For businesses that dive into the realm of content marketing, you are taking on a certain responsibility. If you are writing a blog or creating articles surrounding your business and industry, people are looking at you as an expert on that topic or in that field. In most cases, having a byline gives you some semblance of authority. Maybe this gives you the impression that your job is easier to execute. People are going to think that you know what you’re talking about –so the pressure is off to create truly valuable content. This couldn’t be less true. Mediocre content can potentially hurt your business more than no content at all.

Handling customer service across social media channels is somewhat expected in this hyper connected time. Many customers are looking for instant feedback and response when they have an issue or a question. If your business is represented online, which is absolutely necessary in this day and age, then you have to have a customer service strategy in place as well.

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 don’t maintain your marketing, brand awareness starts to decay sooner than you’d think and there’s nothing fun about that. One question you may be asking yourself:  is good enough ever good enough? Read on for some thoughts on how to keep up.