Over the last ten years social media marketing has been increasing in importance. It is an activity that all business should be doing. Unfortunately, many small business owners get caught up in the day to day running of the business and neglect to be active on social media and maintain their blog. Fortunately, there are tools available to automate many social media and marketing activities.

Scheduling
Timing is important when posting to social media such as Facebook or Twitter. The time you post will determine how many people will see and respond to your article or important announcement.

The correct time to post will be dependent on your industry and customer base, but many business owners will be too busy running their business to be on social media at the right time to post. Therefore a scheduling system is a great solution. It will let you create posts outside business hours but only release them to the public at a better viewing time.

• Klout: This is a service for personal accounts and business as well. You can link multiple accounts including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. You can then write posts and then schedule the posts to be released simultaneously on multiple social media sites. Klout also gives a Klout Score, which is way to compare your business popularity with other businesses and celebrities.
• Facebook: If you have a Facebook Page for your business, you can schedule posts. Write the post as normal, but instead of pressing the post button, select the schedule button. You can then select a time for post to appear on Facebook.
• Tweetdeck: This tool allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts. You can schedule tweets to appear on Twitter at a selected time.

Content Curation
If you want people to become aware of your brand, you need to be constantly posting links of interesting articles and your own product information. You also need to send out targeted communications such as newsletters. There are tools that can help with finding and distributing interesting content.

• MailChimp: What started as a email marketing service has become an integrated automation tool. Articles from your blog automatically become the content in your newsletter. The content from your newsletter then can be used to create posts and ads for Google, Facebook and Instagram. In online stores, if a customer adds an item to a cart but then does not buy it, MailChimp will email the customer a reminder to complete the purchase. You can also add a MailChimp page to you website to act as your contact form and customer database.
• Hootsuite: This is a paid service that allows you to manage over 35 social media sites on a single dashboard. You can schedule posts, like other people’s posts and perform analytics. You can also set up alerts on topics relevent to your business.
• Google and Twitter Alerts: In Twitter you can select hash-tags for topics of interest. With Google you select keywords and topics you are interested in. You will then be notified when certain topics are mentioned online. This allows you to only look at tweets and articles that is relevant to your business.

Original Content Services
Ultimately what will make your business stand out is the creation of your own original content. Writing your own content (instead of reposting other people’s articles) has many benefits. Not only will your business be able to display it’s expertise, you are able to customise the information to suit your customer base. Also, the more articles you put on the your website, the higher your business will rank in Google searches.

Unfortunately, this can be the most time consuming part of social media marketing. You can spend hours doing research and writing the content. The solution is to hire a content creation writer, such as Pixel Layer. We take the time to find out what your business is about and do the research necessary.

We can handle all phases of your marketing strategy. We will build the website, write the content, make the promotional videos and share it on social media.
Fill in our contact form or call 0490 011 585 to speak to us about your business needs and get a free quote. We will come to your office anywhere in the Melbourne suburbs.