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Ever since the outbreak of COVID in 2019, social media usage, not surprisingly, has increased significantly. To stick to the safety protocols of COVID-19, many firms had to adapt to a more remote-based working environment, which resulted in a significant rise in digital marketing and social media usage. This held especially true for law firms, which created more content than ever in 2021. This change in trend was noted by Good2BSocial, an internet marketing consulting firm responsible for creating the Social Law Firm Index (SLFI). The trends within the findings and rankings of law firms remained somewhat consistent for the years 2020 and 2021, with one of the most notable trends being the increase in usage of podcasts and videos. While many law firms may have developed new tactics and taken alternative approaches to effectively increase their social media engagement, not all content proved to be effective; some issues occurred as a result of increased content generation.

Over the past two years, firms have generated content excessively. While some of it may have been useful, such as COVID-19 microsites which served as a valuable source of information to the public, others did not quite serve the same purpose. Within this glut of content, firms tended to forget the actual purpose that content should serve and publish content just for the sake of it. As a result, the true purpose of content somehow got lost in the process and does not serve either party. Neither clients nor the firm benefited from much from this hastily written content. At the rise of the pandemic, firms were generating substantial content, but as things simmered down, much of the content started losing its sustainability. Although quite a few firms used content for press releases, a few wise ones from the lot tried to put the data to better use and create opportunities for business development. Not only is excessive content a problem in itself, but since these platforms exist way past their abandonment, it leaves a very negative impression of the firms. According to David Brenton from BluShark Digital, content should only remain on sites so long as it stays important, relevant, and can be a useful resource. If not, firms need to take it down.

Up until recent years, Facebook was one of the most used online platforms to reach any audience, but since last year, firms have shifted their focus to Instagram to promote different cultural news. Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been one of the most promoted one amongst all news. DEI efforts are initiatives taken in the workplace to ensure diversity. This has gained massive popularity in the news recently and most firms, whether big or small, have taken their influence on social media to support it in many cases. However, these firms should realize that their sole focus should not revolve around this, as it should be one aspect of their social media presence. For example, if they want to promote leadership and reach more clients, they should opt for a more business-related platform, such as Linkedin.

Videos and podcasts have a much greater impact in regard to social media channels and allow a firm to stand out from the others. This explains their drastic rise in recent years. With the technological advancements made in recent years, they have become incredibly cost-effective and do not even need an official shoot in many cases, but simply a good graphic designer or animator to do the job. Podcasts also have a similar impact if used effectively and are thus gaining much more recognition recently.

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The Rise of Social Media Influence and Digital Marketing within Law Firms - Blue Virginia

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Marketing is a lot of work. And social media marketing can easily take up a considerable chunk of time. Fortunately, social media automation software helps you save time on repetitive processes or managing complex workflows so you can focus more closely on customer engagement.

Social media automation uses tools and software that connect to social platforms and assist with social media posting, reporting, and analytics, and social media monitoring.

Depending on your software, you can get approval from clients or stakeholders and curate content right in the application for further time savings.

By automating social media posting and using social listening tools, you can optimize your digital campaigns while reducing the time spent on administrative work and repetitive tasks. In short, social media automation helps you do more with less time and money.

Social media management tools help you plan, activate, and amplify your online campaigns. Having access to data about your audience and message performance lets you adjust campaigns in real time. With preparation and the right metrics, you can find out:

By using social media software to automate timing and deliver data about your content, you can tailor promotions to get the responses you want from your audience.

Few businesses rely on only one social media platform. But once you add multiple accounts, managing them gets complicated. Without social media marketing automation, you need to sign in to each channel many times per day, making it difficult to track the time spent on social media.

In contrast, automated tools help you get a clear understanding of how much time it takes to plan your editorial calendar and upload the content. Moreover, automation software gives you one dashboard to view interactions from all social channels, reducing time spent scanning individual platforms.

It's easy to schedule an entire campaign or a month's worth of automated social media posts in just a few minutes when using features such as bulk upload. Knowing how much time you spend on marketing activities helps you plan labor resources and accurately calculate your efforts' costs.

Consistent posting online helps more customers find you because algorithms tend to reward regular updates. Fans appreciate consistency because they know what to expect from your brand and come to recognize or, in some cases, depend on the information you share.

Furthermore, social media automation gives business owners and marketers more time to spend actually interacting with fans. Your digital campaigns will post without a hitch, so you can join conversations, answer questions, and talk with your customers. All of which provides the authenticity that your audience craves.

Software platforms vary widely. Although many offer the necessities, like automatic social media posting, some are more user-friendly than others or offer features you may want or need. The best way to select your social media automation tools is to consider:

You want the platform to be enjoyable and functional to those who will use it. Do you need to set up approval workflows? Do you want a curated content feed to select new posts from? Make sure your automation tool offers these features.

Then give it a test run. Is the platform intuitive and easy to use? Can you access customer service tools and collaborate with team members? Technology should support your marketing efforts, not make them harder.

The most basic yet helpful thing social media automation tools do is help you schedule posts. However, software options differ in functionality. For instance:

Having data is one thing. But if you can't access it or view it in a useful manner that delivers insights, it's useless. Pick tools that:

Scheduling posts using social automation tools is the easy part. But your software also helps with social media management and engagement. Take advantage of your solution by using these best practices.

Although saving time and money is an advantage of using social media automation tools, none of that will matter if customer experiences suffer.

Ensure that your target market enjoys optimal digital experiences by:

Depending on your business, you may get many of the same questions on your social media ads or posts. Some social media automation tools, such as Agorapulse, allow you to create saved replies or rules to guide responses.

This type of automation saves time and delivers a consistent message to followers. Your teams simply find the response, personalize the message, and click to reply. In Agorapulse, you can also flag specific terms and automatically send those messages to the right team, such as customer service or sales.

Respond to social media fans quickly by personalizing saved replies in your social media management software. Image source: Author

Source: Agorapulse software.

Regular posting doesn't mean much if you don't respond to comments or see your brand tagged in a complaint. Social listening tools help you watch for conversations around specific topics, brand mentions even without a tag, and possible user-generated content sources.

Instead of searching each platform separately, use your central dashboard to find opportunities to engage with users, solve problems, or gather new marketing materials.

Different tools offer variations of features that you can use to your advantage. For example, Hootsuite offers ad tools inside its social media dashboard. You can identify top-performing posts and turn them into promoted posts on Facebook or sponsored content on LinkedIn from one spot.

Sprout Social provides a Smart Inbox to help you easily view and respond to messages from different platforms or assign users to one or more feeds. And SocialFlow gives you an AttentionStream tool to monetize your content.

Extend your reach while saving time by boosting your posts on Facebook through your Hootsuite dashboard. Image source: Author

Source: Hootsuite software.

Don't set up your digital campaigns and walk away until next month. Instead, use a combination of real-time and historical data to continually optimize marketing campaigns, test post formats, and deliver satisfying audience experiences.

Turn your social media strategy into a plan of action by automating social media. With the right tools, you can simplify publication and management while increasing engagement levels and building relationships with your customers virtually.

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5 Social Media Automation Strategies to Add to Your Marketing - The Motley Fool

LinkedIn has quickly become one of the most popular social media platforms for business professionals, with millions of users. Its a practical way to connect with other specialists, share your work, and learn about new opportunities.

LinkedIn offers a variety of tools and options that can help. But it can be tricky to know how to use LinkedIn effectively for marketing purposes. But marketing is an art. It is not only about the numbers; it is also a balancing act of intuition, logic, and emotions.

Digital marketing on LinkedIn requires creativity, analysis, and research to find the right fit for your companys personality or product offerings. You should know how to get ahead of your competition in different demographics. Lets discuss the strategies!

LinkedIn is a no-nonsense social media platform highly sought by professionals. Here are some reasons to bring your business to LinkedIn:

Here are some tips to help you reach your marketing goals on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a great platform to make connections. Still, you are responsible for being proactive in requesting recommendations and references. After all, consistency with posts is the key. The first few weeks will be challenging to get followers.

It is because LinkedIn has strict policies that prevent spamming users. This feature limits the new user from approaching many people at once. But, if your activity levels remain consistent daily, LinkedIns algorithm will start recommending your profile to increase your reach.

Your LinkedIn profile is equivalent to your digital showroom. It makes the first impressions on the people that visit your profile. Make sure you follow these things:

No one likes a person who keeps pitching their product. Instead, provide value to your audience. Always post information that can help your target audience in resolving their problems. For example, write blog posts on topics that start with How to or The Best Ways. It will make you seem like the expert in your niche and increase your future customers.

Another important note: Use high-quality images and videos. Pixelated pictures or generic photos will make you look unprofessional. There are many free image sources to consider. However, standing out means investing in more unique digital art pieces.

Always choose a primetime to post anything, including after-office timings when people are free to engage. Be active for at least 30 mins after posting anything. In this way, you can keep active contact with your most attentive audience. Reply to their comments and build your connections.

Joining LinkedIn groups can help you understand your market better. It has people who can impart knowledge and share some trade tricks. You can even find your target audience and strengthen your contacts with them. Joining LinkedIn groups relevant to your niche is decisive for listening to customer conversations and offering helpful ideas and guidance. These actions will yield future sales leads and clients if done correctly.

Starting a new group is also an excellent option. Invite people and be a part of something that helps you grow. Just be mindful to keep it to your niche strictly. Being part of many groups will decrease your value, and people will not consider you an expert in anything.

The internet is a great way to grow your market and generate customers. Sadly, while LinkedIn is a fertile land for connections and opportunities, it is not always available. For instance, network managers can block access to the websites they choose.

Also, professionals can travel for business to various regions. The internet access situation can differ, meaning in some cases, you will need to unblock LinkedIn to get the latest scoops on business trends. This strategy works if you use tools like proxies or Virtual Private Networks to change your IP address. Then, users traffic gets rerouted through remote servers, and online entities associate a different location with their identities. Differently from most proxies, VPNs also encrypt internet traffic, making users journeys more secure.

A companys page is as important as your page. You can customize the color theme, images, marketing style, and content of your page to create your brand name. It can reflect the product value, growth in sales, services provided, and your employees. Moreover, regularly post presentations and events so that leads can learn more about your company.

LinkedIn too runs ads that can help you boost your content through a more significant audience. It provides an audience reach of 160 million in the USA. These ads are displayed during the highest engaging time of your target audience and inspire them to act.

LinkedIn can be a hotbed for opportunities, be it for job seekers or companies. Businesses need to learn how to use this environment to find these possibilities and build their presence. Additionally, LinkedIn continuously introduces new features, further positioning itself as an integral platform in the job market. So, businesses should put their brand out there and start building meaningful connections and collaborations. Join groups, share quality content, and find valuable opportunities for growth.

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The Art of Digital Marketing on LinkedIn - TheWiseMarketer.com

I was glad when we decided to finally do an official comparison between Hootsuite and ERROR: - slug not found: sprout-social. Reason: 'bool' object is not callable. While I have plenty of experience with many social media management tools from Buffer to Tweepi, Social Sprout and Hootsuite are my two most frequented platforms in my line of work.

While I have more official experience with Hootsuite, over the past year, in the workplace, Ive opted for Social Sprout whenever I can and for managing personal social media projects.

Both platforms will help you schedule Facebook posts, reply to messages, and analyze your social audiences, but one is superior to the other. So here it is, the Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite showdown weve all been waiting for.

Sprout Social is a fantastic option for medium to large businesses with several social accounts per platform and multiple users within a social media management team. With social network management, posting, and reporting features, Sprout Social is one of the best options you can choose.

Sprout Social appeals to many businesses and users, but its pricing shuts some out. This platform starts at an astounding $99/month per user, with each subsequent tier becoming even more expensive.

While its functionality, user-friendliness, and intuitive design are exceptional, this prohibitive pricing places it into a near-enterprise level of expensive.

Hootsuites variety of features, integrations, publishing tools, and even its pricing makes it a good all-around social media management software for businesses and users of all types. And the strongest of those points is Hootsuites pricing.

Not only are all tiers relatively affordable considering everything that comes with the platform, but they even offer a free option with limited functionality for those starting in social media management.

Features are arguably one of the most important topics in any platform comparison. Which social media management tool has the best features to execute your marketing campaigns?

Social Sprout is a comprehensive social media management platform that can do nearly everything you need it to do. Whether you need posting campaign scheduling weeks in advance or youre looking to perform a deep social media audit providing in-depth analytics, Social Sprout has you covered.

The Sprout Social dashboard gives you a rundown of all of the major components of your social media campaigns, from a posting to-do list and channel messages to daily engagement rates and todays posts.

Its the perfect first step to get you up to speed with everything youll be working on throughout the day.

Theres something clean and refreshing about Social Sprouts clean user interface. Image source: Author

Moving beyond the dashboard, youll find a host of other tools from simple publishing mechanisms to a detailed Sprout Social calendar to schedule and monitor your social feeds far in advance.

I particularly love the clarity of Sprout Socials implementation of the social media content calendar, especially when compared to Hootsuites more cluttered social dashboards for tracking posts.

While Sprout Social provides post automation, team workflows for organizing your social media efforts, and even an internal inbox for coordinating your marketing plan from, social listening is where it shines.

Not only can you monitor your own analytics to plan out a successful campaign, but you also get in-depth insight into everything your audience is talking about.

These social listening tools will gather information from social posts relevant to your topics and industry and develop reports on new trends you should tailor your messaging around.

Hootsuite offers the usual features youd expect from a social media management tool: post sharing, feed monitoring, team management, post scheduling, and social analytics.

Ive used Hootsuite with some of my marketing contract jobs and found Im able to do everything I need to execute a comprehensive social media marketing strategy.

Hootsuites post scheduler is easy to use and is perfect for previewing content before it goes live. Image source: Author

The one area where I feel Hootsuite could see some improvement is in the social media analytics department. Ive had trouble locating the metrics I need in Hootsuite reporting, especially when connected to platforms like YouTube, if the data is populated into the analytics reports at all.

Ive had to turn to the native social analytics dashboards sometimes, which is a little frustrating when youre paying money for a platform to manage all of your social accounts in one place.

While there are similarities in the features lists between these two platforms, Sprout Social edges out Hootsuite with additional social listening capabilities and higher quality analytics reports.

When the going gets rough, which platform will offer you the support you need to solve your problems and answer your questions?

Sprout Social offers the support options you'd expect from a software developer, including a phone support number, email queries, webinars, Q&A sessions, and a platform knowledge base.

With this level of support, you can either submit issues or find answers to your questions no matter the level of urgency. Sprout Social support even answers their customers questions through their social channels if necessary which is convenient.

Hootsuite offers three distinct types of customer support. Unfortunately, none of these support routes come in a traditional phone option, but that doesnt mean you cant find answers to your questions.

The first and most basic form of support is the built-in feedback button in the application itself. This button allows you to send your feedback into Hootsuite, with a 500 character limit, detailing your thoughts about the platform.

The second form is the knowledge base complete with support articles for many platform questions. The final form of support is the support ticket form found in the help section of the Hootsuite website. Using this ticket system you can create and track your issues with the support team all in one place.

Sprout Social takes the win for customer support. While Hootsuite offers a satisfactory level of support for its customers, its hard to beat the numerous options offered by Sprout Social.

Features and integrations dont count for much if the tool youre using is complicated, impractical, and difficult to use. Which social marketing tool is easier to use?

Sprout Social is one of the most intuitive and user-friendly social media management tools Ive ever used. Nothing is hard to find, bugs are practically nonexistent, and the reporting capabilities are easy to use and understand.

All of your high-level function navigation is found on the left, while all of your social functions, composing posts, connecting accounts, etc., are found on the right. Image source: Author

Enterprise-level software is often burdened with a preconceived stigma for being complicated. Not so Sprout Social. It upends this notion through easy to locate features, pre-built social analytics reports, and pre-populated, automated social responses for your account inboxes.

This is a social media management tool meant for bigger businesses with the simple functionality of a tool meant for everyone.

Youd think Hootsuite was a simple tool just by reading through the features lists and clean website, but theres more to this platform than meets the eye. Thats not to say Hootsuite is difficult to use, but its not as intuitive as Sprout Social.

On top of that, in my experience, Hootsuite is buggy and slow at times which is frustrating when I have other tasks on my plate to deal with outside of disconnecting and reconnecting social profiles when they wont load into the tool.

The Hootsuite dashboard seems like a good idea at first but is prone to clutter if too much information is displayed at one time. Image source: Author

Navigating Hootsuite is simple with all of your functions and tools on the left-hand sidebar. This platform only suffers from clutter issues in the dashboard and those occasional bugs that might frustrate the user at times.

And who knows, its possible some of these bugs originate from the social networks themselves (Im clearly not a software developer). And that Ive never had these issues with Sprout Social speaks to some issues that need to be ironed out to improve the Hootsuite experience.

While Hootsuite provides a decent experience for most users, ease of use is one area where Sprout Social excels, making it the superior tool in this category.

Unless your software choice fits within your budget, it doesnt matter how functional it is. How do Sprout Social and Hootsuite stack up for pricing?

This is the one area where Sprout Social falls short of being the perfect social media management tool. While its true that you get what you pay for, Im not 100% sure the price of Sprout Social is justified. At least not to this degree:

Dont get me wrong, I am very impressed with what Sprout Social offers. But Im not entirely sure that an asset library, custom URL tracking, and Twitter surveys are worth the additional $150/month per user over the already expensive Standard option.

Its not very often I label software pricing as excessive, but in this case, I think that term fits the bill.

On the other hand, Hootsuite is more reasonable with its pricing when compared to Sprout Social. Starting off, Hootsuite actually offers a free option that allows you to connect three social profiles and grants you the ability to schedule out thirty posts per month.

Once youve grown out of that free option, the paid tiers start off at the low price of $29/month which gives you more features, although it still limits you to one user just like the free option.

That being said, the price does go up substantially once you move into the higher-featured options Hootsuite offers:

While the price does go up substantially once you graduate beyond the Professional tier, it is still much cheaper when juxtaposed with Sprout Social on a per-user basis.

Hootsuite pricing wins on practically every level. There are just too many things going for Hootsuite that make Sprout Socials pricing seem excessive by comparison, such as Hootsuites free option or the per-user cost of each platform.

Its a fact, all social management tools require integrations to succeed in posting, scheduling, and analyzing your marketing efforts. So, the question becomes, which platform gives you a longer list of options?

Sprout Social integrates with plenty of big-name tools and all of the major social networks, including:

Social

Tools

Hootsuite shines with its long list of social network integrations, apps, and software partnerships, including:

Social

Tools

Hootsuite has so many integrations to offer for marketing, collaboration, and analytics needs.

It's a tie! Both tools integrated with a lot of social networks and their list of outside integrations is extensive.

Whats the onboarding process for both contenders, and which platform will have you up and running with the fewest headaches and delays?

The startup process for Sprout Social was a breeze. I had only to enter my email and other pertinent information and I was granted access to the tool in less than five minutes. The setup process for integrating my social networks was especially easy, and I loaded all of my social posts and data within minutes.

Its refreshing to have a startup process that doesnt require a whole tutorial just to understand basic functions.

While the startup process for Hootsuite was similar to Sprout Social in terms of entering information and starting a new account, the social network integration process was less than ideal in my experience.

This is not the first time Ive set up a Hootsuite account and every time, Ive had only problems trying to connect my social networks, particularly Facebook. If I could connect everything up to Hootsuite without errors or slow loading times, this process would be simple in theory.

Sprout Social has a smoother onboarding process that runs without error or delay. The difference is more driven by user experience than by the steps of the process itself.

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Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Which is Better in 2022? - The Motley Fool

Concerned youre being duped by a bot or troll account online? Then youll want to keep reading this guide where we detail the top tools and tips to help you spot inauthentic and automated accounts on major social networks.

Automated social media bots can be used to share art, weather warnings, or keep customers up-to-date on a companys news and products. But mostly, when we hear about social bots in the news, its in the context of deceptive political propaganda, cryptocurrency scams, spam and fraud.

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Of all social networks, Twitter and its powerful API (application programming interface) provide the easiest access and data needed for robust detection of suspicious accounts, but not all tools are equal on this front.

Many free Twitter follower auditing tools are just trying to sell you their full reporting service. Theyll ask you to add their app to your account, but most wont provide a list of your fake followers free of charge, and they often include inactive accounts in the figures they produce a far cry from fakery.

However, the Indiana University Observatory on Social Medias Botometer is on the level and clearly distinguishes between different kinds of potentially undesirable account, although it will take a while to work through all your followers if you have a lot of them. Fortunately, you can check specific accounts, too.

Also useful is Bot Sentinel, a community project that stores and publishes results about accounts as people check them, creating a valuable public archive of problematic accounts.

Other major social networks are less forthcoming with regards to coughing up data that could be used to analysis the authenticity or otherwise of the people you interact with. However, theres a significant body of research about troll and spam accounts that give us some general rules of thumb for making judgements.

The TROLLMAGNIFIER project looked at methods of detecting state-sponsored troll accounts on Reddit. No publicly-available software tools have yet come of it, but the research team found that state-sponsored troll accounts in particular tended to loosely coordinate with one another, interacting to push specific narratives and manufacture conflicts performative augments between one another about the topics they wished to propagandize.

Facebook publishes regular reports on such coordinated inauthentic behaviour, with a focus on not only state-sponsored trolls, but also financial scams and targeted social engineering attacks designed to get prominent influencers and journalists to legitimise the scammers.

Facebooks 2021 threat report indicates that coordinated trolls increasingly have specific targets in mind for their influence operations, defined as coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal.

Inauthentic accounts are rife on TikTok and Instagram, with a bustling trade in click-farmed likes. A current popular rule of thumb for spotting accounts that buy follower and attention is to quickly view an influencers followers to see how many have filled out profiles with avatars, but youll generally have to do this by hand. Social marketing firm HypeAuditor provides fake follower audits for TikTok and Instagram, but these provide very few free searches per IP address (use a VPN if you need more) and will only show you analysis of accounts already in their database, which appears to include only the biggest influences.

More usefully, when it comes to spotting propaganda on TikTok, Tracking Exposed has turned its analysis tools to the task of spotting it, publishing a detailed report on Russian military propaganda in April 2022. Tracking Exposed has tools available to help analyse TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook accounts, but, aimed at academics gathering data en masse, the metadata they spit out doesnt readily lend itself to fast assessment of potential fakery by the layperson.

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As with much of online safety, such as spotting phishing attempts, identifying inauthentic accounts requires us to keep in mind that not everything is as it seems on the internet.

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How to spot bot and troll accounts on social media - TrustedReviews