Jun 1, 2017 | Blog, News
Instagram stories can tell the story of your business
Instagram is fast becoming a favorite social marketing tool of brands and businesses, with Instagram Stories being used by big brands daily. Today where most people enjoy being visually stimulated, it makes this social network so powerful for almost any industry.
Once based on image sharing, Instagram has a new feature that lets you deliver a more complete message than a single image can provide to your prospective customers. It’s called Instagram Stories. If you’re wondering how this function can help you boost your marketing strategies, here are three easy ways to use Instagram Stories for your business:
Brand Your Special Offers for Better Results
Instagram Stories is designed to enhance your brand. So whenever you have special offers for your customers and target audiences, it would seem extra-special when complemented with the unique delivery of an Instagram story. To deliver your special offers via stories, you just have to refer viewers to the link in your bio. You can post a coupon as an Instagram story and announce that the offer is valid for a 24-hour story period only. You can take advantage of the time-critical nature of the Instagram story which delivers a sense of urgency for your customers to click on your landing page so that they can learn on how to redeem your special offer. But remember; make sure you offer something valuable! If you stick with low-value offers, there’s a high chance that they’ll tune you out.
Use Targeted Looks to Build a New Level of Trust with Your Audience
Showing and sharing your creative work and skills with your audience can be persuasive. It lets you show the value of your brand and the power of your services and those that you’re capable of providing. It can be in the form of a design sketch, a video of you checking out the manufacturer behind your product, or simply an excellent shot of the final item. These types of personalised approaches can build a new level of trust and interest with your audience.
Humanise Your Brand
Instagram stories may be temporary, but used effectively, it would surely leave a mark on your overall brand. By sharing polished stories that features a more created look at your business in real time, you are improving your brand to existing customers and attracting sales even more. One good example is by sharing a brief behind-the-scenes looks at your business.
With approximately 500 million active users, Instagram is now a super tool in the social media world. By consistently applying best practices and putting an effort to maximise the power of Instagram stories, rest assured that positive results for your business should come in no time at all.
If you want help getting more out of your social media marketing, please download our free step by step guide today!
Apr 19, 2017 | Blog, News
Blogs – why you need to create them
When was the last time you updated your website through blogs and up-to-date content? Do you use it to grow your business online? How you’re able to connect to your audience? And how effective you are on sending the right message to them?
Creating regular, fresh content in the form of a blog is one of the most effective and powerful ways you can communicate your expertise to your target audience. It is another way, in addition to your social media channels, of spreading helpful and valuable pieces of information to your customers.
So, let us break down the benefits of this powerful communication tactic on building and establishing a good presence online.
Blogs help drive new traffic to your website
Whenever you write a blog post for your site, you are able to index more pages on your website. This provides an opportunity for your website to show up in various search engines particularly on Google. If you spend time building up a solid bank of content, you will be able to eventually drive a great range of traffic to your website.
Another good thing about blogging is that it also helps you get discovered. By providing useful information, you’re able to communicate with your website visitors. By being relevant to your intended prospective customers, they are more likely to engage with your content by sharing to different social media networks such as on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, etc.
It therefore provides higher exposure to online users who may not even know your business exists.
Can help convert traffic into leads
Now that you’re able to drive traffic to your website through blogging, you’re are in a position now to convert your hard earned traffic into leads. So, how are you going to work on that? Any visitor who comes to your website is a potential lead, or can connect you to potential leads.
Every blog post you create is another opportunity to educate your target audience on what your do, and how your help. Make sure that every blog piece you create ends with a clear call-to-action that gives your website visitors something to do, include give you their email address or phone number.
This can take time, so make sure you put aside some time each week to create your content, and set up calls to action that will give value to who you wish to target.
Blogging helps establish authority
When you’re able to provide answers even to the most common questions, you’re clearly establishing a definite authority to your target customer. Customers usually seek to find answers to their questions online. Finding useful information from your content is a way for them to visit your website more often than necessary. Even better, your website visitors may even share your valuable information with their networks.
Educational content provides greater impact to confused customers by clearing things up.
Blogging can drive long term results
The blogs you have created long time ago is of equal or of higher value compared to your most recent blogs. Don’t ever be afraid to recycle your content by reposting your blog content across your social media channels more than once. Chances are that you can pick up new audiences each time you repost your blog. Also, if a particular blog article has had lots of visitors already, it may be ranking well on various search engines.
Over to you
Blogging is a continuous process. And you need to constantly be working on your content and optimising the channels you post your blog articles to. While you may not be able to see results overnight, if done well and consistently, you’ll be able to generate a significant amount of traffic and possible leads for your business overtime.
If you want help getting more out of your social media marketing, please download our free step by step guide today!
Oct 18, 2016 | Blog, News, Social media strategy
How to schedule a post on a Facebook Page
Many businesses with a Facebook page manage it internally – and plenty of them are not doing it effectively, perhaps only posting one or twice a week or month. I’ve seen one page that only gets updated once every three months or so!
Why schedule posts ahead of time?
To be successful and be seen by your followers on Facebook you have to put in the effort. This means updating your page every single day. No excuses. Have a look at the best performing pages and notice how often they are updated; sometime up to 5 times a day. Also have a look at the times. These are optimised so that they are in the most newsfeeds at any given point during the day.
A barrier to updating regularly is not being able to log onto Facebook at the time they want to update. What is not necessarily known is that there are tools that can help you.
Many social media managers use third party applications such as Hootsuite to schedule updates in advance. That way when you have decided on your updates for the week, you can set it up so that they ‘roll out’ automatically and all you have to do is periodically check on them for likes and comments.
Though it’s important to say that automating updates should be a last resort! When you can, post directly onto your Facebook page when you want to post an update and use these tools for when you are going to be away from your computer.
How to schedule on Facebook
Facebook now allows you to schedule status updates in advance so that you don’t have to use a third party tool. Here’s how you do it:
- Make sure you are using Facebook as your business page
- Create your status update as you normally would but DON’T press ‘Post’
- Instead, immediately to the right of the ‘Publish’ button, there is an arrow. Click on this arrow.
- Select ‘Schedule’, then you will be asked to select the date and time for your post.
- Once you’ve selected these options, click ‘Schedule’
You can view any scheduled posts in your Activity Log. This function can also be used to ‘back date’ status updates.
It’s really that simple! So there is now no excuse to forget to update your Facebook page because you can do it in advance.
Over to you
Now that you know how to schedule Facebook posts, how will you increase the amount of content you publish on your page? Don’t forget, you can find Possum Digital on Facebook!
If you want help getting more out of your social media marketing, please download our free step by step guide today!
