Instagram is still considered by many in the pay-per-click marketing word, to be the new kid on the block. With newness comes a bit of fear, so many small and medium businesses have been hesitant to stray from using only Google and Facebook PPC.

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But, it can be a huge lead booster if utilized properly. Here’s why?

Using Instagram To Create Leads For Your Business

  1. Visual Marketing is a Dominant Force

Content marketing rules, and will continue to be the most useful form of marketing for years to come. As the internet becomes more available in non-PC forms, phones, tablets, watches, etc., the need to turn to non-text content will be essential.

You can do this with visual content, and Instagram is the perfect place to put your best visuals to work.

Simply, visual attractiveness in an ad or in any piece of content that has the goal of increasing conversions, leads to more opt-ins, engagement, leads, and sales.

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It will also get you more shares, and that increases each campaign’s reach exponentially at no cost to you.

Using high-quality, bright pictures, you draw the attention of your followers, and can help lead them on the path to purchase.

Instagram Videos

Now with videos in the Instagram feed, you can really skyrocket your leads and sales through the social media site. Video content on Instagram gets more views, shares, and likes. It stops scrollers in their path. Once you become known for putting out good video, you’ll be well on your wall to dominating your market online.

  1. Young, Money-Spending Graphics

In Television, for years the most coveted demographic was 18 – 54 year old males.

Now, it’s men and women 18 – 34 (with 18 – 54 being not far behind). Instagram is custom made, literally, for those in that demographic. Build a strong Instagram following, and you’ll be tapping into the most lucrative market in the world.

  1. Build Brand Awareness

Instagram allows you to use visual content to reach more customers. Facebook is similar in this respect, but Instagram actually gets more shares.

Post a good video or picture, and promote it. Your target audience sees the cool content, wants to show their friends, so they like and share it. Now, for the price to reach your target audience, you’ve reached them plus the friends they’ve shared with. It extends the life of your ads, exposes your products, services, and your brand to a large, warm-audience. This is key for growing your business, especially if you don’t have an unlimited ad-buy budget.

Facebook reviews are now driving e-commerce. Customers are always looking for reviews and validation from fellow customers before completing the purchase or the desired action. Any business must be smart enough to manage the Facebook reviews, and shrewd enough to use the positive reviews to amplify business. Here Retaliate1st list their tactics on amplifying your positive Facebook reviews.

3 Ways to Profit from Facebook Reviews

  1. Facebook Comments Can Be Deleted

If you are receiving negative comments, you can either:

  • Respond to them (positively – fighting in your comments section will harm your reputation)
  • Delete them

The main advantage to getting a negative comment is that you can remove it and block the user. If it’s a legitimate bad review, you should respond.

If it’s a former employee, competitor, or just a whacko who loves to troll, then delete.

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  1. Reviews Can Not Be Deleted

Anything left in the actual review section of your Facebook cannot be deleted. This is done to protect the consumer, as every business would simply delete all non-positive reviews.

But, don’t fret, this is actually a good thing, especially if you have overwhelmingly positive reviews.

If you don’t, then ask your customers to review you on Facebook. Everyone and their mother (literally) has a Facebook account, so getting them to leave a review doesn’t take much action on their part. You should link them to your page to make it as easy as possible. Ethical bribes are ok in this situation, too.

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The more positives you have, the less impact the negatives hold.

What do you do when someone drops a 1-star review plus negative text?

Respond to the review. Publicly invite them to contact you. You don’t have to admit mistakes. A simple, “We’re sorry to hear you are having an issue. Please contact us at 888-888-8888 and we’ll help you.”

Why Facebook Reviews Are Critical

It’s simple, direct, doesn’t admit that you’ve done something wrong, and most importantly, it shows other customers that when there’s an issue, you jump on solving it. No matter how web-savvy we become, there is still a pervading fear of being ripped off online by a business that takes our credit card payment and skips town.

Responding with an invitation to contact helps quell these fears.
What about if the negative review keeps on the offensive?

Continue to remain calm and invite them to resolve the issue with you. If they continue to push, they end up looking bad while you show yourself to be a trustworthy business that handles even the harshest of your critics with grace.

  1. Cultivate More Reviews

The best thing you can do is cultivate as many reviews as possible. As discussed above, link your page in email to your customers and ask for a review.

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Offer them a gift card, discount, free info, or something they’ll like in exchange for a review. Note: in exchange for a review, not a positive review. This is an important distinction with the FTC.

With most experts predicting that Facebook reviews will soon surpass Yelp as the go-to review site (Yelp’s bizarre strong-arm tactics are becoming well known to consumers, they were even parodied on South Park recently), now is a great time to start the review building process.

Facebook is the great advertising platform of our time. Were once television ads and billboard ads were the go to platforms for advertisers, they have now lost ground to Facebook ads. Retaliate1st discuss the reasons why you should focus on this platform for your advertising.

Customers Can Buy from You Without Leaving Facebook

This is huge for both your business, where can sell directly to a warm audience that you’ve built a strong relationship with, and for Facebook, which can help businesses sell more products, buy more ads, and have the whole thing take place on Facebook’s platform, without having users click away from the social media giant.

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It works by giving your customers the option to buy products in Facebook messenger. If they’ve already filled in their Name, address, phone number, etc. for their profile, all they have to do is click “pay.” If not, they can do so at point of purchase.

Payments will go through PayPal or Stripe. At this point, these are the only two usable payment platforms, and you can only sell in the U.S. However, both of these rules will likely change as the program grows.

Facebook ads

If you’ve ever fretted about the transition your customers make between Facebook and your landing or sales pages, now you don’t have to worry. If you crafted a great ad or promoted post, your customer can now buy with one click.

How to Sell In Messenger

This will take some finesse. Facebook is allowing click from ads in the newsfeed to be sent directly to messenger now. This is a slow roll-out, but it will take off soon enough. Obviously, some customers will be put off by having their messenger blow up with ads, but it seems Facebook will allow consumers the ability to choose who they receive ad messages from.

Once there, your customer can chat with a “sales bot” or they can buy direct. And, in a further move toward utilizing similar buy-sharing options as Amazon, Facebook will allow your customer to send the ad copy to their friends if they need help deciding between multiple products. So, if your customer can’t decide between the wing-tips and the quarter-brogues, they can now share it with their friends.

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This helps them take the plunge and make the purchase, and it exposed your products to an even larger pool of warm prospects.

Facebook and Instagram get the most attention when it comes to social media pay per click advertising. But, don’t neglect Twitter; it can be a great source of new leads and sales.

If, you do it the right way…

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What’s a Twitter Follower Worth

The first thing to figure out is what is a follower worth to you? “Follower” campaigns are the most popular, and cheapest ads to run on Twitter.

But, don’t blow your budget attracting followers until you run the numbers and figure out what a follower is worth. This can be tricky, as the metrics are not as helpful as they are on Facebook or Google. So, you’ll need to figure out the best method to track sales and legitimate leads that came directly from your followers.

This will look a lot like figuring out the lifetime value of a client, because that’s exactly what you’re doing.  Try to plan for the long term when running follower campaigns, and not focusing so much on cost per click and trading clicks for dollars. In this case, the dollars will come later. If you can figure how many, you’ll know how much to invest.

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Advantages to Twitter follower campaigns? Like Facebook, Twitter allows you to be very specific in your targeting – age, location, sex, interests, etc.

Disadvantages – if you don’t do the math first, you can end up overspending for followers that don’t buy from you.

Traditional Twitter Ads

You can also use Twitter ads to drive traffic and conversions.

The interface for ads is much like Facebook, so if you’ve used Facebook ads, you’ll have an advantage here. IF not, the program is not difficult to master. It’s a matter of targeting a very specific audience according to the parameters that bring you leads. Usually this is age, location, and interests.

You develop your creative, add a photo, and send users to yoru landing pages.

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Alternatively, you can create a Lead Generation Card where users can sign up (opt-in) directly on their Twitter feed. This again comes down to choosing a stellar picture, and strong, benefit-rich headlines. This can be a more simple lead generation effort as well, since this is a one-step process.

Advantages – decent analytics, highly-targeted demographics are available for your ads.

Disadvantages – the main disadvantage is figuring out conversion rates and long-term value of followers, clicks, and leads. This will take tracking, but if you can figure out the sweet spot for your business, Twitter can provide a steady stream of leads and sales.

Marekting has many trends that rise and fall. The current trend that many marketers are focusing on is content marketing. Content marketing requires that a company creates content to power an inbound engine and drive leads or sales via their website. However, there is a flaw with content marketing. How do you come up with ideas for content? Especially as you start to scale the content up. Retaliate1st has pioneered content marketing for many companies, including start-ups in the pet, tech, wearable and app world. Here we make our 4 recommendations on how you can continually come up with content to power your content marketing and inbound strategy.

4 Places to Generate Ideas for Content Marketing

  1. Google Auto-Suggest

Google’s autosuggest feature is a treasure trove for content creators. Google suggests the actual phrases or questions that people are searching for, so you know that these autosuggests will make great page and blog titles.

Google makes these suggestions based on real searches. The most popular get placed in the auto-suggest categories. If you click on one, you’ll notice at the bottom of the page there are even more suggested links.

How do you use this data to your advantage?

If you have a food deliver service in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse neighborhood, start by typing in “food delivery”

You’ll see results like:

  • Food delivery near me
  • Food delivery near me open
  • Food delivery Rittenhouse
  • Food deliveries near here

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You just found at least 4 article titles that will carry a ton of SEO value if they’re written and optimized well.

Customer Centric Content Marketing

The idea is to get into the mind of your customer. Play around with questions you’ve been asked.

A basic search for “can I order food” returns these suggestions:

  • Can I order food with paypal
  • Can I order food with a check
  • Can I order food to a hotel
  • Can I order food near here

Again, you have 4 SEO-rich titles and topics that people are actually searching for.

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  1. Trade Magazines

If you’re selling B2B services or products, trade magazines are loaded with ideas. Just because something has been written about doesn’t mean that you can’t offer a fresh perspective on the issue.

Plus, every magazine has a letters to the editor section. Again, what better place to address questions than those coming directly from your potential customers.

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Check the back of the magazine. If you’ve been reading it for a few months, you’ll notice a few advertisers that are listed consistently. This is because whatever they’re selling, readers are buying. Study the ads, the products, and services they sell and address these things on your site, in your newsletter, and in your content strategy.

Lead Generation Through Content Marketing

  1. Lead Forms

If your lead form has a text box with “how can we help you,” or if you have a help page on your site, the questions and concerns of your customers can not only help you create new content, but it will also help you from dealing with redundant issues.

If 15-people are writing in to ask where they can buy your widget in Green instead of red, then either make the answer clearer on your website, or address it in an FAQ. Either way, you have new content plus you won’t have to answer another 15-emails about the green vs red conundrum.

  1. Social Media

Searching hashtags, trends, or simply following brands that offer similar, or related, services to yours can help you get into the mind of potential customers. Is there a need out there not being filled? More importantly, is there a want going unsatisfied?

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Content Marketing –> SEO and Social Media

Can your business step in with the solution? Are a lot of Facebookers asking where they can find a product similar to yours? Or, are they confused about how a new app works? Find the questions, craft a response, post it to your website and social media channels. It will help your business climb in the Google rankings, and it will help your customers see why they should buy from you.

When it comes to marketing on Instagram, you can subscribe to a lot of theories on what works, but the one common thread among all marketers, and the research, is that your Instagram campaigns live and die with the quality of your Instagram photos.

Better Instagram photos = more views, more likes, more engagement and more sales.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 3 ways to improve your marketing on Instagram, through better Instagram photos:

How To Improve Your Instagram Photos

  1. Use Your Phone’s Native Camera App

Using your phone’s camera is a better option than using Instagram’s camera. This is especially true if you have a newer version of the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, both of which come with powerful cameras.

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Why is your phone’s camera better than Instagram’s?

  • You can take photos without filters
  • You can edit photos much more easily, and much more quickly, in your phone’s native camera app and editing software
  • You can set your phone’s cam to take pics that are 640 x 640, making them perfect for Instagram without having to crop
  • Most phones have more powerful zoom, clearer pictures, and better lighting
  • The free, or near-free, photo editing apps on smart phones are actually pretty powerful, and can help you enhance lighting, focus, remove red-eye, and make your IG pictures clear and eye-catching

Interesting Instagram Photos Excel

  1. Take Pictures of Interesting Things

This should be obvious, but we’ve all unfollowed a brand (or person) that insists on posting boring photos.
No matter what your product or service, there are opportunities to post photos of really dynamic content that will engage your followers.

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  • Before and after pics work well for weight loss products, home improvements, design, graphics, and clothing stores.
  • Photos of your product being modeled are always a safe bet. Research shows that including a human face in a picture of a product increase views (and sales). Have great clothes you’re selling? Put it on a model that is a slightly idealized version of your customer and do a photo shoot. One shoot can give you a strong catalogue of content.
  • Cool places – if you are an adventure traveler, restaurant, or you sell lifestyle, pictures of nature, especially breathtaking views, always perform well on Instagram
  • Food – we all love to look at pictures of food. If the pictures are bright, clear, and the food is colorful. This should be a no-brainer for restaurants. But, next time you’re on Instagram, check out how many clothing and watch dealers use food in their photo shoots. Elegant coffee displays are the focus of a picture, but the watch on the wrist of the woman with her hand poised on the cup is the real draw.

Instagram Photos Of People Are Most Liked

  1. Use Instagram Photos of People

This can be applied to using models, or taking pictures of your staff having fun, working, or doing interesting things.

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Remember, Instagram is simply another marketing channel. No matter where you’re selling, people want to buy from people, not faceless corporations. This is why product images featuring faces do so well. It’s also why any marketer worth a damn will tell you to include pictures of your staff on your website’s About page. Put a face on your Instagram and your brand identification (and sales) will grow.

Instagram has become the go to platform for millennial and Generation’s Z and Alpha. As the younger generations become the dominant spenders and marketing shifts towards them, platforms such as Instagram will increase their advertising revenue. This makes it a must for growth hackers to master. Retaliate1st have built multiple Instagram accounts into the millions of users and here we list our 5 ways to increase leads and sales using Instagram.

5 Ways to Increase Leads and Sales Using Instagram

  1. Picture Quality is Number 1

No matter what your business or service is, remember that picture quality is to Instagram marketing what headline strength is to print advertising.

You are competing with some high-quality photos on Instagram. Your business needs to stand out. Bright pictures out-pull darker hued shots.

Pictures with blue and light blue as the dominant color pulled 37% more likes than those set in other tones.

  1. Tell Your Story First, Market Second

Instagram marketing is still relatively new. Users and advertisers alike are blazing new territory. But, one rule that’s accepted by everyone is: no one likes in-your-face marketing in their feed.

It’s been said that Google ads are like a carnival barker, Facebook ads are like having a conversation on your front porch and anyone who walks by and is interested by the conversation is welcome to wander up and join in. Well, Instagram is more like telling a few friends about these gorgeous new shoes you bought, whipping out your phone, and showing them pics. They love them, and want to know where you got them.

Mastering the Instagram Feed

You can do this in your feed and with your ads. Simply tell your story through your visual content (pictures and video) and your captions. Most products will sell themselves if the pictures are of the highest quality. Now you just need to give followers a reason to click (free, sale, exclusive content, etc.)

  1. Track Traffic with Short Links

Measuring ROI on social media can be difficult at times. Measuring traffic from Instagram to your site shouldn’t be hard.

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Full links are harder to track than shortened ones, so consider services like bit.ly or TinyURL when posting links in your feed. They’re easier to track, and easier to read for your customers.

  1. Don’t Blow the Bio

Your bio page will get picked up on Google for searches you’re not even thinking about. Instagram is a huge site with a lot of traffic. Load your bio with useful information, and how it can benefit your customer, then link it to a landing page that captures user info. You won’t build a business overnight with this method, but over the long term you’ll attract a lot of leads that would’ve otherwise been lost.

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  1. Use Video – But Not Exclusively

Video, if done well, will capture more attention than pictures. It also allows you to bring your copywriting to life, giving your visitor a visual and auditory tour of your product or service.

But, don’t rely on video alone. Despite what cell phone companies’ commercials tell you, not everyone is walking around with an infinite supply of 4G service. Video can be slow to load, eat into data, and simply not work when your user is low on bars.

Don’t lose a customer because they became frustrated with a feed full of videos that they can’t watch.

Mix in pictures with the same message so you attract those who couldn’t connect with you in your video content.

 

If you’ve ever hired a top-gun copywriter, or wracked your own brain for the best possible ad copy on Facebook and Instagram, only to come up with sub-par results, it may not be your words that sunk the ship.

The visual you choose can have a huge impact on the success of your ad copy and posts.

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5 Ways To Dominate With Ad Copy

  1. Brightly colored visuals, especially those with blue as the dominant color, attract 80% more readers than darker pictures. Both Instagram and Facebook use a white background and a lot of white space. Placing bright, colorful pictures in the info stream helps draw the attention of users.
  2. A recent study showed that nearly 70% of senior marketing execs felt that visual content (pictures, infographics, video, graphics, etc.) were a major part of their branding, marketing, and social media campaigns. Graphic ads are using very short copy combined with stunning visuals to build brands and increase leads on social media.
  3. Facebook Ads: ads and posts with relevant images got nearly 95% more views than those without a relevant picture. This should tell you that you not only need great photos with your ads, but that you should also keep the “zany picture to draw attention” tactic to a minimum. A picture of a clown with bloody fangs may draw the eye, but when Facebookers see that it’s attached to an ad about wristwatches, they’re going to look away. And, they may reject your brand in the future because your ads came off as dishonest.

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Advanced Ad Copy

  1. Infographics get three-times more shares and likes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Most of your infographics should be purely informational, with a strong call to action built in.
  2. Web users followed directions nearly 350% better when they were showed the path through a visual vs. text only. This can be applied to your Facebook and Instagram ads in an effort to grab more leads. Helping people understand the process visually could land you triple the sign-ups and follows. Instagram posts get nearly 4x’s the likes when using a picture featuring a face. No matter what your product or service is, have it featured with real people to draw more customer attention.

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts. You can bootstrap your digital marketing.

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts.

digital-marketing

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

Bootstrap your Digital Marketing

  1. Start with Social Capital

Using social media to promote your business on a budget is nothing new. In fact, it’s not even very effective when you try the totally cost-free route. If you have an amazing product or service that goes viral, great. But for most businesses, that’s not happening right away.

You start a Facebook page, an Instagram, a Pintrest account and are faced with the social media equivalent of a writer’s blank page fears: there’s no one there. You can promote to friends, like other pages, and go through the litany of low/no cost promotion options. You should do those. But, it’s going to be a long climb if you rely solely on these methods.

The good news is that Facebook ads are great for small or new businesses on a budget.

Promoting your posts and “buying” likes is amazingly cost-effective. If the thought of advertising, and losing your shirt, on Google’s pay per click program, Facebook ads are for you.

First, for a few hundred bucks, you can grow your audience to several thousand people. If you are focusing on ads rather than followers, the cost is largely the same. So, it’s possible to spend under a grand and get the word out to thousands of potential customers.

If your site, landing pages, product pages, and copywriting are on-point, you’ll generate sales and leads. Now you can use these profits to expand your ad campaigns.

Digital Marketing for Beginners

  1. Do Work In-House… for Now

You’ve decided to take to Facebook to run ads.

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Who’s doing your ad writing?

Who’s doing the copy for your landing pages, product pages, and website?

These should be done by copywriting professionals. Great copy equals leads and sales; poorly written ads and web pages cost you leads, sales, and losses in ad revenue.

But, early on, you may not have the budget to hire top copywriters. You may not even have the capital to hire mid-level writers.

You’ll have to either:

  • Write ads yourself – this is a free option, but comes with an enormous challenge: writing great ads is not easy.

However, writing passable ads isn’t impossible. There are dozens of books on how to write good Facebook ads. Pick one up, study it, practice writing ads (on paper), then try a few out online. Testing is the only way to know if ads work, so take mini-budgets and test two versions of the same ad. Pick the winner and run with it. Once it generates a few sales, take the profits and hire someone better than you.

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  • Hire a copywriting intern – there are a lot of talented copywriters still learning their way, or studying marketing in college. One of the easiest ways to land big copywriting gigs is to have a killer portfolio.

Newbies need to build their work, so will be willing to work just to build it up their portfolios. Find a few good writers, have them produce ads and your web copy that generates some capital, then use the profits to hire pros. This method is great because you can continue to utilize up-and-comers to produce content while you funnel profits into getting high-end work done on your sales funnel.

For a small or medium business, using social media marketing can become overwhelming and frustrating. There are multiple platforms to choose from and some are clearly not right for your business. Figuring out return on investment can be tough, since most social media marketing doesn’t operate on a dollars-in v. dollars-out model. Converting likes into sales can be a multi-step process, and is best viewed in the long term.

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If you are unsure of how to get your social media marketing on track, check out these 4 tips. They’ll help you get started, or if you’re already going but find your efforts going in circle, these can help right the ship.

4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing

  1. Editorial schedule

If you are using typical social media marketing and networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest or twitter, you need to plan, carefully, what type of content you are posting. Keeping a simple schedule of what was posted, where & when & what type of content, is key. If you have a social media team, have them keep track of this – anything from spreadsheets to old-fashioned notebooks are fine for tracking content flow on social media.

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Scheduling not only helps you keep track of potential ROI, but it will help you re-purpose content, using it multiple times on multiple sites (even changed slightly), which breathes new life into your content marketing and ensures that all content is exposed to the maximum audience.

  1. Simplify

If you are overwhelmed, it is a sign that too much is going on. It is important to simplify. When in doubt, back off, check your content schedule and start again.

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  1. Stats

What is measurable can be improved and measuring metrics on social media can be tricky. Luckily Facebook offers excellent info in their “insights” section and it helps you track likes, reach, click-through rate, engagement, etc. If you are running ads on social media then these stats can help you measure real ROI.

  1. Free Help

Social media marketing is still fairly new and the game changes quickly. This is exciting for young marketers and finding interns to help with your social media campaigns is not difficult. Still-in-college marketers are hungry for experience and social media is time consuming. Bringing an intern or two on board can help you ramp up your production without costing a ton of money.

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