Mediaboss Marketing

Columbia University is the oldest university in New York, and the fifth oldest institution for higher education in the United States. Its School of Professional Studies offers 14 master's degree programs across a range of disciplines, and social media is a big part of connecting with new students, nurturing the alumni network and keeping the various programs aligned in their communications strategy.

But how can you bring social media to the forefront of communications in an institution that was founded in 1754? And how do you help entire faculties get comfortable with using social media as part of their everyday routine? I caught up with Caroline Henley, social media specialist at Columbias School of Professional Studies, to find out how shes been using social to make waves in the academic world.

What are some of the biggest challenges youve experienced using social in a higher education setting?

If youre in a school with a wide variety of programs, things can quickly become chaotic on social if you dont find a way to manage things effectively. Maybe a school has 60 different channels, and you have several people trying to log in to every account to post suddenly youre on a constant hunt for passwords or for the right person to help you.

When I came on board at Columbia SPS, I immediately brought on a social media management platform. With Falcon.io, we have the chance to connect everything in one place, and to make the process of becoming active on social easy and accessible. It creates home for a school that might be delving into bioethics on one hand, actuarial science on the other, and it unifies a lot of programs that wouldnt be connected otherwise.

Connecting and unifying channels might sounds simple, but a lot of higher ed orgs are very traditional institutions, and they arent necessarily ahead in the digital curve. When youre on campus, sometimes you rely on running around into different buildings, and just knowing who people are. And so sometimes the marketing/digital team isn't quite as in the loop as they might be in a more digitally-driven company. Unifying people onto digital through a platform was just huge for us.

How was social managed before you used Falcon?

There was no social hire before me, no one person responsible for overseeing all social activity. There was one team member sort of handling social as a side task, but there wasnt sufficient investment for it to be a priority.

When I came on, I used the Falcon platform to inspire the different masters programs to include me more. I showed them what listening could do for their outreach. I showed them how they could schedule posts in Publish and how they could keep all their passwords in one place. For the first time this brought all the programs together for social, and this enabled me to get a level of control over the overall brand voice for the first time.

What objectives does SPS have for social?

My title is social media specialist. I was initially brought on to get the deans social and online presence going. But it was clear there was more of a need for the school brand as well. So the strategy has been to dive into both, using the dean as the mouthpiece for the leadership of the school, giving students access to his office and highlight the strategic initiatives the school is building.

Were now using social in more areas than ever. Its been a great tool for opening up the channels of communication for our students, prospective students, alumni, faculty and staff. These people could be living across the country, all over the world (Columbia is one of the most international schools in the US) so we need to unite our community across a worldwide stage.

Social is also a way for us to break down the walls of the Ivy League. We live-tweet and livestream guest lectures, all the interesting insights from the top scholars and practitioners speaking at our events, and our social community has access to it whereas they could not before. What I love about my job is that I get to make all of this accessible to a wider audience.

Our chief academic officer, Dr Sharyn OHalloran, recently launched a new fintech model to help implement new standards in finance, and we hosted a panel of speakers from across fintech and the finance industry to discuss it. This is an event that the Columbia community was invited to, but we could also broadcast it through social, which allows a greater access to our work, and offers a fascinating look into this intersection of university research and the needs of the market.

How do you use social to engage prospective students?

We host online info sessions where prospective students can can sign up to ask questions directly to the director of their chosen program. I promote these across our social channels.

Then theres also the brand awareness, content marketing side of things we promote our faculty when a program is mentioned in the press. We run alumni profiles to talk about how they're using their degrees in the real world. And we shine a light on the contents of our programs, so people researching can get an understanding of the student experience.

Suffice to say, theres a ton going on, with new innovations, initiatives and events happening all the time. Im just one social media person trying to unite it all, and this is where the Falcon platform is a huge help. With our various programs prioritizing what needs to be broadcast, having the platform at the center of everything makes it much easier and incredibly enjoyable to keep our schools various social efforts unified and on brand.

Manita Dosanjh is PR and communications executive at Falcon IO

See more here:
How Columbia University unified a fragmented social marketing setup - The Drum

Vancouver-based Hootsuite has announced that it has acquired New York-based LiftMetrix, which offers a tool to measure the return on investments on social media platforms. This marks Hootsuites second acquisition this month.

The addition of LiftMetrix will allow Hootsuites users to create more effective marketing campaigns as they will gain insights into the return on investment (ROI) of their paid, earned, and owned social media marketing campaigns. With access to LiftMetrixs tools, social media marketers will be able to monitor and drive the impact of their campaigns through social-to-web conversion tracking, content recommendations and insights, and social data-warehousing and integration with business intelligent tools.

Its critical for marketers today to prove the impact of social advertising on the companys bottom line, said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite. LiftMetrix offers easy-to-use analytics solutions that helps our customers make sense of data to maximize social marketing results. LiftMetrix will be a fantastic complement to the Hootsuite platform.

This deal comes two weeks after Hootsuite announced the acquisition of AdEspresso, which allows small and medium-sized businesses to split test every aspect of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

By joining Hootsuite, we will be able to offer increased value to our existing enterprise customers around their paid, earned, and owned social initiatives, said Nik Pai, co-founder and CEO of LiftMetrix. Its exciting to be a part of a company with Hootsuites velocity and trajectory.

LiftMetrix and Hootsuite have previously worked together through Hootsuites ecosystem of partners and applications. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Hootsuite acquires New York-based LiftMetrix to help customers measure social marketing ROI - BetaKit

Invoicing can be a daunting experience, especially when many entrepreneurs and freelancers are busy juggling their main work: social media marketing.

However difficult it may seem, invoices are crucial for getting positive cash flow, the real metric to determining the health and longevity of your social marketing endeavor.

In order to help you increase your monthly cash flow and boost your social marketing business, well look at 5 tried and true ways to make your invoicing smarter.

One of the most important things for social media marketers to do when it comes to managing their invoices is to set very clear, direct general policies or Terms and Conditions.

When you create your T&Cs, you are actually giving yourself and your clients a reference point to how your invoicing processes should be going. These are general points that cover all your clients and will discuss the base payment and invoicing issues.

Its important to mention here that these T&Cs are not just client-facing, but inward-facing as well, so that you can keep yourself accountable and be stricter in the way you deal with clients when it comes to invoicing.

Your T&Cs should include the following points:

Setting these up clearly will allow you to point to all your clients what can be expected of you and from them when it comes to payment. This will help you to clarify many issues and avoid any problems later on.

As a social media marketer or manager, you are probably aware of the power of automation. Social media management usually revolves around a few key tools that help you to automate a lot of your daily tasks so that you can focus on other parts of the job.

However, very few social marketers connect this aspect with their invoicing. Instead, they go about the business of manually entering a lot of repetitive information about their clients. This usually means they have to sift through lots of emails to get the specific contact details or to decide what the next unique invoicing number should be.

Manual invoicing can be fine, especially with invoicing templates. However, online invoicing software was created to help small businesses and freelancers automate as much of their invoicing process as possible, giving them more time to focus on their main tasks.

This includes things like saved contact details and job descriptions, prices, etc. It also includes recurring invoicing (when you send similar invoices to the same client on a regular basis), expense tracking, and other features.

Webcast, February 28th: Sales Automation Made Easy

In this digital world, it should be a given that anytime you can automate something, you should do it. That way, you can focus on providing the best service to your clients and growing your business.

As opposed to your general policies from above, you still need to provide a specific job proposal to your social marketing clients.

This is the space where you can clearly help settle your clients expectations. Be sure to answer the following questions:

By addressing these issues clearly in your proposal or quote/estimate, youll be able to further avoid any confusion, delay, or outright payment refusal when it comes time to have your invoices paid.

One thing that affects a lot of entrepreneurs, but freelancers especially, is the energy drain that accompanies a completed task. This happens when you are trying your hardest to complete a project or reach a goal in the waning days or hours of the agreed timeframe. With the amount of energy spent on that, there is great relief in having it done and notifying your client.

However, right after that, many social marketers want to just take a breakfor an hour, a day, a week. And this energy drain then naturally leads to procrastination, where you should have sent the invoice out two weeks ago and still havent started on it.

This is one of the biggest reasons for not getting paid on timesimply, its because you didnt send your invoices out on time.

One great way to fight against that is to use, online invoicing software. You could probably do your whole invoice, from start to finish, in less than a minute. Or, with regular customers and regular prices, setting up recurring invoicing would mean that you wouldnt need to do anything at all. The software will do it for you.

Beyond that, its important to start putting your invoices together even before youve completed the task or the month is finished. This way, you can have a rolling invoice that you update for each itemized job so that you wont have to do it all in one day.

The biggest reason that social marketers dont have their invoices paid faster is because the clients just arent paying them on time. This happens a lot more than you think, and it can cause serious cash flow problems.

One reason that clients pay late is that they are busy and have simply forgotten. Another reason could be that they are holding off payment until their cash flow problems ease up. Either way, its your responsibility to remind them of their obligation to pay you on time.

The best thing to do is to send out a payment reminder to your client before the payment is actually due. The best payment terms is 14 days, and not the standard 30 days. So, for example, if it is day number 13, I will send a quick, polite email reminder that the payment will be due the following day.

If that payment isnt delivered on the 14th day, I will send another email reminder on the 15th day. These emails are all polite, of course. However, that doesnt mean they cant be strict and direct. With the second payment reminder, the client should be able to provide payment or inform you when payment will be made.

For the rare case when there are further delays, you should skip the email and place a personal phone call. Direct interaction with the client will be enough to jolt him or her to recognize their obligations to provide payment for your completed services.

In general, the most important takeaway here is that smarter invoicing is possible if you follow these steps. Not only will you see better revenues and boosts in your social marketing business. Youll also find that the relationships with your clients are improved and more professional.

Uwe is the Founder and CEO of InvoiceBerry. The online invoicing softwarehelps small businesses and freelancers to create, send and manage their invoices online. He's been in the tech scene since over 15 years with companies ranging from FinTech to AdTech and games publishing. Viewfullprofile

The rest is here:
5 Ways Smarter Invoicing Can Boost Your Social Marketing Business - Business 2 Community

If you think teens and young adults are doing the same things on social media that Baby Boomers are doing, or that Gen Xer's experiences in social are the same as Millennial's you're mistaken. That's the key takeaway from new Sprout Social data.

"Social media holds great promise for reaching your audience since multiple generations are now reliably all in the same place," said Scott Brandt, CMO of Sprout Social. "The effort doesn't end there for brands, however. The data shows that while these people of all different ages may be reachable via the same platform, they can use it in drastically different ways. Strategies should be adjusted to support individual customer needs, and brands that don't talk to their customers-directly or via social media-won't see the best possible results."

Researchers looked at how the difference demographics are engaging through social, and found that Millennials are more likely to turn to social specifically to engage with a brand. Other demographics are more likely to make a call or an email, for example. But, both Millennials and Gen Xers are about 2x more likely than Boomers to follow brands via social media. Other interesting findings from the report include:

43% of those polled are using Facebook, making it the most popular social network 1 in 10 social messages get a response from a brand Gen Xers are 2x more likely to unfollow a brand because of the brand saying something offensive.

Tags: Social marketing, social marketing trends, social media trends, Sprout Social

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Report IDs differences in how people use social - BizReport

At The Drum's Predictions Breakfast, I was interested to hear how 2017 is going to be the year social takes its rightful place at high table of digital marketing.

Im normally suspicious about 'years of anything' being proclaimed, but after I saw some fantastic presentations on the use of social data and about how a complex ecosystem of tools has evolved around the discipline I had become a convert.

The biggest area of growth seems to be around influencer marketing with the smart money moving from celebs to micro influencers as the centre of this world. And of course tech and agencies are growing up around this sector as well. We really are seeing a lot of growth in the requirement for staffing in this market already in 2017.

As we are all well aware, organic reach and effectiveness continue to diminish and most brands are increasingly have to pay to deliver the strongest results. Even organic posts which do perform well need fantastic content and more often than not, that will need funding as well.

So it's becoming clear that brands need to put the social channel at the heart of their marketing. Its also become clear that they need to do it well and to do it well is going to cost. No longer can social be seen as something you can do on the cheap. There's nothing more off-putting to a prospective customer than untended or abandoned Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Sadly, when we look at the data we gathered for the seventh edition of our Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report, we see that this is not a view that is prevalent across the board. Social media salaries remain below the average marketing salaries at all levels. This suggests that businesses are still to be convinced that effective social media marketing influences the bottom line enough to increase remuneration.

We found that the average mid-level salary came in at 35,583. Compare that with a general marketing role at 40,296, email marketing at 38,688 or SEO at 39,422 and you can see that social staff are getting a raw deal.

We see the same patterns at junior level where the average social salary is 25,379. A general marketing role is 27,376, email is 27,419 and SEO is 27,038.

So we can see a disconnect here. We know brands want to invest more in social. We know that social marketing is growing as a medium as brands move away from traditional display. Surely it should follow that if social is an integral part of your marketing strategy then you should pay to get that expertise?

Melina Jacovou is chief executive and co-founder of Propel. The Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report combines internal salary data with over 1300 respondents to a survey carried out over three months in 2016.

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It's time to take social media seriously and that means paying higher salaries - The Drum