How Hashtags Help Your Marketing Strategy Noticeable

Everyone in the social media world has probably bumped into the concept of hashtags. For content marketers, it enables them to track the possible trending topics of which they can study and analyze for their own good, or to boost their marketing strategies and apply them into their own businesses. It has basically become a general rule, especially on social media marketing, to have a guaranteed SEO experience, on their end.

There have been a lot of world wide trending topics that have been surprisingly noticed. And just like that of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that has been vastly spreading around across the online world, using hashtags has been one major culprit.

Hashtags are…

These are labels for contents. They are a way to track down topics on Twitter and other social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and so on. By sharing content with their messages and posts having the ‘#’ symbol, these can be quickly found by people, and perhaps makes the topic more known by accumulating the topics into one. Words such as #marketing and #OOTD are just one of the many other famous words or tags that can be seen online.

Each hashtag is clickable and redirects users to a page that displays all the messages and images that use the same hashtag. By using hashtags, it enables people to wade through the fire hose of social media posts and interact only with the content they find relevant.

Market your topics

There are various ways in using the hashtag to help you increase the growth of your marketing efforts such that your brand and your products and services are noticed.

The following are some ways hashtags can help you:

Include a specific and relevant hashtag

By this, it would mean using a relevant hashtag already designated for a certain event, or using a hashtag already being searched for frequently. With the right hashtag, readers will find your message even when they’re not following you. To test, you can search those hashtags from your social media platforms used or you can use an analytics tool.

Create Your Own Hashtag and Consistently Use It

This would mean creating a very unique hashtag. Anyone can start a hashtag hoping that it goes viral, however for the most part, creating your own hashtag for your business name or brand or product, would mean requiring you to consistently effort in order to get picked up by other users. This would also mean that these hashtags could track all the relevant images, posts and statuses pertaining to your product or brand from your consumers end.

Use Your Hashtag on as Many Social Media Networks as Possible

To make everything count, as much as possible, try using your hashtags from different social media platforms. This would not only mean expanding your horizon for such social media strategies, it would also mean that you are targeting different types of audience that may benefit from your products. Thus the need to display those hashtags in a lot of social media networks is very much effective. Not only that, it will also give exposure to your hashtag even more and will eventually help people remember your hashtag whenever they want to tag you.

However, there are also rules on how not to overdo the usage of hashtags. In fact, sometimes, it gets pretty much annoying seeing posts of everything under the hash (#) symbol. It is no more appropriate to make every word ‘hashtagged’—so to speak.

Always remember that hashtags belongs to the community, even if you created it yourself. You can’t censor or control how others use it so it is also important to be careful and be sensitive.

Reasons Why Marketers Should Make Use of Facebook's Ad Scheduling

With the social media as one tool to promote products, services and items online, ways on advertising have been emerging to make the experience more efficient and productive. Aside from Facebook application development in the Philippines, among others, there are many other features in which Facebook can be of good use. In the recently introduced scheduling feature, Facebook allows users to run ads according to their chosen time of the day, which makes the experience worthwhile.

In this entry, we will get to know more of the useful things about Facebook’s ad scheduling and how to make use of it.

What is Ad Scheduling?

Ad scheduling is basically allotting a time for your ads to be promoted, in this case, through a social media called Facebook. Scheduling advertisements are more often used by marketers who want to keep their campaigns running without manually doing them every time.

Facebook Ad Scheduling: how can this help?

With the new Facebook Ad Scheduling feature, users can:

Specify the days and times where and when you want your ad to be served. 

Basically this makes the work done easily because once you have specified the days and times you want your ads to be serve and have them on schedule, it automatically does its job, just like setting up your alarm clock—as easy as that.

Combine the run times with independent budgets and audiences.

Especially for businesses with tight budgets, this scheduling feature on Facebook can be used according to your marketing plan. Of course by mentioning budget, it would also mean having the potential audience that you are targeting on a serious consideration. You would not want to spend money on not well thought of strategies, right?

See how your ads perform at different times of day.

By scheduling your ads, it becomes a learning experience for you to know how well your advertisements perform through different times of a day. By this, it would mean knowing a more appropriate marketing strategy for the next following ads that you are planning to do for your brand.

You might be wondering why you have not heard about this feature on Facebook, because it is quite new. However, this scheduling method isn’t new. In fact, Google ads have been offering this feature for a few years now. They refer to it as dayparting—the practice of dividing the day to show your ad campaign within specific blocks of time.

On Facebook, you can use it through Power Editor. Ad scheduling is configured at the Ad Sets level. This allows you to combine times with budgets and audiences.

Scheduling Your Ads

A thing to consider is that your ads must serve in relation to your audience’s time zone and not on your local time. Carefully plan out different time zones that would fit best to your promotional strategy.

There are three options to set up your times:

First is simply selecting the full days by clicking on the All Day column. 

Second is clicking and dragging through the grid cells to select specific blocks of time.

Third is selecting the same blocks of time for every day of the week by clicking and dragging the Every Day row at the bottom of the chart. 

Is Ad Scheduling Right for You?

There are different scenarios where you can say if this feature works for you and your business (or not).

For businesses, some circumstances are:

• When an ad click from your user requires a responding action in real time for you.
• When you need to promote an event or show a couple of hours before, but not after.
• When a B2B company needs to target their audience only during business hours.

There are also times when you are targeting your fan base by basing your campaigns on the times when your fans are online. You can see the chart on your page Insights.

However, this kind of metric has no indication that your fans who are online at other times won’t engage on your ad, then scheduling ads to coordinate solely with when your fans online might be a mistake. By knowing this, you guess. You test, gather data and analyze the results to make an educated decision.

By targeting delivery of your ads with greater precision, Facebook’s Ad Scheduling will not only allow you to set start and end dates for your ads, you can also choose specific hours of delivery for each day.

Nevertheless, use this feature with care and consideration. It may be a ‘game changer’ for your business, but it might play against you if you don’t use it accordingly.

Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-ad-scheduling/

Taking a Break at Social Media

There comes a point in a person’s life where being active in social media becomes too boring and sappy because of the many unnecessary things that are seen on the newsfeed. For more obvious reasons, the social media has also been a hub for bullying and fake accounts lurking around the Internet. A digital marketing agency in the Philippines, among others, gives out a few reasons why taking a break from social media is needed. At the same time, it also suggests on a few things on how taking a break from social media could also help you more from getting a smooth come back. Taking a break does not always mean leaving. After all, everyone needs a vacation, right?

Troubled if taking a break from the social media is a good idea?

As social media marketers, there is a fine line between taking a break and quitting. And obviously, those are two different stories. According to Buffer’s Kevan Lee, seeking for a vacation from too much media presence won’t hurt. In fact, being a social media marketer needs one. And some of the reasons are the following:

• Posting consistently to social media for six months straight.
• Being a little turned off by some of Facebook’s experiments or Twitter’s redesigns.
• Being on the mood to reevaluate.
• Or just simply taking your mind off things.

And these are real deals. One might be thinking twice of taking a leave off social media because it might affect your site’s performance, but this isn’t always the case. Remember, taking a vacation isn’t always equal to leaving…for good.

Going back, there are still far more reasons why taking a social media vacation is a need, whether you are an individual, or a company who wants to minimize its online media presence for quite some time.

Too much information

Maybe one has been able to notice the fact that you have been posting too much information on your feed in a span of an hour. Which can actually trigger a more disturbing scene because it might get annoying. Unless you minimize posting stuff online, doing so might be helpful for you and your readers. Why? Because you can also allocate time for researching more information for the next content to post, at the same, have your readers wait and want for more.

Lack of time

This means forgetting that you have still other things to do. For some individuals who are too attached to social media like Facebook, one example is spending hours stalking and clicking on unknown people on Facebook just because they have interesting photos or posts on their profiles, rather than going out with friends or spending more time talking to more relevant people. This also goes out to social media marketers, who need a breather and talk with people who have the same passion as them—as social media marketing is concerned.

Privacy and safety concerns

This is one authentic reason why people decide to take a break from their social media activities. It often becomes detrimental and stressful at some point, and affects one’s psychological state and puts it at stake. Somehow, privacy is really an issue when it comes to social media presence albeit the ‘privacy settings’ you can set on your accounts.

Lack of enjoyment

It sometimes gets boring seeing everyone’s statuses, on the same routine, not mentioning the rants of people. I mean, who would enjoy other people’s rants? It even makes a bad day even worse and it does not help reading those on your feed, either. So go, take a break, clear your head and perhaps, enjoy a good book instead and write a good review about it and post it on your social media when you are ready to go back.

Too addictive

This is one legit reason why taking a break from social media is needed. It’s just too addictive and it consumes a lot of time. It’s too explainable and everyone knows what addiction means. You do, right?

Well, it just happened that there is a probable lean approach to social media. And if you do decide to that taking time away from it is in your best interest, then there are lots of options for you.

• Do nothing. Simply stop sharing, following, favoriting. Step away from the computer.
• Deactivate your account. Your can reactivate later anyway.
• Fill up the queue of your social media scheduling app. Facebook’s got one though making it as if you were still around.
• Or perhaps, delete your account. You have to start from scratch though if you wanted to go back.

Question: Is a social media break right for you?

Hoping that you have now got a little grasp on why a social media break might be a good take off and how to go about it in the right way. If it’s on your mind, maybe you can run through the ideas suggested and decide whether or not getting a social media vacation can be of good use to you. Social media has tons of advantages and uses when applied in the right way—and the right way so very often comes down to what feels right to you.