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.

Email marketing is long from being dead. It’s a top choice still in the marketing world. This is a great tool to get your content, sales, product, specials, etc. in front of your target audience. The problem? Getting the email addresses in the first place. So, how do you go about it? Honestly.

Twitter Dashboard is a new app and marketing tool that Twitter has introduced to help businesses. The purpose is to allow you to better understand, engage, and grow your audience on Twitter –exactly what a marketer is looking for. As a social media marketer, I appreciate Twitter continuing to grow tools that help brands improve performance on the platform. It really is targeted towards the management of Twitter business accounts. So, how does it work?

LinkedIn is not a social network to ignore –it can truly be a great resource to you and to your business. LinkedIn is a social network set apart from the others. While it’s still a way to interact and connect while sharing articles, photos, and ideas –it’s also a professional network. When you log into LinkedIn, you’re logging in with a completely different mindset than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So, what should your marketing strategy look like on this network? What are some marketing tips?

This month we’re celebrating a few things here.  Here at Sprocket Websites we’re celebrating our 6 year anniversary! We’re also celebrating a great first half of 2016.  To end the first half of 2016, we’d like to take a look back at our most popular articles so far this year.  These are the articles that viewers have read and interacted with the most in the last 6 months.  We love seeing the topics that interest you, so we can give you more of what you’re interested in.  Happy Anniversary!