Author: Jessica Burkhead

Monday Morning Social Media Routine

Jessica Burkhead

In the world of social media no day is the same so you are constantly on top of your toes. We understand this but also know there are a few things you can do each Monday to get you ready for the week and stay on top of your goals and consumers.

  1. Follow Up on Your Weekend
    • You may or may not be active over the weekend but it’s important to check first thing Monday that everything went out smoothly.
    • It’s also a great time to see if you had any engagement or mentions that you should respond to immediately.
  2. Check your Analytics
    • What time of day and days of the week received the most engagement?
    • What times of content got the largest responses? (photos, status, video, links, etc)
    • How did any of your social media ads perform?
  3. Make a Plan
    • Put your learnings into action and create a plan for the week including adjustments to make and what content you will share.
    • Create an engagement plan including how many people to begin following and searching out on various platforms.
    • Check your keywords, what’s trending based on the content you plan on creating this week?
  4. Plan weekly content
    • Create your call to actions based on this weeks goals, are you driving to your website, a webinar, to purchase, etc?
    • Start putting together your content and matching it up with your planned timing.
    • Prepare visuals to go with your content.
    • Plan any ad budget for your content when available.
  5. Curate
    • Did you miss anything related to your industry or that may resonate with your consumers this weekend?
    • Are your feeds set up for any new articles or information for the week?
    • Start collecting and organizing curated information into your content calendar.
  6. Final Checklist
    • Do you have any important dates this week such as holidays, company happenings or weekly updates?
    • Have you set up your monitoring and engagement plan for the week? Read our post on increasing twitter engagement if you need help getting started.
    • Do any ads need adjusting or do you need to start and create new ads?
    • Are all of your documents and tools up to date?
  7. Coffee Break
    • Well it’s not exactly related but it will help jump start your morning! Once you’ve put together your plan and gotten your week off to a good start, now is the perfect time for a coffee or tea break to get you ready for the week.
    • Have a chat with coworkers, they may have general knowledge of company happenings or consumer behaviors from the weekend you can use! Who know’s.
    • Also, step away from the computer :)

Did we miss any steps? Tell us below!

Or do you want an easy way out? If the above is taking too long or not giving you the results you expect, then check out LiftMetrix. Each week we prepare insights based on how your content performed taking into consideration your business objectives. In addition, each day your recommendations are updated in a way you can understand. Simply adjust your content based on these recommendations to see your ROI grow and keep your boss smiling. Recommendations include which days and times to post, how many times to post, types of content, character length and more. Set up a free consultation today or just go straight for our 14 day free trial!

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Content Curation in Four Steps

Jessica Burkhead 1 Comment

Everyone says “Content is King” and really, it is for all of your digital efforts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to do all the work! We think social media is for sharing and that includes content! If you see good content, leverage it! Here are 4 simple steps for content curation to amplify your existing digital efforts:

  • Get Set Up! This includes searching out industry news sites, blogs, partners and affiliates and putting together an RSS feed. There are many great tools out there such as feedly, storify, flipboard and of course is integrated into many social management software. In addition, we would recommend creating a twitter list to easily see their content on a daily basis.
  • Determine what’s relevant. Although you will see tons of great content, you can’t overwhelm your readers and followers. If you are unsure how many posts you should share per day, try using a tool such as LiftMetrix with custom recommendations including number of posts per day. It’s important to decide what’s relevant to your users and what you want to share. In addition, make sure you have an opinion on things you share as well. Again think about using tools or analytics to see how your users engage and leverage your entire team to come up with a list of requirements to decide relevant content.
  • Prepare to share :) When sharing content, not only do you want to get it out but also add your opinion or a reason to share. Either write your opinion within your social copy or add more through your blog, but always, always give credit to the original author including linking or tagging on social.
  • Organize and Track! This is always the end of any process…but maybe the most important. When posting and tracking, add keywords or tags and understand what types of content are working the best with your audience. From there adjust your strategy from #1 based on your findings. Within LiftMetrix you can add tags to posts and then receive insights and recommendations based on these keywords.

There are tons of great tools out there to help with your content curation, scheduling and posting, such as one of our partners Hootsuite. See our blog post on the integration here. We’d love to hear which ones you use and prefer in the comments below!

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Four Steps to Analyzing Your Social Media Data

Jessica Burkhead 1 Comment

Social Media has developed rapidly over the years and become a large part of the marketing strategy. As the emphasis continues to be on Social Media for most businesses, it’s important to have a process in place to understand if and how it’s working for your business. In addition, that you are measuring against your main business objectives and KPI’s as you would for your other tactics.

Social media offers almost unlimited possibilities in terms of spreading brand awareness, driving website traffic, and creating meaningful relationships with your audience. Analyzing your social media data to inform business decisions helps social media professionals to prove ROI to their superiors and team.

Measure Your ROI in LiftMetrix

Below are four steps to analyzing your social media data:

  1. Decide what success looks like. Understanding your business and social objectives can sometimes be the hardest part but it’s the most important. Pay attention to the right metrics & KPIs and connect to overall goals.
  2. Collect Data. Leverage tools or native platforms to pull your data for specific date ranges depending on your needs. Most teams have set intervals to report on metrics but we’d recommend once a month at a minimum.
  3. Create Your Report. Once you have all of your relevant data it’s time to put it into a nice report to easily communicate your findings with all of your colleagues. Sometimes the way you present the data is more important than what the data says. Create a standard template that is easy to read and highlights wins and recommendations for your strategy moving forward.  If you use LiftMetrix you can easily see how your data affects your ROI and leverage insights and recommendations prepared by your own ‘data scientist’ so you can quickly make adjustments to your content and posting strategy.
  4. Understand New Trends and Industry Changes. Social Media is constantly changing so it’s important to stay on top of the industry. Adjustments to algorithms, new platforms and growing audiences are important changes to stay on top of for future measurement and strategy changes.

Once you have a process nailed down it’s easy to know what to look for and how to track against your overall goals. In no time you will be able to share actionable strategy changes that may help your KPIs and lift your ROI.  Let us know what other steps you use in the process or if you have a template you want to share!

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Identifying and Comparing Against Competitors

Jessica Burkhead

When you are just getting started on social media it’s important to see what’s out there and who better to look at than your competitors. But you may be wondering, who are my competitors? Sometimes it’s trickier than you think when you aren’t a typical brand, such as Nike, and the hard part is typically identifying a competitor or even narrowing down what you do!

Keep in mind a competitor may not necessarily mean you are direct competition but you can learn from someone who has the same target audience or types of products. So now, think about the key things you do and who you do it for, then find brands or companies with the following in mind:

  • Similar product offerings
  • Same target audience (age groups, industry, B2B/B2C, gender, etc)
  • Do searches and monitor keywords that are included in your main business to identify others

Once you have your competitors identified it’s time to see what they are doing. You have a few options, you should start by finding and following all of their existing pages and taking a peek at what’s happening on their pages (we prefer to use our personal sites for this).

From there, you may spend quite a bit of time trying to find the types of content they are finding successful and any key themes they are using. Another option is to leverage us (LiftMetrix) to do the hard work for you, by simply popping in the Facebook page of those competitors and then we can pull their details from 7 social sites and do the analysis for you. We can provide recommendations and analysis on their types of content, what seems to be working, engagement rates, etc.

Any other things we forgot that you find useful when comparing against competitors? Comment below!

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Five Simple Ways to Improve Twitter Engagement

Jessica Burkhead

We must admit we’ve been so focused on everything else, including our new website, version 2.0 and our recent integration with HootSuite that we haven’t put much focus on Twitter.  Now that we are full steam ahead we are back at it and thought we would share some simple techniques we have been using to boost our followers and increase engagement:

    1. Personality in your content can go a long way. Being personable, adding some sass and humor will get people to follow and engage. Use your copy as the voice of your brand and your followers will not only feel they can relate but also want to talk to you. Some simple changes could help you stand out in the clutter of information!
    2. Hashtags, Hashtags, Hashtags! Need we say more? Well we will :) Hashtags can help you categorize your brand and your message whether it is related to your products, services, etc and add value to say what you are offering your audience. Not only does it help your followers engage but it will help you appear in other related conversations happening on Twitter.
    3. Add Images to your copy. Including a visual that users can’t scroll past will encourage them to interact through a RT, reply or click. Just make sure that image is related to your content so you are driving quality interactions.
    4. Use actionable words so that users know what you want them to do. This is especially important when thinking about what your objective is, such as click for a free trial, download now, etc. Twitter has even stated that using actionable words will increase clicks by 13 percent on average.
    5. Check the Time! Most audiences are more engaged and active at nights and on weekends so watch your audience and tweet when they are watching.  There are lots of great tools (including LiftMetrix) that will give you valuable metrics to ensure you are engaging when your target audience is watching.

 

What tips or tricks do you use to jump start your engagement?

(Oh and don’t forget to give us a follow @LiftMetrix!)

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