Getting the Most Out of Social Media for Your Business

In recent years, social media has grown from a fun diversion into an effective tool to help brands instantly interact with their audience on a global scale. From offering more personalized customer service to launching new products, sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer many opportunities for businesses to engage with potential customers.

Social media marketing is where it’s at—but it also changes at a rapid clip. Making sure you get the most out of your efforts is imperative to growing your reach.

Ready to dive into the latest tips and trends to help leverage your social media presence? These articles from the Hiring Headquarters—Upwork’s resource for entrepreneurs, executives, and freelancers—will get you up to speed in no time.

Keeping up With Social Marketing Trends

Social media platforms and their audiences can be fickle. Strategies that work well on a given site one year may change wildly the next, which is why it’s important to stay abreast of any significant updates that can impact your marketing’s effectiveness. Changes to a platform’s existing features—or the addition of new feature—can sometimes make or break your social media battle plans. Facebook, for example, has undergone several notable shifts of late.

“3 Facebook Marketing Trends to Leverage in 2016” explores several new features and looks at how businesses can use them to enhance their reach on the popular networking site. The piece looks at three marketing tools and details how to best incorporate them into your social media plan.

Among the new features set to drive this year’s trends on the Facebook marketing front, these three hold ample promise:

1. Messenger Bots. Beyond helping with customer interactions via Facebook’s messenger feature, this handy tools will make it easier to automate tasks like online purchases and subscriptions via chat.
2. Instant Articles. This feature speeds up the loading time for articles on Facebook by allowing users to host the content on the company’s server, which can help put your marketing content in the hands of users before their attention wanes.
3. Live. With video being a huge component of Facebook, this new feature lets you tap into that by creating interactive live video experiences to engage your audience in real-time.

Rebooting When You’re Stuck

Without a solid plan to tackle marketing on the broad spectrum of social media platforms, it can be easy to miss your target. Having a consistent tone and approach across different social sites can help you cement your brand’s online personality while ensuring your customers feel connected. Rather than continue to spin your tires when things don’t seem to be working right, it’s useful to take a moment for analysis and reflection before moving forward.

“9 Reasons Your Social Media Efforts May Be Stuck” helps to identify what might not be working with your social media marketing approach and outlines suggestions to help you fix any issues and move forward. The article outlines problems that can hamper your social media effectiveness and offers solutions to help you improve your results.

Some of the more common issues highlighted include:

• Not posting on a consistent schedule
• Content that isn’t easily found
• Posts lack excitement and engaging content
• No clear social media policy for team members to follow

Using Imagery to Drive Traffic and Engagement

Striking visuals can be a major factor for standing out in the crowded social media space, and numerous studies show that images and strong graphics tend to get more social engagement online than written content.

That has, in part, driven the popularity of image-centric social platforms like Instagram. It’s important to know how to use Instagram to make sure you get the most traffic out of each post—especially given recent changes to the site’s visibility algorithm.

“How Will the Instagram Algorithm Impact Your Brand?” is a must-read for social media marketers who use the site to share content. This article details some of updates to the platform’s inner workings, which will have an affect on how, when, and where your content gets shown to users.

It offers tips for social media-savvy marketers, such as focusing on great image quality, using striking photography to boost engagement, exploring paid reach options, and using analytics to track the way users interact with your content.

Want to learn more about how to put social media marketing to best use for your brand? The Hiring Headquarters has plenty of articles and insights to help you out.

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