If there is one question I get from clients, it's "how can I get more reach with my social media pages? Can't I just post about my products (or services)? " and the answer is to stop selling on social media! The way to sell on social media is to NOT sell and you've probably heard me saying that over and over again on these posts. It's true, you have to think of your brand as someone's best friend on social media, while you may have that one friend that's ALWAYS selling you their LuLARoe Leggings (we all have that friend), most people on social media share what they eat, their big milestones, accomplishments, who inspired them, and much more. If your social media isn't getting the reach you want, it's time to start thinking about getting personal.

Guests of the new Celebrity Ding Dang Dong will stay at the Plaza Hotel! Have you ever felt like your business should get the celebrity VIP treatment like the Plaza Hotel in Home Alone? If you have never seen the movie, you should! That boy lived every kid's fantasy in the '90s, and I never wanted to eat so much ice cream in my entire life! The thought of it now makes me physically ill, but it gave me a great idea. How nice would it be if you were able to treat your business as the Plaza Hotel? Your social media marketing plan for 2019, will help you prepare for that star treatment.

Whether you just started your business, or had it over 20 years, getting a personal brand is always a good idea. These days people want to know the person behind the company, not just the company itself. This is the reason why many people like to create personal brand accounts rather than business accounts on social media, because it's so much more personable. I'll admit, I am still working on my own personal brand. It's hard trying to get started and getting it right because there is so much to think about. What do you want to promote? What do you want people to know about you? It's tough, but the reward is well worth the work you put into it!

Hashtags are a great way to tag yourself on social media and it's actually a great tracking system for the internet in general. Tags have been used in many platforms (blogs, social media and many more) on the internet for the last two decades. It's a great way to organize content and the overall user experience on any social media platform. If you need to find information on a topic, you can go through the hashtags on Twitter, or just search for the keyword in the search bar on any social media platform. While hashtags have been proven effective in the past, the question remains do hashtags still work on social media?

This past week SPB Productions was at the Facebook Community Boost conference in Atlanta, GA and it was an amazing experience. The Facebook Community Boost conference is a three day event held in almost every major city in the United States. The goal is to help entrepreneurs and corporations with their Facebook and Instagram pages. The event offered free - in person training from real Facebook experts and they also had booths where business owners can learn a lot of cool stuff that can really help their brand on Facebook and Instagram! I took down a lot of notes and I even got to speak to an expert about some of the pages I handle! Here's what I learned:

Referrals are some of the best ways to get new clients or customers for many businesses. That simple "hey, this person or service was really good from this business, you should go to them" is a great way for people to gain business. This was the way it has been for many years until the internet came along. From the late 90's to the early 2000's it was all about how good your website was and how well you engaged with your audience via blog comments and message boards. Now it's all about how well you can engage with folks on social media, how can you captivate your audience, how can you make them stop and look at the picture or video on their feed? More importantly, how quickly can they share your content to their friends?

One of the biggest mysteries on the internet is how can I get verified on Instagram? Any non- social media users might think it's silly to get that blue check mark next to your name for anyone that is not a public figure. However, for many influencers on Instagram, it's a necessity in order to get things like sponsorships and brand deals. It's also a big ego boost, you know the "I got the blue check mark, so you need to take me seriously" sort of deal. Yet, up until recently it was a huge secret on how people could get verified on Instagram.

Imagine that you just opened up your small boutique in the middle of a busy plaza, or your second restaurant after the first one was so successful, or you just got a few life coaching clients. Your business is thriving, so much so that you got a couple of amazing reviews on your Facebook page. You now have an amazing reputation and business is going well, until all of a get a terrible review. It brings your entire rating down on Facebook (or Google and Yelp), and you worry that people are hesitating to come to your business because of one bad review. This is an incredibly common problem for many business owners who market their business online and unfortunately there isn't a clear cut way to handle a negative review. However, there are plenty of ways you can respond.

You know what they say, becoming a successful brand is easy, maintaining your status and business model is hard. This is especially true on social media because 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles. In 2018, if you are not on social media, your brand does not exist. While some may consider this faulty logic because they get their business via referral, but, the truth of the matter is that their audience is already on social media. With over 2.6 billion users, you can easily find ten people you know that is one at least one social media platform. If you are one of those brands that does not know what to do on social media, here are five things you shouldn't be doing.

If you are familiar with AMAs and nosleep, then you might know a thing or two about Reddit. Since it's debut in 2005, Reddit has grown to be one of the most frequented sites on the web and it also gained a reputation for being one of the snarkiest. With the amount of digital foot traffic that this site has received over the years, Reddit has become one of the top go to's for virality, and to build any business owner's credibility. The question of the hour is why has Reddit become the new Twitter? The answer lies in the numbers.

Getting live footage of our everyday lives has been a huge part of social media over the past three years. Live video allows users to capture spur of the moment part of the user's day to day and it is most likely stuff that they would never post as part of their normal feed. SnapChat, Instagram Stories, and Facebook have features which documents day to day lives into a "live feed" and it's all gone within 24 hours. While some would argue that it feeds into a culture of people who can't get off of their phones and constantly post on social media, others will argue that it plays into any major corporate brand's favor in getting exclusive with their audience on their services or products.