Sophia Dagnon

Chatbots have come a long way in the last few years. Gone are the clunky bots that couldn’t understand you and had very little practical use.

Today’s bots are sleek, smart, and useful– in fact, 47% of consumers would buy a product from a chatbot.

So what do chatbots do?

They help brands level up their customer service, automate basic functions, improve user experience and — of course– improve engagement and conversion rates despite ever-changing social media algorithms and increased competition.

November is a deceptively busy month for marketers. Between getting ready for the holidays, putting together special deals around Black Friday and Cyber Monday and trying to plan strategies for the new year, there’s barely time left to check the industry news.
That’s why we put together a list of all the important changes to our favorite social media platforms. Let’s take a look at what went down last month.

When you are building your social media management toolkit, you need to make some hard decisions. With so many tools out there, you’ve got to chose between the must-have and the wouldn’t it be nice kind.

So what about social media monitoring tools? Do they deserve a place in your toolkit or are they just too expensive to be worth the trouble?

What does a social media monitoring tool really do for you?

Do you feel like your social media channels are stagnating? The steady growth just isn’t there anymore. It’s a painfully slow trickle. Like molasses.

You are still putting in the work and crafting exceptional content. Yet despite your efforts, your organic reach is dropping steadily and your click-through rate is following suit.
It’s not you. It’s the algorithm.

Winter, 1995. Randy Conrads launches Classmates Online. The premise is simple. Create an account, add some info and then find your old friends from kindergarten, high-school and college. Rekindle the connection without getting on the phone.

Then in spring 1997 Andrew Weinreich launched Six Degrees. This social network could do even more. If you had a somewhat stable internet connection you could talk to people all over the world.

Other networks quickly followed...

Tap into your best content source

What’s more authentic?

On the left, we’ve got a polished post featuring a delicious looking burger that has clearly had some help getting picture ready.

On the right, we’ve got a real person enjoying some fries, a soda and McDonald’s Instagram hashtag campaign, #SipShareWin.

That’s the difference between user-generated content and official marketing materials. It’s (relatively) unfiltered. It’s not trying to sell you something.

Tumblr has a bit of a reputation. A lot of marketers write it off because it doesn’t have a clear monetization policy or a dedicated “for business” section. But, dismissing it is a bad move.

With over 700 million unique visits a month, Tumblr attracts a steady stream of people.
a steady stream of people. Tumblr’s largest user group in the US are between 18-24 but it does enjoy popularity across all the age groups. In fact, 33% of Tumblr users in the US are over the age of 45.

Don’t let your campaign strike out!

Influencer marketing isn’t just another fad. In fact, it’s one of the oldest marketing techniques in the book, reimagined for the digital era.

Social media has transformed how circles of influence work in real life. For example, our shopping decisions are affected by bloggers, YouTubers, and reviewers. This is word of mouth 2.0. Instead of hearing about that cool new thing from your neighbor at the grocery store, you hear about it from your favorite Instagrammer.

Truth time. Have you read the Instagram terms of use? Be honest with me. Yeah. Up until I sat down to write this post I hadn’t either… They aren’t exactly fun light reading. Plus, by the time I started using Instagram, I’d already signed my first born over to Facebook anyway…

It turns out that Instagram has some pretty strict rules about certain things.

You are proud of your Facebook page. You share valuable content, engage with your followers, and have successfully built an interested, loyal audience. Now you want to grow and reach even more people.

That’s when you started thinking about boosting a Facebook post to get your valuable content in front of a larger audience.

But, you aren’t sure about your timing. When should you boost the post? Who should you boost it to? Will it negatively impact your organic reach? How do you make sure that it’s a good investment and not a waste of your hard-earned money?

The “how” might be easy, but the harder questions questions are when, why, and if you should boost a post on Facebook. In this blog, we’ll explore why, how, and when to boost a post on Facebook so you can get the best possible results.

The platform you can’t afford to ignore…

Pinterest is growing. The popular platform hit 175 million active monthly users in April 2017, which has grown considerably since its initial launch back in 2010. This is still a drop in the ocean compared to Facebook with its 1.94 billion active monthly users. Why should you care? You’ve got enough on your plate. Do you really need to worry about more social media?

Honestly? It depends on your marketing goals.

Video is taking over digital media. By 2020, Cisco predicts that video will make up 82% of the content we consume online. Social video is no exception and, unsurprisingly, we watch a lot of it on Facebook!

In 2016, TechCrunch reported that we watch about 100 million hours of Facebook video every day. While The Atlantic challenged this number because of the way Facebook measures video views, we still watch an inordinate amount of video—and, no, not all of it features cats.

The challenge most marketers face is that 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound.

This brings up a pretty important question: How do you increase engagement for your videos and get more people to like, share, and comment?

Can Facebook search really help you reach your social media marketing goals? Unlike Twitter, Facebook doesn’t have a separate advanced search function. All we’ve got is the “Search Facebook” bar in the top left hand corner.

It wasn’t always like this.

Improve your customer relationships and reap the benefits
Powerful relationships are the driving force behind your business success. When your customers know, like, and trust you, they are far more likely to buy your products and services and recommend them to friends and family.

But, how do you build these relationships? How do you create real, meaningful rapport?

Twitter offers an interesting solution. The platform’s unique microblogging format keeps exchanges short and makes it easy to tag people, answer tweets and engage in conversation in real time.

In this post we’ll share some simple techniques you can use to effectively engage with your customers on Twitter.

The season of long, lazy days, refreshing drinks, and too much ice cream is just around the corner! As a social media marketer, you are always on the lookout for content inspiration. Now, you’ve found it!

Creating summer content can be challenging. You don’t have big holidays like Easter, Halloween or New Years to tap into, but you can use what people love most about summer: warm weather, swimming, beaches and vacations. The summer season is slower. People are either on holiday or daydreaming about one. The kids are home. School is out. Life moves at a different pace.

That’s why we dug through some great social media posts from the last few summers and put together some actionable tips to use for your own seasonal content plan!