by Francois Muscat | Feb 20, 2015 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
Social media marketing has a big influence on the way people feel about and perceive your brand. Ideally, you want people to feel your brand genuinely cares about its customers and sincerely values them, but your social media marketing strategy may not generate those sentiments. If you want to succeed in social selling, you need to cultivate a brand that people trust, that people feel comfortable purchasing from and that has consistent messaging across all platforms. There are many ways in which social media marketing impacts emotional branding and social selling:
- Align your content with your customers’ values. This allows you to become a part of their identity and gives you top-of-mind awareness amongst your core audience. If someone shares an article you post on Facebook, or re-tweets something you authored, it means they’re identifying with the sentiment of the content and in turn, sharing it. Someone who checks a particular website or blog each morning has allowed it to become a part of their identity because it aligns with their values.
- Keep the content consistent, even in small doses. Your interactions with your customers are much like interactions with new friends – you share little bits with one another and as the relationship grows, you share more. Letting your customers know you’re thinking about them, even in a small way, helps build loyalty and allows them to feel acknowledged and appreciated.
- Humanise the experience as much as possible. People want to know there are human beings behind the social media accounts of their favourite brands, not some machine that constantly pumps out self-promotional messages. Answer every question, complaint and comment and ask your customers for feedback, their input is incredibly valuable.
For more information about developing a social media marketing strategy that helps you achieve your business goals, or if you have any general inquiries about the digital marketing services we provide, please do not hesitate to contact us today. We look forward to hearing from you.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 29, 2015 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
Social media marketing is an ever-changing, ever-evolving field and it’s necessary to be flexible, as well as adaptive, to the many changes it undergoes. Rather than abide by a trial and error process in finding out what works and what doesn’t work for your social media strategy, take some advice from the pros at WSI before getting started.
- Check out your competition. There is absolutely nothing wrong with scoping out your competitors, seeing what they’re doing with their social media presence and using their pages as inspiration. This doesn’t mean to copy exactly what they’re doing; rather, it means use it as inspiration and create your own unique take on it.
- Figure out which social media platforms are best suited to your brand or company and focus on developing them. While it may be tempting to create a profile on every available social media platform, there are some which may be ill-suited to your company. Creating profiles on sites that aren’t well-suited to your company is not only a waste of time, it will leave you with a bunch of empty social media pages and this makes it look as if your company simply abandoned them.
- Ensure all your content is easily accessed on mobile phones. This includes videos, photos, blog posts, podcasts and everything else. Now more than ever, most people around the world are using mobile phones to access the Internet and if your content isn’t accessible on a mobile device, you’ll be missing out.
Social media management takes careful consideration and a good chunk of time. At WSI we have a team of social media experts who will work with you to develop a social media presence for your company as well as develop a strategy to help you grow and succeed.
For more information about social media marketing or if you have any questions, please contact WSI today. We look forward to hearing from you.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 26, 2015 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
A new hot trend is emerging for businesses looking to grow their customer base from social media sites. SlideShare is a powerful and popular document and presentation sharing site which allows companies to share their expertise with their consumers and build thought leadership amongst their target audience.
It is a great social media tool for businesses and will continue to yield a great return on your investment. You can upload your presentations in Word and PDF files and then tag and share it across many other social media platforms. You can also embed it on your company’s site or corporate blog.
However, SlideShare isn’t merely a one-way process. Instead, its social functions allow for the site to afford companies the potential to connect with clients and customers in new ways, generating business leads and enhancing your online image and reputation.
Why should you use SlideShare?
Good question, read on:
- SlideShare receives more than 70 million unique visitors each month. This are a lot of potential eyes on your presentation – and even your blog or site.
- SlideShare’s main demographic is Business to Business users in search of great quality content, especially for business purposes.
- Using the correct tags you can easily attract the consumers and users you’re after.
- You can easily embed audio, images, video and an eye catching design into your presentations.
These are only a few of the reasons why SlideShare remains one of the best tools for business social media. When used correctly you can harness the power of this innovative platform to the benefit and advantage of your company.
By partnering with WSI OMS you will enjoy a lucrative partnership with a leader in the social media industry. We are experienced in providing our customers with the best business social media services and tools available today. Contact WSI OMS to learn more about our social media packages and services.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 19, 2015 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
Analysts from around the world have been predicting something of a second tech bubble burst in the social media for business industry for some time now. However, it is yet to happen. In the day and age of micro-payments, it seems even the most niche of start-ups are able to find the customers they need to stay alive.
Social media is all around us these days and it’s being discussed incessantly around the world. Hundreds of businesses have been built by social media networks, with even more deriving most, if not all of their customers from it. Some might argue social media has already reached its saturation point. It started out as being the next best thing – and then it became the next best thing.
Yet social media remains as powerful as ever – for specific target audiences and for specific uses. Most importantly, it remains as powerful as ever for established social networks. Now, companies wanting to jump on the bandwagon of social media for business will need to up the ante to keep their users engaged. Simply pulling off a mere presence in the digital realm will no longer be sufficient to guarantee success and a great ROI.
Is social media over?
According to eMarketer’s new report, social networking sites now reaches the most web users in the U.S. It has become an integral part of South African’s lives and drives change and business trends in most countries around the world.
Social media is not over by a long shot. With the correct strategy and using the social media conversation Prism, your company will still be able to benefit from social media for business. Contact WSI OMS for affordable and expertly managed social media campaigns for your business.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 12, 2015 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
With literally dozens of photo-sharing sites available today, which ones will stand out in 2015 and offer you the best social media investment? With so many sites available, one only needs to look at the excitement amongst users online to determine the viability and popularity of the sites which stand out from the crowd.
There are many photo-sharing websites making a buzz online, so let’s look at the top photo-sharing social media sites that will take your business to new levels in 2015:
- DeviantArt: While this site is not exclusively a photo-sharing site, also acting as an online portfolio site, there are as many animators, illustrators, graphic designers and cartoonists on this site as there are photographers. It is a great online professional artist community designed to let users improve upon and profit from their art.
- Flickr: Flickr remains one of the original pioneers of the minimalist AJAX interfaces. Its GUI continues to be one of the simplest, cleanest and easiest web services of any type of photo-sharing site available today. Its user-friendliness and robust privacy controls continues to make it one of the photo-sharing social media sites to watch out for in 2015.
- Photobucket: This site differs from other photo-sharing websites and services in that it places a far greater emphasis on sharing photos than curating it. It offers great tools for posting and reposting photos to other social networks, services and sites. This is a great site for social photographers and can be harnessed powerfully by business with the right strategy in place.
WSI OMS makes use of the social media conversation Prism where we use social media to drive transparency, vision and value for our customers. For an excellent partner in your social media campaigns, partner with WSI OMS.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 8, 2015 | Community Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization
Social media managers and social media marketers have to juggle a great deal of responsibility, a lot of content and sift through many posts on many social media sites every single day. With so many opportunities for something to go wrong, it’s critical a governance policy be in place and that everyone is on the same page regarding social media policy within a company.
What makes for a good social media governance policy?
- Begin with an audit of your brand’s current social media presence. You should take into account all of your company’s social media pages as this allows you to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for improvement and opportunities for growth. Perhaps you’re particularly active on Twitter yet tend to neglect Facebook, or only post updates once a week, which is not frequent enough. Get the complete picture before devising a strategy.
- Create guildelines and policy for the entire social media team. Spend a day with your social media team and come up with a concrete set of rules which everyone can agree on and ensure everyone understands what to do in certain situations.
- Put your guidelines into place. Social media marketers need to be very aware that it’s necessary to come across as a brand or company which actually cares about its customers, not just a name that keeps pumping out self-serving information.
In the event of a social media mishap or a crisis, a governance policy will be beneficial in helping you handle it in the most effective and professional way. Everyone on the social media team should know what to do during a crisis or a mishap and your governance policy serves as your guide.
For more information about social media marketing or if you have any questions, please contact WSI OMS today. We look forward to hearing from you.
