Category: Social

Are you looking to increase your exposure online? With so many different types of media competing for your audience’s attention, standing out can feel challenging — but it’s not impossible. 

Rather than try to implement every idea under the sun as far as social media marketing goes, try a few of the simple ideas below. Set aside an hour a day for your marketing efforts, and little by little, you’ll be able to make progress.

Get Active on Social Media

If you haven’t already, start by setting up social media profiles on the major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each platform is slightly different in terms of how content is presented and the types of tools available. But don’t worry about that too much right now. Just start with the basics of a profile picture, cover photo, bio, and information about your business such as website and contact information.

Then, start posting content! Does that sound scary? It shouldn’t. All it takes is a smartphone with a camera to get started.

You can snap photos of people, customers who wish to provide testimonials, fur babies who visit your location or belong to your team, community events, and other real-life people and places. These types of authentic photos will help you connect with your audience and provoke conversations online. (Nobody can scroll past a cute puppy, right?)

See our article 15 Social Media Content Ideas for Small Businesses for more ideas of what to post on social media.

Hold a Contest

Running a contest on social media can help you not only grow your following, but also build brand awareness while rewarding your loyal followers.

Some of the possible goals you might have in running a contest on social media could include:

• More views of your posts. Ask people to like and comment on your contest posts, so that more people will see them. Add a boost to these posts for even more visibility.
• Brand awareness. As more people see your content, they’ll become more aware of who you are and what you have to offer. Partner with complementary businesses and influencers to be introduced to their followers, too.
• Email list growth. In addition to asking for engagements on your social contest posts, you can also request entry via name and email address. (Tell your followers this is an optional step that earns them an extra entry, however — otherwise, you risk losing people who don’t want to provide an email address.)
• Buzz around your brand. With an exciting offer, you’ll generate buzz and increase the chances of gaining new followers.

Make sure you have a good giveaway to offer; consider partnering with a complementary brand to award a unique product or service. This way, it doesn’t cost you much to increase your exposure online, and the other brand can help spread awareness, too.

See our article 5 Easy Steps to Run a Successful Social Media Contest for specifics on running a social media contest.

Engage in Conversations 

Visit Facebook and LinkedIn groups related to your brand, and get involved in conversations to help increase your exposure online. Respond to questions that people post. Establish yourself as an expert on a topic, and drop subtle hints about your own brand.

Subtle is the key word here. Don’t use these groups as a way to pitch your products or services unless someone specifically asks a related question. 

For example, if there’s a question about the best tires for a certain type of truck, and you own a tire shop, it would be natural for you to provide your recommendation and mention that you have a special going on these tires.

If someone asks for a referral to a gardener and you’re a housecleaner, this is not a natural place for you to mention your housecleaning services. However, if you know of a gardener through your business connections, you can tag them in your reply. By mentioning another business, you build trust with the audience. The gardener might be inclined to mention your services, too, if the need arises for a housecleaner.

We Can Help Increase Your Exposure Online

It might take a little effort to increase your exposure online, but it doesn’t have to be labor-intensive. By putting in a little effort consistently, you can gradually reach more of your intended audience, grow your brand, and eventually let your followers do some of the work through word-of-mouth referrals. 

Do you need some help coming up with ideas of ways to increase your exposure online? Rather have us do the heavy lifting for you and let our technology automate the entire process? Visit rallio.com to request a demo or contact us for more information.

 

Sometimes, when you hit the drive-thru, all you want is an order of fries. That’s it. No burger, no pink lemonade, no chocolate chunk cookie. And no matter what that person taking your order says, you’re simply not going to cave in. 

You’re going home with your order of fries. That’s it. Nothing else.

Now, at some point, you may decide that your fries weren’t enough. Suddenly a chocolate milkshake sounds like the perfect dipping sauce for your fries. And you find yourself back in the drive-thru again.

Where are we going with all this fry talk, you ask? Compare that order of fries to the social media services you might need. Maybe all you want is someone to create ads for you or post content on your page, and you’re not ready to commit to anything else.

The good news is, our a la carte services menu has you covered. Now, when you sign up for Rallio Local social media services, you can pick and choose from among our many different services and only buy the ones you need.

Later, if you decide you need that proverbial milkshake or want to switch social media services altogether, it’s easy to make the change. We bill month-to-month, with no annual contract — because, like that midnight milkshake craving, how are you going to know what you want or need 12 months from now? 

With Rallio Local a la carte, you can revisit our online shopping portal anytime to select the social media services you need. Below, you’ll find a quick rundown of each menu item. Click on the link below each description to start filling up your cart with social media services today.

Related: Why Use Rallio Local for Your Social Media Needs? Because It Just Makes Sense

Post Creative

If posting is falling to the bottom of your priority list, leave the weekly posting to a Rallio professional. A Rallio social media professional will create up to four unique posts per week for your social pages. Both you and your employees will utilize Rallio’s mobile app to snap in-the-moment photos and videos, or even upload previously snapped content from your camera roll. Our team will select only the best content for your pages, craft highly engaging captions, and publish on your behalf. Want to approve the posts before they publish? Our post-approval feature can be turned on at any time.

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Reputation Management

Responding to your online reviews, whether positive or negative, is a digital marketing must. Rallio’s reputation management services will ensure all of your online reviews on Facebook, Google and Yelp are responded to within 24 business hours. No robots here! Rallio’s trained staff of social media professionals will craft custom, unique responses to each of your online reviews in an authentic and professional way. You will also have the ability to approve review responses before going live. with our review response approval system.

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Dedicated Strategist

If you feel like your social media needs a little extra attention, partner with a dedicated Rallio Social Media Strategist. By working with a Strategist, you’ll have unlimited direct access to their genius mind. Your Strategist will analyze your social media profiles in their current state and develop a monthly strategy to help you maximize your results using goals and benchmarks you will decide upon together. From that point, you can take the strategy and run with it yourself or you can opt into Rallio’s Post Creative, Weekly Boosting,  Reputation Management and Social Care subscriptions and have your dedicated Social Strategist handle it all for you.

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Social Care

A Rallio social media expert will ensure all your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn comments and messages are engaged with within 24 business hours. Questions, messages and comments that require simple answers able to be found using your website or other information on the web will be published automatically. Some messages and comments might require a little more insight before they receive the proper response. In those cases, a Rallio professional will contact you to ensure you are alerted of the message and even recommend a response for you to publish yourself.

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Related: 4 Big Reasons You Should Outsource Your Social Media Marketing

Weekly Boosting

Rallio’s weekly boosting service guarantees you’ll get the eyes you need on your best and most important posts. Each week, a trained Rallio social media professional will place some of your monthly ad dollars on one of your recent top-performing posts. If you want something specific boosted or you want to up your budget, Rallio can accommodate those requests.

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Following Growth

Growing your following is a major part of increasing your overall brand awareness. This service guarantees that you’ll receive new followers month over month. A trained Rallio social media professional will target people in your actual community, ensuring that you always reach real people with real customer potential. If you want to up your budget, Rallio can accommodate that request.

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SEO Management

Having your business information consistent across the web is important for your online search rankings. A Rallio expert will optimize your listings on over 30 different online directories to make sure that your customers can find you in the places that matter most.

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Advertising Bundle

Bundle Rallio services and save. Includes $70/month in advertising dollars.

Bundle Rallio’s Weekly Boosting service and Following Growth service to guarantee you’ll get the eyes and followers you need on your social pages.

Weekly Boosting: Each week, a trained Rallio social media professional will place some of your monthly ad dollars on one of your recent top-performing posts. This will ensure that your post reaches your desired target audience with a specific call to action, like “Call Now” or “Send Message”.

Following Growth: A trained Rallio social media professional creates a campaign encouraging potential customers in your actual community to follow your business page.

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Online Reputation Bundle

Bundle Rallio services and save.

Bundle Rallio’s Review Responding service and Social Care service to guarantee your customers get a response everywhere, every time.

Review Responding: A Rallio social media expert will ensure all of your online reviews on Facebook, Google and Yelp are responded to within 24 business hours.

Social Care: A Rallio social media expert will ensure all your Facebook and Instagram comments and messages are engaged with within 24 business hours.

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Premium Bundle

Bundle all Rallio services and save.

With this bundle, your entire social media marketing efforts will be handled by a Rallio Social Strategist. This bundle includes:

• Dedicated Social Strategist
• Weekly post creation
• Weekly content boosting
• Advertising to grow your Facebook following
• Responses to your online reviews
• Responses to your social comments and direct messages

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Get the Social Media Services You Need With Rallio Local a la Carte 

Forget about buying the entire family meal; Rallio Local a la Carte gives you the exact social media services you need, when you need them. And when your needs change, we make it easy to make the switch.

To get started, visit the links above or reach out to a Rallio Local expert at sales@rallio.com.

Learn more: Why Social Media Is Important for Business Marketing

The realization that you need to upgrade your social media doesn’t necessarily come naturally. If you’ve had your social media pages on autopilot, posting sporadically or simply relying on the status quo to get by, then you might not recognize there’s a problem brewing.

It’s like when you’ve been driving around your reliable, fuel-conserving car for a number of years. It’s easy to get comfortable with your ride, right? You trust that you’ll be able to pop in your key, turn on the engine, and drive away into the sunset (or the local coffee shop, depending on what strikes your fancy). 

Then one day, you turn your key and hear a dreadful gurgle, a noisy clatter, a wheezy cough — or, perhaps worst of all, deafening silence. And you realize it’s time to head to the mechanic or maybe even upgrade your ride altogether.

If the day comes when your social media pages seem to be gurgling, clattering, wheezing, or producing the sound of crickets as your followers fade into the night, then you’ll know that’s the day to upgrade your social media. 

Never fear, because the following four simple steps are here to make your life easier. If you complete even one or two of these upgrades, then your social media pages should be humming along again in no time.

Step 1: Create Videos

This step is so easy, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been posting videos all along. Video content is huge on social media, now that anyone with a smartphone has a built-in video camera. All you need to do is pull out your phone and film a short video, upload it to social media with a fun caption, and maybe boost your best video content for better results (more on that later).

Here at Rallio, our video content is professionally scripted and filmed, with carefully crafted story lines and themes. However, you needn’t worry about getting too fancy if you don’t have the resources or time. 

A simple how-to video or a quick “hello” to your audience can be enough to breathe life into your social media pages, helping you move beyond just image-based content. You can also use live formats on Facebook and Instagram to build even more excitement and catch your followers in the moment, as they scroll.

We reveal several different video content ideas in our article 7 Proven Video Content Ideas Guaranteed to Liven Up Your Social Media. Read through it to see what types of content might resonate with your audience. Happy filming!

Step 2: Humanize Your Content

Creating video content is a great way to bring an authentic look and feel to your pages, but you can also extend that concept into all your different types of content. Posting real photos of your team, your location and your customers, along with their testimonials, is another way to humanize your content with your audience.

Know what doesn’t work? Bland, stale, “stock photo” imagery of random people doing random things. One of the simplest ways to upgrade your social media is by getting rid of anything that doesn’t authentically represent your business. 

Your followers can sniff out a phony from a terabyte away. And on the flip side, they’ll be instantly drawn to your page and your content if you ditch any photos that you, your team or your customers didn’t snap from your own cameras.

Step 3: Crowdsource Your Photos and Videos

By the way, another easy upgrade to your social media is through crowdsourcing content. You don’t have to be the one running around with a camera all day; assign the task to a social media manager, or distribute the task to a few different team members. 

You can also get your entire team involved by creating an employee advocacy program. With this program, you can formalize the process of taking and submitting photos, as well as rewarding your team for their contributions.

We go into more detail with our Employee Advocacy Checklist: “Did you know your employees have greater social reach than you do? And that people are more likely to buy something that’s been recommended by a friend or family member? It’s a hard truth, but one worth embracing. The fact is, your employees’ posts are more likely to earn engagements and visibility than content you create and post on your brand page.”

Walk through the steps to set up an in-house program that will help bulk up your social media presence, increase engagement and boost your following.

You can also try our Rallio Activate platform to organize all your assets in one place and incentivize team members. Need a hand creating and scheduling content? Our Rallio Local program gives you even more options to outsource the work.

Step 4: Toss Some Ad Dollars Around

If you’re new to advertising on social media, it can feel overwhelming to know where to begin. However, advertising is a non-negotiable when you’re looking for ways to upgrade your social media. As we write in this article: “Advertising on Facebook and other social media channels helps you to build brand awareness, generate leads and grow your following. [The] winning combination of great content, coupled with ad spend, increases the likelihood of making your content visible in newsfeeds.”

To get started, try boosting your popular content with a small amount of ad dollars. This way, you can push out your content in front of more eyeballs without spending a lot of time or money. In time, you might wish to incorporate additional ads in Messenger, Instagram Stories and other areas in order to increase your visibility even more.

Read through the article referenced above for a complete breakdown on the process. Again, our Rallio Local program can take this task off your plate if you’d rather let our experts get it done for you.

It’s Easy to Upgrade Your Social Media

Maybe you’ve put off upgrading your social media due to time constraints or lack of motivation to get it done. That’s understandable — and that’s why we’ve kept these four steps fairly simple. 

As author Mark Victor Hansen says: “Don’t wait until everything is just right. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.” 

The simple actions you take will start to propel you forward into additional actions and successes. This week, commit to just one of the steps above, and before you know it, you might just find yourself making additional upgrades to your social media.

When you use Rallio Local for your social media needs, you’ll get the creativity of a social media expert combined with the efficiency of technology. Reviews, comments and social content are handled for you, so you can focus on your business.

But the real reason you’ll want to use Rallio Local for your social media needs? Because it just makes sense. To illustrate this point, we’ve rounded up a few videos in our “Just Makes Sense” series.

Witch Babysitter

Hiring a witch to be your babysitter might sound like a good idea when your kids are misbehaving. But, in reality, you’re not going to trust your babies with someone whose favorite pastimes include riding a broom sans helmet, or mixing up crazy concoctions in a cauldron. That’s one cooking lesson your kids do not need!

 

Viking Gardener

You wouldn’t hire a viking to be your gardener, would you? Unless you want your backyard to look like a kid with a bad haircut, you’ll probably want to go with — well, an actual actual gardener.

 

Invisible Man Aerobics

Taking aerobics classes from the Invisible Man might seem like a great way to tune in to your own body. But what happens when you need an expert coaching you on the proper way to do a double kettlebell snatch or claw-fingertip pushups?

 

Rely on Rallio for Your Social Media Needs

In working with business owners over the years, we’ve come to identify a few truths about being in business for yourself. One of them is that it pays to surround yourself with people who are experts in their field. That’s why most businesses choose to hire, say, an accountant, an attorney or an insurance agent. They are the best at what they do — so you can be the best at what you do in business.

In our case, we are experts who will handle every aspect of your social media, online reputation, directory listings and even recruiting to an extent. Known as Rallio Local, this in-house team consists of social media strategists who work one-on-one with business owners, using technology to streamline the entire process. 

The benefits of hiring social media experts to, well, manage your social media, are numerous:

• You’ll get time back in your day as a business owner because you’re not worried about your social media. You can focus on other aspects of your business — all the things you love about entrepreneurship that made you start a business in the first place.
• You’ll have trusted marketing advisors who have your back and keep an eye on your pages for any new comments, reviews, questions and direct messages. Nobody is slipping through the cracks when you have our team on your side.
• You’ll increase your chances of growing your business faster because your social media marketing will be aligned with your overall marketing strategy. Your dedicated strategist will get clear on your goals and deliver on them.

Related: Small-Business Technology Roundup: How Rallio Can Help You Run Smarter

How It Works

• With our winning formula of local content + targeted ads, your social media pages can begin to produce results for you. Local content = Real, authentic photos and videos of people at your business, featuring employees, customers, owners and other actual humans — not stock photos and sales pitches. Targeted boosting = Advertising your content to your followers and their friends to get more eyes on your page and ensure your content is visible.
• Have special offers, recruitment posts or events? Your Rallio Strategist will work with you to get all the details and schedule out posts strategically, as well as boost them for greater visibility.
• When your followers engage with you via online reviews, comments or direct messages, our team responds to those engagements (with your input, as needed) within 24 hours. Everything gets pulled into your own dashboard so you can easily see everything in one place. With our Revv technology, we can also help you get new, positive reviews, while negative reviews are handled offline instead of published publicly.
• What about changes to your hours, address, phone number or other business information? Your Strategist will make sure it gets updated across the web, using our Business Listings service that’s built right into the Rallio technology. 
• Our technology can also incorporate employee advocacy, so you can get your team involved in creating and posting content, helping to extend the reach of your content through their personal pages.

The key takeaway? Rallio Local gives small-business owners both the technology and the team to be successful on social media. We understand the complexities of your social media needs and are able to navigate them on your behalf.

Whether you want a lot of help or just a little extra push, we can provide the right solution for your small business or franchise brand’s social media needs. Drop us a line at sales@rallio.com and we can set you up with a quick demo to show you how we can help your business.

If you’ve been at it for any length of time on social media, it can start to feel like you’d rather shut down every single one of your social profiles than read yet another social media “best practices tip.” We know how you feel. Being a social media technology company, we’re constantly entrenched in the world of all things social. 

Not to worry. We’re not going to do that to you today. Grab your popcorn, folks, and settle in for this quick read of several anti-tips you need to know in order to be ignored on social media. In no time at all, people will be skimming right by your content and forgetting you even exist — heck, they probably won’t even see it in the first place with your posts not appearing in feeds!  

1. Don’t Be Yourself

Nothing says “likable” like a nice stock photo of someone positioned just so, in a completely unnatural way, in the type of setting you only see in movies and magazines. Like, why wouldn’t you be pausing mid-run to tie your shoe at a park bench, smiling at nothing, with a glorious backdrop of fall leaves and not a hint of perspiration on your brow? 

It totally creates a connection with your audience when they see a random stranger not sweating while crushing it on their 6-mile daily run. To increase the effectiveness of this strategy, we recommend you include a few syrupy, basic hashtags like “#blessed” or “#grateful” and don’t in any way make it relevant to your audience. Better yet, try to sell something with an overly promotional and self-indulgent caption.

2: Post Haphazardly

Post on Monday morning. Post on Friday afternoon. Forget about your social media for three weeks. Post in the middle of the night after a night of taking selfies with your sorority sisters. “When will they post next?” is what your audience is thinking. If your social media isn’t a train wreck of random postings with periods of radio silence in between, you’re doing it all wrong.

Related: 3 Tips for Responding to Your Online Reviews: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

3. Keep ‘Em Guessing on Your Contact Info

Anyplace that lists your contact information online, make sure it’s slightly different from one site to the next. It’s best if you have at least two or three different phone numbers, addresses and websites floating around out there. Why have just one when you can have a handful? People will think you’re different, unique even. Plus, it’s super confusing to Google, Yelp and other online directories when your contact info is inconsistent, making you harder to find. Who wants all that pesky business, anyway?

4. Forget About Boosting

Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms are after you to advertise, right? Save your money! If you don’t advertise, you can make sure none of your content gets seen by customers and prospects. It’s like you won’t even exist. Plus, with the money you save, you’ll have more money leftover to buy stock photos!

5: Post Lots of Text With No Visuals

Long paragraphs of text are so much more fun to look at than engaging videos and images of your employees, customers and leaders. Be sure to include plenty of run-on sentences, typos and grammatically incorrect phrases to keep your readers engaged. Throw in an inspirational quote or two, and you’re golden!

6. Sell, Sell, Sell

The more you talk about yourself and your products or services, the more likely people are to follow your updates! Your audience is craving promotional messaging from you, not boring updates about your incredible culture, core values and philanthropic pursuits. When you’re tempted to connect with your audience on a personal level, just repeat the mantra quietly to yourself, “Sell, sell, sell.”

Related: Don’t Feed the Internet Trolls: 3 Ways to Handle Negative Online Engagements 

7. Don’t Respond to Your Reviews

Someone left a bad review for you? Don’t dignify it with a response. Ignoring them makes you look like the bigger person! If you absolutely must post a response, make sure you get uber-defensive and point out all the flawed logic in your customer’s review. Not only will you drive that customer away, but you’ll also ensure that anyone reading the review doesn’t want to come to your business, either.

8. Ignore Comments and Questions

Along the same lines, don’t bother responding to anyone’s comments or questions on your posts or in your inbox. They’re old enough to figure out the answers themselves, right? And why waste time responding to someone’s comments on your post? Those friendly, supportive customers are probably just faking it, and the angry ones just need a time-out. 

9. Operate in a Silo

No matter what, don’t use the insights you gain from customer interactions to improve your products, services, operations or support. People will have plenty of feedback to give you via social media, but you needn’t listen to any of them. Just keep operating in isolation so no one ever bothers you with comments or questions!

Want to Be Ignored on Social Media? Keep These Tips Handy

As you can see, it’s fairly easy to be ignored on social media once you get the hang of it. Of course, if you don’t follow these tips — and instead, you let our experts and technology do the heavy lifting of social media management for you — you may find yourself with a whole bunch of new followers, leads and customers. Your employees might find themselves engaging more with your brand on social media. And you may become much more discoverable and even likable across the web. Consider yourself warned.

Learn more: 15 Social Media Marketing Fails [Infographic]