When you're not joining your social media and blogging efforts, you aren't benefitting from their full potential impact

Everybody knows that your blog and social media accounts are essential parts of building an online presence for your brand. Both social media channels and blogs are powerful mechanisms for helping marketers analyze their audience and communicate with them. However, people usually separate these two things and use them to reach different goals. The case is that when you're not joining your social media and blogging efforts, you aren't benefitting from their full potential impact. In this article, I won’t suggest sharing your blog posts on your Twitter and Facebook accounts, as I hope it goes without saying. Instead, I’ll provide you with advice on how to make your marketing even more efficient by making your blog and social media work together.

Why you need to integrate your social media marketing and blogging

You’re most likely to…

Social media competition is fierce and your budget is limited – so you need to make the most of your time and resources in order to make sure your efforts are actually paying off

When it comes to social media marketing, you need all the help you can get to stand out and get results. The competition is fierce and your budget is limited, so you need to make the most of your time and resources in order to make ensure your efforts are paying off. You need to find out what strategies actually work. Where your audience is online. What your audience actually wants to hear from you. And so, so much more. You can do much of this with one simple "trick": leveraging UTM tracking links. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to use UTM tracking links on social media to help boost your results. [si_guide_block id="90657" title="Download our Premium Resource –…

Social media graphics are actually very easy to create – you just a need a little inspiration, a good source of images and a handy tool to help you turn your ideas into reality

If you’ve spent even a few minutes on social media, one thing becomes clear: people love visuals. Visual content gets more shares and greater engagement – in other words, it gets noticed and it gets people to act, whether it’s to share your post, leave a comment or click on a link. But what happens if you’re not a designer? How do you create as many social media graphics as you need to without spending a fortune? Social media graphics are actually very easy to create – you just a need a little inspiration, a good source of images and a handy tool to help you turn your ideas into reality. [si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download our Premium Resource – 10 common…

Unless you know where you currently stand, you won't know what to work on and what kind of improvements you’re making

There’s no doubt that social media is an important channel for marketing, especially with the increasing user base and rapidly evolving features. In fact, 73% of marketers in the State of Social survey said that social media marketing has been effective for their businesses. That said, some businesses may not get the desired results out of their social media marketing efforts - mainly because they’re making critical mistakes. [si_guide_block id="142889" title="Social media report template" description="Clearly show the ROI for your social media campaigns with our easy-to-use report template. It's ideal for internal use, or for presenting to a client you're working with."/] In this post, you’ll discover some of the best ways to improve the ROI of your social media marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look:

1. Use UTMs to…

Progressive web apps can help improve your social media marketing strategies by leveraging your brand

Social media has become a focal point of everyone’s lives. You want to stop wasting your time scrolling Facebook, but it’s very addictive and pleasing. I mean, even with all the negative hype about social media tactics, popular platforms like Facebook still manage to channel a significant audience. Business models decide what to show their customers according to their shopping and online behavior, so this strategy is something that’s partially responsible for you becoming a social media addict. It's is all part of the game and, if you want your business to succeed, you have to be really good at playing. [si_guide_block id="37288" title="Social media marketing audit template" description="Managing social media updates as part of content marketing activities takes time. Make sure you are focusing in the right places and getting the returns on your…

Facebook and Instagram are powerful platforms, but you need to make sure you are using them in the right way and at the right time

Social media has proven to be a really effective marketing platform for all sorts of businesses. Facebook and Instagram are hands down the top-picks amongst them, and here's why. Facebook enjoys over 1.4 billion active daily users and 500,000 more are added each day. Aside from serving as one of the top marketing tools for B2C businesses, it equally offers B2B marketers a great choice with its 'Page' and 'Group' features. Instagram, on the other hand, is emerging as a global marketing tool for B2C businesses. The latest statistics from Omnicore show that Instagram has inspired 72% of users to buy something they saw on the app. Nevertheless, it takes more than pure statistics for these two platforms to effectively impact your company.…

Average just won’t cut it...

95 million images and videos are posted to Instagram every day, and more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook since its conception. The need for brands to stand out in the digital era is obvious, yet every day you’ll see generic and uninspiring images carelessly repurposed across the web. Even household brands fall into the trap: at Picfair, we frequently run reverse image searches of globally-distributed magazine covers to show just how frequently an image has been used. This lack of care shown when selecting imagery runs the risk of brands not only appearing inauthentic but also minimising cut-through on crowded news feeds.

So how can brands ensure their visuals stand out?

1. Be bold

Tapping into trends can work wonders, but it’s also good to break the rules…

An introduction to getting visibility in social streams by understanding the algorithms used by Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest

Google was the first major search engine to use a sophisticated algorithm to determine the relevancy of web pages in search results. Their ‘PageRank’ algorithm – together with a ton of other SEO ranking signals – became synonymous with the search engine and rendered many of the incumbents useless. Goodbye Excite and Lycos. Most social media marketers will be aware of the mysterious and ever-changing ‘EdgeRank’ algorithm employed by Facebook. I have written before on Smart Insights on the ranking / visibility factors for EdgeRank in Facebook’s news feed ranking algorithm which determines whether your post is worthy of dissemination and to whom. EdgeRank is also responsible for the way in which older (but apparently popular) updates often appear on top of newer pieces of content on news feed. EdgeRank is not dissimilar to Google’s PageRank algorithm which is…

Are you using these quick wins for social media?

A lot of businesses are now aware of the importance of building a community when it comes to social media marketing. Because of this, marketers are using more sophisticated strategies to maximize the use of online tools to initiate engagement and interaction with their customers. But not all are reaching the results that they want in terms of exposure or traffic. If you’re still looking for more effective ways to use social media to your advantage, you need to use advanced techniques in reinforcing your marketing message. If you find your results underwhelming and you still don’t know what to do next in creating online presence, here are some of the advanced strategies you can use for your social media marketing efforts.

1. Find out the type of content that’s popular with your competitor’s audience.

It’s no secret that marketers monitor each other’s websites to…

7 techniques to saving hours each week on social media updates

So, what you're saying is you just don't have time for social media, right? You've been on all the courses, you've read the 'How to' books, attended all those breakfast seminars - you know you should be using LinkedIn and Twitter, perhaps even Facebook and you've created your profiles/pages but now you've forgotten about them, save for the occasional tweet, post or comment you leave in a group discussion thread. Why is this happening? It could be simple, you're probably not devoting the right amount of time to doing the right things to make social media work for you effectively. What's the solution? Well you could outsource some of your social media activities but then there's a cost involved in doing so…