The next time your business is tempted by the sparkling ‘delete’ or ‘ignore’ button, remember these practices.

After leaving work yesterday, I decided to spend some time with my 6 year-old niece, Makayla. I covered the typical Aunt topics as I asked her about her day and how school went. For adults, these questions are usually answered in a few quick sentences, followed politely with similarly asked questions to strike a bit of small talk. For a 6 year-old who has yet to fully comprehend pleasantry within everyday conversation, these questions came with lengthy answers.

I was quickly reminded that these were big questions as I listened to her description of her favorite teacher, what her teacher likes, how the girl behind her wasn’t listening well, how numbers are hard, that Mommy packed her a good snack, how she visited the school library, that the reading rug is soft, but not soft enough….you get the point. After about hearing all about Makayla’s day it hit me:

Just as young children have yet to become accustomed to the rules of conversation, businesses are failing to understand the rules of engagement via social media. Think about the content thrown at you, as a consumer, daily. From the constant posts of “try this product” or “check out this link,” it is easy to feel as if businesses are just talking at you rather than with you. Rather than allowing back and forth dialogue from business to consumer, businesses are attempting to tackle social media themselves by solely talking about themselves.

In my day to day work as a Marketing & Social Media Coordinator at Easton Advertising, Inc. much of my time is spent analyzing businesses in their use of social media engagement. As the issue of proper engagement continues to grow, we’ve developed an internal set of rules for engagement.

Perhaps the worst thing you can do for your brand is fail to respond to a comment or review across your business social media accounts. This can be something positive or negative; every engagement should be addressed. Often, the ability to simply delete or ignore a comment tempts businesses who don’t necessarily have the time or means to engage. It seems simple enough:

Don’t like the comment? Delete it.

Unsure of what to say back? Ignore it.

The comment is positive? No need to respond.

Unfortunately, these practices are wrong. Ignoring or deleting comments is quite possibly the worst choice of engagement or lack of. Businesses fail to realize the importance of addressing their audience. Regardless of whether comments are positive, negative, or simply statements, engaging with your audience humanizes your brand, shows acknowledgement, and gives a public example of how you interact with audience members. When posting to social media, the amount of viewers can be endless. With content constantly being shared back and forth, viewers have the ability to see post history, comments, reviews, or recent activity with just the touch of a button. The next time your business is tempted by the sparkling ‘delete’ or ‘ignore’ button, remember this:

Recognize that negative comments such as this happen to everyone. Acknowledge the comment, recognize that there is a problem, and address the issue in a professional manner. If the problem is more than just a simple fix, offer to move the conversation to a private message or call to better understand without asking particulars over a public platform. This is beneficial for both you and the individual you are engaging with.

That is okay! Often follower engagement can be as simple as commenting ‘cool’ or a thumbs up emoji. While sending a response to this may seem pointless, it is important to remember that this person took time to engage with you. Taking the time to give a quick ‘like’ or ‘thank you’ makes all the difference for both the member you’re engaging with and viewers simply reading comments.

Great news! Let your audience members know how important their feedback is. Thank the individual for their comment in addition to relaying how important their thoughts are to your business. Just as each negative engagement is addressed, each positive engagement should be addressed. This shows that you are not only responsive, but also appreciative of customer praises.

I found myself searching for the best description of dynamic displays when trying to describe featured services we provide for clients at Easton Advertising, Inc. Here is what I found: Dynamic displays can be anything. Dynamic displays can be the kiosk you use to search for a store at the local mall, the television in an art gallery featuring artwork, or even the iPad someone hands you to give contact information at the weekend trade show. The fact is that dynamic displays can be anything that is changing, being especially valued for real-time content updates and geographically targeted campaigns.

Returning to my search of a description for clients, I found that the best way to describe dynamic displays is by giving a story. Imagine this:

Joe runs a small sneaker business and wants to get a storefront. Joe has a website, but doesn’t know how to have customers within the store see his website. On his website, Joe has contact forms for potential customers to receive monthly promotions, featured collections and images of his sneakers, and even insight to his designing process.

Joe’s vision of the storefront is to have a kiosk at the front of the store with an iPad where customers can either search for a particular product or see featured collections. Our friend, Joe, wants to have multiple televisions within the store. His vision has some screens showing the art gallery of shoes, while other screens broadcast his design process to create better connections with customers. How can he make this happen?

Dynamic displays are in sync with websites and relay the information of choice to the desired device. These allow for promotional changes across the board with just the click of a button. If your business has multiple locations, it is quite simple to promote geographically targeted campaigns with dynamic displays. If customer engagement to your site is made so simple that they can touch a button to look for what they need, then the possibilities are endless.

In the world of technology that we have found ourselves living in, dynamic displays are the way of the future. In your next trip to Panera, take a closer look at the screen you are ordering from. If you’re getting a copy of your key made with a key assist machine at the local Home Depot, look at the display while you’re waiting. When you take the family out to dinner and order from the screen on your table at Red Robin, think about how that is working. In a home builder’s sales model, a decision as important as buying your next home, review the various floor-plans on various screens.

Often, we are interacting with them across several devices without thinking of what it is we are truly interacting with. When you are deciding the next strategic marketing steps for your business, remember our friend Joe, and the importance of dynamic displays.

There are great parts and there are intimidating parts to Twitter, but overall your small business should be using it to discover, reach, and grow your audience. The point is that Twitter, for small businesses, is the key to earning attention and engagement via Social Media.

Sure, there are tons of articles regarding Twitter, the uses, new features…the list could go on for miles. However, the topic of Twitter’s use for small businesses has stuck with me since representing Easton Advertising in a #TwitterSmarter Chat with Madalyn Skylar. The impactful, unique question of the Twitter Chat asked the following:

Social Media, especially Twitter, is all about making relationships. Yes, I’m aware this discovery was not recently made. However, small businesses extended reach through the use of Social Media has soared in recent years. Using Twitter as a small business gives the same opportunity of creating connections and raising awarenesses that large businesses have if they were to hop on a company plane and meet someone across the world.

Search engines, like Google, increase rank in two ways: paid Google AdWord targeting or retargeting and keyword content. This means that if you are not paying for Google AdWords or creating Google Ads, you can still increase your optimization with new content across the board meaning social media sites, the use of Google+, and blogging. While posting across various social media boards does constantly update with new content, that content is very short and may not possess many of the keywords you’d like to align your company with. With a blog, your company can publish a large amount of content that can be filled with keywords and engaging information. This content can be in the format of a weekly news article, monthly synopsis of the work accomplished, or even something that is published when new products are released by your company.

Twitter is the company plane for small businesses.

The new content created with the help of blogging not only provides content in a set area of your site, but it also gives social media posts a source of content to link back to. This is critical for audience engagement with your company across the board.

The great thing about Twitter use within a small business is the ability to engage. Unlike large companies with automated responses or generic replies, small businesses typically have one or two members covering responses, engagement, and posting on Twitter. This provides a level of personalization that is unique to small businesses. Since working as a Social Media Coordinator at Easton Advertising, I’ve found three key functions to be especially effective on Twitter as a small business.

After only a few months of our Twitter account being opened at Easton Advertising, we’ve increased our followers by 100%. Now, that’s great and all, but followers don’t mean engagement. Engagement is hard to come by on the site. Luckily, there are Twitter Chats! Imagine a place where business owners, top influencers, interested followers, and whoever else could join to talk about relevant information between a designated time frame—that’s a Twitter Chat.

Small businesses have the opportunity to join, share thoughts, engage with others, and build on amazing ideas. Many, like myself, may be nervous to post in their first Twitter Chat. The Chats are extremely fast-paced leaving little time to review your post (opposite to the general rule of thumb regarding posting). This can be very intimidating for new members. In addition, the influx of information being updated across the globe can come across as overwhelming. These gives you two options–join them and have access to global engagement or don’t participate and miss out on knowledge specifically aligned with your industry.

In contrast to other media sites, Twitter promotes posting throughout the day. The optimum number of tweets per day is between 10 and 15. Continual posting allows for increased views leading to increased engagement. Small businesses can post just as much as large businesses and vice versa, reaching the same number of people. Unfortunately, this also means that a lack of posting can seriously hurt your analytics. The key is to find the happy medium.

Twitter is a valuable source of industry-related news if you have the right connections. Connections or followings on Twitter determine the copious amounts you will see on a daily basis. Users are sharing their own information, information they found interesting, and information their followers shared. This is creating several sources of news that have been deemed as valuable because you or a connection of yours has read and chosen to share. The analogy of a newspaper is excellent for this frenzy.

Think back on being a child and picking up the newspaper in the morning. The first page you’d flip to is the cartoon section because you’d seen it before, knowing that those pages produced something funny and worthwhile to you. News shared by your connections on Twitter is quite the same. Your connections are there because they have shared some piece of information at one point that you deemed meaningful.

The point is that Twitter, for small businesses, is the key to earning attention and engagement via Social Media. There are great parts and there are intimidating parts to Twitter, but overall your small business should be using it to discover, reach, and grow your audience. So jump on your small business company plane or flip to the cartoon section of the newspaper, however you want to describe it, start your global engagement today.

Consistent posting of engaging content across social media sites provide multiple purposes, but most importantly, boost and maintain company brand recognition.

I vividly remember the numerous conversations I had with my parents begging to have a Facebook page like the others kids my age. For obvious reasons, safety and age were lectured on multiple times until finally, my senior year, they allowed for me to create a Facebook account. I so terribly wanted to get my name out, gain “friends,” and increase my “likes” to catch up to my peers who had longer established profiles.

The push to keep up with updates, take photos in the latest outfit, and engage in posts was greater than ever (as you can imagine, being a high school senior and all). This was the cool thing to do, and I wanted to play a part in it just as my peers did.

Ironically, this social media crazed teenager was dealing with the same thing that businesses are today:

As a Marketing and Social Media Coordinator at Easton Advertising, Inc., I often hear the struggles of clients in their efforts to engage in the social media aspect of marketing their business. Our team excels in managing ads, daily posting, and media creation for various clients, but this is our profession. Posting on one or two accounts may seem manageable for a business owner, but with search engine marketing and the need to reach audiences within their daily social media browsing, ensuring brand recognition across the board of social media can be very overwhelming.

Social media provides a source for daily engagement with customers and businesses ranging from local to global.

With a social media presence, businesses have a unique opportunity to show true day to day company culture, create their own voice, and advertise their products or services on a continually updated platform. 

Without a source of content, media postings will begin to seem irrelevant to targeted audience. Blogging is critical in maintaining new content for your social media platforms.

Starting this endeavor is a little unnerving as you create multiple social sites, discover the voice of your brand, and train others within your business to maintain that voice. Consistent posting of engaging content across social media sites provide multiple purposes, but most importantly, boost and maintain company brand recognition.

Blogging for a business spells out an opportunity to publish new content on a website that is typically static.

Blogging for a business spells out an opportunity to publish new content on a website that is typically static. Yes, maybe your monthly events or job opening pages receive updates within your company website, but what about the remainder of the website? If you think about the various pages, the majority never changes. This is where blogging comes into play.

Blogging allows businesses to create new and relevant content for websites increasing the search engine optimization in addition to publishing a source of contentwhich media posts can be linked back to. For some, I may be speaking gibberish at this point. Be that as it may, once broken down, the concept makes a lot of sense.

Search engines, like Google, increase rank in two ways: paid Google AdWord targeting or retargeting and keyword content. This means that if you are not paying for Google AdWords or creating Google Ads, you can still increase your optimization with new content across the board meaning social media sites, the use of Google+, and blogging. While posting across various social media boards does constantly update with new content, that content is very short and may not possess many of the keywords you’d like to align your company with. With a blog, your company can publish a large amount of content that can be filled with keywords and engaging information. This content can be in the format of a weekly news article, monthly synopsis of the work accomplished, or even something that is published when new products are released by your company.

The new content created with the help of blogging not only provides content in a set area of your site, but it also gives social media posts a source of content to link back to. This is critical for audience engagement with your company across the board.

Content Marketing is everything in reaching potential customers today

Without a source of content, media postings will begin to seem irrelevant to targeted audience. Blogging is critical in maintaining new content for your social media platforms.

With the continual use of blogging, audience engagement and search engine optimization will increase, creating an unbroken cycle of content and interaction for your company. Blogging creates a source of content that is constantly changing allowing for search engines to distinguish your company’s website from the use of various keywords. The updated content allows for new postings across your social media platforms, increasing reader engagement.