All marketing gurus during the past few years have exhorted business and not-for-profit managers to upgrade their old websites to mobile-friendly ones. Many pooh-poohed the need and claimed their customers weren’t mobile users. Were they right all along?

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.

As a business owner you answer questions every day from your customers, your vendors and your colleagues. The most important questions you should be answering are these two that you ask yourself.

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?

Nearly everyone and their nephew can make you a website these days, but will it accomplish your goals? Only Mary Poppins is practically perfect in every way, so prepare for your web designer’s strengths and weaknesses.

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.

Target audience, call-to-action, reach analysis – you have tons of super-important stuff to consider for successful Facebook marketing. But don’t get so carried away by the big picture that you overlook these little mistakes:

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. 

I was the "opening act" for NaperLaunch Entrepreneur's Week, and I spoke all about Facebook. If you attended and are looking for the "slides", you're in the right place. If you didn't attend, you missed lots of details, but this might help you too.