YOUR Social Media Leadership Presence?

5 Ways leaders can create a productive presence on social media..

Far too many business leaders have the mistaken idea that social media isn’t worth their time. In fact, roughly 60 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no personal accounts on any of six major social networks. And no presence means no engagement, which is a huge missed opportunity for leaders and their businesses.

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Social media isn’t just a time suck. With the right strategy, it’s a valuable tool that can build brands and cultivate credibility. And if you’re using content marketing in any way, social media is a must.

Leaders who are active on social media can broaden the reach of their company’s message and play a critical role in content distribution. A social media presence is also a two-way street, and it can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your industry while connecting with brand advocates and critics alike and humanizing your brand.

A productive social media account isn’t an accident — it takes a little bit of intuition and a lot of intention to use social media to its full potential. Take advantage of free social media tools and start with these five steps, and you’ll be well on your way.

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1. Stick To A Schedule

One of the biggest reasons business leaders avoid social media is the difficulty in pinpointing a starting place. While there are tons of platforms out there, chances are that only a few make sense for your brand. For instance, if you’re a leader of a B2B company, then you might prioritize looking into LinkedIn over Instagram.

Once you’ve decided on the right platform (or two), work with your marketing team to create a posting schedule and stick to it. Start with a goal that’s easy to accomplish, such as one or two posts each week.

A tool like Buffer or Hootsuite can help you plan out your posts in advance to ensure you don’t forget to post when you inevitably get busy in the future.

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2. Cultivate A Conversation

So many people view social as just another channel for pushing out their message, but I’d challenge you to change your mindset. Much of social media’s potential comes from the ability to start a conversation with followers, including brand advocates and even critics.

Instead of looking at it as some sort of online billboard, look at social media as a tool for building meaningful relationships.

If you’ve ever met another human being, you’ll know that forming a connection requires listening to people and responding authentically to their questions and comments. With social media, you can do this on an incredible scale.

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3. Create Your Own Content

If you’re somewhat new to social media, then you’re probably more comfortable sharing other people’s content than creating and sharing your own. It’s an easy trap to fall into. It can be difficult to put yourself out there, but tapping into your voice and creating your own content to share can help you garner more engagement and make your efforts more valuable.

Try to publish original content at least once a month, and you’ll find you get better at recognizing a good post. Maybe a conversation with an employee or prospect will trigger an idea for a piece of content. Maybe during an evening in with family, your kid will say something that makes you feel proud and inspires an idea for a more personal post. Good content will begin to come more naturally over time, and creating and posting that content might even become something you look forward to.

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4. Learn To Love LinkedIn

As a business leader, you’re probably already on LinkedIn, so it should be pretty easy to start maximizing it. Publish your own original writing on its publishing platform and share content you find interesting or informative. You can also participate in groups and conversations with experts and influencers in other fields and learn skills that are highly relevant when it comes to building your business.

LinkedIn features powerful tools such as the Sales Navigator and LinkedIn for Small Business, but I’d encourage you to learn to walk before you run. Start by getting used to connecting with potential contacts and maintaining an active presence in the community. Only then should you start utilizing paid tools.

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5. Optimize And Adjust

Social media is an excellent way to build your brand and your business, but like any marketing effort, you need to pursue specific goals so you can define metrics that indicate success. Fortunately, digital marketing can offer transparent measurements of ROI.

Dive into the data and determine what behaviors are the most valuable to you. If you’re looking to generate awareness about your brand, you might be after social shares. Likes and clicks are sometimes labeled as vanity metrics, but they can help you measure engagement, and you can actually determine what those clicks are worth if your analytics are set up properly.

Guest Authored By John Hall. John is the CEO of Influence & Co., a keynote speaker, and the author of "Top of Mind." You can book John to speak here. Follow John on Twitter.

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"Compared to the countless calls and meetings that can clutter your calendar and consume your attention, social media might not seem like a priority. But the truth is, you as a leader need to play a role in your social media presence — for the sake of your brand and your business. Hopefully, these five steps give you a place to start.." -JohnHall

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

2018 Future Social Media Trends?

When it comes to reaching audiences, effectively distributing your content, and building a following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities.

It's where your audiences already live and engage with content, which makes it a convenient platform for brands. Its built-in analytics allow you to track and improve your efforts over time. Plus, all the free social-media tools make it easy to use and maintain an active presence.

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As you look ahead to 2018 and begin planning for ways to strengthen your social strategy, it's important to keep a pulse on trends. To help, here are six social-media trends you need to prepare for if you want to hit the ground running in 2018:

1. More robust social analytics signal more opportunity for content personalization.

Nobody likes content that's irrelevant to one's needs. This is especially true when you're interacting with a brand you know and love -- the last thing you want is a piece of generic content that doesn't offer anything unique to you as a member of that audience. In fact, nearly three out of four of us get frustrated when content isn't relevant to our interests.

Improved personalization for audiences is a major trend in content marketing, and it extends to social media, too. As social platforms evolve, their analytics tools and business-specific features will become more detailed and valuable to brands.

This kind of data means marketers will have the insights to craft better and more personalized content for their audiences. It's past time for marketers to be creating and distributing content that truly speaks to and engages audiences on a personal level; social media will help make that easier.

Related Article: Powerful Social Media Success Metrics?

2. Platform feature overlap means you'll have to be more selective.

Both Snapchat and Instagram feature timed videos and visual content, so the main points of differentiation are audience and reach.

Instagram Stories has a significantly wider reach and receives more engagement; Instagram influencers see up to 10 percent of their audience members open their Instagram Stories on a daily basis, which is more than can be said for Snapchat.

On the other hand, Snapchat continues to dominate among members of younger demographics.

As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be increasingly selective about which ones they invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return, and start there.

Related Article: The Exponential Growth of Social Media?

3. Social listening will give brands an edge to their messaging online.

Instead of just tracking what kind of content your competitors are developing or what they're sharing on social media, you should also monitor their mentions and what people are saying -- and use it as a metric to compare your performance.

"Using web monitoring, we can collect an enormous amount of data on our company and our competitors that can be used in our marketing strategy. At Brand24, our research showed that in one month, 14,000 online searches started with 'Can anyone recommend?' and about 30,000 searches started with 'Where can I buy?' About 60 percent of these questions never received responses from companies; this is a huge opportunity," says Magdalena Urbaniak, global communications manager at Brand24.

Urbaniak says monitoring these social mentions can show you what people in your shared audience like and don't like, which can give you insight into where your brand can improve. Social listening can give you valuable information about your competitors' performance and your own audience that you can use to your advantage in your content strategy.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

4. Video will only take a stronger place in content strategy.

Everyone and his mother knows that video content is popular and, therefore, important for brands. And as social algorithms keep updating, video will only grow more valuable for generating engagement and building your following.

In fact, in our experience at Influence & Co., videos on Facebook receive higher engagement; we see more people commenting on them, and they get more likes and more shares. Facebook's reporting features let us know how video content performs compared to our other posts, and you can't deny how good video is at engaging audiences.

Instagram's Stories feature and Snapchat's entire platform also give brands the chance to create video content and share it immediately with their followers. Obviously, video is only becoming more important. Having the ability to create that kind of content -- and the strategy to tie it to your written content for your blog and outside publications -- will be critical for brands in 2018.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Video Marketing?

5. Facebook is becoming almost entirely mobile.

By 2020, it's predicted that 59 percent of U.S. users will access Facebook through mobile exclusively, and 80 percent of the company's ad revenue already comes from mobile ads.

Facebook was one of the last social media platforms that wasn't really designed from the beginning to be on mobile.

Looking at popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat, we've seen the trend of mobile-only (or mostly mobile) social apps for a while.

Sure, mobile optimization has been an industry best practice for savvy marketers for a while, but with Facebook not far from being dominated by mobile use, brands will (finally) have no excuse for creating or distributing content that's not optimized for mobile.

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6. Chatbots will make customer service faster and easier.

Instant connection and widespread internet access have conditioned us to want things yesterday or, when that's not possible, in the next five minutes. Unfortunately, I've seen this prompt a lot of brands to do one of two things: respond so quickly that mistakes are made and service quality suffers, or freeze in their tracks because they're not quite sure how to meet this demand for speed.

That's part of what makes chatbots -- especially through Facebook Messenger -- so valuable. Chatbots give you the chance to interact quickly with your audience in a way that feels personal; you can customize your brand voice and send personalized content directly to users. Maybe that's why there are at least 100,000 monthly active bots on Facebook Messenger -- and the reason two billion messages are exchanged between brands and their audiences each month. If you aren't already, 2018 might be the year to test chatbots for your business.

Guest Authored By John Hall. John is CEO and Founder of Influence & Co, Author of Top of Mind, and Expert Speaker. He's a columnist for Forbes and Inc. Follow John on Twitter.

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“Social media presents so many opportunities for marketers to connect with audiences, create and distribute better content, and build their brands (and their following).

To take advantage of all that opportunity, you've got to understand that these shifts happen frequently, so staying ahead of the trends is imperative.

We're only four months away from 2018, so what are you planning for??" -John Hall

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)