Businesses cannot ignore the impact of daily mobile use and mobile purchasing, especially given the fact that 85% of Americans surveyed said that mobile devices are important in their everyday lives. Mobile app is the perfect platform for reaching to a larger audience. The mobile-oriented services like Whats App, We Chat and Facebook Messenger are now achieving the top social media ranking spots. To know more, please read this article by OREN LEVY (CEO of Zooz) at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246430 

According to the 5th annual Sensis Social Media Report, the percentage of small businesses with social media accounts has declined from 37% in 2014 to 31% in 2015. 68% of the broader population use social media sites, 61% of small businesses don't know how much they spend on social media each year, with just 17% actively measuring return on investment. 57% of small businesses don't know whether they've recovered their investment in social media. 70% of consumers' access social media from a smartphone, 52% use a laptop, 34% use a tablet and 28% rely on desktop computer. To know more, please read this interesting article by ANDREW SADAUSKAS (tech-company editor) at: http://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/social-media/46997-small-businesses-flying-blind-on-social-media-and-some-are-walking-away-report.html 

In this competitive world, advertising is very important for getting customer’s attention. But, a small industry has limited budget and they need to develop a successful marketing campaign, which creates revenue for them without expending too much. Here are some tips to grow business with limited budget:
• Make an interesting and short elevator pitch.
• Try to think locally because it can really pay off.
• Collaborate with local business.
• Networking is the best way to grow your business.
• Presenting speeches full of information about the product and benefits, in conference and events can be helpful.
• Try to build relationships with customers.
• Offer incentives and coupons to customers.
To know more tips and benefits of all these tips, please follow this link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246528

Social media marketing is considered to be the best way to reach the prospective customers. But it could be a disaster also, if not done with proper planning and strategy. Jeff Foster (Co-founder and CEO of Tomoson) in his article “How to build a social media marketing strategy that works,” discussed about some tips for building a good social media marketing strategy. That are:
• Understand your goals
• Create measureable objectives
• Characterize your customers
• Look at the competition
• Develop your messages
• Choose a content plan
• Choose your channels

For building an effective social media marketing strategy an organization need to define their mission that could increase their sales, creating brand awareness, etc. One should choose one or two missions at a time to make marketing more effective. To know more about these tips and their benefits, read an article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246085

In today’s competitive world, most of the organizations have a social media marketing as the part of their marketing strategy. But most of the time they won’t get success. Here are some common mistakes are discussed:

·         Choosing an incorrect platform.

·         Doing too much or too little.

·         Ignoring content marketing.

·         Inappropriate content or self-promotion.

·         No personal branding.

·         Canned responses to negative comments.

·         Not aligning with the target audience in terms of tone and messaging.

Here are some tips for choosing a right platform:

·         Facebook can be used for leveraging the community efforts and building trust.

·         Twitter can be used for broadcasting your messages and connect with thought leaders and people.

·         LinkedIn can be used for targeting a professional audience.

·         Google+ can be used for SEO efforts.

To know more about these mistakes and solution, read an article “7 deadly sins of startup social media marketing” by Radha Giri, http://yourstory.com/2015/05/social-media-marketing-deadly-sins/

About 85% of the world's population has email accounts and check their email inbox daily. So, email advertising is becoming very important. Email Campaign is the cheapest way of advertising and generates the highest Return on Investment (ROI). Here are some suggestions by Justin Zhu (CEO of Iterable) on creating good a email campaign:
1. Map out the customer flow.
2. Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much.
3. Embrace marketing automation.
4. Offer value with every touch.
5. Recognize lapsed users and bring them back.
6. Perpetually tinker with A/B testing.
To know more about these tips, follow: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2015/05/05/the-6-rules-for-creating-killer-email-campaigns/

A business is identified with its customers. And to attract and retain customers, social media marketing is a must. But, unplanned or not well organized social media campaign is as effective as having no campaign at all. Therefore, it’s important to plan an inventive and comprehensive social media campaign.

Nina Zipkin, in her article at entrepreneur.com has shared few tips to help build up your following and your brand via social media marketing campaigns. Some of them are:

• Make your tweets stand out
• Inspire action
• Stay top of mind
• Share your feedback
• Veer off the beaten track

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/240295

According to Kevan Lee (Content Crafter, Buffer), testing phase in a social media marketing is an important phase, which include "What to test" and "how to test." Some questions you should ask yourself while testing are:

• Which one thing you will be testing?
• What metric will be my best measurement of success?
• Do I have enough data to assume this result will be true and repeatable for everyone?

In this article, the author writes about some tips for improving social media marketing test. They are: testing one variable at a time, look at the right data, compare consistently and check for statistical significance. 

To know more about the test used for various social media marketing sites, read on: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245478

Many brands consider social media and content marketing as two different fields with no relation at all. But, what they chose to forget is the fact that social media marketing cannot function without content. Their synergy leads to better engagement on social media and thus, better social media marketing campaigns.

Brett Relander, Founder of Launch & Hustle, in his article on entrepreneur.com gives three tips for bringing social media and content marketing together. They are:

1. A/B test content for effectiveness with your audience
2. Optimize content for specific social media networks
3. Tap your audience for ideas

To understand them in detail, visit the following link:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245306

E-Mail marketing has been into existence since long. On the other hand, social media marketing is doing wonders these days. What will happen if we combine these two mass marketing mediums?

The answer to this question is given in the following article by Thomas Miller at socialmediaweek.com. In this article, the author tells us the reasons why this integration is important and also suggests 8 ways to do so. Some of them are:

• Put social icons in your emails
• Create dedicated email campaign
• Add “Retweet This!” in your email

To know more, visit the following link:

http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/8-skillful-ways-integrate-email-marketing-social-media/

In today’s world, online presence of business is a must have factor for its success. For this, each business has multiple social media accounts. Management of these social media accounts and thus, social media campaigns by businesses requires alignment of people in correct positions, budget, time and the goals of the organization. This in turn, enhances the output as well as presence of the business.

This article by Linda Philips, social media strategist, on socialmediatoday.com lists out the following must have tools with their benefits that businesses must have to manage their social media accounts efficiently:

• Buffer
• Social Hunt
• BuzzSumo Alerts
• SumAll
• Social Count
• Social Oomph
• Postplanner

To know more, visit the following link:

http://bit.ly/1KmzSW6

There is devastation all around. People are dying, missing and injured. Telephone lines have crashed. This is what Nepal looks like since April 25, when a 7.9 magnitude earthquake had hit the country.

With almost no other means of communication with the outside world, Social Media, served as a lifeline in this tragic earthquake’s aftermath. It had enabled information sharing via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This has helped people trapped there to get help and people elsewhere to know about the status of their near and dear ones. These websites are also helping to locate people via features like Facebook Safety Check and Google Person Finder.

To know more about how these networking sites have come out as a savior, visit the following link at thehindu.com:

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/social-media-pitches-in-for-nepal-quake-aftermath/article7143425.ece

According to Mike Proulx (Executive VP-director of Digital Strategy), social media marketing is also known as advertising. Social media marketing is also called paid marketing, as brands have to pay for showing the messages to target audience. Dick Costolo (Twitter), say that out of 20 tweets 1 is an advertisement. Brands are using social media for marketing as it more automated, targeted, instant, shareable and optimized. There are several ways to use social media marketing for advertising which are as follows:

• Open your wallet
• Play Blackjack
• Show Restraints
• Measure what matters
• Connect the dots
Read more at: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/social-media-advertising/297841/

According to Aaron Agius (Contributor), social media is an effective marketing medium. There are many marketers who use Facebook followers, retweets, etc. to monitor their performance, but there are some other metrics like brand search volume, lead growth, brand sentiment, inbound links, and klout score. Social share provides very little information about the overall effectiveness of your campaign because: Many social shares come from bots.
• Social shares many not come from your target customers.
• Social shares can be from people that are speaking negatively about your brand.
Read more at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244669

According to Monica Zent (CEO & Founder of Foxwordy), social networking just takes a quarter of all time spent online to reach more than 75 percent of all internet users. Social selling, basically, is engaging with your target audience via social media. To leverage the power of social selling you must understand your stakeholders (customers, investors, clients, business partners etc.). Once you find your target, you need to engage with them and for building long term relations, you need to be credible. This strategy helps to generate 50% more sales. Read more at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244293

Social media is becoming popular. Social media answers millions of users nowadays. These users want their personal news feeds and timelines is full of interesting content. Digital media marketing analysts have conducted numerous studies on what kind of content performs best on social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter.  Answer? Photos and videos. Pinterest, despite being new in social media field, is actually the second-largest social media traffic referrer behind Facebook. To know more about the reasons why images will increase social media research, follow: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/2015-04-04/6-reasons-why-images-increase-your-social-media-reach

The key elements for a business to succeed are a well-articulated strategy and well-defined goals and every business activity should contribute to move the organization in the right direction and thereby achieve its strategic goals. Nowadays, firms spend a lot of time on consulting strategic planning to support sales, marketing and operations across the enterprise but, they don’t include social business activities which sustain the firm’s digital footprint. Social business activities are an automated version of a firm’s identify, thought leadership, relationship and value drivers and also means looking at social business as more than marketing campaigns. To know more about social business strategy, follow Vanessa DiMauro (CEO, Leader Networks)’s article link: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/2015-04-03/social-business-strategy-how-prevent-digital-muddle?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Social+Media+Today+%28all+posts%29

Organizing an event? How to spread the word about the event? This is where marketing comes into the picture. Nowadays, while promoting an event, you have to include social media. It has become unavoidable in today’s world. But social media is used in different ways for different events and one must follow a unique process of marketing while promoting one’s event on social media. William Johnson (Web designer), writes in his article link about some tips on how to promote an event on social media. Read more at: : http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/2015-04-01/top-7-ways-use-social-media-make-your-event-successful

User Experience, also known as UX has become important and it impacts everything from app design to social media. UX designers work with digital marketing teams and this will only increase in 2015. Digital marketers will benefit when working with the UX design teams as it will provide loads of ideas that revolves around how they position the product for sale and marketing. Tara Lifland (Content marketing manager), writes in her article about why UX is important and where. Read more at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/2015-03-26/5-reasons-why-user-experience-important

Social media has become one of the most important tools for consumers who wants to file complaints or questions. But, the question is how a brand handles their customer care team.  Sofie De Beule (Community Manager at Engagor) writes in her article link about some of the top 2015 trends for organizing your social customer care team. Read more at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/2015-03-24/top-trends-organize-your-social-customer-care-team