Social Media Training for Marketers

Snapchat smartly lets you both browse through stickers, or instantly shows you ones related to words you’ve typed in the text compose window. For example, typing “Love you” or “Hungry” brings up all the stickers matching those sentiments, and even highlights the text after you choose a sticker so you can instantly delete or type over the words.

ne day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say “I’m a writer. I don’t do math” in a message to my accountant: [Girl symbol] (meaning me) + [Pen and paper] (writer) + [calculator] (math) = “?!?!?” Right, it doesn’t sound so complicated. But by finding said emoji, putting them in sequence and spacing them out, I could have typed the statement 17 times.

It wasn’t until 2008 that a uniform emoji alphabet was created (the idea was to minimize inconsistency across platforms), and Apple adopted it in 2011, adding it to its iOS5 operating system.

First, you may already be using data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and market research to inform campaigns. But a wider array of data signals is available, from analytics on your brand's website (that could tell you your most popular products, for instance), to audience data (that could give a glimpse of age, gender, or interests), to contextual insights about which device, location, or media type delivered the most success for a campaign. The trick is to know all the sources of data available, and figure out which can fuel smarter creative.

Too often, the creative agency and production shop are brought into the campaign process after the media strategy has been decided. By informing the creative agency of all the data from the outset of the project, you can work with the agency to build more relevant creative strategies for your target audience.

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language. Instagram has always supported emoji, but they did not see wide adoption until the introduction of the emoji keyboard on iOS (October 2011) and on most Android platforms (July 2013). The graph below shows the percentage of text (comments and captions) containing emoji characters graphed over time

In the month following the introduction of the iOS emoji keyboard, 10% of text on Instagram contained emoji.

Usage continued to grow and in March of this year, nearly half of text contained emoji

Katie Hooper, managing director and vice president of strategy at HZDG, agreed: "As soon as you say you're changing your loyalty program, an instant skepticism emerges. When you make the reward harder to realize, it feels like something that's just helping the companies improve their revenue streams. We recommend telling customers how this is going to improve their daily life. Before, Starbucks was doing it really well by rewarding them based on frequency. It said they valued the customer no matter what."

Changes such as these actually could make your loyal customers less loyal, said Susan Cantor, president of Red Peak Branding: "It erodes good will. If you make a change, it needs to be more in line with previous customer expectations."

When you’re ready to write PR content, these free tools and resources can help you with the process. SEOToolSet: provides information on search activity (e.g., how popular search terms are) and the demographics of people doing the query Ubersuggest: gives suggestions of keywords you might want to add to your keyword list or article content Google Trends: shows topics trending on Google, which can help you as you brainstorm topics to write about Scribe: shares the content marketing process with an integrated, holistic approach that maximizes your return on investment.

Content creation is 80% promotion and 20% content creation. Part of that 80% is finding influencers.

Start out by contacting one or two that have the personality type you want to be associated with, a shared message, and that your audience would like.

Once an influencer sends their audience to you, work extra hard to keep the newfound audience engaged and coming back to you for more creative, influential, and authoritative content.