Three Keywords in Social Media Marketing and What They Mean

Today in social media there are buzz words that are flying around all across the internet, and we will be looking at the most important few of those, to help you be better equipped to enter the arena of social media marketing. Also please stay safe folks, and stay informed!

1.     Hashtags: First on our list will be hashtags what are they? What purpose do they serve? What are some popular hashtags that have been used throughout the short history of social media? We will answer all of these questions! First off hashtags at the base level are words that come after a pound sign, these are used to create viral movements, such as the #MeToo movement, #IceBucketChallenge, or even things as simple as #love, #ootd, #yoga which are used to make it easier for users interested in content such as this to find your post. Hashtags are powerful tools to create a buzz in the social media world, and some catch fire and set the internet ablaze. Brain storm with your colleagues to create your very own viral sensation.

2.     Stories: Second are stories which are short videos that can be posted Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, that are used to do exactly as it says tell miniature stories. These are also extremely useful in telling your brands story, interacting with customers, holding contests, etc. These help you to interact with customers on a daily basis without the need to flood their timeline with actual posts, it is important to be consistent with your posts, so your consumers are constantly informed on your business’s plans, and future ideas.

3.     Ads: Ads are vital to the success of new businesses because the first step when creating a business is to create brand exposure! As you can have the greatest product or service in the world but if no one knows about your business it is all for not. Without awareness of your brand, you will never be able to be truly profitable, this is where ads come in. Ads will allow you to target specific users of social media platforms that you believe would be most interested in your business. This is an extremely helpful tool, as you can target by age, gender, income, hobbies, and so much more. Become familiar with ads and you will set yourself up for the best chance of success.

We hope that this blog post has been informative, and will assist you greatly in your entrepreneurial journey!

Social Media Marketing Tips For Beginners in 2020

Getting your name out there when you're just starting out on social media can be a challenge. All the terminology and "rules" can be overwhelming, so here are a few tips on how you can make the most of it.

If you are a goal-driven person, you're going to want to ask yourself what the end result should be. Do you want to get three new leads by the end of the month? Is there a certain target audience you want to reach? Whatever it is, be sure you're creating tasks and schedules that help you reach that end result.

As a beginner, you will want to avoid anything that will take up too much of your time unnecessarily. Those starting out on social media should be aware of how much time is spent performing certain tasks. If you have other external responsibilities such as being a stay-at-home mom or a student, steer clear of spending four hours batching content for your platforms. Take time for what's important, and the rest will fall into place.

The previous point briefly mentioned content batching. This is an excellent time saver and will be less stressful in the long run. Keep it simple; people can tell when you're trying too hard. A well-used tip that many people use is dedicating one day to each platform or theme. Run specials for your business on Mondays or perhaps do those inspirational quotes mid-week.

The last tip deals with platforms themselves. While it's okay to use as many platforms as possible, it's always wise as a beginner not to overwhelm yourself. Choose two platforms that you think will get you the most results. Facebook and Twitter are pretty popular choices these days. Smaller businesses lean towards Instagram.

Marketing yourself on social media can be a daunting task. Let us at Real Time Outsource help you make the most of your goals. Contact us today!

Best Instagram Marketing Strategies for Mompreneurs

Mompreneurs are a driving force in the home-based business world. Many stay-at-home moms have become mompreneurs in recent years, but single mothers and even mothers who work full-time outside the home are also embracing this sector. The U.S. Census states that the number of women-owned businesses rose from 7.8 million to 9.9 million between the years 2007-2012. In addition, many moms are becoming business owners out of the desire for a better work-life balance that is sometimes lacking in traditional jobs. If you're a new or established mompreneur, it's important to embrace social media marketing. Instagram is a platform that is growing in popularity each year, and here are ways you can use it to promote your business.

Don't Post Content Excessively

You should post content to Instagram on a consistent basis, but this doesn't mean that you need to do it too frequently during the week. The key is posting quality content that will get your audience's attention and make them want to share your work with others. Create a flexible posting schedule that you can stick to and this ensures that you're posting regularly without overdoing it.

Utilize Hashtags Strategically

If you're new to Instagram marketing, you're probably intimidated by the use of hashtags. Hashtags are helpful in targeting your audience if you do it correctly. Come up with a list of keywords that your audience is likely to search for, and those words can be your hashtags. Currently, Instagram allows for at least 30 hashtags.

Let's Get Visual

Go beyond long boring text or links to your content. Make your brand's mission come to life with visual storytelling. Start by writing down the goals you have for your storytelling campaign, and also plan how you will promote those goals through Instagram. Post videos about how your products work and how they will benefit potential customers. Also, post videos on what motivates you as a mompreneur. If you create homeschool curriculum for students with learning disabilities, talk about your struggles with finding materials that would be a good fit for your child who struggled with reading or math.

In conclusion, these strategies can help mompreneurs get started with Instagram marketing.

If you need assistance with Instagram or other types of social media marketing, contact us. We are here to assist you in your business promotion efforts.

Three Common Mistakes the Businesses make with Social Media

Today we will be discussing common mistakes within social media, such as not creating a sound strategy to follow, dealing with criticism in the wrong way, not having the right target audience, not creating a budget appropriate for your business size, and many other obvious and not so obvious obstacles that can arise while creating a solid foundation for your business’s social media ventures.

1.     Ignoring negative comments:  Rule one of social media is do NOT ignore negative comments, they should be addressed in a calm and helpful manner, try to assist the consumer it whatever problem they are having with your product or service, as if left unchecked it will continue to fester and hurt your reliability, and will create doubts of the customer service aspect of your business. Be courteous, respectful, and respond in a timely manner, and it will pay dividends for your business.

2.     Not having a strategy in place for your business: Do not go into business without a plan that is recipe for a quick exit, you need to know your product inside and out, know its strengths and weaknesses, be able to sell it to anyone and everyone, be persuasive in your methods you plan to implement. You need to know your target market, you need to know how much it costs to advertise your particular business, what’re the hot key words, what is the appropriate length for the keywords your targeting you don’t want them to be too broad in scope where it’s a buckshot approach and shows the ads to anyone, but you also don’t want them to be too narrow where it will be missing out on potential customers.

3.     Not having an appropriate budget regarding the size of your business: You need to gauge the necessary amount of money you will need to distribute towards the ads you will be showing on social media. Too little and you’re not maximizing your effectiveness, too much and your wasting unnecessary resources, you have to do some experimenting and look at how much you are willing to gamble, and when the ROI begins to drop off.

We hope this post will be useful in assisting in you all of your future entrepreneurial endeavors on social media.

Harnessing the Power of Podcasting in Brand Marketing

The recent retirement of the Indianapolis Colt's star quarterback, Andrew Luck, swept through social media and news outlets, with pundits and fans weighing in on his decision and wondering what's next for the athlete, including those wondering if Luck would use his popular Andrew Luck Book Club podcast as a platform to launch into a different career path.

Podcasting has certainly come of age and shows no signs of slowing down.

As a medium to reach targeted audiences, Podcasting continues to explode, with staggering growth levels between just 2018 and 2019.  According to data compiled by Apple, there were 550,000 active podcasts in 2018 with 18.5 million episodes in total; by 2019, those numbers have grown to 700,000 active podcasts with 29 million episodes in total.

The widespread use of smartphones worldwide has driven the growth in podcasting, with smartphones listed as #1 for the means in which users find, access, download, and listen to podcasts.  Using smartphones to listen to podcasts allows users to access their favorite audio content in a multitude of environments, including at work, at home, while traveling or commuting, and during exercise or workout sessions.

With the ability to reach audiences through dozens of languages, podcasts have taken fire worldwide, and the top categories include society and culture, business, comedy, news, and health.

While larger producers of podcasts such as NPR reach a listening audience of 20 million people per month, there is room for smaller, more targeted podcast producers to reach their ideal listener, making podcasting a valuable addition to branded content and advertising campaigns that seek to build brand recognition and brand authority.

Creating the right podcast content to reach your target audience is critical.  Seek to inform and entertain your audience instead of hard-selling your product or service.  Building authority in your niche and trust with your audience is key.

If you're wondering how to incorporate podcasting in your overall marketing scheme,  contact Real-Time Outsource and let us help you in creating quality podcast content that builds your brand and reaches your niche audience.

Two Major Differences Between Social Media Platforms

Today we will be discussing the key differences between the various social media platforms at our disposal. We’ll be looking at the foundations of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the three giants of the industry. We’re going to determine how each site is used by the users, and what the pros and cons of each site are.

1.      Twitter vs. Instagram: One of the key differences between these two sites is the way people try to portray themselves. On Twitter people are much more vocal about their beliefs, and unforgiving. They are willing to speak up to others and often engage in arguments to defend their point of view on matters. While on Instagram people wish to create a facade. They only show you the highlights of their life, no one will post what is going wrong in their life, and essentially it is only what they want to show you, in an attempt to show you how great their life is, but in reality, we have no idea what their life is like behind the screen. Another thing to note is the censorship on Twitter is very lax, and you can almost put anything you want, nudity, cursing, bullying, whatever you choose. While Instagram is quite strict when it comes to things of that nature and engaging in posting such content will surely result a ban on your account. So, depending on the type of content you post, you’d want to choose one over the other. Visuals vs. Words, this is another significant difference between the two, while both can be used as visual mediums, Instagram is definitely the preferred of the two, to post things like photography, graphics, memes, etc. While using Twitter is the preferred method when using words, while you can write captions on Instagram, like posting visuals on Twitter, the latter is preferred when writing about issues your passionate about.

2.      Instagram vs. Facebook: While on the surface these appear quite similar there are some differences we can look into. It is well known that typically Instagram has a younger userbase than Facebook, this is because Facebook has become a more family oriented social media platform, this is because it is usually to keep in contact with loved ones, such as Aunt’s, Uncle’s, Grandpa’s, Grandma’s, you get the gist of it. They are both owned by Facebook, so they are also highly compatible, you can almost think of a Facebook as compliment to Instagram or vice versa depending on your age.

We hope this discussion will serve you well in dispelling the mysteries surrounding the differences and similarities regarding the various social media pages we interact with.

3 Book Recommendations to read in 2020

Books are an incredible resource for information in the business world, there are books on any topic in business you can imagine, such as marketing tactics ranging from how influence your consumers, how to build deeper long lasting relationships with your customers, etc., there are also books you can read about former business giants, to seek out their perspective when making decisions, as well as to see the mistakes they made throughout their careers and how this can show you that even the greatest of greats fail on their way to the top, and you will not have to make the same mistakes they did.

1.      Shoe Dog: Written by the founder of Nike, Phil Knight. This book is Phil Knight’s memoir about his rise to prominence in the business world. It is an inspiring tale of a young man lost trying to find his way in the world. I feel that young adults will find his story very relatable and also inspiring. He goes through the whole evolution of Nike as a company, which was originally Blue-Ribbon Sports, which got its funding from Japanese investors. Highly recommended.

2.      Influence! The Psychology of Persuasion: Written by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. This book is incredible in learning the many different ways marketing can be used to influence your consumers to make purchasing decisions. It goes over things like price adjustment, reciprocation, authority, scarcity, and social proof among other techniques. All of these are useful additions to your marketing tool belt, not only that but it is useful information to know so you can defend yourself against such practices and be aware when they are being used against you. A must read to improve your marketing skills.

3.      How to Win Friends & Influence People: Written by Dale Carnegie. This book while not necessarily specifically for business, has many insights and techniques that can be used within a business setting. Such as remembering people’s names always, in the book he describes a person’s name as being the sweetest sound in the world to themselves. Another technique is letting the other person do most of the talking, as people love to hear themselves talk, be genuinely interested as this is one of the greatest compliments you can pay to someone. It has many recommendations that while they may seem to be common sense, we all too often forget to utilize.

We hope these recommendations will be of great use to you in your professional and personal lives! Good luck to you in all of your endeavors.

4 Social Media Marketing Don’ts You Should Know (And the Dos)

Social media marketing is not an option in today's business environment. For every business, big or small, smart use of social media is the way to go. To optimize your use of social media, these are some caveats that you definitely should pay attention to. 

Don't Forget Your Links

Your website is your anchor when it comes to marketing because that's where you properly showcase what solutions you have to offer, what your brand is about, and what your business cares about. All roads should lead home, and by roads, we mean Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and just about every other social media platform you're on.

Don't Post Text Only

A chunk of text after another won't cut it.  Your audience will soon tune out. Not good for your business. Remember, with social media marketing, and indeed, all types of marketing, visuals always go a long way. Imagery is appealing, captivating and more impression leaving. Mix up your text with an infographic, a video, or photo(s).

Don't Ignore Negative Reviews

One of the mistakes marketers do is to ignore negative feedback, believing if they do so, it will go away. In fact, these are the reviews that deserve your attention the most, because it shows goodwill and desire to fix mistakes. Instead, initiate dialogue with the customer. Ask for their contact so you can reach out and listen. Take this as a lesson on how to handle such a situation in future. It's a win for everyone.

Don't Spam Your Followers

There's nothing more annoying on social media than seeing the same person fill your news feed with the same info time and again. Brands are not exempt. Inundating your followers with the same material, or even mixed up content, but without a break, will drive customers to hit the unfollow button. Instead, schedule your content in such timing that it's relevant, fresh, and insightful every different time. 

With these simple guidelines, you are guaranteed a smooth and productive use of the very handy social media to market your business and stay ahead of the curve.

Please contact us to speak with one of our social media marketing experts today. 

Creating EPIC Graphics for Your Business

Today we’ll be talking about the best tips and tricks on how to create stunning graphics for your business’s social media pages, infographics, advertisements, billboards, etc.! It may seem like a daunting task at first but have no fear! After you are finished reading this article you be well equipped to tackle this endeavor with great success.

1.     Pay Attention to The Core Values & Themes of Your Business: You want your graphics to reflect that, if you have a business that is dedicated to fitness you don’t want to go and post quotes about love on your pages and vice versa. The first step is to figure out what types of content and quotes most closely match your business’s core philosophies. We also take this into consideration when considering the visuals, we are looking to use for our posts. If your business focuses on beach attire, you wouldn’t want to pick a visual that depicts a city’s skyline for your post as it just doesn’t match your product or theme you want to show consumers.

2.     What Program are You Going to Use: For programs available to create beautiful graphics we have a couple very high-quality options that come to mind. The first being Canva, which allows you to choose from hundreds of templates, fonts, shapes, pic art, combined with an easy to use format gives you all you need to create an amazing image that will be an accurate visual representation of your business’s core principles. Another viable option is the program Adobe Spark, which allows for professional level quality visuals, and loads of customization options, it does require a bit more practice to become proficient with, as the interface is not quite as user friendly as Canva’s is. There are many other programs available across the web, but these are the two we have personally had the most success with.

3.     Get Creative: The most important thing about creating graphics for your business though is to remember to fully express your creativity, trying different color combinations, visuals backgrounds, fonts, and font sizes, there is many different routes you can go. Perhaps come up with some type of weekly post, of a certain style of visual.

We hope that this post has been an enlightening experience on how easy it can be to create beautiful visuals for your business.

Three Helpful Tips to Create More Successful Social Media Campaigns in 2020

Creating a social media campaign can be a lot of work, that’s why today I’m going to go over some helpful tips and tricks on how to make the process go a lot more smoothly. We’ll be talking about things such as the Pomodoro technique, using a planner, calendars, and other tips to help you keep a clear mind to be your most productive self during the creation of your campaign.

1.     Pomodoro technique: What is it? The Pomodoro technique is essentially a way to better manage your time while working for maximum productivity. It is working in intervals, generally people will work 25-30 minutes at a time, followed up by a 5-minute break, then you continue these intervals until you reach your fourth interval, then you will take a long break up, around 30 minutes or so. This helps to keep your mind fresh, and not become overwhelmed from too much continuous work, it is works very well, and is personally one of my favorite techniques I have developed over the years.

2.     Using a planner: Using a planner is exactly how it sounds getting a planner and filling it up with all of your different goals, aspirations, meetings, project due dates, etc. This helps to keep your mind focused on what you are doing in the present, because you’ve already written down all of the other things you need to do, and when you need to do them by, so you don’t stress about them as much as you usually would. It is also a good idea to create mini goals, or steps that are achievable along the way to a larger goal, as this keeps your motivation and lets you know you’re on the right path. Using a planner can pay huge dividends in your life, if you have various different things you are focusing on at once.

3.     Using a Wall Calendar: Is one of the easiest ways to keep yourself on track for whatever endeavor you are currently tackling in your life. Simply put a wall calendar in a place you pass by or see frequently such as in the restroom, a spot in your bedroom or kitchen, and each day you accomplish a step to a goal you are working towards put a big X through that day, this is you playing mind games with yourself essentially because after a couple weeks it will begin to form a nice chain and you won’t want to break that chain. Even if you do, because as we all know in life things inevitably do happen when we least expect, just try your best to never miss two days in a row, I have also personally used this technique in my own life to stay on top of habits I wish to form and have found it very effective.

We hope that this list of tips and tricks, we’ll help you to stay on track tackling your goals and to do so with a clear mind.