Seven Creative Ways to Amplify Your Social Media Impact

Social media serves as a vibrant battleground for attention in the digital age. Businesses, creators, and casual posters strive to carve out their niche and captivate audiences. However, how do you stand out with millions of posts flooding platforms daily? This article from RTJ Online guides you through innovative strategies to spice up your social media posts, ensuring they draw attention and foster engagement and growth.

Forge Alliances with Influencers
Partnering with influencers is one effective strategy to amplify your social media presence. These partnerships can significantly extend your reach, bringing your content to a freshly engaged audience. Influencers, with their dedicated followers and established trust, can introduce your brand or message in a more relatable and appealing manner. Collaboration might take various forms, from joint posts and endorsements to hosting events or giveaways. Choose influencers whose brand values align with yours to maintain authenticity and maximize impact.

Utilize Trending Hashtags
Integrating trending hashtags into your posts can remarkably increase your visibility on social media. Hashtags act as clickable links that group similar content, making it easier for users to discover posts about topics they’re interested in. To leverage this, research and use hashtags that are trending but relevant to your content. This strategy ensures that your posts are not only seen by more people but also by those who are genuinely interested in your message or offerings.

Enhance Posts with Compelling Visuals
Utilize eye-catching visuals like crisp images, captivating videos, and detailed infographics to ensure your posts capture and hold your audience’s attention swiftly. Visuals often communicate more powerfully and quickly than text alone. For your videos, you can use an online video creator to add compelling audio tracks, adjust the playback speed, and incorporate animations, enhancing your content’s interactive quality and memorability. By embracing these visual tools, you can significantly elevate the appeal and effectiveness of your social media posts.

Keep Your Content Fresh
To keep your audience engaged over time, you must rotate your post types and themes regularly. This variety keeps your feed dynamic and exciting, encouraging followers to return. Different post types can cater to your audience’s diverse interests, whether a behind-the-scenes look, a tutorial, a customer story, or a product showcase. Consistently introducing new content types prevents your social media presence from becoming stagnant or predictable, keeping your audience excited and engaged.

Engage with Interactive Content
Creating interactive content, such as polls or quizzes, invites your audience to participate actively rather than passively consuming your posts. This type of content can provide valuable insights into your followers’ preferences and opinions, which can guide future content creation. Interactive posts are more likely to be shared, increasing visibility and engagement rates. The direct interaction can also strengthen the relationship between you and your audience, building a community around your social media presence.

Encourage Participation through Giveaways
Running giveaways or contests is a powerful tactic for engaging your followers and attracting new ones. These activities encourage interactions through likes, shares, and comments, boosting your post’s visibility in social media algorithms. Make your giveaways enticing with worthwhile rewards and simple participation criteria to ensure maximum engagement. Collaborating with other brands for giveaways can also introduce your content to a broader audience.

Share Your Successes
Celebrating milestones and sharing success stories can resonate deeply with your audience, fostering a sense of community and achievement. Whether you reach a follower count, launch a new product, or receive an award, sharing these moments invites your audience to join the celebration. This humanizes your brand and shows appreciation for your followers’ support, enhancing their loyalty and engagement. You should feel connected and valued as part of this community.

Conclusion
Enhancing your social media content with creativity, strategic planning, and direct interaction can revitalize your platforms into vibrant, engaging spaces that foster growth. As you adopt these innovative methods, you’ll find that every post becomes a unique chance to connect with and expand your audience authentically. Focus on making each interaction memorable, turning your social media efforts into catalysts for increased follower engagement and broader reach. This potential for growth and expansion should leave you feeling optimistic and motivated.

By Ed Clarke of Social Health Today & Reginald Jackson

Use a Press-Release to Get Traffic to Your Site!

Gaining traffic through creating quality content, sharing in social networking sites, and joining forum may not be enough. Although these approaches may come viable, it still need a boost. With press release, your traffic campaign can be more effective. Let us see how you can get more traffic to your site with this interesting strategy!

What Is A Press Release?
Even though you may associate a press release with a news paper or the media, a press release is an official statement reporting specific, but brief information about an event, particular matter, or other happening typically tied to a business, organization or your website.
For example, here is a press release for the launching of a website called mycathairmatting.net: “A new blog titled mycathairmatting.net has been launch to help cat owners solve their cat hair and fur matting problems. Pet owners around the world will be thrilled to discover a website design to help them with the latest information and tips on healthy cat hair-care!”

Essential Guidelines in Creating Press Release
Press release can provide valuable links to your website. The number of visitors it garners will depend on several factors. For instance, the topic your press release covers and the option of press-release submission. To ensure that you are on the right track, read this article!
• Newsworthy of the subject matter. The amount of visitor you will receive will depend on your subject. When press release is about celebrity, it usually gets a lot of traffic. Nevertheless, it should be noted that your press release should be related to your website or business that could grab the attention of your audience.
• Remember, it is not an advertisement. Press release is not the avenue to promote your products or services. According to Realty Blog Content, an actual press release should appear like it is written by a neutral third party. Hence, it only states the story and facts of the product.
• Quote. Your press release should not be dull as one reads through every line. Including some quotes relevant to your subject matter can take your press release a leap.
• Credibility and quality. Read and edit your press release once you are done with your draft. When you read it, read as if you have never laid your eyes on it and make the judgment. Edit your write-up once you are done.
• Submission. Selection of press release websites should also be considered. Nonetheless, always check for the credibility and charges..

The Free and Paid Press Release Websites
Now that you are up for submission, the question is which one will you opt to? Is it the free-press release submission or the paid press-release submission?
1. Free-press release submission. When you do not have enough budget, you can always turn to a free press release website. However, it has its boundaries. For instance, photos and videos cannot be included. The following are some of the free websites cited from subhub.
• Free-Press-Release.com (Page rank 5/ Alexa 3,547)
• PRLog.org (Page rank 5/ Alexa 16,551)
• OpenPR.com (Page rank 5/ Alexa 42,088)
• 1888PressRelease.com (Page rank 5/ Alexa 58,760)
• NewswireToday.com (Page rank 5/Alexa 51,449)
2. Paid press-release submissions. The premium websites for press release have its perks. Some of these are tagging and checking of grammar. They also have a list of where they can send your release. Here are the websites cited from subhub.
• PRNewsWire.com (Page rank 8/ Alexa 7,508) — annual subscription of $195.
• BusinessWire.com (Page rank 8/ Alexa 16,730) — prices on application.
• PRWeb.com (page rank 8/ Alexa 9,822) — $80 to $360 per press release.
• PRLeap.com (page rank 6/ Alexa 55,935) — $49, $99, and $149 per press release.

Makes Results
Press release can make a difference to your website and business. Nonetheless, every step and decision is critical as it can direct you to your destination-that is to increase awareness and get traffic!

The Secret to Market Research-How to Find Your Killer Niche!

thinkingThis is where it all starts! The idea, the thought of going into business of your own. What are you going to promote or sell? Well if you already have an idea, that’s good. But if not-that’s okay too. Because with market research or niche marketing, I’m going to show you the secret of finding a unique brand or niche-to promote online with enormous success. Here’s how it works:
What Is A Niche?
A niche is define as a situation in which a business’s products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or group of people. In other words it zero’s in to a specific group, making them special or exclusive. Weight Loss is a broad category for example, tremendous competition to compete with others. But if you can narrow it down to a special group or situation maybe like weight loss for post-pregnant women or overweight children under 12, then that becomes a niche under that broad category. And that idea will be your keyword and part of your website URL.
A killer niche is something really unique, something nobody has thought of-but you!
Market Research
Market research, or niche marketing, is simply a process of collection and analysis of data to find what people are looking for. What do everyday people want? How to create a new market, something different.
Where Do I Start?
Start by asking yourself: What is something you know about well? Something that you are passionate about? This is where you are going to start searching for keywords.
Yes the one key is keywords. The other is the competition. You don’t want to have to compete with a million other websites of your niche, and you certainly don’t want to have to compete with the “big dogs” either! So what are you going to do? Here are 4 methods that will aid you in an effective market research, to where you can find that one unique niche.
Google Ad-words
It use to be that one way of doing market research was just starting an Google Ad-word campaign with pay-per-click(PPC), and you would be able to determine what keywords is getting you good traffic, providing of course that your campaign was a successful one. With Google Ad-word you’re having to pay every time someone clicks on your ad. But the Internet is always changing and things isn’t what it use to be years ago. Now there’s a way to perform market research that is free!
Keyword Search
Once you have an idea of what your potential niche is going to be, then just do a simple keyword search. One tool you can use is Google Keyword Tool, which is a free tool. Just sign-in enter a keyword and it will show you a list of other keywords you can use depending on two things: The number of search, and the competition. You want the search volume to be high, but the competition to be very low. Once you locate a keyword with more than 1,000 searches per month or more, and at the same time the competition is at its lowest-then you may have discovered what I call a “potential website keyword.” In other words, a potential niche that you center an entire website around! But more on that later.
Amazon Bestsellers
Another market research strategy is the use of Amazon.com. Amazon has emerge to one of the biggest places online where you can find what people are looking for when it comes to information. So just go to the books section in Amazon, select a category, then select at the top the word “Bestseller.” Now you have an idea of what people are interested in. Take notice of something that you can use as a niche to promote as a product, service, or information to sell online. Now your potential niche becomes a keyword to do a keyword search as described above.
Trends.
What are the current trends? What are people talking or asking questions about? Trends can be an effective market researching strategy as well, if you can get an idea on what’s the next hot thing that people are going to want to get their hands on. Just remember, the Xbox, the iPod, and the Mac-book, as an example, were all just a trend at one time. Once you get an idea, again, do your keyword search. The best way to keep up with trends are websites like http://blogpulse.com/trend or http://google.com/trends. At http://boardtracker.com you can follow what people are talking about and  http://technorati.com keeps up with the latest technology in electronics.

Building A Site
Before you launch your site though, it’s important that you make your keyword part of your domain name. In other words you are going to build your whole brand around that one “killer” keyword, due to good research marketing. You can use your site to either sell a product, services, or information? Whatever you decide, I would suggest that you create a blog with your site and off-the-bat, write 3-5 articles on your niche-using your main keyword and start driving traffic to your new site.

Even though market research takes time and effort, it is all well-spent, because sometimes you may be surprise as to what you will decide on a niche. So get busy and go find your “killer” niche now, and be sure to leave a comment below please!

5 Reasons You Need A Social Media Manager

Virtual AssistantBusiness owners around the globe are asking themselves whether or not they need a social media manager. However, more and more of them are noticing the popularity of social media, but don’t know how, where, when, or why they should jump on the bandwagon themselves. They notice their colleagues, peers, friends, children, and family have jumped on board, on a more personal level. But, what so many of them fail to see, is that their present and future customers have jumped on for a ride too!

Right now, as you read this, your customers are flying down the road going mach 5 with no end in sight. They’re enjoying themselves too while reading/writing reviews, articles, comments & opinions on your business. They’re chatting amongst themselves (and to the rest of the internet world) about their latest visit, what their experience was, and even how it bugs them that Sally the cashier always seems “nice”, but never says thank you when they are leaving.

Wouldn’t you love the opportunity to be in that cart flying down the road too? Do you want to know what your customers are saying about you? Do you want to be able to effectively converse back with them? Wouldn’t you love to hear, first hand, about their experiences? Wouldn’t it be great to know how they felt about Sally so you could enforce stronger cashier policies?

There is no excuse for you not being in that bandwagon yourself. If you want to continually grow your business every year with the goal of higher profits and better ROI’s, then you need to be in that cart. Most importantly, you need to be sitting in the cart as strategically as possible so your customers don’t mistake you for luggage!

If the last four paragraphs didn’t provide you with enough reasons as to why you need a social media manager…don’t fret! Here are five more:

1. Contrary to popular belief, just because your 14 year old niece has a Facebook account, that doesn’t mean she could (or should) create your own businesses fan page. Hire a professional. Your goal should be to have a better social presence than all your competitors. Better website, Facebook, Twitter etc. Hiring someone who has extensive knowledge on the platforms best suited for your business will benefit you enormously. Social media is so constantly evolving, that you want a professional handling yours that you know is up to speed with the latest tools, platforms, & strategies.

2. You must have a well thought out social media strategy if you want to succeed. You must have a plan. One that will provide a road map for you so you don’t get lost. You need to be consistent with your content and most importantly, you need to make sure your content is *valuable*.

3. Just because you already have social media platforms in place, that doesn’t mean you are using them correctly. If you have a Facebook business fan page or Twitter account that gets updated once “every now and then” (when you find the time) … you’re in trouble. It actually looks worse for your business to have inactive pages than not having any at all. Also, you want them all integrated together so they are working for you, and not the other way around.

4. You need someone to remind you -not- to be a broadcaster! It is extremely easy for someone to “hide” you on Facebook and “unfollow” you on Twitter. So easy, it can be done with one click of the mouse! You need someone helping you develop content strategies that are focused on providing engaging valuable content that people enjoy reading and make them feel comfortable enough to join in on the conversation. One of the most successful companies at doing social media is Zappos.com. Check out their Facebook site to see what I mean about engaging content.

5. Having a social media manager saves you, the business owner, time (our most valuable asset). Even though an effective social media campaign requires an “all hands on deck” approach to be effective, having a social media manager undoubtedly saves you time. They can provide you with a road map and content strategy that should make it easy for you to distinguish what is considered good and bad content. They also could take away the burden of having to log onto your computer and manage comments and updating content regularly on all platforms. They do all that for you leaving you more time to concentrate on your livelihood … your business!
By Krysty Petrucci facebook.com/TribalMedia

Now it’s your turn. Have you jumped on the social media bandwagon yet? What has been your experience thus far? What have you had difficulty with? What seemed surprisingly easy? If you haven’t jumped on yet- what’s stopping you?  What are you waiting for?

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