our jobs, and call out your specific performance interests. Tweet me with questions.

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Quick Reference Guide for Facebook Marketers

Want an easy reference to Facebook’s many marketing features? Are you using all that Facebook offers marketers? In this article I’ll share helpful links to Facebook shortcuts to get the most out of your Facebook pages, ads and groups. Manage Your Account Settings You can access all of your Facebook account settings here. Be sure […]

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7 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Engagement

Do your fans interact with you on social media? Want to spark more engagement? While it’s relatively easy to get people to like and share posts, it takes creativity to drive comments and dialog. Here are seven ways to get your audience to talk to you on social media. #1: Ask Questions Creatively Asking your […]

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Saturday, 9 May 2015

Facebook Native Ad Tools: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Introduces Native Ad Tools: Facebook is offering “new native-focused tools to help publishers more easily implement native ad formats: […]

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Friday, 8 May 2015

Refreshing the Sent Message Report

sprout social sent message report

As social marketers, we understand the value of driving conversations among your community. Analyzing Sprout Social’s Sent Messages data is an effective way to measure content performance and then make improvements to your overall social content strategy. It’s also important to present data in a way that’s easy to understand, so we’ve cleaned up the Sent Messages Report with a design refresh. The new interface loads faster while offering improved navigation, so you can more easily find and use the data you need most.

Glean Data Across Profiles From a Single Page

Instead of making you go to separate pages for Twitter, Facebook and Google+, Sprout simplified the design by rolling all profiles into one page. The new right-side navigation bar lets you choose your network, then filter by profile and message type so you can see the content that is most relevant to you. Similar to the previous version, you also can export a CSV file based on your filters right from the navigation bar.

sent message report screenshot sprout social

As a bonus, Sprout added the Twitter Favorite count for posts to the CSV file, which eliminates the need for manual calculation and enables users to more easily measure engagement.

View Message-Level Data Right From the Message

Sprout also aggregated all message-level stats and offers easy access while you are already looking at the message itself. Now you can simply click on a message for a drop-down detail of:

  • Twitter: Clicks, Favorites, Responses, Retweets, Replies, Reach and Retweeted by*
  • Facebook: Clicks, Reach, Engaged, Shares (new to the report!), Talking About This, Likes, Comments, Negative Feedback and Engagement
  • Google+: +1’s, Comments and Reshares

message-level data screenshot sprout social

*Sprout Tip: Retweeted by shows a list of profiles ordered by most followers to least followers. This order arrangement provides more clarity to users looking to quickly distinguish between followers who have the greatest to least impact on reach.

If you have any questions or feedback on the new look of the Sent Messages Report, give us a shout @SproutSocial.

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Purpose: How People Over Profit Leads to Business Opportunity

Does your business have a purpose beyond making money? Want to discover how shifting your business priorities can make a huge difference? To learn how focusing on purpose and people leads to powerful marketing, I interview Dale Partridge. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social […]

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Thursday, 7 May 2015

Guarding the Guards

Guarding the Guards

In the fall of 2013, Sprout Social Engineers Aaron Zimmerman and Dave Huber undertook an ambitious endeavor, writing a new scheduled message sending system to make Sprout’s platform even better. This system enables social media messages (Tweets, Facebook posts and more) to be sent out at a specific time in the future. Here, Zimmerman examines the architectural underpinnings behind Sprout’s scheduling system and discusses why keeping things simple is so important.


Original Scheduler

Guarding_Guards-02

Sprout’s original scheduler was built using ActiveMQ, a program that allows you to enqueue items with a delay on the item entering the queue. ActiveMQ was responsible for holding that message in flight until the appropriate time. While it was awesomely simple, this implementation had several critical defects:

  1. It kept multiple versions of the truth. As a scheduled message is subject to revision or deletion, we had to keep a second version of the message in a relational database. So it was necessary for the queue consumer to query the database upon the message entering the queue to ensure it was still valid.
  2. It was not resilient to failure. As a scheduled message was a pending queue delivery item, the only thing that made it send at the appropriate time was a local KahaDB file on the ActiveMQ server. We had two servers. The primary would rsync the data to the secondary. But this was far from truly resilient.
  3. It did not scale. We were using ActiveMQ as a database and a scheduler. It was not performing well under this particular load. As people schedule message often on round hours, 11 a.m., 3 p.m., etc. became hotspots of message delivery. These times would often result in delayed messages, while the ActiveMQ server struggled to enqueue a burst of messages.

To solve the first challenge, we decided to use a single database cluster to support both user interaction with scheduled message and message delivery. To make this database highly available, we set up two MySQL servers. Any updates made against one automatically replicate to the other, meaning we can write to either of them and the data will be in both. Should either server fail or need to be rebooted, the overall system is not impaired at all.

Queue consumers (the application that issues the API request to send the message) are easily made resilient by standing up multiple instances on different servers. But what of the queue producers? How do the database rows become items in the queue? It’s not as easy as running multiple instances, as we don’t want duplicates sent into the queue. So we need to create different modes for the producers. They can run in either active or dormant mode, and then we need a mechanism for toggling the dormant, should the active fail. When we allow multiple simultaneous producers, they need to collude so they don’t duplicate work.

We needed something to guard the scheduler. This guard system would monitor the active producer and, should it crash, flip the state of the passive so there would be no downtime. But what if the guard system itself were to crash? We use multiple guards. But which should act in the event of a crash? The guards themselves will need an active/passive state as well.  But what will flip the state of the passive guard, should the active fail?

And so on. When you try to engineer for availability, it’s guards all the way down.

Our solution was to avoid as much architecture as we could. We found a not-quite-perfect-but-close-enough framework to do the hard, distributed things for us. We used Storm.

Storm Scheduler

Guarding_Guards-03

Storm is designed for distributed stream processing, and if you squint hard enough, scheduled messages look kind of like a stream. I won’t delve into the semantics of Storm, but we had multiple producers (spouts), running on a storm cluster. These spouts would pass their payloads (the messages to send) to a queue consumer (a bolt), where it would be sent and marked as delivered in the database. This producer-consumer pattern is built into Storm, and a lot of effort by really smart people has been put into making message delivery reliable. So using Storm, we can abstract away the bursty nature, the need to buffer events and the actual means that messages will be delivered from one point to another. We can focus on the actual business logic of sending a Tweet.

Operationally, Storm was a big win as well. Storm will restart a producer or consumer elsewhere if its host machine dies. Adding additional processing power to the application is as easy as changing a configuration setting that controls how many servers the topology runs on.

Storm has downsides as well. There isn’t any visibility into the internal queues between the producers and consumers, and no way to see how many items are pending. There is no out-of-the-box way to deploy a topology with zero downtime. Storm passes around tuples, which are lists of objects. Our tuples consist of one object, a “ScheduledMessage” POJO. So to interact with that object, we have to cast it.  This is annoying at best and, more likely, a bit dangerous. These problems, and others, could have been mitigated with a more extensive, more perfect architecture.

Our job as engineers is not to write perfect systems. Our job is to build things, to create value for the people who use our software. Our customers do not care about the architecture of distributed locks. While complexity, and architecting around complexity, is an undeniable aspect of engineering, it is our job—nay, our responsibility—to keep things as simple as they can functionally be. Storm wasn’t a perfect fit, and we had to compromise on things. But building it this way let us step away from the architectural rabbit holes and focus on the business logic.

In one sense, we moved from using one tool in a way it wasn’t intended to using a different tool in a way that wasn’t intended. But there is no such thing as perfect architecture. There is only better architecture. And the Storm based implementation beats the “delayed-message” implementation on each of the three problems called out above.

“There is no such thing as perfect architecture. There is only better architecture.”

An important dependency to things simple is monitoring. We recognize up front that we aren’t going to catch every corner case that could throw a wrench in things, so we set up alerts to go off if something unexpected happens. Then we fix it.

It is far easier to fix problems in a simple system than it is to create a complicated system that doesn’t have problems.

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7 Ways to Create an Effective Facebook Ad Campaign

Are you using Facebook ads? Want tips to step up your game? Facebook ads can be highly profitable, and there are countless ways to make them more effective. In this article, you’ll find seven ways to create an effective Facebook ad campaign. #1: Mine Audience Insights for Target Data Use Audience Insights to find new potential […]

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Wednesday, 6 May 2015

6 Ways to Use Live Streaming Video for Business

Looking for ways to boost engagement? Have you considered live mobile streaming apps, like Meerkat and Periscope? Live streaming video is a great way to interact with your audience in real time. In this article you’ll discover six ways live streaming video helps you connect with your audience and increase engagement. #1: Share Live Events […]

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Tuesday, 5 May 2015

9 Ways the Pros Curate Content for Success

peg fitzpatrick - how to curate content
Content is an essential part of your social media marketing plan. As a social media marketer, you need to both create original content and curate content from other sources.

Time spent reading niche-related blog articles is important to keep up with industry news. Being a part of the conversation by sharing content with thoughtful comments and questions will help your brand be a sought-after source of knowledge as well. Still, feeding the content monster can take over if you let it.

To help your content curation become less of a chore, let’s look at nine tactics you can use to maintain control and keep fresh.

“Feeding the content monster can take over if you let it.”
—Peg Fitzpatrick, Social Media Strategist

1. Find Your Brand

Knowing what to share is the first step in making sure your content is on point. The key aspects of your brand’s content creation should naturally extend to other content that you share to build your content platform.

Your curated content and your originally created content should have the same tone, big ideas and overall fit. Your content platform’s output of original posts, curated content, graphics, Tweets and comments all flow together into what the public sees and judges you on. Yes, it’s important!

2. Stay on Target

I like to call this target the “brand seeds.” Find the three seeds that make up the heart of your social content, and stick to them. For example, if I were working with Sprout Social, my three seeds might be social media, social media management and social customer service.

I would find content that fit these three seeds and add in other content that was related and would be of interest to my followers. Sticking to a narrow focus helps build your area of expertise and knowledge base.

3. Be Organized

Creating systems for your social media consumption is important. If you don’t have something in place for reading content and finding great content, you’ll waste a lot of time. I like to use Feedly to create folders for the different types of content I create. For each folder, I add RSS feeds to fill the needs of different accounts and sometimes clients.

Sources to Find Content

  • Feedly: Add RSS feeds into folders for different accounts or topics.
  • Alltop: Create a MyAlltop page to see the blogs that I pull in to review when I curate from this platform. These are some of my go-to sources.
  • Pinterest: This never lets me down for great content when I search.
  • BuzzSumo: You can customize alerts in BuzzSumo by keyword, link, author and domain. I get an email for these each morning and check through on the website occasionally.

buzzsumo curate content screenshot

4. Share Over Time

A rookie mistake is sharing all your content at once in a huge bunch and then going long stretches without anything else. Don’t do this. Instead, create a steady stream of content that people won’t be overwhelmed with when they are live on social media.

There are many ways to share your content within Sprout on a schedule that you create:

  • Set up your Queue to meet your needs. Mine is set to publish four times a day so that I don’t have to think about an exact schedule. This makes it easy to add posts with one click to the Queue.
  • Use the Compose box to precisely schedule posts at a certain time.
  • Use the Chrome extension to add to your Queue or schedule at a certain time.

sprouts social queue settings screenshot

5. Monitor Your Success

Important social media metrics will be based on your overall social media marketing strategy. This is a bigger conversation that you should have worked into your plan, but the basics are:

  • Growth in follower count
  • Number of +1s, Likes or shares
  • Customer engagement with content

If you notice these things taking a dive, it’s time to rethink your content strategy. Slow and steady may win the race in some industries, but smart marketers are quick and agile.

6. Cut What Isn’t Working

Sometimes you hit a sweet spot with your content, and everyone loves it! Then the algorithms change. Again.

If your former best type of content is falling flat, it’s time to remove it from the repertoire. Use your metrics to see what’s working, and do more of that. This is common-sense advice that people fail to implement every day.

7. Ask What People Want

In one of my most difficult-to-manage social media communities (read: low-tech industry with many lurkers), I asked what type of content they liked best and wanted to see on the Facebook Page. It was great to get feedback that reinforced what I was already doing and gave me some ideas for future content.

Now I feel more confident that I’m sharing the content they love, and my Page is doing better than ever. I think many communities want to dictate what they want to share, when the goal should be to give people what they want.

8. Keep Your Sources Fresh

I keep my RSS feeds in Sprout and Feedly full of great blogs to read, but if I find myself skipping over blog articles in my feeds, I reassess whether I want to have them in my daily content to skim and read. Cutting them out here means more efficient curating later.

Extra resource: How to Use RSS Feeds in Sprout

9. Maximize Your Content

Be there when you share your content. You are the X factor in your social media content curation. Managing the brand online with comments, questions and conversation is what ultimately draws people to your content over and over again. The best-laid social media strategy in the world will fail without people to manage the social media listening and interaction.

Learn More

I hope these pro tips give you some ideas to tweak your content strategy and create a compelling plan for your future social media marketing efforts. Interested in learning more? Join Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist at Canva, and me for a webinar at noon CST this Tuesday, as we reveal some of the best practices from our book, “The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users.” Reserve your spot now.

canva webinar

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