A social media strategy is important to your overall growth plan! Here are 5 key takeaways from our strategy and proof in the numbers!
Our Social Media Strategy has led to an over 15000% growth on Instagram Reach!
1. Set Your Social Media Strategy Goals!
We love a good SMART goal for our social media strategy! Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals are a great way to give yourself goals with a purpose. Once you’ve laid out your goals, you can write down steps to accomplish the goal(s)! Taking baby steps is sometimes the best thing you can do, but being able to watch how those steps affect measurable factors lets your stay flexible and pivot to the best action plan!
2. Plan, plan, plan!
Speaking of planning, if you go into anything unprepared, you’re going to put a lot of energy into a lot of nothing! Creating content can be a chore, and a lot of small businesses don’t feel like they have the time or energy to put into it! When they do think of their social media content, it’s a last-minute, rushed task that makes the audience feel like they aren’t worth your efforts… We at Forward Digital Marketing sit down once a month to write out a very overarching plan to guide us. This plan is not rigid, but it gives us a base to build off of!
3. … But don’t over plan!
The reason we don’t give ourselves a hard and fast plan is because trends change fast on social media! In our monthly plan, we create a set amount of evergreen content and then leave room for trends that pop up throughout the month! Another great tip for your small business is to set “fallback” content days! Don’t know what to post on a Thursday? Have an already set theme for that day that you can quickly grab or make content for without feeling like you are starting from scratch.
For example, we at Forward Digital Marketing have Wednesday scribbled down as “Trend Alert Wednesday!” When we do not have any content plans for that day, we can quickly default to doing a trend breakdown. This saves us a few minutes and helps keep us sane during a busy week of content making!
4. Check Your Insights!
Once we’ve posted anything, we check out insights! Now, we do this for a living so how often we check is going to be greater than how often you need to check! When posting content, you should always look back at the insights 24 hours and 7 days later. This will give you a better understanding of what your audience likes and does not like. If you keep posting things that are getting low engagement, your audience is going to zone you out.
If you watch your insights and see that carousel posts are more successful with your following, then in your plan you should add more posts like that! Keeping an eye on the analytics is going to give you valuable, measurable feedback! This helps you reach your SMART goals set at the beginning of the process.
Organic growth is growth that has NO MONEY put into advertising!
5. Remember, It’s the Internet.
One of the biggest takeaways with social media is that it is the internet… the internet can be a wild place full of unique personalities, robots, and ever-changing algorithms. What works one month, may not work as well the next! It can be an overwhelming place of confusion, but as long as you are putting in the time to plan and watch your insights, you’ll be more prepared to face whatever is changing! Another way to stay on top of all of the news is to follow trusted industry experts!
Most of us are on social media personally, so why not add a few educational and helpful small business tools to your feed! Forward Digital Marketing is one to follow! We work hard to research the changes, the growing pains, the successes, and the trends so you don’t have to! We take one more thing off of your to-do list. Still, feeling overwhelmed by the idea of building and posting content monthly, weekly, or daily?! Hire us as your social media management team! We build your monthly posting schedule based on your insights and audience. You give us a few photos and we do the rest! It’s just one more way Forward Digital Marketing can serve you!
Forward Digital Marketing Helping YOUR BRAND Find It’s Look 👀
Start with a Brand Kit designed by our in house professionals! The brand-kit is build custom for your brand and gives you a play book to create seamless content across all of your media and digital marketing. Have a team who works on different pieces of marketing? Send them your brand-kit so that everyone is on the same page! Fonts, colors, graphics, etc. are all defined for your brand.
Yep, that is right! Your Facebook contest is probably illegal… or at least breaking Meta standards and it can get you into a lot of trouble! We understand! Your friend of a friend started a new business and did a giveaway contest that got them found by a of of people! When you see that they are succeeding, you assumed you could just do it too! WRONG.
Meta Has Standards That Small Businesses Tend to Ignore
Don’t be that business…
Small business do not have a lawyer on staff like large corporations, so often “legal” matters are not on the radar. That does not mean you are exempt! As a small or medium business owner you have even more to lose. You do not take home a six-figure paychecks. Often, you do not even see that yearly vacation! Running a small business is not for the faint of heart! That is why you have to check and recheck the standards to keep your business on the right tracks.
Can I Run A Social Media Contest?
Yes! Just Do it Right!
Running a giveaway or contest is a fantastic way to build followers and engagement for your brand. The excitement that consumers feel when they win is something is hard to match, and it is be a great way for your brand to stand out and be found! When you run a contest or giveaway, there are some techniques that make it even more successful.
Why Should I Run A Social Media Contest?
#1: Growth!
When you run a social media giveaway you are allowed to ask potential consumers to like or follow your brand. This obviously means that you are growing your network of individuals that can see your future content.
Example of Giveaway Post
#2: Build Your Brand
Please the algorithm to be able to please your following! When your consumers like, share, and comment on your content, the algorithm learns to put your posts in front of people. When you run a giveaway with clear instructions to like and comment on the post, you are inviting consumers to engage with the algorithm so that they see your content in the future! Another great way to build your community is to work with other brands. Collaborate with other content creators to reach each other’s audience.
Example of working with other accounts for giveaways or follows
#3 Increase Your Email List
Email marketing is still king! Marketing campaigns in consumers inbox is the number one marketing technique that provides long-term success. So why not use your contest as a way to build email data? Adding the option to opt-in to your email list is a fantastic way to ensure that you can connect with your audience in the future, without stressing about algorithm changes.
#4 Jumpstart Engagement
Remember that the contest buzz will die; However that does not mean that your brand buzz has to die with it! Any giveaway will generate engagement with your audience, but it is important to keep that interest up after the prize has been handed out. Remember, Forward Digital Marketing would love to help you keep your content fresh… *hint hint* We can analyze your website and social media accounts for you to build a targeted contest for long term success!
How Do I Run A Social Media Contest?
Set Your Goals
If you do not plan, you will not win! At the end of the day, you need to define S.M.A.R.T goals to be able to measure the success of your giveaway. Define what you will accomplish with the contest. Are you looking for more followers? Do you want to convert more sales? Whatever your goal is, make sure it is something that you can go back to at the end and compare data. Remember, you can get creative with what you are collecting from your consumers. It does not always have to be likes or comments, but always remember that you are within the community guidelines.
Determine the Type of Contest
After you’ve set your goals, you can figure out which contest type will fit your brand best!
Want more followers? Then your contest can be based off of simply following your page or profile. Be sure that the person or account is still following you when you announce the prize winner! Often times we see people follow and then unfollow, tricking you into thinking they are eligible.
If you are looking to generate more leads, you can ask participants to enter their email to enter to contest. These can be collected through a landing page or a separate Facebook tab for your contest.
Another unique way to build participation is by running a “photo-competition!” To enter this type of contest, participants tag your brand in their own post. This method works on many different levels, but it can be hard to execute if your brand does not have an established reputation.
Set Your Prizes
Budget, budget, budget. You need to ask yourself (or your marketing department) how much are you willing to spend or giveaway? How often are you wanting to run these giveaways? Also, is there an advertising budget for your giveaway?
Learn Your Audience
To be even more successful, you should target your contest towards a specific audience. This will help that advertising budget stretch farther. It will also help ensure that your audience is genuine and will engage in the future, giveaway or no giveaway.
Knowing your audience also means you will know where to put your contest (and learn the rules that goes along with that platform.) It also means that you are being careful to not ostracize your current followers for potential entrants.
Run A/B Testing
Before you go to far, run an A/B test. An A/B test is when you create content that is exactly the same, except for one difference. Maybe you test which product your audience would prefer to receive. Or maybe you test which platform your contest would be most well received on. No matter what, do not rush into posting a contest because you are eager to reap the benefits. If you do not put in the time to pre-plan, your giveaway or contest will not reach its full potential!
Understand the RULES!!! (each site is different)
Yes, there are rules… and you need to figure them out!
Facebook’s Guidelines are often ignored… Don’t get shadow-banned (or actually banned) for not following the Facebook Contest rules!
Facebook
You can check out the full list of guidelines here, but it is so important to remember that you need to define what the contest or promotion is, clearly. Also let your audience know that Facebook is in no way affiliated with or a sponsor of your contest.
Most importantly, you also cannot use friend connections to increase the reach of your contest on Facebook. This means you cannot have people share the post for more entries, or even tag their friends in a post as a form of entry.
Instagram
Instagram is now owned by the same business as Facebook, Meta. This makes the rules pretty similar, however it never states that you cannot use tags of other users in the comments, like Facebook discourages. Instagram does say that you cannot ask a user to tag themselves or their friends in a photo that does not show them or apply to them. Like Facebook, the contest owner must state that Instagram is not affiliated or a sponsor of the contest.
Twitter
Twitter’s biggest concern is the creation of fake accounts… so their guidelines ensure that users running a contest or promotion discourage entrants from creating multiple accounts and tweeting the exact same thing repeatedly.
Run the Contest
Now is the easy part! Make your contest announcement, run some ads and boost the post to increase reach, cross-post on other platforms and through your email campaigns, and watch it take off!
Analyze the Results
Once the contest deadline has come and passed, you’ve announced your winner, and shipped off your prizes, now is the time to look at the new collected data. How well did your contest do? Have you achieved the SMART goal you set at the beginning of all of this?
Running contests should be about improving engagement, reach, followers, and potential customers! But do not let the fire burn out. Now that you have all of these improved metrics, it is time to get serious about building great content that will keep your audience engaged and producing conversions.
I Need Forward Digital Marketing’s Help To Run A Contest!
We understand the ins and outs of social marketing, and we are data nerds! Who could be a better partner in running a successful contest? As Forward Digital Marketing, we can run social media audits before and after the contest to see just how well it did on your chosen platforms! We can crunch the numbers and measure your SMART goals for you, giving you the opportunity to focus on your growing business.
Running a contest to increase product sales? Let us help you build a beautiful e-commerce or Shopify website!
We do not want to sound the alarm, but Instagram is experimenting with a whole new feed experience! Something creators and businesses alike should be aware of is that this will change the way you post! No more top bar of stories. No more bottom bar with feed, reels, and shopping all separated in different links… Nope, Instagram is going… TikTok?
But why? Why is Instagram willing to throw out their well-known playbook for someone else’s? Why is Instagram testing a new fully-integrated main feed?
The Background – Instagram vs. TikTok
Instagram has been working hard to take over as the top performing social media platform since it was first released in 2010. Starting out as an image sharing site for artists and photographers, it has since grown into a platform also three different video-sharing abilities: IGTV, stories, and reels. Reels are definitely a response to TikTok’s domination of in-feed videos that can be set to music or voice-overs. As of 2018, Instagram has succeeded in becoming an elite platform, having over one-billion active monthly users! It has since grown 22.9% since last year, gaining 73.5 million active users in 2021.
After rebranding in 2019, TikTok has had over 2.6 billion downloads globally; 315 million of those downloads came within the first three months of 2020, with the global pandemic motivating us to stay inside and isolated. Those early 2020 downloads is what pushed TikTok over the edge, making it king of the social media apps!
The Proof – Instagram Experimental Feed Shown
In the example posted by Alessandro Paluzzi, via twitter, you can see how the experimental feed would now be fully-integrated. Images, stories, and reels would all now be in a single flow. In this system, stories would be presented in a frame bar with the ability to swipe left to see other frames, while videos would be differentiated with a progress bar.
In theory, this would help make the algorithm more intuitive. The change would allow you to see data based off of the response to each specific post, whereas right now stories, reels, posts, and IGTV cannot be compared side-by-side because they are all separated into different areas of the app. This is where TikTok succeeds!
The video platform is able to pinpoint which specific content is engaging to the consumer. Not only that, TikTok can identify the exact point the content stops becoming engaging! TikTok not only measures if you “like” the content, but also how many times it was watched, how quickly it was swiped away from or back to, and every data response specific to that video. All of this data collection is what helps make the platform engaging to its audience- it learns the audience quicker and at a deeper level, making it even more addictive!
Knowing what content is pulling your consumers in can help you create even better future content! Better posts make for more engaged followers. More engaged followers makes your brand more authentic and inviting!
All of this Instagram feed change is just a rumor and not something that is set in stone. As we analyze our own feeds and build better content for our consumer, video content is absolutely something to embrace! TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and even Pinterest are all using the short video template as its new favorite way to disseminate information. You may not like it, but your followers do!
Connect With Forward!
In the future, we will share more ways to create videos with ease and as little pain as possible! Remember, you do not have to be in videos for your consumer to engage, but building self confidence can lead to brand confidence!
Welcome to our new website, our new look, our new approach to helping small businesses define their market and help them increase exposure for their products and services. Whether retail, real estate, services, municipalities, organizations, whatever the small business type, we help small businesses generate more leads, gain new customers, differentiated exposure, etc. with digital marketing.
As you will read, we have been in business for over 20 years,
building websites and offering marketing assistance in various ways. In taking
a real good look at our business recently, a business professional asked me if
I had thought about changing the name. Change my name? Why would I do that?
What a concept… LOL…
Follow along if you will. We want to offer you some good tips and tricks to help your small business grow. When we find something really good from another source, we won’t keep it to ourselves. We will share with you here. One thing is certain, marketing is technology necessary. So it is always changing. Never hesitate to contact us. If you’d like to talk about your small business marketing, or you have any ideas and suggestions that you would like to share, maybe even success stories, we want to hear about them.
If you know me, I have been signing off my emails this same way
for a couple of years. Thus, the new name… We are now: Forward Digital
Marketing.
