5 Good Reads to Help Improve Your Social Media Strategy in 2014

Despite the holiday rush, it’s important for businesses to take stock of their social media efforts in 2013 and look ahead to 2014. Here are five good reads that can help enhance your social strategy in the new year.

1. Developing a social media strategy can be hard, so why not let your competitors do all the work? That’s just what Social Media Examiner suggests your business does in order to wade successfully into the social media waters. Yes, outright stealing ideas is lame, but there’s nothing wrong with doing research into why your competitors’ strategies are working better than yours. This post also correctly points out that any research is useless if it doesn’t answer these fundamental questions:

  • Should your business be on social media?
  • What networks should you choose?
  • How do you create a great profile?
  • What type of content should you post, and when should you post it?

2. Does your store use automated social media responses? Stop it. Just stop it. Not responding to social consumers in a genuine and human way destroys any claims your business makes in having superior customer service. You should be treating every social media follower like he or she just walked into your brick-and-mortar store. But don’t take my word for it. Learn from the examples posted by iMedia Connection on big businesses failing to grasp the importance of engaging customers on social media.  

3. It might not be a surprise for those in the jewelry business to learn that a recent study named Instagram the best platform for brands. SumAll, a business analytics tool, tracked more than 100,000 businesses on social networks and analyzed more than 290 billion social actions per year to determine Instagram the winner. According to the study, Instagram resulted in the most new followers in 2013 along with significant revenue. Brands on Instagram saw an average of 7 percent growth in both followers and engagement. U.S. brands also saw a 1.5 percent to 5 percent revenue lift from Instagram. If you haven’t added your sparkle to the social media site, now might be a good time to start.

4. Instagram has had a great 2013, but will it be the top social media dog in 2014? According to InformationWeek, the top five social media trends for 2014 will be businesses learning how to better monetize social media, the growing importance of user-generated content, Google+ gaining momentum, and Facebook finally being “regarded as the powerful digital platform that it is.”

5. And finally, an infographic chock-full of data from the past year across social media channels. Two numbers that jump out for me are: 74 percent of marketers think Facebook is important for their lead generation strategy and 60 percent of Twitter users access it from a mobile device. Also enlightening, “garlic cheesy bread” is the most repinned Pinterest pin.

social media 2013
by Digital Insights

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