Social Media
Our social media marketing coverage addresses management tools, educational courses, platform tips, social analytics, and strategies for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. We’ve interviewed merchants who rely on social media traffic, and vendors who provide specialized services.
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Social Media
Get More Guest Reviews with TripAdvisor Review Express
September 24, 2015 • Paul Chaney
TripAdvisor now offers a free service called Review Express that lets hotel and B&B owners who have their business listed on the site send review request emails for up to 1,000 guests.
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Social Media
Creating Facebook Custom and Lookalike Audiences, to Drive Traffic
September 23, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Facebook custom audiences can greatly help a business. Facebook has one of the most advanced targeting systems — every Facebook user tells you what she likes and doesn’t like. While that’s ...
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Social Media
7 Ways to Get Yelp Reviews (without Violating Its Policy)
September 10, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Yelp is possibly the most restrictive of all the business directories and review sites when it comes to asking for customer reviews. Basically, “asking” is forbidden, according to its policy guidelines.
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Social Media
Optimizing Instagram for Ecommerce: 10 Tips
September 2, 2015 • Samantha Collier
With 300 million active monthly users and 30 billion photos shared to date, Instagram is one of social media’s great success stories. This social channel is entirely visual, focused on ...
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Social Media
Pinterest: How to Sell Products Using Buyable Pins
August 20, 2015 • Kristine Wirth
Pinterest just launched a new feature, “Buyable Pins,” making it available to all U.S.-based companies. The feature gives smaller retail businesses a unique way to get their products in front of Pinterest's 73 million users.
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Social Media
How to Use Twitter for Remarketing
August 13, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Remarketing is an advertising technique that lets you show ads to people who have visited your website. If you have never used remarketing, perhaps it’s time to start. There are numerous ...
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Social Media
Local Businesses Still Need a Google Plus Page, for Now
August 10, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Google is in the process of slowly dismantling Google Plus, its ill-fated social network. The first signs occurred when Vic Gundotra, then head of the Google Plus project, left the company in 2014, and Google moved many of the project's staffers to other areas.
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Social Media
23 Tools for Social Media Monitoring
August 9, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Social media can be a good resource for promoting a business. But if you’re just plugging your brand, you’re missing the point. Listening to others is an effective way to ...
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Social Media
Little-known Social Media Features that Boost Engagement
July 28, 2015 • Samantha Collier
Once you come to grips with social media, the main functions of each network — posting, sharing, liking, commenting — become second nature. But there’s a hidden world of advanced ...
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Social Media
How to Deal with Negative Comments on Facebook
July 28, 2015 • Rodney Hess
Every small business that participates in social media must be prepared to handle customer service issues from time-to-time. Customers may leave negative comments or reviews about your company, products, or services on occasion, which can be a good thing. It gives you the opportunity to show your followers that you take customer service — and their complaints — seriously.
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Social Media
How to Use Digital Loyalty Programs to Retain Customers
July 27, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Customer loyalty programs operate based on the well-founded notion that it is less expensive to keep a current customer than to find a new one. Providing rewards in the form of points, cash back, and discounts on merchandise can help achieve that goal.
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Social Media
20 Twitter Feeds for Online Merchants
July 27, 2015 • Sig Ueland
With its many experts and evangelists, Twitter is a good place for an online merchant to get help growing a business. The challenge is figuring out whom to follow. Here is a ...
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Social Media
Ad Management Tools Can Save Time, Simplify
July 23, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Managing advertising campaigns across different platforms — such as Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter — can be daunting. Think about it, each platform has a different interface, different targeting options, and seemingly different goals.
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Social Media
Facebook Marketing: 3 New Features for Page Owners
July 22, 2015 • Kristine Wirth
Facebook recently introduced three new features designed to help you market your business through your Facebook page more effectively: Saved Replies, Responsiveness, and Video Metrics.
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Social Media
Marketing to the ‘SoLoMo’ Consumer
July 20, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Three characteristics define today's consumers: They rely on the influence of social network friends and followers when making purchase decisions; they shop locally as well as online, and they are increasingly dependent on mobile devices to find business information.
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Social Media
15 Facebook Marketing Tips for Realtors
July 9, 2015 • Kristine Wirth
Every day, real estate agents use Facebook to connect with prospective home buyers and to foster business relationships with peers. Maintaining these relationships, however, requires a bit of handiwork, which is where this article comes in.
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Social Media
How to Use Foursquare and Swarm to Promote Your Business
July 6, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Foursquare started the social "check-in" craze a few years ago. It has since changed its business model to become a recommendation engine based on user ratings and reviews, similar to Yelp.
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Social Media
Which Social Media Sites Fit Your Ecommerce Company?
July 6, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Yelp, and dozens more: There are so many social media platforms. Which ones should your company be on? If you sell drain cleaner, should your company be on Pinterest?
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Social Media
Facebook Advertising: A Case Study
July 3, 2015 • Rodney Hess
Facebook advertising is nearly essential to the success of any small business's social media marketing efforts. This case study, from a long-standing client, helps prove the point.
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Social Media
8 Content Formats to Jazz-up Social Media Posts
July 1, 2015 • Samantha Collier
It can be easy to fall back on tried and trusted formats when developing content for social media channels. Sometimes there isn’t time to think more widely about the types ...
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Social Media
Social Media: What, When, and Where to Post
July 1, 2015 • Kristine Wirth
As a small business owner, I know how difficult it is to plan exactly where and when to post my social media content. Not only do I want people to see my posts, but also share, like, and comment on them — and click on the links contained in them. Without interaction, social media marketing will do me — or anyone else — little good.
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Social Media
9 Essential Tools for Instagram Marketing
June 23, 2015 • Rodney Hess
Instagram has quickly become one of the best social media marketing platforms for small businesses, to increase awareness and build engagement. A recent Forrester study found that brands on Instagram see an average engagement rate of 4.21 percent.
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Social Media
7 Home Service Marketplaces to List Your Business
June 22, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Consumers can now purchase services from local vendors on-demand and pay for them online, via home service marketplaces. Amazon recently entered this space with its “Home Services” store, but many comparable sites exist that cater to the service sector in one form or another.
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Social Media
Using Short Links to Verify Clicks in Marketing Campaigns
June 17, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Short links are popular. You’ve likely seen them, such as in the form of a bit.ly, though there are plenty of other services. The benefits to using short links are ...
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Social Media
Creative Uses of Facebook Carousel Ads, by Industry
June 10, 2015 • Rodney Hess
Carousel link ads, introduced by Facebook last year, allow a business to display multiple images and links within a single ad. According to Facebook, “When comparing carousel link ads to standard link ads, advertisers saw a 30 to 50 percent decrease in cost per acquisition and a 20 to 30 percent decrease in cost per click.”
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Social Media
How to Measure Conversion Values from Twitter, Facebook
June 3, 2015 • Michael Stancil
While setting up conversion tracking is a must, setting up values for those conversions is equally important. Even if you don’t have an ecommerce site or sell products at a ...
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Social Media
5 Tools to Plan and Post Social Media Content
June 1, 2015 • Samantha Collier
Planning social media content across multiple platforms can be complicated. Social media schedules typically include multiple events and wider marketing initiatives; a seemingly simple social media plan can quickly turn complex. In this post,
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Social Media
7 Web Marketing Automation Tools for Small Businesses
May 25, 2015 • Paul Chaney
Marketing automation platforms can help small businesses with their web marketing efforts. Many platforms are affordable and easy to use. They combine multiple marketing functions into a single interface, which saves time.
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Social Media
15 Tools to Curate Content for Social Media, Newsletters, More
May 17, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Content curation is the process of gathering content — blog posts, images, videos — from a variety of sources. Sharing relevant information with your customers can be an effective way ...
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Social Media
Using Google Tag Manager to Track Social Conversions
May 15, 2015 • Michael Stancil
Tags are code snippets on a web page that track the actions of users on that page. Tags are necessary to measure conversions from marketing campaigns, user activity, and so ...
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