Whether you are a big corporation or a small business, you need to be on Instagram. There's a lot of potential for almost every single industry on Instagram. If you are not on Instagram at this point, you need to be. It's a great platform where you can get lots of engagement very quickly. The reason for this is that Instagram in general is a very visual social media site. Facebook and Twitter, are more text based, which in turn led to more people engaging on Instagram, YouTube, and now TikTok. If you are visual based brand (beauty, real estate, and food brands especially) will do amazing on these platforms.

Video is taking over all internet content! I've stressed this in many of my previous posts before that videos on social media are extremely important for your social media strategy. Videos now account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic. Also, more important (and relevant) mobile video consumption increases by 100% every single year. If your social media strategy doesn't involve videos in some form or another, then you, my friend, are doing yourself and your business a grave injustice. Let's say that you do have a video strategy going already for your social media presence. Here's how you can do better.

It's Q1 of the new year, are you getting the leads that you want? Well, what's the main goal of marketing? Gaining leads, customers, or clients at the end of the day. I get more questions about how to monetize and get leads off of social media than any other inquiry about social media marketing. I do like to stress many of my prospects that while gaining leads would be the ultimate goal, it's so important to engage with your audience. Getting the trust of your followers on social media is crucial if you want them to convert into leads. How do you gain trust? That's a good question!

What are your new year resolutions? Is it to make more money with your business? Is it to hit those numbers this year? Or, on a personal note, is it to lose weight and get in shape? Maybe you have a resolution to get a life coach to organize your life and business. Well, it's 2019 and that means it's the start of Q1! It's time to get back into social media shape with your content this year! Like your body, your business goes through changes, and sometimes you need to have some annual maintenance like you would with your body.

Whether it's frosting holiday cookies or lighting up your house with Christmas lights, it seems that everyone is in the holiday spirit. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but it's crucial for brands to get into the holidays because the biggest sales happen right now! Consumers say they will spend an average of $1,007.24, according to the National Retail Federation. That is a pretty big number for a single consumer! Marketing is also at its highest this season, with ads on social media as being the most competitive it has been all year, and most people are already getting bombarded with email promos from their favorite stores. What are you doing on social media to get those high ticket clients and customers?

It's less than a week until the famous national shopping holiday, Black Friday or for many online businesses, Cyber Monday and it's sales, BOGO and FOMO galore! Whether it's 50% your promotional coaching services, or doing a buy ten kickboxing classes and getting five free for the new year, the holiday season is a great time to get new customers! If you are one of the many businesses that's prepping for the upcoming holiday season, then you are for sure getting ready to pull out all the stops for your social media campaigns. In between the hectic end of year sales, and the constant promotional holiday push for the season, it's easy to forget the every day stuff you are supposed to be doing with social media. Here are three things that you will forget to do with your social media this holiday season.

The leaves are changing, the weather is getting colder, and the smell of hot cocoa is in the air. It's that time of year again! For many businesses that means the holiday season is right around the corner. With that comes holiday campaigns for your products and services. Social media holiday campaigns are the most competitive campaigns you can do for the entire year, but there are some things you can do to make it easier. We have discussed the use of AI in social media before in another post, but we haven't talked about how you can use it in a holiday campaign.

If you are one of the many that paid someone on Fiver to get a bunch of bots to your page "to grow a page", then you need to listen up. Engagement on social media is essential for growth, and having an audience that is seeing and listening to what you put out, is also important. While creating content that will play on emotions will get your audience to engage, you will also need to actively interact. I tell my clients and prospects this all the time: social media is a two way street, if you are not engaging with your audience, you are not doing your job.

Hashtags are a great way to tag yourself on social media and it's actually a great tracking system for the internet in general. Tags have been used in many platforms (blogs, social media and many more) on the internet for the last two decades. It's a great way to organize content and the overall user experience on any social media platform. If you need to find information on a topic, you can go through the hashtags on Twitter, or just search for the keyword in the search bar on any social media platform. While hashtags have been proven effective in the past, the question remains do hashtags still work on social media?

If we have learned anything about social media over the last five years, it's that people love to pin! It only proves the point of people liking pictures to text even more. Visualization is key to getting anyone's attention on the internet, and Pinterest makes that very clear. It's a far third from the top social media sites on the net, but that doesn't stop many marketers from using it as a search engine! Pinterest is no longer a place where women in their mid thirties (or twenties) looking for diet, wellness and exercise tips to improve their lifestyles. You can get some serious traffic to your website with its search engine features and optimizing your profile the right way. It reached 175 million users in April 2017, and that number reach to 250 million active users last month! Pinterest is hot right now and it should be a part of your 2019 marketing plan if it's not already.

One of the biggest mysteries on the internet is how can I get verified on Instagram? Any non- social media users might think it's silly to get that blue check mark next to your name for anyone that is not a public figure. However, for many influencers on Instagram, it's a necessity in order to get things like sponsorships and brand deals. It's also a big ego boost, you know the "I got the blue check mark, so you need to take me seriously" sort of deal. Yet, up until recently it was a huge secret on how people could get verified on Instagram.

Use of social media in 2018 has not only increased for small businesses, but it has grown exponentially in usage. In fact, social media users are expected to hit three billion in 2021. Yes that's right three BILLION, in three years. While there has been controversy over the past year, especially with Facebook, about privacy and manipulation concerns on many social media platforms. There is no doubt, there is a lot of power in these platforms, and with these numbers only growing it's important to know what the usage will be like in future, so you can grow on social media!

Like many other sites back in the early days of the internet, we saw message boards and chat rooms. AOL and Yahoo! had their own versions of topic message boards, like if you wanted to talk about boy bands you were getting the latest dirt from there. No one ever saw this one coming, Reddit is slowly becoming one of the bigger named social media sites out there. It used to be a site known for (and still is in some aspects), it's trolling but these days, Reddit has become one of the bigger social media platforms on the internet! How does this particular platform work and how can you be a part of it? I answer this question and more in this week's blog.

As I've talked about many times before, it's important for you to create your own content on social media, but how can you create amazing quality pictures that can generate the engagement you are looking for? Getting pictures on your social media sites that are on brand, relevant and will get you followers are all the ingredients you need to get the ROI you need for your time on social media. How do do you get there? Most smartphones these days have the same quality as your standard DSLR camera, and with a little help, you can create stunning photographs for your social media sites as well that would be #amazing!

When you are running a business, especially a service based business, one of the last things on your mind is creating new content for your social media pages. You have social media accounts, but you aren't experiencing activity or you do have some activity but it's not the engagement or content you know like or know that you can get. Does this sound familiar? A lot of businesses experience this common social media issue and there's really no organic way to solve but to create engaging content, but how can you create fresh and new content that is not only engaging but can make you go viral? There are plenty of ways you can do that.

Imagine that you just opened up your small boutique in the middle of a busy plaza, or your second restaurant after the first one was so successful, or you just got a few life coaching clients. Your business is thriving, so much so that you got a couple of amazing reviews on your Facebook page. You now have an amazing reputation and business is going well, until all of a get a terrible review. It brings your entire rating down on Facebook (or Google and Yelp), and you worry that people are hesitating to come to your business because of one bad review. This is an incredibly common problem for many business owners who market their business online and unfortunately there isn't a clear cut way to handle a negative review. However, there are plenty of ways you can respond.

We are almost at the end of the 2010's and it's been a wild ride technology wise since the start of the decade. We've got tablets, smartphones and messaging systems in social media sites that are more effective than email ever would. The numbers show that more and more people use social media devices to find brand new products, and many of those social media sites will direct message those businesses on social media rather than finding them on a website and getting their email address. As I have explained in my post about emails going extinct, the way we communicate with our teams are drastically changing.