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Recipe of the Day: Whipping Up a Mean Batch of Social Media Updates

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Say you decided to start having a cookie after dinner every day.

(Because you’re just good to yourself that way.)

You probably wouldn’t bake one cookie every day, would you? Whisking together a few drops of egg, a few pinches of sugar, a sliver of butter, and a couple of chocolate chips so that you can bake a lonely little cookie doesn’t make much sense. You’d make a whole batch of cookies at the start of the week, get all the work out of the way, and then spend the next few days enjoying the fruits of your labor. (Well, not fruits, but you get it.)

Turns out, cookies aren’t the only thing you should whip up in batches. Preparing your social updates in batches can make your life a whole lot easier, too.

Living your life one status update at a time doesn’t make any more sense than baking the lonely cookie over and over. It means you have to start from scratch every single time – maybe not with raw ingredients, but with the mindset you put yourself in to accomplish the task.

It gets in the way of your schedule, because every time you want to share something, you have to set aside the time to write it and post it. You end up task-switching all the time, which can wreak havoc on your productivity without you even noticing.

Basically, it’s a total pain.

So what’s the trick to social batching? How do you measure out and prep everything you need ahead of time, so that you aren’t starting over from scratch every single day?

There are exactly TWO things you do on social media, and you can do them both in batches.

When it really comes down to it, pretty much everything you do on social comes down to one of two actions:

  1. Live interaction (replies, retweets, shares, and so on)
  2. Posting original updates (the things you share, whether it’s an update you wrote, a photo/video, or a link to someone else’s website)

Both of these are things you can do in batches, so you don’t have to do them constantly.

First, live interactions.

You can’t plan live interactions ahead of time, because you don’t know what other people are going to post in advance. (Unless you do, but please, keep those psychic visions on the down-low.)

You can, however, plan how much time you’re going to dedicate to live interactions in advance.

For example, it’s tempting to keep a tab open to Twitter all day, so you can jump back and forth and see what’s new. Whether it’s checking your notifications, looking for insightful new blog posts to read, or hunting down Twitter chats you can jump in on, the opportunity to distract yourself from work is always there, just one little tab away.

That’s why you have to come to terms with a harsh truth.

At any time of day or night, there are interesting things happening on social media. Things you would enjoy. Articles you’d like to read, conversations you’d like to join. But unless your one and only job is to monitor social media, and you somehow finagle your way out of requiring sleep on a daily basis, you will never, EVER be able to experience everything.

Check your FOMO at the door. On social media, missing out is an inevitability.

The only trick is to be okay with it, and budget your time realistically.

Instead of making your live time on social media something you use to fill all the gaps in your daily routine, make it a part of your daily routine. Set aside blocks of time throughout the day for checking social and interacting live, and stick to those times.

Respond to notifications, engage other users, find articles to share, retweet The Rock, do whatever – but do it on a schedule. Knock out as much as you can in batches, so the rest of the time, you’re not falling into those nasty task-switching habits that keep you oh-so-distracted from what you should be doing.

The Rock tweet

What you retweet is your business. Just find your material on a schedule.

That brings us to the OTHER thing you do on social media: post original updates.

You can’t post an update until you write it, though, so batching your social updates actually starts long before you even open a browser window.

Ready to whip up a great big batch of social updates that’ll last you all month? Here’s how to do it, step by step.

Recipe for the Perfect Batch of Social Updates

Every recipe has two parts: the ingredients and the instructions.

First up, the ingredients – these are your updates themselves, and you’ve gotta make ‘em from scratch.

Cookies with sprinkles

Is this blog post making anyone else really, really hungry?

Like any recipe, your ingredients can’t all be the same. You can’t make cookies with just a carton of eggs, or a bag of flour – you need a variety of different things. On social media, that means a variety of different update types, such as:

  • Links to your own content – Blog posts, videos, downloads, etc.
  • Other people’s content – Remember the 80/20 rule!
  • Shareable wisdom – Quotes, tips, and wit
  • Promotions – Contests, sales, newsletter signups, and more

These are just a few examples of the types of updates you probably share on a regular basis. (You might even break things down more – have separate categories for expert tips and shareable quotes, for example.)

Now, the instructions.

Say you end up with six or so categories – six types of updates that you routinely share.

Eventually, you’ll end up sharing some of those types more often than others – posting more links to other people’s content than you do to your own, for example – but for now, keep it simple and assume that you’re posting them all with the same frequency.

If you’re posting three updates a day, five days a week, that’s a pretty respectable number when you’re starting out. That makes 15 updates a week, or 60 a month.

60 updates a month comes down to 10 updates per category per month.

Not so bad, right?

And now you make the batch.

Once a month, sit down and write 10 updates per category. That’s it! 10 links to blog posts you think are interesting. (Shouldn’t be too hard to find, right?) 10 tips or quotes. 10 links to your own blog posts, and so on – and when you’re done, you’re done.

You take your big batch of updates, load them up into your scheduler of choice, and kick back – you now know that for the next four weeks, your social profiles are going to keep posting a steady stream of updates at all the right times, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

That gives you the freedom to schedule in your live interaction batches whenever you want – and since you’re not spending time every day thinking of new stuff to post, you can actually spend more time on live interaction than you were before. And let’s be honest – the live interaction is the fun part of all this anyway, isn’t it?

So take this recipe for managing your social media in batches, give it a try, and see how much less of a chore your social media management can be!

The post Recipe of the Day: Whipping Up a Mean Batch of Social Media Updates appeared first on Edgar.


Edgar Hits the Millions!

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Edgar's Millionth Update

Edgar’s a millionaire!

No, not that kind of millionaire. He’s a workin’ octopus.

This month, Edgar posted his one millionth status update to social media!

And he couldn’t have done it without every single one of his users. (Well, he could have, but it would have taken a really long time.)

Every day, Edgar posts more than 14,000 status updates, and hitting the big million within his first 9 months is pretty exciting.

So thanks to all you Edgar lovers out there who’ve made him your scheduler of choice – and here’s to the next million!

The post Edgar Hits the Millions! appeared first on Edgar.

Big Brand Trends for Social Customer Service: What You Need to Know

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever tweeted at a brand.

(Okay, put your hand down. We can’t actually see you.)

Still, as many as 80% of users have mentioned a brand in a tweet before – and the number of users turning to Twitter as a way of getting customer service is increasing.

The data wizards at Simply Measured recently conducted a study on Twitter customer service, and what they found can teach us a lot about what you should focus on the most – and what you shouldn’t worry about so much.

They studied the customer service Twitter handles for companies in the Interbrand 100 (the top brands in the world, basically) and put together their findings. You can download the report here – and if data’s your thing, you absolutely should – but in the meantime, let’s take a closer look at what they found, and what it means for you and your Twitter presence.

What you need to know about providing customer service on Twitter

Here’s what the statistics have to say:

1. People are looking for customer service on Twitter more and more

The number of Twitter mentions for big brand customer service handles was higher in early 2015 than at the same time in 2014 – a lot higher.

Twitter users mentioned these handles 41% more than they did in 2014, showing that people are using Twitter to get customer service considerably more often than they used to.

Year over year increase

Source: Simply Measured

Not only that, but the brands managing these accounts are stepping their game up, too – the number of responses to these tweets increased by 33%, showing that brands are working harder to keep up with the growing demand for customer service on social media.

When your customers try to get your help on social, and you don’t provide it, they notice. Make sure that you’re paying attention, and when people have questions or concerns, don’t just let them slide.

And how should you respond, exactly, when somebody needs help? Well, what do you think the top brands in the world are doing?

2. Brands have a wide variety of response strategies

While brands have plenty of different ways of responding to customer service queries on Twitter, not all of those methods are popular.

For example, only 5% of responses direct the user to call the company – and only 3% of responses direct the user to DM the brand on Twitter.

The most common responses? Directing the user to email (12% of replies), apologizing (15%), and directing the user to online resources (24%).

That last one is actually the most popular way to respond to users looking for customer service on Twitter, and with good reason. For one thing, Twitter’s limit on characters can make it frustratingly difficult to give clear directions, or answers to complicated problems. Directing your user to a resource that will answer their question means you can get as detailed as you need.

Additionally, it makes your job easier, because you can stop explaining the same thing over and over. (Why do you think most businesses have an FAQ page?)

For example, we maintain a massive database of guides, tutorials, and answers to frequently asked questions, so when our users need assistance, we can direct them to detailed answers in a snap. Video tutorials are another resource you might create, so you always have a quick and easy place to direct people who need assistance.

Setting up resources like these may seem like a big time commitment, but ultimately makes it easier (and faster) to provide the type of customer service your fans expect and appreciate.

3. Response times aren’t as fast as you might think – or fear

How quickly do you think the world’s top brands are responding to customer service queries on social media?

Keep in mind, these are huge, heavily-funded businesses with dedicated CS teams. They probably respond to most requests in what, 30 minutes? An hour?

Actually, these brands are responding to social CS queries a lot slower than you’d expect.

Nine out of ten responses to social customer service queries come within 24 hours, but in shorter periods of time, that number drops fast.

Less than half of all responses come within 4 hours. Less than a quarter of all responses come within 2 hours. Only 5% of responses come within an hour. Basically, even some of the biggest, most recognizable brands in the world have their limits.

And what does that mean for you and your brand?

For starters, timeliness does matter, and it matters a lot – but you may need to rethink your definition of just what “timeliness” is.

Would it be nice to respond to every customer service query on social media within minutes? Within an hour, even? Of course – but the reality is, even enormous brands with funding and resources out the wazoo can’t maintain that kind of pace.

That’s why providing responses to customer service queries in pre-scheduled batches is such a good idea. You’re still responding within the same time frame as most businesses – check in multiple times a day, if you want – but you aren’t allowing the fear of lingering questions to dictate your entire schedule.

Check in on social periodically, answer any questions that have accumulated since your last check, and move on. It’s easier than responding to every question as it rolls in, it’s better for your overall productivity, and it’s well within the standards set by the big brands.

4. Time zones and business hours affect everyone (so don’t drive yourself crazy)

Your customers can come from pretty much anywhere in the world – thanks, Internet! – but that may also make you feel like there are some pretty big gaps in your customer service routine.

Here at Edgar, for example, we know that we have customers in places like the UK and Australia – but does that mean we should have a 24-hour customer service team? Should you?

Turns out, if you’re not able to respond as quickly as usual outside of North American business hours, you’re not alone – not by a long shot.

The customer service Twitter handles analyzed in this study maintain their best response times during North American business hours, but outside that range, the times between customer query and brand response get pretty long.

Response times for customer queries posted to Twitter outside North American business hours can average as long as 7+ hours.

Business hours and response times

Source: Simply Measured

Even big brands can’t necessarily maintain the same standards 24/7. If you check your social notifications first thing in the morning and find that somebody’s question has gone unanswered since midnight, don’t beat yourself up for not being able to answer in the wee hours – it’s just not something most businesses have the resources for.

Key takeaways:

To recap, some of the big things to remember from this study:

  1. People look for customer service on Twitter more and more every year
  2. Businesses are making it easier to provide customer service on social by preparing outside help resources
  3. Response times don’t have to be immediate
  4. You don’t have to be present 24/7

Ultimately, this is one reason why writing and scheduling your usual, non-CS updates ahead of time comes in so handy. When you know that your usual stream of updates is loaded in advance and scheduled to post automatically, it frees up both the time and the mental real estate to take care of social customer service queries as needed.

Scheduling mistakes happen when brands forget that live engagement is part of the equation – that’s when things like customer service get sidelined. Your advantage is knowing that you’re going to spend time live time on social media one way or another – so you may as well set yourself up to spend that time in as valuable a way as possible. The more you do in advance, the more time you have for things like social customer service – and the data just goes to show that this is what more and more of your followers expect.

The post Big Brand Trends for Social Customer Service: What You Need to Know appeared first on Edgar.

Two Times You Should Give Your Audience What It Wants (And One You Shouldn’t)

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When you first stop and think about it, following a brand on social media doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

(On that note, you can find Edgar on Twitter right here!)

Seriously, though, why do it? You fast-forward through TV commercials. You click YouTube’s “Skip Ad” button literally the second it pops up. Why volunteer to have branded content show up in your social feeds?

That’s the question BuzzStream and Fractl recently posed to nearly 1000 respondents – and if you want to get more people to follow your brand on social media, you’ll definitely be interested in what the data has to say.

What can you do to make more people want to follow you on social? What can you do to make them unfollow you? And what’s the fatal mistake you might be tempted to make by paying TOO close attention to these stats?

Let’s break this data down into three major lessons.

1. Why people follow brands on social media

First things first. What is it about a brand that makes any given consumer want them showing up in their social feed?

Here’s what the survey found as the top responses:

Why people follow brands on social media

Source: BuzzStream

The number one reason people gave for following a brand on social media is that they like them.

But what does that mean? How do you make your brand more likable?

Likability is predicated on two things: your brand’s practical value and your audience’s emotional connection.

Think of it as a left brain, right brain sort of thing.

The left brain’s all about the practical value of your brand – it’s where you do all your number-crunching and analytical thinking. Because face it: we like things that bring value to our lives. If a brand creates products or gives you information that you can use, you’re going to form a positive assessment of that brand. (And on the other hand, if you’re disappointed by a brand’s value over and over, you probably won’t like them very much.)

The right brain is where creativity and emotions live – and emotions play a huge part in your brand’s likability. This is where your brand’s identity enters the equation. How do you communicate with your audience? What’s your style, your voice? This is especially important if you’re the face of your own brand, like a public speaker, a coach, or an author – it’s the question of who you are. (Actor Vin Diesel turned himself into one of the most popular living celebrities on Facebook by sharing his softer side with fans.)

Nobody can dictate your brand’s identity, but this much is certain: your brand can’t be all things for all people. And that means some people just aren’t going to like you.

(Cue the sad music.)

Instead of trying to make yourself as appealing as possible to as many people as possible, then, create a distinct and consistent voice for your brand. For example, is your brand:

  • Optimistic?
  • Sardonic?
  • Casual?
  • Techno-speaky?
  • For beginners?
  • For experts?

Figure out what defines your brand, and who your audience is, and stick with it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a little bit of everything mixed in there – and that ruins your flavor. The majority of people only follow one to four brands on social, so just showing up to the party isn’t enough – you’ve gotta prove your value and forge that emotional connection if you want to get followers.

And what about keeping those followers?

2. Why people unfollow brands on social media

While something like likability is open to some interpretation, the reasons people give for unfollowing brands on social media are a lot more concrete – and that makes it easier for you to stop followers from jumping ship.

45% of people say the thing most likely to make them unfollow a brand is excessive self-promotion.

Easy enough to avoid – after all, sharing a variety of different update types is the foundation of any good social strategy. If you followed a brand and found that they only ever shared their own promos, you’d bail, too.

More than a third of people say that automation fails will make them unfollow a brand.

Specifically, automated messaging, like this:

Progressive automated social media fail

Source: Adweek

In this example from August 2012, Progressive’s automated responses to tweets were a major contributing factor in a scandal that sent their reputation into a serious nosedive.

Progressive reputation graph

Source: Business Insider

The lesson?

You can automate your social updates, but you should never automate your social interactions. People will notice, and they won’t like what they see. (Besides, interacting with people live is the fun part of social media. Why hand that part over to a robot?)

(Bonus round: Nearly 1 in 5 people say the most likely reason they have for unfollowing a brand on social is poor hashtag usage. Hashtag responsibly, people.)

 

So you know why people follow brands, and you know why they unfollow brands.

But this study also produced some data that could get you into serious trouble on social media if you take it at face value.

If you’re not careful, a study like this can encourage you to make a fatal mistake.

What’s the deal? Do the numbers lie? Let’s take a closer look.

3. How many times you should post on social media per day

You’ve learned how to find the best times to post on social media, but how many times per day do consumers expect you to post?

Why is this the one time you shouldn’t listen to what your audience is saying?

According to this study, the vast majority of consumers think you should only post on social media once or twice per day, per network.

They’re wrong.

Here’s why.

The average consumer might not want to see your brand’s updates more than once or twice a day, but that does not translate to you only updating once or twice a day. Because most of the people in your audience don’t see any given update at all.

Less than half of your Twitter followers log on even once per day. Less than a third of your followers log on more than once per day. And when a tweet only has 24 minutes or less to get half the engagement it will ever see, what are the odds that many of your followers are seeing it?

Or look at Facebook, where the number of people who see an update is determined by ever-changing algorithms. As of February 2015, the average organic reach for a Facebook post is down to just 7 percent – not a very large swath of your audience.

So while your audience may think you should only be posting once or twice a day, if you take their advice, you’re hardly going to reach anyone in your audience at all. Those same people are likely to never see your updates, because you’re posting so few, and each one has such a limited audience.

It means that taking statistics like this at face value can be a fatal mistake.

(When you look below the surface, though? That’s where the real lesson is lurking.)

So remember these three things:

If you want to attract more followers on social media, and keep the ones you get, you have to:

  1. Be likable. Prove your value, find your voice, and stay consistent. (Not just on social, either – be consistent across all your communication.)
  2. Share a wide variety of update types, and be authentic. Automate what you can, but don’t try to automate personal connections.
  3. Post regularly, because most people don’t actually see any given update.

They aren’t the only rules you need to keep in mind when you’re marketing on social, but they’re important ones – and if you break them, you’ll find out just how important they really are!

The post Two Times You Should Give Your Audience What It Wants (And One You Shouldn’t) appeared first on Edgar.

Building a Social Fanbase: What You Can Learn from Baskin-Robbins, Aristotle, and Three Important Questions

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You’re used to people asking questions about you and your business.

How do you compare to your competitors?

Are you worth the cost?

Is your customer service any good?

Whether they’re asking you directly or using social media to gather opinions, before people feel confident enough to do business with you, they’re gonna need some answers.

And so should you.

The majority of people only follow one to four brands on social media, so if you want to be one of those brands, you need to know your followers (and potential followers) as well as they know you – or better.

The social media analytics experts at Simply Measured recently conducted a study of 1 million Twitter users who follow brands on social, and learned a lot about what makes them tick. You can download the study here, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at what they discovered, and how it can answer some of the most important questions you have about your audience.

How do you get more followers on social media?

Because let’s be honest – who doesn’t want a higher follower count? Building your audience on social has a real snowball effect, because the more people you’re reaching, the more opportunities you have to get shared and get your brand in front of even more people.

Generally, people find your brand on social in one of three ways:

  1. They know and like your brand
  2. Somebody they follow shares your content
  3. The social network they use recommends your profile

First, knowing and liking your brand.

It takes more than brand familiarity to get someone to follow you on social – it even takes more than somebody being your customer. Remember again that most people only follow one to four brands, so somebody knowing who you are isn’t enough to make them want to follow you.

For that, you need them to know you and to like you, and that means liking both who you are and what you post.

Here’s an example.

Baskin-Robbins makes ice cream. Ice cream is awesome. And hey, ice cream is photogenic, too – so Baskin-Robbins has over 89,000 followers on Instagram.

(Admit it – you totally want some now.)

Now, let’s look at General Electric. GE is a big, faceless conglomerate corporation. They don’t offer 31 different flavors of hard-packed bliss. (They don’t even offer rum raisin.) There’s nothing cute or cuddly about them.

But General Electric has 181,000 followers on Instagram – more than twice as many as Baskin-Robbins. Why? Not only do they share photos of their more impressive creations being designed and built, like jet engines, but they post inspirational quotes about the nature of creativity, innovation, and progress – topics that are appealing whether or not GE manufactured your microwave oven, and that reinforce a brand identity that endears GE to its followers.

GE is engineering a brand image on social that’s about not just what they do, but what they stand for – and those universally-appealing values have attracted a lot of followers. (More so than appealing solely to your sweet tooth.)

Use social media to establish and maintain a strong brand identity, so the people familiar with you become the people who like you.

The second way new people find you on social media: someone they follow shares your content.

When your followers share your content, it exposes your brand to an audience that might otherwise never see what you’re posting – and those are all people who might become followers themselves.

(Want people to share your stuff more often? Try this blog post about the five reasons people share content online.)

Finally, new people find you on social media because the social network they’re using recommends you.

When you log on to Twitter, for example, you probably notice a little box to the left of your feed that looks like this:

Twitter Who to Follow Suggestions

Twitter recommends accounts that it thinks will appeal to you – but how does it determine what those accounts are? And why does it matter if you show up on that list? (After all, this is only one of three ways that new people will find your brand on social, isn’t it?)

The median total number of accounts that someone follows on Twitter is 127.

In fact, according to the survey conducted by Simply Measured, almost 1/4 of Twitter users follow 50 accounts or fewer – so the sooner you get discovered, the better.

How do you get a social network to recommend your brand to its users?

Unfortunately, there’s no secret to getting recommended without paying. (You can’t just fill out a form, or send Twitter’s home office an Edible Arrangement.) For example, Twitter describes its algorithm that determines recommendations as a program that looks for “a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals.”

That isn’t the most helpful description in the world, probably. But it’s also not hard to guess at what some of those signals, ingredients, and indicators are.

Consistent tweeting and strong engagement rates are signs of an active social presence, so don’t allow your account to go stale for long stretches of time. Post regularly, and carve out time in your schedule for live interaction, like responding to your followers and participating in Twitter chats. Share content that attracts engagement (like those shares we talked about) and clickthroughs to your website.

A strong social presence indicates to the network that you’re worth following, and that can help you earn recommendations. (Similar to how Facebook’s algorithms reward high engagement rates with higher organic reach.)

Now that you know a little more about getting new followers, it’s time to get a better understanding of just who those people are.

How do you better understand your followers?

Aristotle probably wasn’t talking about social media when he said, “The fool tells me his reasons – the wise man persuades me with my own.” (Probably.) But if you needed a compelling argument for why you should know your audience, that’s as good as any.

The better you know your followers, the better you can communicate with them. What are their interests? Who do they listen to besides you? What sorts of references would they appreciate, what sort of language do they prefer?

The social networks you use have built-in ways to get to know your followers.

For example, the Followers tab in your Twitter analytics has all kinds of information about them, like:

  • Where they live
  • Who else they follow
  • Their top interests
  • Their gender breakdown

This cross-section of information makes it a lot easier to get to know your audience, and predict what they might be looking for from you. It might also reveal connections you wouldn’t necessarily expect – for example, Simply Measured found that Starbucks shares 16% of its Twitter followers with H&M (considerably more than its overlap with any other fashion brands featured in this study).

Your Facebook Insights tab provides a similar set of data:

What’s particularly notable about Facebook’s data is that it shows you not only your own stats, but how they compare to the rest of the social network – for example, though the majority of Facebook users are men, the majority of Edgar’s fans are women.

You can actually do a little more sleuthing to find information about your Facebook fans, too – here’s how.

Just like Twitter shows you who else the people in your audience follow, Facebook will show you what other pages your fans have liked. It only takes three steps:

  1. Go to your Facebook page and click on the “About” tab.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see your Facebook Page ID number. Copy it.
  3. Copy and paste this URL: https://www.facebook.com/search/XXXXX/likers/pages-liked and paste your Facebook Page ID number in place of the Xs.

That will show you a list like this:

While it isn’t as tidy as Twitter’s analytics, it does allow you to scroll through and develop a clearer picture of who/what your Facebook fans are interested in. (And remember that your breakdown of fans on one social network can be drastically different from on another.)

Don’t forget, too, that you can always learn more about your audience the old-fashioned way: by asking. Asking your followers questions on social media helps you get to know their interests, challenges, and priorities, and that means you can tailor your content all the more effectively.

Even once you know where new followers come from and who those followers are, there’s still one big question you should be asking:

How active are your followers?

You already know the statistics regarding how often most people log on to Twitter, and while this new study takes a closer look at just how active users are once they’re visiting, the data isn’t a whole lot more encouraging.

Of the users studied, only 25% tweet once a day or more – and 48% of users don’t even tweet as often as once a week.

The lesson? Your Twitter followers may be active, but they aren’t that active – and that means you can’t make any assumptions as to how many people will see or interact with a status update.

Your best course of action is to post consistently and monitor your analytics, so you can find patterns in what performs the best and when. Determine your own best times for posting certain types of content, and post at those times regularly – because while you can use your statistics as a guide, you can never guarantee how many people will see any given post.

Answer these questions, and you’ll find that building and maintaining a community of followers is easier than you thought.

The better prepared you are to attract new fans, keep the ones you have, and share the right content at the right times, the easier it will be for you to become one of those very few brands that someone chooses to follow on social!

The post Building a Social Fanbase: What You Can Learn from Baskin-Robbins, Aristotle, and Three Important Questions appeared first on Edgar.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Beating Writer’s Block, Writing Amazing Blog Posts, and Driving Crazy Traffic to Your Website

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Who knew blogging was gonna be so much work?

It seemed so easy back when you started. A post a week? No biggie! Let’s do this thing!

But eventually, you start running out of ideas. You start having more urgent things you need to deal with. All of a sudden, writing that regular post is a Sisyphean task you’d do just about anything to get out of.

It doesn’t have to be such a chore.

Writing an awesome blog post and getting people to actually read it does NOT have to be the worst part of your week – you just have to approach it with the right mindset. Whether you feel like you’re running out of ideas, your headlines are too boring, or you can’t figure out how to get more traffic from social media, this walkthrough of our process will help you get un-stuck and publishing posts like a pro.

Why “I don’t know what to write about” is the worst excuse ever

Some writers like to pretend that writer’s block is a thing that doesn’t exist.

99% of them are liars. (The other 1% are Terry Pratchett, who published more than 75 books and thereby earned the right.)

Everyone suffers from writer’s block at some point, so when you sit down in front of that blank Word doc and have no idea what to write yet another blog post about, you’re not alone – and it’s not an excuse.

Overcoming writer’s block isn’t passive – it’s something you have to put work into.

Most people, when they don’t know what to write, act like they do when they want a snack. You go to the fridge not really knowing what you want, idly look inside for a minute, then close the door without having chosen anything.

Then you do it again in five minutes, just in case something magically appeared when you weren’t looking.

Ideas don’t magically appear – they come from somewhere, and you have to find them.

The blinking cursor on the blank page isn’t your friend, and it’s not going to help you figure out what to write. You can ask Clippy if you want, but trust me, he doesn’t know jack.

Clippy the MS Word assistant

If a brilliant idea just so happens to come to you all on its own, and you’re feeling inspired right off the bat, then great – but don’t trick yourself into believing that this is how it’s always supposed to work. (Unless you want to start off every blog post by doing this.)

Adaptation Writer's Block

Instead, start by asking yourself a few of these questions, which can help point you in the right direction:

What’s going on in your world?

It sounds silly at first, but it’s easy to forget: what you do is special. Your business immerses you in a culture that most people know very little about, and probably don’t have the time or means to understand all on their own. (If I asked my parents what a Facebook algorithm is, they’d probably guess that it’s some kind of dance.)

So don’t take for granted that you’ve got your ear to the ground! You are your readers’ person on the inside – the one with the scoop on everything going down that they might want to know. You keep up with the latest studies, news, and trends so that they don’t have to.

Here’s an example. We read a lot about social media around these parts. Major headlines, new data and studies, trends, you name it. Back in January, we came across a statistic we thought was pretty interesting, and wrote a blog post explaining why it matters.

Within two weeks, it was our most-shared blog post of all time.

Is it because it was the best blog post we ever wrote? Probably not. But it was about something that most people probably weren’t aware of, despite the fact that it’s relevant to their interests.

You know what’s going on in your industry in a way that your readers don’t. If you’re a career counselor, you know what HR professionals look for in a resume today. If you’re a dog dietician, you know what the latest studies are saying about proper nutrition. If you’re an interior designer, you know whether mid-century modern is in or out right now.

Share what you know and learn with your readers, and bring something to the table along with it. Offer your expert opinion, have a unique point of view. Analyze. Agree with what you read, or disagree, it doesn’t matter – you’re an authority in your field, so act like it.

What do you know how to do?

Remember participating in Take Your Child to Work Day?

My dad’s a pharmacist in a hospital, which means part of his job is mixing and filling IV bags with whatever narcotic cocktail a patient may need.

Now to him, this is probably the most mundane task imaginable. The number of times he does this in a week is probably somewhere between one and two billion. But when I was a kid on Take Your Child to Work Day, watching him do this was fascinating, because I’d never seen it done before! I had no idea what this process was like, and that made it really, really interesting.

The things that seem elementary to you can be groundbreaking for your readers, so don’t write them off.

Over at Social Media Examiner, a task like optimizing images for social sharing is about as routine as it comes. They know this topic inside and out – they must do it a dozen times a week (but more on that later). That didn’t stop them from writing about it, though, because they know that their blog’s readers don’t necessarily have the same depth of knowledge on the subject that they do. (And consequently, this post racked up more than 7,000 shares in under two weeks.)

The things you know, and that you know how to do? Not everyone knows those same things, so share your expertise. Just because you wouldn’t need a particular guide or how-to article doesn’t mean that your readers don’t – in fact, it could be quite the opposite.

What have you learned?

There’s a reason 70% of consumers look at a product review before making a purchase – we prefer concrete truths to guesses and hypothetical situations.

While offering your readers insights into the things they should try is valuable, giving an inside look at what happened when you or someone else actually did it can be even better.

Just look at a few headlines from Copy Hackers:

There’s a reason they’re one of the best resources online for anyone who wants to write better marketing copy. Every single one of these promises a story, and simply put, stories are interesting. (You’ll never tuck a child into bed and have them ask you to tell them a blog post.) This is your version of ripped from the headlines – a true tale that taught you a valuable lesson about, well, whatever it is that you do!

The trick, of course, is to think like Aesop – every story has a moral. The hare learns that slow and steady wins the race, the lion is rescued by the mouse to whom he showed mercy, and the boy who cried wolf gets his lying keister ripped to pieces – these stories have endured for literally thousands of years in part because they teach valuable lessons.

When Help Scout wrote a blog post about their experience building a remote company culture, it wasn’t just a story about themselves – they made its lessons relevant and applicable to their readers. You find out not just what happened to them, but what they learned from it, and how those lessons may apply to you and your own business. So share what you know, what you’ve tried, what you’ve experienced – even the times you’ve failed – but make sure that your readers can apply what they learn to themselves, too.

What do your readers want?

Still stumped? Just look at what’s worked before.

For example, we’ve noticed in the past that blog posts about Instagram are popular for both traffic and shares – so we revisit the topic on occasion, and it usually works out pretty well.

Keep track of how your blog posts perform – traffic, shares, comments – so when writer’s block strikes, you can take a quick look at what’s worked before and use it as inspiration. (For example, we maintain a spreadsheet that collects these stats on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, so we always know what’s striking a chord with our readers.)

Now that you know what to write about, just write it!

Wait, no. Actually, don’t do that.

Ever been to a wedding where the best man obviously didn’t plan his toast ahead of time? You don’t want to be that guy – the one rambling and nervously clutching his champagne flute while the audience wonders when he’s going to get to the point.

Be the writer who plans ahead, and knows exactly what they want to say and how they’re going to say it. Even bestselling authors like J.K. Rowling rely on outlines that they plot out in advance, so that they know how all the pieces will fall into place before they start actually writing:

Order of the Phoenix outline

Rowling’s outline for “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”
Source: Flavorwire

Granted, your blog post probably won’t be 896 pages long, so your outline doesn’t have to be quite so in-depth. Even if you just take 10 or 15 minutes to scribble down a few bullet points before you start writing, you’ll at least have an idea of how you want to structure your post.

What points do you want to get across? How should those points be organized? What examples, stats, or links do you want to make sure you don’t forget to add while you’re writing? When you figure these things out first and plot them in an outline, the actual writing process feels like a lot less work – it’s like googling directions before you leave the house, instead of just assuming you’ll figure out how to get where you’re going based on instinct.

Now you can finally write this thing!

You know what you want to say, and you know how you want to say it – it’s time to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) and actually get this thing written.

What you write in your blog post is up to you, but there’s something very important you should do after you write it:

Don’t publish it.

Seriously, put it away. Walk the dog. Sleep on it. Do pretty much anything except publish that post you just wrote, because it’s not ready.

There’s a reason we always write our blog posts at least a week in advance – it gives us time to step away and come back to look at them with fresh eyes. (Case in point: I wrote “we always right our blog posts” and didn’t catch the typo until two days after I finished the first draft.)

You’ve never read anything in your life that was published after one draft. Not a blog post, or a newspaper article, or the back of a cereal box – everything gets revised before it gets published, and your work should be no different.

Science shows us that the more familiar your work is to you, the less likely you are to catch an error.

You’re likelier to miss not just embarrassing, obvious stuff like typos, but actual errors in structure and logic, too – basically, you could publish your post without realizing that you left out something important (even if you outlined first).

De-familiarize yourself with your post before you publish. Get your mind thinking about something else, then come back. (It may even help to approach it in a new context. For example, print it out and proofread by hand – this helps eliminate the subconscious biases that can make you overlook errors.)

After you’ve polished, proofread, revised, rewritten, washed, rinsed, and repeated, it’s time to write an amazing headline. Writing headlines is so important that you can find dozens of articles dedicated solely to that task, and you should probably read them. As advertising legend David Ogilvy put it, when you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent 80 cents out of your dollar – it’s arguably the most important piece of the equation!

Every time we write a blog post, we come up with at least 15 different headlines, then choose the one we like best. Sometimes they’re all drastically different, and sometimes only a few words change between them. Sometimes the best headline is the one we write last, sometimes it’s the one we write first. Give yourself options – you’re likelier to surprise yourself than you may realize.

Once you’ve got your words all sorted out, don’t forget to give your blog posts a visibility boost with images.

In the context of the post itself, images break up those massive walls of text and can provide handy dandy visual aids, like in this post from Copy Hackers:

Copy Hackers visual aid

(And yes, that’s an image in a blog post of an image in a blog post. Blog-ception.)

When you’re adding images, though, don’t just think about how they’ll look in the context of the blog post – think about how they’ll contribute to your social media visibility.

Adding a photo to a tweet can increase its retweets by 35%. Link posts get the best organic reach on Facebook, and those pull images from the destination URL. You don’t need fancy schmancy image editing software to put these things together, either – you can do it all on your own for free.

An eye-catching image can come from anywhere – Social Media Examiner, for example, creates a header image to go with almost every single one of its posts:

Social Media Examiner banner

When they share that the link to that post on social media, then, they can use that image to increase its visibility and emphasize the title – because you remember just how important headlines are.

But speaking of social media, your work isn’t quite done.

It’s time to actually get some readers!

Obviously, social media is hugely important to driving traffic to your blog. It broadcasts the link out to your followers, and when they share it, it puts your website in front of people who have maybe never even heard of it before. (Hence why those statistics about increasing retweets with images are so important.)

But how many times can/should you promote your blog post? Once or twice, something like that?

Promote your blog post frequently. Promote ALL your blog posts frequently.

Statistically speaking, whether you’re posting on Facebook or Twitter, most of your fans aren’t going to see any given update. The majority of them don’t sign on to Twitter even once a day, and at the very most, your link posts will reach less than a third of your Facebook followers.

If you only share a link a few times, you’re only hitting a teeny tiny segment of your audience – and frankly, if you’re writing a blog post and not sharing it with many of your followers, you’re wasting your time.

Career Contessa found that by posting a steady stream of links to their blog posts (among other social updates, of course), they increased their Twitter referrals by 655%. It wasn’t because they were writing more blog posts – it was because they made the most of the ones they already had.

We do the same thing here – unsurprisingly, using Edgar. Edgar allows us to write, upload, and save our blog-related updates all under one category, then schedule when we want updates from that category to be shared on social media. Every time we write a post, it gets added to the Library, and when the time comes for Edgar to share a blog post on social, he chooses one, shares it, then shuffles it back in at the bottom of the deck to be shared again at a later date.

Edgar social schedule

A small section of one of our social media posting schedules.

You can do this manually if you prefer, but the important thing is that you do it at all. When you promote your blog posts again and again over time, you make sure that all the work you put into writing them doesn’t go to waste, and you make it easy for brand new people to discover your work.

Hey look! You did it!

That’s all there is to it – now, wasn’t that easy? So remember, when it comes to blogging:

  1. Brainstorm up a killer idea
  2. Outline your main points
  3. Write, walk away, revise
  4. Craft some irresistible headlines and shareworthy images
  5. Post and promote (and promote, and promote)

Follow those steps, and your blogging routine will actually feel like it’s worth the time and effort!

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Beating Writer’s Block, Writing Amazing Blog Posts, and Driving Crazy Traffic to Your Website appeared first on Edgar.

Why Smart People and Popular Brands Get Publicly Shamed on Social Media (and How to Avoid It)

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Think you’re safe from being publicly shamed for a social media faux pas?

Tell that to Justine Sacco, whose tweet to only 170 followers launched a firestorm that derailed her career and made her an international pariah.

She’s not an outlier, either. From Trevor Noah to Britt McHenry, the social media shame machine is always on the lookout for fresh meat – anyone who’s said or done something distasteful, and thereby deserves to be locked up in the village stocks where they can be publicly judged and ridiculed.

Locked in the Stocks

It’s one of every social marketer’s worst nightmares, especially because every new victim of the shame machine has one major thing in common:

They never saw it coming.

Whether they’re celebrities who are used to being in the public eye or just everyday people like Sacco, the common denominator is that they don’t think it could happen to them – and they pay for it dearly, typically with their jobs and their dignity.

So how do you avoid being caught by the shame machine? What do its victims do wrong, and how can you act differently to make sure it doesn’t happen to you?

Here’s what you have to remember.

There’s no such thing as personal privacy

There’s no reasonable expectation of privacy on the Internet.

None.

(At all.)

Just because you keep things 100% professional on your business’s social accounts does not mean you’re free to post whatever you want on your personal ones. People are going to find you, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Even if your personal profiles are on lockdown – your tweets are protected, your Facebook profile is visible only to friends – the things you say and share can still be screencapped and blasted all over the Internet before you even know it. No matter how much you want to trust that your cousin or your high school pals or your D&D club will respect your privacy and not share privileged status updates with the world, you’re better off assuming that if you say it online, it’s fair game – to anyone.

Protected Tweets Screen

Hiding your personal updates from people you don’t know doesn’t mean they’ll never get out.

With that in mind…

If a joke or a comment needs context, just don’t make it

They say that a joke isn’t funny when you have to explain it, and there’s no place where that’s more true than on social media.

Take Sacco, for example, whose infamous, apparently-racist Twitter joke was meant as satire. Because Twitter is more or less designed to take things out of context, the tongue-in-cheek comment she intended to be seen only by her friends was taken at face value by millions of strangers in just a few hours.

Or Ethan Czahor, who earlier this year was forced to resign from Jeb Bush’s political campaign when offensive tweets from his past began circulating. Czahor claims they were exercises in joke-writing dating back to his days studying improv, but without that context, they come off as straight-faced and offensive. (Not that the “it was just a joke” excuse is a Get Out of Jail Free card anyway – but more on that later.)

Ethan Czahor Offensive Tweet

This is actually one of the least offensive of Czahor’s tweets, which he couldn’t delete before they were screencapped and shared en masse.
Source: Buzzfeed

If you’re on the fence about sharing a particular update with people who know you, and who you’re sure will understand you mean no offense, ask yourself – what would someone who doesn’t know you think? With no context, no background, and no knowledge of who you are or what you believe, what’s the worst they could assume? (Hint: If you’re asking yourself this question, it’s probably a good indicator that what you’re thinking of posting is riskier than it’s worth.)

You don’t get a free pass on stuff from the distant past, either. The dicey tweets that lost Czahor his job in politics dated back five years or more. Same with comedian Trevor Noah, who learned that offensive jokes he’d tested out on Twitter years ago left him vulnerable to criticism today. Your digital footprint goes back a while, so if you’re a public figure – or you expect to become one – you should probably give it a look.

Check the attitude

No way around it – the Internet can be a pretty snarky place. Heck, the way it encourages snap judgements and pithy remarks is one of the reasons social shaming is such a phenomenon.

It’s your job to not give in to that temptation.

Some brands, like DiGiorno and Denny’s, have built their social reputations on oddball humor, snarkiness, and gentle jabs – but it’s difficult to pull off, and can go disastrously when the jokes don’t land. (There’s a reason DiGiorno appears again later in this post as an example of what not to do.)

DiGiorno Twitter Burn

DiGiorno’s critical attitude toward delivery is integral toward its brand identity – a tweet like this is something they’re uniquely suited to get away with.

When you’re using social professionally, you have to learn to put a cork in some of your beautiful zingers. Does that mean you can’t have fun? Of course not – Edgar’s Twitter profile certainly isn’t serious all the time. But if you don’t maintain a consistent filter, you can easily cross the line between keeping it light and being unprofessional.

For example, using your professional profile to criticize other companies can cast you in a severely negative light. If you went to dinner with a prospective client, you would probably try not to complain, or badmouth other businesses – so why would you do that on social media, where your audience is significantly larger? If you would feel embarrassed saying something out loud to a room full of strangers you want to impress, you probably shouldn’t say it on social, no matter how much you may believe it.

Hashtag surf with caution

Unfortunately, even a good-natured update can go horribly wrong – so you have to stay alert.

We said we’d come back to DiGiorno, didn’t we? Their official profile typically excels at offering pizza-themed commentary on whatever topic Twitter users are posting about, whether it’s March Madness or “The Sound of Music.” In late 2014, though, the company bit off more than it could chew by accidentally bringing pizza jokes to the table for a conversation about domestic violence.

The tweet was quickly deleted, and the company’s mea culpa was swift and sincere – but it was still an embarrassing error. Entenmann’s made the same mistake just a few years prior when they tweeted using the trending hashtag #NotGuilty, not realizing that they’d joined a conversation about the verdict in a murder trial.

Entenmann's Twitter Fail

This isn’t what you want your Google search results to look like.

With more than 5700 tweets being posted every second, the pressure to act quickly or get left behind can feel overwhelming – but that’s also when mistakes like these happen, and the brands responsible for them are deservedly taken to task.

If you’re going to join a conversation on social media, get the facts first. It takes all of 10 seconds to click on a hashtag and see how it’s being used – and that’s a lot easier to handle than the potential fallout if you use one inappropriately.

Reduce your risk of mistakes

No matter how careful you want to be, though, there’s a big difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it – and good intentions alone won’t keep you safe if you get caught up in the social shame machine.

If you want to avoid mistakes on social, you need to have fewer balls in the air.

Juggling gets harder the more balls you’re using, and social media is no different. The more work you pile on for yourself, the more you have to keep track of, and the likelier you are to start making mistakes and letting balls hit the floor.

Juggling the Planets

Whether juggling social media duties or the planets, professionals tend to make things look easier than they are.

One of the easiest ways to avoid the type of task overload that leads to mistakes like these is to write and schedule updates ahead of time – if it doesn’t need to be posted live, then don’t post it live.

The average person makes it up as they go along on social media – they think of something they’d like to share, and they post it on Facebook or Twitter right then and there. And because that’s how you’ve learned to use social networks as an individual, it’s tempting to want to use them that way in a professional capacity, too.

But think of this: when a politician gives a speech, did they plan everything they wanted to say and write it out ahead of time, or do they just take the podium and wing it? When someone has to give a presentation to their boss, do they prepare notes in advance, or do they just make it up as they go along?

Everything you do in your professional life is planned, because winging it leads to mistakes. And as you’ve seen, mistakes on social media make you a target.

Imagine your social media updates as falling into one of two categories – the things you’re going to post no matter what, and the things you can’t predict (like replies, or tweets that include a trending hashtag).

Palm Reading Diagram

You can’t predict everything you’ll want to post on social – but you can predict a lot.

The first category is things that you can plan, write, and schedule ahead of time – things like blog links, tips, quotes, jokes – whatever it is that you usually have to take time out of your day to post. By scheduling those updates in advance, you free up all the time they would normally take out of your daily schedule.

All that spare time means your updates from the second category – the unpredictable, live posts – are going to be better. You have more time to spend writing them, and more time to engage live with your followers and in trending conversations. You’ve essentially cut your daily social workload in half (at least), so you have way fewer balls in the air and are a lot less likely to make mistakes.

And if you DO make a mistake?

Everybody screws up sometimes – the good news is, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

The best thing you can do to avoid being eaten alive by the social shame machine? Own up to it and try to move on.

That example from before, about DiGiorno’s poorly-chosen hashtag? They deleted the tweet immediately (obviously a good idea), but then went on to personally apologize to everyone who’d been offended. They didn’t skirt the issue, either – they admitted that they goofed, and issued heartfelt apologies.

Compare that to Progressive, who infamously dealt with their own social media critics by issuing uniform, tone-deaf auto-replies. Guess how that went.

When you try to excuse what you did wrong, pretend it never happened, or issue insincere apologies, you inevitably do more harm than good – best to just own your mistake and keep moving forward. It might not keep you out of the shame machine entirely, but it can stop a situation from getting out of hand before you become another cautionary tale.

The post Why Smart People and Popular Brands Get Publicly Shamed on Social Media (and How to Avoid It) appeared first on Edgar.

Twitter Changed Its DM Rules – Here’s What It Means, and Why You Should Care

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A few weeks ago, Twitter introduced some big changes to the way its Direct Messages (DMs) work – and it can affect your social marketing and customer service routines in a big way.

Just not necessarily for the better.

Because as we’ll explain, the changes to Twitter’s DM system can give you a lot more power as far as contacting people goes, and vice versa, but with great power comes great…how does that go, again? (We’ll think of it eventually.)

So, what’s different?

First things first: let’s cover how DMs used to work.

DMs are Twitter’s private messages, and their policy until a few weeks ago was that you could only send a DM to a user who was already following you. This meant that if you were following Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he could send you a DM personally thanking you for downloading his hit single with Wyclef Jean on iTunes – but you couldn’t DM him to ask for an autograph unless he followed you back.

It Doesn't Matter music video

“It Doesn’t Matter” was a bit ahead of its time.

While this was a great system for preventing harassment – The Rock can only sign so many autographs, after all – it presented a potentially huge roadblock for anyone trying to provide customer service. If a customer wanted to DM you with a private question, they couldn’t do it unless you followed them.

Not anymore.

Now, on your Security and privacy settings page, you can opt in to receive DMs from anyone on Twitter, whether you follow them or not – and other users can do the same.

You should go ahead and enable this feature.

New Twitter DM Security Settings

The default setting is “off,” so unless you go in and change it yourself, you still won’t be able to receive DMs from anyone you don’t follow. While this may make sense for a personal account, when it comes to your business, you ought to go ahead and switch it on – all it does is make it easier for your fans and customers to reach you, and that’s rarely a bad thing.

I automate my social media – should I automate my DMs, too?

As more and more users opt in to this feature, you’ll theoretically be able to send DMs to a much wider audience.

Did you catch that “theoretically” in there?

Sending too many DMs is a classic blunder, and a surefire way to alienate your fans. There are programs and apps, for example, that allow you to auto-DM Twitter users – and with this policy change, there are sure to be more popping up – but that doesn’t mean you should do it.

As of a few short years ago, sending auto-DMs on Twitter led to a 245% increase in unfollows. As of 2014, auto-DMs were the #1 reason given by Twitter users for unfollowing someone.

Twitter Auto DM Unfollow Statistic

Convinced it’s a bad idea? You should be.

Sending automated DMs to anyone – follower or not – is spammy and insincere. DMs are for genuine, one-on-one communication, not robo-messaging, so don’t abuse your new ability to message way more people than you were once able to.

That means no skeezy sales stuff, either.

Email marketing’s value to both businesses and consumers is pretty well-documented at this point. Generally, consumers are accustomed to receiving lots of marketing emails, and those emails can pack serious ROI for the people who send them.

The same cannot be said for private messages on social media.

DMs are generally reserved for private, personal conversation – and until recently, the fact that you couldn’t send them to non-followers was the perfect demonstration of that. They aren’t the preferred method for marketers to send their promotions, and such being the case, they aren’t the preferred method for consumers to receive them, either.

DMs are poorly suited for marketing your brand. Like cold-calling someone on their home phone, an aggressive, one-on-one tactic like this demonstrates that you’re more interested in seizing opportunities than in respecting someone’s boundaries.

So what ARE DMs for?

DMs are perfect for providing social customer service – they allow you to engage with someone discreetly, making the conversation more private and organic than a series of updates tagged with each other’s name.

Among other things, though, providing customer service means engaging in a way that suits the customer, and that means deferring to their terms.

While you can invite someone to DM you, leave the decision to do it up to them.

For example, if you need details that a customer might not feel comfortable sharing out in the open on Twitter, you can suggest that they send you a DM. (Remember, too, that your customers might not be as well-versed in social as you are. They may not have realized that DMs were an option.)

Twitter DM Invitation

DMs are perfect when you want to protect someone else’s privacy.

Not only does this leave the ball in their court and give them the freedom to choose how best to contact you – they may decide to email sensitive info, instead, for example – but it also shows other users that the situation is being handled.

Because Twitter exchanges are visible to anyone, a back-and-forth between you and a customer that suddenly ends without explanation may seem as though you left them hanging. If it ends with you inviting that customer to DM you, it demonstrates to any observers that the issue was resolved privately.

If a customer service inquiry doesn’t require the sharing of private information, though, and the customer chooses not to seek support via DM, that’s their prerogative. It’s the same reason you should opt in to the new feature in the first place – allow your customer to reach you on their own terms, rather than trying to force them off the path they chose.

The way that marketers use Twitter DMs could change in a big way.

Twitter’s new DM capabilities will undoubtedly impact the way businesses use social media – potentially in ways both good and bad. As with any tool or feature, the important thing is to take advantage of it without taking advantage of it, because the temptation to overstep your bounds will always be there.

The post Twitter Changed Its DM Rules – Here’s What It Means, and Why You Should Care appeared first on Edgar.


29 Online Business Tools Perfect for Beginners, Experts, and Everyone In-between

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We would never dream of suggesting that Edgar is a high-maintenance fella. (Especially because we’re pretty sure he reads these posts.) But we will say that keeping him happy and running smoothly takes more than just elbow grease!

Everyone on Team Edgar, from development to writing to customer service to management and more, depends on certain tools of the trade to do their job – and today, we thought we’d give you a close look at just what some of those tools are!

So, what are some of our favorite tools for managing a business online?

The online tools that keep Edgar working (and keep Team Edgar sane)

First things first – some of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means that if you decide to purchase, we may receive a referral fee (and in certain cases, you actually score a discount yourself). We have strong feelings about honesty and affiliate links, so we never recommend something that we don’t actually use and love. (That would be silly.) If it’s on this list, it’s because we genuinely think it’s amazing, and that our readers would love it, too.

Analytics/Data

KISSmetrics

If you want to know more about your customers and how they’re interacting with your site, KISSmetrics can tell you. It’ll set you up with all kinds of data, like customer behavior and retention, your marketing’s conversion rates and ROI, A/B testing results, and more.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free stats/data service that provides detailed information about your web traffic. Among other things, we use it for monitoring our blog traffic – where visitors are coming from, which posts are the most popular, and so on.

Google Analytics Screenshot

Google Analytics gives you data about which of your site’s pages are most popular, and how much traffic each one draws.

HookFeed

This sweet little CRM system hooks up with your Stripe account to provide you with all kinds of valuable customer insights. From monitoring at-risk users to tracking the performance of different segments, this thing keeps an eye on important information so you don’t have to.

ProfitWell

Want real-time sales information and handy dandy long-term revenue stats? ProfitWell is how we track things like MRR, retention, and growth – perfect for seeing the actual results of all your hard work, all in one place.

Blogging

WordPress

WordPress is the gold standard for building a website or a blog, and with good reason. With tons of free and paid themes to choose from, reliable support, compatibility with countless plugins, and a massive community of users, WordPress is the platform you want, plain and simple.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

You don’t have to be an SEO expert to optimize your website. Yoast offers both free and premium plugins that make SEO manageable regardless of experience, so the posts you write are easier for people to discover than ever.

WordPress SEO by Yoast Screenshot

WordPress SEO by Yoast makes it easy to edit your meta data and preview it in real time.

Development

Cloudinary

Integrating images in your dev is way easier with Cloudinary. Fast and versatile with built-in image manipulation tools, it cuts way back on time and headaches.

PagerDuty

You don’t want to be the last to know when something isn’t working. PagerDuty alerts you when something gets busted, so you can be quick with the fix instead of letting it go unnoticed (or noticed by everyone except you).

Code Climate

Edgar’s built using Ruby, but Code Climate provides automated code review for other languages, too. If you’ve ever felt nervous before a deploy, this can help give you some much-needed peace of mind.

Heroku

Welcome to Edgar’s humble abode. He lives on Heroku, which provides a secure and loving cloud-based home to him and plenty of other apps, too.

Email and Customer Service

MailChimp

If you receive our weekly newsletter, you’ve seen a little of what MailChimp can do. We use it to build and manage almost all of our major email campaigns – not just because it’s immensely user-friendly, but because it provides you with all the data (like open rates) you could possibly dream of. And hey – who doesn’t love monkeys?

MailChimp Screenshot

(Also, check out Mandrill for managing transactional emails.)

Intercom

A little more app-centric, Intercom is perfect for automatically sending your users messages that are triggered by certain actions. An absolute lifesaver for apps and SaaS products!

SnapEngage

Ever see one of those little livechat dealies pop up on someone’s website? (Like ours?) SnapEngage will put one on yours, too – it’s a great way to keep in touch with visitors and answer their questions live while they’re on your site! (This link will set you up with a free trial.)

Help Scout

If you want to provide reliable customer service, you’ve gotta stay organized. Whether you manage your CS alone or have people who do it for you, Help Scout saves time, keeps everything organized, and prevents customer emails from falling through the cracks. (Their blog is also a Team Edgar favorite.)

File Sharing and Storage

Dropbox

Stop it with the endless USB drives and emailing files to yourself. Dropbox stores photos, music files, docs, PDFs, whatever you’ve got – and you can access all of it from anywhere (including your phone, because it’s the future).

Google Drive

Like Microsoft Office, but free and better. For a distributed team like us, Google Drive is perfect not just for uploading and maintaining a communal database of docs, spreadsheets, slideshows and more, but also for collaborating on them and seeing each other’s updates in real time.

Google Docs Collaboration Screenshot

When two people work on the same Google Doc, edits appear in real time on both ends – it’s even easier than collaborating in person.

Productivity

Boomerang

A cluttered inbox promotes a cluttered mind. Everyone on our team uses Boomerang to keep theirs nice and tidy – schedule emails to send at a later time, or “boomerang” something in your inbox so that it disappears for now and comes flying back later, when you have time to deal with it.

Trello

If you feel like you have way too many tasks and projects to keep track of all at once, Trello just might be the organizational solution you need. It works like a digital bulletin board, so you can create and categorize tasks, then drag-and-drop to move them around according to what you’re working on and when. (And we can attest to how useful it is for managing projects on distributed teams!)

Trello Screenshot

Trello is great for keeping track of your progress on different projects.

(You can also hook it up with Corrello if you want to really supercharge your dashboard.)

iDoneThis

Want to see how you really spend your workday? iDoneThis allows you to enter in your daily tasks, and to see what everyone else on your team gets done, too. It’s less micro-managey than a true time-tracker, but it’s less invasive, too. (We’re not really into being invaded.)

Zapier

Sort of like an even more awesome IFTT, Zapier allows you to create hookups between the different apps you use, so they can communicate and dictate automatic actions. (For example, we have a HipChat chatroom that gets pinged every time someone signs up for Edgar. What’s HipChat? Find out two entries down…)

Team Communication/Conferencing

Google Hangouts

A free must-have for anyone in a virtual office, or with web-based coworkers/employees. Hop on a one-on-one video call or group chat, or use features like screensharing so you can collaborate or advise live on the spot. All it takes is a Google profile, which, let’s be honest, you already have.

HipChat

When you have a distributed team like we do, there’s no watercooler to stand around. And even if you’re in an office, the watercooler might be really far away. HipChat is a fun and easy-to-use private chat client that allows us to stay in touch throughout the day, for both matters that are work-related and those that…aren’t so much.

HipChat Screenshot

HipChat makes it easy for you to discuss the things that matter.

UberConference

Wasn’t there a section in Dante’s Inferno about glitchy conference calls? (It’s been awhile since we read it.) Point is, conference calls don’t have to be such a pain. We use UberConference literally every day, and frankly, it’s the best phone call you can make that doesn’t end with a pizza at your doorstep.

Confluence

Who doesn’t love printing and reprinting an employee handbook every single time you make an edit? (Besides, you know, everyone?) Confluence allows you to create and maintain a private online wiki for your team, so you can keep all your most important info in one central, organized, searchable database.

Confluence Screenshot

Confluence allows you to create a private wiki for you and your team.

Videos and Webinars

Wistia

Like YouTube, kind of, but way prettier and more powerful. If you do professional videos like courses, demos, tutorials, etc., Wistia provides the horsepower you need and all kinds of insightful analytics.

WebinarJam

We know you’re probably expecting us to say that WebinarJam is our jam, so we won’t. But we will say that it’s our favorite webinar-hosting tool that we’ve used – and we’ve really used a few, so we don’t say it lightly. If you’re into hosting and/or recording presentations, trust us, you want to give this one a look.

Camtasia

Another great tool for recording what happens on your computer screen and editing it into professional-looking videos, Camtasia is one of our new favorites. (If you’ve watched one of our tutorial videos, you’ve seen a little of what it can do.)

That’s it! (For now…)

This might not be everything tucked away in our toy box, but they’re all tools we wouldn’t dream of managing Edgar without! Keep your eyes peeled for more recommendations in the future – and if you have any recs of your own, make sure you share them in the comments below!

The post 29 Online Business Tools Perfect for Beginners, Experts, and Everyone In-between appeared first on Edgar.

Four Ways to Promote Your Opt-in on Social Media without Feeling Like a Broken Record

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Mailing lists, newsletters, webinars, whatever – you’ve got something you want people to opt in for, but where do those people COME from?

You’re not the only one wondering. One of the toughest parts about creating a successful opt-in is actually getting people there in the first place! Doesn’t matter HOW convincing your landing page is if you can’t get anyone to visit it, right?

That’s why today, we’re taking a closer look at how you can use social media to drive more traffic to your opt-in. (There’s a whole heck of a lot more you can do than tweet out the occasional link!) So, how are some majorly successful businesses using social to turn followers into subscribers and customers, and how can you borrow their tactics to do the same thing?

Your blog posts

We know what you’re thinking.

“My blog isn’t social media – that’s my website!”

The thing is, though, your blog actually IS an integral part of your social media plan. Or at least, it should be.

Every time you publish a new blog post, you have a place to direct social media traffic toward. Something you can promote on social, and perhaps even more importantly, something your followers will want to share, too – they’re more likely to retweet a link to an interesting or helpful blog post than a link to a promotion. (No matter how much they love a good landing page.)

A new blog post means hundreds or even thousands of hits to your website, so why not give every one of those visitors the opportunity to opt-in right then and there? If they’re on your website, they’ve already demonstrated interest in what you have to offer – this is just your way of providing them with a Next Step.

Magic Action Box

The site isn’t broken. This is just a humble screenshot – not an actual opt-in form.

We’ve used the Magic Action Box WordPress plugin to implement opt-in forms on our own blog posts – this plugin is particularly useful because it allows you to upload and save a variety of opt-ins, then use a drop-down menu to choose which one you want to display on each blog post. The one pictured above, for example, gives visitors to the LKR Social Media blog a one-click way to sign up for our weekly newsletter.

There are other ways to do it, too, like in this example from KISSmetrics:

KISSmetrics Opt-in

KISSmetrics places an opt-in on their blog’s sidebar (and another at the end of the post, too).

Or in pop-ups, like the ones used by Copy Hackers (the effectiveness of which you can learn about in this brilliant breakdown – a must-read for anyone interested in a better opt-in rate).

No matter what type of form or opt-in you add to your blog posts, doing so is an easy way to get the most out of the traffic you already attract.

Your own social media

But hey, let’s be honest. Sending traffic from social media to your blog posts is easy. Your blog is where fresh content goes – it’s always changing and growing, so you always have something new and exciting to offer.

That can make your landing pages feel more than a little stale by comparison.

The static nature of a landing/sales page – even a well-made one – can make linking to it over and over feel boring and repetitive.

Fortunately, you can make the links to your landing page a lot more interesting – and over time, a lot more effective.

Every time we run a promotion, we create a wide variety of status updates by varying things like:

  • The different benefits we’re focused on
  • The images we’re attaching (if any)
  • The tone (funny/serious/optimistic/etc.)
  • The style (does it ask a question or make a statement?)
  • The specificity

Three Promotional Status Updates

Posting promo updates in a variety of styles doesn’t just keep them from being too repetitive – it enables us to test and see how our audience responds to those styles. Monitor the statistics for your promo updates in relation to each other, so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t forget to take advantage of the space every social network gives you in your profile, either. Take a look at how Marie Forleo uses her website to drive opt-ins:

Marie Forleo Opt-ins

On the left, you can see Marie’s links to her website in both her Twitter bio and her profile. That link takes you to her homepage, where you’re greeted with a pop-up opt-in, as well as a static one.

Is it unique to her social media? Nope – it’s the same website you’d see if you entered the URL directly into your browser. But Marie knows that she’s going to link from her Twitter profile to her website anyway, so why not create multiple opportunities for visitors to opt in right at the point of entry?

Whether your social profile links directly to your homepage or to a separate landing page, anyone who clicks through should be given the chance to opt in to what you’re offering as soon as they get there.

Other people’s social media

We already focused on how you can use shareable blog posts to put your opt-in in front of a bigger audience, but that’s not the only way you can encourage others to spread the word.

Integrating a click-to-tweet with your opt-in gets your followers in on the action. Sites like HubSpot have been doing this for years in blog entries like this one:

HubSpot Click-to-Tweets

Using a tool like Click to Tweet makes it easy to add these to your blog posts, so your readers can share the highlights (and your link) with just a few clicks.

You can even create action-specific click-to-tweets, so that your fans and customers can share specific milestones on social.

Edgar Milestone Tweet

A few milestone-related opportunities might include:

  • Signing up for a newsletter
  • Reading a newsletter
  • Enrolling in (or completing) a course
  • Watching a webinar
  • Downloading an ebook

You might be surprised by what your site’s visitors are most eager to share – and the number of new people that can direct toward your opt-in pages!

Paid ads

You see that header. So first things first – we need to dispel a myth here.

Using social media is free. Reaching your full marketing potential on social media is NOT.

Sure, Facebook is free. So is Candy Crush. But when you get stuck on the same level for days on end and still can’t figure out how to beat it, shelling out a few bucks in exchange for a competitive advantage doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Facebook ad

Paid advertising on social is an investment – and one that can pay off in spades.

So learn your way around Facebook ads. (Don’t just pay indiscriminately to boost posts here and there, either – those are the slot machines. You want to be James Bond at the Baccarat table.) Determine which of your landing pages are worth spending money to advertise, and which ones aren’t. We don’t pay to advertise our newsletter or our individual blog posts, but a promotion like a sale or a webinar – even a free educational webinar – is worth the cost.

Recap time

Alright, let’s review. You’ve got the opt-in you want to promote – so where do you do it?

  • Your blog – Add opt-in forms and links to every blog post, so when you promote those posts on social, you’re also promoting your opt-in
  • Promotional status updates – Break up the monotony and make your promotions more successful over time by experimenting with different styles
  • Other people’s updates – Encourage shares with click-to-tweets and image-sharing plugins that make it easy for your fans to spread your content far and wide
  • Paid ads – Learn the basics of social advertising and determine which pages and promotions are worth paying to promote, so you can get more bang for your buck

A strategy that combines a few of these tactics – or ideally, all of them – will give your opt-in a way bigger visibility boost than a few sporadic social updates!

The post Four Ways to Promote Your Opt-in on Social Media without Feeling Like a Broken Record appeared first on Edgar.

Using This Strategy? More Marketers Would Rather Just Skip Social Media Altogether

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They say that if you’re not going to do something right, you may as well not do it at all. And while we’re not sure who “they” are, statistics show there’s at least one group of people who really live by that motto: marketers.

When it comes to social media, marketers would prefer to not do it at all rather than do it without planning ahead.

According to research published by eMarketer in 2015, considerably more US marketers plan their social media content ahead of time than those that plan and post on the same day. In fact, the percentage of marketers who skip using Facebook and Twitter altogether is higher than that of marketers who plan and post on the same day.

Planning Ahead on Social

On Twitter, 50% of marketers plan their content at least a day ahead of time, while only about 1 in 5 plan and post on the same day. On Facebook, the percentage of marketers that plan ahead rises to 66% – and 1 in 4 pros actually plan their content as much as a month in advance or more.

The bottom line? If you’re seeing branded content on social media, odds are, it was planned and scheduled long before it actually got shared.

If that sounds like a big number, it’s because it is – more than 3 out of 5 Facebook posts are planned out in advance? How are they doing it? And what’s the mental roadblock that can make it feel so unnatural to do it yourself?

Why scheduling makes you feel like a robot, and why your followers don’t even notice

First things first: if all these other brands are planning and scheduling their social content ahead of time, why does it still feel so weird to do it yourself?

You think of social media as a marketing channel. Your followers don’t.

Because you use social media for marketing, you actually use it differently as a consumer, too – and that can influence your perception of how other consumers use it. Case in point: you’re more likely not only to follow brands on social media, but to make purchases based on your social experiences, too.

Compared to the average consumer, as a marketer, you are:

  • 50% more likely to follow a brand on Facebook
  • 400% more likely to follow a brand on Twitter
  • 100% more likely to make a purchase based on what you see on Facebook
  • 150% more likely to make a purchase based on a tweet

Not bad, right? In fact, about 50% of users only follow one to four brands on social at all. While they expect brands to have a social presence, consumers aren’t nearly as focused on branded content as you are. Consider that along with the fact that the average user doesn’t see most of your updates on Twitter or on Facebook, and the whole thing makes a lot more sense: the average consumer on social media doesn’t see, think about, or act on social marketing nearly as much as you do.

Marketers on Social Media Statistic

One of the most important things you can do when planning your social media, then, is to think less like a marketer and more like a consumer. This will help you get over the mental roadblocks that make scheduling posts ahead of time seem unnatural – it only feels like a big deal because you and your audience are approaching social media from different angles, and with different levels of awareness.

So consumers don’t fixate on social marketing quite as much as you do – but that doesn’t explain how or why most marketers prefer planning their content in advance to posting it same-day.

How popular social media accounts plan their posts ahead of time

When you go scrolling through your Twitter feed, you can’t always tell whether or not an update was written and scheduled ahead of time.

(And considering that 50% of all branded tweets are, it really goes to show that the whole “feeling like a robot” thing is all in your head.)

When you look at a brand’s social media feed over time, though, the evidence of careful planning becomes a lot clearer – and so do its rewards.

Here are a few examples.

Long-term campaigns

Oreo’s most famous social media win is still its surprise hit from the 2013 Super Bowl blackout (which inadvertently kicked off a kind of bizarre pseudo competition between brands during Super Bowls to come – more on that later). Oreo’s no one-hit wonder, though, and the social campaigns they’ve launched after careful planning and scheduling have been just as impressive as their still-infamous live quip.

Their 2012 “Daily Twist” campaign meant a series of 100 Facebook updates commemorating culturally or historically significant events (but, you know, with cookies):

Oreo Daily Twist Bastille DayWhile it took 100 days of planning ahead (along with a new custom graphic for every update), the payoff was huge: Oreo gained more than 1 million new fans, increased their engagement by 195%, and increased their share rate by 280%. Instead of always playing it by ear on social media, they developed a long-term campaign ahead of time and were able to execute it with consistency and style that got widespread recognition.

Categorized content

Planning ahead on social is the key to sharing and re-sharing your messaging at the right times. This isn’t something that just brand marketers know, either – just ask the people who manage social media for the White House.

White House Tweet Repeat

These three tweets all went out on the same day, within six hours of each other – and they go to show just how valuable sharing the same thing more than once can be.

The same image that was tweeted in the early afternoon got four times the engagement as it did at 8 am (and all three demonstrate the value of testing different ways to promote a single thing). The White House actually makes a habit of promoting its causes via social this way – compare the tweets above to this one, which was also shared multiple times:

ACA Works Tweet

In both cases, the social media team has created a highly shareable image, branded the conversation with a hashtag, and included a link driving traffic toward an informational resource. When you see any one of these updates on its own, competing for your attention with the other tweets in your feed, you don’t consider that it’s part of a larger strategy that was clearly planned out in advance – but it was.

This is why categorizing the types of updates you post most frequently is so important to a cohesive, planned-out strategy. For an online retailer, this may be as simple as writing posts promoting a sale and scheduling them in intervals to ensure they’re seen by a variety of fans:

Old Navy Sale Tweet

Determine what you want to share ahead of time and plan out a few strategic timeslots for sharing it, and you can expect more consistent results than a few on-the-fly updates could provide.

Live-tweeting with a plan

We said we’d come back to the Super Bowl, didn’t we? After Oreo made headlines and gave the marketing world a serious case of professional jealousy with their blackout tweet, brands everywhere felt the pressure to step up their game the following year. This meant that they had plenty of time to think of a way to draw attention to themselves – by any means necessary.

(It also started the unfortunate phenomenon of brands feeling the need to comment en masse on literally everything in the world, but that’s a whole other story.)

For example, during the 2014 game, department store J.C. Penney shared a series of misspelled, increasingly incoherent tweets that attracted a lot of attention from users (and other brands) who suspected the account had been hacked, or its manager less-than-sober.

JC Penney Super Bowl Tweet

J.C. Penney quickly revealed the tweets were all part of a gag they’d planned ahead, and cheesy though it was, it worked – they were the second-most mentioned brand on social during the game, and the most mentioned brand that wasn’t an official sponsor. Their plan to “create [their] own narrative” didn’t hinge on what might happen during the game – they came up with it in advance, posted when the time was right, and stood out from the crowd.

The same could be said for brands like DiGiorno, which has a reputation for posting sassy updates during live events like NBC’s televised musicals. It’s possible that they come up with all of their pizza-centric zingers on the spot, but not particularly probable – after their runaway success tweeting along with “The Sound of Music,” for example, they knew that people would expect the same for NBC’s next show, and they delivered. (Get it? They “delivered?” Okay, moving on.)

Point is, even when you know that you’re planning on updating at a certain time, you can plan what you want to say in advance. Even if you’re just jotting down a few points you want to be sure you make on a Twitter chat, you’ll be better off than you would be walking into a situation empty-handed.

So if you want to do something right…

There’s a reason the majority of marketers would rather not post on social at all than write and post their updates on the same day. When you figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it ahead of time, you can make your social strategy a lot less random and a lot more consistent – and enjoy more consistent results, too.

The post Using This Strategy? More Marketers Would Rather Just Skip Social Media Altogether appeared first on Edgar.

How to Find Out If You Have Good Facebook Reach

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Everybody wonders it sometimes.

You peek at the organic reach for every Facebook update you post, and the numbers aren’t what you’d hoped. They aren’t even what you expected. You’ve seen people with higher bowling scores. And you can’t help but wonder:

Does my Facebook page suck?

It’s frustrating when it feels like nobody is seeing your posts. Sometimes it seems like you’re the only person who doesn’t have the whole thing figured out – like there must be one simple, glaring thing you’re doing wrong and just need to fix, like plugging the hole in a sinking rowboat.

That’s when it’s time to get a little perspective – and here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can do it.

How does your Facebook reach compare to other pages?

Want to know how your Facebook page is really doing? You can’t just look at your own stats – you need to have something to compare them to.

Today, we’ll use these findings from April 2015. The social media analytics experts at Locowise compiled the statistics for 5000 Facebook pages, and came up with results you can use to contextualize your own. (Hint: If you need a refresher on how to access Facebook data beyond what you get on your Insights tab, this shows you what to do.)

Here’s an example.

According to their study, the average reach for a Facebook post in April was about 4.11% of total page likes. Let’s see how Edgar’s Facebook page stacked up.

Edgar's Facebook Page

First, we used the Post Data spreadsheet we downloaded directly from Facebook (again, here’s how) to add the reach for every update we posted to our page in April. (Remember, when you’re looking at your own spreadsheet, look at organic reach, not total!) Our total organic reach for the month? About 45,182 users. Divide that by the number of updates we posted (91), and we get an organic reach of about 497 users per post.

Because your page’s number of likes is probably different at the end of the month than it is at the beginning (ours grew by more than 2000 in April), again, make sure you average your page’s likes over 30 days. Add the numbers in your “Lifetime Total Likes” column (in the Page Data spreadsheet) and divide by 30: we got 10,862.

Divide the average number of users reached per post by the average number of total page likes, and you’ll have your result. Our average reach? About 4.6% – a number that might initially sound disappointing on its own, but is actually higher than average.

This is why context matters so much. We could look at that 4.6% and feel disheartened, but when we compare it to the average of 4.11%, we see it’s actually not a bad figure at all!

There’s more to life than Facebook reach

So now you know how your reach compares to the average – but reach isn’t the only thing that matters, either. Not by a long shot.

You need to pay attention to your engagement rates, too. Engagement means clicks – comments, shares, likes, and clickthroughs. It means people seeing what you post and actually taking action, instead of scrolling on past without a second thought. And it’s easy to measure your own.

On your spreadsheet, look at the Lifetime engaged users column. This gives you the engagement for each individual post. Add them up (hint: use the sum function instead of doing it manually) to get your total engagement for the month, then divide that number by your total number of people reached to get your engagement rate.

Spreadsheet Sum Function

Enter a sum formula into a blank cell to calculate a total. For example, if you want to add every number in a column between cells B3 and B50, you would enter =SUM(B3:B50) into an empty cell.

According to the study, the average engagement rate in April was 15.58% of a page’s reach – so again, you can compare your own engagement rate to the average.

And what if yours is really low? How can you get a better engagement rate?

Well, that’s the other nice thing about spreadsheets like this – they make it easy to identify what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you can sort all of the updates in your sheet in order of engagement rate, so you can easily pick out patterns in what people liked the best, the least, and so on. Pay attention to factors like:

  • Type of update
  • Time of post
  • Day of the week
  • Message phrasing (A question? A statement? Funny? Serious?)

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t recognize any immediate patterns – especially if you’re looking at a relatively small period of time, like a single month. Try going back to your Insights page and exporting data for a broader range, like several months, and you may notice things that weren’t apparent in a smaller data set.

Now see how you’re performing

That’s all there is to it – now you know how to figure out your own average organic reach, as well as your average engagement. So download your data from your Facebook Insights tab, compare it to the average, and see exactly how you’re doing compared to the other pages out there!

The post How to Find Out If You Have Good Facebook Reach appeared first on Edgar.

Twitter’s New Audience Insights: What They Are and Why They Matter

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Want to learn a ton of vital (and addictively interesting) info about your Twitter followers in about 5 minutes?

Last summer, Twitter updated its analytics. And it was kinda cool! It looked like this:

Old Twitter Follower Insights

Great as that was at the time, Twitter just beefed up its audience analytics in a big way, and it’s offering a LOT of brand new information they’re calling “audience insights.” This is information that could change the way you think about your followers, and just as importantly, about what you share with them.

So, what IS Twitter’s audience insights, exactly? What’s new, and what’s important? Let’s take a closer look!

Demographics

First things first – head over to your Twitter analytics page and click Followers. This will take you to your audience insights section, where all the juicy new intel lives.

As you can see, your insights are divided up into four main tabs. (Five, if you include the overview, but that’s all information you can find in the other sections anyway.)

The first one is your demographics tab. Like the older version of Twitter analytics, this tab gives you information about where your audience is located, and how it breaks down gender-wise – but it also tells you a whole lot more. You can use this tab to learn things like:

  • Your audience’s education level
  • Their household income
  • The languages they speak
  • Their home value

At first, some of this information might seem like little more than “fun stuff” – you know, little bits of trivia that make you say, “Oh, that’s neat, I guess, but what difference does it really make?” In reality, though, this can be some really important info to keep in mind.

You could be sharing tips targeting people with more financial resources than your typical follower, or someone with (or without) the same level of academic experience. There could be a major difference between the audience you’re writing for and the audience you have – and this is the first step in identifying those differences.

What’s the NEXT step? Read on…

Lifestyle and Consumer Behavior

Now hold on tight, because there’s a lot of info to absorb in these two tabs. First, the Lifestyle tab:

You’ll probably recognize the Interests chart, which is another carryover from the old Twitter analytics. Odds are, not much in this list will surprise you, because your audience’s interests are likely to match up at least partially with you and what you do. (Edgar’s followers are interested in technology and entrepreneurship? Scandalous!)

Something new, though – and potentially more surprising – are the insights into your followers’ TV-watching habits. For example, you might learn that a shockingly low percentage of your Twitter fans follow sports – which would make you think twice about all those football metaphors you’ve been making.

What makes things even more interesting is that you can compare your own followers to another group. Just above your data, click the “Add comparison audience” link, and Twitter will show you how your followers stack up to all Twitter users:

Keeping that up on the Consumer Behavior tab gives you even more lifestyle/consumer-oriented information, like what types of credit cards your followers use, and their buying habits:

Now hold on one second. This is all well and good, but it raises one big question:

Where does all this information COME from?

Good question, because at first glance, this all does seem a bit Big Brother-y, doesn’t it? According to Twitter, “The data comes from user-supplied data, app-supplied data, Twitter internal models, and partner data.”

Translation? Some of the data is based on information you give or gave to Twitter, some of it is culled from what you post, and some of it is taken from “Partners” – companies like Datalogix, which gather user data and provide it to Twitter, who provides it to you. (And heads up – a lot of that partner data only reflects the portion of your audience in the United States.) Get it? Got it? Good, because that brings us to the final tab:

Mobile Footprint

This is where you can learn about the mobile devices and wireless networks your Twitter followers use:

Here we can see that our own Twitter followers prefer iOS to Android by a pretty significant margin (and that Blackberry just plain gets no love at all). Just like with most of the other information available in your audience insights, your mileage may vary when it comes to how practical this information actually is – in our case, it may mean that tweeting links to Android-specific content from other sources isn’t as valuable as iOS-specific content.

How will YOU use Twitter’s new audience insights?

Take a look at your own audience insights – what surprises you about your own followers? Do factors like gender and interests break down in ways different from what you expected? And how do you see yourself using (or NOT using) this information in the future? Share your thoughts about this new feature in the comments below!

The post Twitter’s New Audience Insights: What They Are and Why They Matter appeared first on Edgar.

The Non-Gimmicky Tricks to Getting More Followers on Any Social Network

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Joining a new social network is pretty exciting – except of the whole “you don’t have any followers” part.

That part’s actually pretty lame.

Especially because it seems like everyone else already has their fanbase on social built up! It’s like you showed up late to the party and all the hors d’oeuvres are gone. (Only this feels way worse than a shrimp cocktail shortage.)

When you just start out on a social network, where do your fans come from?

Whether you’re creating a Facebook page for that new business you just started, you just installed Snapchat on your phone, or you’re finally getting serious about starting that Instagram account, the big question is, now what? How do you build something from nothing?

How to get your first fans on a new social network

1. Fake it ‘til you make it

Imagine two street performers starting the day on opposite corners. Nobody is stopping to watch either of them, so one decides not to bother trying, and sits down on the curb. He figures if anyone comes by, he’ll perform for them – but nobody does.

On the opposite corner, though, the other performer is jamming away, even though nobody is watching yet. And as he keeps on going, eventually more and more people take notice and stop to watch him do his thing.

Street Performer

You get the point. It might feel silly and even a little futile posting things on social media before you have an audience, but you’ve gotta do it! When people do visit your profile, they need to see that you’re active, and that you’re posting the types of content that interest them – that’s what’ll entice them to actually follow you.

Here’s some good news, though: depending on the network, being the new kid in town may actually be better for you. On Facebook, for example, the smaller the page, the higher the organic reach. The network’s algorithms are designed to make succeeding easier for the little guys – but if you’re sitting on your hands and waiting to build an audience before you start posting on a regular basis, you’re going to be waiting around for a while.

What kind of content should you post when you’re just starting out? Focus primarily on updates that will help you get shares and engagement.

There are psychological reasons people share content online – learn what they are, and post accordingly. If someone who has 100k+ Twitter followers shares your tweet, it doesn’t matter if you only have three of your own. Their audience becomes your audience, and you can count on some of their fans becoming your fans, too.

Retweet with Profile Details

While shares are technically a type of engagement, other types – like clickthroughs, comments, and likes — are important, too. For one thing, Facebook factors in engagement when it’s determining how much reach to give your future posts, which means a high engagement rate can actually put your content in front of a lot more people.

Even on social networks where engagement doesn’t impact visibility, like Instagram or Twitter, visible engagement like users commenting on your posts makes your profile more appealing to others – it has the same psychological appeal of a crowded cafe, or a popular product. We’re attracted to what attracts other people, so the more engagement other people see taking place on your profile, the better.

Crowded Cafe

When you see that something is popular with others, it piques your curiosity.

(Not sure what types of content might be the most engaging when you’re just starting out? Here are a few ideas!)

2. Make your new profile a traffic priority

It’s tempting to want to use every last opportunity to drive traffic on sending it to your website, but funneling your audience toward your social profiles can be just as valuable – even more so.

For example, last November, we launched Edgar HQ, a Facebook group where our users can go to share Edgar tips and strategies, and talk about using social media professionally. While our Facebook page would continue to be our main outlet for promotions, general social tips, and useful links, HQ would be more of an online community – but a community needs people.

We started making it a priority to drive traffic not just to our website, but to Edgar HQ, as well, promoting it onsite, in emails, and on other social accounts. Within its first four months, the group had more than 1000 members.

Edgar HQ Header

Now HQ is a lively lil’ hub for our users, where they and our team can ask questions, share announcements, and talk shop. (It’s also the perfect place for us to share links to our latest news, promotions, and blog posts, because we know it’s where our most engaged users are.)

How do you send people to your new social networks?

For one thing, use your existing social networks.

To a lot of people, that sounds almost disgustingly self-promotional. “They already follow me on Facebook, but now I’m supposed to ask them on Facebook to follow me somewhere else? I’m going to look like a JERK.”

If that’s your perspective, it’s because you’re thinking like a marketer – and you shouldn’t be. You’re grateful for your fans and followers, which you should be, but that gratitude tricks you into thinking they’re following you as some kind of favor.

Sorry, but they’re not.

If people are following you on social media, it’s because they want to. (Unless it’s, you know, your mom. She’s just supportive like that.)

And when someone follows you on one social network, it stands to reason they might like to follow you on another – especially if you have something unique to offer there. There’s a reason the marketers having the most success on Snapchat are the ones using it to offer promotions their fans won’t find anywhere else. Same with Instagram – the way networks like these work is different from ones like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and that makes them the perfect outlet for content that wouldn’t make quite as much sense somewhere else. Show your existing social fans that there are unique benefits to checking you out on other networks, and they will.

Visitors to your website should be able to find you on social with absolutely zero effort, too.

You know that feeling when you’re hunting around all over a website looking for a company’s phone number? You’d think they would want that front and center, right?

If that’s the case with your website’s links to your social accounts, it’s time to make those things more conspicuous. (Because frankly, people aren’t going to bother hunting all over looking for them.)

Scroll down to the bottom of this page, and you’ll see links to our Twitter and Facebook profiles. (Or just take our word for it. You don’t have to stop reading to actually check.) Assume that every person who visits your site is only going to look at ONE page. Can they get from that page to your social?

“But isn’t sending people AWAY from my website a bad thing? I don’t want people to leave!” Hey, that’s fair. But with tools like Facebook’s Page Plugin, you can give your site’s visitors a little preview of what’s on your page AND the opportunity to go ahead and like it, all without navigating away.

Facebook Page PluginYou can do similar things by embedding Instagram updates in your blog posts, and so on. Basically, there’s no excuse for not having easy-to-find links to your social profiles on your website. Same with easy-to-overlook places like your site’s checkout pages, emails, and newsletters – just because you see every little thing your business publishes doesn’t mean that your audience does, so give them as many opportunities to get from one place to another as possible.

3. Put yourself out there

Say you’re brand new, though. Not much of an email list, and hardly any followers on ANY social network. How do you start completely from scratch?

You’ve gotta put yourself out there. If you don’t have an audience anywhere, you can’t just treat your social media content like a tractor beam that’s going to pull people in. Sure, your updates are discoverable when you do things like use hashtags and geo-tagging, but that still depends on other people finding you. Wouldn’t you rather put yourself right in front of their faces?

Be willing to take the first step in engaging on social media. There are opportunities for you to get noticed, if you’re willing to take them. For example, we like to participate in Twitter chats as a way of networking with users as interested in social as we are:

Twitter Chat Example Tweet

Guest posting on other blogs and appearing on podcasts can also give you opportunities to branch out and share links to your social profiles:

Podcast Social Links

Opportunities to put yourself out there are a lot less passive than just posting updates and hoping for the best, but they’re also a lot more effective – so don’t be afraid of them!

And most importantly…

In a time when you can find more information about going viral than baking a cake, it stands to reason that on social media, people want to get lots of followers and attention as fast as humanly possible.

How to Go Viral

But here’s the thing. Making yourself “go viral” and other gimmicks are magic buttons that don’t exist. The only “trick” to getting more followers is to be consistent and patient in your efforts.

(Not what you wanted to hear, probably.)

But all those intimidating pages and profiles with the thousands upon thousands of followers? Almost none of them got there overnight. They got there by posting, and sharing, and promoting, and engaging, over and over and over again. Kind of like losing weight, it happens little bit by little bit, and it happens because you never stop working at it.

That’s why Edgar does what he does, and why people who use Edgar often gain followers a lot faster than they did without him. Posting with consistency is the most important thing you can do when you’re building a following – just like the street performer at the start of the day, even if you only have a few people listening at the start, you’ve gotta keep playing if you want more to come.

The post The Non-Gimmicky Tricks to Getting More Followers on Any Social Network appeared first on Edgar.

Less Than Half of Small Businesses Believe This About Facebook Marketing – But They’re Right

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Odds are, you’re among the 93% of small business owners and marketers who use Facebook for their marketing.

Are you also in the majority that either doesn’t know if it’s actually working, or even thinks that it isn’t?

According to a recent survey published by Social Media Examiner, more than half of small businesses either think that Facebook marketing doesn’t work, or they don’t know if it works. Only a paltry 45% of marketers actually characterize their efforts as effective.

Effective Facebook Marketing Statistic

Kind of hard to believe, right? Despite the fact that virtually everyone uses Facebook for their small business marketing, less than half think it actually works!

(Doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence.)

That in mind, it’s pretty likely that at SOME point – maybe even right now – you’ve been one of the people asking yourself one big question:

Does Facebook marketing even work?

It’s an easy thing to wonder about. After all, it’s no secret that organic reach can be almost embarrassingly low. (It averaged 2.6% in March, and 4.11% in April. It’s not just you.)

But what does successful Facebook marketing even look like? Is there one specific thing you can look at on your page and say, “Yes! I’m totally nailing this Facebook stuff!”

Is it…

  • High reach?
  • More likes and comments?
  • Lots of clickthroughs?
  • Shares for that great selfie you just took?

This is why more than 1/3 of all people in your position have NO idea whether or not their Facebook marketing even works. It’s like firing at a moving target and not knowing how many points anything is worth. You don’t know if you’re winning or losing, but you keep on playing – and that feels frustrating. It feels like a waste of time.

So what do you do?

How to make Facebook marketing feel like it’s actually making a positive difference

The good news is, there’s no universal benchmark for what defines successful Facebook marketing.

The bad news is, there’s no universal benchmark for what defines successful Facebook marketing.

Because while there are averages you can compare yourself to – like those reach figures above – there are no make-or-break goals that every business should necessarily be hitting. That means it’s up to you to determine just what success looks like.

How do you do that?

  1. Know that some data is more valuable than OTHER data

One of the reasons that Facebook reach can be so frustrating is that we think it’s more valuable than it really is. Just like Jon Loomer explains in this must-read blog post, reach is a deceptive metric, and one that can distract you from focusing on much more useful information. You can have strong engagement rates even with relatively low reach – in fact, that can be a lot more valuable than having it the other way around. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a larger swath of your audience to see your posts, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that lower reach is automatically the kiss of death, or that higher reach means you’re killing it.

  1. Learn how to play Calvinball

In the game of Calvinball, you make up the rules as you go along – and that means your luck can change at the drop of a hat.

Calvinball

Source: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/05/05

Facebook is the same way – their constantly-shifting algorithms mean that keeping up with the rules is a never-ending task. Your organic reach is affected by factors like:

If improving your reach is an immediate goal, learn what Facebook is looking for – and NOT looking for. The rules change, but that doesn’t mean you always have to guess at what they are.

  1. Spend your time wisely

Feel like you’re spending a lot of time on your social media marketing?

(Like, a LOT?)

You’re not alone. In fact, most small businesses spend at LEAST 6 hours a week on their social media marketing – and that’s a lot of time for something that they’re not really sure is even working.

Hours Spent on Social

Spend the time you have on tasks you know make a positive impact – and find ways to simplify the rest.

Our team, for example, could spend hours a week uploading and scheduling Facebook posts, or manually shuffling a queue to make sure we post the right types of updates at the right time. The time we’d spend on that task, however, would take away from the time we have for other tasks – ones that have a more predictable certainty of making a positive difference. We use Edgar to manage what types of updates get posted at certain times, and to automatically fill and refill our queue, effectively giving ourselves more time to do things like interact live with our followers on Facebook and other networks.

Twitter Engagement

Using Edgar is how we reduce the time it takes to do something mundane (but necessary), so we have more time for the high-impact tasks that can’t be automated, and that make a big difference when it comes to building relationships with fans and users.

Spend less time on the tasks that frustrate you, so you can spend MORE time on the things that don’t. Tasks are frustrating because they feel like a waste of time – and they’re satisfying because they feel valuable. There’s a reason for that, so don’t feel guilty for tipping the scales in favor of the things that feel right!

And remember…

What you define as successful Facebook marketing can change over time – and it can be a LOT different from someone else’s definition of success.

You might find that Facebook is most useful for sending traffic to your blog.

Or getting new signups for your newsletter.

Or making sales during a promotional period.

You might find that Facebook is most useful just for building brand recognition, and turning awareness into preference – things that aren’t as easy to interpret from raw data as other figures, but are important nonetheless.

Failing to meet one goal doesn’t necessarily mean that Facebook isn’t an effective marketing tool for your business – it might just mean that you have the wrong goals. Focus on where things are going right, even if it isn’t what you intended when you started. That could be all it takes for you to join that minority of marketers who realize just how effective Facebook can be!

The post Less Than Half of Small Businesses Believe This About Facebook Marketing – But They’re Right appeared first on Edgar.


How to Make an App: Under the Hood with an Edgar Developer

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Edgar is our team’s baby – and today, we’re going to talk about where babies come from.

No, wait. Let’s try that again.

Meet Lail.

Lail Brown Edgar Developer

Lail Brown is Edgar’s front-end developer, which means every day, he’s writing the code that defines how Edgar looks and feels. We sat down with him to learn a little more about how an app like Edgar gets created – and what we can look forward to next.

So what does it mean when we call you a front-end developer?

Well, everybody divides up coding responsibilities differently, but here at Edgar, we do it front end and back end, which is actually fairly common.

The front-end developer is responsible for all the code that ends up in your browser, so it’s kind of equal parts design and development. All the interfaces you use on a daily basis inside Edgar are built by the front-end developer.

And what does the back-end developer do?

The back-end developer does a lot of heavy lifting on the server, shaping the data as it comes in, making sure posts are going out, all that fun stuff. They do a lot to make the app faster and more functional.

Sometimes that means we’re working together on a particular update, but a lot of the time, they’re making changes that don’t affect the front end at all, and that the user never even knows are happening. They’re doing things like changing where the images that users upload get saved – that’s a change that’s completely invisible to the user, but makes a big difference in how Edgar performs. And sometimes I make changes to the interface that don’t really affect the back end, like a tweak to an interface. It goes both ways.

You’re both writing code, but different types of code.

Exactly. One of the things I like about front-end development is that you get the opportunity to work with a few different things. So for example, I spend maybe 20-30% of my time in Ruby on Rails. Our back-end developer probably spends 90% of his time in it.

Ruby on Rails?

Rails is what we call a framework. In development, it’s a layer you build your code on top of, so you don’t have to start from scratch every time. Another one I use a lot is React.js, which is for JavaScript. I spend a lot of time coding in JavaScript, CSS, and basic markup, just building out pages and interfaces.

So when you’re writing code, it doesn’t look anything like what the user sees. How do you know what it’s going to look like? Is this like The Matrix?

Honestly, the single button you press the most is the refresh button in your browser. When I’m writing code, I have two separate monitors – there’s a browser open on one, and a code editor on the other. And you just constantly go back and forth, hitting refresh, seeing what it looks like as you go.

Edgar Code

What a section of Edgar looks like as code…

...and what it looks like inside the app.

…and what it looks like inside the app.

You know how much we love feedback from our users. When someone submits a feature request, what happens to it? Does it go to you?

It actually does. We keep track of feedback and requests, and for every single one we ask ourselves a few questions:

  1. Is this something we’re hearing about a lot?
  2. Is it something that people seem to really want?
  3. Does it make sense for the average user?
  4. Does it line up with our own goals for what Edgar can and should do?

Once it’s clear that something can and should become part of Edgar, we move it to our roadmap, where they all get sorted and prioritized.

How many things are on that roadmap?

A lot. We actually take that roadmap and break it down into smaller lists, so we know the difference between things we want to get done sometime, and things we want to get done now.

How’s that process go?

It’s really collaborative. Which as a developer, is amazing. Some places, development is a top-down sort of thing, where you don’t really give feedback on whether something is a good idea or a bad idea, or if it should be a priority. Here, you have a lot of individual say, and can feel as though you’re really helping shape the program. That’s a critical difference, especially because sometimes one developer can have a really unique perspective on a particular feature. Once we agree on what we’re going to work on, we divide up the work between front end and back end.

Developing Edgar

Team Edgar members Chris and Matthias working on an early build of the app at our 2014 team retreat.

Once you know what feature you’re going to build, then what?

Each individual developer codes using a version of Edgar that’s saved locally on their computer, so you basically download all the code and edit it offline, instead of editing the one that’s live for our users.

Once the coding is done, and I feel like it’s working well, I’ll write something called tests. Tests are actually like robots that test the feature.

…robots.

They’re like robots. When you introduce new code, you want to make sure that it doesn’t have unforeseen consequences elsewhere in the application. It wouldn’t be realistic to have someone go through and manually click on every single button inside the app every time we introduce a change, so tests do it automatically, and make sure nothing is broken.

And then it gets uploaded and you’re done, right?

Not exactly. Once I’m convinced it does what it’s supposed to do and has been tested, then it goes to code review. This is when you get another developer to look over your work, and see if there’s anything you could have done differently, or better – just like you would with pretty much anything else you might write.

Okay, and THEN it gets uploaded and you’re done.

First it gets reviewed and tested one more time. At this point, we actually upload it to a special server for quality assurance (QA). We tell Kristina (our customer experience manager! -Tom) what the feature is supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work, and she tests it. She has great insight into what our users are looking for and how they’ll use a new feature – sometimes that means sending it back to me to make changes, and sometimes it means that it looks great the way it is.

Kristina, Customer Experience Manager

And then…

Then it’s ready to upload! Depending on the nature of the change and how it affects the database, actually deploying the new code can take as little as 30 seconds or so, and then the new feature is online.

So all in all, how long does it take for us to implement a new feature?

Well, that depends. Because even once we know something is going to be coded and implemented, we can’t just do it immediately – we have to wait until it makes sense to revisit the code for that particular part of the application.

So for example, we recently added a feature to the schedule where you can click anywhere to add a timeslot, instead of clicking a static button. Once I started actually writing code for that, it only took a few days, including all of our testing. The part that takes the longest is when we already know that we’re going to do something, but it doesn’t line up with other changes we’re making.

How often does Edgar’s code change?

All the time. We’re writing updates constantly. They often aren’t huge, noticeable updates, though – we split our time between creating new features, implementing small improvements, and fixing bugs.

We don’t like to drop huge features and new sections all at once – we evolve things, and iterate things. So the new schedule interface launched a few months ago, for example. And from the beginning, we’ve had a lot of ideas for scheduling features we want to add or change, and we’ve been building and releasing them over time, in iterations.

Edgar Schedule Editor

Updates like this one are made in iterations, rather than all at once.

Ultimately, that means we get to create the best user experience possible. When you make decisions in a vacuum, there’s a good chance you’ll mess something up. But because we do things in iterations and evolve Edgar over time, we get to learn what our users like and don’t like as we go.

Sometimes they ask about features that are already on our roadmap, and sometimes they suggest things we hadn’t necessarily thought would be useful. I know for a fact that if I’d just built whatever I wanted from the start without any user feedback, the schedule wouldn’t look the way it’s going to end up looking. It’s way better off this way, with us having the benefit of hearing what people think as we go. And that’s how it is with every major feature.

Got a question for the Edgar developers? Hit us up in the comments below!

 

The post How to Make an App: Under the Hood with an Edgar Developer appeared first on Edgar.

Running from These Business Realities? Here’s How We Learned to Embrace Them

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Businesses – they grow up so fast!

(Or is that children?)

Either way, it’s hard to believe how much can happen in just a year.

See, it’s Edgar’s birthday right about now, and way back when he launched, our great big pie-in-the-sky fantasy was that maybe – just maybe – by the end of 2015, he’d have enough users to be making $1 million a year in revenue. (Worth a shot, right?)

He hit that mark in March – exactly twice as fast as we thought was even possible.

Turns out you can’t predict some things.

And that means there’s a LOT you can learn from them.

Team Edgar in San Diego

Team Edgar in June 2015! (Well, most of us, anyway.)

Since Edgar made his big debut last year, we’ve learned a lot – about creating a product, running a business, and octopus anatomy. (They have three hearts!) Now that it’s the little guy’s birthday, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the most important things we’ve learned in our first year – including a few things that REALLY took us by surprise.

That idea you have? People already want it

When you have an idea, it’s surprisingly easy to convince yourself that not a lot of people would be interested in it.

The thing is, though, that’s not true.

(And that’s how somebody makes half a billion dollars selling blankets with sleeves on ‘em.)

You might not realize just how interested people may be in what you have to offer – and you never will, unless you just go for it.

Because we didn’t exactly expect for this to happen.

When we first started developing Edgar in early 2014, it was mostly to solve a problem that we had. We wanted a social media management tool that would catalogue and automatically share our status updates – something designed to go with the strategy taught in Laura Roeder’s Social Brilliant course.

Nothing like that existed, so when Laura learned that building one of our own was actually something we could do, we figured, what the heck – let’s give this a shot. If nothing else, people who enrolled in Social Brilliant might like it. In a REAL worst case scenario, it’d make our lives easier.

After half a year or so of development (more on that later), we released Edgar into the wild.

In his first two weeks, 100 users had started a trial.

Two weeks after that, that number had tripled.

And the thing was, a lot of those users stayed with Edgar – within about six months, he had 1000 paid users. Some of our current users are people who signed up on the very first day.

Edgar's First Year of GrowthIf you want something to exist, other people probably want it to exist, too. Creating Edgar felt like a challenge and a risk, because we didn’t realize how many people were on the same page as us, and wanted a tool that would do the things we wanted, too.

That thing you’ve been thinking about doing or making? It’ll probably appeal to more people than you realize – and you won’t know for sure until you actually go for it.

There’s a big difference between being “ready” and being “done”

It’s no secret that Edgar looks a LOT different now than he did a year ago – but he couldn’t have gotten to his point unless we launched him when we did.

Nothing is ever perfect – especially before you release it. You’ve gotta release it anyway.

There’s a big difference between refining something and trying to perfect it. Case in point: Edgar didn’t always allow you to choose the times that certain categories would post! In his pre-launch version, he asked you to assign a level of importance to each category, and he would choose categories randomly according to their value:

Edgar Version of Edgar

In an alternate universe, this is what Edgar might look like!

It made sense to some of us, but to others, it was WAY too confusing – so we nixed it in favor of building category-based schedules that allow you to choose what types of posts get published at certain times. (Which, incidentally, ended up being one of his big selling points.)

But there comes a time when you have no choice but to stop tinkering.

It can feel weird to release something before you’re confident that it’s 100% perfect. It might even feel a little embarrassing, like turning in a half-finished term paper. But no matter how much planning ahead you do, you can’t always predict what people are going to like the most – and how the things that make sense to you don’t always seem so clear to others.

Speaking of getting opinions from others, though…

The best opinions can come from outside your inner circle

Nobody wants to hear negative feedback.

But you NEED to hear it.

We learned this early, when we’d get on the phone with some of our first users and ask them to tear Edgar to shreds.

We still do it, when we read our weekly company-wide email detailing the recent reasons people have given for canceling.

It’s not fun, but it makes you better at what you do.

Laura Roeder Quote

While we have a formal system so that users can submit their feedback, in November, we also launched Edgar HQ – a Facebook group where users can ask questions, share tips, and engage in discussions with us and with each other.

Edgar HQ allows us to get a better understanding of how people are using Edgar, so we can figure out the best ways to improve him. We can learn about the problems they’re having with social media, and come up with solutions that we can build into Edgar.

You can learn a lot more from strangers’ honest feedback than you can from soul searching. Is it scary and hard? Heck yes – no matter how long you’ve been doing this! But it has to happen, and if you listen to what others are saying, you’re going to be a LOT better off.

But say you do all these things – then what?

It might be one of the biggest, hardest lessons you can learn, and it’s something we’re adapting to every day:

You can’t run your business the way you’re used to

One of the perks of having a smaller business is that it’s a LOT easier to manage. When you have a tiny team, you always know exactly who’s doing what and when.

If you want your business to grow, though, you need to grow your team, too.

Before Edgar launched a year ago, our team had seven people. Now it has thirteen – nearly twice as many! That’s a lot of growing to do in a year, and it’s meant not just adding more people to the mix, but completely rethinking how we do things like manage projects and delegate responsibilities.

When you’re scaling up a business, you can’t exercise the same level of control as you have before – if you try to have a hand in everything, you’re only limiting yourself.

Building a team is scary for every business, big or small. With every single person you add, you’re putting your business in their hands – and that takes a lot of trust.

Team Edgar Sarah Quote

By building a team of people with complementary ideals and being prepared to completely rethink your company’s structure – including your own role – you can give your business what it needs to grow. Otherwise, it’s going to hit a ceiling. (That old “if you want something done right” saying? FORGET IT.)

On to year two…

So yeah – the past year has been a serious learning experience for all of us here at Edgar, but it’s one we wouldn’t trade for pretty much anything! Hopefully the lessons we picked up along the way can help you with your own business, too – and if anyone has any idea of what to get an octopus for his first birthday…please, let us know.

The post Running from These Business Realities? Here’s How We Learned to Embrace Them appeared first on Edgar.

The Only Four Questions That Actually Matter When You’re Auditing Your Content

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A lot of people are tweeting blind – are you?

It’s no secret that a huge percentage of people share content on social media without actually having read it. When you see that somebody has shared a link to an article on someone else’s site, there’s a pretty decent chance they never actually clicked it themselves.

So once again – are you tweeting blind?

Because if you are, you might be making mistakes without knowing it.

This is an especially big concern if you maintain a library of status updates that you share again and again over time. Whether your posts are automated (like ours) or you just have a spreadsheet of your greatest hits that you like to pull from every now and then, you can’t just assume that everything is in working order all the time.

When you do, you run a huge risk of making the kinds of mistakes that other people notice, but you don’t – like walking around with a piece of broccoli stuck in your teeth all day. Someone might point it out, but odds are, you’re just gonna keep on smiling none the wiser.

Broccoli - The Silent Humiliator

Yeah, it’s good for you – but it can also embarrass you, if you’re not careful.

It’s not a good look.

Just like keeping your teeth clean, though, the solution is simple: look in the mirror every now and then.

And what are you checking for when you do?

Four questions to ask about your status updates

If you manage a library of social media updates, there are four questions you should ask about every link you post:

  1. Does this link still work?

This is one of the easiest things to check – and it’s also one of the easiest to take for granted.

Click every link you share on a regular basis. (Every link that you don’t control, anyway.)

Yes, it’s boring. No, you can’t skip it.

Links get taken down. URLs change without redirects. Articles get archived behind paywalls.

Bottom line? You might be sharing links that lead to nowhere – and if you do that a lot, the people who click them are going to learn not to bother.

An Update Inside Edgar's Library

We periodically check the links we share on social to make sure they still work.

The process is simple enough – go through your library or spreadsheet, and open every link. Tedious as it sounds, this should only take a few minutes. (Feel free to switch on Spotify and switch off your brain.) If there are dead ones, update them, or chuck ‘em out.

That’s the easiest thing to check – now, though, it’s gonna take just a little more focus.

  1. Is the information still relevant?

Some posts and articles are evergreen – they stay relevant pretty much forever. (Our step-by-step guide to writing better blog posts is a good example.)

Some posts and articles only stay relevant for a very short moment, like the announcement of a new product, or other particularly timely news.

But some posts and articles fall somewhere in the middle – and this is where you have to be the most careful.

Because evergreen posts last forever, and timely posts probably never make it into your library at all. Some of the posts in your library, however, will stay relevant only for a while.

A perfect example would be this infographic about image sizes for different social networks. After this was posted in January 2014, it would have been relevant for a while, but by now, some of its information is outdated. It’s something you may have shared with your followers a few times back then, but not something you should keep in the rotation anymore.

Header from a 2014 Article

Info that was new in 2014 might not be so helpful today. Always know what you’re sharing!

Take a quick look at the links you’re sharing, keeping a close eye out for dated information. Once something is no longer relevant, take it out of your stash.

Knowing that everything still works and is relevant isn’t enough, though – there are a few more things you should ask yourself, like:

  1. Does your audience care about what you’re sharing?

On the one hand, it’s tempting to think that it doesn’t matter if people engage with your links to other people’s content (OPC).

On the other hand, you’d be wrong.

Because sure, it doesn’t directly matter if those links get a lot of comments or clickthroughs – after all, it doesn’t add up to more traffic for your site, right?

But indirectly, it makes a big difference. For one thing, Facebook’s algorithms take your engagement levels into consideration when factoring organic reach. If you’re posting OPC that nobody engages with, that’s bad.

For another thing, posting boring content is the kiss of death, and a major reason people unfollow brands on social media.

So take a look at the statistics for the OPC you share. You should be doing this anyway to make sure you’re posting at the right times, but pay special attention to the types of content you’re sharing, too.

Facebook Stats

Download and sort your post stats, so you can easily see which links have been your most popular – and which ones are duds.

Find common ground among the types of content your fans respond and don’t respond to. For example, they may engage with posts about one subject, but not another. (It all depends on who you are and what you share, really.)

Don’t drive yourself crazy poring over these stats, but give yourself a general understanding of what topics resonate with your followers – and which updates should get the ax.

As for the updates you’re going to keep, there’s one final question you should ask:

  1. How can you tweak what you’re sharing?

It never hurts to experiment – especially if you’re experimenting with tactics proven to improve your performance.

For example, you might try adding images to tweets with links, which generally get more clicks. You can make sure that you’re creating your link previews properly on Facebook, so that they’re in the format preferred by the network’s algorithms.

Otherwise, you can experiment in smaller, more subjective ways. Take an update that’s in the form of a statement, and change it into a question – see how people respond. Add an @-mention for an author whose post you’re linking to, and see if they retweet you. A little freshening up every now and then can go a long way – so don’t let your library of updates just sit there.

You know the questions – now go ask them!

That’s it – your quick-reference checklist for a quick and easy audit of your social updates! Take a look at what you’re posting, ask yourself these questions, and never stop improving – it’s not the most fun part of your social media marketing routine, but it’s a whole lot better than tweeting blind.

The post The Only Four Questions That Actually Matter When You’re Auditing Your Content appeared first on Edgar.

Why We Stopped Assigning Deadlines – and Started Getting More Done Because of It

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If you’ve ever missed a deadline, you’re not alone.

Turns out, people miss their own deadlines a lot – there are even some fancy schmancy psychological reasons why it happens.

And while some people try to focus on incorporating lots of little schedule hacks that’ll help you trick yourself into meeting deadlines more consistently, we actually found one BIG one that’ll really do the trick:

We got rid of deadlines altogether – and you can, too.

No deadlines?

No deadlines.

And we know what you’re thinking:

That sounds like a really stupid idea.

It’s okay – your brain has been wired to think that way. From the time you got your very first homework assignment in school, you’ve been told time and time again that every task has a due date. It’s why some people insist that without deadlines, nothing would ever get done at all.

Student Working

You probably learned from an early age that deadlines are really, really important.

In a way, that’s true – but not nearly to the extent you’ve been made to believe. Because there are things that would probably never get done if they didn’t have deadlines – things like filing your taxes, or getting your car inspected, that you really just don’t feel like doing. You don’t want to do them, so you’re only allowed to put them off for a certain period of time.

But most things aren’t like that. Not in your business, anyway. And treating them like they are can lead to serious frustration.

Why arbitrary deadlines are dangerous

Because certain tasks throughout your life have built-in deadlines, it’s tempting to think that everything needs one. In a way, deadlines are comforting, because they give you a concrete goal. You know what you need to do, and when you need to have it done by.

In theory.

But the reality is, when you assign deadlines to everything you do, a lot of them are arbitrary. A certain task doesn’t need to be completed by a certain time – you just tell yourself that it does as a way of holding yourself accountable. Which might not be a problem, except for the fact that not all deadlines are arbitrary – and fake ones can get in the way of real ones. Separating the things that need to be done on deadline from the things that don’t gets confusing, and that’s where the problems really start.

Deadlines get moved around so much because not all of them actually matter. That means you’re constantly moving things around on your calendar, trying to find the perfect way to squeeze everything into place in a way that makes sense, when most of those things don’t actually need to be squeezed in at all. Which is easier to solve: a jigsaw puzzle with 10,000 pieces, or with 100?

Puzzle Pieces

When you only set deadlines for things that actually need them, you’re free to prioritize the rest of your projects as needed – and it’s a lot easier to keep them organized than you may think.

How to get things done without deadlines

This all leaves a big question:

If you don’t have deadlines, how does anything get done?

In our experience, this has been a two-part process.

First, do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.

Parkinson’s Law says that your work will take up as much time as you give it – allow yourself a day to do a task, and it’ll take a day. Give yourself a week to do that same thing, and it’ll take a week. And while some would argue that the way around this is to just give yourself shorter deadlines, that can also mean scrambling to get things done on time instead of taking long enough to do them right. You can burn yourself out, and your work can suffer for it. (Just because you can do something in a day doesn’t mean you should.)

The alternative is to forego the deadline altogether, so that the project takes as much time as it needs, rather than as much time as you give it.

And yes – you’ll still be motivated to do work even if there’s no deadline. The pessimistic take on Parkinson’s Law is that if your work has an infinite deadline, you’ll never be motivated to do it.

This makes about as much sense as saying you’ll starve to death if you don’t schedule all of your meals. Your tasks will get done because they need to get done, not because you marked a due date on the calendar. If you’re worried about losing your motivation, look to part two of the process: work only on one project at a time.

Even if you feel confident in your ability to multitask, task-switching has a way of throwing off your productivity, slowing you down and making half-complete projects pile up before you ever finish just one.

At Edgar, we force ourselves to work on one project at a time, seeing it through until it’s finished before we’re allowed to do something else.

It’s organized using a Kanban flow, which looks a little something like this:

Kanban Flow

On the left is a column of upcoming projects. Someone chooses a project from that queue, moves it into the Doing column when they start, and when it’s ready for the next step, it continues moving to the right. (In this case, a developer’s project goes to the Code Review stage – more on that here.) Once the project makes it all the way to the column on the far right – the Complete column (not pictured) – the developer can go back to the start, choose another project, and go again.

Your to-do list of projects motivates you to not waste time. Sure, maybe you’re working on something right now that you hate doing. It’s boring, it’s frustrating, whatever. But you’re not allowed to work on anything else until it’s done – sort of a “no dessert until you eat your veggies” policy. It might sound kind of new age-y, but it turns finishing a project into its own reward, because it means you get to start work on the next thing. (It’s also great motivation for knocking out a ton of small, annoying tasks – you know, the kind that are normally really tempting to procrastinate on.)

You can still manage other people without deadlines, too

From a management standpoint, deadlines can seem like invaluable tools for keeping your team accountable. Like little mob enforcers who are always there to remind people that they have certain obligations to meet.

Mob Enforcer

“That’s a nice lookin’ job you’ve got there. Would be a real shame if something were to…happen to it.”

But is that really the tone you want for your business?

Constant deadlines can send the wrong message to your team. Instead of fostering a sense of autonomy, it turns them into thing-doers who are just there to tick off boxes on a checklist.

If you don’t trust the people on your team to do work simply because it needs to be done, you should rethink the people you’re hiring.

Businesses don’t grow by hiring thing-doers – they grow by bringing in people who can think of new ideas, and collaborate with you to make contributions bigger than just doing what they’re told. In his book “Ogilvy On Advertising,” industry pioneer David Ogilvy shares the advice that he gave every head of office in his agency:

“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

Eliminating deadlines isn’t the only way to empower your team, but it fosters a collaborative and trusting environment, and one without the rigid timelines that can discourage finding creative solutions.

Note: This isn’t the same thing as eliminating oversight altogether.

Getting rid of deadlines does not mean less management – it just means different management. You should work with people who want to do good work, sure, but you can still check in with them, monitor their progress, and step in to assist or get answers when you deem it necessary. If a task seems to be taking longer than you’d like, find out why! In the end, it’s about balancing trust with accountability – and the micromanagement inherent in constant deadlines on top of deadlines makes that harder than it has to be.

Here’s how to try it out with zero risk

Switching your entire method of project management is obviously a pretty big commitment – so here’s how you can give it a try.

For the next week, eliminate multitasking from your repertoire. Every time you work on something, don’t allow yourself to start your next project until the first one is finished. How does it affect your motivation? Your focus? The time it takes to complete a task? Try singletasking on for size – you may find that it’s a lot more effective than a deadline on a calendar. (And let us know in the comments if you like it as much as we do!)

 

The post Why We Stopped Assigning Deadlines – and Started Getting More Done Because of It appeared first on Edgar.

Six Common (and Cringeworthy) Mistakes to Avoid When Scheduling Social Content

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Everybody makes mistakes sometimes – and when you’re lucky, those mistakes happen in a place where nobody can see. If you’re not paying attention one morning and accidentally squirt earlobe ointment on your toothbrush instead of Colgate, it might be embarrassing, but at least you can take that little secret to your grave.

The mistakes you make in public, though? Infinitely worse. Because even when they’re relatively innocuous, everyone can see, and can screenshot, and can link to and pass around and laugh at in perpetuity.

Social Media Fails Headline

This isn’t the type of list you want to end up on. Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/social-media-engagement-strategy#.atq7oGgQ57

Failing hard on social media is an easy thing to do, and when it happens, the cycle of Internet shaming kicks off with you in the spotlight. And despite how much we advocate for writing updates in batches and automating your social media, there’s a cold, hard truth at the center:

Automating your social media carelessly can lead to some seriously embarrassing screwups.

Just like that old urban legend about the driver who gets into an accident because they think that cruise control is the same thing as autopilot, taking a “set it and forget it” approach to social media automation has accident written all over it.

So how do you avoid making some of the biggest social media automation mistakes imaginable? How do you protect yourself and your brand from the utter humiliation of a major faux pas?

Whether you’re brand new to scheduling your social in advance or you’ve been at it for years, here are a few ground rules to keep in mind.

1. Don’t make scheduled posts your ONLY posts

Scheduling posts ahead of time is easier than doing everything live.

That’s not just us talking, either – more marketers would rather skip social media altogether than have to plan and share their posts on the same day.

But scheduling posts ahead of time doesn’t mean you NEVER have to engage live. If anything, you might be engaging live even more than you would otherwise.

"I haven't logged in to Twitter in three weeks. Maybe I should do that."

“I haven’t logged in to Twitter in three weeks. Maybe I should do that.”

Say you typically spend two hours a day on social media marketing, and a certain percentage of that time is dedicated to thinking of, writing, and sharing tweets live. You use the rest of the time for interacting with your followers – responding to mentions, participating in Twitter chats, and so on.

If you start scheduling your tweets in advance, you’re suddenly not spending that daily time sharing them manually. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re spending less time on social media, though – it means you’re spending your time on social more wisely.

Automating your social media means taking certain responsibilities off your plate so that you have more room for the things you can’t plan ahead of time – the live engagement that makes social, well, social. It doesn’t replace live posting altogether so much as it makes live posting easier. If you just set up your automated posts, call it a job well done, and promptly stop checking in on social media, you’re likely to leave a lot of fans and followers feeling neglected – and that’s not a good look.

2. Don’t assume everything is working the way it should

Content audits are a seriously important part of any social scheduling strategy, and while you can read our full walkthrough of a successful audit here, the first step is particularly important: check your links to make sure they still work.

Just because you shared a working link a few months or even a few weeks ago doesn’t mean that link still works – and enticing your readers with a curiosity-building update only to send them to a 404 page is just brutal. It’s like dropping someone during a trust fall exercise. (We’re not gonna name names.)

Google 404 Page Example

When you’re automating your social media, make sure that links work before you share them, even if you’ve shared them before. Even if you don’t do a full audit, checking just that one thing can prevent an embarrassing slip up.

3. Don’t share the same exact thing ALL the time

It’s no secret by now that if you want an update to reach a sizeable audience, you should think about sharing it more than once. (After all, less than half of your Twitter followers log on even once a day – the odds that they’re bumping into one of your tweets is pretty small.)

That doesn’t, however, mean you can reuse the same status update constantly. For example, say you like to promote a new blog post pretty heavily – maybe twice a day per social network, for a week. Even if you’re just posting to Facebook and Twitter, that’s fourteen posts, and if they’re all the exact same update, it’s not unlikely that someone’s going to notice.

Give your repeats a little breathing room. So for that last example, that might mean writing a small handful of updates for a single blog post and sharing them on a rotating basis. Building a library of updates you can pull from again and again over time doesn’t mean making a list of a dozen and calling it a day – it means adding to it over time, so it accumulates and expands, and the space between repeats gets smaller and smaller. Sharing the same exact thing over and over makes you sound like a robot – and people don’t like to be friends with robots.

(Except Johnny Five, obviously.)

4. Don’t keep the same posting schedule forever

A lot can change over a few months. Maybe you gained a few followers. Maybe you lost a few pounds. (You look great, by the way.)

Point is, the social media schedule you spent so much time pruning and perfecting way back when? It might not be the best one for you anymore. Even the types of posts that worked so well for you back then might not be resonating with your audience the way they used to.

Facebook Insights

You may be surprised how much certain stats can change over just a few months.

Keep a close eye on your analytics, and every few months, see if your performance is still meeting your expectations. Automation can make you feel complacent about these statistics, so don’t slip into a pattern of assuming that what worked before is still working now. (Otherwise, you could end up sharing all the right things at all the wrong times – or vice versa.)

5. Don’t stop paying attention to the real world

One of the best things about automated social media is that it goes on and on without you having to think about it.

But if you’re not careful, that can also be one of the worst things.

Sometimes, quieting down on social media is a good idea. (You don’t want to be the gun club that tweets in the aftermath of a mass shooting.) Something that seemed harmless when you scheduled it might come across completely differently in the context of the real world, and for reasons you couldn’t possibly have predicted. Maybe you queued up an inspirational quote from a celebrity now embroiled in a scandal, for example – there was nothing wrong with it at the time, but the world has changed since you scheduled that update, and having it automatically posted now may seem insensitive.

Be mindful of the world around you, and don’t forget that your automated social media is going to keep on chugging unless you tell it not to. No matter how smart your tool may be, it’s not smart enough to monitor current events for you!

6. Don’t over-publish just because you can

How many times a day do you post to social media? Five? Ten? A HUNDRED? (You animal!)

Okay, you’re probably not posting to social media a hundred times a day – but you could still be posting too often.

Knowing what you know about Twitter, it makes sense that the more you post, the better the odds that you’ll be seen. That’s easy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t post too much. For example, about 29% of your followers check Twitter multiple times a day. What if you’re appearing in their timelines every single time they do? Or more than once every time they do? Are you willing to risk annoying nearly a third of your followers by posting incessantly?

This is one of those “your mileage may vary” things – nobody can tell you exactly how often you should be posting to social media. Some people have excellent results posting just a few times per day. Others may post once or twice an hour, every hour. But just because you can post every 10 or 15 minutes by automating doesn’t mean you should – not necessarily. (Even if it doesn’t drive your followers crazy, it’ll definitely drive you crazy writing enough fresh material to keep up with that kind of schedule.)

Carelessness kills (your image)

These may not be the only ways that careless automation can result in an embarrassing situation, but they’re biggies. The good news? Avoiding them is really, really easy.

All it takes is a little general mindfulness, and you can keep your squeaky clean social reputation, all while reaping the ridiculous benefits of an automated posting schedule. (And that’s all anybody really wants, isn’t it?)

The post Six Common (and Cringeworthy) Mistakes to Avoid When Scheduling Social Content appeared first on Edgar.

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