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Social Media Mistakes – Are You Doing Any of These?

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Social Media Mistakes – Are You Doing Any of These?

All websites should have social media share and connect buttons. It doesn’t matter if the site is a retailer or not, social media is a form of communication for people of all ages. We use social media to make purchases, as a customer service tool, for public relations, and to share reviews of brands we care about. Website social media buttons help your readers share your content – including images and posts – across social channels. They also help you build up a following. If you are indeed a retailer or blogger, then these are a must-have for your web presence!

There are two types of social media buttons every website should have. The first is a social connect button. The second type is a social share button. Social connect buttons are the ones that say something like, “follow me” or “let’s connect” When you tap in a social connect button, you become a follower of an account on a social media channel. These are different from social share buttons.

There are a few configuration mistakes common in social media share and connect buttons. Fortunately, they are easy to fix, especially if you are using a content management system like WordPress or Shopify. Watch this YouTube Video on Social Media mistakes and find out!

Five Common Social Media Mistakes

  1. Missing Social Share – Social share buttons allow users to tap a button on a website and share your content to the social channel of their choice. A properly configured button will have the attribution already set. For example, if you tweet this post using the button on the page, then the post will be attributed to me @metrony. Two taps and the post is shared. Done!
  2. Social Connect Buttons – These buttons are a close cousin to the above social connect buttons, but they are for building up a following rather than sharing. Social connect buttons are the buttons that you click or tap and they automatically have your profile like the profile associated with whatever you are reading. For example, if you tap the Facebook icon in the “let’s connect” section of this webpage, you’ll “like” my Facebook page.
  3. Broken Links – Have you ever gone to a website, hit the social connect or social share button only to have it pop up a window to Facebook.com rather than “like” the page or even land on the brand’s profile page? It happens all the time. The share buttons are set up before the profiles, and configuring them properly gets lost on the madness of getting an e-commerce site set up properly.
  4. Open in New tab – Sometimes social connect buttons take users away from the website. The goal of social media is to get users to the website and take a certain action (buy something, give an email address, get directions, download something, etc…) Social media should NEVER take users away from a website. Many times, a misconfigured connect or share button opens a new tab or window and takes users away.
  5. Add Attribution – Now that we have the social share buttons working correctly – they pop open their own standalone tab – add your user handle to each social share button. Whatever your user handle is per social media channel, that should be tacked onto the end of the post. Be sure that your user handle is correct for each individual channel.

Twitter Announces Longer Tweets

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Twitter Announces Longer Tweets

Twitter announced that users are now able to write longer Tweets. The URLs for photos, videos, GIFS, polls and Tweet quotes will not count as part of the 140-character limit. The update to the social media channel is rolling out to all users of the social media app on both desktop and mobile app versions.

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Twitter is famous for its unique and super short character count limit in posts. Users had to compose all posts, called Tweets, in 140 characters or less. This limit included all hashtags and URLs. Formerly, media such as images, videos, and GIFS used up a portion of each tweet’s 140-character limit because they liked to a URL. Now these are excluded from the character count and users have at least a little more room to express themselves. Links pasted into a Tweet are still counted against the 140-character limit as they always have been.

Twitter announced the change with a Tweet, of course!

twitter character count

Another new feature is that users can re-Tweet themselves – just in case you want to say something twice! This gives Twitter users 280 characters for a single Tweet (140 for the re-Tweet on top of the 140 characters for the original.)

Still, 140 characters is not much space to write in. Pinterest allows up to 500 characters in a description! Facebook and Instagram allow 60,000 and 2,200 characters respectively!

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How to Increase Social Media Engagement

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How to Increase Social Media Engagement

The world has a love of visual communication. People of all ages and cultures share photos and videos of their everyday lives. We cannot get enough of pouring over photos images of travel destinations, fashion, and food. Do it yourself videos are the go to for many trying to master a new skill.

This is evidenced by the popularity of well-trafficked social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and SnapChat. Video is expected to surpass images in popularity in 2016 so we have to include video is on sites such as YouTube and maybe even Vine in our marketing strategies! Images are only optional in two of the social sites I listed – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

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We look to be entertained with no down time. If we are not engaged in an activity, we are heads down looking at something on our smartphones.
According to the US Department of Commerce, US E-Commerce Sales accounted for only 7.40% of retail Sales in the third quarter of 2015. However, many businesses are 100% online must do all they can to drive ecommerce traffic.

Data supports that including images on social media posts increases engagement. Figure one shows that by including native video, that post engagement increase by 8.71%. Including images increases post engagement by 3.71%. This number is a bit of a reversal for images. Facebook’s Edgerank prevents the majority of posts from ever appearing in Facebook users’ newsfeeds.

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Figure 1

Including images also increases the likelihood of a Twitter Tweet will be retweeted! (Say THAT three times fast!) Tweets with images and native video simply stand out on the Twitter stream. They receive more retweets than Tweets that only include text. [Figure 2]

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Figure 2

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