Let’s face it, keeping up with marketing developments is an issue on many people’s minds.  How do you set a pace with posting on social media?    I think the biggest answer is to stay focused, post regularly and consistently.    Keep an eye on other platforms, and know what your clients consider relevant. Try not to post unwanted or outdated information.   Removing yourself totally from social media, will create a knee-jerk abrupt decline and can produce a negative result.  Stay the course, stay relevant, and most of all, stay consistent.

– Rachel

Social media – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn…it’s all pretty easy, right? You just write some posts, invite people to like your page, ask your friends and family to comment and share often so there aren’t any crickets chirping.

We hear it all the time – why would someone need a professional marketing effort for Facebook? Why would any business want a thorough, organized strategy for managing something “so simple”? The truth of the matter is, that SUCCESSFUL, PERFORMING social media is anything but.

A majority of people don’t understand what all we do as a social media company – and that’s okay. It’s our job to turn you into a believer and show you the value behind the services we provide, like creating, publishing, promoting, and managing your content.

Sure, anyone can do social media themselves. Anyone can create content. But the whole purpose of having a social media account is to connect and ENGAGE.

A strategized social page for your business needs to have a wide variety of QUALITY posts – ones that aim to inform, entertain, attract, educate, etc. You’re not going to create any meaningful relationships by posting your sales every day. It’s not about you – it’s about them. Your followers. Your customers. Your prospects.

We know there’s a whole myriad of mind-numbing content on a person’s newsfeed. If yours isn’t relevant and attention grabbing to your audience, you’re going to end up lost. And what’s even the point if you don’t make an impact?

The other thing about content is that only a small percentage of your followers will actually see each post – your social media presence needs to be consistent. It isn’t going to do much for you if you post 9 times in a week and then go MIA for two months because you got too busy with running all the other facets of your business.

And content is only one piece of the puzzle. There’s SO much data to be mined, measured, and applied to every social media platform out there. Knowing how to find and read the numbers is one thing, but using those numbers to increase reach, engagement, and ultimately, conversions – yeah, that’s a complete science in itself.

Long story short, running a results-driven social media account is actually a lot harder than most people think, with a lot of ways to do it wrong. There’s not only a chance of complete ineffectiveness and inefficiency – a poorly managed, inconsistent presence can significantly hurt your company and deplete its reputation. Yep…no pressure!

The good news? You don’t have to overwhelm yourself. For many small businesses, there just isn’t enough time or resources to dedicate to successful social media management. That’s where DiAndrea Media comes in – we’ll help supplement your efforts by providing strategic social media services and ensuring your accounts are geared towards achieving your goals, both short AND long-term.

In the end, it’s your job to run your business – it’s ours to make you look good while you do it. #micdrop

 – Angel

The Best Ways to Use Hashtags on Social Media

Hashtags are still one of the most popular methods to grow your audience on various social media platforms – ESPECIALLY Instagram. According to research cited on Inc’s website, posts with up to two hashtags get double the engagement of ones that don’t have any.

The thing about hashtags, is that they are both a science and an art. You can’t just blow up your post with 20 hashtags and expect magic to happen. Believe it or not, there’s a strategy behind finding the right hashtags to use and exactly where to use them. Below we cover some helpful resources and tips for finding the ideal hashtags for your post and making sure they perform.

Twitter

Twitter may seem old school, but it’s still super popular, relevant and not to mention, a hashtag paradise. In Twitter’s sidebar, you’ll see a trending box that alerts people of the top hashtags (both overall and within their network). Tweeting hashtags was best practice from the get-go, and continues to be a mainstay today.

But this doesn’t mean you want to load your tweet full of them. You only need one or two as a rule of thumb. It’s more of a quality vs. quantity thing, and the right hashtags will help your tweets get more overall engagement (clicks, likes, replies, etc.). Tweets with hashtags are also 58% more likely to get retweeted. This type of increase in engagement can help Twitter accounts get more followers AND a wider audience.

To find out which hashtags are most popular in a specific industry, try using the tool Hashtagify. If you enter in a high-level hashtag, it suggests other related hashtags to include and shows them based on popularity or correlation:

This tool is a great way to find related hashtags for your tweet.

Instagram

Yes – the Gram is driven by hashtags. Here, you can throw in a little more sizzle and up the number of hashtags used, but moderation is still key. Instagram currently allows up to 30 hashtags per post (including comments and captions combined) – but once again, it’s important to hashtag strategically and relevantly. The best part about hashtags on Insta is that it’s a huge booster for gaining organic followers and widenening your audience.

While you can certainly use Hashtagify for Instagram data, the app Hashtagger is where it’s at. Enter in a top-level keyword, and it will display the top related keywords with a percentage correlation of how often they are used with the main keyword. You can then copy up to 30 and past them into your Instagram post.

It’s common for users to put their hashtags in comments opposed to the caption, because it gives your post a cleaner look. However, Instagram’s algorithm is only getting smarter, and it looks for these comment hashtags to find spammers (via shadowbanning). Even though you want to incorporate popular hashtags in your post to get more impressions, keep relation and relevacy in mind and be sure to mix it up – don’t use the exact same group of hashtags on every single post.

Overall Hashtag Tips

Twitter and Instagram should be where all your hashtag efforts are. Even though LinkedIn and Facebook accept hashtags, they haven’t caught on as much as the other two platforms. So it’s not worth the effort to include them on LinkedIn and Facebook posts.

When you are tweeting or posting on Instagram, cut down on clutter by making existing words in the tweet into hashtags, instead of repeating the word as a hashtag at the end.

Hashtags continue to be an effective way to grow engagement on Twitter and Instagram. Make sure hashtags are an included part of your posting strategy to get more followers and better conversations.