It's Q1 of the new year, are you getting the leads that you want? Well, what's the main goal of marketing? Gaining leads, customers, or clients at the end of the day. I get more questions about how to monetize and get leads off of social media than any other inquiry about social media marketing. I do like to stress many of my prospects that while gaining leads would be the ultimate goal, it's so important to engage with your audience. Getting the trust of your followers on social media is crucial if you want them to convert into leads. How do you gain trust? That's a good question!

How is your 2019 shaping out? Are you writing down your goals? I have been bad about writing down my goals for my business this year, but I plan to do it! With all of this talk of changes for social media this year, we have to wonder what is your focus this year? Do you want to keep killing Facebook? Or do you want to start dominating other spaces? Maybe start dominating a space no one has really truly dominated yet? I've already talked about how you can dominate Reddit before, but I haven't talked about other untapped social media spaces or spaces that businesses don't really look into. The platform I want to talk about today is LinkedIn.

The two biggest questions I get about social media marketing are: How can I monetize my content and how can I gain leads? I talk a lot about social media here, but I don't really talk about what you need to have in place to monetize your pages. If you have done some online marketing or even traditional marketing, you will know about lead magnets. A lead magnet is where you offer something for free (an ebook, a pdf, or a webinar), and after your class or your book, you can give a great call to action at the end, explaining what you do. I like to use lead magnets myself, (and I am working on a few right now as we speak), but you might be asking yourself what is a good lead magnet? How can I create one? Or why do I need one?

What are your new year resolutions? Is it to make more money with your business? Is it to hit those numbers this year? Or, on a personal note, is it to lose weight and get in shape? Maybe you have a resolution to get a life coach to organize your life and business. Well, it's 2019 and that means it's the start of Q1! It's time to get back into social media shape with your content this year! Like your body, your business goes through changes, and sometimes you need to have some annual maintenance like you would with your body.

2019 is almost here, can you believe it? It's like this year has flown by, and I swear I say that every year! It's true, I feel like we take so much for granted throughout the year that we don't stop and look at everything as a whole. Businesses of all sizes go through many changes as they grow, whether for you are trying to build your business from scratch or re-branding, there's always a need for growth. As SPB Productions continues to grow, I want to take a look back to see what has 2018, and where we can go from there.

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.

Social media has been through the ringer this year, with the many Facebook scandals, and data breaches almost each social media site has faced. Twitter still continues to decline, according to Gary V, companies still need to be on Twitter. Facebook's stock is not doing much better, with their stock on a sharp decline since July. However, Facebook is such a mainstay in pop culture and internet culture, their stock hit won't have much of an impact as Twitter. Facebook has partnered with so many businesses, like Spotify and many businesses will use their free services in exchange for their Facebook contact info. You might have seen this in the form of "signing in with your Facebook login". With all of this in mind, we have to look at what the future of social media holds in 2019. I give you three on my predictions that I think we should really focus on.

Whether it's frosting holiday cookies or lighting up your house with Christmas lights, it seems that everyone is in the holiday spirit. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but it's crucial for brands to get into the holidays because the biggest sales happen right now! Consumers say they will spend an average of $1,007.24, according to the National Retail Federation. That is a pretty big number for a single consumer! Marketing is also at its highest this season, with ads on social media as being the most competitive it has been all year, and most people are already getting bombarded with email promos from their favorite stores. What are you doing on social media to get those high ticket clients and customers?

If you are one of the many businesses doing holiday deals this season, then you might also be worried about how you are going to make your posts go viral on social media. I recently saw a Black Friday ad, that made me laugh, it's from Betabrand and it's amazing! Talk about creativity! They definitely knew who their audience was and if you look at that engagement, it looks like they got customers from it! These guys have been targeting me for a while now and I might become a customer cause come on it's work yoga pants. While this isn't an Instagram ad, it's a great example of how creative you can be during the holidays.

It's Small Business Saturday and it's time to kick your marketing into high gear! That means coming up with new strategies to get your business to the next level. The holidays are a great time to promote new products and give your customers the best deals, however no one is going to see them if you keep doing one marketing strategy for each. The best way to keep on trend for the holidays (and into the new year) is to learn more about influencer marketing. It's been proven time and time again that users on social media are more likely to buy a product or service if it's recommended by someone they trust, like someone who they follow religiously on social media. I have talked about the effectiveness of influencer marketing before, but I haven't talked about how it can help your holiday marketing campaign!

It's less than a week until the famous national shopping holiday, Black Friday or for many online businesses, Cyber Monday and it's sales, BOGO and FOMO galore! Whether it's 50% your promotional coaching services, or doing a buy ten kickboxing classes and getting five free for the new year, the holiday season is a great time to get new customers! If you are one of the many businesses that's prepping for the upcoming holiday season, then you are for sure getting ready to pull out all the stops for your social media campaigns. In between the hectic end of year sales, and the constant promotional holiday push for the season, it's easy to forget the every day stuff you are supposed to be doing with social media. Here are three things that you will forget to do with your social media this holiday season.

The leaves are changing, the weather is getting colder, and the smell of hot cocoa is in the air. It's that time of year again! For many businesses that means the holiday season is right around the corner. With that comes holiday campaigns for your products and services. Social media holiday campaigns are the most competitive campaigns you can do for the entire year, but there are some things you can do to make it easier. We have discussed the use of AI in social media before in another post, but we haven't talked about how you can use it in a holiday campaign.

If you are one of the many that paid someone on Fiver to get a bunch of bots to your page "to grow a page", then you need to listen up. Engagement on social media is essential for growth, and having an audience that is seeing and listening to what you put out, is also important. While creating content that will play on emotions will get your audience to engage, you will also need to actively interact. I tell my clients and prospects this all the time: social media is a two way street, if you are not engaging with your audience, you are not doing your job.

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?

If we have learned anything about social media over the last five years, it's that people love to pin! It only proves the point of people liking pictures to text even more. Visualization is key to getting anyone's attention on the internet, and Pinterest makes that very clear. It's a far third from the top social media sites on the net, but that doesn't stop many marketers from using it as a search engine! Pinterest is no longer a place where women in their mid thirties (or twenties) looking for diet, wellness and exercise tips to improve their lifestyles. You can get some serious traffic to your website with its search engine features and optimizing your profile the right way. It reached 175 million users in April 2017, and that number reach to 250 million active users last month! Pinterest is hot right now and it should be a part of your 2019 marketing plan if it's not already.

It's no secret that there are other communication tools that started to take over some work areas. AIM used to be very popular in work spaces before it went away for good last year. We are starting to see Slack and similar tools, not only take its place, but become a better, more streamlined tool for the work place. As I explained in my other post about email going extinct, there are simply better forms of communication out there on the internet and the quicker your company gets on them, the more streamlined your line of communication will be for your entire team.

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:

We all know that social media is an essential part of of the daily lives for many Gen X, Gen Y (Millennials) and Gen Z. Even if you are a baby boomer, then you at least have a Facebook account. Have you looked at Facebook's numbers recently? One billion active users, making it one of the largest sites on the internet and almost the size of a big country. I've been telling you how to get new customers via social media for the last 60 some posts now, but have you been listening to your potential customers through these platforms? Social listening is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools out there for many small businesses and it's one tool that a lot of people aren't using effectively.

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?