INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Effective use of social media, which builds relationships and grows your audience, requires doing more than posting about your monthly specials or even featuring user-created content by hosting selfie stations in your place of business.

It requires understanding your customers and creating conversations and sharing information about other things they are interested in, besides just those your business offers.

Details matter. And sometimes, those details can be as simple as making sure you use the right images, in the right places, on all of your social media channels. Don’t fall into the trap of finding one photo and thinking it will work across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter without at least a little tweaking.

Congratulations! Another year full of successes celebrated and lessons learned has passed, and the next round of opportunities lies ahead. It’s been busy, hasn’t it?

If you are like me, you missed a few things along the way — I get it. With more than 100 new posts on the Inbound Accelerator, I doubt you had time to read every one. But there are a few I think you really need to see, so I’ve rounded them up together. These are the posts our visitors and followers read the most, and for good reason. This top 10 list touches on social media, contributed articles, how to create great content, and how to use that content in a complete integrated public relations and inbound marketing program.

Creating content for social media (or writing emails to send to your contact list, or having a designer create a great brochure, or updating your website with detailed descriptions of services and staff bios, etc.) is a significant investment of time, money or both. So don’t use that content — meaning images, videos, or text — only one time. Repurpose it!

Social media and video seem to be made for each other, but are you making the most of the opportunity?

A few statistics to know:

• 54 percent of consumers say they want to see more videos from brands and businesses they support.

• 72 percent of people would rather learn about a product or service through video than through text.

• Viewers are 95 percent more likely to remember a call-to-action after watching a video, compared to 10 percent when reading it in text format.

(Source)

When you first opened your spa, chances are you had a business plan. It spelled out the details of income and expenses, employees and services, hours and location, and all the other bits of information your bank or other financial backers wanted to know. It spelled out how you would succeed.

That business plan probably also included at least a rudimentary marketing plan — how would you get the word out and bring customers in?

One key benefit social media has over many other types of marketing is its ability to engage followers in an interactive way. It is not just a passive medium.

And by engaging followers, you not only increase their involvement with your page, but also expand your exposure to others as their own contacts see when they like, comment or share your content.

It can be easy at times to focus on just one marketing channel at a time—focusing on your local media advertising when the TV or newspaper ad salesperson knocks on the door, but thinking about something totally different when you sit down to dedicate time to social media.

The problem is that when you do that, without considering an overarching marketing strategy, you may send mixed messages, or at the least, lose out on opportunities to make each of your channels work more effectively by building off the others.

So, you’ve created your social media accounts, and you’ve scheduled a steady stream of posts for the next few weeks (after considering the best times and days for them to appear). So you can just sit back and relax for a while, right?

Sorry. No.

When was the last time you scrolled through your Facebook feed and saw an image that just wasn’t right. Maybe it was a profile photo on an account that awkwardly chopped off the top of someone’s head. Or maybe it was like these “postcards” from a page I like, but am constantly frustrated by: