Facebook live is here to stay. If you haven’t thought about including Facebook live in your marketing strategy, you could be missing out on quite a lot of social traffic, engagement and building relationships with your audience.

Believe it or not, people tend to spend 3x longer watching the video which is live compared to a video which is no longer live, according to these statistics^[1].

What does that mean?

It means you need to start utilizing Facebook Live if you haven’t done so already.

Facebook Live is free, and it’s a brilliant way to increase your fan base, reach your audience and engage with them on another level.

In this article, I’ll be covering 5 ways you can utilize Facebook Live. No more excuses!

1 – Behind The Scenes

People are usually interested to know what happens behind the scenes, with Facebook Live, you can do just that! Show them what you get up to, let them see what it’s like.

It will help build trust, and your audience will feel more special being able to see what’s going on backstage. They are also more likely to engage as it will be of interest to them.

2 – Share Industry Breaking News

One of the best ways to increase your engagement on social media platforms, is keeping your followers up-to-date with the latest trending content in your industry.

Utilising Facebook Live to cover trending content for your audience is the perfect way to build up relationships, trust and skyrocket your engagement.

Not everyone has time to read up all the changes, so a quick livestream covering all the new trends and breaking news is likely to catch your audience’s attention.

You could also tell them to engage using the emojis as a response for example on a scale of 1-5 on how they feel about the new trends and changes.

3 – Webinars

Providing exclusive content such as webinars to your Facebook community will definitely result in a boost of engagement, especially if you’re covering interesting content and featuring influencers.

It’s a great way to build your fan base, and you’ll reach a larger audience, even more so if you tag the guest’s profile in your Facebook live post.

The best thing of all, these webinars don’t even need to be “live”. Once you’ve finished the live webinar with your email list, you should consider releasing it via a Facebook Live for your community. It definitely boosts engagements and helps you grow pretty quick!

4 – Q&A’s

Engaging with your followers by running a live Q&A session is a great idea to build up engagement. You could get them to ask questions during the livestream or request questions on a specific post published before the livestream starts.

Just like with running them on other social platforms, for the best turn out, you should announce it on your other social streams like Twitter and Instagram.

In the Q&A you could mention to click a link in the status or comment section, that could lead them to your site or a gated asset, which you’ll then receive sign-ups for to increase your email list, etc.

5 – Sharing Your Latest Blog Posts

Repurposing your blog posts into Facebook Livestreams is a good way to keep your audience engaged. You could cover the top key points in the latest blog post, and go into them in-depth, whilst answering any questions from the audience.

In the end, you could link to the blog post for them to read up more about and learn some extra tips. Especially if you mention there is a key tip or asset on the blog post that they should go and read.

Your traffic is likely to increase, and your audience will appreciate you taking the time to explain the article in-depth and answer any questions they have.

If you’ve optimised your website for collecting leads, you’re bound to generate more signups, building your email list with high-quality interested leads.

Conclusion

If you don’t use Facebook Live already, you need to implement it into your Facebook strategy right away. Experiment with the above ideas and see what works best, what generates the most engagement and interest to your audience.

There’s nothing wrong with asking them what content they’d like to see. The more value you can give them, the more they’ll remember and stay connected with you, moving down the funnel.

The post 5 Ways Of Using Facebook Live To Escalate Your Social Media Engagement appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

With the platform having over 700 million monthly^[1] active people worldwide using Instagram, it’s pretty easy to come to the conclusion that standing out will be very tough.

You’re not alone… I thought that too.

Especially when 400 million people use the platform on a daily basis…

But don’t worry…

By the end of this article, you’ll have some key takeaways to grow your account fairly quickly, in a safe organic proven method.

The best of all, the followers you will gain, are targeted and most likely will engage with your content because they’re interested in the content you are publishing.

Before I even begin sharing these top tips to grow your Instagram following, you first need to identify what niche you’re and whether the type of content you are producing could be improved.

It goes without saying.. the better your content is, the more attractive and insightful it is, the more engagement and publicity you’ll receive, potentially resulting in more sales.

Here are top tips for growing a targeted Instagram audience:

Post Regularly

In order for you to start growing, you need to be very active. Posting multiple times a week. If you think you’ll grow an account by posting once a week, you’ve not got the right mindset on.

It’s recommended to post a minimum of one a day, but if you can publish at least 3 times a day at different times, you’ll grow an account much quicker.

Whilst it can be hard to keep track of that, I’d recommend creating your content, sending it to your Instagram app and leaving it in your drafts, when the time is right, share the content. You could also utilize other tools out there for scheduling your content, however Instagram isn’t too keen on that kind of stuff and it may hurt your account.

Related: How To Grow A Targeted Twitter Following

Identify Suitable Hashtags

Using hashtags is great. But if you aren’t utilising the best ones that are not overcrowded, then you’re missing out.

Using hashtags like #marketing and #instagram is pointless. The amount of users that are sharing content with those hashtags every second is insane. Your posts won’t be seen.
Think of it like this.

Imagine being in a room without 1000 people. If you shout “Instagram” hardly anyone will hear you.

You need to be sharing content using hashtags that are not too popular, but are still used on a regular basis. Depending on your content, and the amount of engagement you receive, you \might end up getting featured in the top 9 section which usually lasts a few days and will help you rack up a lot of impressions, follows and more traffic.

Engage With Your Targeted Audience

One of the best tips for growing a targeted following is by engaging with your target audience!
Quite obvious..yet not many people actually do it.

Go ahead and identify what type of keywords your target audience are likely to use when hashtagging. Find relevant content and start engaging with it.

Like three of their pictures.

Comment 4+ relevant words – make it seem like you’re interested in the content.

Go back a few minutes later and drop them a follow.

The majority of time, they’ll likely engage back and might even drop you a follow.

For each time you like their content and comment, they’re receiving a notification. If you do that with an internal of 5-10 minutes, that’s a few different notifications at various times, making them more likely to view your profile.

Share User-Generated-Content

If you follow Go Pro on Instagram, you’ll know how successful their Instagram marketing is.

They are always reposting user-generated content and the best thing of all, this content usually attracts a lot of attention and the engagement can be crazy.

Everyone loves it when their content is featured in a positive way on a company’s social feed. User-generated content is also known to garner more engagement.

You May Also like: Top 6 Social Media Marketing Trends to Stay Ahead in 2017

Conclusion

The above tips should help you get growing a targeted following right away. Just make sure you’re targeting the right audience and share content that is eye-catching and would make yourself want to engage with it, if you was in their position.

Featured Image: shutterstock
In-Post Image: shutterstock, dmnews.com

The post How To Get Real and Targeted Instagram Followers appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Although it may seem hard to grow a following and stand out on the platform, it’s still possible.

If you haven’t got a strategy in place to grow a targeted following, then you could be missing out on a large audience.

The good news here is that in this article, you’ll find out how to grow a large audience on the platform that’s not only active but also targeted.

What does that mean? It means they’re likely to be interested in what you are posting about and will most likely engage with your social activities providing you’re publishing high-quality, useful content.

How To Grow A Targeted Twitter Following

1 – Identifying Your Target Audience

In order to have a targeted following, you first need to think about who your audience is, who would find value from your brand and the content you share, what the characteristics of your customers are and more importantly, what’s your niche.

You can easily find information like this by utilizing a few tools, one of them is Buzzsumo. This tool will not only allow you to find trending content from top influencers, but you’ll also be able to identify key influencers and large accounts in a specific industry.

Another way to identify your target audience is by utilizing Twitter’s Advanced Search. This is a simple yet effective method to find influencers who may have a targeted audience in their niche, which would help you define your audience even more.

Some other tools available that you should include in your Twitter marketing strategy are these. If used effectively, you’ll see more success on Twitter.

Once you’ve discovered a great amount of people/accounts that fit your niche and are active, you should create a Twitter list and make it private. Add them to it. This will help you remember those accounts, so you can go back and engage with their followers in the future.

2 – Using Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are brilliant for keeping track of certain accounts when you follow a lot of people, or even just monitoring their activity, for example, a private list of your competitors to see what they are doing.

For what we are doing, growing a targeted following, Twitter lists come in handy.

When you add someone to a public Twitter list, they receive a notification.

Here’s an example of what it looks like.

As you can see, that stands out a lot more than an average like or retweet notification.

You should utilize Twitter lists and add those who tweet about your niche or those that follow the influencers in your industry.

Providing your Twitter list is public, they’ll be notified and might visit your profile and possibly follow if they like what they see.

Keep in mind, you’ll want to name your list something catchy and interesting, so it entices your targeted account view your profile and engage back.

3 – Follow your Target Audience

Whilst the Twitter list strategy does help, following your targeted audience and engaging with their tweets providing they are suitable will help you grow an active community that will most likely follow you and engage back.

You’ll want to make sure you follow the right targeted accounts and don’t follow too many in a single day, so utilizing tools like Crowdfire or Tweepi is important.

If you’d rather not use tools, you can still follow your target audience by looking at the influencers followers tab and drop a follow on the recent accounts, engaging with their account. Keep in mind though, that method can be quite time-consuming!

Both Tweepi and Crowdfire offer a follow feature, utilise that and add the influencers Twitter handle, you’ll then see a list of accounts that follow the influencer. Go through that list and follow those that are suitable and have an interest in the industry,

You can also use Crowdfire’s inactive followers and non-followers feature to unfollow those that haven’t engaged back or that have been inactive on Twitter for more than a month.

4 – Engage With Your Audience

Once you’ve started to follow your target audience, some will begin to follow back, once they have, you should start to think about how you’ll engage with them.

Will you like a few of their tweets? Ask them a question? Retweet them? Or share a valuable piece of information they may find useful?

Building a connection with your followers can help you further down the line when it comes to sales and networking.

Read More: Mistakes That You Make During Twitter Marketing

Conclusion

Providing you follow the strategies above, you should start to see growth on your Twitter account. If done correctly, whilst sharing interesting content, you’ll also notice much more engagement and an increase in your social reach.

Featured Image: istockphoto.com
In-Post Image: istockphoto.com

The post How To Grow A Targeted Twitter Following appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

That’s quite a lot of emails when you think about it.

Those emails are sometimes sent to people we don’t really know very well or haven’t even built a connection with.

Cold email outreach, whilst it may come across as annoying and receiving/sending potentially unwanted emails, it can be a success.

In this article, I’ll be sharing a few examples of email outreach and will include some key takeaways and explain how they were effective, and what key points you need to think about when drafting up your outreach emails.

I recently received an email from Sara Daugherty, a fellow marketer. She noticed I shared an article on my Twitter account and decided to send an outreach email mentioning the CEO of the company she works at publishing a similar article that expands on the points in the original article I shared.

This outreach email has been drafted together quite well, not only has she mentioned the original article and the fact that she thinks myself and my followers will enjoy it, but she’s also asked me to reply to her in order to receive the link to read more and share it – rather than just link dropping.

Key Takeaway: Think about how you can help provide value to the recipient and their audience. Ask the recipient if they’re interested to receive the link to the article or piece of content, don’t just send it.

Another good example of an outreach email is this one from Sofie Nelen, Digital Marketer at Survey Anyplace.

Sofie’s main reason for reaching out to me was due to this blog post I published. She’s emailed to see if I would be willing to include her survey tool in an upcoming blog post.

Usually, that kind of emails suck… They aren’t put together well, and I doubt they’d have much success. Sofie’s email, however, did grab my attention, and I did get in touch with her.

She’s covered why she’s emailing me in the first part of the email, then she continued giving me a compliment about the tools I included, and lastly asked if I’d be happy to include their tool in an upcoming blog post.

Sofie then began to list the reasons as to why this tool should be included – stating interesting quick points about the tool, not taking up too much of my time.

After all, time is very precious to us all, nobody wants to be wasting their time reading an outreach email that’s too long and won’t provide value.

Key Takeaway: Mention why you’re outreaching at the start of the email. Provide a compliment about the article/content.

4 Key Points for Outreach Emails

So as you have seen from the above examples, email outreach can be a success providing you have a clear strategy on how you go about it.

Businesses use email outreaches for various reasons, some of these include sales emails, guest blogging opportunities, backlinks for SEO, etc.

Below are 4 points you want to keep in mind for when sending outreach emails.

• Don’t use a template – always customize your outreach emails. Make them personalized. Talk about something they’ve recently shared or something of interest that shows you aren’t just selling to them.
• Stay on top of trends – like mentioned above, it’s important you make your emails personalized. You should stay on top of trends in your industry and mention about latest trends as long as it ties back to your product or service you provide. This will also portray you know what you’re doing and are very always up-to-date in the industry.
• Add some creativity – don’t just make them general emails. Make them a memorable email. Add some creativity to it, make it one to be remembered and make them feel like you’ve put time and effort into it not just sending out a bunch of emails with no personalisation or creativeness. Think about adding suitable images or a personalized video.
• Keep it short- while the above tips might bulk out your email a little more, try your hardest to keep them short and to the point. Especially the main reason as to why you’re emailing them. No one wants to receive a long cold email; I doubt they’ll even read past the first paragraph.

The post Email Outreach: What is it? & 4 Key Points to Remember appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

In this article, I will be covering 3 mistakes that businesses tend to make, and how to overcome them.

Being On Too Many Social Media Platforms

Majority of smaller businesses tend to create an account on most social media platforms, the reason being “Because I was told it’s good for my business, I need to be on everything”. That’s not always true.

Sometimes your ideal audience may not even utilise that platform. Being on too many social media platforms can be a tough task because there’s nothing worse than leaving your social media accounts inactive on a social media platform. Trust me, it’s not good.

You need to be active on the platforms. I’ve seen it happen a few times where someone has tried contacting an inactive company social media account and they’ve not got anywhere, the issue then escalated even more. I’ve been in the same situation where I’ve tried to contact a company yet they’re inactive.

If you haven’t already guessed the key takeaway from this mistake, is that you shouldn’t be on too many platforms if you don’t have the time to manage and update them. It could really damage your brand reputation. You should identify if your audience is on the platform and how you could interact with them, mapping out a realistic marketing plan before you jump on the bandwagon and end up leaving it to go inactive.

Sharing Non-Interest Content

It’s all well and good sharing content on your social media profiles but if you aren’t actively sharing nor are they interesting to your audience, you aren’t going to receive much engagement nor increase your follower growth quickly.

Content is key. You need to ensure you have interesting engaging content that your audience will find helpful and worth sharing. Whether that’s the latest news in a specific industry, top tips, interviews with well-known influencers, or even eye-catching media like images with interesting quotes etc. You can find content that’s share-worthy via the use of many tools such as Feedly, Buzzsumo and Anders Pink.

Don’t just share random articles that you come across on the web and think are interesting. You need to think about your audience, would they find it interesting? Would they share it? What will they get out of reading it? – staying up-to-date with industry trends, gain knowledge etc?

Once you start to think about the content you are sharing and have a content marketing plan you will start to notice your engagement will increase and you should see your follower growth start to pick up, providing you apply these top tips too.

The main takeaway from this mistake is that you should focus on sharing useful information with your audience at least 4+ times a day depending on the platform. Think about sharing industry trends, news, interviews with the established industry influencers etc.

Focussing On Just Sales

Throughout my time working in marketing, I’ve seen a numerous amount of business social media profiles sharing sales posts one after the other. The engagement they received? It was amazing! No, far from it. They had little to no engagement on their sales posts.

For starters, their timeline was just full of posts sharing their latest products or telling people to buy their products. The posts had no creativity and were very basic. Those accounts had a very little following. Like seriously, who wants to be faced with constant self-advertisement all the time? Definitely not me!

You need to focus on more than just your sales. Whilst it’s recommended to post sales posts every now and then, you should follow the 80/20 rule.

Most of the updates on your social accounts should be useful engaging content that your audience will find interesting. Like mentioned in the above point, you should think about sharing content such as industry news, interviews and tips.

The best type of content you should be sharing on your social media platforms should be useful content from your company blog, for example like Creation Agency does. If you don’t already have one, you should be writing insightful content that provides your audience lots of knowledge and makes them want to come back for more so you can slowly but surely start building relationships.

Also Read: The Rules That Will Help You Master Influencer Marketing

With the help of an agency like Proven SEO, delivery of sponsored blog posts, branded content and social influencer services can help your company stand out from the crowd and show you don’t just care about your sales, but care and engage with your audience, developing that human relationship even more.

The post Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes In 2017? appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

1. Measuring ROI

Measuring ROI from your influencer marketing campaign was one of the top challenges faced according to the report from Linqia.

This challenge isn’t only for influencer marketing, quite a lot of brands have been struggling with ROI for many years, more so when it involves content and social media.

To overcome this, you could instead look at the non-financial return, for example driving traffic to your website or landing page from influencer referral traffic, increase in social following, more engagement, looking at the total brand mentions that have been made by your influencers etc.

2. Identifying influencers

Another challenge that quite a lot of brands have trouble with is identifying the right influencers. In order to see success from your influencer marketing campaign, you’ll need to identify suitable influencers.
An ideal influencer would be one that meets the following golden rules:

• Active influencer that shares high-quality content regularly
• Have a large and engaged audience that both comment and like
• Appears to be authentic
• Has a specific theme and style that relates to your brand

However, always keep in mind that the size of an influencer doesn’t always necessarily mean you’ll see success. Smaller influencers also known as micro-influencers that have less followers sometimes have much higher engagement rates than those that have large followings in the millions.

According to Digiday, Instagram influencers that have a following of 10,000 to 100,000 followers receive more engagements (2.4% like rate) compared to those that have 1 million to 10 million followers and more (1.7% like rate). Comment rates also known to follow a similar pattern.

In order to overcome this challenge, you’ll need to understand and identify what your potential audience like, what motivates them, what they want to achieve.
For example travel bloggers, travel vloggers and travel photographers would be your ideal influencers if you are a travel agency or sell travel gear.

3. Approaching influencers

Getting an influencer’s attention is also one of the tough challenges brands face. This is mainly due to the rise of influencer marketing, making it harder for brands to work with influencers as the demand for them increases and is a battle for who can win them for their campaign.

In order to successfully work with influencers, offering them only a financial reward is no longer the best option. To stand out and increase your chances of engaging with an influencer and working with them, you need to also offer extra perks that would be relevant and interest the influencer’s audience.

In Augure’s study, the participants mentioned their most common motivations are when they are able to increase their reach and engagement, create high quality content for their audience, shape their image, receive additional perks (discounts, free products etc), earn money and live new experiences.

To find suitable influencers for your campaign, you should look to use tools like BuzzSumo, LinkedIn, Ninja Outreach or use a provider like Proven SEO for delivery of sponsored blog posts, branded content and social influencer services.

Also See: Learn How Your Fitness Company Can Benefit From Influence Marketing

Conclusion

Influencer marketing will continue to rise as brands continue to see more success. The above challenges are the most common marketers usually face, however there are several more. Hopefully, this article has given you an overview of some of those challenges and how to overcome them. When using an agency like Proven SEO, the challenges you face may slowly become easy with the help from experts. Just always remember, you need to make sure you build a healthy strong relationship with influencers.

The post Influencer Marketing Challenges & How to Overcome Them appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.