FACEBOOK

How to Create a Facebook Business Page

Consider this: 2.5 billion people log on to Facebook each month. Over 140 billion businesses have a Facebook business page. If you haven’t joined the competition, now is the time to better reach your audience.

Facebook Page vs. Facebook Profile: What is the Difference?

Don’t make the mistake of confusing your customers when they come across your Facebook page intended to be a business page when in reality is set up as a personal page. There are many differences between the two, including the ability to obtain page likes and run paid ads.

How to Set Up Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager makes creating engaging content for your audience much easier and streamlines the process into one place. First, you need to have a business page. See how to set up Ads Manager for your business.

How to Create a Facebook Shop for Your Business

If your brand sells products, you should consider making a Facebook Shop part of your sales and marketing strategy. This allows consumers to buy your products directly through Facebook, which has the potential to increase sales and provide added convenience for your customers.

How to Use Facebook Business Manager

Facebook Business Manager is a one-stop-shop for your business to access all Facebook marketing activities for your page. You can also assign other employees to access to manage the page, such as responding to messages and viewing ad performance.

How Does Facebook Business Manager Work?

Think of Facebook Business Manager as a centralized place to find all of your ads, posts, messages, and comments. You can also create and preview Instagram ads here, too. Make sure to take advantage of this feature to make life easier.

TWITTER

How to Use Twitter Hashtags Effectively for Business

Hashtags are a great tool for categorizing your brand’s content on Twitter. By incorporating the right hashtags, more users can find you when searching for the same topic. Learn how to use this effectively.

How to Promote a Tweet

You might be creating paid social advertisements on other platforms, but do you have a paid strategy for Twitter? With no cap on budget limitations, Twitter is an interesting place to promote the content you want your audience to see.

How to Use Twitter Effectively for Business

Twitter can be a lead generating powerhouse. Often seen as just another social media platform, your brand might be missing the mark on reach your audience on Twitter. Learn new tips on how to best strategize for this platform.

How to Change Your Twitter Account to a Business Account

In an effort to keep your already established followers, if your Twitter account is not already set up as a business account, there’s a way to do so. Follow this guide to find out how and start taking advantage of Twitter for Business.

LINKEDIN

How to Use Hashtags on LinkedIn for Business Growth

You might not think of LinkedIn when you think of hashtags, but the platform officially introduced them in 2018. This is a great way to help others find your content through the search feature.

How to Use LinkedIn for Personal Branding

In many ways, you are your brand. And if you’re in a leadership position, it’s important to make a name for yourself in association with your business. LinkedIn is a tool for positioning yourself as a thought leader and utilizing your personal network to promote your brand.

How to Find Clients on LinkedIn

LinkedIn features many useful tools for finding leads. For instance, you can search companies and individuals by industry, geography, and more.

INSTAGRAM

How to Create a Poll on Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are a great way to really engage with your followers. There are many fun and interactive features to choose from, including polls. Here’s how to run a poll to ask your customers a question, like their thoughts on a new potential product.

How to Get More Followers on Instagram for Your Business

Obtaining new followers is no easy feat, but there are ways to increase your success. The more followers you have, the more likely you are to see more sales and increase brand awareness.

How to Choose Hashtags for Instagram

With so many hashtags floating around Instagram, it’s important for your brand to be strategic in choosing which ones to use. Picking relevant hashtags can help up your Instagram game immensely.

How to Create Branded Instagram Stickers for Stories

Instagram has many fun features that are engaging for users. One of those features is “stickers” that can be placed on Instagram stories. Brands can create their own unique stickers that anyone can use.

TIKTOK

TikTok for Business: Is It Right for Yours?

The demographics of people who watch TikTok may surprise you. It’s not just teens who are on the platform. Find out if taking advantage of TikTok is a surprisingly smart move for your business.

How to Use TikTok for Business

TikTok isn’t just a place for lip-syncing and dance challenges. It can actually serve as a very educational platform. Learn how to create relevant content on behalf of your brand that resonates with your audience.

How to Come Up With Content Ideas for TikTok

We get it, TikTok is pretty new to everyone and entirely different from other social media platforms. If you don’t know where to begin, we’ve got your back on coming up with content ideas.

How to Create a Business Account on TikTok

There’s a difference between a personal account and a business account on TikTok. Before your brand joins the platform, make sure to read this guide to setting up the right type of account.

SNAPCHAT

How to Use Snapchat for Business Growth

There are many useful features for businesses to take advantage of on Snapchat. From paid advertisements to custom filters, it’s a great place to engage with potential customers and increase brand awareness.

How to Develop a Snapchat Branding Strategy

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to Snapchat. From partnering with influencers to learning all of the available features on the platform, learn how to best strategize for Snapchat.

PINTEREST

How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Business

Your brand doesn’t have to be crafty to be on Pinterest. There’s a place for more types of businesses than you may think. Learn how to effectively use Pinterest for your unique business and industry.

How to Use Pinterest to Sell Products

Pinterest is a great avenue for selling products to potential customers. Catch their eye with high-quality photography and link directly to your website. Learn how.

MAXIMIZE YOUR SUCCESS ON SOCIAL

How to Add Social Media Profiles to Google My Business

Combing the power of Google and your social media presence can make a huge difference in finding your brand online. Add your social media profiles to Google My Business for increased visibility. Learn how!

How to Create Social Media Images that Support Your Brand

The right messaging is important, but the visuals are just as vital for drawing in your audience and leaving a lasting impression. Make sure the images you’re using on social media are high quality and aligned with your marketing strategy.

How to Monitor Your Brand on Social Media

When you choose to have a presence on social media, you also add more responsibility to your plate. It’s important to designate someone to monitor each platform in order to respond to customers in a timely fashion and catch any errors posted to the page.

Our team of experts is here to lighten your workload when it comes to all things social. Reach out if you’re feeling overwhelmed or simply want a second opinion. We can come up with a strategy to help your brand get results, faster, or take care of the posting for you. We will also measure the results of your posts to ensure you’re putting out the right types of content to reach your target audience. Reach out!

Build Brand Awareness On Social Media

Utilizing social media is a great way to build brand awareness, and theses C-leveled e-books break down how and why you should do it. Take advantage of these free platforms to reach millions of customers and let us guide you through social media best practices.

Download The Ebook

The post Social Media Guide: How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

In fact, what most people don’t realize about Pinterest is that it is a huge sales channel as well. 

If you are looking for ways to quickly grow as a business owner and maximize your online sales, there is nothing better than Pinterest. 

Are you curious why is that so? 

This is because Pinterest consists of users who are willing to pay more per order as compared to users on other social media channels. In other words, Pinterest stands synonymous to a goldmine for eCommerce store owners. 

Now, let’s move on to the million-dollar question of how you can use Pinterest to sell products. 

So, without any further delay, let’s delve deeper to answer your question. 

The following are our top tips to successfully turn this visually stunning platform into a stream of revenue. 

1) Design visually apt pins 

Firstly, you can only survive on Pinterest if you have stunning visuals.? So, make sure all your pins are a visual-delight that compels users to click and explore. 

Invest in high-quality photographs and graphics that are both beautiful and relevant to your brand. 

2) Focus on SEO 

Considered as the ultimate visual search engine, it comes with its own SEO algorithms. 

Make sure to have your primary focus on keywords relevant to your industry. The key is to strategically include them in the title of your Pins as well as descriptions. Also, ensure that the inclusion of keywords doesn’t come off as promotional but rather natural that users feel like wanting to know more. 

3) Use rich pins 

The rich pins are of immense helo considering that they pull out extra information from your site and put it on display alongside the information that your normal pin has. Information such as price and availability are automatically synced. 

This way, users can view the information while being on Pinterest only. And you don’t have to spent hours entering the same information on Pinterest to keep it aligned with the information mentioned on the site. 

4) The promoted pins 

Another way to get your Pins to the top is to invest in promoted Pins rather than just relying on SEO. 

Promoted Pins are helpful as they can turn a regular user to a potential customer by directly taking them to your website. 

Moreover, through promoted Pins, you can target the audience by interest, age, gender, and geographical position. 
 
If you need help with strategizing your content, our team will be more than happy to assist you! 

The post How to Use Pinterest to Sell Products appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

While there is no denying that Pinterest has a lot to offer to businesses, you can only maximize these offerings if you know the right strategies and tactics.

Pinners browse Pinterest for inspiration, or shall we say Pinspiration, to plan big days like birthdays, weddings, or baby showers. Now, it depends on how well you market yourself to turn those pinners into potential customers.

In this article, we shall talk about how you can make Pinterest effectively work for your business. The following are our top tips and tricks to help you slay your Pinterest business marketing campaign strategy.

Are you ready?

Let’s get to the business, folks!

Make sure the content is captivating

You need to drill it in your mind that Pinterest is the ultimate visual search engine. Hence, your Pins should be designed in a visually appealing way. To put things in perspective, you should write a compelling copy to entice your users, coupled with some tasteful branding.
Incorporate high-quality photography in combination with graphics that are not only stunning but highly relevant to your brand image.

Be consistent

A pin a day keeps your business in the limelight. Yes! Pinterest strongly recommends pinning at least once or twice per day. This is more effective than setting up a board and filing it up all at once. When you pin regularly, your content reaches a much wider audience, and this builds up the brand’s image and reputation in the eyes of the Pinners.

Create boards to connect with the users

As a business owner, you must strive to give pinners a good, solid reason to follow your Pinterest Board. You can do so by uploading tutorials related to the product or service you are offering. Additionally, you can also create a board that displays customers using your product or talking about your service.

This way, the users will gain insight, will be able to relate to your brand, and might even think about trying the product or service.

Optimize your pins

As we mentioned that it is a visual search engine, including keywords, is important to make your content and brand discoverable. Hence, make sure to research and use keywords in your board, pin and board titles as well as descriptions to maximize reach and generate leads. In addition to this, using relevant hashtags is also a plus point, as it can give an additional boost when it comes to user engagement.

Pay attention to the analytics

We cannot stress how crucial it is to check your Pinterest analytics regularly. All your hard work and effort can go to waste if you ignore Pinterest analytics.

Pinterest analytics allow you to assess whether or not your strategies are working. Based on the assessment, you can improve, tweak, or refine them accordingly to maximize results. 

If you are unsure about how to make a business account on Pinterest, please contact us.

The post How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Business appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

As a company, you’ll want to figure out a strategy or some sort of plan on how to manage and lay out your account’s boards.

#1: Organize Your Boards

Think of Pinterest as a digital bulletin board. Fill it with your company’s interests, products, favorite things, and things you want to share. To make the board easy for you to manage and for your customers to browse, put similar pins into similar boards. If you accidentally put a pin in the wrong board, no worries! You can move it into the right board in a snap. Keeping your account orderly provides easy navigation and a better user experience.

#2: Pin at Least 2-3 Times a Day

As with any social media platform, consistency is key. You’ll want to pin on a regular basis to keep your account fresh with new content. Pinning regularly allows for more engagement from pinners because you are providing them with something new that they haven’t seen before.

#3: Pin from Other Sources and Different Topics

It’s important that you keep your pins diverse. Pin from other companies and sources. You don’t want to seem flat and only focused on yourself. Repin content; for example, search for related topics and pin from sites you see while surfing the web. Yes, it’s important to pin things that relate to your business, but remember that Pinterest is a visual place where striking images succeed. So think about things that make your company special. Is every Friday popcorn day? Do you support a local charity? Where is your company located? What makes your town special? You can make boards on all these topics and while still having your board be relevant to your company. Tell your business’s story with pins.

Pinterest allows you to display what your company does in a novel venue. You are likely to capture a different kind of person’s attention on one of your boards than you will with your website. Pinterest is great place to highlight your expertise in playful ways. You might even promote your blog or other featured content there, and providing such content can increase your authority online.

#4: Brand Your Pins

You can brand your pins by using a hashtag (#). A hashtag in Pinterest functions like Twitter’s hashtag and will help further categorize your pins. For example, if you put “#BobsCarpentry” in the description section of your pin, it will show up whenever anyone searches for “BobsCarpentry”. All pins tagged with that hashtag will show up in search results. This puts you in control of where your offerings appear and gives you a little more control over what searchers will see your products.

#5: Incorporate Other Social Media

Twitter and Facebook are great places to promote your Pinterest account. You can do this by posting links to your whole account or specific boards. Using other social media can increase your Pinterest followers and boost awareness that your company is on Pinterest. It is also possible to link your Pinterest with Facebook and create an app on your company’s Facebook page.

If you are interested in setting up a Pinterest account for your business, or if you would like to discuss a strategy for using your current account better, get in touch with us today.

The post 5 Pinteresting Tips for Businesses (Updated June 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Social Media Advertising Infographic

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Pinterest is more popular than Twitter in the United States, especially with a female audience, and is currently working on catching up overseas. Pinterest is an advertising goldmine because it allows people to share products in addition to ideas. Many businesses have gotten free advertising from users sharing their product, but there is still room for optimization.

How can retailers optimize? Try the newly-launched promoted pins.

Paying to promote your business with pins will help your products better reach your target audience. Promoted pins will be native ads, which means they will be the same format as user-generated pins. The theory is that promoted pins won’t be annoyance to users—they will simply help them discover new products and companies. There is small text at the bottom of pin that informs the user that it is a promoted pin, and gives the option to hide it. When it comes to the mobile user (More than 90% of Pinterest use is on mobile devices), the ads will appear the same as in desktop mode.

What to Consider Before Using Promoted Pins

Pinterest promoted pins create an abundance of opportunities to acquire new consumers. Many factors come into play as advertising meets Pinterest.

Like any form of advertising, that is one of the most important components of a great promoted pin is an eye-catching image. Businesses actively leveraging Pinterest know that appealing images grab users and result in interaction, so the same creativity should be used for promoted pins.

Another crucial factor to consider is the way Pinterest’s platform is designed. Blending in yet standing out or becoming someone’s must-have brand: it all starts with a virtual pin and a board. How do you make your pin that pin? A heavily branded pin isn’t going to be a selling point for most, but a product in a setting that fits into someone’s life, or what they want as their life, will be.

Pinterest represents what someone wants in their future—an idea or a dream. Each pin represents something that could be purchased or created, whether tomorrow or in 20 years. There are hundreds of millions of idea boards, so how can your product fit in with those ideas and tie into someone’s future needs and wants? A consumer might not realize that they need or want your product until it shows up in their Pinterest feed. But if your promoted pins are relevant and appealing, they may just be a few mouse clicks away from a purchase.

Do you have a Pinterest presence already and want to know if promoted pins are a good idea? Contact us for recommendations! 

The post Promoted Pins: Why Retailers Should Start Using Pinterest Advertising appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Found Video Recap

I used to walk 2 miles to school uphill in the snow…

Unfortunately we live in an age where virtually everyone has a digital footprint, voluntarily or not.  Mistakes and stupid actions I took as a kid I could get away with or had limited consequences. Heaven forbid there would have been a Boys Gone Wild* video series (or market for it) when I was in college. * After an extensive Google Image search, I feel confident in saying there does not exist any photo even remotely appropriate to use here and I don’t feel like Photoshopping one. Regardless of Google’s and Bing’s recent decisions to offer some additional privacy options for Europeans after a European court ruling, these same mistakes today can live forever and cause much more real world damage. Here are some tips for students and parents to keep in mind:

• Privacy doesn’t exist.  Just because you use tight privacy settings, are careful with whom you share, and don’t use your real name, you’re not anonymous.  It’s relatively easy for college admission staff, HR representatives, and the police to find you already – with or without catfishing.  And it’s only going to get easier as facial recognition software evolves.
• Everything lives forever.  When I was a kid, my dad said to never put in writing anything you didn’t want published on the front page of the New York Times.  Today anything you post – or is posted about you – can live forever.  Just assume it will.  Snapchat is the most dangerous of the platforms currently out there because people assume their photos and videos will disappear.  That’s simply not true – as they were forced to admit after a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
• Be safe.  Want to post those pics with your roommates on the beach?  Wait til you get back from vacation.  Otherwise you might as well hang a “Please Rob Me” sign on your door.  And do not share your current location with any networks, especially if you’re female.  That makes it just as easy for stalkers to track you down as it does for your friends.

I don’t want to sound too harsh on social media.  After all, a good bit of our income comes from it.  Here are some ways students can best use it to their advantage:

• Paint yourself in a favorable light.  We already established that recruiters will check out your social media profiles at some point during the hiring process – often before they even decide to offer a phone interview – so don’t post that picture of you doing a keg stand on Instagram.  Party however you want in person, but if you wouldn’t want your employer to see it, don’t post it.
• Build a strong portfolio.  What are you passionate about?  What do you do well?  Start showing that off online through a blog, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, or whatever platform you prefer.  One, that forces you to practice and to do your best.  Two, it allows potential employers to learn more about you and see your skills even if they don’t directly relate to their companies.  As a side note, if you’re really talented, it can help you establish yourself as an expert.  The more niched your expertise, the better for your future earnings.  Being an expert in something very specific allows you to set your own rates.
• Start networking.  Set up a LinkedIn page.  Even if you don’t have a lot of experience to add yet, you can use it to highlight your skills and receive endorsements.  Plus it allows you to start networking.  It’s a great way to have a connection to people you want to work with now, and it allows you to connect with current friends that you may want to get in touch with later on in life when you don’t see them anymore.

So much more can be said on the topic – please add your own advice in the comments.  Questions welcomed, too!

The post 3 Social Media Pitfalls Kids & Parents Must Avoid & 3 Must Dos appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.