15 Social Media Marketing Trends For Small Business

Social media marketing has evolved in the last few years as marketers are taking advantage of all the media platforms available to them. While these platforms offer marketing tools for small businesses, there are also some marketing solutions available to connect with consumers. 

However, small businesses should continuously re-evaluate their strategies and modify them based on the latest developments and trends in the marketing industry. These changes should consider possible trends in the industry. The trends expected social media marketing trends for 2017 are as follows:

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1. Facebook and Other Platforms Will Still Contribute to Small Businesses Growth

Developments and innovations offered by different platforms make them more relevant to the growth of small businesses. Marketers are aware of this and continue to enhance their competencies to take full advantage of the features offered by these platforms.

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2. Professional Marketers Focus More on these Platforms

Professional and experienced marketers understand that running campaigns take time. However, the time spent on these campaigns is well worth it since it typically results in considerable benefits for small businesses.

3. Sales Figures Increase after a Two-Year Campaign

The majority of marketers are using different platforms for at least two years. The time they spent focusing on these platforms have resulted in increased sales for small businesses.

4. Two-Year Campaigns Allow Small Businesses to Grow

Aside from increased sales, these marketers also noted the significant growth in the businesses after the two-year campaigns.

5. Videos are Important

Videos encourage deep personal relationships between small businesses and their customers. These businesses can easily convey their messages through videos since users spend a good amount of time watching videos. 

6. These Platforms Generate Leads and Reduce Marketing Costs

Six hours a week on these platforms is sufficient enough for marketers to generate leads for small businesses. Also, professional marketers spending eleven hours per week on these platforms know that marketing costs will go down.

7. Search Rankings and Fan Base Will Improve Using These Platforms for One Year

Using these platforms for at least one year will result in an improvement in search rankings.  It also results in significant fan base for the small business after twelve months of using the platform.

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8.  Social Media Marketing Can Increase Exposure and Traffic for Small Businesses

Using these platforms can increase the exposure of small businesses. As more people are aware of the small business, it will result in an increase in traffic for the business.

9. Domination is the Key

While Facebook is the dominant platform in the industry, it is still important to consider the other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. Marketers should dominate the platform used by their customers to reach them.

10. Content is Still King 

Content that can capture the attention of customers will result in conversions. These platforms feed on quality content, which makes it important for small businesses to always have quality content on their blogs.

11. Business-To-Business Marketers Focus on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become the number one choice of B2B marketers since it caters mainly to professionals and other businesses. On the other hand, Facebook is used mainly by B2C marketers.

12. Snapchat is on a Growth Path

Snapchat is gradually gaining ground as an option for marketers. There is a considerable increase in the number of marketers using the app.

13. LinkedIn and Facebook are Top Channels for Republishing Content

Many marketers have already started to republish content on both LinkedIn and Facebook, depending on the type of customers of small businesses.

14. Social Media Engagement is Critical

Likes and views have been replaced with comments and shares. If more customers comment on or share posts, it may result in possible conversions in the future.

15. Conversion is the Goal

Conversion is considered as the main goal of social media marketing. All efforts will be useless if they do not generate income for small businesses.

Author Bio:

Jessa Camacho is part of the Marketing team at ConvertBetter. She has a good grasp of all the essentials conditions in building and promoting a website. Her skills and knowledge in marketing makes her prominent in the company. With her expertise, she perceives what a business should require or want and furnish her marketing skills to create, as well as, establishing software and technology in building perceptive systems for a better user experience. Her focal point is incorporating the growth hacking principles of her company, ConvertBetter.

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How to Create Your Own Twitter Auto Retweet and Favorite Bot

You can easily create your own Twitter bot that will automatically retweet whatever you want in twitter, including topics, selected accounts, lists, favorites and more!

How to Create Your Own Twitter Auto Retweet and Favorite Bot

This tutorial explains how you can easily make a Twitter bot that will automatically favorite and/or retweet tweets that contain particular keywords or #hashtags. You need absolutely no coding knowledge and your Twitter bot will be up and running in few minutes.

Before we get started, you may be wondering why would anyone write a twitter bot that mindlessly favorites or retweets tweets? Yes, bots are often used for spammy behavior but, if used right, they can also help grow your Twitter network. For instance, when people share a link from your website on Twitter, you can favorite that tweet and it will give an hint to the original poster that you are author of that page. A brand may like to retweet tweets that contain positive mentions of their product. The list goes on.

1. Go to apps.twitter.com and create a new application. Fill in the mandatory fields (name, description, URL) and click the Create button. Next go to Keys and Access Tokens and click the Create my Access Token button. Twitter will generate the Consumer Keys & Access tokens that we will need in the next step.
2. Click here to copy the Twitter bot script to your Google Drive. Replace the search phrase and Twitter keys that were generated in the previous step.
3. Go to the Run menu and choose StartBot to initialize your Twitter bot.

That’s it. The bot will run in the background, every 10 minutes, and favorite / retweet matching tweets. It will fave/RT a maximum of 1 tweet per minute. If you wish to stop the bot later, go to Run again and choose StopBot.

Read full step by step guide here: How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter

How to create a Twitter bot that auto-favorites and retweets tweets containing particular keywords or hashtags. The twitter bot is written in Google Scripts and can be installed in a minute.

Using Twiiter RSS, Google Scripts IFTTT to Create Your Own Twitter Auto Retweet Bot 

What we will be using:

1. A Twitter account for your bot (or even your own twitter account if you wish to retweet yourself)
2. Google Scripts (You don’t have to code anything, though)
3. IFTTT (For retweeting)

How will we be doing it?

Twitter has disabled RSS feeds for profiles, so the major step to do this is obtaining tweets in RSS form. A script from Amit Agarwal, a well known blogger, solves this issue. With a little modification to the script, we create a non-repeating version (i.e, same tweet will not be retweeted multiple times). With the help of IFTTT, we tweet these feeds. Hence, the auto-retweet bot. twitter-activity-retweet

Let’s start, then..

First, you need to create a twitter widget. Log in to your twitter account and click on Settings and select Widgets. Click on Create. Now, you should create a widget with what content you would like to retweet. If you would like to retweet whatever a particular user has tweeted, then click on “User Timeline” and enter that user’s name.  Or if you would like to retweet tweets of a particular group of people, create a list and make a widget of it. If you would like to know about a particular topic on twitter, click on the “Search” tab and enter your search query. Click on “Create Widget” after you finish. In the URL bar, copy the ID of your widget, which will look something like “363815745370191000”.

Converting your Widget to RSS Feed.

This script from Amit Agarwal converts your twitter feed to RSS. However, with minor modifications, the below script can be used for this purpose. To execute this script, go to Google Scripts and open a blank project. Copy and paste the following code. Then, click on Run> getTweets. When asked to Authorize, click on the authorize button. (This is a one time procedure only).

function Twitter_RSS() {

  return; 

}

 

function doGet(e) {

   

  var widgetID = e.queryString? e.queryString : "ERROR_NO_ID_FOUND";

  var cache = CacheService.getPublicCache();

  var id = "Twitter" + widgetID;

  var rss = cache.get(id);

   

  if ( ! rss ) {

    rss = getTweets(widgetID);

    cache.put(id, rss, 120); // Expire in 2 minutes

  }

   

  return ContentService.createTextOutput(rss)

  .setMimeType(ContentService.MimeType.XML);

}

 

 

function getTweets(id) {

     

  try {

             

    var widget, json, tweets, regex, tweet, list, time, url, when, rss, heading, title, link, alltweets, permalink, permatitle; 

     

    title = "Twitter RSS Feed : " + id;

    link  = "http://www.techcovered.org/#" + id;              

    url   = "http://cdn.syndication.twimg.com/widgets/timelines/" + id;

     

    widget  = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url);

    json    = Utilities.jsonParse(widget);   

     

    if ( ! json.body ) {

      return;

    }

     

    list = json.body.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm," ")

                    .replace(/\s+/g, " ")

                    .replace(/<div class=\"(h-card|footer|detail-expander|retweet-credit)[^>]*>(.*?)<\/div>/gi, "")

                    .replace(/<time[^>]*>(.*?)<\/time>/gi, "");

     

    regex = new RegExp(/<h1[^>]*>(.*?)<\/h1>/ig);

     

    if ((heading = regex.exec(list)) !== null) {

       

      regex = RegExp(/href="(.*?)"/ig);

      if ((permalink = regex.exec(heading[1])) !== null) {

        link = permalink[1];

      }

       

      regex = RegExp(/title="(.*?)"/ig);

      if ((permatitle = regex.exec(heading[1])) !== null) {

        title = permatitle[1];

      }

    }

     

    var self = ScriptApp.getService().getUrl() + "?" + id;

     

    rss  = '<?xml version="1.0"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">';

    rss += ' <channel><title>' + title + '</title>';

    rss += ' <link>' + link + '</link>';

    rss += ' <atom:link href="' + self + '" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />';

    rss += ' <description>' + title + ' :: RSS Generator available at http://www.labnol.org/?p=28149</description>';

     

    regex = RegExp(/<ol[^>]*>(.*?)<\/ol>/ig);

     

    if ((alltweets = regex.exec(list)) !== null) {

       

      alltweets = alltweets[1].replace(/\s+/g, " ");

       

      var re = /<a class=".*?permalink.*?" href="(.*?)" data-datetime="(.*?)"[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>(.*?)<p[^>]*>(.*?)<\/p>/gm;

       

      while (tweet = re.exec(alltweets)) {

         

        url   = tweet[1];

        when  = Utilities.formatDate(parseDate(tweet[2]), "UTC", "EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss");

 

        tweet = tweet[5].replace(/<\s*(div|span|b|p)[^>]*>/gi, "")

                        .replace(/<\s*\/\s*(div|span|b|p)[^>]*>/gi, "")

                        .replace(/class=".*?"|rel=".*?"|title=".*?"|target=".*?"|data-expanded-url=".*?"|data-query-source=".*?"|dir=".*?"|data-scribe=".*?"/gi, "")

                        .replace(/\s+/g, " ");

        if(tweet.substring(0,2)!="RT") {

        rss += "<item>";

        rss += " <title>"+ tweet.replace(/<a[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, "") + "</title>";

        rss += " <pubDate>" + when + " +0000</pubDate>";

        rss += " <guid>" + url + "</guid>";

        rss += " <link>" + url + "</link>";

        rss += " <description><![CDATA[ @"+url.split("/")[3] + ": " + tweet + "]]></description>";

        rss += "</item>";            

        } 

        

      }

             

      rss += "</channel></rss>";

      return rss;

    }

     

  } catch (e) {

    Logger.log(e.toString());

  }

}

 

function parseDate(d) {

 

  var date = /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})T(\d{2}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})/;

  var m = date.exec(d);

  var year   = +m[1];

  var month  = +m[2];

  var day    = +m[3];

  var hour   = +m[4];

  var minute = +m[5];

  var second = +m[6];

   

  return new Date(year, month - 1, day, hour, minute, second);

}

After that, go to Publish> Deploy as a web app. Enter a version number and in the “Who has access to the app” select “Anyone, Even Anonymous”. Click Create. Copy the link in the box. To test your feed, paste this URL in the address bar and in the end, add “?” followed by your twitter widget ID. It will look something like this: 

https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbufejQanpLBnFIelEaq5e774Ya7GIFFd33OE-srjTF8n7Pi3sc/exec?363815745370191000 

In the URL, you will be able to see the twitter feed you asked for. Do note that it is displayed as just code in Chrome, but is displayed as RSS in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The Final Step

After you have the RSS link, its now time to go IFTTT, the awesome website that you can use to make trigger-action based events and more. Create an account and select the “Create” link on the top. Select “this” and click on the RSS feed icon. In the next step, click on “New Feed Item” and type in the URL you copied. Then, select “that” Next, select Twitter in the next list and click on “Activate” button to link your twitter profile in which you would like to post your retweets. In the next step, click on “Post a tweet”. In the “What’s happening box”?”, type the following: _RT _ Click on “Create Action”.

Read more: How to Create Your Own Twitter Auto Retweet Bot

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Why We Love Manage Your Twitter Account (And You Should, Too!)

Home › Guest Blogging › Why We Love Manage Your Twitter Account (And You Should, Too!)

Twitter Marketing Tips For Lead Generation

Twitter Marketing Strategy: What do you think keeps the social realm of the internet buzzing all the time? Facebook, yes! But, virtual Twitterati generates the most amount of buzz after Facebook. Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams’ micro-blogging child, and Twitter receives millions of users who are chirping out their thoughts in a daily manner. Twitter is such a phenomenon these days that even President Barrack Obama opened his Twitter account. 

Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! Every netizen loves managing their account. Netizens pursue the most viral topics, the trendiest hashtags and the best headlines to catch their audience’s eyes. A tweet may be witty and colorful, or even often opinionated and persuasive. So, are you one of those netizens who love to tweet? Well, welcome to the bandwagon. You are not the only passenger – and here’s why we all love to manage Twitter accounts:

1. For communication – after all, who doesn’t want a voice that will stand out from the rest?

Twitter is the best way to voice out your opinions, feelings and thoughts on anything that comes to your mind. For instance, you may experience personal setbacks that you feel easier to talk about getting rid of the burden of those unsaid words; sometimes, you may have news or an important piece of information that you want to share with the world on a virtual platform. 

Additionally, viral retweets can also be an instant source of self-importance! Take the example of movie celebrities. They lead lustrous lives and often keep out of the public eye. With Twitter, they not only generate interest in their movies, but also give tidbits to their fans about their lives. Twitter becomes a brilliant platform for them to promote their films, share stories and memories or post updates so that their fans won’t feel left out. 

2. For promotional activities and business marketing

Are you an entrepreneur with a new product? What are you waiting for? Twitter is one of the best places to release the brand new promo of your product. For a person who knows how to properly manage their Twitter accounts, this social marketing website can be used to generate a lot of buzz. Platforms like Twitter are brilliant for developing positive marketing strategies and fostering better relations with your target audience. 

If you properly invest in a Twitter account, chances are, you will reap benefits as a marketer or a business manager. As serprank.com puts it on the website – “Either commit to your Twitter account or expect it to be unsuccessful. But if you are willing to invest in a well-run Twitter account and work toward developing a real reputation on the social media site, you’ll find that there are many benefits that can help your company thrive in today’s economy, both in the short and long term.”

Twitter marketing strategies should follow this basic outline!

3. For free and easy connection

Twitter is a social network that doesn’t really charge any of its users. You can connect with your most favorite celebrities, voice out your thoughts and opinions, interact with your followers and foster bonds and relations – and all of these without spending a penny! 

Aside from being a free social media platform, Twitter has another likeable feature – its lack of advertisements. Ads can be quite irritating for most people and since Twitter doesn’t have ads, it should do the trick for you! Also, tweets are brief and are only 140 characters long. This feature of brevity makes Twitter easy to use, often requiring only a brain, a grasp of language and the ability to click on icons.

4. For generating leads and building a brilliant network

Most of the world is on Twitter, hence through your profile, you can access another person’s account. This person has other followers, which you may view and follow as well and the chain reaction never really comes to an end.

For business ventures, finding leads on Twitter is easy. Leads, or potential customers who express eagerness to use your account can help you create a thriving business from scratch. On Twitter, you can forge connections by collecting their email addresses and then use them to form regular marketing campaigns. A campaign also enables them to directly share email addresses to which you can send promotional content whenever needed!

How Twitter generates potential customers!

5. For researching on the market you are interested in

Twitter is a brilliant website to study social analytics for a product. Interaction with customers through tweets can give you an idea of what your audience is interested in. Through their feedback, you can modify your products or upgrade them accordingly. 

6. For targeting an interested audience member and enhancing customer satisfaction

You shouldn’t generally follow someone who doesn’t follow you back. The Tweepi app, with its ‘Flush’ option allows you to locate the users who aren’t following you back while its ‘Reciprocate’ option allows you to see the users you are following, but who aren’t following you back. The ‘Cleanup’ option literally helps you tidy up the mess in your list of followers. 

With the ‘Follow’ option, you can follow the ones who are genuinely interested in your updates, tweets and anything that you have to offer. Such a targeted audience can be of immense help. A specific audience and an audience interested in your product can immediately translate into better publicity – and positive publicity often results in positive growth and feedback.

These are the reasons why we love to manage Twitter accounts – but it’s not always about the pros – sometimes the other side of the coin needs to be explored. Excessive love for Twitter can result in a Twitter overdose – something commonly known as social media addiction. Immense addiction can gnaw into your daily schedules and derail them – so do watch out! Nevertheless, don’t stop altogether. Just be passionate and tweet within your limits. There is nothing wrong for having self- discipline while enjoying. That is what matters!

Sheena Mathieson, understands the essence of making excellent content that suits the needs of every business especially when it comes online marketing. She can spice up your marketing campaign with the content she makes and then incorporate Buy Real Marketing services.

Thats our look at using Twitter account for lead generation!

If you have any interesting stories about twitter marketing strategies and would like to share or have any questions or feedback you can leave them in the comments section of the blog post. 

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