by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jun 25, 2014 | Small Business, Social Media
Participating on social media platforms can present many challenges from knowing when to post, what to post and how to engage. While we all know that utilizing a variety of channels is important to your marketing funnel, it can be a daunting, time consuming task to establish and grow your community. I hear it every day. My clients can spend 20+ hours a week buried in social media, which also takes them away from their business.
It is a big investment of time and energy. So many individuals or companies will create a profile, upload a few posts and then desert their networks. This action does not translate to results. If you are going to set up shop then you must actively participate to reach out and maximize your opportunities. The data clearly defines social media growth and it will only continue to explode over the coming years. Each platform offers you the digital ease of connecting on an infinite scale if done properly.
Social media success is developed on a solid foundation comprised of several components which help to build your credibility, following, loyalty and thought leadership. It takes time to build a loyal following and that is only achieved through mutual dialog and building relationships. Social media is not just a soapbox to taut your company, yourself or your achievements. The old adage, people buy from people holds steadfast.
Social Media Success via Weigh Your Mind
If you were at a cocktail party, you wouldn’t rush up to someone and abruptly hand them your business card and begin to discharge your elevator speech. Refrain from the same ME ME song on social media. Build relationships with an authentic voice and humanize your brand. I know when I have attended networking events or even establish a new connection with someone and they immediately deluge me with websites, posts, things to download, things to sign up for or I receive unsolicited emails, the “hair goes up on the back my neck.” Just don’t do it! It is a tremendous turnoff.
Reduce your angst and free up some time by implementing some systems and processes that will work for you. Test them out and create a schedule that you will adhere to. Don’t jump around – stay on task. There are always ways to work smarter and enhance your marketing efforts. These become your everyday routines, part of your calendar to help maintain not only your sanity but streamline your efforts. If you are all over the board, jumping from task to task or briefly stopping in on your networks when you think of it, you are decreasing your efficiency and of course, effectiveness. Always have a plan of attack.
Social media has to be done right. To execute properly, you have to begin strong, know what to do and what to avoid. Brett Relander
Become the Ninja: Simple Social Media Tips
- Identify your social business goals
- Learn about metrics
- Understand ROI
- Create a social media strategy
- Perform a social media audit
- Discover tools to help you search, curate, share and measure
- Plan your profiles with keywords and custom images
- Set up alerts for keywords, interests, thought leaders AND competitors
- Better engage with your influencers by creating lists and columns on your social channels
- Use and track hashtags
- Review profiles and websites
- Get listed on directories
- Create your content plan with a balance of rich information to share and how you will give back to your community.
- Be authentic and build relationships
- Tailor your content for the right network
- Use humor
- Compliment others and share their content
- Create captivating images
- Post some promotional content
- Automate and push some relevant content leaving you time to engage
- Delegate some of your social media management, saving the personal interactions to build your brand
These are just a few of the suggestions I recommend to my clients either for them to implement or to discuss as part of the Ace solutions. If you’d like a few more ideas, click on: 20 Time Saving Tips for Your Social Media Workflow – The key take away is to design a PLAN to implement and stick to in order to save some time and be more efficient with your social media marketing.
Just start somewhere but T H I N K about what you are doing and why. Always, always be real and give back to your audience. It isn’t just about you, it’s about them and creating the kind of relationships that you desire to be a part of. Yes, of course you need a strategy and tactics. That goes without saying but when you begin from the human standpoint, that is half of the battle to nurture your global network.
“Humility, gentleness, and helpfulness go so much further and open doors you cannot imagine. Think from a higher level and try to see beyond today. Some hard work and insight will bring you to paths that will reward you so highly, it’ll make the little inconvenience you incurred so worth it.” @AnnTran_
Best of success and please do share your thoughts and tips with us. We value your input.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jun 18, 2014 | Blogging, Small Business, Social Media
Social media experiences exponential growth on a daily basis and with active users in the millions, you need to figure out how to get a little more exposure and engagement. Stand above the noise and be memorable.
It isn’t enough just to create a few profiles, start a blog and schedule content, you need to be an active use, participating in the ongoing, real-time conversations. It can be overwhelming a times but the payoff is there.
Your blog is the signpost for your company and you work hard at creating just the right content to feed and satiate your audience. Many laborious hours can go in to writing your content. Solving the pain points and delivering value, but what do you with it? Are you seeing a return on your investment?
Social Media Examiner offers up some great tips and tools to help streamline your blogging process to flush ideas, brainstorm, generate topics, optimize your posts and even find free images. You can’t go wrong. Know the Erogenous Zones of Your Blog Post and get started today and tap out some successful blog posts.
There seems to be an art, a science to writing the “perfect” blog post. Buffer outlines it for you with clear succinct tips to ensure your success. After you’ve worked on your perfect post as shown below with their 7 suggested elements, your next step is to work on your strategy for increased social shares.
The 7 essential elements of a perfect blog post
- Headline: the 6 words that count most
- Storytelling hook
- Fewer characters per line at first
- Featured image
- Subheads for scanning
- Content and the 1,500-word sweet spot
- Soundbites for sharing
In Easy Steps to a Winning Blogging Strategy, Canva answers the questions below and gives you 5 easy steps to kick start your blogging strategy. Having a strategy is extremely important for the success and exposure of your blog. You can’t simply grab a digital pen and start writing. Your content and message could simply fall through the cracks, wasting your time, energy and efforts. Establish your goals; know your audience; develop original content, use an editorial calendar, tell a story, don’t merely push products/services and incorporate a variety of distribution channels not just your social media networks. With a little knowledge and deeper understanding of the process, you too can have the opportunity to see greater success with your blog and social media.
What is this platform going to do for your brand? Are you selling products? Are you building a community? Is it about building awareness? And most importantly, who’s it for? Canva
Adam Connell of Blogging Wizard has some sure fire tips to get you more social shares and traffic. It’s time to leverage your social shares says Adam and he explains why:
- Leverage social proof to get better results
- Your visibility may reach new heights
- The opportunity to generate more traffic on your blog can skyrocket
- Your engagement can go through the roof
The Blogging Wizard offers up 100+ tips to get more social shares in: 100+ Bite-Sized Tips To Get You More Social Shares (And Traffic) He covers it all: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and more. Don’t miss out on his fabulous suggestions to grow your audience and get more shares with your engaging content. Adam is a wizard!!
“A business blog is important because it is the optimal choice for your content marketing hub. In today’s content-driven world, while you may view yourself as a marketer, you’re really a publisher. You have to provide relevant content for your prospects, customers and the public, who spend over 10 hours a day consuming media.”—Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute
How do you stand above the crowd? If you have a favorite tip or tool, please share with our community.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jun 11, 2014 | Organization, Time Management
Feeling a sense of overwhelm and chaos during your day? Think about your time management and organizational skills. If you do not manage your time or keep things in their place, this may generate undue stress in your life and diminish productivity. You’ve all been there and felt the weight of the day pressing down hard as the clock keeps ticking away. Things are piling up. You feel as though you are being productive but in actuality, you are spinning the wheels and only putting out fires or moving from one thing to the next without truly accomplishing anything meaningful.
The reason time management gadgets and systems don’t work is that these systems are designed to manage clock time. Clock time is irrelevant. You don’t live in or even have access to clock time. You live in real time. Joe Matthews, Don Debolt, Deb Percival
Hitting the panic button, you hop on the track of overdrive, further increasing the craze. It can be an endless cycle only causing further anxiety and frustration.
STOP and slow down. It’s time to assess the situation, your goals, and desired outcomes.
Examine your project and task list. What does it look like to you?
Are there real deadlines or did you create your own crisis with personally imposed limits?
I know I have done this, but at the end of the day, I realized, with an AH-HA moment, that I did it to myself with self-imposed deadlines. Not every single thing is a must-do at this very moment. If you begin to try and tackle every sticky note, your focus and efforts are diminished. Your efficiency is decreased leaving you with a sense of dread for the next day. The next list.
“Time management” takes discipline and commitment. There are many hindrances to time management but they all relate back to how you regulate your life and productivity levels. It is a matter of the daily choices you make and how you set your priorities. If something is that important to you, then you will get it done; otherwise, you will make excuses. Your success depends on getting the most out of each day.
Task Management Tips:
- What are the priorities? The absolutes that must be done today?
- Triage those by order of importance.
- How many of these items must ONLY you do or can you delegate any of them?
- After you determine these first three, then create your action steps for each.
- Breathe again and take a few minutes to realize you can do this.
- Jump into the fire and set a timer, giving yourself 30-60 minutes of dedicated focus (At the ping of the timer, take a short break).
- Tune out distractions.
- Disable notifications: Stay away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and text messages – whatever your nemesis may be at this moment. You have work to do that requires 100% of your brainpower without multi-tasking.
“You cannot run at full throttle when applying your mindset to all of the different things running through your head. Focusing is the key to manifesting your desires.” – Stephen Richards
Thinking in terms of real-time actions and your goals for the day will help to ensure you better manage yourself and your time. Creating your routines, processes, and systems will keep you on task and being productive; otherwise, the day may seem like a tornado of activity with a shattered foundation and half done To-Do list. Your business can’t operate at this level and neither can you. Get a handle on your task management and revel in an environment of enhanced productivity.
What keeps you sane? Sound off and share your tips on managing your To-Do lists and projects.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jun 3, 2014 | Blogging, Content Marketing
That sounds virtually impossible. Insurmountable even. Who the heck can truly write “remarkable” newsworthy content in such a short period of time? I know and read about many who do and on a daily basis. Personally, I labor over many of my posts; no matter how many other ones I read stashed full of tips, tricks and recommendations for curating, newsjacking and writing.
The pressure’s on and you must produce a blog post. “Ugh” you say.
Sometimes you experience writer’s block, the dreaded blahs or why reiterate what’s been said time and time again. You know you’ve got game but it can still be a struggle to create something mammoth, something so rich that your audience will be shouting and sharing your post from the rooftops. Or, at least a few social channels.
[Tweet “Writing with your readers in mind, you must author up some compelling content.”]
One of my core beliefs of effective content marketing is to deliver content people actually want. Publish stories they actually will enjoy – to read and to share. Michael Brenner
Maintain originality, enticing your audience to hang on to every word, be inspired or educated with your twist on your hot topic. Remember, you aren’t writing for yourself, but your readers, those in need; those hungry for your content. When you know where they are, how they prefer to consume content, speak their language and solve their pain points, you will have initiated the first step toward:
- Educating them
- Generating authority
- Instilling trust
- Nurturing relationships
- Developing credibility
- Building your community
It’s just the first few bricks of your foundation.
Whether you are creating content for new prospects, current customers, industry analysts or someone else entirely, the real purpose behind those efforts should be to build a higher level of trust between the consumer of the content and the brand creating it. Dan Newman
Customize your content marketing strategy and tactics to target your unique audience. While there are allegedly many best practices and beliefs as a single monster sized umbrella for CM, you should experiment and create your own plan based upon your buyer personas, their needs, your industry and your budget as well. If you want different results, change the experiment.
Track and measure your efforts to determine what works.
And what works today, may not work tomorrow, but keep at it. It takes time, effort and creativity but with a little ingenuity and a genuine interest for your audience, writing can become second nature. So they say.
Blog Writing Tips
- Set aside some time each week
- Use an editorial calendar
- Be consistent
- Remember: quality over quantity
- Eliminate distractions
- Keep a swipe file of ideas, interesting articles, hashtags, circle of influencers and favorite websites/blogs
- Have a list of curation/news sites
- When you outline your post, know what questions you want to answer
- Organize your content
- Write a captivating intro
- Use headlines and subheads
- Include a CTA!
- Visuals count
- Use anchor text both internal and external
- Remember your tags, descriptions and SEO
- Take breaks to refresh and energize
- Edit
- Proofread
- Proofread
- Proofread
Expand your knowledge and understanding with:
The Research and Science Behind a Perfect Blog Post
Know the Erogenous Zones of Your Blog Post
39 Blogging Tips From the Pros
10 Content Marketing Lessons from Social Media Examiner
What Blogging Tips Are You Missing?
47 Content Marketing Tools To Help You Save Time And Get Better Results
Content Marketing Minds: 1 Genius, 3 Minutes, 9 Vital Concepts [VIDEO]
53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Post
How to Write a Blog Post Outline: A Simple Formula to Follow
Back to you: what tips and tools do you suggest to help others with their blogging efforts and time management?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | May 15, 2014 | Life Thoughts, Time Management
How often do you tune out and turn off technology?
While you all “live” online, conducting your business and connecting with others, it’s important to be able to disconnect and be in the present moment as this is where real memories are made. Granted, your digital presence is essential to creating the online experience for your customers, colleagues and network, but there are times when you should be truly present in the real world experiencing all that it has to offer. There are no do overs or scrolling back through posts and articles to see what you missed.
I was gifted with an incredible visit from my dad and his girlfriend for 6 whole days. It was their first visit since my move to North Carolina almost 5 years ago. As a virtual assistant with a few secret weapons and a VA of my own, I managed the fundamentals, scheduled client work and planned way in advance, enabling me to step away and thoroughly enjoy time with family. Sure, I worked some in the very early morning and in the evenings, but time is too precious to let it slip away with an incessant need to be connected, troll social channels, read industry articles or waste valuable moments online.
We ate, shared, laughed, loved, hugged, rested, visited tourists spots, beaches, stayed overnight with friend, shed a tear and made new memories.
Treasures of a lifetime. Irreplaceable.
When we were leaving a restaurant on our last night together, we walked by a couple, not talking or engaging, but glued to their phones. I looked at them and said to the young woman as she looked up and caught my gaze, “I hope you are texting each other.”
Oh the horror of my comment!! She looked at me, sneered and grunted some type of response.
Prioritize what you value most. People. Family. Loved ones. Friends. These are what matters most and when given the opportunity to be in their company, what transpires online cannot compare to the rich relationships you can nurture. It isn’t just merely out of respect to put down your phone, but the sheer value of spending personal time, engaged and sharing real communications.
The love of one on one. Eye contact. A personal touch. Body language. Intimate nuances that can’t be reproduced by a keystroke.
Unplug!
Do yourself and those in your immediate presence a favor and tune out.
Turn off the notifications.
Live in the moment.
Share the love of those you are with.
Time passes too quickly and in a flash, can be lost while you are too busy being engrossed with technology.
There is no replacement for human interaction and a good solid hug.
Love the ones you’re with!!
