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6 Social Media Mistakes You Might be Making

Social media is an alluring way for businesses to advertise, but it also comes with many pitfalls that you may not expect to encounter. Each platform has its own preferences for post types, image sizes and even search optimization. Without a pretty good grasp on the intricacies of each platform, you may be making these mistakes and making your brand look less professional and even a bit silly.

An embarrassing (and easily avoidable) mistake made by a big brand on social media.

Rushed posting. One of our cringiest pet peeves is when it’s obvious that a page has posted something that was not looked over or thought out. You can end up with typos, inappropriate hashtag use or just messy-looking posts. Make it a rule that at least one other person looks over a post before it goes live, you can save yourself a lot of grief over little mistakes. Similarly, you also always want to check what trending hashtags relate to before using them in your own messaging. You don’t want to wind up with a debacle like DiGiorno’s mistake in 2014 where they used a trending hashtag relating to domestic violence to advertise their pizza. One tweet may not seem like a big deal, but if you make a mistake it can turn into bad news for your brand.
Please refer to this when you are sizing images for social media!
Incorrect formatting. Take advantage of the plethora of social media cheat sheets for image sizing. If you’ve sized a cover photo for Pinterest you’ll have to change it around for Facebook so it fits. Similarly, a long vertical picture will work great on Pinterest but looks bad on Twitter. Just keep in mind what works best for the different platforms so that your posts are as visually appealing as possible.
Inconsistent voice. We frequently see pages that just allow all their employees to have access to their social media accounts and post whenever and whatever they like. While this is a nice thought, it leads to a distractingly inconsistent voice and tone across your posts and makes you look pretty unprofessional. You don’t want to give your followers whiplash from all the different types of posts going up on your pages. Try to stick to one voice, one tone and one theme across posts. This can be achieved by having only one person in charge of the account or by hiring professionals like us to manage it for you!

Everything you post on social media should include a visual.
No visuals. If there’s anything worse than formatting images incorrectly, it’s not even having visuals in the first place. Text-only posts are boring. Facebook has tried to spice them up a bit by making short text posts bigger but the 35 character limit is usually just too short for you to get much across. If you must make a text-only post, consider adding a background to make it stand out. The only weapons left to get people’s attention are visuals. Video is taking over and posting relevant video content will always perform better. But if you don’t have a video to go with your post then at least find a license-free picture somewhere to make your post pretty! 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. Get ahead of the curve!
Platform misuse. Pinning 50 different things to a Pinterest board every day is totally acceptable. But sharing 50 different things to your Facebook page is going to make you (and your brand!) look a little crazy. Similarly, you should absolutely be hashtagging your posts on Twitter and Instagram. But for Facebook and LinkedIn this practice is pretty much useless and it makes you look like a novice if you’re using them. LinkedIn won’t even acknowledge your hashtags and Facebook will make it look like it’s using them (they turn blue) but Facebook posts without a hashtag fare better than those with a hashtag. It’s true. Learn about your platforms before posting anything.
Some quick investigation into relevant hashtags can make it much easier for a search engine to find your content!
Disregard of search engine optimization (SEO). To piggyback off of platform misuse, we have to talk about disregarding SEO. Social media is a treasure trove of SEO. You should be researching what keywords and phrases people are using for your brand and paying attention to high-performing hashtags you can use. There are great tools for doing this, Keyhole can give you a good idea of good hashtags to use and even Hashtagify. You should save room in your tweets for at least two to three hashtags and put up to 30 hashtags at the end of your Instagram posts. Even Pinterest is hashtag-friendly! If you’re trying to reach the biggest audience possible you need to take the steps to help search engines find your content.

So there you have it. A basic overview of six mistakes you might be making on social media along with some ideas on how to fix them. If you’re still struggling with getting a handle on the intricacies of social media marketing, we offer training and comprehensive social media packages. Send us an email at info@buzzlymedia.com if you’re ready to hand over the responsibility to the experts.

June 29, 2019/by Emma

What Can Social Media Do for my B2B Company?

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Leaving a comprehensive social media strategy out of your marketing efforts is a big mistake for B2B businesses. In today’s digital world, the sales process is shifting online for the majority of industries, with one study finding that “most customers are 57 percent through the buying process before the first meeting with a company representative.” The same study found also found that “61 percent of all B2B transactions now start online. And 58 percent use social media as a research channel.”

Consumers across all industries are becoming less responsive to cold-outreach and more independent in their research on companies they might do business with, and products they might purchase. Social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, and social media service providers like Buzzly Media offer B2B companies many valuable ways to reach customers online. salesperson shaking hand

Social media virtually eliminates the learning curve and gives your customers an almost immediate idea about your brand and your brand’s values before they even make contact with a sales person. This is valuable in the sales cycle because customers who have some interest in your brand (but not enough to convert) may be searching for your company online to learn more before they commit. Social media will offer them softer, more relatable content to ease them into your company culture and let know what to expect when they do decide to reach out.

Social media is one of the best tools available to strengthen your brand’s status as a thought leader in your industry. By connecting with influencers, posting timely industry news updates and weighing in on relevant issues, your brand’s credibility will rise dramatically over time. Brand-building, however, is just one element of a social media campaign and should reflect that customers like to see educational content that is more informational than it is brand / sales-centric.This builds trust and will help them remember your company when they are ready to make a purchase.

You would also be strongly advised to consider social media marketing if you are trying to drive valuable traffic to your website and landing pages. Buzzly Media clients have had great success in generating leads through the careful development of laser-focused landing pages. It’s a great way for someone to engage with your brand without committing much time. The easier you make it for people to hop in your sales funnel, the more leads you’ll have overall.

customer doing online search Social media will also help your website’s ranking by increasing the number of sites linking in, otherwise known as “backlinks.” These tell search engines that your website must have valuable information on it if others are spending time putting your links in their content, and it’s great for boosting search engine optimization. Remember, “94 percent of business buyers do some form of online research” when looking over their options.

And finally, the best part of social media is that it’s social! Having digital presences for your brand and its executives will allow you to connect with valuable industry contacts and start building relationships online. We know that “more than 90 percent of decision makers never respond to cold outreach.” A great way to move right past the cold outreach part of the sales cycle is to network online and give your potential customers a face to your brand. This will make you and your company seem more familiar when the time comes to sell.

The most important thing about establishing a digital presence for your brand is having the right information available to people at the right time. You never know how or when customers are searching. If it’s on Google (which is quite likely), then you want to make sure you are ranking high for generic industry keywords and have the social media profiles to back it up. If it’s late at night (or in a different timezone) when a potential customer can’t make contact with a human salesperson, you want them to get that same personalized experience through your social media.

A comprehensive social media strategy is the way to take your B2B business to the next level in today’s digital world. When you decide it’s time for a thoughtful and effective dive into social media marketing, let the fabulous people at Buzzly Media know! We’re always ready to help and will respond to your request with surprising speed.

Already have a social media presence and want help to improve it? Sign up for a free audit with Buzzly Media on our site and our experts will deliver their recommendations.

June 13, 2018/by Emma

3 Creative Pinterest Campaigns to Replicate

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Here’s an industry secret: looking at the strategies and campaigns that are working for other brands is one of the best to brainstorm what will work for yours. While Pinterest is often overlooked in social media marketing strategies, it actually has a diverse audience, can improve your site’s SEO and it drives a significant amount of ecommerce activity.

Each one of your pins should included a branded hashtag and a link back to your website–that way you know that every person that sees your pin has been exposed to your brand name and has the opportunity to convert to web traffic on your site.

Pinterest boasts an impressive 150 million users, 87% of which have purchased something that they have seen on the platform. Pinterest users consist of mostly women (45% women to 17% men), but 40% of new signups are actually male.

Every once in awhile, we see a campaign that really takes advantage of the benefits Pinterest has to offer. Below are three campaigns that have inspired us and might do the same for you!

Campaign 1: Mastercard – #AcceptanceMatters

It all began with NYC Pride in June of 2013, when Mastercard used a sort of play on words with “acceptance.” Mastercard has been accepted everywhere for over 25 years, and they wanted to make the conversation around acceptance more dynamic by asking their customers via social media to tell them why #AcceptanceMatters.

“Our idea was straightforward and organic to the platform: Develop inspirational word art that evoked the spirit of #AcceptanceMatters and partner with some of the platform’s most prolific pinners to spread the content,” wrote the marketing team behind the Pinterest campaign. Mastercard kept their content simple yet aesthetically pleasing, making sure that it resonated with the already-active Pinners.

mastercard in woman's wallter The result was incredibly successful. They had 13,000 repins in just nine weeks, and their Pinterest board gained 171 followers. The pins continued to circulate through 24 levels of repins, and 15 influencers shared their content. People throughout the world connected with Mastercard’s message of tolerance and acceptance. Not to mention, the pins were a perfect addition to the thousands of “inspiration” boards already out there!

Even if your brand is much smaller than Mastercard, you should still be able to identify a core value that will resonate with people. Remember, when Mastercard began their campaign on Pinterest, they had no followers. Influencers played a huge part in helping to spread their message throughout the site – your brand can find influencers, too!

Campaign 2: Uniqlo Hairdo

Uniqlo Hairdo Campaign example Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing company who took to the feminine appeal of Pinterest to market their fall and winter 2014 fashion line in a unique way. DIY hairstyles have always been an incredibly popular topic throughout the Pinterest world, and were also a hit with Uniqlo’s target audience. With this in mind, they created 16 DIY hair tutorials and paired the end result with the clothing that they thought best fit the look.

The board gained nearly 15,000 followers by assimilating a trending topic into their content. Lovers of hair and fashion came together to follow and repin their Hairdo board. It became what their marketing agency called a “social style catalogue” and helped women think of “head-to-toe outfits.”

Although Uniqlo doesn’t sell hair products, they combined an aspect of Pinterest that already had high popularity with their clothing line to gain more views and repins. Staying up-to-date with Pinterest’s trending topics, from DIY ideas to Star Wars, can be incredibly helpful for your business to find new content opportunities and capitalize on relevant trends. Get creative!

Campaign 3: Honey Bunches of Oats, Happy Mother’s Day – The Pinterest Way!

Honey Bunches of Oats has always promoted kindness. In their Mother’s Day Pinterest campaign, they continued on that path by giving Pinterest users the option to give their moms the gift of a personalized Pinterest board.

To begin, they created boards full of fun Mother’s Day graphics, such as quotes, different ways to say Mom, designs, flowers and even a board of 250 popular names so that users could add Mom’s name to her board! Additionally, they provided a unique service: if a user didn’t see their mom’s name in the board, they could send a note or email to Honey Bunches of Oats and they would create the graphic. Once users populated their own unique Mother’s Day boards, they were encouraged to send the boards to their moms.

This brand created over 300 requested name pins and provided something of value to their followers. It was not overt advertising, but giving something in the spirit of a holiday. If you have the resources to offer something digital and/or customized to your audience, you can give back to your followers in the same way. Bonus points if you can tie in a holiday relevant to your brand!

Here are some of the top interests of the Pinterest audience to get you started!

Unique Pinterest campaigns are a great way to get organic followers for your brand. Pinterest users appreciate well thought out and visually appealing content, so if you have developed an idea that will resonate with your audience and can tie in with the current trends on Pinterest, you can create a hit!

If you get stuck, or need help coming up with a creative Pinterest strategy unique to your brand, contact us! We’re happy to help!

February 5, 2018/by Emma

6 Essential Marketing Channels for Nonprofits

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Marketing in the digital age gets more and more complex every day. There are new platforms to consider, old platforms to throw out, and overall way too many things for one person to think about. If you’re wondering what marketing channels you shouldn’t be ignoring, you’re in the right place! We’ve elaborated on “The Big Six Channels” put forth in the 2016 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report.

Websites. Please please please have a search engine optimized, easy to navigate and mobile-friendly website. If search engines cannot find your website, users may not be able to get to it in the first place! If your website is hard to look through, users will get frustrated and leave. And if your site is not mobile-friendly, you could be losing more than half your traffic. (Yes, according to SimilarWeb’s State of Mobile Web US 2015 report, an average of 55.67% of site traffic now comes from mobile devices.)
Email. If you think email sounds old school and have shifted your focus away from it you are doing your organization a huge disservice. A recent survey by Adobe showed that even millennials are addicted to email, checking it more frequently than any other age group and even checking it while using the bathroom! (Gross, but true!) Email is a great way to directly reach your followers, but beware of fatiguing them with too much of it.
Traditional social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram… They’re all still extremely valuable to an organization looking to increase brand awareness. These channels will help make your organization become an authority in its industry and keep up engagement with followers. A Blackbaud study on the next generation of American giving recently found that “Nearly 60 percent of Gen Y identified the ability to directly see the impact of their donation as a critical part of the decision process – this tails off with the older generations.” More and more, people want to really see where their money is going. Social media is a great way to show people that. (And be sure to start focusing on visual social media, Instagram and videos are the ways of the future!)
In-person events. There’s nothing like humans telling other humans about causes they care about. Nonprofits cannot afford to eliminate events from their marketing strategy. Get on the mailing lists of local convention centers and check events on sites like EventBrite to stay up to date on relevant happenings your organization can attend!
Print marketing. That’s right, it’s still worth your time to print things onto pieces of paper. From printing beautifully designed event tickets to putting together newsletters, don’t write off print marketing just yet. Though many will claim that things like direct mailers are dying off, we know that mailings have grown modestly year over year and that people are indicating they do still read their physical mail. While your response from these efforts may skew towards an older demographic (55+) you certainly don’t want to ignore it as a channel.
Media Relations and Public Relations. According to Everything-PR, “Media relations can be described as a company’s interactions with editors, reporters and journalists.” You need someone in your organization to be connected to the news world and constantly be looking for opportunities to get your organization out there. Similarly, you’ll need some public relations people to effectively handle that communication and choose the message you want to send to the public. Without these two things no one will ever know what a great job your nonprofit is doing in the community!

If this seems like a daunting list then think about what is most important to your organization’s goals and try to prioritize from there. Also remember that you can outsource a lot of this to professionals–we’ve previously talked about some reasons to outsource social media! You don’t have to go it alone. Happy marketing!

June 29, 2016/by emma totten

5 Myths About Public Relation’s Impact on Journalism

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1. Myth: Journalists and public relations (PR) people are opposing forces.

Fact: The roles of PR people and journalists are very similar in nature.

Often, a PR person will do much of the journalist’s work and simply hand over what they come up with. This could be an idea for a story, essential facts of a story, pictures, multimedia and sometimes even a fully written article. When journalists are working with PR people they trust, they have no problem taking the content provided by a PR person, vetting it for accuracy and fairness, and printing it. In this way, journalists and PR people are really complementary in nature. One is on a deadline searching for relevant and interesting stories, and the other is working for companies that often are part of relevant and interesting stories.

2. Myth: With pressure from PR agencies, all the content getting published will be advertising in disguise.

Fact: A good PR agency would not try to pitch a journalist advertising and a good journalist would make sure that what they are publishing is truly journalism.

Reputable journalists abide by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Code of Ethics. The code mentions that journalists must “take responsibility for the accuracy of their work,” “resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage, and “distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.” So fear not, citizens. The future of journalism is safe as long as journalists abide by these ethical guidelines. Additionally, PR agencies do not seek to corrupt journalism and expect the story ideas and press releases they submit to journalists to undergo rigorous scrutiny and fact checking before being published. And believe me, if a PR person sends any reputable editor a press release that resembles advertising it is promptly deleted.

3. Myth: PR people outnumber journalists almost 5 to 1 and will soon have complete control over the marketplace of ideas.

Fact: That metric is already questionable and when citizen journalists are included there is no way that PR people outnumber journalists that much.

The outnumbering ratio of 5:1 has been widely reported but actually originates from a report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Occupational Employment and Wages for May of 2013. It measures the number of reporters and correspondents (43,630) against the number of PR specialists (202,530). This amounts to a roughly 4.6 to 1 ratio that has been rounded to 5 to 1. Note that the number of reporters and correspondents does not include writers or editors for media outlets, which would add another 189,680 people to the journalism number. This would mean that journalists actually outnumber PR specialists slightly. But regardless of the ratio, journalists are still acting as the gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas.

The first job of a journalist as outlined by SPJ is to “seek truth and report it.” A professional journalist would never just perpetuate an idea that isn’t true to benefit a PR agency. One of my journalism teachers in college said that the truth has a way of getting out. There is a free market for the truth. If something is not backed up by fact then people won’t be buying it. So even if there were some large conspiracy between professional journalists and lying PR agencies, citizen journalists would still find the truth and a way to get it out.

4. Myth: With more PR people pushing a positive spin on things and fewer journalists around to challenge them, we will be inundated with press releases-turned-articles.

Fact: An ethical journalist would have several issues with just printing a press release.

The SPJ Code of Ethics specifically prohibits advocacy of something without labeling it as such. They also warn that “neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.” A good journalist would not just toss out a press release and call it journalism — no matter how pressed for time they are. Sponsored content should be labeled as such and native advertising should be labeled and used very carefully.

5. Myth: This is the collapse of journalism! PR is taking over!

Fact: The rise of PR is enhancing journalism and helping journalists who are pressed for time and ideas. There will always be a market for good journalism; you’ll just have to figure out how to know it when you see it.

Content on the Internet should always be inspected for accuracy, anyone can post anything on there, you know. And with the 2013 Pew Research Center State of the News Media reporting that 82% of Americans said they got news on a desktop or laptop in 2013, it’s clear that we need to be careful what we believe. Journalists are very aware that our trust as readers is hard to come by. They will continue to diligently label sponsored content and you will continue to make sure what you’re reading is true. Based on Website Traffic Spy findings the top myth-busting website, Snopes.com, sees roughly 5,335,182 unique users each month. Regular consumers of news are already suspicious; this is not the era for journalists to try to be sneaky with what they publish.

March 3, 2016/by emma totten