Make It With Michael

By Emily Copp North American steak restaurant chain The Keg uses social media to find and create new brand advocates and customers in any city that they are located in. How do they do it? In this Hootcast episode , we chat with The Keg’s digital marketing manager May Yousif about how they find potential customers in unlikely places—and why social listening is core part of gaining new fans. Later in the episode Hootsuite’s social engagement coordinator Nick Martin follows up with tips on how to create meaningful moments with your customers on social. In this podcast you’ll learn: How social media can lead to meaningful offline experiences Tips for finding and creating fans with unbranded keyword searches How to get advocates involved in future campaigns Press play to hear the show in its entirety or, if you don’t have a set of earbuds handy, read the transcription of our conversation below. Q&A with The Keg’s digital marketing manager May Yousif To get started can you...

By Kendall Walters Close your eyes and picture this: it’s May 3, end of day, all the designers have gone home and suddenly it hits you: tomorrow is Star Wars Day —May the 4th—a huge marketing opportunity and you’ve got nothing. A mad scramble ensues to come up with a clever concept, create assets, and execute in time to ride the wave of lightsabre-filled fun. In some cases, it may be too late to do anything at all. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Enter the social media content calendar. Content calendars are exactly what they sound like: a way to plan and organize upcoming content. There are, of course, different types. An editorial calendar is specifically for planning content assets such as blog posts and videos, while a social media content calendar—the primary focus of this post—is for planning content for social. This blog post will cover why you should have a social media content calendar for your business and how to create one. We’ll also look at examples and provide yo...

By Christina Newberry Imagine the powerful business insights you could gain from an organic form of market research where the focus group was made up entirely of people already engaging with your brand or your industry. Sounds pretty great, right? That’s exactly the kind of business intelligence you can access when you implement a social listening strategy to track, analyze, and respond to online conversations about your brand and your industry. Think you’ve already got this covered because you’re tracking online mentions, engagement, and other social media metrics ? Well, you’ve made a good start, and you’re collecting some key data that will be useful for social listening, but you’re not quite there yet. Let’s get you started with a clear social listening definition and a look at how this important technique differs from your other social monitoring efforts. Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite...

By Curtis Foreman Thanks to the magic of following and unfollowing, every Twitter user can tweak and adjust their feed until it delivers exactly what they want. Looking for breaking news ? Product recommendations ? Cat GIFs ? Twitter’s the place to find the latest and greatest. What that means for marketers is that there as many ways to use Twitter as there are brands (and people) using it. What is Twitter marketing? It’s what you want it to be. Want to learn more about your customers? Make your brand a little more human ? Build buzz about your new product? Make an influencer’s day ? Provide lightning-fast customer support ? Start mopping up after a PR disaster ? Publicly humiliate trolls ? Twitter’s got you covered. Whatever your marketing goals, there’s no question Twitter can be a powerful tool to help you achieve them. But you might not be sure where to start—or if you’ve already started, maybe you’re having trouble tying your Twitter strategy to your larger business objectives....

By Evan LePage It’s your first day as a social media manager for a new company. Where do you even start? This question is a common one, but one that often goes unasked as people are worried about seeming inexperienced or making a bad impression when they start a new job. Really, it’s a very reasonable question. Making a critical error would be far more costly than asking colleagues for help. You can’t just jump in and start tweeting on behalf of a business you’re unfamiliar with. Every company has a different audience, different needs, and different goals for their social media presence. But you still want to show initiative and dive right into your new role. Your first day or week at a new social media job should be spent doing a lot of listening and learning. You need to establish what works, what doesn’t, and what goals you’re trying to meet. To help you kick things off on the right foot, here are eight things to do during your first week as a social media manager. 1. Audit the...