Social media Archives - Page 2 of 2

20 Top Tips for Creating Engaging & Informative Content

Everyone in business knows that we should be engaging with our customers on a daily basis with rich, informative content. It sounds great until you actually sit down, switch on your computer… and then stare at it for an hour because you don’t know where to start.

So to help get your creative juices going, here are our top 20 ways of engaging with your customers online.

1 – Infographics – Create some visual representations of ideas and information found on your website. Infographics are so much more interesting (and often more informative) than large passages of text.

2 – Memes – Those little videos and images with witty comments are often the messages that go viral.

3 – Videos – Create videos (short & sweet) giving information regarding your products and services. Don’t worry about how you sound or look like, non-professionally produced videos appear much more authentic.

4 – Product Reviews – Got a new product? Put together a product review to allow customers an insight into what you really think.

5 – User Generated Content – Get customers to produce content for you. Share stories and content from third party websites you find interesting or promote good practice.

6 – How to Guides – Put together a range of helpful guides aimed at people that use your products and services.

7 – Lists – People love lists and they improve talkability. Even a list like this one!

8 – Photo Galleries – A picture paints a thousand words. Create galleries of products and theme them to make them more interesting.

9 – Case Studies – Use these to show the breadth and depth of what you have to offer your customers and underline how great you are. Make sure they’re up-to-date and are heavy on pictures and light on text.

10 – Client Testimonials – Testimonials build trust and loyalty. So when a customer says what you did was great, ask for it in writing. Better still, ask if you can film them saying it.

11 – Newsletters – Keep in touch with your email subscribers with a monthly update featuring new products and the highlights of any articles, blogs, videos and social media posts you’ve put out that month.

12 – GIFS – Use clips from videos embedded with text to demonstrate a point.

13 – Events – Create online events like Zoom webinars to engage with your customers , record them and share with others that couldn’t attend.

14 – Images – Use, wherever possible, original images to demonstrate and reinforce written messages.

15 – Podcasts – To convey ideas that don’t necessarily require visuals, put together some podcasts on various themes that may interest your customers.

16 – Slideshares – Get innovative with Powerpoint or Keynote and create decks of slides to inform and engage with your customers and share them online.

17 – Blog Posts – If no one was interested in opinions, they wouldn’t buy newspapers. Get your thoughts down in order and publish them. Try to ensure they are not time sensitive and can be read anytime.

18 – Newsjacking – Take a news story and use it to create content that will attract positive exposure for your brand.

19 – Press Releases – Directly target the media with industry news that may be of interest to their readers.

20 – Polls – Create polls to get your customers voting and seek out their preferences and their dislikes.

If you need help with any of the above, contact the Local Pages team on 0117 923 1122 or drop us a line at info@localpages.co.uk

Leave a commentBlog, Branding, Creative, Design, Help & Advice, Marketing, Small businesses, Social media, Websites

5 Social Media Strategy Tips For Local Businesses

Whether you’re a multinational corporation or a one-man band, using social media is a powerful and cost-effective way to grow your business. If you’re looking to target customers local to you, here are a few things to consider.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY CONVERSATION

It’s one thing posting and tweeting to keep followers updated. But wherever you’re based, there are guaranteed to be online conversations taking place in your community about the things that matter to you. Identifying the most relevant and adding your voice to them is a great way to build valuable connections.

As it’s a conversation and not a sales pitch, being open, friendly and not too “salesy” always helps. As do tagging, @mentioning and using local #hashtags.

CONTENT IS KING

There are loads of interesting tools out there to make social output more interesting and engaging. Most are pretty simple to use. Emojis, Vines, Snapchat filters or even the simple act of posting a tweet with an image is proven to significantly increase engagement vs. those without.

Landscape gardener? Try creating gifs that showcase before and after shots. Restaurant? How about a Twitter poll to pick a new dish on the menu?

To see what works, test a few out and stick with the ones people engage with most.

KEEP GOING!

Social media never sleeps, so it’s vital to be prepared for the long game. The relatively small pool of a local area means that once people become aware of you online, they’ll expect to hear from you and talk to you on a regular basis.

Having someone permanently dedicated to it is the simplest approach. Though I have other duties at READY, one of my tasks is to manage our social channels. I devote time to it every day, and we’re significantly growing our following as a result.

HAVE A PLAN, AND STICK TO IT

It’s important to set a long-term strategy complete with goals and measurable results. Otherwise how do you know if what you’re doing is working

It can be done alone, or with an expert’s help. However, we’d advise keeping day-to-day management in-house. Your staff know your products and the community you’re targeting better than anyone outside your business.

Do ensure they have clear rules and governance to follow, particularly in terms of what’s appropriate to post and what isn’t.

THINK ABOUT CAMPAIGNS

As mentioned, regular maintenance is essential for building your business’s profile. But consider dedicated campaigns too, like competitions, promotions or celebrations around particular occasions or local events.

To maximise impact, it’s essential to plan them well in advance and set clear objectives, such as capturing data or generating an uplift in sales. Social platforms offer plenty of nifty tracking options, which you can use to measure performance and identify improvements for future campaigns.

Did you like this post? You might also be interested in Choosing The Right Social Media Platforms.

Leave a commentBlog, Social mediafacebook, local businesses, marketing, snapchat, social media, twitter

Choosing The Right Social Media Platforms

Image Credit: https://edubirdie.com/

With so many social media networks available and different people getting excited about different ones, the choice of which social media platforms to choose can be quite overwhelming for busy business owners.

Having been on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for around 7 years – and Google+ and other networks more recently – here’s how I position the main social networks to people who ask.

LinkedIn for substance – this is a social media platform where we can position ourselves and our businesses, describing who we are, what we do, and why people should care, in the many 2,000 character sections in the profile. Then we can add multi-media, status updates and much more to build a rich picture, to attract, engage and nurture business relationships. As the leading business to business network, with over 400m personal profiles and 8.5m company profiles, being on LinkedIn is a logical choice for B2B professionals and businesses. If you and your business have knowledge and expertise then showcase it on LinkedIn using an educational marketing strategy. If you want business customers or business partners look on LinkedIn.

Twitter for Soundbites – 140 characters creates brevity that makes reading and creating Tweets an art form. It’s a quick way to share a thought, a resource, a moment or an emotion. It’s also an incredibly useful source of information. Want to know how a football or rugby game is going? Look on Twitter. What to know who’s influential about a topic? Check the #hashtags on Twitter. Does your business create, or can you curate lots of quick, short messages? If that suits your business schedule and customer relationship style then get active on Twitter.

Facebook for Family and Friends – and it’s also great for businesses and brands who sell to consumers. It’s also good for local businesses, especially ones where casual, friendly, person to person relationships are a big part of the business essence. If you and your business offer products or services aimed at consumers then you should definitely be present and active on Facebook. If you can create a community feel and involve people in your Facebook activity then you’re onto a winner.

Google+ for SEO – although the Google+ community is not as far reaching as Facebook or Twitter, or as business oriented as LinkedIn, I’ve still found it’s very good for getting status updates indexed because it’s a Google network. So, if you want to appear in search results pages then put status updates including keywords into Google+ with links to your website landing pages or blog articles, and build a power group who will share them on a reciprocal basis.

Many other social media networks exist, such as Instagram and Pinterest, and content network such as YouTube, Slideshare and Periscope. It’s worth having a presence on all networks, even if most are passive place-holders and sign-posts to your primary network.

And I’d say there are three factors to bear in mind when choosing which network(s) to use.

Where are your ideal customers or your target audience if you want referrals or partners?
Go where your current customers are, because the likelihood is that there will be similar people who are not yet customers on that network. And consider specific audiences such as partners, suppliers, introducers, media, investors etc. as they may be on a different network to your customers.
What type of content do you want to share? If your content is visual then you have a more difficult choice. If it is primarily written then LinkedIn is best.
If you can make your content visual as pictures and images then check Instagram and Pinterest, if infographics and presentations then look at Slideshare and LinkedIn, or if video then it’s YouTube and Periscope. Having said that, all networks have become much more visual. When a picture says more than a thousand words it’s worth finding a theme about your business that you can show visually. Then choose a network that allows you to really showcase that content, and encourage people to share and distribute it for you.
What type of conversation do you want to have? Chatty and informal or considered and professional?
If you want to be chatty then Twitter and Facebook are good. If you want to have a more serious business discussion then LinkedIn is better. Each network has an etiquette, and we risk looking out of place if our behaviour is inappropriate.

Leave a commentMarketing, Social mediafacebook, linkedin, marketing process, social media, twitter

Turning Social Media Into Lead Generation

Put your hand up if you like being bored by what you see, hear & read?? No of course not! None of us want to log on to Twitter or Facebook or wherever and find it as dull as watching paint dry. Noooooo we want excitement and thrills. We want laughs and crys. Ooohhh’s and ahhhhh’s. When our minds are being intellectually challenged and our hearts are being stroked with human stories of kindness and gratitude and love, guess what happens? We fall in love! OK, so not quite but you get the idea. We form an emotional attachment and fondness for these people/brands/businesses that make us feel: Happy, understood, cared for, confident, humoured and so on. This is where social media comes in.

When you can make someone FEEL something positive and good from their experience with you, even when that experience just means them retweeting you or commenting on your post or repinning your pin, you are starting a meaningful connection. Their experience doesn’t have to be a face to face one or something lengthy over a period of time with many backwards and forwards communications. In today’s society we’re all busy and we do things faster and we want things done with speed. Quick
brief nuggets of conversations spattered about here and there are what’s expected and what is the norm. The important factor is to ensure these nuggets make people feel good!

What I’ve been talking about here is: Stimulation. In order to for your social media activity to channel through into new customers and repeat customers (as these are very important too & mustn’t be forgotten) the key element for success is keeping your readers stimulated! However much you love joining in Twitter Chats and sharing your thoughts on a discussion thread on LinkedIn you are not solely doing this for the pure joy of it. Or are you?? Well, for most of us our strategy is to build our network, our connections and our business reputation to as many of the right people as possible to propel our businesses forward for bigger profitability and business growth. And for this we need.. Dah dah dah SALES!! We need to generate quality leads by using this wonderful thing called social media!

You might be interested to know that the definition of “lead generation” is: The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline. (https://www.marketo.com)

There are two significant words here: Stimulating (yep think I’ve got my point across about this!) and Capturing.

It is a complete waste of time if you’re spending your precious energy creating incredibly amazing content for your social media campaigns that is highly stimulating, engaging and useful, if you are then not capturing your reader’s interest. Otherwise you’ve just let them slip through the net to swim off to a competitor of yours. I’m not implying you should be asking people for their email address and phone number at every opportunity but you do need to have a capturing method in place with a plan and a structure, so that when appropriate you are obtaining contact information and you are using it wisely! By wisely, I mean storing in a CRM system that easily and smoothly allows you to communicate effectively with your audience to keep them stimulated!

Leave a commentSocial mediafacebook, lead generation, linkedin, social media, twitter

Welcome to The Little Blue Blog!

Hello and welcome to the Little Blue Blog! We’re so happy you found our little corner of the Internet. Here we hope to provide both practical and informative weekly content on how to effectively market and grow your small business; alongside some interviews with local businesses and snapshots from the areas where our Little Blue Books are distributed.

Local Pages was founded in 1979 by Boris Bernard. It remains a family company to this day with his two sons, Dan and Ollie at the helm supported by their amazing team. The world has changed a lot since the 70’s. Promoting and marketing your business has never been easier, yet at the same time, it’s more complex than ever with the overwhelming amount of platforms and ways to do this.

We’re passionate about small businesses and our goal is to become a one-stop-shop for all marketing strategy. From advertising in our heritage Little Blue Books to social media and website design & hosting, we’re here to provide solutions. Connecting local people with local businesses is at the core of Local Pages.

Thanks for stopping by! We’re a friendly bunch, so please feel free to comment on or share our posts – we’d love hearing from you. Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and please subscribe to The Little Blue Blog.

Leave a commentAdvertising, Design, Marketing, Print, Small businesses, Social media, Websitesbusiness directory, family business, local businesses, local people