Social media isn’t slowing down any time soon. It’s up to marketers to keep up the pace and make sure that all of their bases are covered. The problem is that it’s easy to be swept up in the streams, platforms and never ending chatter. Here are a few tips to increase your productivity as a social media marketing manager.

Fresh and relative content is a benchmark in any effective social media marketing strategy.  Customer testimonials and reviews are perfect, custom made, marketing tools. Businesses have exploded on nothing more than reviews alone.  Look at sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.  Leaving a review can make or break a business.  So, as the business, how can you put testimonials and reviews to work for you?

For those who have gone through all of the steps to create a complete social media marketing presence for their business, it can be frustrating when the engagement remains stagnant. So, where do you turn? You can try boosting posts and paying for advertising, but before you start putting more money into your plan – maybe a good approach would be to actually take a step back and evaluate the assets you have around you.

For the New Year this past year, Facebook had a “Year in Review” feature that allowed users to create short films out of the top moments they’d shared throughout the year. This feature was a huge success and wildly popular among Facebook users. As a way to encourage people to share more videos, Facebook introduced a new slideshow feature that takes your photos and videos on Facebook and turns them into a short movie. These short clips can be customized with different themes and with music. The idea was created to help Facebook take a step towards turning the social network into a video-first destination. The result actually has some great potential and benefits to social media marketers. 

Now that we’re officially in the fourth quarter of the year, it’s time to take a look back over our efforts from the last nine months to prepare a great strategy for the new year to come. Sure, you can keep your social media marketing and content marketing efforts stagnant, but who is that helping? Who is that hurting? If you look back over what you’ve done in the last year, I don’t think you can honestly say that there isn’t any aspect you wouldn’t change, add, or improve.

If you haven’t planned your marketing strategy for the upcoming holiday season, it’s not too late for you. Having said that –you should probably start now. We’re right around the corner from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s sales and so much more. If your business isn’t taking advantage of the opportunity that these holidays offer, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Online marketing is one of the fastest and easiest ways to reach customers, both existing and new, so why not take advantage?

We all have bad habits. We fall into a routine, we get comfortable, and we do things because they’re easy. It’s human nature. When it comes to social media marketing though –this is a trap. Run far away! If you’re marketing your business on social media (which you should be), you need to start shaking things up. Get out of that rut. Jumble up that routine. Put a little pep in your step. We’re all guilty of getting too comfortable. Myself included. Everything on this list is something that I can improve on in my own marketing routines!

If you run a social media marketing campaign, you’re marketing on Facebook. Facebook is still the number one social media platform out there. As a business, you know this (or you should). So, it’s always good to go back through and figure out how you can effectively optimize your marketing performance on this leading network. What’s better than finding new tools to help your marketing campaign? Finding FREE tools to help your marketing campaign. Here are a few we’ve been looking into more lately.