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The Social Media Starting Kit (Part 3): Calendars and Management

You've got a profile, you've got ideas for a few posts and images, and now it's time to begin posting. But, how do you bring strategy in? When do you post? Where do you post? How do you keep from becoming a slave to your social media? That's where the next two crucial elements of social media management come in: calendars and management. First off, each social media platform has different needs, and each audience within the platform has different expectations. The average consumer expects a response from a corporation in Twitter, and 72 percent of people who complain on Twitter expect a response within an hour, per the HubSpot blog . Otherwise there are standard best practices for when to post and how often to post on each network. Image courtesy of Fast Company SproutSocial posted earlier this year about the best times to post on each social media network for engagement . It is an incredibly thorough post, and I would recommend reading it to begin charting
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The Social Media Starting Kit (Part 2): Choosing Your Network & Beginning the Journey

It's time to start posting, but where? While some assume having a presence everywhere is better, I would argue that a focused and highly social presence in a few places is better than an auto-post everywhere. The key question to ask is... Where is my audience? Each business will have a slightly different answer to this question, and rightly so. Every audience is a bit different, and also how that audience behaves on social media varies.  Two audiences, two approaches For example, there is a huge running community on Twitter and Instagram , but their behavior on each platform varies. On Twitter, the runners are incredibly personal, communicating with each other, giving high fives, asking about health and weather conditions. (If you're not familiar with Twitter, this is also non-standard behavior for a Twitter community.) On Instagram, the runners post new pictures of themselves every run. And, these are no beauty selfies. In the winter, the more snow flaked eyelas

The Social Media Starting Kit (Part 1): Establishing Your Brand

Businesses, the best businesses, are the response to a problem. And, the entrepreneur's encounter with this problem and creative response is the story. Problem: Children without shoes Response: Tom's  Problem: Unhealthy hair Response: Monat Problem: Children with a lacking education after public school term Response: Classical Conversations Your business tells a story. Its formation, website, branding, and sales style are all a part of that story. But, in a world of billions, how do you ensure that story is being heard? The answer is social media. And, when a story is spread on social media, you have magnified your audience and increased the likelihood of your business' success.  But, how do you engage in social media? A business owner does not have time for rabbit holes, education in social media best practices (which are constantly changing), or endless likes, follows and unfollows, tweets and moments.  Entrepreneur's Social Media St

The Space between Social Media and Business Acumen

There was a space for an entrepreneur to offer quality and business acumen in social media to other entrepreneurs and small businesses. SDS took it. A Passion for the Written Word There are thousands out there. We're the people who notice a Q without a U, a misplaced apostrophe, and a false word ("conversate"). We strive for meticulosity. We are logophiles and linguaphiles, and we often suffer from infobesity . In the modern business world, we find our niche in the conversation of the day--social media. This passion for the written word is the beginning of the SDS story, but the inception was forced by a frustration with dishonesty and a love of the hustle. A Frustration with the Status Quo Too many are paying too much for too little. This truth is apparent to every business owner who has hired a social media agency and received a smattering of disconnected posts that amount to nothing. However, this is not the way it should be. A social media professional, at h

Storytelling is an Essential Component of Social Media

In 60 seconds, there are 3.3 million Facebook posts, 448,800 tweets, 65,972 Instagram photos uploaded. In 60 seconds. Every hour. Every day. Amid all the noise, how do you ensure your blogposts, your Facebook videos and your Instagram Stories are read and shared by the right audiences? Two elements are essential: list building and storytelling. Article Highlights ·        AI makes list building easier ·        Storytelling is a trend in 2018 ·        Business leaders must participate in their stories Software makes list building easier As social media continues to climb in popularity and profitability, more tools emerge to manage and accelerate it. These tools make list building easier. You can find influencers, join in at-the-minute conversations, and follow new users daily to become part of their conversations. How many users varies with the network, but it’s likely more than you think. Twitter, for example, will allow you to follow up to 1,000 new u

Instagram: Thank you for scheduled posts...and reposts!

After extensive changes that make marketing through Facebook even more difficul t , Instagram marketing and posting (which is also owned by Facebook) is becoming easier. If you use Buffer , Hootsuite , Soci , or any other social media management tool, you #instalife just got easier. Now, instead of posting from your phone to Instagram, you simply schedule and the post becomes live at the preset time, like all other social networks. How does this help you tell your story? We all, as business owners and entrepreneurs, have a story to tell. Instagram allows us to tell it visually, and to reach audiences unavailable on other social networks. With every post, we create a visual storyboard that reaches an increasingly attention-starved world. When you can project your message, your story in seconds, you magnify your reach. How do you tell your story on Instagram? Clarity in your profile, an Instagram aesthetic, tagging and distilled images are the key. My favorite Instagram examp

Deep breath: Facebook changed.

Facebook has changed its strategy when working with businesses to protect users--what's a business owner to do? The reality of it is, for most businesses who have been using Facebook to authentically engage with their audiences, the strategy need not change in major ways. Facebook is still accepting posts from businesses, and they're still all about posting beautiful, relevant content for users. Google's similar strategy This change is similar to the Google changes that have been made over the past decade with tags and SEO. At the beginning, SEO was a game in which coders would generate hundreds of tags and place them behind the page to create a search presence. The content that the user saw did not necessarily relate to these tags, and the content didn't have to be good; it was basically the wrapping to deliver the tags to the web. As Google grew more sophisticated, so did the content strategy. Businesses actually had to write content engaging to the reader and