Soon after creating accounts on today’s different social networking platforms, many community managers learn that social media marketing is, in fact, a wild beast. They wonder why their engagement is low, why their strategies are not generating the expected ROI. Here are some tips to help you do social media optimization (SMO) right.

Always use social media to establish a more solid relationship. Social media engagements can be fleeting, because your business is competing with so many other images, sounds, and messages. The best SMO practitioners understand that social networking websites like Facebook should in fact serve as both media and point of contact. Make sure you follow through on every like, or comment on any of your pages, to begin creating a more solid relationship. This could be automated on some pages now: A data entry window to get their email pops up each time the page is opened. Following or unfollowing your page would only require the click of a button, but it would generally be more complicated – at least, the impression is – to unsubscribe to a newsletter database.

Master the ABCs of content shareability. Produce digital marketing materials that everyone will in fact enjoy sharing with their own personal networks. Have your team master the ingredients and settings for content shareability: High-quality but low-file size/compressed pictures and videos. Material that evokes strong emotions – especially positive ones, although nostalgia is a known good element of marketing, too. Text that encourages interactions, especially by asking questions. And very carefully targeted tagging – preferably involving influencers or industry authorities, and referring to websites that enjoy good reputation.

Ensure company and customer data security and privacy. Social media pages are generally public domains, and everyone becomes fair game for cyber security threats. Your blogs can be attacked, and your social media followers can get their personal information retrieved without their permission. Monitor your accounts closely and screen for spammers and potential phishers. Allow comments and follows only from those who appear to be legitimate accounts – not bots who are asking on your wall if you would like more followers, or inviting your followers to find jobs online that pay good money.

To know how to do social media optimization right, talk to social media marketing experts like New York-based online marketing agency GBX Digital. They invest in the latest tools and the best people to understand how to tame this wild beast, and with their help, you too, can.

It is fairly easy to establish a presence on today’s various social media channels. How to make that presence count, however, is another story altogether. This is where the role of SMO professionals becomes indispensable.

SMO or social media optimization refers to the use of such social networking platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to raise awareness of a brand or product. Content is produced on a regular basis, with the goal of boosting engagement as well as sharing or redistribution. Today, many businesses have tapped dedicated community managers for handling social media presence. But so much more can be achieved by partnering with SMO professionals:

Viral, meaningful content.Honed by years of experience, SMO experts know what it takes to produce a content that’s timely, meaningful, and relevant to the target market. They retain a pool of writers who understand the requirements of social media marketing: Catchy and engaging but short copies. They also have in their employ a team of graphic designers and art directors who can create such engaging and well-thought out materials as teasers, GIFs, infographics, and animation. The best of the best can also help produce podcasts and videos, and even organize webinars and live workshops on behalf of their clients, for distribution via social media.

Real-time monitoring. Social media rules change by the day, if not the hour. Because it is a constantly growing domain, new patterns of user behavior quickly impact on the way marketers play the game. The SMO professionals are able to observe these changes as they happen, because they are equipped with the tools – and have the well-trained manpower – for monitoring in the real-time – something businesses might not always want to spend on.

Proper measurement of performance. Relatedly, experts in SMO know how to conduct proper tracking and measurement of performance, beyond what the insights or default reports the social networking platforms provide. They invest in applications for this task, and are then capable of churning truly insightful analyses about what strategies and channels are working and what aren’t, and how these can all be improved. Most importantly, they know how to turn these into lead- and sales-generating platforms, to achieve the carefully drafted marketing goals.

Learn more about the value of working with social media marketing experts by getting in touch with GBX Digital today. GBX Digital is a team of experienced digital marketing professionals based in New York.

Underrated Tool for Online Reputation Management: Company Blog

For today’s customers, searching on the Internet has become a mandatory first step in choosing a product brand. This makes it important for businesses to effectively manage their online reputation.

This article discusses an underrated practice when boosting or repairing one’s image in the age of digital marketing: maintaining a company blog.

Through a blog, a company can publish as much shareable marketing content as it can. It costs very little to maintain one: The domain name purchase and data management expenses can be subsumed under the company website maintenance, and the materials – articles, images, videos, podcasts – can be easily provided by employees and executives, or composed by the members of the marketing team as part of their regular functions.

In truth, a company blog is an often overlooked online reputation management tool that fulfills many functions: It establishes your brand as a thought leader, as the source of the latest news and the most insightful analysis of trends in the industry. It is a cheap but practically unlimited space for promotional content – no word, dimension/size limits for your text or file. It can facilitate collaborative projects with merchant partners or influencers. Finally, it can be your tactic for local search engine optimization or SEO.

Reputation management and SEO are typically discussed as separate strategies, but the two are in fact inextricably linked. Being ranked highly on search engines is generally a good thing for a brand, as this means being easily “found” by the target market – a success SEO-wise. At the same time, one hopes that the top-ranking links will show positive content, which is the target of reputation management.

Since by now, many local businesses have already completed the ABCs of digital marketing such as site optimization, making Google+ updates, and encouraging customer reviews, most end up in the same low ranks of Google Local search results. To harness Google’s algorithms and be a step ahead of the competition, companies need to create fresh content that can attract audience and boost interaction, which will in turn enhance one’s prominence score on Google local search results.

Aside from fostering a relationship between a brand and its target market, company blogs are known for attracting frequent site visitors. It is then considered a core component of content marketing, which involves providing informative materials that link the brand with its prospective clients.

GBX Digital is an experienced team of digital marketing specialists. Talk to us today to know how to manage your online reputation.

The First Two Steps in Establishing Corporate Identity Online

For many of today’s businesses, marketing in the digital world is a novel terrain. And the first challenge in conquering this new terrain is establishing one’s corporate identity.

This article discusses the first two steps for building a company’s identity online:

Compose a powerful online value proposition. A powerful value proposition will help you convey a unique online impression, sparking interest among prospective customers, while providing existing ones with a standard by which they can judge the competitors’ offerings. It argues why you should be the customers’ choice: What problem does your product or service resolve? How is it better than the other products or services in the market?

Part of establishing this value proposition online is composing an original brand message or tagline that can be compressed into a catchy hashtag. It is important to conduct a search for your chosen tags on Google, or any hashtag aggregator sites. Double-check if it has not yet appeared on an advertising campaign on Facebook or YouTube, among other platforms – the last thing you want is to be known as a brand that steals other people’s ideas.

Gather all the relevant information to back your brand messaging, and create marketing materials based on your research – copies, images, and infographics, etc. – to ingrain the value proposition into your followers’ consciousness. Publish each of them on your website as well as the social media channels visited by your target market based on your updating schedule.

Be accessible in all social networking platforms. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube are some of today’s most popular digital marketing platforms, which host millions of users on a daily basis. Each appeals to a slightly different demographic, but on the whole, they are all potential access points that draw consumers who are curious about available services.

Company accounts on these websites should bear materials that adhere to the company’s corporate identity guidelines – from the official motif, logo and images, and tone and diction. It is very important is to offer a consistent experience of your brand across all these networks.

After establishing a presence in each of these channels, remember that those pages are already extensions of your brand. These social media accounts need to be constantly updated by well-trained community managers. They should painstakingly monitor the nature and level of the followers’ engagement, and know when to initiate paid efforts to boost said engagement.

To learn how to build your corporate identity online, get in touch with our team here at GBX Digital.

Internet Reputation Management From The Top

Amid the intensified digital marketing competition, companies have learned to pay more attention to internet reputation management. Now, businesses are all about building a solid and credible image online, one that is built on a personal connection between the consumer and their brand.

More than its promises and its mission and vision, a company is defined by the quality of offerings and its people. And many times, customers directly associate a brand with the credentials and behavior of its executives or owners, making it important to also devote resources towards managing the images of the company’s top personnel.

Craft good profiles on the company website. A dedicated bio page of each executive on the company website is a good first step. Your goal is for said page to feature the best introduction to an exec that a prospective customer can find. It should contain their position and duties, education and training background, their vision for the company, and their relevant experience. The profiles should be accompanied by a professionally shot photograph with a consistent look – same background, scale, and angle, etc. Depending on the industry you belong to, some personal details may be added to make the execs more relatable, such as their socio-civic engagements, their hobbies and passions, or their family life.

Publish materials, obtain speaking engagements in their name. Efforts should go into finding platforms for publishing their by-lined material, as well as securing speaking engagements in conferences or industry gatherings to establish their credibility. This means monitoring industry events, preparing compelling materials for digital publication or for presentation, and coordinating with the publication or conference organizers. The success of any such efforts should be duly covered and hyped as well: News articles must be drafted whenever a company exec obtains an invitation to write or speak.

Create social media accounts for each exec. One platform that links the company’s top management with the customers is social media. Community managers can create and maintain accounts on these sites, with a process in place for approving every post before publishing. These accounts can deliver company or industry news from an insider’s perspective, and using a more casual tone, too. Should the execs have another personal account, disclaimers must be issued that what they post on said accounts are their own opinions and not the company’s.

GBX Digital offers internet reputation management services. Get in touch with us today to learn more tips for boosting your brand online.