Spac3 Media News

Spac3 Media is a premier digital branding and social media marketing agency aimed to assist brands increase their social media presence and customer base.

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Social Media Listening For Your Brand

Introduction

Social media listening is a powerful tool that can help you build your online community, engage in conversations relevant to your industry, discover potential customer service opportunities, strengthen relationships with current customers, and much more. It provides brands with an opportunity to engage with potential and existing customers in relevant social media conversations. If done correctly, it can prove to be a valuable asset for your business.

Keyword Research

One of the first steps needed for social media listening is the identification of your competitors within your industry. Another step is to compile a list of keywords that work for you so that you can create content that will suit your target audience. You can then do manual searches on each of these keywords and respond whenever appropriate. There are plenty of software programs that can assist with these processes such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social.

Engage with Prospective Customers

When you conduct a search for a specific keyword or term, find the conversations that are relevant, and show how you can help. You may be able to provide insights on a certain product or service to help the consumer. You can also just provide a quick tip on a certain problem related to the product or service. By just sharing your knowledge and you may gain a potential fan , consumer, or strengthen the bond between you and an existing customer.

Social Media Influencers

Another great benefit of social media listening is that you can discover social media influencers in your industry as well. Reaching out to these influencers and getting them to support your product or service can vastly assist your business. Having them tweet or retweet one of your tweets can help your message and brand be seen by thousands or even millions of people. They could also write a blog entry about your business or product, which could also be seen by thousands or millions of people.

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Why Social Media is Important for Small Businesses

Introduction

Social Media is rapidly evolving by the second. Though it may seem difficult and overwhelming at first, if used correctly, it can be a powerful tool in helping a business grow and prosper.

Sharing Information and Knowledge

Social Media is important for small businesses because of how quickly you can reach out and connect with fans, loyal customers, and potential customers. You can share useful information that your target audience would find useful and interesting. You can also notify your fans and customers about news regarding your restaurant such as a planned extended closure, upcoming renovations, or other news updates regarding your business. You can also engage with fans and show that you care by sharing engaging content to build an online community with your business page.

Exclusive Online Deals

Aside from sharing updates about your business and sharing information related to your business, you can also entice fans, customers, and potential customers by sharing exclusive online deals. You can do limited time offers by mentioning a code word for that specific time frame, or you can simply make an online coupon. Another tactic you can use is to give a special deal based on having customers check into your business on the social media platform of your choice.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business

The two biggest social media platforms are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has over a billion users worldwide, and Twitter has over 230 million users. These two platforms are great for getting the word out on your business and giving your customers and fans the latest news and updates about your business. There are other platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram which may be useful for your business if you have products that would be better served on a more visual platform such as fashion and food.

Using Social Media Tools

Posting on social media can be time consuming if done manually. However, the great thing about social media is that there are tools you can use to help you schedule and queue posts so that you are not spending your time all day. There are a number of different tools you can use such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer, all of which can help you schedule posts for the future. Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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How to Boost Engagement on Your Blog

Introduction

For many of us, blogging is an important part of our digital marketing efforts. However, without any engagement on your blog, what good does it do? Here are some tips for boosting the engagement rate on your blog.

Content and SEO

The most important key to increasing engagement on your blog is to have useful, interesting, or informative. People will naturally gravitate towards blog posts that serve some sort of use towards them. They will comment and share the content with their peers if they truly enjoy it. Creating quality content is also key part of your search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines are constantly updating their algorithm to help users find best content for their searches. It is best to not worry about your SEO efforts and just focus on writing good content, which will lead to a boost in engagement on your blog.

Social Media

Social media can also play a huge role in your engagement rate for your blog posts. One of the best ways to help your blog posts gain exposure it to post and share it on social media. Social media is the easiest and fastest way for content to get shared and gain exposure. When one person engages with your Facebook update regarding your blog post, many of their friends will see this engagement and they may also interact and lead to even more exposure for your blog post. This is how content goes viral, and viral content is most likely shared via social media.

Load Speed

One of the things that can detract people from your website is the load speed of your blog page. If your page is inundated with advertisements, banners, scripts, and plugins, your website load speed will take longer than usual. People are generally impatient when it comes to webpage load speeds, and having a page that takes a while to load will be a huge turnoff for people. Try to limit the ads, scripts, and plug-ins, to make the load speed as fast as possible.

Conclusion

These are some of the key parts to boosting the engagement rates of your blog. Of course, these are not the only ways you can increase the engagement rate on your webpage, however, following these tips should help your blog immensely!

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Twitter Will Offer Coupons in the Form of Tweets

Introduction

Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world today. With over 280 million users, Twitter has become a vital platform in the digital marketing era. Twitter has a new plan that can make this platform even more powerful. This plan is to release digital coupons in the form of tweets.

Coupons on Twitter

Twitter plans to offer digital coupons in a new ad platform on its site called the Twitter Offers. This piece of news is a huge announcement in the world of online commerce. Many analysts believe that this is Twitter’s attempt at gaining a bigger piece of the online commerce world. This new system will give businesses the ability to offer coupons to its followers. Twitter also hopes to later on allow businesses to post coupons via sponsored tweets aimed at the business’ targeted demographics.

What Started the New Platform

This recent move by Twitter is tied to its recent acquisition of a company named CardSpring. Many analysts believed that some sort of in platform buying would soon ensue, and they were correct. The technology they obtained in this acquisition will be used to link these coupons to users’ credit cards to be used at a later time. The discounts will be embedded within tweets with a get offer button that will link the offer to the user’s credit card.

What This Means For Businesses

What does this mean for Twitter? This move will immensely help increase engagement rates on Twitter for businesses. This gives the detractors of Twitter less reason to stay away from Twitter. Followers of businesses can help spread the word of the coupons by retweeting them as well. People may also be more inclined to impulse purchases because of these digital coupons, leading to an increase in sales for businesses. Business owners should be very excited about this new platform that Twitter is planning to release.

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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The Benefits of Blogging for your Business

Introduction

Blogging has become a popular activity on social media. Blogging may be seen as a more casual and leisurely activity, however, businesses can use blogging to benefit their business! This form of marketing is called content marketing. Providing readers with unique and intriguing content increases websites and eventually customers to your website!

Show off your Expertise

One of the biggest benefits of blogging for a business is to show the business’ expertise in the field of interest. When you provide interesting content that is relevant to your ideal customers, it leaves your customer wanting more, making them more likely to visit your website. Show your potential customers the benefits of your product(s) or service(s), and put your brand in their minds whenever they think of that product or service!

Increased Social Media Presence

Have you ever seen those stories or posts that are shared by your friends on social media? This is another potential benefit of blogging for your business. Blogging can help grow your social media presence on all of your social media platforms. If you create interesting and unique content that is shared by your friends and customers you will have increased exposure and potentially new customers and fans! Every interaction with your blog post on social media such as likes, comments, or shares, helps you gain exposure for your business!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Lastly, arguably one of the biggest benefits of blogging for your business is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Blogging can provide you with natural backlinks to your website which are highly beneficial in SEO, and greatly contribute to your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Having other blogs and websites link to your blog post increase the number of backlinks to your website, this in turn helps raise your ranking on SERPs.

Conclusion

As you can see, blogging can have many benefits for your business. It all ties into the new era of digital marketing, so if you haven’t begun to do so yet, what are you waiting for?

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Cross Promotion With Your Social Media Platforms

Introduction

Cross promoting is a marketing fundamental strategy that should be applied in every campaign. It assists the growth of each platform and helps them grow much faster than they would on their own. This ultimately allows your brand or business to gain exposure and grow its presence on social media at an accelerated rate!

What is Cross Promotion

Cross promotion is the process of promoting your business social media page(s) with other pages. For instance, you can promote your Pinterest account to all your Facebook page fans with a post about the Pinterest page! The promotion shouldn’t stop at just one platform though; you can use that same Facebook page to promote your Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media platforms! You can do this on each one of your social platforms and get some free advertising for each one of your platforms!

Cross Promotion is not the only thing you need!

Of course, this is not the only factor in helping your social media platforms gain more exposure. If your Facebook page is filled with updates that are promoting your other social media platforms, nobody will want to follow your page. Content still reigns supreme in social media marketing. If you create enticing content, the fans will follow. Content is what drives users to your social media pages, because people want to learn, watch, or read about something that caters towards their interests.

Conclusion Cross promoting your businesses’ social media pages is a great way to quickly gain exposure. When you acquire a new follower, if they see the occasional cross promotion, and truly like what your business has to offer, they will surely follow your business on all other platforms they use as well! Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Handling negative reviews for your business

In today’s society, online review sites such as Yelp or Google places are becoming more and more important deciding factors for consumers. When deciding on a new restaurant or salon, after friend recommendations, online site reviews are the next most important factor for potentially new customers. Of course every business wants 100% positive reviews, but there will always be negative reviews. Here are a couple of ways to handle those negative reviews.

Acknowledge the Mistake

Mistakes do happen in the workplace and having them once in a while is normal. Respond to the negative review with a response acknowledging the mistake and mention that you and your company will work on improving in the area of the mistake. There is always room for improvement with every business, and showing that you are always striving to improve your business shows customers that you genuinely care.

Don’t Try to Stir Up an Argument

Sometimes you may feel that the customer wrongly gave your business a poor review, or you do not agree with their reasoning for the poor review. One of the worst possible things a business can do is engage in back and forth banter with the customer. Publically arguing with a customer shows that the business owner or manager is immature. Even if you win the argument, you have gained nothing for your business, and more likely than not, scared other potential customers away once they read through the argument. If you strongly feel the urge to speak with the customer, do so in a private manner, and always maintain a level headed and professional tone.

Encourage Positive Reviews

One way to mask those negative reviews is to have many more positive reviews. Having more positive reviews makes the negative reviews less likely to be seen. For the customers that are happy with your product(s) or service(s), politely ask them or encourage them to leave you a positive review on those directory sites. For those brick and mortar businesses such as restaurants or retail stores, if a customer is unhappy inside the business, try to resolve the issue before the leave your business. Doing so may turn an unhappy customer into a satisfied one, and they may feel more inclined to leave a positive review and return to your business.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is no need to panic when you receive a poor online review on your business. You can actually turn this negative review into a positive one and possibly even flip this whole ordeal into a positive situation. If you turn a dissatisfied customer, one that has left a negative review, into a satisfied customer that goes back to change their review, this can be even better than just a regular good review. This shows that your business cares about their customers, which will present a great image for your business for potentially new customers. As long as you maintain a sense of professionalism and always strive to improve your business, customers will be satisfied.

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Check out this awesome infographic showing a cheat sheet for the sizes of different images spaces on Facebook!

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Check out this marketing infographic regarding a marketers brain!

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Using Facebook for your Business

Advertising through television and radio is now a thing of the past for businesses. The revolution of social media has changed the landscape of advertising. A business can now broadcast their brand to the whole world at the touch of their fingertips with Facebook and with very little to no cost at all. Utilizing Facebook effectively can assist a business in enhancing their image and expanding its fan base.

Building the Connection

For a business to utilize Facebook for its benefit, it must establish a strong connection between itself and its customers. In order for a business to effectively get their name out, It must first consider its target audience. After determining this, the business must then engage with its audience to effectively get its name out. Once people start becoming fans of the business, friends of those people will see their engagement with that business and that business will then be seen by friends of their fans. This starts a domino effect and can lead to a page being seen by thousands of people within hours.

Engaging With Customers

The best way to build a fan base on Facebook is to have unique and interesting content that will raise engagement rates on your Facebook posts. The best way to do this is to figure out your ideal customer for your business and to think of sharing content and updates on topics you think they would be interested in. Tailor your voice to your ideal customer, and your fan base will build organically!

For example purposes, say a new bar opened up near a local university. That bar would generally try to target students, who are primarily between the ages of 21-25. It would then post updates on Facebook about things that would typically interest people in this audience group such as partying, drinking, or even updates about the university's sports teams. Simply asking questions about things like their favorite cocktail or favorite beer would encourage responses and likes from people in this age group. This is an important part of communicating with potential customers. Hearing what customers have to say and figuring out ways to accommodate them. Customers can also have complaints and businesses can use this to their advantage by apologizing and explaining how they plan on fixing the problem. Building this connection will encourage customers to engage in that particular business' updates. Having people engage in the conversation will then lead to the status being seen by their friends, and push the status higher up on the top stories news feed.

Conclusion

A business should be listening to what the consumer has to say and figure out ways to accommodate the consumer. When a business engages actively with their consumers, each of the business' updates will have a higher Edgerank and that will lead to more views for each of the updates from the business. Results from using this method may not occur overnight, but if done correctly, over time the results will be substantial.

Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Increased Competition w/ Facebook Company Posts Drive the Need for Higher Quality Content

As the competition for a spot on people's News Feeds increases, everyone's share of "Reach" on Facebook naturally decreases. Facebook has tuned and reworked their News Feed algorithm many times already, with each update focusing on driving more and more user engagement. It turns out that not everyone's Facebook posts are getting less reach. The most engaging brand posts are actually getting even more reach than before since Facebook is trying to drive up exposure for the best content for the best user experience. Many companies are affected adversely from all of this since their brand posts contain mostly low quality content (mostly spam) that are just marketing themselves and provide no other value. To take advantage of this, companies need to post the highest quality content as much as possible. The key factors in providing the the most engaging content are: providing value, a high level of genuineness, being concise but effective, providing content that encourages sharing/liking/commenting, and using visual aids. Be conscious of what you're saying and put yourself into the end user's point of view. It can take time, research, and creativity to only provide the best content possible, so you can also look into using an agency to manage everything for you if you don't have the time.

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Did you know you can lose up to 85% of your business due to poor customer service?!?

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Great tips on how to use hashtags on Google+ Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Check out all these interesting statistics about Pinterest! Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Look at all the activity on #Facebook in one minute! Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Are you familiar with all of these popular social media marketing acronyms?!? Spac3 Media, LLC.

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Facebook Releases Snapchat Competitor Slingshot

By now everybody has heard about Snapchat. Facebook has decided to join the fray by rolling out Slingshot, its own service for sending disappearing photo and video messages. Slingshot released 6/17/14 in the U.S for iPhones and Android phones.

Slingshot lets you instantly share what you are doing with a group of friends. First you take picture or a short video. Then you add some text, draw something, and then send it to a friend. Videos can be up to 15 seconds long and once the recipient views the photo or video, they disappear for good. Slingshot is not just another Snapchat clone, one fundamental difference between the two is the fact that you cannot view an incoming photo or video unless you also respond with an image or video. This is a way for Facebook to encourage those who have downloaded Slingshot to share more frequently. This forced active participation may put off some potential users, but Facebook wanted everyone who uses the app to be an active participant, not just a spectator.

Slingshot’s “feed” is a pleasure to use, every time you send a shot to your friends, the app immediately pops up all the shots that you’ve unlocked from those friends. Swiping through these shots that you’ve just earned has a sense of accomplishment that comes with it. Overall, the app is amazing to use, the speed is great and comes with all the polish that you would expect from Facebook. We definitely recommend checking it out, how relevant it will become has yet to be determined though. Article provided by: Spac3 Media, LLC.