Week 11 (Social Media)---Social Media for Organizations

Why is Social Media Important to Businesses?

For a business, one of the keys to their success is their connection with their customers. Businesses have had many ways of sharing and communicating with their customers such as the internet, television, in store, email and radio. The use of social media has allowed customers the chance to give feedback and interact with businesses on a personal level. This also has helped businesses develop close relationships with new customers and closer relationships with existing ones. Social media also helps businesses develop better relationships with their employees by empowering them and giving them the training they did to carry on the company's values. Giving employees the tools they need to excel at communicating with customers through social media and effectively translating the company's values. 

Social media has become the go to place for sharing content. We can see now that people aren't turning on the television as much for the news, now they are going on Twitter to look for stories. People aren't calling or texting their family members as much...now they're going on Facebook to keep in touch. LinkedIn is used to search for job opportunities instead of searching through the yellow pages. This has affected purchase habits as well by consumers interacting with their peers in order to get opinions on new products being offered. Social media opens a window for businesses to quickly resolve issues, accommodate different audiences, and create deeper connections with customers and clients.

Week 10 (Social Media)---Social Media Etiquette

Intro to Social Media Etiquette

Social media is an insightful way for you to develop and deliver content to many different people. Not only is it a way for you to deliver content, but you can also interact with those who view this content. Whether its through comments that they leave on you posts or viewing some of the information that they share about your content. However, dealing with social media is no joke and requires that you have proper social media etiquette so that you don't make mistakes that could cost you or your company. There are some do's and dont's that are associated with social media and it is important that you learn them so that you can engage responsibly online. Here are 5 rules that are important to follow on social that can help lead you to a successful campaign:

1. Be Yourself. It is very important that when doing social media, you communicate your personality to your audience. Be genuine and express your personality because that is what will attract consumers. However, be aware of the things that you post because you are being monitored at all times. You have to be mindful of your audience and speak as if you are in public at all times. Most importantly, use your real identity so that others can recognize you.
2. Be Transparent. One thing that people fail to remember is that what you say and do on social media can be search or seen at anytime...its there forever!!! Therefore, its important to disclose information that'll be important for the public to know. That goes for whenever you're being paid or sponsored to represent a company, its courteous to disclose that information to the public.
3. Listen Frequently. Consider social media a two-way conversation by actively listening to what your viewers have to say. This includes monitoring your social media account on the regular, especially when being tagged or mentioned on one of your sites. Make sure that when you have conversations with others, you are paying attention to what they are saying so that you get the full message. This is the best way to fully understand what is going on with your audience.
4. Engage. Although we all know social media is here to share your personal interests or your company's presence, its important to use it to participate in conversations with your audience. If some of your followers feel that you content is just one-way, then they may lose interest. Sharing photos is a large part of engaging with your audience; however, be mindful of what pictures you share because you are always being monitored. Make sure to keep conversations flowing so that they don't just languish.
5. Be Respectful. When communicating with others, you have to be aware of what you say and how you say it because miscommunication can happen. Something that may seem okay to you can be seen as disrespectful to someone else. Now although you can't satisfy everyone, you must keep in mind everyone opinions. If there is situation where you say something you didn't mean...it is important that you retract the comment and apologize. When creating content it is important to thank the people who shared it along with giving credit to those who show you appreciation.

Week 9 (Social Media)---Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring, Social Listening and Analytics

Listening is a technique that has to be developed over time. Learning to listen to other people when they have advice to give, listening to your parents when your a teenager, or even listening to your boss when given criticism. Social media marketing of course is putting content and initiating conversations on social networks. However, the biggest aspect of social media marketing is listening to what people have to say. Whether it is a direct response or commenting on their social media account, it is very important to create a dialogue to see what people have to say. Social analytics allows you to measure impact through aspects such as number of likes or conversations. These are things you can use to determine the success of your social media when answering the question, "How are your social media efforts going?"

Social media marketing and listening can be divided into two aspects: owned media and earned media. Owned media is essentially places where you post content, and start conversations, and you have direct access to reviewing the conversations. This gives you a chance to create dialogue for you content and a chance for you to find out what others think. Earned media is essentially when people start their own conversations or maybe someone share something you post with someone else. You know you have reached a great place in social when word of mouth conversations are generated about your content. These are goal for social media marketing, listening and analytics. 

Week 8 (Social Media)---Hootsuite

Understanding Hootsuite

One of the main purposes of social media is to share content. It's essentially a chance for you to show off something that you've put time into to, to any and everyone that is willing to see it. In previous blogs, I have stressed the importance of having not one, but multiple social media networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. All three networks are used differently to help reach different audiences. Hootsuite is great because it helps you to manage social media, through providing assistance on developing and posting content to multiple social networks. Once you set up those social media accounts, you can "connect" them through to Hootsuite.

One of your main focuses when setting up social media accounts is to find what we call your "home base" for social media. Personally, I believe that your blog should be your home base for a couple reasons. One main reason is because a blog is made specifically to post content and you have control over every aspect of your blog. Another reason is because your blog will always be around and its literally yours. Content is one of the main purposes of social media and its important to think about what is sustainable: time spent and ROI. Social media makes things easier and less of a hassle to develop and present content. Hootsuite fits right in this category by making things hassle free and easy to post content to multiple networks.

Week 7 (Social Media)---ROI Strategies

ROI Strategies

There are many ways that you can calculate ROI on LinkedIn. You can track the results of deals and offers that you placed on LinkedIn for your followers. You can also use LinkedIn to help build credibility for relevant content that you have or even as an outlet for PR. This can be a way to help people learn about relevant topics and boost their content in the eyes of their followers. Making ads on LinkedIn can be more costly than ads made on Facebook or Google, but that's because the ads are towards a highly focused business audience.

You can use LinkedIn ads to reach your ideal customers. It has a few different options and value propositions: sponsored updates, professional audience, precision B2B targeting, set your own budget, and ad formats. These categories are in LinkedIn and are all combined and used to help you acquire new customers for your business. Targeting customers through LinkedIn is very benefical in the long run because of the ROI that you can have.

Week 6 (Social Media)---Twitter

To Do or Not to Do

To use Twitter or not to use it? That's the real question. From my previous post, you can see how social media sites such as a Facebook can be a very useful tool. Twitter is considered one of the social media sites that are here to stay, so investing in Twitter would not be a terrible option for a company. However, the main determiner of this decision is whether or not your audience is on Twitter.

When using Twitter, you have to go into it with the notion that people aren't on Twitter with the mindset to purchase something. This a younger audience and are more likely to exchange news or information on the product or service that they are using. Most likely this audience will tweet about problems that they are having with this product or service in hope that they can have a dialogue with the company in order to fix the issue. 

This is a valuable concept to keep in mind if you are a decision-maker when it comes to using social media within a company. The biggest thing you want to think of is ROI and think about how social media will benefit you. Facebook and Twitter are two great outlets that provide their own separate benefits. Twitter is great because of its ability to reach a younger audience as well being able to create dialogue with customers who are having problems with their product or service.

Week 5 (Social Media)---Campaign Management

Monitoring the Campaign

Facebook ads are very beneficial to expanding your brand or company throughout the social media network. Creating a Facebook ad gives you the opportunity to advertise your site or blog or even a Facebook page. One of the best ways to test this is to make or find a website of your interest, create an ad, and try to run the ad for a while. Once your create this ad you will have to monitor it from time to time to maintain its performance.

Once an ad is reviewed and approved, you can check on the status of your ad by going to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage. There are various options for you to keep track of with one being "reach" which is the amount of people that have looked at your ad. You can create multiple ads and essentially have them compete against each other to see what content best connects with your audience. These ads can be put under "ad set" and will be organize by each campaign. Monitoring advertisements is an easy way for you to see how many people view your ads, click them, and how much money you spent on that ad.

Week 4 (Social Media)---The Power of Facebook

Boosted Posts

Many people do not realize that Facebook can be such a powerful tool that can take your brand or company to new heights. Of course Facebook has its use for social needs. Most people use it to communicate with friends and people all over the world. My Facebook for instance has over 2,000 people as friends (which isn't much considering the amount of people that I have met over the years) and anything that I post on there can be seen by these people. There are many different things that can be done to help your business; however, there is one feature that I want to focus on in particular which is boosting posts. 

From a business perspective, when you share useful and engaging posts, it helps to build relationships with current and future customers that you have. So you may think, "If I can current customers and future customers can see my posts, what about those who have no idea about my company?" That's an interesting question and Facebook answers that with the ability to boost your post for as little as $5 so that more people can see it when they visit Facebook. 

You have the option to reach out to those who like you page, their friends, and even new audiences. This function makes it somewhat like Google ads just from your own Facebook page. This is just another function of Facebook that could potentially help a company expand its brand to new customers on one of the most popular social media sites in this day and age.

Week 2 (Social Media)---Top Skills

Hottest Skills to Get You Hired

We've all reached that point where we're looking for a job and we're wondering, "What does this employer want?" Admit it, it has crossed your mind whether or not the skills that you learned in high school or college will help you earn a career somewhere. Well the good thing is that I have LinkedIn's list of the hottest skills to get you hired and trust me, there are a wide range of skills in favor of tech-savvy people.

These skills vary among job descriptions and will sometimes be in high demand together. Basically, if your skills fit into one or more of these categories, then you either have a job or could've gotten a job last year by recruiters. These were the jobs that were in high demand last year and well into the last couple of months which means that they will probably be hot this year as well. Data has been one of the top 4 skills across every country and is expected to stay that way because the world is becoming more data driven. Skills such as game development, digital and online marketing, and computer graphics have all fallen down the charts a little bit; however, this does not mean that these skills are not wanted. Recruiters are still looking for them just not as much.