Best Social Media Tools for Early-Stage Startups

Running a startup is easy,” said no entrepreneur ever.

Got a great product and a potential unicorn? Perfect, but is everyone around chatting about it? Unless they are, having a great product isn’t all that helpful for bringing those dollars in.

Generating relevant traffic and leads are the top marketing challenges for a business,” says a report by Hubspot, Litmus, and Wistia.

To keep your pipeline populated, you need to spark some chatter around your product or service. Your perfect weapon to get the buzz on? Social media.

Social media is mission-critical for your early-stage startup, so you need to get laser-sharp clarity on your overall marketing strategy. Working on social media without documenting your marketing plan is walking with a blindfold on. If you need some capital to invest in your new business, consider this easy option giving loans for bad credit records.

So, start by creating a marketing playbook. A playbook is a marketing asset that anyone from your team can just pick up and start using. If you don’t know where to start with your marketing playbook, there are plenty of resources online like this Playbook for SaaS Marketing or The Startup Growth playbook.

Once you’ve created your marketing playbook, you’re ready to accelerate your brand on social media. And this is where social media tools can help you.

5 Best Social Media Tools for Early-Stage Startups

When you start getting your hands dirty with social media, you realize that you need to spend more than just a few minutes every day to get the job done.

Give startup marketers 36 hours in a day, and they still won’t have a minute to spare. A full plate warrants not only streamlining the processes, but also using tools that can get things done faster.

That’s exactly what you’ll have equipped yourself with by the time you finish reading this article.

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5 Reasons to Switch from Boosted Posts to Dark Posts on Facebook

One of the best reasons to be involved with social media marketing is that there’s always something new to learn and explore. Of course, many of our readers will be familiar with the concept of dark posts, whether that’s on Facebook or an alternative platform. But, for those who aren’t, especially those who are still using boosted posts, there’s an opportunity for even better results.

What’s a Facebook Dark Post?

There are certain similarities between boosted posts and their dark counterparts. Both represent paid advertising on the platform to position posts in the feeds of your target audience. However, the critical difference is that dark posts exist as ads and nothing else. They don’t appear on your regular feed, and they don’t go out to people that follow you already – unless they fall into the specified target audience.

Conversely, regular boosted posts involve taking something you’ve already posted to Facebook and paying for further reach. If you’ve experimented with boosted posts already, alongside conventional Facebook advertising, you’ll know that there are nowhere near as many options with the former as the latter. Dark posts represent something of a middle ground, whereby your paid posts benefit from all the flexibility of ads while still appearing in the main feed.

1. They’re Perfect for Targeting Without Disturbing Your Full Audience

You’ve probably segmented your audience in dozens of ways already. Dark posts enable you to communicate directly with those segments without compromising everyone else. Boosted posts require a more general tone regardless of who you target, as anyone that visits your page will be able to see them. With dark posts, you can target people of certain ages, in specific job roles, or even an exact location. You can use a VPN to emulate their location, too, to see firsthand how your post appears and what other local promotions appear nearby.

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4 Reasons to Use a VPN as a Social Media Manager

Social media has become a vital component of business plans for companies of all sizes. No longer is managing feeds and engaging with customers something added to the intern’s never-ending to-do list. Instead, larger companies have entire teams dedicated to keeping their followers up-to-date, and there’s absolutely no shortage of specialist freelancers to get the word out about you and your products.

Most of these dedicated social media workers know what they’re doing. However, a surprising number of them overlook one crucial tool that can help them reach their goals. It’s none other than a VPN. If you’re not sure, what is a VPN connection, it’s referred to as a software tool that hides your true internet connection behind a secure firewall. More commonly associated with accessing geo-filtered content and general data privacy, it can prove pivotal in taking your social media strategy to the next level. Here’s how:

1. Access Any Content from Anywhere

Any business that regularly posts on social media can struggle to come up with new ideas. Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with sharing or repurposing content from others. Pictures, articles, and videos all fit the bill, but you don’t want to be subject to arbitrary restrictions when finding things that would be great for your social feeds.

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Reputation Management vs. Search Engine Optimization: What’s the Difference?

These days, it seems like you can’t get by without a solid digital marketing strategy. According to data collected by SEO Tribunal, in 1998, Google served only 10,000 queries per day. That number skyrocketed to 3.3 billion daily searches in 2012, and as of 2016, stands at over 5.4 billion daily searches.

These staggering figures serve to prove that consumers are looking overwhelmingly to search engines to find the answers to informational and transactional questions. The intent behind these queries is incredibly valuable, as they provide instantaneous insight into buyer intent, or where searchers fall in the sales funnel—an intangible concept that has traditionally been the bane of a marketer’s existence. The amount of money on the table has led companies from the largest enterprise organizations to challenge e-commerce brands to funnel large portions of their marketing budget into optimizing their site content to rank better in search engine results pages for specific queries (SERPs).

At a minimum, 75% of clicks go to content on the first page of Google results, according to a study on Google organic click-through rates. What’s more, the majority of that percentage goes to the higher-ranked content, and decreasing exponentially the further you scroll (33% of traffic to the first result, 15% to the second, and just 9% to the third result, respectively).

As an e-commerce business, your survival depends on visibility in organic search. You can’t afford to rank poorly for product-specific and branded keywords because the combined search volume behind those queries is what drives sustained organic traffic to your site.

But what if I told you that there was more to organic search than optimizing on-page content or building backlinks? Customers are also searching for your brand name in any combination of ways, and what they find can greatly influence purchase decisions. Buyer perception matters, which is why eCommerce brands need to pay attention to their branded search results.

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How to Effectively Optimize Your Facebook Business Page for Sales?

“Facebook business page optimization… What does that even mean? I just fill out the details and I should be good to go, right?”

A lot of online business owners think about Facebook optimization. Indeed, it can seem that simply creating a page there – just like you do with your personal account – is enough for a decent web presence, but it’s really not. Certainly not in early 2020.

Today, your business needs to optimize their presence on every online platform, be it a social media website or a business directory. Facebook has a special place here because of the wide popularity of the platform (your target customers are certainly using it).

In this article, you’re going to learn how to optimize your Facebook business page for more sales by going beyond just “filling out the details.”

#1. Get Facebook Page Name Right

“So how you can this wrong? Just type your business’s name and you’re done.”

Again, that’s how many business owners think about this. Just “typing the name of your business” is not optimization!

Let me explain.

Let’s suppose that your name is Samantha Brown and you’re a real estate agent working in Los Angeles (fancy!). At your Facebook business page, you just “typed your name,” so its title doesn’t really differ from your personal page.

That might be a good idea if at least everyone in the tri-state area knows you by name so they don’t really need a lot of time to find you (they just look for your name on Google).

But what if you’re not a well-known business?

In this case, limiting your Facebook Business page’s name to your name is a really bad idea because people generally don’t search for names when looking for realtors.

They look for realtors.

This means they use keywords like “a real estate agent in Los Angeles” to find a person that can help them with finding real estate in that city.

Long story short, your Facebook business page name should also contain keywords that describe your business and are used by your target customers to find you online regardless of the search engine.

Here’s an example. Cindy Ambuehl, a real estate agent from Los Angeles, has the keyword “realtor” in the name as well as the hashtag needed to find her on Facebook or Messenger.

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How to Attract More Customers with Instagram Local Business Profiles

Over the last few years, consumer behavior has changed. For local businesses, having a good restaurant, a cafe or a comic book shop isn’t enough to attract more customers. It’s important to spread the word about your business online as a business’s online reputation impacts customer purchase decisions.  

One BrightLocal report says that 90% of customers use the internet to find a local business,

82% read online reviews for local businesses, and the average consumer spends around 14 minutes reading reviews before making a decision.

Instagram Local Business

Today, over one billion people are active on Instagram every single month and 90% of them follow at least one business on the platform, so it’s more likely your local customers use Instagram, too. Thus, it’s no wonder that Instagram is testing the local business profile feature to help local businesses attract their customers in-app. And if you want to make the most out of Instagram, let’s find out what is an Instagram business profile and how to use it for local marketing.

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The Pinterest Pyramids: Automated Social Media Marketing at Its Worst

Social media platforms are perhaps the most important marketing arena for any business in the modern world. These platforms allow you to micro-target your marketing and send razor-sharp messages that cut through all the other noise. Unfortunately, some so-called black hat social media marketing techniques, such as running fake Pinterest accounts with fake IP addresses, are starting to ruin the internet. Let’s take a look at how these black hat techniques are exploiting social media as well as affecting search engines.

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8 Interactive Content Ideas to Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing

Content marketing is arguably an empowering medium to target and engages the right audience.

Though content marketing has been impactful, marketers still grapple to find the suitable content to strike the right chord among their prospects and target audience. Simply churning out volumes of the content does not serve the purpose of attracting the right customers. The success of a content marketing strategy lies in identifying the exact needs of the audience and delivering content to them through the right medium.

Due to the high volume of content availability, some pieces may get lost and never see the light of day. So what kind of content can help attract the maximum number of prospects?

Interactive content takes charge of this aspect and ensures to provide marketers with supercharged results.

Undoubtedly, interactive content is a driving force for marketing strategies. So let us delve into its intricacies and know how it can help businesses boost their conversion rates.

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Sentiment At Any Price – The Best Sentiment Analysis Tools For Your Budget

In today’s marketing world, the words on everyone’s lips are ‘sentiment analysis.’  As businesses strive to get ahead of the competition by earwigging on their customers – and potential customers – sentiment analysis is rapidly rising up the ranks to become the most important tool in a marketer’s arsenal.  It’s no wonder then that there are so many different tools out there as software companies race to get on board with this hot new trend.  Sieving through all of these tools can be time-consuming and frustrating when, having chosen the right one, you discover that it’s outside of your budget.  Here are eight best sentiment analysis tools by range to allow you to choose the right tool.

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Dear Brands, It’s Not You, It’s Your Story

Consumers of today’s age are more empowered than ever before.  They have tons of questions and zero tolerance for generic push marketing. In a nutshell, they absolutely hate being sold to. 

Enter: Storyteller marketing, an unconventional marketing strategy that weaves gripping narratives to help your audience think –

As Joe Lazauskas, an expert storyteller says, “Good stories surprise us. They make us think and feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that a PowerPoint crammed with bar graphs never can.” 

Now, while storytelling works, successfully implementing it in your marketing is no easy feat. In fact, successfully storytelling demands creativity, genuine vision, and an a-level consistency to connect with difficult consumers of 2019.

You cannot just improvise a boring story and use it as a sales pitch to attract customers. An impactful story must be emotionally engaging and focused on customers.

So in this article, I’ll answer all the questions you’ve ever had regarding storyteller marketing and further share strategies to implement.

So let’s dive in.

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