New Year's Resolutions Won't Make You More Successful

MPW Insider is an online community where the biggest names in social media marketing plan sample and beyond answer timely career and leadership questions. Today’s answer for: What’s your New Year’s resolution? is written by Erin (Mack) McKelvey, CEO of SalientMG. It’s that time of year again–year-in-reviews and predictions are flooding my Twitter TWTR -1.65% feed. While the New Year is a good time for executives to pause and reflect on the previous year’s successes and missed opportunities, it should also mark the time that leaders are focused on the coming year’s goals and milestones. Business milestones are one thing; resolutions are another. The truth is that there aren’t stops and starts in business, in order to gain and sustain momentum, planning and execution must be fluid. Constant testing and learning, and continuous improvements based on results strengthen an organization. A company’s business goals and milestones should reflect the overall business plan for the year and company strategy. Stops and starts indicate a company’s tendency to live only in the short-term. And unfortunately, a short-term mentality is usually what derails a company, causing internal chaos and overloading employees. Resolutions usually reflect short-term thinking in fact, only 8% of those who make resolutions achieve their goals, according to a University of Scranton, Journal of Clinical Psychology study. That is an abysmal success rate. The success rate also highlights the flawed thinking about resolutions. According to that same study, the top ten resolutions are personal in nature: weight loss, organization, financial discipline, fitness and habit quitting–to name a few.So is there a reason people don’t stick to their resolutions? Professionals’ answers are mixed. Some believe that many don’t have a plan to achieve these “goals”, while others believe that many rush into an idea, like weight loss, without a plan to sustain the goal once it’s reached. And others believe the lack of actual incentives force resolution-makers off target. If 92% of those that set personal resolutions don’t achieve them, what does that say marketing on social media for the professional world? I don’t see a place for New Year’s Resolutions in business. We cannot afford failure rates that high in any sector.

Make it your New Year resolution to increase your Social Media interaction in 2016.

It goes without saying that being active on Social Media is an essential part of your marketing plan. But how can you reach your audience more social media marketing campaign effectively than your competitors? While creating quality content is a given, you also need to engage your audience. Here are a few free tips you might like to try to boost your Social Media engagement on Facebook. Post at least five times a week. Monitor when the best times to post are – good times to post are usually 7.15am, 11.30am and 8pm. Make posts more image-based because they are 80% more likely to generate engagement. Text posts should be roughly 80 characters long. Make sure to keep your content up to date and relevant and focus on upcoming events which relate to your company. Lists are popular, such as “Top Ten Ways To…” and often generate likes and shares. Ask viewers to ‘like’ or ‘share’ the post. Make posts educational with tutorials and helpful guides relating to your business or product. Look at the demographic of your current ‘likers’ and choose posts that will interest them so they are more likely to share or like.People love to see their content and their friends’ content shared by brands. Use your fans’ content every once in a while instead of your own, giving your post a viral push through specific communities that are close to the content creator.Include a CTA – a call-to-action – a clear social media marketing degree instruction telling your audience how you want them to respond to your post. Even if you’re just posting regular content, you can increase your engagement by asking your readers to respond using CTAs like these: Read more, Click here, Subscribe now, Please share, Leave a comment and Buy now! YouTube can also be used as a video blog and if you can create rich useful content your customers should want to follow you if there is a benefit to them. News updates about your company and new ranges, information based videos, even aftercare information, tips and tricks can all generate continued interest.

Create New Or Expand On Existing Target Audience Personas

Do you have a vague idea of your target audience? Something along the lines of “25-35, likes cats and watching Friends”. That’s a start, but to really get your social media marketing los angeles and marketing tactics of the ground you need to build those rough ideas into clearly defined personas. Build up as much details about them as possible. What challenges do they have? What publications do they read? Which events do they attend? How can you solve their problems? If you’re new to personas this slideshare presentation from Hubspot will help you get started.If you already have defined personas, make a resolution for next year to expand on them. Conduct surveys, ask questions on social media and at events. You can never know too much about your audience.Sharing other people’s content that’s either useful or interesting to your audience is a great way of being helpful, building new relationships in your industry and increasing your follower numbers. But by adding your own commentary or highlighting a particular part, you also demonstrate your own expertise. Win-win!While establishing a basic presence on the big social networks is technically free, managing these accounts, building an online community, using social media management and marketing tools and creating campaign assets such as images and videos usually require some kind of investment. Either time or monetary. Make 2015 the year your brand stops skimping and start taking social media seriously. Get More Mileage Out Of Your Existing Content. This one is all about working smarter, not harder. Why would you (or someone in your team) want to spend hours creating a thoroughly researched, well-written, and insightful piece of content only for social media marketing strategy template it to start gathering dust a week or two after it’s been published? Why not take something from that piece and turn it into something different later on, generating more interest for a fraction of the original effort. For Halloween, we listed 13 tips to help repurpose your content. The puns may not be relevant, but the ideas are.