Do you want to maximise engagement on your social media posts? Looking for the ideal times to post to each network?

Craig Ryomoto at Hootsuite highlights the findings from a recent study of over 400 million social media posts.

The following are four areas of social media marketing that you should invest in today.

1. Social media care  

2. Content curation

3. Influencer marketing

4. Social media PR

Master these eight core disciplines to execute a successful and profitable social media strategy for your brand.

"Remember: Your content marketing strategy should define your social media marketing strategy — not the other way around. It’s best to evaluate each social channel before you start distributing content there. And when you turn this evaluation into an actionable plan, everybody on your team will know where, when, and what they should be posting on each channel, as well as what their efforts are meant to achieve.

Here’s how to create and implement a basic social media marketing plan that will help you do just that."

Business-to-business (B2B) companies need to research and understand buyer behavior on social media before executing a social content marketing plan, which can be done through social insights, a recent report suggest.

Startup advisor Jill Rowley explained in the report that mining social networks for signals is the backbone of understanding buyers. “Do the research to be relevant to your buyer and the entire buying committee. B2Bs should use social networks to find buyers,” she said. “Insights allow you to listen to your buyers so you can relate, connect and engage them.”

For marketers, this is a big shift in behavior, since social media is often thought of as a downstream method to share content with customers. However, using it with an upstream approach for persona analysis is valuable.

2017 Social Media Marketing Statistics You Can't Miss! by Douglas Karr on MarTech

1. Conduct a proper keyword research
2. Use keywords throughout your social media marketing strategy
3. Publish great content, get content suggestions using Social Pilot
4. Set up analytics for tracking
5. Use URL shorteners
6. Make your content easy to be shared and linked
7. Canonicalize
8. Page load time
9. Title & Meta Description
10. Measure and improve

Focusing on two separate marketing tools can be difficult, but email marketing and social media go hand in hand. Additionally, both social and email are affordable marketing strategies that produce high engagement and conversion rates.

Marketers should spend time developing strategies that play off both email and social to reap the combined benefits. Marketers can do this by cross-promoting key messages and top-performing content across all channels, social and email, to increase followers, subscribers and grow your brand.

Marketers need to balance the focus between email marketing and social media and use both marketing tools to complement, not compete with, each other. When that balance is achieved, you can maximize the effectiveness of your entire marketing program.

With a new component called “BumbleBIZZ” (set for release in early fall) Bumble is aiming to make a transition from a Tinder-like dating app to a more all-encompassing social-networking platform.

This new feature matches individuals to others in similar professional circles. Like with Bumble’s dating feature, women must message first — and within 24 hours of being matched. CEO Whitney Wolfe says that this makes it “easier for women to set the tone in a potential business relationship.” Unlike Bumble’s business networking competitor, LinkedIn, where conversations and connections are more formal and professional, BumbleBIZZ hopes to engage potential cohorts in a more casual and immediate manner.

With merely a swipe, individuals who have the potential to influence and advance careers can be within reach. Whether the user is looking for help, an intern or a new coworker, BumbleBIZZ can connect them to others in the field. The algorithm behind this program takes into account the location, “industry, current job, education, and other relevant details” to match profiles of similar interests or professions to benefit both parties.

#1: Social Profile Integration Plugins

#2: Social Sharing and Follow Plugins

#3: Administrative Plugins

#4: Comment and Discussion Plugins

#5: Bonus Plugins

Social media marketing is a language all of its own. You wouldn’t expect to ace your advanced Spanish class without taking a beginner’s course, so you can’t be too hard on yourself for not gaining thousands of followers or meeting other business goals if you haven’t built a foundation of knowledge. We’ve created the following guide as a first step for any new social media marketers, and to help seasoned pros get back to basics.