If you want to make a living off your personal brand, you must cultivate digital authority. Naturally, you need to own the blogging and social sphere, as this is where most influencers live. You must have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. You should also have a home for all your unique content (cough, cough: blog.) Failure to master these platforms will stunt your digital growth.

In addition, the following social media boo boos will have you taking one step forward, three steps back. What’s the point of having a personal brand if you’re not making the most of every opportunity to engage? Run through this six point checklist, and make sure your efforts coincide.

1. Your ‘about me’ is comatose.

Keep it short and sweet. Be interesting, but don’t tell your life story. Remember, the thesaurus is your friend. Spice up your bio with unexpected verbiage or a tongue in cheek anecdote. For example, instead of calling yourself a “marketing specialist,” give “marketing groupie” a try. You want your brand to stand out. If your about me is blah, you’ll easily get lost in the mix. The words “specialist, guru, and consultant” are boring and overused.

2. Your profile photo is unrecognizable.

Stop trying to be someone you’re not. Here’s a great rule to follow when snapping a new profile pic. Would your friends and family immediately recognize that as you? If your mother was scrolling through Facebook, and saw that photo, would she instantly be like “There’s my son/daughter!” If your own mother thinks the photo is unrecognizable, everyone will.

Even on LinkedIn, your profile photo shouldn’t look stuffy. (Unless, for some reason, stuffy is your brand. In that case, rock the serious face.) Smile. Showcase your most natural self. Bottom line: make sure your mom knows it’s you. Don’t confuse your brand by using heavily filtered/altered pics.

3. You’ve got friends in low places.

If you went to my Facebook profile, and saw I was friends with one of America’s Most Wanted, you’d judge me. Don’t say you wouldn’t. In fact you might not want to do business with me — or even be my friend. Most people would avoid someone with an association like that. And, if they’re not  … might want to reconsider that friendship. On the other hand, if you’re aligning with key influencers, you’ll be considered an expert by association. Obviously it takes more than one social shout out, but if you constantly get retweeted by Seth Godin, you’re on the right track. More often than not, associate with digital thought leaders who will heighten your brand reputation.

4. You don’t know where your fans are.

Are you spending all your time on Twitter when Facebook boasts better engagement? Think carefully about how you divvy up your hours. Let’s be honest. You can’t equally commit 8 hours a day to each social platform. In fact, two might be pushing it. For this reason alone, know your audience. Where do they “live,” in a digital sense? In addition, find out what platform gives the best return. If thousands of your followers migrate to Instagram, but there’s no real way to quantify referral traffic or income from this source, look for an alternative. I recommend maintaining a primary social presence on one of the top platforms; and then maintaining 1-2 other sources.

5. You regurgitate content.

Do you always share blog posts that aren’t your own? Are you re-gramming like a fiend? Although it’s always good to spread the love, you still need to create your own unique content. The digital world needs your voice. Contribute original content on a weekly basis; at the very least. Keep your content marketing efforts fresh. On top of that, use social media to build a marketing web of communication. Promote your email marketing list on Twitter. Run a Facebook ad to grow your text marketing list. If all your channels are working together in one uniformed fashion, your efforts to grow your digital community will offer an exponential return.

6. You don’t follow 2-3 consistent brand themes.

If people know you as a personal trainer, but you regularly post about politics … might not be the best course of action. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but if you want to build a strong brand, you need to pick content themes. No one person can be an expert on 300 different topics. Attempting this does nothing for building authority. Do some soul searching. Ask yourself, “Where can I offer the most insight?” Pick 2-3 topics that showcase your talent and experience. Generally speaking, make sure these topics align or connect in some way. For example, I might pick branding, content marketing, and entrepreneurship as my three. Each one relates to the other. Don’t be too random. For example, if you’re trying to brand yourself as a cake decorating, oil changing, opera singing expert … you might have a hard time pulling off that trifecta.

Now here’s a question. Why social media? How do these digital platforms boost your personal brand?

• You can engage in real time. Bonus: Some channels now allow you to go live with your content. This is yet another reason to use social media for brand building.
• It’s like a “you” museum. Fans can get to know you at their own leisure.
• The analytics are advanced. With Facebook specifically, you can see where your top followers live, how old they are, and what content they enjoy engaging with.
• You can add and remove content as you please. Feel like an old post doesn’t represent you or your brand anymore? Go ahead and hit “delete.”

Remember, owning the internet doesn’t have to be difficult. But, if you’re not giving social communities a solid effort, you won’t ever build an engaged and loyal following. You’ll experience low brand interest. People won’t care about what you have to say, and your message most likely won’t be consistent. Your social community is counting on you for an above average effort; don’t let them down. Whip your social media prowess into shape by avoiding those six boo boos.

This article was originally written by Kristen Vanstrom for the Heyo blog.

It’s always fun to see how brands bring their campaigns to life in new and exciting ways. This week, we launched a few promotions with Bahama Breeze and Air Canada that do a great job of engaging their audiences with interesting user experiences.

Bahama Breeze: Rumtoberfest Instant Win Sweepstakes

To promote the restaurant’s month-long Rumtoberfest celebration, Bahama Breeze launched a fun and engaging Instant Win Sweepstakes to drive awareness. This promotion was built using Votigo’s Self-Serve Platform, and also features a custom CRM integration, which creates a seamless database management solution for the brand.

Bahama Breeze: Pirate Personality Quiz

To create an additional engagement opportunity for their audience and drive more awareness of the Rumtoberfest event, Bahama Breeze leveraged Votigo’s Personality Quiz App, also available on our Self-Serve Platform, to give their customers a fun and unique way to participate in the restaurant’s brand conversation.

Bahama Breeze: Rumtoberfest Photo Sweepstakes

To round out its social marketing efforts in support of the Rumtoberfest celebration, Bahama Breeze also launched a photo sweepstakes for a chance to win a week-long Caribbean cruise. This promotion was also built using Votigo’s Self-Serve Platform and features #Hashtag entry, mobile responsive design, content moderation and social sharing. The combination of all three promotional experiences should do a great job at driving awareness of and participation in Rumtoberfest!

Air Canada Trivia Sweepstakes 

Air Canada launched their ’14 Days to Win’ promotion  as a way to engage with and incentivize travel agents to book travel with the airline. The promotion was built by Votigo’s talented Full-Service Development Team and features multi-language display, custom trivia questions after registration, daily rotating prizes in the header, and dynamic message display based on the user’s answers.

Want to learn more about our products and services, or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

Did you know that every day, more than 2 million pieces of content are published on the Internet? From blog posts, articles, and reviews all the way to e-books, white papers, and special reports – content marketers are busting their chops to get noticed amongst the internet clutter.

This fact is surprising in and of itself, but what’s truly shocking is that most of those content marketers actually have no idea what they’re doing. Recent research done by Moz and Hubspot reveals that 75 % of randomly selected posts and articles found on the Internet have zero links and shares – they are completely off the grid.

Basically, they are totally irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. They’re usefulness in terms of SEO, establishing the company as a thought-leader in the industry, or exposure is seriously crippled.

The same study reveals that nearly 85 % of published content is redundant – rehash after rehash of the same old information that hasn’t been built on or added to in any significant way to make it more appealing to readers.

In order to avoid these pitfalls and start creating content that is shareable and that attracts links it is important to stick to some proven and tested methods of content creation.

Not surprisingly, originality doesn’t play a huge part here. It’s very difficult to come up with something completely new on a daily basis. However, content presentation, format, and style, and emotional triggers do play a large part in getting those shares you want so badly.

Following these 5 simple rules will ensure that your content gets picked up more readily on social media networks or anywhere else on the Internet and can be a ticket to your content going viral:

1. WHENEVER POSSIBLE, WRITE LISTS

Visual content gets easily devoured, especially when it’s good. However, sometimes it’s not possible to do an infographic, a video or a presentation and you just have to sit down and write something.

When that happens, try to find an angle that allows you to present your information in the form of a list. Lists are easy on the eyes; the content is broken up into chewable pieces that are more palatable and people know what to expect the moment they see the title.

Lists present information in a way that is easier for people to comprehend. If you can’t write up your article as a list at least try adding some bullet points whenever you have to write stringy sentences that might be difficult to comprehend or would require the readers go through them more than once – people simply don’t have the time to make the effort.

2. EVOKE EMOTIONS

Your content should aim at four specific emotions:

• Awe-inspiring
• Surprising
• Elating
• Amusing/positive

People tend not to share sad or outrageous content – most of us don’t want other people to experience the same negative emotion we did.

On the other hand, everyone likes to be amused or surprised, or inspired by something – that is why content that evokes those types of positive emotions gets picked up and shared more easily.

Bottom line: if a piece of content makes you feel something while you’re reading or watching it, there’s a good chance that other people will feel it too. Always try to spice things up a bit through good storytelling and emotional triggers.

3. KNOW YOUR READERS

A lot of times a piece of content falls flat on its face because content creators forget the audience they are writing for. People respond better to content that is in sync with who they are and what they want to accomplish. In most cases, people share content that confirms an image of themselves they want to project outwards.

People want to be seen as caring, fun, smart, rich, inspiring, clever – and a whole bunch of other things. Create a persona of your average reader (or create 5 if your target audiences are diverse) and find out what is the image of their ideal self that they are projecting to the public. Use that to create great content and watch those share numbers skyrocket!

4. BE USEFUL

Useful content gets shared – period. It’s how most people are wired; they see something helpful and they want other people to see it too. It might be out of the goodness of their heart or they want to appear more knowledgeable than their friends – it really doesn’t matter, shares are shares.

What matters here is that your content is the most helpful they can find on the given subject. Make your how-to articles most detailed and your tutorial videos packed with easy-to-follow information and you will be able to get all the shares you need.

5. PLAY THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

Whenever there is a hot topic on the internet, content creators flock to it in an effort to drive some traffic to their blogs, media sites, or social media platforms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that except that after a while everything becomes a blur and all those articles or videos start looking like boring copies of each other.

A better approach to this is to invest some time in studying the topic and creating something that has a different angle. Don’t be afraid to swim against the current sometimes – taking a controversial stance on something differentiates you and it’s guaranteed to spark a debate.

This article was originally written by Scott Ragin for the Heyo blog.

Social media sites are among the most effective platforms for getting online exposure and relevant traffic to your business website. More and more people are joining popular social networks to express their thoughts, opinions and memories with friends, while many users also join social media networks so that they can endorse the products and services they like.

Why not reach them on the social networks where they are already spending time and maximize your business revenue while you’re at it? Here are some of the tools and strategies that can help you optimize your social media pages to attract more people to join your brand community.

1. USE YOUR BRAND LOGO AS A PROFILE IMAGE

Businesses are recognized by a meaningful logo that also appears on all documentation and correspondence mediums. The social networks expose your business to your targeted audience which means you can easily get your logos recognized along with the official profile.

Some experts argue that the use of an image of a business representative makes a business page more personal and authentic. The use of a personal picture is commonly seen by bloggers, service providers or owners of small size businesses. These people need the exposure to their personality, skills and expertise for a selected group of people. However, it is recommended to use a logo if you have an established brand or a renowned business. Additionally, it is important to note that the logo needs to be consistent across all of your social accounts.

2. USE YOUR COMPANY NAME AS THE PROFILE NAME

People on social networks are inclined to search keywords or names of their favorite brands, that’s why companies have to use real product names as user IDs/profile names.

Another benefit of using a company name as the username is that the fan following loves to refer to the products or services they use by mentioning them in posts and comments. They can easily tag these names and give you more brand exposure.

3. BE STRATEGIC WHEN IT COMES TO THE FREQUENCY OF YOUR POSTS

A common perception about a social network is to make a maximum number of posts for staying active among the users. That of course is not true for all the platforms. For example, for a Facebook business page, 6-7 posts are more than enough for a week, whereas your Twitter profile may require 6-7 tweets on a daily basis. At the end of the day, it is always more about quality than it is about quantity. Make sure you are providing your audience with meaningful and relevant content and you will be more successful.

4. SIMPLIFY YOUR LINKS

The link addresses of your website helps visitors know what the page they are going to is about. It may include a part of structuring URLs for better visibility and understanding on social media, whereas to make it more appealing and clickable you need to shorten them as well. Shortening a URL can also reveal the number of traffic you are getting from a specific account, page or profile.

The use of a link address varies between different social networks as it may display a preview of your website which is more appealing that just a URL. While some of the networks only grab the images of your product or CMS pages to pin them to an audience.

You can also add the website link in the page description so that a user can click on it after reading about your business, whereas a separate space is also provided for a URL which is worthy to use.

5. USE HIGH-QUALITY IMAGES

Visual content has proven to be more interactive and engaging than other forms of content. This means high-quality images of the products or info-graphics with well-researched data composed in a well-presented manner.

Visual content is said to be more captivating for users as they can easily absorb the information and get connected without compromising their time in reading.

6. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ACTIVE ADMINISTRATORS AND EDITORS

The excessive use of social media on mobile devices has provided a quick search tool for customers to find a company and ask them directly what they want. Nowadays, the presence of your business is enough for reaching customers, but you need to have an active administration to reply to their comments and private messages.

Social networks give people access to the profile pages for instant messaging since visiting your website and filling out a contact form is typically more time consuming. Better profile optimization also accounts for the time you take in replying to a message. This can become quite embarrassing if a user continuously contacts your staff and gets no response.

Try to post information and useful content, in order to keep your visitors engaged. Also consider the use of social contests and giveaways. The comment section can also help you grab users’ attention by replying to them with the information they are looking for.

CONCLUSION

The blending of social pages with a business’s core marketing activities has revealed that the creation of profiles is only valuable if you take the latest trends and consumer behaviors into consideration. Start by implementing the above tips to get going towards the optimization of a successful social media page.

This article was originally written by Alastair Brian for the Heyo blog.

UGC Contests and Quiz Campaigns are a great way to engage your audience and drive meaningful brand conversation and awareness. Here are two brand-new promotions from Pringles and The Co-operators to help inspire you as you start planning your next promotion.

Pringles “Battle of the Cans” Video Contest 

Pringles is all about school spirit! And this Fall, they’re inviting marching bands from across the country to submit a video featuring a killer drumline solo (using Pringles cans of course!) for a chance to win one of 16 $1,000 high school band booster donations.  Built by Votigo’s full-service development team, this contest features Instagram, Twitter & Direct Upload options, a head-to-head voting gallery and fully responsive design.

The Co-operators “Name Our Neighbours” Quiz Campaign

Canadian insurance company The Co-operators is about to release a new TV commercial, and with the help of Votigo’s Quiz Application, they’re allowing their customers to participate in the process of naming all the starring characters! This is a great example of how to bring your audience into the larger conversation for your brand, and make them feel like they are part of the overall brand experience. Built by Votigo’s full-service development team, this campaign features technology that requires all users to watch all of the video before proceeding (in order to maximize brand engagement), custom registration flow and fully responsive design.

Want to learn more about our products and services, or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

The less you spend on marketing, the better. That’s why Word-Of-Mouth marketing is still so highly sought after. This is, by definition, the oldest marketing method. It’s been around for centuries. We love talking about what we’ve bought, what we love, what we hate … just sharing our opinion in general helps us form an identity. Now, the question is: how do you capitalize on this human tendency? As a business owner, you need to find a balance between encouraging customer feedback and straight up soliciting reviews.

Don’t think WOM has a place in your industry? Think again.

Some top word of mouth marketing stats suggest the following.

• Customers who were acquired through social influences have a 37% higher retention rate.
• 72% of consumers say reading a positive review increases their trust in a business.
• Brands that leverage social influencers to spread their message are seeing up to a 10X increase in conversion rate.
• 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people; more so than they do from brands.

Ready to rake in awesome customer reviews and churn up some word of mouth feedback? Learn these 7 tricks like the back of your hand, and put them into practice.

Offer an instant reward.
You’d be amazed at what people will do when an instant reward is on the table. Who wants to wait for their prize? Not me, that’s for sure. For example, if my hairdresser told me, right here right now, that I’d get $15 off my cut and color if I shared a selfie on Facebook and mentioned her in the photo, you better believe I’d do it. When comparing the 60 seconds it’ll take me to post that selfie to the $15 I’ll save, it’s definitely worth the effort.

Send out free product.
Give away free product in exchange for an honest review. Now, to prevent disappointment, be very clear about what you expect. If you absolutely need the review in exchange for free merchandise, make this apparent. Type up an instructional note, and place it in the package before mailing it out. Your note might look something like this.

Thanks for agreeing to review our product! 

• Please review the product within one week of receiving.
• Please post the review on your personal Facebook page, and tag us using @milliesoaps and #soapsbymillie. 
• Be 100% honest. If you hate it, include constructive feedback in your review. Not only will your review help us promote the product, it will also help us understand how we can do better.

Ask questions.
Hop on Facebook, and ask for customer feedback. Post a product, and ask for fans to leave an honest review in the comments. This is probably the quickest way to drum up a bunch of buzz. In the middle of a customer crisis? Then wait it out. Doing this at the wrong time can encourage a ton of nasty feedback.

If you aren’t looking for product reviews, but want to gather a general opinion about your customer service or shopping experience, you can also ask questions along these lines.

“What can we do to make our shopping experience better? Comment below with suggestions.”

“We’re putting together our fall line! What would you like to see us carry?”

Run a contest.
Ask customers to share a photo on Facebook for a chance to win that product. Or, invite fans to tag people in an Instagram photo for a chance to win the pictured product. Above all else, focus on customer engagement. If you’re not regularly interacting with your social media fans, they won’t respond to this call to action. Be consistent, and focus on building a community. If you do this, everything else will fall into place. People will be lining up, eager to post a rave review.

Pay customers for how to tutorials.
If you have an amazing product, customers will want to rave about it. They’ll want to show others how to use it and why they love it. Find your most active customers, and then see which are most involved in the DIY community. This will take a bit more effort on the customer end, so don’t be afraid to spend a little for this project.

Post something like this on social media.

“Are you Youtube savvy, obsessed with our roses, and looking to make some extra shopping money? We want to see how you use our product! We’re currently looking to hire 25 members from our DIY community to film how to tutorials. Email us at videos@sandysroses.com if you’re interested. We’ll reach out if it’s a good fit.”

Offer a promo code in exchange for a review.
You can email the promo, or text it out in the form of a mobile coupon. You can either operate on the honor system, meaning you send out the coupon first, and just encourage customers to share their feedback online or, you can walk customers through a funnel that only rewards them with a coupon when they’ve posted their review. Personally, the second option is the way I would go. People have good intentions, but if you leave the task open ended, it will get pushed to the wayside.

Create a referral program.
This might not technically happen overnight, but with a little work, a referral program can help you auto generate extra revenue and word of mouth reviews. Once put into place, this program will keep the review process somewhat automated. Before launching it, test it out at least a dozen times. The last thing you need is a faulty referral program. People expect to get paid for their referrals, and you want to iron out any kinks in your system so this can happen.

So, what are you waiting for? Get to pushing that product, people. Don’t lose sleep over high cost promotional methods. Instead, loop your happy customers in, and ask for their honest feedback. That’s the quickest way to grow your business on a budget. Why spend thousands of dollars on so-so marketing methods when you don’t have to? Be smart with your spend, and you’ll be rewarded.

This article was originally written by Kristen Vanstrom for the Heyo blog.