Facebook is showing strong dedication to helping small businesses and their customers stay aligned with the changes that are happening due to the pandemic situation. Now, with the features they recently announced, it’s even easier to share updates.

Launching Shops both on Facebook and Instagram

As soon as the pandemic caused ECommerce to explode, Facebook reacted with the launch of it’s “Shop” feature. As positioned by the company, it helps businesses adapt to the crisis while helping customers “experience the joy of shopping versus the chore of buying.”

Facebook Shop is easy-to-setup. You can add products one by one or export from a file, create collections, set prices, and include product descriptions. The best thing about Facebook Shop is that it’s customizable. Sellers can set a cover image for each product and highlight colors that meet their brand standards.

Shops are available both for Facebook and Instagram, and customers can get in touch with sellers via WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct. It creates a feeling of transparency and improves the shopping experience.

By promoting Facebook and Instagram shops via Stories or ads you will encourage interested customers to view your products. All they need to do to make a purchase is click on a product, add it to their cart, and place an order. It will be charged to the credit card attached to their profile.

Introducing Businesses Nearby section

In order to help businesses become more visible to potential customers and grow virtual foot traffic, Facebook is developing a section dedicated to posts made by local businesses within a preset radius (from 1 mile to 500 miles). Users will be able to see actual hours of operation, delivery options, and quickly find the products and services they need.

Adding #SupportSmallBusiness stickers and hashtags

When times are tough, your customers can volunteer to help your business not only with positive reviews, but also by using the #SupportSmallBusiness hashtag on Facebook or the sticker on Instagram. Other users see in shared Stories all the posts from people they follow, so this feature will definitely help businesses spread the word about themselves.

This type of support obviously requires good relationships with customers. As soon as the concept “we’re all in this together” is in full swing, you can ask them directly to show their support and use these hashtags or stickers.

The features announced by Facebook provide opportunities for transparent communication and improved customer experience. To learn how to maintain trust and relationships with your clients by utilizing digital marketing, subscribe to our Emergency Marketing Center and get a weekly digest of the latest updates.

The post Facebook Supporting Businesses: New Features You Can Leverage appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

As COVID-19 has given a boost to digital commerce since more and more people are moving online, digital giants like Facebook and Google have adjusted their services to support businesses and meet their needs.

The Instagram tray now offers “Gift Card” or “Food Orders” Stories stickers

Instagram has provided not only tips for businesses to reach out to potential customers by utilizing Stories, but also features that can be of service. All you need to do is choose a delivery partner and add a link to your product. After that, users can buy from you by just clicking on your Stories.

You can also add “Gift Cards,” “Order Food,” or “Donate” buttons to your Instagram profile. These features are available for business accounts only.

Messenger Rooms and Lives for online events by Facebook

In his latest Facebook Live Stream, Mark Zuckerberg stated that Facebook’s top priority is helping users stay connected with people they care about. These people can be your customers, too.

As the popularity of video content has been growing during the lockdown, Facebook has announced upgrades in functionality for video conferencing and running online events.

Very soon you’ll be able to try new forms of interaction with customers by opening Messenger Rooms. They’re similar to Zoom rooms, you just don’t have to schedule them. It’s an opportunity for genuine communication with customers—you can create kind of a virtual cafe, and instead of dropping by for a small one-on-one chat, people can now feel the atmosphere by tasting delivered coffee along with other “visitors.”

Also, Facebook has brought back the Live With option, so you can invite guests to Live events. For example, you can run a workshop with a manicure artist, chef, or yoga instructor to attract subscribers to your brand page with fresh useful content.

Facebook developers are currently working hard to make it possible to run online events live. This feature is about to be announced, so you can already start planning ways to leverage it for your business.

Google has removed Reviews and Q & A from GMB, but has enabled free selling

Google My Business asks brands affected by the crisis to label themselves as “Temporarily closed,” emphasizing this won’t lead to a decrease of local search ranking. It encourages businesses to provide credible information without taking risks.

Google is currently focusing on making information on Google Search reliable and “prioritizing critical services.” As a result, some features have been removed from Google My Business. New reviews won’t be visible on GMB pages and there were no announcements as to whether they will be after the quarantine. The Q & A feature has been removed, too.

Having said that, Google is actually aiming at helping small businesses. Starting this week, it’s free to sell on Google. Retailers can connect with millions of potential customers via free listings even if they don’t advertise. This initiative puts merchants on equal footing and makes it easier to switch to online sales.

These updates are a gold mine for getting creative and experimental and leveraging social media marketing to build relationships with customers. To get a regular digest of the opportunities for franchise and multi-location businesses during the crisis, subscribe to our Emergency Marketing Center.

The post 3 Major Social Media Platform Updates Your Business Should Utilize During Lockdown appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

• Why Build a Social Media Strategy?
• How to Create a Social Media Strategy From Scratch
  • Step #1: Establish clear social media goals
  • Step #2: Figure out how you’ll measure success
  • Step #3: Get to know your audience well
  • Step #4: Monitor your competitors
  • Step #5: Create thumb-stopping content
  • Step #6: Develop an optimal social media posting strategy
  • Step #7: Optimize based on your results
• A Better Way to Execute Multiple Social Media Marketing Strategies

Why Build a Social Media Strategy?

There are a million reasons for finding room for social media in your marketing strategy.

Aside from search engine optimization, social media is one of the best ways to find your audience. It’s no secret that there are 3.499 billion active users with the average daily time spent on social equalling to 142 minutes a day. In fact, 81 percent of companies already leverage it to get their brands noticeable.

According to Neil Patel, social media is a great place to generate sales that can drive you more than $500,000. Not too shabby, right? Right. But you need to know the spells and we’re here to show you. Remember that Harry Potter couldn’t do a lot without actually learning.

How to Create a Social Media Strategy From Scratch

So what exactly is a social media strategy for business? It is a roundup of things you plan to do to achieve a certain goal on social media. It is supposed to guide you along the way and show if you’re moving in the right direction. A winning strategy will reflect on your successes and failures. Every action in the form of posts, replies, likes, and comments should come in handy and serve a particular goal. To elevate your strategy, make sure to take the next strategic steps.

Step #1: Establish clear social media goals

Building a social media strategy, you should take into account many things, but the most important is your end goal. Start by asking yourself a question: What would I like to achieve with social media? Brand awareness, traffic, leads, conversions, purchases? Wait. Why would I even bother to start? Answer this question and you’ll set a foundation for your social media marketing strategy and focus on a specific goal.

Your objectives and goals should be the starting point if you want to create a social media strategy. There’s no other way to identify return on investment (ROI), and success can only be measured against specific targets. However, to put it clearly from the beginning, your goals shouldn’t be abstract. Hootsuite has invented the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework for marketers who are interested in driving real business results. Following that framework, you make sure that the goals are specific and measurable, attainable and relevant, and, of course, time-bound.

Another important thing for small businesses that have just started, is to focus on smaller goals and set realistic expectations. Let’s face it. In 2019, it’s more reasonable to expect a couple of thousand followers than a million.

Step #2: Figure out how you’ll measure success

Success on social media alone can be misleading. There are lots of vanity metrics that give you a sense of instant achievement and joy. Everything that is easy to track, from retweets to likes, however, does not necessarily bring you real value. You can get a million likes, as in the case with a famous egg photo on Instagram, but what could you do with them all except for storing them in your memory?

A real social media management strategy should harvest and count the number of leads and conversion rates. In other words, metrics that bring end value to your brand and return more costs than you spent. Social networks, obviously, can have different metrics. According to Hootsuite, you should differentiate between the following:

• Awareness metrics (brand awareness, audience growth rate, post reach, potential reach, the social share of voice)
• Engagement metrics (applause rate, average engagement rate, amplification rate, virality rate)
• Conversion metrics (conversion rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, cost-per-click rate,
• Customer metrics (customer testimonials, customer satisfaction score, net promoter score).

For your activities to be meaningful, a social media marketing plan should rely on data. Data is the new oil, remember?

Step #3: Get to know your audience well

After you’ve figured out what you want from social media and why, it’s time to focus on another factor, vital to achieving anything that comes after. Determine who is your buyer persona, what their expectations and greatest pains are. A buyer persona is a customer with real needs whose problem you’re trying to solve. It will give you a better perspective as to what content to create and how to appeal to those needs.

To better understand where your audience spends most of their time, you can refer to the social demographics reports. They will help you identify where your buyer persona can be found and limit your efforts to one or two social channels. One such report by SproutSocial distinguishes between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn demographics. Here are some thoughts:

• If your users are in their middle age, live urban lives, and have an income higher than average, most of them spend their time on Facebook.
• Instagram, compared to Facebook, leans towards a younger audience, mostly from the US.
• Twitter is a favorite of men and women who are in their twenties and live outside of the US.
• LinkedIn is the most famous social media platform for B2B marketing activities.

An important step here would be to put your buyer persona against every social network and figure out what they look for on different channels in particular. Your social networking strategy will always depend on what content users expect at a certain place.

Only after doing in-depth research into your target audience will you be able to come up with a true brand strategy that converts. Treat your audience as a guiding light and build upon that knowledge.

When you build a portfolio with your first clients, you can also rely on that data and improve on it.

Step #4: Monitor your competitors

The first thing that comes to mind when you need to roll out a marketing strategy, is to take a look at what other businesses just like you are doing. By constantly investigating the strengths of your competitors and what actually works for them, you can test similar methods and generate better ideas. Just be open-minded as to what your rivals do and try to perform better than that.

There are many ways to find your competitors, with Google Search being the best and the easiest. Just look for your keywords and see what pops up. Don’t ignore the ads! Then, check their social media pages and investigate further. Another option to discover who your competitors are would be to use tools like SEM Rush, Stat, Similarweb, or Buzzsumo.

Step #5: Create thumb-stopping content

Any social media channel strategy requires a special approach to content creation. Unfortunately, small businesses usually struggle to produce great content and get disappointed after putting a lot of effort into making their strategies work. The problem lies deeper. Not being able to get more followers and likes is not your fault. It’s not your fault. On Twitter, for example, you’ll have only 18 minutes to impress your followers, as the feed is chronological, so you should be laser-focused about the activity of your audience.

But of course, there’s a way out. Visual content can help you greatly if it’s in line with the current trends. The more visual content you post on social, the better your engagement rate will be. PromoRepublic has everything you need when it comes to unique thumb-stopping graphics for different social networks. In addition to premade social media content across seventeen industries and holiday templates, the tool provides you with the ability to edit it and schedule to multiple platforms.

Step #6: Develop an optimal social media posting strategy

For a social media content marketing strategy to bring results, it’s important to feed the content monster consistently and stick to a schedule. At the same time, it’s essential to know the right times when every network actually wants to be fed. We suggest that you don’t try to remember all the right and wrong dates. PromoRepublic has a built-in feature that suggests the optimal times to post different types of content, based on your time zone. There will be various time slots in the calendar for engaging, motivational, educational, and other posts. Just choose a piece of content from our library, tailor it to your taste in the graphic editor and schedule to be published.

When the audience starts interacting with your posts, you should be there to respond. And you can do it from PromoRepublic as well. Also, the tool allows you to monitor your brand mentions.

Step #7: Optimize based on your results

The best social media business strategies are always the results of hard and comprehensive work. When everything is set up, you should always improve on it. To grow on social media, you’ll need to track the results and efficiency of your posts against the initial goals established in the beginning. Sometimes, your promotion strategies will be effective, other times you may find that what should have worked well, didn’t live up to even 50% of your expectations. Through trial and error, you’ll discover more efficient ways to approach social media marketing plans.

All you need to do to optimize is to track your data and apply it to re-evaluate some steps in your social media strategic planning. Every social business page has an analytics section where you’ll be able to check your performance. But aside from analytics, you can do surveys and polls, asking your followers questions that will help you better understand if the strategy is working. Listen to what they say and learn some lessons.

A Better Way to Execute Multiple Social Media Marketing Strategies

It just so happens that you should execute multiple social media marketing plans at the same time. This holds true especially for agencies and freelancers that struggle to manage social media for multiple clients simultaneously. This task demands a whole lot of work and revision on every step of the way. Imagine being responsible for twenty social platforms or even more. Where would you get content ideas to fit the needs of every audience? A tough nut to crack, isn’t it?

Sometimes, all of us get to the point, when we run out of ideas. At PromoRepublic, we do everything in our power to alleviate this pain and help marketers come up with social media marketing plans that bring results. All of this is done through great content and an inexhaustible pool of templates and samples for almost every occasion and industry.

Organizing work around social media is one more strength we’re very proud of. PromoRepublic allows you to have a separate workspace for each client, making it extremely comfortable and motivating to scale and enrich your portfolio.

If developing a social media strategy is #1 on your priority list, the seven simple steps described above will help you begin and give you a good understanding of what works best. Remember that it all starts with realistic goals and inspiring content.

The post How to Elevate a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Zero to Hero appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

Facebook has been in the social media sphere for years, providing great support and opportunities for marketers and salespeople. As of July 2019, it currently sits at 2.38 billion monthly active users. In fact, every minute, the number of signups to join increases by another four hundred people. Sounds like a paradise for marketers, right?

But let’s not forget that as the biggest social network in the world, Facebook is also the most challenging one. There’s no chance you’ll get thousands of followers overnight unless you try hard, spark creativity, and know how social media algorithms work. To survive in the blast of this social boom, we’ve prepared some essential Facebook business tools that can help you out in managing your day-to-day social media tasks that will make the curves go up.

• Facebook Marketing Tools for Better Engagement
• Facebook Community Management Tools
• Facebook Tools for Design
• Facebook Tools for Analytics
• Facebook Tools to Get More Leads & Increase Conversions
• Social Marketing Tools for Running Facebook Ads
• Facebook Tools for Businesses to Promote Brands

Facebook Marketing Tools for Better Engagement

The day before yesterday, one couldn’t think that social media will be such a hive. Yesterday, one couldn’t imagine that we can make honey out of it. Today we do both. Page management on social media shouldn’t be all that difficult, especially with the new Facebook business tools that enter the market fast.

1. PromoRepublic

One of the best tools for small businesses, agencies, and freelancers that want to have everything in one place. PromoRepublic alleviates many pains – from social media posting to brand watching. But the most valuable asset it gives to brands is unique fresh content that rocks, premade to be published on your social channels. Your engagement will start to skyrocket!

2. Facebook Insights

Facebook Page Insights is a go-to if you want to learn more about your audience and how it interacts with your content. There, you’ll see what resonates most with your followers and be able to track actions, views, likes, and more. The insights Facebook provides for its business pages can help you understand the direction in which your audience wants you to move. In the long term, based on this information, you’ll create consistent engagement.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media engagement platform. It works with almost three dozen networks and helps you manage engagement workflows. Anytime there’s an inquiry from your audience on social media, you’ll be there to respond, just like superman always ready to react to another disaster. By replying fast, you’ll boost engagement under your posts and it will have more impressions.

4. Post Planner

Post Planner is a money and time saver, as well as an engagement booster for many customers. Buzzsumo and Buffer have proved that Post Planner posts get five times more engagement than other tools, 921.8 to be exact, compared to 216.766 that don’t use any application. Wondering how it works? Simple. The tool allows you to find top-performing content and share it on your page. Its recommendation engine analyzes content and finds pieces that will resonate most with your audience.

5. Sumo Share

Have you seen these beautiful social media buttons in your competitor’s blog? You can do exactly the same using Sumo Share. It’s one of Facebook marketing tools for business and a free way to get built-in buttons to enable the readers to share content.

Facebook Community Management Tools

How do we know the mood of our community and where meaningful conversations take place? It wouldn’t be possible without a set of Facebook group management tools that bring the most important insights to the table.

6. Agorapulse

Agorapulse provides lots of opportunities to manage your community. There are a lot of scheduling options and their famous Social Inbox to catch up with every conversation. In fact, it has built-in CRM that allows you to track your followers and segment them into groups if necessary.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a powerhouse of Digital Consumer Intelligence products and a top social listening tool with access to over 80 million sources. You can access Facebook data through Brandwatch, but first, you’ll need to give your permission for the tool to do the dirty job, just like the cleaner cleans the house. In return, you’ll get an impressive amount of data with the ability to segment and categorize it.

8. RapidMiner

RapidMiner is a sentiment tool that distinguishes between positive and negative engagement. To do so, the software analyzes unstructured content sources, for instance, Facebook or online reviews. It highlights the areas for growth and spots the trends among your customers.

Facebook Tools for Design

It all starts with a great design. Good design is the new word for signaling success, don’t you think? We live in a world that strives to become more beautiful and social media is not an exception. If you’re not an expert in graphics, the following tools will make you more confident.

9. Canva

Canva is a classical tool to design something fast and post it to social media, for free. With lots of templates to choose from, you don’t need to be a professional to create a beautiful visual. Canva has definitely got small businesses covered from extra costs spent on graphics.

10. Adobe Spark

Everyone needs a short video, especially on Facebook, trust me. And you can definitely get one done on the go using Adobe Spark. Aside from videos and social graphics, this tool can also assist you in web design.

11. Unsplash

If you’ve just started on social media, you’d like to know that there are sources of freely useable images like Unsplash. Not exactly a Facebook tool, but a database that has some nice photos, fresh and free. Everyone can find something special there, especially if your posts need a vibrant touch.

Facebook Tools for Analytics

There’s no way to iterate and improve your performance on social media without checking analytics and tweaking your strategy based on data you manage to collect. Do you agree? The following Facebook page marketing tools will help to make decisions backed up by data.

12. Likealyzer

Likealyzer is one of the best analytical Facebook tools, totally in a class all its own, when it comes to social media. What it does exactly is grading your Facebook performance looking at 70 different factors. Based on the score you get, you can compare yourself to other industry leaders and improve consistently. Additionally, Likealyzer will show you how to maximize your reach on Facebook. Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

13. Facebook Page Barometer

Facebook Page Barometer is one Agorapulse initiative that reflects on your page performances and compares it to thousands of pages added. You get your page insights shown in nice graphics, including monthly organic reach, viral reach, and paid reach.

14. FanPage Karma

FanPage Karma is an all-inclusive, but in social media management. It incorporates analytics, provides publishing features, enables communicating opportunities, gives you a room for research and transforms it all into beautiful reports. Wondering how it can help you extract more from Facebook analytics? FanPage Karma is a research giant, actually. It can analyze an unlimited number of Facebook profiles, including content and time of day analysis. All of this can be wrapped into customized chart boards. The tool will also keep you posted on recent trends, sending you morning reports.

Facebook Tools to Get More Leads & Increase Conversions

Lead generation has become simpler on social media with the emergence of messenger marketing and bots. And so has conversions, taking into account recent stats.

15. ManyChat

Did you know that more than a billion people use Messenger every day? ManyChat is a vivid example of a tool involved in messenger marketing. To be exact, it is the #1 bot platform on Facebook Messenger useful for marketing, retail, and support teams. The inventors of the software promise 80% open rates and 25% CTR with increasing opportunities to engage prospects and drive sales. So how does it work exactly? You create a bot in just minutes, either using one of ManyChat’s templates or customizing your own.

16. Heyo

Heyo has a specific purpose. That is to alleviate marketers’ pains through running contests, sweepstakes, and interactive campaigns. They have a lot of examples of what can be done on different social channels and here’s one for Facebook.

17. MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey is an alternative to ManyChat and a favorite messenger tool of Neil Patel and other top marketers. MarTech named it as one of the best marketing bot platforms. If you want to test Facebook Messenger Ads, consider MobileMonkey the right tool to start with.

Social Marketing Tools for Running Facebook Ads

Today, Facebook Ads seem to be an indispensable part of a marketing strategy. Still, a recent study conducted by AdStage shows that the median CTR for Facebook News Feed ads as of Q1 2019 is only 1.33%. Check out the following tools for Facebook to iterate on that number.

18. Adespresso

Adespresso is one of the marketing tools for Facebook, Instagram, and Google that make Ad creation a cinch. You can easily create, manage, and analyze all your ads under one roof. At the same time, the tool allows you to collaborate with your team in the system, which helps you stay on the same page. The reviewers also recommend investing in personal consultations with Adespresso experts, as they share best practices in ad management.

19. Compass

Facebook Ads Compass is one of Adespresso tools dedicated to Facebook completely. It helps marketers discover their best and worst choices in ad campaigns by generating one free report. In essence, the analysis will let you understand what’s bringing money into your pocket and exclude unnecessary practices next time. Additionally, the compass will benchmark you against your competitors and show if any improvements are needed.

20. Coschedule Headline Analyzer

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a real saver, especially if you need to analyze any of your campaign headlines for clickability. The tool is useful for Facebook and any other social network, as it breaks your title down and suggests measures to improve it. You’ll find out if your headline has enough power and emotional words, and if it has any chances of bringing you more traffic. CoSchedule will score your title from 1 to 100. Try to make it green, no less than 70.

21. AdRoll

Out of many promotion tools, AdRoll is all about retargeted Facebook ads. To put it simply, you can show ads to your website visitors who haven’t completed the desired action. Retargeted campaigns give you another, second chance to attract your readers, but this time on social media. AdRoll will help you collect data from your website visitors and get them engaged on Facebook, for example.

22. Perfect Audience

Perfect Audience is another Facebook retargeting tool that makes your readers come back to your website after their first website visit. Aside from retargeting at its core, the app provides you with conversion and revenue tracking. Perfect Audience also works with Twitter, so you can retarget on multiple social media channels all at once.

23. Qwaya

The beauty of Qwaya is in the optimization of Facebook campaigns. This add-on allows you to carry out A/B testing and split your targeting into a few segments to get the actual comparison side by side. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations of texts and images, as Qwaya will eventually choose the best one.

Facebook Tools for Businesses to Promote Brands

There are many social media tools for Facebook and each of them was designed to help marketers promote their clients’ brands. Facebook tools can increase engagement, help you manage communities, drive campaigns. But the most important thing is that they might contribute to your lead generation strategy and increase conversion rates. Choose the one from the list that seems a fit and matches your needs. Share your choice with us! Don’t forget to try PromoRepublic and its creative templates for social media.

The post 20+ Facebook Tools to Boost Engagement, Conversions, and More appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

There are a million Twitter tools on the web, but only the best can complement your social media marketing strategy when you’re just starting a small business. No doubt, it might be difficult to increase your follower base on Twitter if you’re alone. However, it doesn’t mean you should stop and do nothing. Twitter has the most caring algorithms, allowing you to organically reach 100% of your audience, compared to other social networks. Free or paid, all of these tools can help you tweak your strategy and get your first thousand followers.

• • Twitter Tools for Analytics
  • Twitter Tools for Chats
  • Twitter Tools for Discovering Fresh Content and Entertaining Users

• • Twitter Tools for Following & Unfollowing
  • Twitter Tools for Hashtags
  • Twitter Tools for Images
  • Twitter Tools for Mentions & Monitoring
  • Twitter Tools for Scheduling Tweets

How to choose Twitter management software?

If you have ever used Twitter, you already know that this platform is not the easiest one when it comes to management. To optimize your marketing strategy for this platform, you need to consider numerous variables:

• Characters limit (280 characters)
• Relevant hashtags 
• Consistent posting
• Ways to interact with potential customers
• Accumulation of constant users’ engagement 

To choose the right tools, you should decide which Twitter activities boost your brand marketing considering the peculiarities of your niche. Also, mind your customers’ needs and preferences – you can only keep them active when you post something that makes them excited. Analyze your previous content marketing campaigns to see which posts boost better reactions and see which of the processes require automation. Take a look at this list of Twitter tools we have gathered for you to choose those that will make your campaign skyrocket! 

Top Twitter management tools and software

Twitter Tools for Analytics

Before jumping to different tools, the best advice would be to learn how to use Twitter account home. It’s the official analytical overview you get creating your Twitter profile. Just visit analytics.twitter.com and you’ll see your own profile analytics, including useful information collected during the past 28 days. If there’s more you’d like to discover when other users’ analytics is concerned, you’re welcome to check what comes next.

1. Daily 140

Free package: Yes (for 3 accounts)

Daily 140 is a dedicated Twitter tool with only one feature – sending you a daily email with the information about three guys you find particularly interesting. There are 3 accounts to track for free or you can pay a $5 fee to track more people. You will get daily reports about their tweets, likes, and shares via email every morning.

Pros:

Daily reports

Free package + cheap extension 

Easy to use

Cons:

Only one feature to enjoy

Best for:

Beginners

Everyone who wants to keep an eye on their competitors and niche influencers 

2. Twitonomy

Free package: Yes

Twitonomy is a Twitter follower tracker and one of the best apps that gives you an opportunity to get detailed analytics both on users and their tweets. Simply choose a user and you’ll see a dashboard of analytics with the analysis of a profile, its tweets, engagement, and other insights relevant to marketers.

Pros:

Detailed visual analytics

Downloadable lists 

Desktop and mobile versions

Search analytics on keywords, hashtags, usernames, URLs
Cons:

Huge amounts of data that is hard to manage and compare

No custom reports

Crowded dashboard 

Best for:

Professionals

Those who are looking for an opportunity to know everything about other Twitter users

3. Bluenod

Free package: Yes
Bluenod is good at community visualization. It’s an all-in-one Twitter app that gives you insights about your target influencers and their networks. This tool will build you a map around a specific user or hashtag.

Pros:

Great for audience targeting

Makes brand management simple

Visual analytics

Cons:

No SEO tools

No scheduling tools

Best for:

Professionals 

Digital strategists and marketers will find this app especially useful

4. SocialRank

Free package: Yes

SocialRank is one of the Twitter followers tools powered by features that analyze your audience and segment them to a list of your best and the most popular people you engage with on Twitter. It’s one of the easiest ways to manage your audience on social and discover which professional relationship on Twitter should be a priority. 

Pros:

An opportunity to track your most active followers

Easy to use

Convenient data export
Cons:

You can only track followers, but not competitors

Hard to navigate 

Best for:

Professionals

Small social media agencies

Great for Twitter and Instagram 

5. Klear

Free package: Yes
Klear is one of the best Twitter tools with many free influencer marketing capacities, including one which helps marketers find influencers on Twitter by means of keywords. It’s presented in the form of an iOS app and a Chrome extension.

Pros:

Accurate tracking 

Daily tasks automation

Perfect for influencer programs 

Cons:

The full version is pretty expensive
Best for:

Professionals and newcomers

Suits for different social networks, including Instagram and Tik Tok

Twitter Tools for Chats

Twitter chats are efficient for networking, sharing, and communicating with like-minded people. They need to be hosted and monitoring popular chats is challenging – they move fast and answering timely becomes nearly impossible. How to manage them successfully? Try using these tools.

6. TweetChat

Free package: Yes 

TweetChat is a tool for Twitter conversation aimed at filtering messages by hashtags – they can be added automatically to your posts. Also, there is a sharing button to promote your chats. Also, this app can slow the chats down and give you a chance to read them in your pace and reply. 

Pros:

Retweets filtering

Spammers block

Cons:

Slow-down intervals have limits

Best for:

Beginners

Brands that want to communicate with customers directly and hold online events

7. Twubs

Free package: Yes

Twubs is a Twitter management tool that helps you find relevant Twitter chats. Also, you can use this app to host your own chat. It is API-compliant and able to aggregate pictures, videos, and tweets into a brand page. 

Pros:

The tool creates branded homepages for chats and adds them to a global calendar visible for new users

Convenient interface 

Separated feeds for host messages and regular feed

Adjustable speed
Cons:

Commercial hashtags can be added to paid version  

Best for:

Professionals 

Those who would like to arrange public talks and invite special guests 

8. Hootsuite

Free package: Yes (up to 3 social profiles)

Hootsuite is a multifunctional app with numerous Twitter softwares and tools. It is widely used for chats due to advanced moderation opportunities and multiple streams to add. As such, you can track and host a number of chats at the same time.

Pros:

Track chats by hashtags and mentions

Internal features for collaboration and inner chats

Advanced moderation options

Cons:

Too many tools and features – might feel confusing

Best for:

Professionals

Those who are looking for a cross-functional app

Twitter Tools for Discovering Fresh Content and Entertaining Users

To engage your users and keep them active, you should post interesting content regularly. All in all, they come to this social media to have some fun! Give them what they want by means of these apps:

9. BuzzSumo

Free package: No| Free trial: Yes, for 30 days/100 searches

BuzzSumo is a tool for content management that allows you to search for tweets and influencers by hashtags, shares, and likes. With its help, you can find engaging content that resonates with your target audience. You can use it to retweet popular posts and get ideas for your own.

Pros:

Extended filtering by themes and authors

Personalized dashboard

Data export

Content analysis reports 

Cons: 

Full version is expensive (starting from $99)

Not very suitable for small companies 

Best for:

Professionals 

SMM and content specialists 

Great for numerous social networks, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn 

10. Buffer

Free package: No | Free trial: Yes (14 days)

Buffer is a content management app that allows you to find the best hashtags to use, engage your fans, and find influencers to collaborate with. In addition to content search, this tool provides numerous opportunities for campaign analysis and scheduled posting.

Pros:

Tools for publishing, search, and engagement

Strong analytics

Visual content plans

Custom reports

Planners
Cons:

No free package 

Best for:

Growing businesses 

Suitable for Twitter and Instagram

11. Hashtagify

Free package: No

Hashtagify is one of the most advanced hashtags tracking tools for Twitter and Instagram. With its help, you can find relevant hashtags for your target audience. The app provides custom suggestions and helps you get an insight into your competitors’ campaigns. 

Pros:

User-friendly interface

Numerous features for hashtag search 

Tools for influencers’ and competitors’ analysis
Cons:

No free version

The starting package is expensive ($99) but doesn’t include too many features

Best for:

Professionals 

Suits for Instagram and Twitter hashtag search and analysis

Twitter Tools for Following & Unfollowing

Monitoring who follows and unfollows you helps you drive meaningful connections. Often, when building up your audience from scratch on Twitter, you’ll have to follow domain experts you don’t know. If they don’t follow you back in return, the number of who you follow will be bigger than the number of your followers. This can make you look bad in the eyes of your target audience. The next Twitter management tools come in especially handy if your mission is to create a whitelist of followers on Twitter.

12. Tweepi

Free package: Yes

Tweepi is an AI tool that helps you find the best relevant tweets and engage with the users. Additionally, it allows you to scan the list of accounts that follow your own followers. Daniel Vahar, a Social Marketing & Brand Communications expert at Forbes proves that Tweepi can grow your Twitter account by as much as 100 new followers a day!

Pros:

Uses advanced AI

Sorts followers in meaningful lists

Suggests custom hashtags and retweets

Cons:

Limited to Twitter only

Free version is pretty restricted 

Best for:

Professionals

Brands focused on Twitter only

13. DoesFollow

Free package: Yes

DoesFollow is one of those simple and 100% free Twitter management tools. It is a helping wand if you’d like to know if Elon Musk, for example, follows Richard Branson. The only thing to do is to fill in the boxes with two usernames you have in mind and see who follows whom.

Pros:

Simple and fast

Online 

Free to use
Cons:

Just one feature for followers search 
Best for:

Beginners 

Can be used for the first steps in content management 

14. ManageFlitter

Free package: No

ManageFlitter has a set of features to make a presence on Twitter a breeze. Aside from scheduling tweets and viewing analytics, you can follow and unfollow in bulk. The beauty of ManageFlitter is also in the possibility it gives you to segment your followers based on a number of factors, such as last tweet, follower count, location, language and if they follow you back.

Pros:

Easily detect and get rid of spammy and useless accounts

Easy to use

Detailed dashboard
Cons:

Slow loading

You can unfollow only selected account with a minimum number of 100 daily 

Best for:

Beginners

Those who want to keep their list of followers clean and neat

Twitter Tools for Hashtags

Hashtags work great to build your presence online and here are some effective ways to use them on social. However, you might need more than that to succeed. The following apps for Twitter will let you boost engagement faster and make it up to more efficient strategic planning.

15. RiteTag

Free package: No | Free trial: Yes  

Rite Tag is the best hashtag recommender that works great if you need instant suggestions in terms of a hashtag’s reach. After filling in a hashtag, you’ll see the number of unique tweets, retweets, and exposure your hashtag and other semantically close keywords get per hour. You can download the full report as well. In addition, Rite Tag suggests relevant hashtags to get seen over time and creates a beautiful map. Hashtags to get seen over time appear as blue highlights, while the ones you should use now are green.

Pros:

Mobile app plus Chrome extension

Integrates with Buffer
Cons:

Twitter only (if not complied with Buffer)

Doesn’t have trending hashtags search
Best for:

Beginners and professionals

A great tool for PR and audience engagement  

16. Tagboard

Free package: No

Tagboard is one of the top tools for Twitter and other channels that creates mood boards for hashtags, keeping all posts under one roof. You heard that right! Entering a hashtag, you’ll see posts from different social networks that used it and be able to filter them respectively. The only thing left to do is engage!

Pros:

Simple drag-and-drop interface

Customized cloud-based graphics

Real-time content curation
Cons:
No free trial

Best for:

Small business

Medium business

Twitter Tools for Images

Images are more captivating than text, so you cannot ignore their power even if you are using Twitter. How to make your tweets more compelling? Add visuals with the help of these tools:

17. Perfect Quote

Free package: Yes 

Perfect Quote allows you to create tweets with beautiful images and memorable quotes. You can customize your pics entirely. There is a large base of images, patterns, photos, and quotations that can be found with the help of powerful AI.

Pros:
Great AI search 

Tool matches relevant quotes and photos 

More than 5 million quotes by author or term

Cons:

The app is relatively fresh and includes bugs

Best for:

Beginners and professionals

Brands that offer goods for ladies 

18. Twit Helper

Free package: Yes

An online graphic editor that allows you to locate your tweets on the images and post them right to your account. Simple and neat.

Pros:

2000+ images to use

Works online

You can upload your own background

Search by filters

Cons:

Just one function

Best for:

Small businesses 

Motivational posts 

Twitter Tools for Mentions & Monitoring

Stay updated and be aware of all mentions and shares from your account. This becomeи easy with the tools listed below:

19. Warble

Free package: Yes

Warble is a free tool for social media marketing. One of the main features of Warble is a system of notifications sent to your email whenever something important happens on your account. Namely, you will get emails when someone shares your tweets or mentions your name on his/her page. Also, this app does keyword, hashtag, and name tracking.

Pros:

Completely free tool

Custom alert schedules

Advanced search actions
Cons:

Will suit small businesses only
Best for:

Beginners, small companies, individual use

20. Twilert

Free package: No | Free trial: Yes (14 days)

Twilert sends real-time alerts for particular keywords. Track the keywords that interest you and receive an email notification every time someone mentions them. This way, you can keep an eye on products, branded hashtags, and companies’ names.

Pros:

Advanced search 

Instant notifications 

Help you find mentions and send fast respond
Cons:

No free package

Best for:

Professionals and large companies

Those who would like to react on brand name mentions, competitors mentions, and industry-related hashtags immediately

21. MentionMapp

Free package: Yes

MentionMapp allows you to create and visualize the map of you and people you mention, as well as people mentioned by them. This way, you see your network and networks of other users. As such, you can target new users that are interested in brand-related trends.

Pros:

Intuitive interface

Visual cloud

An opportunity to discover related content and hashtags
Cons:

Data analysis and reporting are far from being comprehensible 

Trial is limited to 15 free Twitter accounts analysis per month
Best for:

Professionals, large businesses 

Brands that seek to expand their audience 

Twitter Tools for Scheduling Tweets

Think about the last time you had to post something on Twitter. Did you do all the work manually? Now, you can stop right there. Current Twitter engagement tools allow you to schedule dozens of posts to get them published automatically without any additional efforts needed. Spend a couple of minutes and chill out, using one of the following:

22. PromoRepublic

Free package: No | Free trial: Yes (for Standard and Professional packages)

PromoRepublic is one of the best social media scheduling tools in a class of its own. The truth is, there’s no alternative to PromoRepublic when it comes to a combination of visual content creation, posting, and analytics. There’s a post library, for almost every industry, where you can choose a premade post and schedule to publish it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Pinterest. Additionally, the system will give you a hint when it’s best to schedule Twitter posts based on their type.

Pros:

Save posts to reuse them for other social networks

Calendar for scheduling

Recommendations for the best posting time

Ideas generation
Cons:

Doesn’t integrate with other apps and features

No direct posting
Best for:

Small businesses

Brands that implement multichannel posting 

23. TweetDeck

Free package: Yes

TweetDeck was created by Twitter, so its capabilities suit this platform perfectly. This tool is pretty similar to Hootsuite: you can use it to schedule tweets, view streams of your content, followers’ updates, engagement rates, and messages. 

Pros:

Manages multiple Twitter accounts

Great for news tracking

Simple muting

Convenient users’ lists

Cons:

For Twitter only

A lack of customization options

Best for:

Small, medium, and large businesses 

Beginners and professionals will find this scheduling tool useful

24. Social Oomph

Free package: Yes

Social Oomph is a free tool that provides tweet scheduling capabilities to users. Also, you can track keywords, shorten URLs, view retweets, track mentions, and manage several Twitter accounts with its help.

Pros:

Multifunctional 

Automatic content generation

Unlimited tweet schedule

Cons:

If you want to use the tool for other social networks, you will have to pay a fee

Outdated and not very convenient interface 

No calendar layout

Best for:

Small, medium, and large businesses 

Perfect for active social media users that have to manage lumps of marketing information 

Conclusion

Have no doubts that after you arm yourself with these tools, your Twitter marketing campaign will shoot up! With their help, you will automatize numerous processes, save your time for creative work, and get better insights into your campaign. Chats, analytics, content search, scheduling, and posting tweets, as well as other Twitter activities will become easier to manage. Benefit from the fresh and advanced tools – make the most of your social media accounts! Most of them have free packages or trial versions, so give them a try!  

FAQ:

What are 4 things Twitter apps help you do?

The most crucial things Twitter apps help you do are analysis, audience building, increasing brand awareness, and boosting audience engagement

How do I monitor my Twitter account?

Twilert, MentionMapp, Tweepi, Warble, and other tools listed below have numerous tools for monitoring.

How do I manage my Twitter feed?

Track the engagement and analyze users’ behavior regarding tweets they like and share

Create lists (competitors, customers, influencers, events, etc.)

Use relevant hashtags

Follow people smartly and make sure that they are really interested in your offers

Track your competitors’ activity 

Use tools for efficient management, scheduling, and data gatherin

Is Twitter for free?

Yes, you can create a Twitter account for free.

What is Twitter good for?

Direct more traffic to your website and generate sales

Improve brand awareness

Create warmer relationships with your customers

Boost conversions 

Establish social media presence

How do I count tweets with hashtags for free?

Try using Hashtagify or any other hashtag-focused tool from our list.

The post The Best Twitter Management Tools That Guarantee Growth in 2021 appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

That’s because Twitter is used by 326 million people every month and they send around 500 million tweets every day. At the same time, Twitter remains the top social network for government officials and most of the world’s leaders use this social network. Personally, I like following Elon Musk’s activity, how about you? It’s sad, but you can’t reach maximum exposure on Twitter, unless you find the best time to post for you personally, with regards to your audience’s habits and social media algorithms. But no worries. In this guide, you’ll find:

• Why Social Presence on Twitter Matters: General Facts
• Bare Necessities of Twitter Engagement
• The Best Time to Tweet to Get Likes, Clicks, and Retweets
• How to Find the Best Time to Tweet Using Twitter Analytics
• Twitter Posting Frequency
• How to Automate Twitter Posting

Why Social Presence on Twitter Matters: General Facts

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief recalls people rolling their eyes at the mention of Twitter in his lecture. Many still think that it has nothing to do with the media business. But raising Twitter’s archives of statistics, you’ll see that skeptics are mainly wrong. Twitter is a favorite and a front runner among millenials, as 81% access it at least once a day.

In some respects, Twitter is even better than Google as a search engine. Alan Rusbridger admits:

Google is limited to using algorithms to ferret out information in the unlikeliest hidden corners of the web. Twitter goes one stage further – harnessing the mass capabilities of human intelligence to the power of millions in order to find information that is new, valuable, relevant or entertaining.

In fact, 74% of Twitter users say they use the network to get their news. Seeing such a big opportunity at their fingertips, 65.8% of U.S. companies bigger than 100 employees in size use Twitter for marketing purposes. The results won’t make you wait: marketers admit that it’s a powerful tool because it rewards quality content with distribution. Agencies and freelancers, taking care of their clients’ brands and building presence on Twitter, should remember the following fact:

Attention:Twitter is the best in a class of its own because it allows you to organically reach 100% of your audience. Whenever you tweet, your post is going to pop up in every follower’s Twitter feed (in contrast to Facebook or LinkedIn with your posts’ organic reach around 2% and dropping).

Bare Necessities of Twitter Engagement

Before we jump to the best times to post on Twitter, let’s take a look at the basics for Twitter engagement and what you can do to boost it. When we say ‘engagement’ in the context of Twitter, we refer to the following actions:

• Impressions: The number of people who’ve seen your post.
• Clicks: How many times people clicked on it.
• Retweets: The number of shares.

As a user, you may engage with a tweet by replying, retweeting, favoriting, clicking, or sending a tweet in your direct message. No doubt, the more of the above your tweet receives, the more it will appear in others’ feeds and get noticed by a broader audience.

To deliver a great Twitter experience, social media managers, entrepreneurs, agencies, and freelancers have to bear in mind a few best practices and general rules that make tweets stand out.

Tweets accompanied by an image get 150% more retweets,  18% more click-throughs, and 89% more likes.

Visuals rock regardless of the social channel they appear on. It’s a widely known fact. The audience on Twitter appreciates up-to-date news, but what it loves more is unique images. Be sure to include a graphic with every tweet and you’ll see the positive imprint on your engagement.

Even though the length of tweets has increased from 140 to 280 characters, Twitter is still a place for brevity and precision.

It’s interesting to note, but brevity is in Twitter’s DNA. The decision to double the character count hasn’t dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. “Twitter is still regarded as a network for briefer thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters,” reports Sarah Perez, contributing to one Tech Crunch article.

Brands that focus on building conversations on Twitter can skyrocket their engagement. 

The best way to get engagement in your Twitter posts is to make use of Twitter polls. They are techniques to help you interact with your audience, let your creativity flow, and understand what drives people’s actions and opinions. Integrating Twitter polls into your tweets, you’ll discover more about your audience. Moreover, once the poll is over, all participants receive a push notification, which brings them back to your content.

Below, you’ll find an example of one popular Twitter poll:

It Mondays were shoes, they would be Crocs.
What helps you get through Monday? #mondaymotivation

— frank body (@frank_bod) October 3, 2016

To get higher engagement, try starting your tweets with words like “Thanks,” “Top,” “We,” “Congratulations,” “Learn,” and “Great” at the beginning of your tweets.

A little bit of semantics here. Researchers admit that these particular words have been associated with higher engagement than tweets which didn’t use them.

All of the above won’t bring you to the next level of efficiency unless you learn when is the best time to tweet and stick to Twitter peak hours.

The Best Time to Tweet to Get Likes, Clicks, and Retweets

Analyzing over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, a great study carried out by Buffer has highlighted many insights in terms of the best time of day to tweet. Here’s what their findings have shown, at the surface:

• The early morning hours tweets receive more clicks than tweets posted during the day.
• In turn, evenings and late-night posts on Twitter have a tendency to receive the most favorites and retweets.
• Times to tweet differ across time zones, but noon to 1:00 PM local time, on average, is the safest time to tweet for any time zone.
• The time people tweet most often is between 11:00 AM. and 1:00 PM, while the fewest tweets are sent between 3:00 and 4:00 AM.

Thus, the type of engagement is different for mornings and evenings. While the majority of clicks can happen in the morning, likes and retweets are in frequent rotation in the evening. It depends on what type of engagement you need more. Your posting times will depend on your goals. If you’re interested in clicks, it’s best to post in the morning. If you want to get more likes and retweets, be sure to post during the evenings.

Additionally, check out what were the most popular times to tweet in the United States in different time zones, as to Buffer’s investigation.

Source: Buffer

You can try posting during the most popular times or rather find success posting at non-peak times when the volume of tweets is lower.

It’s official: The two studies, conducted by Hootsuite and Buffer have shown that the best times to tweet are during your morning commute, the time before lunch, the evening commute, and between 9 p.m. and midnight.

Also, let’s see how Twitter posting would differ depending on the weekdays. Sprout Social’s study reveals that

• On Mondays, Twitter peak hours are from 9:00 to 10:00 AM.
• On Tuesdays, the most active hours are from 9:00 to 11:00 AM.
• On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the situation is similar to Tuesday, but the highest engagement occurs at 9:00 AM.
• On Fridays, you can receive higher engagement if you post from 8:00 to 11:00 AM.

Source: Sprout Social

As you can see from the image above, weekends promise less engagement than weekdays, so it’s not the best idea to post on Saturdays and Sundays. Otherwise, if there’s a necessity, you can post at 9:00 AM. In fact, the Argyle Social study has shown that weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends.

Peak Twitter times may be different based on your audience and the niche it represents. Data from SproutSocial research point to different days to post to Twitter when your audience’s interests are concerned. Have a look:

• Consumer goods: Sunday at 11:00 AM.
• Media companies: Thursday at 9:00 AM and 8:00 PM.
• Schools: Saturday at 5:00 PM.
• Nonprofits: Wednesday at 7:00 AM.
• Tech companies: Tuesday at 9:00 AM.
• Healthcare industry: Wednesday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM.

A great deal of information to remember, right?

How to Find the Best Time to Tweet Using Twitter Analytics

You can rely either on external data above, or on your own. It’s up to you to decide. In the long run, knowing when your audience is Twitter most active pays off in bigger engagement. To find out the best days to tweet, visit https://analytics.twitter.com/ and go to Tweets at the top right corner closer to the middle.

Hovering over the highest row, you’ll see the day when your post got the most impressions. In my case, it was a Thursday and then the pattern repeated. Now you know when your audience is the most active and can make better decisions as to when tweet. I’d recommend that you experiment for a month, tweeting every day, and then check Twitter analytics. In this way, your data will be more down-to-earth and reliable and you’ll be able to catch a trend. Also, in Audiences, you can check the niche your posts get most impressions from. Twitter analytics is a good way to find the time of day to tweet.

Twitter Posting Frequency

Because the life of a tweet is approximately 18 minutes, you’re encouraged to tweet a few times during the day. According to Hootsuite, the sweet spot for getting high tweet engagement is posting 8-10 tweets per day. This article from CoSchedule shows how often to post on social media, based on 14 studies, and concludes that it’s best to tweet 15 times a day. With such frequency daily, you won’t need to think about the high times Twitter loves the most. You’ll simply post once per hour, excluding midnight.

Also bear in mind that it’s considered normal to repost the same tweet for 7 times in a couple of months, for example. The engagement will start to fall down after you repost for the eighth time.

I Can’t Remember Them All: How to Automate Twitter Posting

Unfortunately, Twitter in action is a far cry from Twitter in theory. And we know that you try to build a social presence on other social channels as well. Combined with posting times for other networks apart from Twitter, you’ll have a difficult time remembering all these posting times and easily get confused.

PromoRepublic can give you a helping hand for maximum exposure. Our smart analytical social media posting tool suggests the best times and days to post on Twitter, relying on the data above, for different types of posts! All you need to do is to fill the information in our calendar and the system will do the rest – schedule your twitter posts at the appropriate time. In fact, you’ll be able to recycle your posts later and it’ll take less time to re-post them again.

The post The Best Time to Post on Twitter to Fly High appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

You know your content is good – so why doesn’t Facebook agree? Every time you share your latest blog post on social media, you feel sure that this one’s going to hit the big time. Yet every time, you’re disappointed by a distinctly lackluster reception (likes don’t really count when they’re from your mum…). 

The first thing you should know is that it’s probably not your fault. Remember that social media networks are dominated by ever-changing algorithms, which control who does and doesn’t see your content. Standing out on social media can feel like trying to get your voice heard above the crowd at Wembley Arena, as Adele and Beyoncé perform a duet on stage. 

However, it’s not a completely hopeless situation. Fortunately, there are some effective strategies that can get your blog noticed on social media. What’s more, they’re surprisingly simple to implement. Let’s take a look!

1. Make sure you’re hanging out in the right places

If your struggling to see any traction from your blog content on social media, reassess the platforms where you’re sharing content. It’s crucial to find out your target audience’s preferences, so conduct a competitive analysis to learn where brands in your industry are the most active and successful, as well as directly asking your audience about their most-used social media platforms (in a customer survey, for example).

This is all the more important if you’re a small team that can’t afford to spread itself too thinly. If you’ve tried everything you can think of to make a channel work for you, and you’re still not seeing results, do you really need to be pouring your time and money into it? It can be tempting in the FOMO-driven world of social media, but you really don’t need to be everywhere at once.

For example, a fashion eCommerce brand is likely to find success on Instagram, whereas a B2B marketing agency will be better suited to LinkedIn. It’s also worth considering more ‘alternative’ platforms like Reddit, or up-and-coming platforms like TikTok, where you could be the first brand in your space to tap into its potential. Whatever you do, document your strategy, experiments and results, then you’ll be able to identify patterns of success or failure more easily. 

2. Sharpen your copywriting skills

You probably spend a long time researching and writing the main body of your content. A mistake lots of bloggers and marketers make is that they’re so eager to get their content out into the world, they rush the headline and social media captions. Neither of these should be an afterthought – in fact, we should probably all be spending more time on them.

Let’s think about your headline first. You’ve probably optimized this for SEO purposes, but you need to balance this with ‘attention-grabbing factor’ for social media. Neil Patel explains why this is so important: “The post title is possibly your only interaction with your audience…So a catchy headline will not just improve your CTR. It also starts the interaction with the user on a positive note. If your content keeps the promises you made in the headline and conveys your value proposition clearly, you nail your first impression.”

Keep in mind what Neil says about your content keeping the promise made in the headline; don’t resort to ‘clickbait’ titles that will lose the trust of your audience. It’s always a good idea to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about what would inspire them to click your post. There are several proven formulas you can use, like how-to guides, lists, and facts or statistics.

Study other successful headlines and learn some high-converting formulas in resources like this one. I really like CoSchedule’s headline analyser tool when I’m writing blog titles, and another super easy, yet really effective tip is to test them out on your own team. Companies like ManRepeller, for example, have a dedicated Slack channel for feedback on headlines. 

Next, you need to think about your social media caption – which can be just as make or break for your content’s success. Your caption should be tailored to the specific social media platform to which you’re posting, so let’s look at each of them in turn.

Twitter

On Twitter, captions work best when they’re quite straightforward – partly due to the character limit! You have both less space and less time to work with (tweets have the shortest lifespan of any social media post). One option is to simply use the headline of your content. Buffer actually use Twitter as a testing ground for their blog post headlines, trying out different options in their tweets. Questions, quotes or statistics also work well on Twitter. 

Facebook

The Facebook algorithm now prioritizes content from friends over content from publishers. It’s all about ‘meaningful interactions’, so you really need to forge an emotional connection with your audience to get your content seen. 

Use captions that will trigger a strong feeling – that could be surprise, amusement, curiosity, excitement, happiness, sadness or even anger. You can afford to get a little ‘bolder’ with your captions on Facebook, which includes using emojis.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social network for professionals, so keep it professional! Useful insights, questions that prompt discussion and eye-catching statistics work well on LinkedIn. Also, LinkedIn prioritizes posts that keep users on its platform, so you might get higher reach with status updates (you can always link to the content in the comments), videos or LinkedIn articles.

Instagram

Instagram is primarily a visual platform, but captions are still important for grabbing people’s attention. From my experience, there are two types that work well: either keep it super short – a pithy one-liner or meme-style caption – or go super long, in-depth and even personal. 

3. Be visual

Of course, if you’re sharing a blog post on Instagram, you’re going to have to find a way to represent it visually. This might be creating a quote graphic, a relevant photo you’ve taken, a stock photo, meme or GIF. 

The thing is, as newsfeeds become more crowded, all social media networks have become visual platforms. As CoSchedule puts it in this post, “Visual content has gone from a “nice-to-have” to a must-have vehicle for marketing messages.”

This is why top brands are adding media to almost every single thing they post. For example, when Social Chain share the link to their latest podcast episode, it’s accompanied with a video of the interview:

You might be thinking, ‘That’s all well and good for Social Chain, but I don’t have that kind of budget!’ Fortunately, there are plenty of tools – a lot of them free – that make it easy for anyone to repurpose their content into high-quality visuals.

I can’t seem to go a blog post without mentioning Canva, which is great for creating graphics.

Lumen5, Animoto, and GIPHY are also great options for creating videos and animations. One of my secret tricks is simply to create a slideshow of images on Facebook, then download it as an mp4, which can be shared anywhere.

Another tool I love is Anchor, which lets you create videos of audio snippets from your podcast episodes – perfect for sharing on social! 

4. Put some money behind it

We’ve got this far without mentioning paid – but when we’re talking about getting content noticed on social media, we can’t not mention paid! 

It’s getting rarer and rarer to achieve real success on social media without putting some money behind it, but I’d still advise testing organic strategies as much as you can first. Once you’ve got some organic social proof, you’ll know which content or versions of posts are worth investing in. This is a much safer, more strategic bet than blowing a load of cash before you have any idea how people will react to your content. 

You also need to think about your objectives for your content here. For example, most of the content we create for the Quuu blog is SEO-driven: we want our post to rank for a particular keyword that our target audience is searching for. However, other content we produce is more socially-driven, designed with shareability in mind. In this case, it would make more sense to apply paid to the second type of content.

For example, we knew this blog post sharing content marketing lessons from Ariana Grande’s ‘thank u, next’ campaign was ripe for liking, sharing and tagging friends on social media, so we boosted it on Facebook – with some pretty good results!

If you’d like to learn more about when to invest money in your content strategy on social media, check out this blog post.

5. Ask people to share your content.

Did we mention that social media marketing is hard?! Which is why, sometimes, you need to get by with a little help from your friends.

Ever wondered why some people you follow on social media always seem to get tonnes of likes and comments, even though their content is no better than yours? The answer might be simpler than you think: they’re probably just asking their friends.

It’s a really effective strategy, and with social media moving towards private communities, we’re only going to see more of this behavior in the years to come. That’s why Quuu has launched Pods, which will enable you, your friends and your team members to automatically share each others content on social media.

When you publish a new piece of content, email any individuals or brands you’ve mentioned/linked to in the post, asking them to share it with their audience. You could also do the same with relevant influencers, although this kind of cold outreach is easy to get wrong – think carefully about what’s in it for them if they share your post, and try to build genuine relationships with them first.

However, don’t underestimate the reach of peers, friends, and family, whose combined influence can be powerful. Employee advocacy is a big trend in content marketing right now, so establish a culture where everyone shares company content on their own social media profiles.

You could also try participating in Slack groups with dedicated content promotion channels, and signing up to Quuu Promote to have your content shared by real people in your niche.

Wrapping things up

The content promotion strategies we’ve covered in this blog post are all very simple. In fact, that’s the mistake I think a lot of brands and marketers make with social media: overcomplicating things.

Remember that social media is just a tool for people to connect with other people, so it ultimately boils down to basic human psychology. Looking good, sounding good, being in the right place at the right time, building relationships. Strip it back to these fundamentals and you should see results.

Are there any other methods or tools you use to get your content noticed on social media? I’d love to hear about them!

The post 5 Effective Ways to Get Your Blog Content Noticed on Social Media appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

Still, I often notice that some people use them in posts without realizing what benefits they can reap from appropriate hashtags. 

So this guide is for everyone who would like to become hashtag-literate on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. 

• What Are Hashtags?
• Why Use a Hashtag?
• How to Use Hashtags on Social Media
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
• Tools That Simplify Hashtag Research
• How Do You Use Hashtags?

What Are Hashtags? 

Any formulation put into a single line of inseparable words and numbers, introduced by a hash mark (#), and designating a specific keyword, topic, or short message is the definition of a hashtag. 

Adding one to your post, you make sure that the post will be indexed and appear in the separate feed when someone searches this particular phrase or clicks on it in other people’s posts. 

The main purpose of hashtags is to help social media users get their posts discovered by topic, regardless of posting times. Additionally, they give you an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals. Instagram is a vivid example of how a hashtag search looks like: 

Why Use a Hashtag? 

Drawing from my own experience, other relevant sources, and friends, I can say for certain that hashtags can light up your accounts with engagement. This especially holds true for people only starting a business and, respectively, launching their social media pages. 

When I started integrating them into my posts, I noticed that people I hardly know began to follow me. It is a time-tested fact: Posts without an added hashtag have less engagement than they could get even with a single one. 

This doesn’t mean that you should overuse them.  

Apparently, there are many reasons and cases when you should use social media hashtags. One of them is to categorize your posts and make them discoverable by subject, as mentioned above.

Life is too short to waste it on the wrong people. Cut ties with negative influences and open to new people that build you up. #leadership #community #teambuilding #success

— Steve Gutzler (@SteveGutzler) June 27, 2019

They also turn up helpful in bringing light and promoting specific events. The beauty of social media hashtags, however, is in their innate ability to let people participate in meaningful conversations. 

In fact, checking hashtags popular with your audience, you can participate in numerous discussions and tell the world about the existence! Allow some wit in your comments and you won’t have to wait long. 

How to Use Hashtags on Social Media 

The best way to use hashtags, however, depends on which social network your activity falls on. Best practices differ when it comes to Facebook or Instagram, for example. 

On different social channels, a hashtag would mean different use, considering the peculiarities of the audience. While on Instagram people expect you to use more #, on Facebook it may look inappropriate. 

I’d single out three universal rules that apply to all hashtags on different social media networks: 

1. Never misspell the words. A single misprint gets your post in the inappropriate feed. Check twice. 
2. Use relevant and popular keywords. If you want your posts to get easily discovered, do your homework. Write hashtags that are the most popular and use them.
3. Make sure that your hashtags are clickable. If they are, they will get indexed and displayed in the search results. 

But if you’re in marketing and have to deal with different social networks, those rules won’t be enough. Check each social media below for advice. 

How to Use Facebook Hashtags

Because most user profiles on Facebook are private, they are open only to the eyes of their friends. So the hashtags people use will be discoverable only to their friends. Still, you’ll be able to see them used by famous influencers or brands, whose profiles aren’t limited. 

To perform a search, go to the search box and fill it in with the relevant hashtag. Then, you’ll most likely see the results of your friends using it. 

When using hashtags on Facebook, it’s better to keep them to a minimum. One or two, with 10+ characters will suffice, according to Sprout Social’s research. 

And by the way, the most popular hashtag on Facebook is #love. 

There are some tips and tricks to boost engagement on Facebook through hashtags. Each of them has a unique URL with a status update box at the top. The first tip would be to drive traffic to that URL from other places to spark more conversation. 

Additionally, you may include a hashtag when posting from your mobile phone. Even though your mobile device won’t recognize it, the desktop version will. 

It’s also a good idea to use hashtags to have a conversation with a group. Every string of words will thus be grouped into its own status update box!

According to Social Bakers, for Facebook users, it’s better to capitalize the #FirstLetterInEachWord of your hashtag to make it more readable.

How to Use LinkedIn Hashtags

LinkedIn as a professional network is more famous for what I call serious business topics like #leadership, #softwareengineering, #realestate, etc. 

Recently, LinkedIn allowed business pages to create brand hashtags people can immediately see visiting your page. Now they cannot only follow the page, but they can also follow your hashtag as well.

In contrast to other social networks, LinkedIn sometimes recommends a box of popular hashtags to follow in the feed and thus encourages you to participate in themes you like. 

But how to use hashtags on LinkedIn? It’s best to include them in your posts on business or personal accounts, not groups. 

The most popular ones on LinkedIn are #business, #work, #office, #success, #quotes, #inspiration, #entrepreneur, #life, #love, #happy, #HR, #jobs, #marketing, #sales, #leadership, #tips, #influencer, #successful, #worklife, #officelife, and others. 

LinkedIn hashtags can help you expand the reach beyond your connections, to people who follow them. 

#business, for example, has more than 2 million followers, and chances are that including it in a post, you can speak to some of them with your content. 

How to Use Pinterest Hashtags

Remember that when it comes to Pinterest, there’s no reason to use hashtags in account descriptions, board titles, or profile names. 

What differentiates Pinterest from other social networks is that hashtags are only clickable in the description of a Pin. 

According to Rachel Ngom, a Pinterest strategist, 

“Pinners can find you by searching for a specific keyword term OR a hashtag. Typically it can take some time for keywords to appear in search (like weeks or even months). But when a user searches a hashtag, the newest pins with that hashtag will appear at the top of the feed.”

At the same time, Peg Fitzpatrick, a popular social media speaker reveals the best practices when it comes to Pinterest hashtags. “Depending on your Pin, consider using hashtags that are timely (e.g., #oscars, #backtoschool, #halloween) and hashtags for evergreen content that works well on Pinterest (e.g., #mealplanning, #hairgoals, #homedecor),” points out the expert. 

On the flip side, it has been reported that “having too many hashtags in your descriptions may negatively impact your ranking.” In fact, you can use only one in the description of the Promoted Pin. 

How to Use Twitter Hashtags

It’s no secret, but the history of hashtags originates from Twitter, first used on this social platform in 2007:

Twitter encouraged to use them in tweets to make it easier for people to find relevant conversations and make descriptions shorter. 

Instead of writing a long text, people would create a short one, full of hashtags, to make their tweets discoverable from different angles. However, it has been concluded that tweets with one hashtag can generate more engagement than posts with two or more. 

To find hashtags on Twitter, just use the search bar.

Hubspot has analyzed millions of tweets and made a list of the most popular Twitter hashtags to get more likes and retweets. According to their research, the 25 best hashtags to use on Twitter can fit into five groups: 

1. Cryptocurrency: The recent rise of cryptocurrency remains one of the most spoken of topics on social media — #ico, #ethereum, and #crypto occupy the top three positions in terms of use. In fact, #cryptocurrency and #bitcoin are also very popular.
2. History Months: #blackhistorymonth and #womenshistorymonth were ranked 5th and 6th spots, respectively.
3. Holidays/Other Days: Aside from hashtags directly connected with the crypto world, the rest of the top analyzed included #happyeaster, #happybirthday, #internationalwomensday, #piday, #worldwaterday, and #starwarsday. #Fathersday, #maythe4thbewithyou, and #memorialday were in frequent rotation as well.
4. Contests: To find a good contest to improve the engagement rate on Twitter, you can use #contest and #giveaway.
5. Evergreen Content: These types of hashtags are universal but less topical and strong-performing – #photography, #funny, or #pets.

How to Use Instagram Hashtags

Making Instagram hashtags, you ensure that your photos all go into respective streams that can be found and followed using the search box. 

People use them with the purpose of discovering content relevant to them, following like-minded professionals, and thus exposing themselves to a larger audience.

To keep yourself posted, just like on LinkedIn, you can now follow hashtags on Instagram. 

To be more specific, one study has concluded that posts with at least one hashtag have 12.6% more engagement than those without on Instagram.

Overall, you can include no more than 30 hashtags per post. 

Influencer Marketing Hub has collected the most used ones in the world into one list: #love, #instagood, #photooftheday, #fashion, #beautiful, #happy, #cute, #tbt, #like4like, #followme, #picoftheday, #follow, #me, #selfie, #summer, #art, #instadaily, #friends, #repost, #nature, #girl, #fun, #style, #smile, #food. 

#Love has been used in 1.6 billion posts, while #instagood has recently crossed the threshold of 1 billion. 

You can use the above in your own posts, but not too often because they can be easily crowded out. The best strategy would be to use hashtags that have less competition and can make your posts stand out in combination with the most popular ones.

[Tweet “#Love is the most used hashtag in the world. Love wins.”]

Tools That Simplify Hashtag Research

Hashtag trends may change at lightning speed. Today people show their interest in a specific topic, tomorrow they no longer care. To know what’s buzzing, you might need to do research. Here are some tools to help you out: 

• Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that collects online mentions of predefined keywords and provides social media analytics. Brand24 analyzes millions of social media mentions to find these containing your keywords. Then, the tool analyzes all of these mentions to find top 100 most popular hashtags on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
• RiteTag, in turn, is a good search tool that’s applicable to Facebook. It gives you access to timely data showing your hashtag’s performance.

How Do You Use Hashtags?

Even though making hashtags seems like an easy task right now, you still need to think of the content that you’re going to use with those hashtags. Alone, they won’t save your engagement rate. 

The more visual the content, the better! PromoRepublic’s library includes 100,000+ premade creatives that can be scheduled to be published on five different networks – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Just choose your industry and enjoy the process!

The post How to Use Hashtags to Bump up Your Social Media Accounts appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

According to HubSpot, about 90% of B2B buyers have stated that online content greatly influences their purchasing decisions.

A well-thought-out content strategy is critical for growing your brand and attracting new customers. To execute one, it is necessary to create a structured and organized content plan. The key to successful content marketing is all in the planning.

If you think that content planning is energy-draining and time-consuming process, you’re not exactly right. What if I told you, it’s possible to plan out a year’s worth of content in just one day?

Continue reading this article to learn how!

3 Reasons for Planning Out your Content in Advance

Planning out your content is not an easy task. One might think that creating content spontaneously is less demanding than planning (spoiler: It’s not).

So, is it really worth it?

Yes, it is. And, here’s why:

• It keeps your content organized and consistent. Consistency is key to the success of your content marketing campaign. Planning out your content in advance is a great way to keep your online presence on track and be consistent in posting no matter what.
• It gives you more time to interact with your audience. That’s no secret – communicating with your audience is highly important. However, when you have to constantly come up with new content ideas it becomes a real challenge. A content plan can free up time for you to interact with the audience.
• It helps to keep track of the posted content. Our memory is not flawless. You can’t guarantee to keep track of every single piece of content that you make. A well-structured content plan can.

How to Plan Out a Year’s Worth of Content in 1 Day

Step 1. Set goals 

The first step of planning your content is setting relevant, measurable, and realistic goals.

Think about what you want to achieve with your content this year. Are you looking for more engagement on social media and blog? Are you wishing to increase brand awareness? Are you interested in generating more leads and customers? Are you trying to build trust with your audience?

The content you make should help you achieve these goals – keep this in mind when planning out your marketing activities. This approach will help you to create the exact type of content that you need to accomplish your goals.

Here are a few helpful tips on setting goals for the content you are planning to make:

• Be as specific as possible;
• Make sure these goals are measurable;
• Divide big goals into smaller ones and give time frames in which these goals should be achieved;
• Make sure your goals are actually realistic and attainable;

Step 2. Think of your audience

Creating content just for the sake of keeping up with marketing trends is a total waste of time. Your content must be relevant, helpful, and valuable for your audience. Once you know the preferences and problems of your target audience, you can make content that they need and want.

• Who are your ideal customers? 
• How old are they, where do they live?
• What devices do they use and platforms?
• What kind of content can make the biggest impact on your audience?
• What pain points do they have?
• What potential questions can they have about your product or service?
• What triggers your audience’ emotions?

Knowing the answers to these questions can give you some initial direction and help you avoid creating content that doesn’t resonate with your target market. If you can’t answer these questions with confidence, consider conducting market research, Doing it is the most effective way to understand what kind of content you should create to get the most out of it.

Step 3. Brainstorm content ideas

To plan out your content for a year, you have to decide what exactly it is you’ll be creating. While there are plenty of options available, from blog posts to webinars, it makes sense to pick types of content that you’re capable of producing in terms of your budget, man-hours and other resources.

Generally speaking, types of content can be categorized into three main groups: Video, Written, and Visual content.

• Video content 
  • product demonstrations
  • reviews & testimonials
  • how-to tutorials
  • webinars & live videos
  • interviews, etc.
• Written content
  • blog posts
  • white papers
  • ebooks
  • case studies, etc.
• Visual content
  • images
  • Infographics
  • memes & GIFs
  • checklists
  • screenshots, etc.

The most effective strategy is to experiment with different types of content and figure out what works best for your audience. 

When you’ve made the decision regarding content types, brainstorm some ideas from different categories that you’ll be able to actually put into action. This will help you to form a vision of your content strategy for a year and come up with actual ideas on what you can create.

Step 4. Start building an editorial calendar

Editorial calendars are real lifesavers for content creators. They help to organize and categorize the content you plan to publish in the future. As a result, editorial calendars allow keeping your online presence on track and ensuring that all your platforms are covered every day of the year.

To start building your own editorial calendar, you first need to determine your optimal posting schedule. Focus specifically on when is the best time for your brand to post and what is the ideal posting frequency that your audience prefers.

• Where is your target audience located?
• When and how often does your audience go online?
• What posting time is most relevant to them?

There are plenty of planning tools and pre-made templates available online, such as Evernote or Trello. If you don’t feel like trying out new tools, these ones will do!

Step 5. Start scheduling your posts

While it does not seem possible to create posts for the whole year in a day, it’s a good idea to schedule a few most important ones. 

For instance, research relevant events in your industry and prepare short posts for social about them. This way you’ll be sure not to miss out significant dates even if their existence slips your mind during the year. Use a tool like Wave Social Calendar to search for trending holidays, observances, and events for your industry.

To schedule your social media posts in advance, use a publishing calendar like Smart Posting by PromoRepublic.

Summing Up

Planning out your content is no less important than actually creating it.

When done right, a content plan can enhance your marketing efforts dramatically. Follow our guide to plan out a year’s worth of content –  in just one day.

What’s your biggest struggle when planning out content? Feel free to share in the comments!

The post How to Plan Out a Year’s Worth of Content in 1 Day appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

• How to Measure Social Media Success
• Awareness Metrics
  • 1. Brand Awareness
  • 2. Post Reach
  • 3. Audience Growth Rate
  • 4. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)
• Engagement Metrics
  • 5. Average Engagement Rate
  • 6. Amplification Rate
  • 7. Virality Rate
• Conversion Metrics
  • 8. Conversion Rate
  • 9. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • 10. Bounce Rate
  • 11. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
• Tracking Social Media Metrics Has Never Been Easier

How to Measure Social Media Success

There are different ways to measure social media performance metrics. But there’s one universal and relevant way. Track specific numbers as they relate to the top stages of the funnel:

1. Awareness reflects all the metrics that connect your current and potential audience with your brand.
2. Engagement combines numbers, illuminating how audiences engage or interact with your content.
3. Conversion, in turn, is a way to demonstrate how effective and persuasive your content strategy on social media really is.

It largely depends on social media algorithms and your activity. If the leads will get to know your brand, engage with you, or convert. PromoRepublic gives you access to thousands of post ideas, visuals, and templates. To generate more compelling content, sign up for a free trial below:

Awareness Metrics

Awareness banks on metrics that entail the number of your followers and the number of impressions from your posts.

1. Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness is all the attention and understanding your brand gets from the audience on social media. It will be easier to discover your brand if you stick to a social media posting schedule and publish consistently.

Do it for a certain period of time (a week, a month, or a quarter). Then, you can start creating analytical reports based on data you collected on your business pages. First off, you can consider @mentions, shares, links, and expressions during a reporting period.

Generally, there are three things you can do to measure social media marketing success. Based on brand awareness, consider the following:

1. Identify the attention metrics that you will track, tied to your goals, further connected with brand awareness.
2. Decide on the reporting period during which you’ll be collecting the above information.
3. Track, figure out the trends, and improve on the data you get.

You can use PromoRepublic to track brand mentions on six social media channels.

2. Post Reach

Post Reach refers to the number of people who have seen a post since its publication.

Based on post reach, you can make actionable assumptions. Specifically, figuring out the perfect timing and the type of content you publish. This metric encourages you to answer two questions correctly:

• When is my audience the most active during the day?
• What are my audience’s favorite topics?

To measure post reach, analyze any post you have. Divide the reach by the total number of followers to your page and multiply by 100. You’ll get a percent signifying how well your posts are performing on social.

Use PromoRepublic’s tool to post when your audience is the most active to get a higher result.

3. Audience Growth Rate

Audience Growth Rate is a metric that evaluates how fast your number of followers increases on social media. In simple terms, it reflects how quickly you gain followers during a certain period of time.

The best way to discover if Audience Growth Rate increases, is to compare it with a reporting period from the past. You’ll need to have solid data with a proven time record to measure your social media performance based on this metric.

This approach to numbers in marketing shifts from the actual number of followers you get. You should rather ask yourself how fast you managed to gain them.

The formula anticipates dividing new followers by your total audience and multiplying by 100.

4. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)

Social Share of Voice is another measurement. It reveals how many people have mentioned your brand on social media, directly or indirectly. But this time all the data should be compared to your competitors.

SSoV is supposed to tell you about your competitive position in the market. Measuring social media success, in this case, is not rocket science.

Count your mentions, your competitor’s mentions, and get the total of both. After that, divide your brand mentions by the total you received previously and multiply by 100.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics are one of the most interesting and easiest numbers to track. They demonstrate what people do to interact with your content. This can be displayed in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

5. Average Engagement Rate

Average Engagement Rate is one more metric for social media success. It displays the number of engagement actions, usually represented as likes, shares, or comments, in relation to your total number of followers.

LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, show you the engagement rate immediately. You don’t have to zoom in to the actual numbers of likes or shares. If the engagement rate is high, your content resonates with the audience, which is a super good sign.

If you still need to do the calculation, total the actions under your posts and divide it by your total number of followers. Don’t forget to multiply by 100 to get the actual percent.

6. Amplification Rate

Amplification Rate is the percentage reflecting the number of shares per single post relative to the number of page followers.

Wondering how to track social media metrics of this kind? Calculate how many times your post was shared. Divide it by the number of your entire follower base. Further multiply it by 100 to get the percentage.

7. Virality Rate

In turn, the Virality Rate is calculated taking into account the number of people who shared your post and the number of unique views impressions during a certain period of time that gets measured.

To measure Virality Rate, there are three steps to take. Consider measuring impressions and post’s shares respectively and do the calculation. To get the percentage, just divide the number of shares by the number of impressions and then do the multiplication as in all the cases mentioned above.

Conversion Metrics

Getting a high conversion rate from social media is a dream of every marketer. It would definitely mean that social media meets business expectations. However, being the most important social media metrics, this rate is the hardest to get. In fact, it needs a higher-level view of the campaign, as compared to other metrics.

8. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate includes metrics for social media success that measures the effectiveness of social media engagement. In simple words, you should track the number of visitors who come from your social media pages. Take a look at how many people sign up on the form, become subscribers or clients. Whatever is your goal. To get the number, just divide conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100.

To become measurable, the Conversion Rate usually requires more actions than the metrics above. It’s advisable to make a link with a call-to-action trackable before you publish the post, to be able to see where the visitors come from.

9. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is one of the most popular metrics used by marketers to measure success of their posts. It shows how often people actually click on your posts to go to your website, for example. The higher the CTR, the more unique and compelling is the content you produce. You can confidently say that you write actionable posts.

Social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn provide a CTR to every post, so you won’t need to bother about measuring it yourself. But if that is the case and you want to do it yourself, just divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions. After multiplying by 100, you have your CTR right there.

10. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate shapes the percentage of visitors who click on a link in your post and immediately discontinue their journey leaving the page. A high bounce rate would mean that people don’t take any additional actions, landing on your website, which is a good warning sign that you might be speaking to the wrong audience.

In fact, you can compare Bounce Rates from visitors who come from different social channels and make assumptions regarding your next steps, depending on the number. It will help you answer the question of whether you’re targeting the right audience with each. Bounce Rate is also the only social media metrics to track and keep at a lower percentage. To measure it manually, you’ll need access to Google Analytics and its Acquisition tab.

11. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Cost-Per-Click is a term in paid advertising and the number aiming to measure social media marketing success from a paid campaign, for example. Basically, it’s the amount of money you pay for a click in any sponsored post you should track all the time after creating advertisements on social. It’s better not to leave it unattended, as it can change depending on the social networks you’re using to promote content.

Tracking Social Media Metrics Has Never Been Easier

Measuring social media performance metrics seems like a daunting task, as there are lots of numbers to track and improve upon. But today, social media business pages have extended analytics reports. They allow you to see how everything’s growing or decreasing. Analytical reports focus on almost every point in the above list. Often times, you won’t need to make calculations yourself. But it’s still good to be equipped with the knowledge where comes what. What social media metrics are your guiding light? Which ones do you use to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

The post Social Media Metrics That Really Matter appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.