When it comes to business sensibility, we are often required to determine whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze concerning our expenses. If the hot new advertising campaign we’ve kicked off isn’t getting us any further attention, at what point do we pull the plug and consider it a loss? Is the new $200 coffee maker we purchased for the break room encouraging morale or wasting people’s time? Are our social media expenditures simply costing us money or are we actually seeing results?

With any transaction of goods or services, ROI is most certainly expected. As a consumer driven society, we want to be sure we’re getting our money’s worth, especially in terms of successful business dealings. The worst threat to our sanity as human beings is to think we’re being taken across. So, when determining a sensible social media contract for outsourcing, can ROI be considered an attainable goal?

This is a highly contested question in the world of social media, as concern swells around how important a presence can be. Allow me to answer that question quickly and without excessive words; very important. Social media is a way of adding a human element to your branding, and people like human. They like to see the faces of the businesses they frequent, they enjoy your fun fact or quirky anecdotes, and they like to know there’s a human on the other side of the website when they need help with something.

There are many goals to focus on when it comes to social media. Improving your brand awareness, increasing website traffic, and ramping up your exposure are all fantastic examples of attainable goals. These goals are easily measurable with analytics and can therefore prove whether or not the effort of your social media company is working. ROI, however is trickier.

The reason most social media company’s don’t list ROI as a client goal is this; it’s not easily measured from behind the desk. Whether or not your Facebook page is driving people to purchase from you, thus increasing your business, is knowledge that can only be attained by asking your customers what drove them to your location. This means relying on customers for honest answers and feedback.

If social media outreach tactics allow you to gain new customers, then the ROI question is easily answered. During a targeted outreach campaign, if direct contact yields a new client or customer, then your social media efforts are indeed netting a positive in the new business column. At this point, ROI is a sure thing.

Unfortunately, too often, these results go unmeasured and the questions go unasked, making ROI such a dicey dilemma for social media professionals. ROI remains one of the great unknown questions when acquiring a new client. There is no simple answer to the question as to whether or not social media can increase your bottom line or even match what you’re spending.

In terms of whether or not social media is worth the money you’re spending for the services you retain, the short answer is yes. If the firm you’ve hired has their eye on the ball and is willing to be diligent and steadfast in portraying your business on social media platforms, the package is well worth the money. In contrast, if the company you’ve hired is bogged down with personnel changes and personal issues, then this question becomes, ultimately, more challenging. In any event, the risk is often worth the reward.

For some social media professionals, ROI is an attainable goal, as it should be. In a customer service profession like social media management, commitment to the customer should be the number one concern. If the customer is willing to listen to advice and stick to a plan, ROI is absolutely something a social media professional should be able to provide. However, to ensure the maximum return on your investment, a long term plan is probably the best chance at success.

Social media isn’t a sprint, it is a marathon. So, if you’re expecting an immediate return within weeks of starting up a fan page, social media may not be a successful endeavor. The goals a customer sets for their social media must be realistic, and it is the responsibility of the social media manager to assist in the setting of these goals.

In making the decision to outsource social media, discuss the importance of ROI with your management professional. During this discussion, the manager should be able to let you know exactly how realistic your goals are. If your ROI is not something they are willing to consider, move on. ROI is entirely realistic, but it won’t be immediate. Before signing social media contracts, ensure that your goals and the social media company’s goals align; this is the number one concern for a cohesive relationship and will often guarantee a better result.

It’s hard to pick a better Joker from the Batman movies. The original Jack Nicholson version was dark and funny and had the psychopathic flare that only Jack can bring to the table. Heath Ledger’s Joker brought critical acclaim and an Oscar win because of the raw grittiness in the way he threw himself into the role.

We shouldn’t choose. We shouldn’t have to. Both performances can thrive on their own merits and be watched for generations to come.

The same sort of toss-up applies to Facebook and Twitter posting, particularly when it comes to advertising for business. Everyone knows about the public posting component. These are the posts that appear on the Facebook pages or Twitter profiles of the business and fill the news feeds and timelines of the business’ followers. The unpublished side, known to some as “dark posts”, are usually not known by the business community and often ignored by marketing companies.

If a social media company isn’t taking advantage of both of them, you should run away and pretend like they don’t exist. Both are extremely important to the success of a business’ social media presence. If anything, the dark posts are even more important than the public posts. Let’s define them, then go into why they’re both so important.

Public Posts

Not much to say here since you all already know what they are. If you post to your “wall” on Facebook or to your Twitter profile, you’re posting publicly. These posts appear whenever anyone visits your page or profile. They also appear on the Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines of those who are following you (though your actual reach with advertising on either platform is normally pretty abysmal, even embarrassing).

Dark Posts

These are the unpublished posts on Facebook and Twitter. They’re the ads that don’t appear on your page or profile, but fill the news feeds and timelines of the audiences you select. They aren’t bound by time – they run until you replace them or tell them to stop.

Dark posts are avoided by many companies for three reasons:

1. They aren’t automated. You can’t schedule them with Buffer or Hootsuite, for example, and an API feed doesn’t work. This makes them non-scalable, which means that only nimble companies like the automotive social media folks, our friends at Dealer Authority, have the ability to manage them for their clients.
2. They aren’t popular. For whatever reason, both Facebook and Twitter have done terrible jobs at letting businesses know the power of dark posts. This is good for those who are taking advantage of them because the competition in most industries is minimal. Of course, that also means social media companies can get away with not selling them because few businesses are asking about them.
3. They aren’t profitable… for the social media company. Unlike Google PPC where even small businesses can have monthly budgets in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, social media dark post advertising is usually in the hundreds or thousands per month. Those charging a percentage can’t make much money and those charging a flat often have to overcharge to make them worthwhile.

The thing is that these types of posts have the strongest ROI, higher than with public posts. For this reason, social media companies must offer them if their goal is to truly help their clients.

Why You Need Both

By themselves, neither is exceptionally effective. Sure, you can get incredible branding and exposure through a public posting strategy with a small advertising budget and you can get great traffic to your website through a dark posting campaign with a slightly higher budget, but it’s in the combination of both types of posting that a proper strategy can be delivered.

Get the buzz with public posts. Get the traffic with dark posts. It’s not a hard concept to understand, but it’s strangely a hard service (for some) to deliver.

The trends have been pointing to older generations jumping on Facebook for a while. Now, the latest numbers from Pew show that over half of internet users over 65 use Facebook.

Overall, Facebook’s growth slowed but engagement levels increased. On other networks such as Twitter and Pinterest, the number of users rose more dramatically but engagement decreased. While some say this is due to fatigue and accounts going dormant, we speculate that the users are getting more efficient at using the networks. The can be seen in the dramatic rise of adults using multiple networks – 52% in 2014 versus 42% the year before.

The most important finding of the study surrounds the rise in Facebook engagement. 70% of users access the site daily. That’s huge. That means that once Facebook gets its hooks into users, they tend to crave it in much the same way that people watch television daily. This is a sharp contrast to recent speculation that Facebook is suffering from being antiquated and too “uncool” for younger users.

That may be the case, but as they get older and are forced to expand their social circles through work and adult groups, it’s likely that they will be forced to come back to the “old person’s social network” if they want to engage with their adult peers.

There are definitely some gems in the exhaustive study, but overall it’s not really anything new. Facebook is huge. We knew that already.

Twitter was tiny. Then it was huge. Then it was irrelevant. Now, it’s on the verge of landing somewhere in between “huge” and “irrelevant” with the rollout of their “While you were away” feature.

Businesses have had a love/hate relationship with Twitter since its birth. It can be a tremendous communication tool, of course. That hasn’t changed. However, it seemed to only be of true benefit for big companies. Local businesses outside of real-time floaters like food trucks or music bands had a hard time generating a true return on investment.

The problem has been that for a local business to have any chance of getting noticed on Twitter and generating proactive benefit, a lot of time was necessary. Unfortunately, the return did not always justify the time spent. What’s worse is that it became painful for some who were finding that the positive things they tried to do went nowhere while anything negative about them that went out on Twitter seemed to go viral.

Bad news flourished. Good news got buried.

That’s in the process of changing. “While you were away” will bring real ROI for local businesses.

Start Paying Attention to Twitter Now

One of the most appealing aspects of Facebook is its extremely intuitive algorithm. Most people take for granted the amazing complexity and uncanny accuracy of the algorithm that powers the news feed.

On the other hand, Twitter has always maintained strength in real-time exploits. See what’s happening now… and now… and now again. This meant that local businesses would have to Tweet several times a day in order to get any traction, plus engage in conversations, plus monitor for mentions, plus several other little annoying activities that made it more cost- and ROI-effective to simply maintain a basic presence and monitor briefly every day.

The new feature means that quality could trump quantity, or rather add to it. On Facebook, it’s better to post less and make it meaningful. Posting too much can hurt. With the new Twitter, it will likely make sense to focus on quality first but with the understanding that quantity will still help. In essence, “While you were away” means that you want to do whatever you can to generate some sort of interactions on some of your Tweets. If you do, your Tweets from minutes, hours, or even days ago have an opportunity to be seen by your audience in ways that were impossible in the chronological-only world of old Twitter.

Quality is new Twitter’s best friend.

Here are a few anticipatory best practices. We can’t be definitive at this point because the feature is still limited, but we can anticipate some things that you’ll want to do to bump up your Twitter quality.

• Include images whenever appropriate. By keeping them the proper size (2-to-1 ratio) and compelling, you’ll get more attention while it’s live, giving it more potential engagement and increasing its chances of being seen by people when they log into Twitter next time.
• Post often but spread it out so as to not get unfollowed. Every guru has an opinion about frequency. I like to keep at least an hour between standard Tweets (not including @replies).
• Do not ask for retweets. Here’s the thing. It works. Unfortunately. Then again, panhandling at the subway station can work as well, but it’s not something that you want to do for a living. Rely on your content. They’ll retweet it if they love it.
• Retweet and favorite others’ posts aggressively. I’m a little worried about using the word “aggressively” in this best practice because it can definitely be taken too far, but helping others will encourage them to help you. Don’t do it randomly, though. Whatever you retweet will appear on your Twitter profile. Be selective and only retweet the best content from good sources. That doesn’t necessarily mean big sources. A Ford dealer will probably notice if you retweet them. Ford corporate most likely will not.
• Use hashtags, but don’t overdo it. Reading these, one would think that it’s written by Goldilocks. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right. That’s really what you want to do with Twitter – find the sweet spot for all activities.

I hate to admit it, but I lost love for Twitter over the last couple of years. The love is getting renewed. Twitter is going to be effective for small businesses once again if they do it right.

Someday, I will have the opportunity to prove to a client or prospect beyond any reasonable doubt that this is true. In the meantime, I will continue to write about it in hopes that the facts will win out.

To prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, I would have to take a page that has zero fans and send massive engagement and traffic with a small budget. Then, we’d need to look at the statistics to show that a page that starts off with zero likes can have more than just paid reach. It can have more organic reach than pages that have tons of likes.

We do have examples, not to the extreme of having zero fans, but by demonstrating that through strong content and proper use of advertising we can get strong organic reach. Here’s a quick one that’s pretty clear:

As you can see, this page has 2,458 people liking it. However, you’ll see that the small budget, in this case around $15, was able to get it good paid exposure. More importantly, it generated more organic reach than the number of people who like the page.

Now, let’s look at a different page. It has nearly 8 times as many likes, but the reach is minimal.

The gap is crystal clear. Facebook has been pulling back on organic reach for some time. While many will say that it’s all about greed and the bottom line to force pages to use money to get exposure, it’s more likely about what the users want. When they see page posts on their news feeds, they are much less likely to engage with those posts than the posts of their friends and family. Still, they’re a business, so the reduction of organic reach and the rise of sponsoring posts is the end result.

You’ll notice that I said that page likes are 99% worthless. There’s one minor benefit. Some would call it credibility. Others would call it ego. Either way, having a page that people are liking gives a psychological boost to the page to let people demonstrate how popular their page really is. While likes are infinitesimal in importance compared to reach, it’s still a benefit.

Focus on content. Put a budget behind it. Give your page real reach rather than the artificial benefits associated with page popularity.

There are two major components to a good blog. Sure, there are plenty of other components such as design, site speed, consistency, purpose, niche relations… actually, there are so many that I could write a full-length article just listing the different components, let alone going into detail about them. Still, there are two primary components that can overcome poor performance on all of the other areas.

Great content. Great promotion. That’s it. If your content is strong and you’re able to promote your site properly and gain credibility on social media and search, you’re blog will grow and be successful.

The content part is actually easier. If you’re a good writer, strong at making videos, a great photographer, or a combination of all three, you can put together great content. You’ll need passion to do it, perseverance to stick with it, and time to stay consistent, but strong content can keep people coming back to your site.

Early promotion is what gets them there in the first place. Just like a tree falling in an empty forest, a blog with great content that nobody is seeing will not be able to grow simply on the merits of your Pulitzer-quality works. You have to have promotions to make it work.

By “promotions”, I’m not necessarily talking about paid promotions. Those help, particularly on Facebook and other social media sites, but you have to be able to get the right people seeing your content so that it has the opportunity to get noticed, shared, and eventually trusted. There are other ways to promote other than social media, but I’m writing this assuming you have little or no budget, in which case good ol’ free social media is the way to go.

First and foremost, many who read this will say that they are already promoting their blog. They’re sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media site and that should be enough, right? If you’re very popular on social media, it might be, but it will probably take more than that. If you’re doing it in an automated way such as having it share directly through a WordPress plugin or RSS service, you’re completely doing it wrong.

Let’s look at how to do it right.

Post By Hand

Stop feeding an automated posting solution. It saves you minutes (maybe even seconds) versus hand-crafting your posts on social media. If you don’t have time to write up an appropriate title and description as well as sharing the right image, you don’t have time for promotion and you probably don’t have time to blog in the first place.

Use the Right Tools

Take advantage of every possible advantage that you can. If you’re going to be posting it to your personal social media profiles, use the right tools. For Facebook, the right tool is Facebook. Don’t post through Hootsuite or any of the common posting tools. Using the Facebook interface is better because it gives you an algorithmic advantage over the API posting services. The same thing holds true for LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

For Twitter and Google+, using a tool like Buffer is fine.

Take Advantage of Platform Strengths

Do each individually and make sure to take advantage of the platform’s individual strengths:

• Facebook: Post the link directly on Facebook.com. Pick out the right thumbnail and make sure it renders properly as a full image rather than a partial image. You may even want to upload a fresh image, particularly if there’s text involved. For maximum quality and space management, use images that are 1200×628 in aspect ratio and at least 600 pixels wide. Fix the title and link description if necessary. Keep the post text short but important. Some say to leave the link itself in the post text but I disagree. It makes it look sloppy.
• Twitter: Whenever possible (which is just about every time) be sure to include an image in your Tweet. The exception is if you have an extremely long title or a ton of hashtags that take up a lot of the necessary character room. Images should be 2×1 ratio and over 500 pixels wide. Use hashtags when appropriate but don’t overdo it. Mention people of note if you believe they will be truly interested, particularly if they’re the subject.
• Google+ and LinkedIn: Pretty much just like Facebook, but craft the text portion to match the network.
• Pinterest: Make sure the image selected is large enough to fill an entire Pin properly. Make the description a full paragraph when necessary and include the right hashtags.
• Tumblr: If you have an interesting image, that is much easier to promote on Tumblr than a link. If you use the Tumblr browser addon, you’ll be able to share as an image from the page directly, select the right one, and hand-craft the description. Doing it this way will make the image clickable to your website. Tags are extremely important on Tumblr. Make sure they’re relevant but don’t be shy with them, either.

Build Branded Pages and Profiles

It can become a chore to build up additional profiles beyond your personal ones, but it’s worth it long-term if you’re committed. Be warned – if you can’t manage them and keep them robust, they’ll become more of a detriment than benefit.

Don’t duplicate your efforts from your personal account. Say things in different ways. Post at different times. Divide and conquer using your two sets.

Share Other Works

The biggest mistake I see people make with their branded accounts is that they’re all about the blog itself. You’ll build an audience for them much faster if you diversify with content from places other than your own blog.

This is hard for some to grasp. Most major blog pages and profiles do not do this. They can afford to not do it. Until you build something as big as Mashable, there’s no reason to mimic them. Build an audience with tons of relevant content even if not all of it is helping to promote your own site.

Final Note

All of this is much easier with money behind it. Facebook and Twitter have great and inexpensive advertising models. You don’t have to spend a ton. A few bucks consistently utilized for promotions can help take your blog higher much more quickly than trying to build it through strictly organic promotions.

If you care about your blog and the content you post, you’ll put in the effort to get people to see it and love it.

When I finally stopped counting, I found 43 articles posted this week on various publications proclaiming that everything was going mobile and that marketers and businesses need to make the appropriate adjustments. All of the articles had two things in common: they gave reasons why we needed to market to mobile users and they didn’t give very good ways other than the basic or generic methods for doing so.

Well, I’m here to give you some good ways to do it. That’s all. No need to convince you that you need to do it. If you’re reading this article, you already know. If you’re not reading this article, you probably already know. Now, let’s get away from why and start really digging into how.

Build Everything for Mobile

Everything. I didn’t say most things. I didn’t say “everything digital” or “all of your advertising”. I said “everything” and I mean it.

Signs. Billboards. Television commercials. Radio spots. Newspaper ads. PPC campaigns. Social media posts. Your website. You employees’ apparel.

Pretend like people will be either carrying around smartphones and tablets with them everywhere they go. Pretend like their primary method for interacting with businesses is not the phone, not their email, not their laptops, and not coming to see you in person. Pretend like they’re on the verge of using their mobile device even when they’re in your store. Now, stop pretending because all of that is already a reality.

Watch your customers if you have a physical location. How many of them check their phones during the visit? If you don’t have a physical location, check your analytics. Look at the devices through which they’re viewing your website.

Now, give them the opportunity to have a mobile experience with everything you have. Once you have the opportunities in line, give them the reason to act. For example:

• Forget about paper coupons. Put virtual coupons at your store if they download your app or go to the “In-Store Customer Discount Page” on your website.
• Restaurant owners, post videos and articles about particular recipes showing how you cook your signature dishes. You don’t have to give away the whole recipe if it’s secret, but you can get your visitors interacting with your food, even sharing this content on social media before, during, and after they have eaten it.
• Let customers post to your site, community, or social profiles. In fact, encourage them. Give them incentive to do so. Tell them if they post a selfie with your sign in the background, they’ll get 10% off. Images posted to Facebook or Twitter are much better than checkins on Yelp.

I could spit out ideas for hours, but we’re writing an article, not a book. Think of ideas for yourself. What can you do with everything you have to make it part of the mobile experience.

A Mobile-Only Website Would Work

All too often, we build a website for the company and make it really pretty on a desktop, but we neglect to put the same effort in for mobile. Whether you’re using responsive, adaptive, mobile-ready, or full-site only platforms, make sure that your website is designed specifically for mobile.

In fact, if your primary website mimicked a mobile experience, you’re better off than if your mobile website mimics a desktop experience. At some point in the near future, we will begin to see more websites that appear like mobile websites even when viewed on desktops. This is a good thing. Those who start doing it early will be ahead of the curve.

Social is Mobile

For a while there, it was looking as if Facebook would be able to become the only web presence. They faltered, then interest dropped off, but they got close. Now, we’re still stuck with our standard online presence and our social presence.

But wait! It doesn’t have to be so partitioned. Social media sites, Facebook in particular, have very powerful mobile connections. By drawing as many people in as possible to engage with you through their mobile devices on social media, you can start to bridge the gap and work towards a unified web presence. This is much trickier than what I can explain in a short article, but the strategy is one that we’re implementing for clients now.

If you think social, think mobile. If you think mobile, make it work with social. Both can be made local, thus the SoLoMo concept that has been so popular at marketing conferences for a few years now.

Erase All Desktop and Analog Thinking from Your Mindset

This is the most important thing to do. We’ve hammered it so far in this article with everything we’ve said. Now we’re going to push it all the way through to the other side.

You don’t have a mobile website and a desktop website. You have a website. You don’t have social media fans on mobile and social media fans on desktop. They’re all on mobile (or will be eventually). You don’t have customers walking through your doors who aren’t seconds away from having their phone in their hand. Embrace it.

Buzzwords like “showrooming” and “competitive shopping” are real but pretty much meaningless until you have a purely mobile strategy for everyhing you do. Keep that in mind next time you’re looking at your advertising and marketing budgets. If an expenditure doesn’t assist in taking advantage of a mobile society, consider letting it go.

Here’s a quick post on Storify:

YouTube is a huge social media outlet with unparalleled outlets. It has a huge audience and great marketing potential for your business, but most businesses or brands aren’t quite sure how to use YouTube to build up their brand. The most common use for YouTube and business is to promote their company and show consumers what they do, but this isn’t the only way you should be using YouTube to promote your business. So what can you do different to market yourself on this social media outlet with one of the largest audiences on the internet?

First of all, most people don’t visit YouTube and search YOUR business. Most people will not subscribe to your YouTube Channel to see your commercials and what you sell. They typically know that car dealerships for instance, sell cars. They will most likely know what your dealership is all about from television commercials, internet ads, newspaper, and radio ads. They aren’t there to research your company’s history. Although these things are important, YouTube may not be the best outlet to promote these items on. Of course, you will want to still have videos like this on your channel, but to capture your target audience, you must do more.

So what can you do? Create interest. People go to YouTube to be entertained, so entertain them. Grab their attention with a weekly spot that may not be relevant to your business, but will keep them coming back to your channel weekly, or better yet, getting them to subscribe to your channel. You can create comical spots, or tell a story that builds over the weeks about a character at your business. Leave them wanting more every week. For instance, Sony Mobile has created a weekly spot called The Take Out that features upcoming movies, music, apps, and video clips from social media across the web.. Although this happens to be relevant to their business, consumers have an interest to come back every week and see what is new.

Another option to get consumers to repeatedly visit your YouTube Channel, is by creating How To Videos. For car dealerships, this may be as simple as showing consumers how to change the oil on a vehicle, or how to replace a fuse. These useful videos will create rapport with your customers and they will begin to trust you as a business. When you can show consumers how to perform simple tasks on their vehicles, they will begin to think of you as the experts. They will think of you when a more serious repair or maintenance item is required and this will not only build your brand, but will bring in money and new clientele to your dealership or business. They may also come to you when purchasing those needed parts and tools for the jobs you teach them to do.

The best advice when using YouTube as a marketing tool is to think outside the box. Consumers want information, they want to learn how to do things, and they want to be entertained. When you create videos that cater to your audience, you not only build your brand, but you build trust and become the authority when it comes to giving advice in your particular field of business. So with this knowledge, go forth and be creative with your YouTube videos and entertain, educate, and excite your audience, always leaving them wanting more.

For traditional marketers, the end of year holiday season marks a massive push in terms of advertisements. Unfortunately, when small businesses don’t realize the power they wield with social media, they miss out. The holidays can be a beneficial time to ramp up your social media efforts in order to attract new clients or customers.

All too often, small businesses don’t understand the importance of an active social media presence and suffer the consequences. Developing a strategy for your small business in terms of social media can be just as important as the right location. With the advent of social media, businesses have been allowed the freedom to reach customers and other businesses in new and inventive ways.

While a presence is important for every month of the year, the holidays allow for increased visibility and better brand recognition.  Potential customers pore over internet sites looking for the next big deal, and social media is no different. If you don’t have a social media plan in place for the holidays, develop one now, it’s not too late.

Simply having a Facebook page or a Twitter following is not enough, and neither is the sporadic posting of statuses. To have a well-rounded social media plan, consistency is key. For social media success, a business should post on a regular basis (3-4 times per week) with relevant, timely, and interesting content. For the holiday season, themed posts work brilliantly.

Social media posting does not always have to be a sales push. Intersperse sales information with attention-grabbing facts about your business. Give your business a face, as consumers like to know there is a human involved in the businesses they frequent. An anecdote about holiday traditions, photos of your decorated business, or your charitable efforts are always great tips for posting during the biggest shopping season of the year.

If you’re in a customer based business, get their attention and don’t just stick with the safe and traditional channels. Branch out to hot and fresh mediums like Snapchat, Instagram, or Pinterest.   There are a variety of techniques that are useful in utilizing social media during the holidays.

Rewarding customers is a great way to get social media recognition. Offer $5 off of a sale for customers that “like” your page, follow you on Twitter, RT you, or re-pin some of your pins. A small discount can go a long way with attracting new customers and showing gratefulness to loyal customers. Plus, during the holiday season, consumers are always looking for any way to save.

Establish a Snapchat account for your business and offer teases of new holiday merchandise. Have people flocking to your business in droves by offering a discount via Snapchat that they won’t discover until they are at the register. Once they open the message in your store, the customers find out what percentage of discount they’re being offered.

Use Instagram to post photos of your decorating efforts in your store, ask for people’s opinions via comments, or award people that follow you and consistently like your photos. A well-timed photo can be extremely beneficial in attracting new people, especially if you’re offering a product only available in your business or offering a great discount on a hot product.

Businesses that make charitable contributions during the holidays are often popular. As a consumer, knowing that a portion of sales will go to charity is pretty powerful motivation to buy from that location. Use your social media to get the word out that your business is accepting donations, or that a percentage of your proceeds will be donated. Pick a charity that means something to your business or to your client base, and assuredly people will line up to participate.

If you’re a business that provides a service to consumers, offer an open house during the holidays, and use your social media accounts to publicize it. With a minimal amount spent, you offer customers the opportunity to meet the staff, experience the ambiance of your location, or simply socialize and network. A simple effort like an open house, backed by social media endorsement, can foster business relationships that will last long past the season.

Using a medium like YouTube, you can thank loyal customers for their dedication. You can also film a staff holiday party or an event, as it will provide a personality for your business. People enjoy feeling like they’ve gotten a look at something they wouldn’t typically see, and this can directly translate to new customers or repeat visits from solid customers.

The holidays can prove to be a powerful marketing tool via social media if utilized properly. Don’t allow your customers to feel that you’re capitalizing on their holiday spirit, however. There is a fine line between a holiday push and being overly aggressive. The number one recommendation for social media is to think about what you’d like to see as a consumer, and follow your own lead.

The trends have been pointing in this direction for a while, but now many social media companies are making it official. The “pay to play” model is in full swing, and despite how this might make social media content companies feel, this is a really good thing for businesses.

Facebook is the most recent to announce that spam from businesses won’t be tolerated. This has really been the unspoken case for a while, but now they’re upping the ante by threatening to remove posts from brands that are too promotional.

For businesses, it really comes down to two options: pay to play or keep it simple. Some are proposing abandoning the site altogether, but until search engines and the users stop putting so much credibility in the site (it ranks for most businesses on Google and Bing when people search for the company by name), abandoning the site would be a poor idea.

Here is a breakdown of the two options:

Pay-to-Play

If Facebook is going to prevent unpaid posts from being seen or even allowed on its site from brands, then the first valid option is to start paying for placement. The bad news is that the platform has been free for many businesses for a while, so paying is a hard pill to swallow. The good news is that it’s cheap, especially when you compare it to other forms of digital advertising like banner or PPC advertising.

Businesses that adopt pay-to-play can take advantage of social media without it hitting their advertising budget too hard.

Automate

Yes, I said it. For years, I’ve been against automation on social media. I’ve written about how bad of an idea it is. Today, there’s a valid reason for the right type of automation to fill the gap for those who do not want to advertise.

Let’s look at the automotive industry as an example. The social solution by LotVantage is a perfect way for dealers to make it happen without spending much money. It fulfills the three basic needs of automation: relevant content, diversity of sources, and scaling levels of control by the user.

The content is relevant; it focuses on automotive websites, a dealership’s videos, their blogs, and the inventory from their website. This wide range of content types also fulfills the diversity of sources necessity for proper automation. Lastly, it allows dealers to set it and forget it, manually vet every post, or anywhere in between. This last part is important because the goal of automation in the first place is to be able to establish a strong presence without investing much money or time into social media.

The Future

This is a trend that isn’t going to change. Those who believe that they can work their way into social media success without spending money are not being realistic. It’s spreading to other networks. It’s the end game that has always been planned (in some cases unwittingly) by social sites since the dawn of Web 2.0.

Even though the direction of social media has been set, there are still very valid options available for businesses. That won’t change until they start charging users or decide to become non-profit… and those things will likely never happen.