Once the enormity of these numbers hits you, you realize how social media has become such an essential part of how businesses operate today. The 21st century marketing rules are simple: if you want to survive and flourish, in a sea of brands and companies, you need to up your social media marketing game.

Social media helps increase your reach to potential customers while helping you better connect with your existing customer base. Additionally, it’s a vital means of increasing ROI and brand awareness. The consequence of all this? Increased sales and leads, every business’s dream.

Facebook and Instagram being two of the most widely used platforms, they become the obvious choice when it comes to advertising your business. Further, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and the integrated option to run your Facebook and Instagram ads from the Facebook ads interface makes it even easier for businesses to run their ad campaigns.

Having said that, there are definitive reasons for businesses to compare Instagram vs. Facebook ads both in terms of understanding the nature of the platform, compare the audience reach, ad types, cost of advertisement on the platforms, and more.

Instagram vs. Facebook for Business

While both are greatly used for advertising your business, the set of features that each of these offers are quite different from each other.

Being the older of the two platforms, Facebook wins when it comes to having a greater number of users (a whopping .13 billion daily active users as compared to Instagram’s 500 million monthly active users). With a tag line of “Be Connected,” Facebook does a hell of a job at connecting businesses to their respective customer bases.

Instagram, on the other hand, goes by the motto “ Capture and Share the World’s Moments.” True to this, its focus revolves around image and video sharing.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Which is better for Brand Engagement

The most significant advantage Instagram has over Facebook in terms of marketing is that Instagram has a significantly higher user engagement rate as compared to Facebook.

According to Ecommerce CEO, about 68% of Instagram users engage with brands regularly, while for Facebook, this value is only a measly 32%.

Looking at these numbers, you would expect to get more views, shares, and comments when posting on Instagram rather than on Facebook, right? However, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Because Facebook does so great with videos, video ads posted there to get more views than those posted on Instagram. Meanwhile, pictures on Instagram fare far better than those on Facebook.

Choose Between Facebook or Instagram Based on Your Target Audience

An important factor that goes into deciding what social media you should use to promote and advertise your brand is the demographic you’re targeting. We all have at least one grandparent that uses Facebook, but I doubt you know of any old people.

If your brand is targeted towards a younger demographic, say generation Z and millennials, then your best bet would be Instagram. Known for its youthful image, Instagram’s user base is mainly composed of users under the age of 30, and that too predominantly in the 13-17 year age bracket.

Facebook, on the other hand, caters to an older demographic, the most prominent of which are millennials and baby boomers. The good thing about this is that these generations are more well off than younger users. Therefore, they are more likely to carry through with a purchase.

Instagram Ads vs Facebook Ads

As expected from a platform that’s as well developed as it is, Facebook offers users the option of choosing from the following different types of ads.

Facebook Ad types

Video Ads: These are pretty self-explanatory—they allow you to showcase your product in video format.

Image Ads: these include one captivating picture of your product or service, along with a persuasive caption and usually a link to buy the product.

Collection Ads: A cover image or video followed by a few product photos.

Carousel Ads: this interactive format allows you to showcase up to 10 images (or videos) in a single post, each with its own link.

Slideshow Ads: Using a slide show of photos, you create a video-like ad, which use combines the elements of motion, sound, and text to maximize engagement.

Facebook Instant Experiences/Canvas Ads: one of the most immersive formats on Facebook, Canvas ads allow for a full-screen experience with a mobile-optimized ad that shows all your relevant advertisement data in one place.

Lead Generation Ads: These ads allow businesses to gather user information via a form.

Instagram Ad Types

Instagram, on the other hand, offers more limited types of ads, but if used correctly, these too can lead to high conversion rates.

Photo Ads: These are the regular images that allow you to showcase your products.

Video Ads: These are ads in the video format. A big limitation, though, is that ads can only be up to 60 seconds. So there is an increased pressure to captivate viewers within a minute.

Carousel Ads: These can contain a maximum of 10 images or videos, with each picture/video being linked to the relevant page on your website.

Stories Ads: Now, this is where Instagram truly shines. Stories ads feature full-screen pictures or videos that users can go through by simply tapping them. They give brands a huge capacity for showcasing their creativity and are highly versatile in getting engagement.

Compare Instagram vs. Facebook Advertising Cost

Nothing worthwhile ever comes free, especially not something that you get to reap such huge benefits from. The same is the case with social media advertisements. However, your final cost will also be affected by other variables like

• Ad objective
• Bidding type and amount
• Audience
• Ad quality
• Your industry

You can use ADCostly for getting an estimation of the cost of an advertisement campaign. The tool contains massive data collected from various ad campaigns. You can easily determine the approximated cost of ad campaigns. The tool supports Facebook and all its direct advertising channels such as Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

As you can see from the above screenshot of the dashboard, we’re in the “ADCOST” tab of ADCostly. You can see different filters here, let’s have an understanding of them.

Network: This is the main advertising platform that will be used for cost estimation. Facebook is the network that ADCostly currently supports. However, the availability of the option for the selection of network is surely there to select other networks too, which may be added in the tool later.

Publisher: A publisher is basically an advertising channel related to the selected network. E.g if we take “Google” as a network, the channels can be display, search, shopping, Youtube, and Admob etc. So, in the present case, the direct advertising channels of Facebook include the Facebook app itself, Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

Category: A category here indicates the type of products that one is going to advertise. You can select gaming apps, non-gaming apps, eCom, B2B Lead generation, web, and page. One thing that is very important here is that for a good estimation of AdCost, you should select your proper category instead of selecting all.

Advanced: This filter covers ad placement, targeting country, and CTA (Call To Action). There are tons of available options in all of these filters, which are enough to get you a more precise estimation of cost. This filter and its subfilters play a very important role in building a perfect strategy.

Date: The date filter is there to select the date range or the number of days. You can select either specific number of days mentioned or you can select a range of days.

After you’ve selected the filters according to your criteria, you can see the results in the form of graphs and charts. Thus, you can add those estimated values of cost per click, click-through rate, and cost per mille in your strategy from this data.

The Top Campaign section of this tool contains data of the best advertising campaigns. All the filters are the same here as mentioned before. This data fetched from this massive database can be used in crafting a great advertising strategy.

ADCostly can be used to check which placement is better and which advertising channel can help in this. If the tool shows more conversions via Instagram in your niche, then you should go for it and vice versa for other publishing channels of Facebook.

We hope that this article has helped you in understanding the value that you can add to your strategy by estimating the approximate cost and understanding the difference between the two platforms.

The post Instagram vs Facebook Ads for Business appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

And yet more often than not Internet marketers use YouTube as “one more social network” rather than a powerful way of connecting and reaching their target audience. While some selective major brands have been killing it on YouTube, most others have been limited to launching their TV Ads, their product demo, an office party or an off site event. Long term commitment to strategy and brand storytelling is often missing. Here is a guide to help brands and small business to get started with YouTube the right way.

How to Optimize YouTube Channel

Make a Channel Trailer

Channel trailer is the first video which auto-plays when a person lands on your YouTube Channel Page.

1. Channel trailer should match and reflect what the video quality, type and story telling style of your content.
2. Keep channel trailer to be between 30 to 45 seconds
3. Communicate WHY strongly in your channel trailer. What sets you apart, should be the why people follow you.
4. Talk to your audience directly
5. End it with a strong call to action to subscribe.

YouTube Channel Banner

Most users convert into subscribers after landing on your channel page. In order to leverage this use a channel banner which captures the interest of the user. You can even share your brand’s other social channels like FaceBook, Twitter, Linkedin and Snapchat. This helps people other options to stay in touch with your brand.

1. A good banner typically reflects the style and personality of the brand.
2. Posting a schedule and sticking to it will help.
3. Keep it non promotional. Channel banners are not Advertising banners. It should give people a hint on why he or she must stick around.

YouTube Content Best Practices

Titles & Thumbnails
Titles and thumbnails attract attention from a heap of other videos on YouTube. Titles and Thumbnails is not a set it and forget it element. It needs to be A/B tested and tweaked for best results. Use thumbnails which has colors and styles which are complementary/contrasting to your competitor’s video thumbnails. This will help you grab attention and clicks.

The Takeoff
The first 15 seconds of the video is what hooks people up. You can show a teaser of the climax in the first 15 seconds or even show something totally off topic yet totally unexpected. Casey Neistat does this best.

Tell Great Stories
Stories are what people are, what people to connect to most. Not just ideas and facts. As a brand your job is to tell a story which will engage your audience. For instance, if you are an adventure travel company your story could be around how people have changed their perspectives after a skydive or a hike through the Andes.

According to Dan and Chip Health to make an idea stick it has to have these 6 ingredients.

Simple – It is easy to grasp. If the audience has to pause or replay your video to understand your message you need to simplify.
Unexpected – As humans we are hard wired for finding weird coincidences. The person who didn’t follow the conventional path get talked about. Countries which succeed despite global recession become heroes. The unexpected stuff gets talked about. It is also what hooks people stay till the end of the video.
Credible – Transparency is key. Don’t shy away from streaming a footage from your workplace. Closer you as brand are to the face of the viewer deeper the connection.

Concrete – Concreteness builds trust. Abstraction builds confusion. Concrete and practical ideas are easier to digest. People find them useful and are more likely to subscribe to your channel.
Emotional – Human beings are irrational when it comes to emotions. Emotions are dear and deeply ingrained in human sub conscious. We think based on logic but the tribes we follow and decisions we make are based on emotions. Make sure your video/story has a strong emotional pull. Positive emotions like hope, happiness, inspiration will get it more shares than the one’s with negative emotions.

Planning Your YouTube Content
It is NOT about you. It is NOT about your product. It is about creating content which will entertain and inform your audience and keep them hooked for life. As per YouTube’s official playbook for brands brands should focus on creating Hero, Hub and Hygiene type content to make their content marketing holistic on YouTube.

• Hero – Hero content is the stand out content which is targeted on increasing reach of your brand among your target audience. This is typically the mashup or lists kind of posts which have higher potential of getting picked up by large media houses like Buzzfeed and Upworthy.
• Hub – Hub content is the meat of your channel. This is why your channel exists and focuses on the core message you want to deliver to your audience. If you are a brand which sells razors the hib content could be around men grooming and being a confident man.
• Hygiene – Hygiene content focuses on the basic content addresses issues which your target audience face. For a brand which sells shoes a hygiene content piece could be around “How to Tie your lace right” or “You have been tying your lace wrong all your life”.

Guide to YouTube SEO

YouTube Keyword Research
YouTube SEO, like the general SEO process starts with finding the right keywords that people are searching for.You need to find what your audience is looking for on YouTube in your country. Keywordtool.io is a great tool for this purpose. Using this tool you can find out what people are looking for on YouTube, its search volume and the search trend.

Meta Tags for YouTube SEO
In order to make the video discoverable in YouTube and other search engines we need to make sure titles, descriptions and tags have keywords which are searched for often by your audience. The three important meta SEO attributes in YouTube are

1. Title – The title should be click worthy and keyword rich. The title is what incites people to click from the search results page. Having keyword in the title is critical SEO on page factor.
2. Description – The description should define what the video is about. It is place to give context and summary of the video for the users to understand.
3. Tags – Tags are clues for YouTube Search engine to understand what the video is about once it gets uploaded. Using tags helps YouTUbe quickly understand what the video is about and its chances of showing up in search results goes up immaterial of the recency of the video.

Optimize for Watch Time
The most important ranking metric in YouTube algorithm is watch time. What is the likelihood of a person staying within YouTube after watching your video determines how well your video ranks. You can optimize for watch time by using the following tricks –

• In youtube card link to playlist – This will help people get a complete series of videos which will increases their time spent on YouTube further.
• Leverage End Cards – Give your audience something to watch at the end of the video. You can point the user to a relevant video or a teaser of your upcoming episode.
• Translations – Use translations in your video description and captions to help users of different country and language find your content and engage.
• Captions – Using captions in your video helps people grasp your content better. THis increases the probability of they sticking with you. This increases retention % and watch time, a key metric for YouTube SEO.

Sniff Your Competitor’s YouTube Ads & Strategy

YouTube is becoming an increasingly effective option for advertisement and with the ease of advertising on YouTube through Google Adwords, it is accessible to even the smallest of advertisers. If you are planning for YouTube video ads, a good idea would be to start with finding where your competitor’s are running their ads. This can be found out using SEMrush Video Advertising Tool.

This data can be used in two different ways. Once you know which videos your competitors are running their ads on, you can either directly target them but that would also mean a bidding war with your competitors. Now a different way of doing it is to look at the videos that your competitors are targeting and trying to understand their audience profile. Once you get a better feel of what are the preferences for those target audience groups, you might be able to target other videos that can appeal to the same group.

Below is the list of all YouTube Channels where Amazon Ads have been played along with useful information like times the Ad was played, # of Ads played, Number of times the Ad was viewed to the total views of the video.

Try SEMRush

Which of your Competitor Videos Worked
Social Blade YouTube analytics tool gives stats on the performance of a YouTube Channel. Enter the channel you want to analyze and you can see its historic growth, estimated Adsense earnings and top 50 popular videos. The tool is free to use.

Understand Your Competitors Ad Messaging
Every brand wants to position and promote a message among its audience. Knowing this message and style of delivery will help you what possible perceptions your target audience might be having about your brand. Understanding Ad messaging will help you understand what type of products or which kind of events is your competitor trying to get attention for. Once you know this you can either come up with a messaging which positions you against your competitor or target an audience which your competitor missed talking through in its Ads.

SEMRush Video Advertising tool gives a list of all Ads your competitor is using to reach his target audience on YouTube. You can do this by signing up for a free 30 day trial with SEMRush.

Following are the list of Video Ads used by Macys.com to promote its products and brand on YouTube.

Building Your YouTube Community

All work on YouTube is to build a community of loyal listeners. Listen. Act. Repeat.

• Increase subscribers – Subscribers get intimated every time you post a video. Subscribers tend to watch your upcoming video with more zeal and more likely to share it among your friends. Higher the number of subscribers lesser the need to depend on other channels of promotion.
• Engage – Listening to feedback via comments is great but having a meaningful conversation is what gives your audience the feeling that they are being heard. The more you reply the better the chances of the user returning to your channel/video.
• Partner – Affiliations are one good way to promote your channel in a vertical which is parallel to your own. If you sell hiking equipment a good channel to partner with would be a company which arranges corporate outings for weekends.
• Take Polls – Use the end cards and CTA buttons to collect poll from users. You can take feedback on improving the channel with your current audience and work on improving your channel.

The post Complete Guide to Rock Your Brand on YouTube appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The last weekend Kolkata experienced a first of its kind event in Social Media for Photographers – a two day event, organized by a very young and passionate group of photographers. The event saw an ensemble of some of the most well known photographers in India and though not a photographer, I was invited to speak at the event to give a talk on Personal Branding for Photographers in Social media. There were a couple other sessions related to branding and digital marketing by two of my good friends Suprit Patra and Aji Issac Mathew. It was indeed a good experience to share the platform with this guys as well as some of the eminent photographers like Hari Menon, Soumya Shankar Ghosal, Neelutpal Das.

The presentation on personal branding though oriented towards photographers, contains certain basic principles that are applicable for anyone and everyone looking to focus on personal branding. Of course without the live narration the content might not be as appealing as it is meant to be, but I am sure you will find some interesting stuff to pick up from this.

A big “Thank You” to Anirban and his team for organizing such a fantastic event. I am sure the momentum will continue and we will see a lot more of this initiatives happening in Kolkata.

The post Personal Branding in Social Media for Photographers appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Google has been going out of their way to promote Google Plus though the platform never gained as much traction as they would have liked it to. However, things could now change with the + Post Ads.  To put it simply Google now gives you an option to use your Google Plus posts as advertisements on their Display Ad Network. The best part however, is that +Post Ads are not displayed in Google Plus stream but on relevant websites in Google’s Display Network, which basically means with + Post Ads, your content is no longer limited to the Google Plus audience but would have a much broader reach encompassing millions of sites in Google’s Display Network.

Also if an user is signed into his Google Account while viewing a +Post Ad, he can forward, comment and / or +1 the content in the Ad itself, without even having to go to Google Plus at all. If there is a link to your website in the ad, users can click through to your website also. This is a seamless experience for the users and also a beautiful opportunity for brands to get a larger audience connected and engaged to their content.

Google + Post Ads are managed through the regular Adwords interface and also offers a wide range of targeting options. It won’t be surprising to see if Google adds a few more audience segmentation options for +Post ads exclusively. However, at present + Post Ads are limited only to Brands with more than 1000 followers on Google Plus.

The Masterstroke

The reason I talked about +Post Ads as a masterstroke from Google because with this they are achieving multiple objectives..

• Now That Google Plus content has a much broader reach with this ads , more Brands would join and actively participate in Google Plus
• More and more people will now be using Google Plus without even realizing it
• Google can showcase the valuable content in Google Plus to the non Google Plus users at the advertiser’s expense and attract new users to the network
• They are able to monetize Google Plus, without cluttering the platform with ads

+ Post Ads and Facebook Ads

No I am not going to compare them but talk about how + Post Ads can actually help your Facebook ad campaigns. Facebook allows you to create a custom audience by placing a conversion pixel on certain pages of your website. When a user visits a page with conversion pixel, Facebook analyzes the person’s profile and serves your ads to people with similar profile ( as they are more likely to be interested in your product). Now if you put a link in your + Post Ads to one of the pages with Facebook Conversion pixel more and more people will visit that page by clicking on the + Post Ad and this will continue to increase the target audience for your Facebook ads. However, we will need to carefully consider the fact that Conversion Pixels are supposed to be used for conversion tracking which in many cases could be transactional whereas + Post Ads are more focused on engagement and would attract a different type of audience and reaction.

Google Plus never really had the type of attention from marketers as Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest had. People shared great content on Google Plus but there weren’t many to appreciate. SEOs looked at the platform as a necessity with the apprehension that Google might be using +1s as a signal in their algorithm or at least getting more +1 for their content would increase their content’s visibility on search, with personalized search being ubiquitous. With this update Google has probably given marketers a genuine reason to focus their effort on Google Plus, though it stands on the shoulders of Google’s biggest bread earner; Adwords.

The post + Post Ads : Another Master Stroke By Google Marketers Should be Excited About appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

What Buffer does is pretty simple. It allows you to post content across multiple social channel through a single platform. But more importantly, it allows you to schedule the content to be sent out at different times during the day. Buffer also comes with a nifty browser plugin that allows you to share any content that you might be viewing right from the browser without having to depend on the sharing options provided by the content publisher. If you happen to log into the BufferApp website you can also find “Suggestions” for content that they provide. They are working on making it more powerful with topic based segregation, though its not yet ready. Buffer also provides you with some really good analytics on all the content you share across different platforms. While the basic analytics is available for all users, they have a more advanced “analysis” option which is available only for the users who upgrade to their awesome plan.

Besides regular scheduling of content through Buffer, this days I make it a point to spend the first half an hour in my day in reading and  scheduling my posts and it is such a pleasure to see the content going out across al the platforms and just in right time. It saves time, keeps my profiles updated, offers relevant high quality to my followers consistently.  While I am aware that there are few other tools that do almost exactly the same thing I  love the Buffer interface way too much.

And with this love note I think the Buffer guys should probably give me a free upgrade to their awesome plan

The post My Love for Buffer – Scheduling Social Posts Makes Life Easy appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

When Google Plus was introduced there was no talks of integrating with Places, thus many marketers went on to create their own pages in Google Plus. Later Google wanted Places to be integrated with Google Plus and as a result, for all the existing Places listing a corresponding Google Plus page was created – IRRESPECTIVE OF THE FACT WHETHER THE BUSINESS HAD A GOOGLE PLUS PAGE OR NOT.

Consequence : The business now has two pages in Google Plus – one that was actually created by them ( possibly with a lot of content and information) and another automatically created by Google with only the information they fetched from the Places Listing.

The Bigger Problem : In local search results, Google actually links to their Places Listing Google Plus page rather than the page that is actually maintained by the business.

Now let’s think of a business with multiple locations. Yes, you guessed it right ; for each of the locations Google will create a separate Google Plus page based on each of the Places listings. So, if you are a retail chain with 10 shops – you will have 10 different G Plus pages, showing address and details of only that specific outlet. You might have another brand page in Google Plus where you feed in all your valuable content and try to build engagement, but Google will show only those Places pages in their local search results – depriving the audience from viewing all the other content you are posting on Google Plus.

At present there is no way to consolidate:
a) Your existing Google Plus Page with your Google Places Page on Google Plus
b) Your multiple location specific Google Plus pages ( if you are a multi-location business)

Now that Gundotra is gone, I have no idea by when this will get streamlined and if this is a priority for the Google Places team but till then we marketers have to live with all the confusion.

P.S. Google has been strictly against thin content pages and has been cautioning people against creating them. When you look at those Google Plus Pages based on Places data – I can’t help but think of those auto-generated business directories that would harvest yellow pages and put up zillions of pages to rank in Google. I hear they don’t rank anymore in Google. Google Plus is however their own

The post The Messy Affair of Google Plus and Google Places appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

So what did I do ?

Why this image ? Because I liked it and I felt the apparent mismatch between the headline and the photo might make readers even more curious to click.The image has been taken from runawayjuno.com

Though most of the time I like to post quality content on my blog, I just thought of trying out the clickbait trick here on this post and see how many people actually clicks. Does clickbait work for marketing blogs ? Well, will know after a week! You can bookmark this post as I plan to update the post after a week and again after a month with the number of visits it received in all.

If you are feeling bad about reading this post ( feeling tricked?), consider that this is just an experiment and your participation is appreciated. Also, there’s plenty of good quality articles in this blog on different subjects like SEO, Adwords, Email Marketing, Social Media etc.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments below.

The post This Guy Read About ClickBait and You Wont Believe What He Did Next appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Organization : Make A Difference ( MAD )
Job Title: Social Media Specialist
Location: Bangalore
Employment Type: Full-time
Reporting to: PR Head

About Make A Difference ( MAD )

Make A Difference (MAD) is a platform that empowers youth to become change leaders who drive positive impact and create self-sustaining communities. We are committed to provide equal opportunities for all children and our vision is that some day every child can learn and pursue their passion.

MAD is based in Bangalore, India and operating in 23 cities across the country. Today it is one of India’s largest youth volunteer networks. 1800 volunteers participate in our projects and work with over 4000 children in 80 centres.

Our projects aim to provide a positive learning ecosystem for children in order for them to regain confidence and start believing in themselves. We currently run an English Teaching, Library, Career Awareness and Personality Development Program.

Social Media Specialist – The Profile

We are looking for a social and interactive person with awesome communication skills and strong interest in social media stategies that make things go viral.

You will be at the forefront of social change by managing our blog and social media profiles and let the world know about MAD and our activities and programmes. You will use current social media and identify new trends to reach out to as much people as you can and inspire them to take action.

Social Media Specialist Job Description

Strategic Planning

• Develop, implement and manage MAD’s social media strategy.
• Create and manage a comprehensive social media messaging and activities calendar and ensure deadlines are met.

Social Media Management

• Daily management of MAD’s social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, YouTube, Pinterest and similar.
• Management and regular update of MAD Blog.
• Make MAD a huge force in social media by monitoring trends and best practices and implement them.
• Design and post creative and compelling content to all social media profiles such as blog posts, wall posts, tweets, videos, photos, infographics etc.
• Identify new and innovative ways to increase engagement of users on blog and social media platforms.
• Ensure that all MAD activities and events are documented and celebrated.
• Ensure consistency of messages across multiple profiles.
• Boost brand awareness by following MAD’s brand guidelines and brand aligned voice.

Social Networking

• Initiate conversations and engage in online dialogues with friends and followers on MAD’s online profiles.
• Answer all comments, questions and requests on MAD’s online profiles.
• Initiate action in online communities through advocacy, community-outreach efforts, promotions etc.
• Participate in online discussions and post on various relevant blogs and social networking sites.

Monitoring and Evaluation

• Create metrics and monitor effective benchmarks for measuring the impact of social media strategy.
• Collect data related to all social media and other online activity.
• Analyze effectiveness and impact of social media campaigns in an effort to maximize results.
• Provide regular feedback to PR Head and write reports.

Other duties as assigned

Eligibility

Education and Experience

• 1-2 years as PR Fellow or 1-2 years relevant working experience in online communication and social media.

Skills and Abilities

• Enthusiasm and passion for online communication and social media
• Expert knowledge of social networking channels
• Strong written communication skills
• Innovation and creativity
• Entrepreneurial spirit
• Ability to plan and meet with deadlines
• Ability to take initiative and ownership
• High level of interpersonal skills
• Excellent knowledge of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Reporting

The Social Media Specialist will report directly to the PR Head.

Remuneration / Salary

Rs. 3.4 lacs to Rs. 3.6 lacs per annum (to be defined)

Apply for Social Media Specialist

Interested applicants should submit the following documents to careers@makeadiff.in

• Detailed Curriculum Vitae
• Cover letter stating motivation to be part of MAD, as well as skills and abilities (max. 1 page)

The post Social Media Specialist Job in Bangalore appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

This article would outline a bunch of activities that you should be doing to get the most out of Linkedin company pages.

How Businesses can make the most out of Linkedin Company Pages.

Add a Banner

Linkedin company pages allow you to add a banner on top. Make full use of it, add a banner that is aesthetically pleasing and also properly exudes the nature & spirit of your business. Remember, visual appeal goes a long way and this banner is your opportunity. It is doubtful that a visitor will want to further explore the page if it doesn’t have any visual appeal.

Product Page

Linkedin Company Pages also have a page dedicated to showcase your products and services. Make sure your product page has proper content and actually lists your product and services for users to see. Here are few specifics that you should consider for the products page :

1. Product Page Banners : Linkedin allows up to 3 banners on your product pages and you can also embed a link to each one of those. Make sure you have enticing banners that showcase your best selling products or offers and link to the relevant page on your website.
2. Not All Products : If you are dealing with a lot of products or high value products, Linkedin is definitely not the place where transactions will happen but it is an excellent place to start a conversation. In such cases it might be wiser to display only selected products that you think will have the maximum demand and acceptance among your visitors.
3. Offers : If lead generation is one of your objectives, you can actually create special offers targeted as Linkedin users and add them as products. For example,  as a digital marketing consultant if I would set up a Company page for myself, I can always add a product as “Free one hour consulting on how to best use Linked for Business”. What it does is that it gets more people interested in my services and as they contact me for the free consultation, it also creates an opportunity for me to convert them to paying clients.
4. Recommendations : Social proof matters! Linkedin has provided the perfect opportunity by giving the option for users to recommend products. Once you have added your products to the product page, invite your existing customers to write recommendations about your product.

About Section

The Home section of your Linkedin Company Page gives you an opportunity to write about your company. Every company that has a page writes an About section, so give it some serious thought and make sure your “About” section is interesting enough to keep the readers digg for more. Also based on your main objective for Linkedin presence, you can customize the about section a little. For example, if your primary objective is Recuritment, you might want to talk a little more about the organization culture and what a great place it is to work at.

Updates

Updates are what keep your audience engaged to your Linkedin Page. Make sure you are posting relevant and interesting content that your followers would like to read and know about. Do not make your updates all about your promotion and advertisement – that’s one of the biggest mistakes to do. Post updates that adds value for your followers.

Here are few other specifics that you should consider in regards to posting updates :

1. Frequency : Make sure to post at least one update everyday if not more.
2. Variation in Updates : Linkedin now allows users to post images, links, questions etc in updates. This is a fantastic way to connect with your users. It is often seen, if relevant, people often connect and engage more with images and link compared to generic textual updates.
3. Targeted Users : Take advantage of the “targeted users” facility. Linkedin allows you to now send customized updates to specific groups of your followers. You can now segment your followers in subgroups like employees, non-employees, vendors, customers etc and send tailor made messages to them.
4. Employee Participation : Ask your employees to like and share the updates posted on your Linkedin Company page. This helps to increase the reach of the message manifold.
5. Reward the follower : Organizing sweepstakes and contests are also a great way to engage your visitors

Reconverse used this promotion to shoot up their follower count.

Promotion

Promote your Linkedin company page on your company website and also through other social platforms. It works specifically well if you reach out to your recent customers and ask them to join your Linkedin company page and you can also ask them for recommendations.

Linkedin Ads

If you are ready to spend some money, you can also make use of Linkedin ads to promote your page. That is a good and quick way to make your company present in front of your targeted audience and gain a lot of new followers.

Linkedin Page Insights

Do not ignore the Page Insights. Check the Linkedin page insights data to see the traffic trends to your Linkedin Page. Map this trends with the content posted on your page in respective dates, this will give you some cool insights on which type of content gets more attention from your audience and fuels engagement.

The post How Businesses Can Leverage Linkedin Company Pages appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

As Linkedin celebrated its 10th anniversary yesterday, I thought of doing this post showcasing some very simple things you can do to better leverage your Linkedin profile for personal branding.

Linkedin Celebrates its 10th Birthday!

Your Profile Picture

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – and yes, your profile picture is the first thing most visitors look at, the moment they land on your profile page. Linkedin is a professional network and make sure your profile photo shows the professional you. Post a clear and professional headshot. You might have a great party face but reserve it for facebook and bring out your suits.

While I personally find this idea to be a little too desperate and aggressive some experts do advise to put a red border around your picture before putting them on Linkedin as the red color works as a strong attention grabber for your audience. I think this could be helpful when a user is conducting a search and your name shows up amongst a long list of similar other profiles.

Professional Headline

An often ignored and under utilized part of your Linkedin profile. It appears just below your name in real nice bold fonts, creating a golden opportunity for you to sell yourself to the readers, yet often times we end up leaving it blank or just adding our current job role to it. Use this space to include words and phrases that explain the way you want to be perceived by others. Use separators between words and phrases to make it easier to read. For example, I could probably use the one below:

“Digital Marketing Professional | Search Marketing Consultant | Social Media Enthusiast | Blogger | Speaker “

Showcase Your Work

A relatively new but extremely powerful feature. Linkedin now allows you to upload presentations, photos, videos, documents etc in your profile itself. This is a golden opportunity to showcase your work and achievements right inside your profile. This feature is probably still not available for non-English users.

Add Value

What we are talking about here is basically marketing yourself and marketing today, personal or otherwise, has become heavily content driven. Linkedin is no exception. Share high quality relevant content (whether it is your own or from some other source on the web), knowledge and industry updates with your connection. This not only adds value for your connections as they get to see relevant and important updates from you but it also works as a great indicator to project yourself as someone who keeps himself informed and updated.

Recommendations

It is definitely great to have a lot of recommendations in your Linkedin profile we all know that, however, there are some basic principles that can help. Do not request a recommendation from people with whom you have not worked for real. At times you do tend to get some recommendations that are irrelevant to your profile ( sounds strange? but yes, it does happen at times ), Linkedin provides an option to hide those from your profile – use it where needed. Now why would you hide a recommendation? Because like any other marketing currency, even recommendations have been abused to hell and it is not uncommon to find profiles with only reciprocal recommendations. Irrelevant recommendations does not create a positive impression with your readers, rather it hurts your credibility.

Connect

Make sure your Linkedin profile links to your company website as well as any personal website/blog that you want to showcase to your professional network. Also, link back to your Linkedin Profile from your other sites like company website, personal blog, twitter profile etc Each of these ( your website, twitter profile, Linkedin profile etc) are all tools that can work together to project your personal brand; linking them together helps the visitor get the complete picture and additional opportunity for you to connect with them through each of these channels.

A bonus tip : Linkedin Groups

Linkedin Groups are another great opportunity for you to share content, participate in discussions, network and establish your credibility . While it could be a little time consuming, it is an extremely enriching experience as you learn from others and at the same time it helps you to demonstrate your knowledge and experience in your field of work. However, while participating in Linkedin groups, make sure you are not spamming the groups and commenting on topics that your are not sure about. Think of it as a virtual conferenece area, the way you carry yourself and whatever you say decides how people perceive you.

The post 6 Tips on How to use Linkedin for Personal Branding appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.