YOUTUBE INSTAGRAM YouTube is a video-sharing website which Instagram is a social media site specifically S O C I A L M E D I A T OOLS , T I P S A N D enables users to view and upload videos designed to share photos. Once a photo is free. Similar to Facebook, users can Like uploaded to Instagram, it can be shared T ECHNIQUES FOR B USINESS and share a video as well as add it to a on most other social media sites with Favourite list and Subscribe to be notified whatever caption information you apply. of videos uploaded by the channel owner. WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? WHAT SHOULD I POST? Businesses use YouTube to showcase their products and OTHER TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA SITES While each business is different in the content that is services to clients and prospects, provide tutorials on the Social Media is a term used to refer to websites that In addition to the social media sites covered here, there valuable to their customers and clients, the following use of products as well as promote programs and services provide interactive online environments to communicate are other categories of social media sites. overall categories of content are typical of most to build their business. with others who are interested in the same topics and companies:  Social Bookmarking: (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) who wish to engage in conversations about shared Business channel owners can keep in touch with their Interact by tagging websites and searching through content such as products and services, news topics, subscribers, track view analytics and respond to inquiries  Promotional Content – providing news about websites bookmarked by other people. information articles, as well as videos, photos, music and about their videos. Channels can also be `monetized` other files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media upcoming promotions which means that you allow YouTube/ Google to  Social News: (Digg, Reddit) Interact by voting for  Educational Content – building brand awareness HY SHOULD BUSINESSES USE SOCIAL MEDIA advertise on your video page. This can be a significant articles and commenting on them. W ?  Conversational Content – engaging clients in source of revenue for many businesses whose videos are Today, social media has become one of the most popular conversations about your products and services or very popular. There are many businesses whose sole  Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles ways to share information about new products and related topics source of income is YouTube advertising. and editing existing articles. programs, changes in company direction, new leaders  Humorous Content – always popular, this keeps your and anything that existing or potential customers might customers and prospects coming back YOUTUBE BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS  Blogging sites: WordPress, Blogger, etc., which be interested in when learning about your company Title: Your title needs to be concise but also engaging and provide online opinions and other content online. Social media is very effective at building brand  Inspirational Content – can be a call to action or note that title gets cut off around the 53 character mark on recognition and developing client relationship and loyalty. motivational posts to inspire, inform or otherwise add many link sites such as Facebook.  News Readers: Pulse, RSS provides easy access to value to your brand online news sites which notify you of new articles HY SHOULD MY COMPANY USE SOCIAL MEDIA Keywords: Include keywords that you think users will be W ? Some examples of posts that fall into these categories and searching for in your category SOCIAL MEDIA AGGREGATOR SITES Not every company needs to build an online social media have proven very effective: presence. However, depending on what stage of Social media aggregator tools allow much more Description: This is the where you can really make your video development your business is at, social media may be  A current success story – new leader, news about stand out: include all relevant contact info including other streamlined updating across multiple social media sites appropriate if the following is true: your product/service, article about your company, social media sites, links to your products/services/other and accounts. Depending on your business’ needs you expansion of your business related videos, full description of what the video is about,. can choose from several excellent tools:  You are launching a new business and want to  A link to something cool, preferably showing your Tags: It is recommended that you use between 3-10 HootSuite – one of the more popular introduce your brand and build excitement about product/service keywords your product and/or service social media site aggregators, it is  Information about your competition and how your Your Video: Video editing tools also provide excellent easily configurable and comes either  You regularly have new products or services that your product/service is better free or premium versions existing clients or potential clients would be interested additional features to help your viewers get the most out of  An exciting, interesting video your channel. Annotations, captions, notes, links, social media in NimbleContact – a full-featured, icons all help make the video more interactive and engaging  Your own company videos fee-based, configurable and  You have an established business which needs to but don’t overdo it. very powerful social media maintain a public profile and share new information  An event that you want to share about/with/for your company – i.e. an open house Social: Encourage your viewers to like/share and comment aggregator about events and promotions that help to keep your on your video, as YouTube and Google see user engagement clients engaged and loyal  A celebrity mention of or involvement with your as a way to identify high-quality content. Promote your TweetDeck – an online social  Any company that wants to be seen as popular, product/service media service owned by Twitter videos on other social media sites regularly to drive traffic to progressive, competitive and informed.  An unexpected piece of trivia your channel. which aggregates Facebook and other social media sites in a WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITES SHOULD I USE?  A photo that makes someone say ‘amazing!’ Your Channel: Your channel is your brand, so use some of the browser environment  A relevant question to engage your customers in same branding images and colours that you have on your Every business is unique in their selection of social media conversation business website to build brand recognition. It’s also helpful Buffer Social – similar to HootSuite, websites and resources. Generally speaking, the most to link to a Google+ account to share your YouTube videos. Buffer Social is a free plus premium popular sites that are available would be a good start.  A promotional offer about something new you’re online service which links to Here are the top 15 English speaking sites globally: offering Embedding your Videos: Consider embedding YouTube on multiple social media sites. your own website so that you benefit from the valuable 1. Facebook 9. Flickr  A joke about or related to your industry content you’ve created but be sure to use the ‘Old embed Regardless of the social media tools available, you will 2. Twitter 10. Vine  An appeal for public involvement – i.e. a charity event code’ option in order to allow web crawlers to access your need to do your research to determine which aggregator 3. LinkedIn 11. Meetup No matter what you post, it’s important not only to share content instead of YouTube. This helps to raise your website’s tool is right for your business. No matter which one you 4. Pinterest 12. Tagged profile on search engines but make sure it’s accompanied by relevant content, it’s also essential that you plan your posts select, it will certainly make your job of developing and 5. Google Plus+ 13. Ask.fm ahead of time and develop a social media strategy and relevant caption and description. When you have multiple maintaining social media strategies a lot easier. Have fun! videos embedded, be sure to also create a video site map 6. Tumblr 14. MeetMe schedule. Furthermore, it’s critical that you regularly check where appropriate to help your site visitors to navigate them. 7. Instagram 15. ClassMates for responses and queries that may come up on each of This is separate from your regular site map and will help SparQ Corporate Training 8. VK your social media sites from those who are following your Google to improve your ranking. (416) 432-8436 business and reply promptly. Remember, you`re Source: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social- developing relationships and like any relationship, it must Source: http://white.net/blog/essential-youtube-best- [email protected] networking-websites www.sparqcorporatetraining.com be nurtured. practices/ www.youtube.com/sparqlearning/videos

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WHO IS MY AUDIENCE? FACEBOOK FACEBOOK BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS LINKEDIN The single most important thing to consider is your Facebook is the most popular free social Here are some best practices for business: LinkedIn is an online social network for audience. Ask yourself these questions to determine when networking website On the internet. It’s business professionals. Unlike other social and how often to post: available in 37 languages. It allows  Post consistently networking sites like Twitter and registered users to create profiles, post  Target your posts Facebook it's designed for professional  Does your audience consist of other businesses or the content such as photos and video, share  Keep post images and text fresh networking -- discovering potential clients public? web pages and communicate with or projects, finding a job, connecting with  Boost important posts  Existing clients or potential clients? friends, family, colleagues and clients. Facebook, includes business partners. However, similar to other social  Publicize exclusive discounts and promotions with ads  When will they be most active on social media? public features such as: networking sites, you are able to post much the same  Connect with words and pictures content: links, photos, news articles, etc.  What type of content will they expect from me?  Presence technology - allows members to know which  Review post performance  What types of posts will they find of greatest value? contacts are online and chat. LinkedIn users must create their business profile in order to view and post content. A user can pay a monthly fee for  What content will they be Groups - allows members who share common Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/page-  additional features. As much or as little detail can be most inclined to share and interests to find each other and exchange posts. posting-tips provided depending on how it will be used. There are when and to whom?  Events - allows members to promote an event, invite TWITTER several types of Linked in profiles although a LinkedIn user  Will I need to be available guests and track who plans to attend. may be considered more than one: for them if my posts are Twitter is a social media website that is  Marketplace - allows members to read, post and used to send short 140 character text intended to invite respond to classified ads.  Job Seeker responses? messages to anyone who follows an  Pages - allows members to create and promote a account. These posts are called tweets and  Networker Will they be anticipating  public page built around a business, celebrity, product, these tweets can include photos, links to  Executive my posts? or any topic. websites as well as retweeting existing  Entrepreneur  Will I be following them as tweets from others. Marketer well as them following BUSINESS PAGES  me? One of the first steps in using Facebook as a business is to Unlike Facebook which uses a newsfeed to display posts  Thought Leader develop a Page. Pages are very useful for communicating from friends and followers according to an algorithm You may discover that they really only look to your tweets are displayed in real-time, so they move quickly on One of the most effective ways to promote your business business for promotions. Or you may find that your with Facebook followers day to day content such as is to publish articles as a business leader in your industry. promotions, news about the company, photos and videos your screen. For this reason there is more of a sense of customers choose to make their inquiries on Facebook excitement and urgency about Twitter. When posting on the company LinkedIn site, click the instead of email. They might appreciate the humour you and other relevant information. In order to post content Create a Post icon on the right which will take you to the post or they might look to you for advice on how they use on a business Facebook page you must have a personal GETTING STARTED WITH TWITTER: Pulse Create an Article page which you can customize your products. Once you answer these questions to the profile and then create the page. with photos and links to support your article when  Discover sources: find and follow others. best of your ability, you will plan your strategy and posting Unlike Twitter and other social media sites, posts in published. schedule accordingly. Facebook can contain fairly lengthy text content and even  Check your timeline: see what’s happening. LINKEDIN BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS include data files for download, but keeping them brief  Take it with you: connect your mobile. WHEN SHALL I POST? will mean they’re more likely to be read. Source: https://support.twitter.com/articles/215585-  Optimize your company page.  Will my customers only be visiting my social media If appropriate you can assign roles to others to manage getting-started-with-twitter#  Create targeted showcase pages. sites during business hours? the posts, reply to queries and otherwise keep it up to  Post company status updates (and target them!). HASHTAGS  Will they be using it on specific days/times? date. Here are the roles used in Facebook:  Use pulse to keep track of industry news.

Using hashtags to categorize Tweets by keyword:

 Will they be visiting frequently or occasionally?  Use LinkedIn's trending content tool, too!

 Will they be sharing your content promptly? Role Actions / Role Name  Any Twitter user can add the hashtag symbol # before  Use LinkedIn to generate leads.

For example, you may realize that your followers may only a keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their Tweet to  Experiment with LinkedIn ads and sponsored updates.

Editor Moderator Advertiser Analyst be online occasionally. Or you might find that they want Admin apply a category making it easier to find in Twitter Manage Page roles and settings ✔ Search.  Use group statistics for better targeting and to hear from you daily. Only you will know and perhaps marketing. only learn after working with social media for a few Edit the Page and add apps ✔ ✔  Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows  Create your own industry LinkedIn group (or months. Create and delete posts as the Page ✔ ✔ you all other Tweets marked with that keyword. subgroups). Send messages as the Page ✔ ✔ ✔  Hashtags can occur anywhere in the post SUMMARY  Email your LinkedIn group. Respond to and delete comments and posts to the ✔ ✔ ✔  Hashtagged words that become very popular are Finally, here is a list of activities that you will want to Page often included in Trending Topics.  Experiment with LinkedIn's publishing platform. consider when posting to social media sites: Remove and ban people from the Page ✔ ✔ ✔  Recruit new talent.  Hashtags are now used on many social media sites. Create ads ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔  Add the company follow and LinkedIn share buttons  Develop Relationships – with existing and new clients TWITTER BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS to your website/content.  Invite Discussion View insights ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ Most of the best practices with Facebook apply to Twitter.  Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance with Boost Credibility See who posted as the Page ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔  page insights and LinkedIn's content marketing score.  Comment on News and Events  Post consistently These roles can be updated at any time, but you cannot Source:  Invite Action remove yourself as admin. You must first assign someone  Target your posts https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23454/The-  Share Blog Content else who can then remove you as that role  Keep post images and text fresh Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-for-Mastering-LinkedIn.aspx  Share External Content  Publicize exclusive discounts and promotions with ads  Connect with words and pictures

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