1. Leverage social media to your advantage.

According to a survey by DemandWave, 55 percent of all businesses worldwide find social media to be the best way to generate leads, rightfully so. Traditional marketing platforms don’t always provide marketers the same luxury social media does in identifying and engaging your target audience. For example, hosting a Twitter chat to announce a new product release, sharing pop-culture polls for your followers, and interacting with influencers and thought leaders who cover your industry are surefire ways to build a powerful brand presence online and bring traffic to your website.

Start by creating a page for your business on popular social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Using the Zoho Social application in Zoho CRM Plus, you can publish posts across all platforms simultaneously and measure their engagement levels.

Next, identify keywords and hashtags that are relevant to your business and track them on a regular basis. When the time is right, make your presence felt by joining the conversation to build your overall brand presence.

Remember to keep up the momentum. Keep your page bustling with activity by posting quality content that’s relevant to your audience. In a few months, you will start to see a rise in your website organic traffic. But consistency is the key.

2. Invest in an AdWords campaign. 

Statwit estimates that businesses make $2 in revenue for every dollar they spend on Google AdWords. However, PPC (Pay Per Click) ads are not exactly cheap (Depending on your industry, keywords can even go upwards of $50 per click). To truly get the results you want, you must find the best keywords and the right ad content for your PPC ads . Here’s how Zoho CRM Plus can help.

Use Zoho Social to identify trending tag words in your region. Experiment with Google AdWords by starting a small campaign by bidding on these tags. Create landing pages with relevant content for each keyword, and route traffic accordingly. Next, import your AdWords marketing data into Zoho CRM so you can see which keywords led to each sale. You can also export your sales data into AdWords to optimize your bidding and streamline budgets to yield maximum profits.

Once you merge your Google online marketing data with Zoho’s offline sales data, both your sales and advertising teams can learn which marketing strategies are driving the best ROI. After the campaign is over, use Zoho CRM Plus analytics to combine your AdWords analytics with sales data from your CRM and make sure that the keywords you’re investing in offer the most bang for your buck.

3. Take your show on the road.

Trade shows are one of the few opportunities where brands get a chance to directly connect with their customers. According to the Center of Exhibition Industry Research, 86 percent of people attending a trade show have the ability to purchase. Find local trade shows that are relevant to your business interests and meet potential clients. Zoho CRM Plus mobile apps allow you to scan business cards and import them to your CRM, right from the trade show floor.

Once the contact details are imported in your CRM, the best way to solidify your relationships is by creating an immediate follow-up plan to ensure your potential client does not lose interest. Sync the names and email addresses of your new CRM clients into individual subscriber lists, based on their industry in Zoho Campaigns. Next, create mailers for each industry type with your call-to-action as a link to your website. Grab your client’s interest by adding their first name in the subject lines, using merge tags. Once the campaign is sent, measure click rates/open rates in Zoho Campaigns, and start experimenting with different subject lines to improve your success.

It’s your turn now, are you ready?

First, choose one or two action items from this list. Try to implement them and tell us how they went in the comments below.

Second, we’d like to hear your thoughts. Do you have any other ideas you’d like to see on this list? Feel free to share them here, as well.

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Check out Zoho CRM Plus, our end-to-end customer engagement suite for sales, marketing and support teams. Zoho CRM Plus allows you to do everything you can from attracting leads to converting them into customers, and from managing your social media profiles to providing top-notch customer support. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial.
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If you are reading this post you are probably already familiar with what a North Star Metric is. If this is true you are also ready to implement a viral cycle to take your precious metric to the moon. If it's not, please take the time to read about Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown to learn more about growth. To implement this hack you need 3 tools to make it work. Zoho Creator, Getty Images API, and ifttt.com.

Zoho Creator is a low-coding platform that lets you build online database applications for your unique business needs. First, you need to create a form in Zoho Creator and make it public so you can embed the code in your website, blog or fan page.

Second, you need to connect the Getty Images API to GET an image related to your business and store it inside Zoho Creator database. The script needed to implement the integration is below. You will notice a string search value in the first section of the script. This is where you tell the API what kind of image you need. If your business is cookies then you can pass the search string "Cookies" and get a beautiful well-taken cookie picture on the other side.

string API.gettyImage(string search)

{

 uriValueResult = "";

 headerGettyMap = map();

 headerGettyMap.put("Api-Key", "jzyt5hyYOUROWNKEYbtycwbj");

 responseGetty = getUrl(("https://api.gettyimages.com/v3/search/images?phrase=") + input.search, headerGettyMap);

 //info responseGetty;

 responseMap = responseGetty.toMap();

 imagesValue = responseMap.get("images");

 imagesList = imagesValue.toJSONList();

 if (imagesList.size() > 0)

 {

 randomValue = thisapp.API.Randomnumber(0, (imagesList.size() - 1));

 imagesMapValue = imagesList.get(randomValue);

 //info imagesMapValue;

 imagesMap = imagesMapValue.toMap();

 displaySizesValue = imagesMap.get(("display_sizes"));

 //info displaySizesValue;

 displaySizesList = displaySizesValue.toJSONList();

 if (displaySizesList.size() > 0)

 {

 displaySizesMapValue = displaySizesList.get(0);

 displaySizesMap = displaySizesMapValue.toMap();

 uriValueResult = displaySizesMap.get("uri");

 }

 }

 //info ((responseGetty).toMap()).get("images");

 return uriValueResult;

}

Third, you need to publish and get the URL of the view with an image from Zoho Creator reports and replace the /view-perma/ section of the URL with /rss/. Keep in mind that column headers in the view will become part of the post url sent to facebook. So its important you think about the names you want to use. For the column name of the image use a "." or a "_" the idea is for the image name not to be visible.

And last but not least, create an RSS to FB page applet in your ifttt.com account and insert your Zoho RSS URL from the previous step. Follow the instructions ifttt.com will provide, be creative add emojis and #hashtags to your post just like you would in real life. Listo!

In conclusion, people tend to follow the actions of others especially if it's your friends. Using this hack you can inform your followers in facebook or twitter about who has taken action on a purchase, a registration or any other metric improving the odds for others to follow. In the video below I show you how we successfully implemented this process for ACRO-GYM the largest gymnastics chain in México with a 10x improvement for our North Star Metric.

There are software providers that specialize in just one area of business operations and productivity, and then there are the companies that cover every enterprise base within one ecosystem. Zoho is in the latter category. The cloud-based office suite and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider is known for products like Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, Zoho Campaigns, and a slew of other business apps and services. But in 2015, the company entered the social media management and analytics arena as well with Zoho Social (which begins at $10 per month for the Standard plan).

Zoho Social is a full-featured, responsive hub for managing your social operations and tracking key metrics. It's ideally suited for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) looking to curate and monitor a single brand across Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. It's also ideally suited for small to midsize enterprises (SMEs) managing up to three different brands that are looking to track core internal metrics and external reporting on specific social networks. While its broader social listening capabilities and depth of reporting data can't match the global enterprise scale of Editors' Choices Synthesio and Sysomos, Zoho can also do a lot more on the publishing and CRM integration front, and at a bargain price.

Pricing and Setup Zoho Social is free for a single user and brand, with basic social publishing functionality (though with no Instagram access). But the real features begin in the $10 per month Standard plan, which includes two users, publishing and scheduling, and basic monitoring, reporting, and collaboration features. Local SMBs looking for the basics might be suited to this tier but, for most businesses, you'll need the $50-per-month Professional plan. Compared to $99 per month for Sprout Social or Buffer for Business, Zoho Social is a bargain.

The Professional plan comes with five users, three brands, and premium features such as advanced and custom reporting, sentiment analysis, and up to 15 columns in the Monitoring tab. Though beyond those relatively small user and brand caps, businesses will need to pay $10 per month for every additional user or brand. Zoho Social also offers a yearly pricing option, where businesses can pay $100 upfront for the Standard plan or $500 for the Professional plan to get two free months.

Once you sign up for Zoho Social, you're prompted to connect all these networks you see on the home screen. As far as supported social networks, the platform keeps it simple. Zoho Social supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. There's no support for other social networks including Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, and others—Zoho focuses on the core sites for businesses. The rest of the setup is pretty simple. Once you authorize Zoho Social for any given social network, that account is then added to the main dashboard, where you can tab back and forth between your different "brands."

Interface and Social Media Management Zoho Social sports a clean user interface (UI) broken down into seven main tabs accessible from the left-hand vertical navigation bar, which expands and contracts when a mouse hovers over it. The tabs are straightforward, with icons for Home, Posts, Messages, Monitor, Connections, Collaborate, and Reports, but the first thing you see on the Home tab is a Brand Health dashboard.

The dashboard is essentially a table showing key metrics—total audience, active audience, engagement, and the number of "stories" or posts created—each with a red or green plus/minus percentage next to them showing week-to-week change. It's a brand's social report card. This is a great little feature for novice social media editors or brand managers to easily gauge social brand progress and report to their superiors with a few key hard numbers.

On the right of the dashboard is a live stream column showing the most recent brand engagement of any kind of any network. The Interactions tab shows a full list of user engagement, but the live stream tab is good for quick influencer identification and engagement. Click on a message and you'll get a pop-up window with profile info—friends and followers, who they're following, likes—and immediately reply with a comment, tweet, direct message, etc. The Home dashboard does a good job of putting quick actions and key metrics at a user's fingertips, rather than inundating the UI with all the social data the platform is pulling in.

The Posts tab is where you manage publishing in Zoho Social across brands. The main feed is a fairly simplistic look at Published Posts, which can be filtered by network, sorted by date, or sorted by post popularity. You can also sort by Promoted Posts, if you've paid for any reach on Facebook or Twitter, or failed posts to reschedule and post again. There is a bulk scheduler option by uploading a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file containing text for a list of posts, but it's not the most intuitive or easy-to-use bulk scheduler I've tested.

The posts do include positive, negative, or neutral sentiment analysis, but only after a given posts hits a volume threshold for engagement. Zoho Social's sentiment analysis is streets behind Crimson Hexagon and Synthesio, but if a post is popular enough, even basic sentiment analysis is one of the most crucial data points in improving a business's social engagement.

To create a post, you press the New Post button on the top right of the tab to open the publishing window. Zoho Social allows you to toggle brands on and off to send a post to one or more networks and customize the message accordingly. You can add a photo, but Zoho is still working on the ability to attach a video to a post. As for scheduling, there's a calendar and publishing time field on the bottom right of the window. One useful feature is the ability to set a post to repeat on specific dates, weekly, or monthly.

Zoho Social's publishing is nothing fancy, but its most innovative feature is the Smart Q, a custom-built Zoho algorithm that monitors social networks and suggests the optimal time to publish a post. Smart Q recommends the time at which a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc, audience is the likely to be the most active and engaged. It's the first hint of true automation in the tool, and if you let it, Smart Q will schedule your entire arsenal of social posts for you. It's similar to the automated publishing features and recommendations in Buffer for Business, but without the drag-and-drop scheduling queue to rejigger post order you'll find in that tool. Zoho's continued experimentation with this kind of smart automation will be key to how the platform evolves in the next several years, as social media managers are overseeing more and more brands, and have less and less time to curate them all.

Social Monitoring, Analytics, and Reporting The Monitor tab is Zoho's hub for all social listening. You can create more than 10 different columns or "streams" reminiscent of the curated social listening experience in Sprout Social and Hootsuite, but one big difference is that—as with the Messages tab aggregating direct interactions across social networks—it's all integrated with Zoho CRM.

When creating your monitoring streams, you can not only add columns such as Facebook page interactions, searches for a specific Twitter keyword, Instagram likes, etc, but also posts or interactions from CRM contacts and leads. You can also set up a stream of another user or page for competitive brand monitoring and analysis purposes.

The CRM integration is also key in the Connections tab, which shows users who've engaged with your brands in any way. It's a more fleshed out version of the live stream column. In this tab you can filter by network, interaction recency, most engaged users, or filter by CRM leads or contacts. More importantly, in the Connections tab you can also add a user as a lead or contact in Zoho CRM with a single button from their user profile. This kind of simple but effective influencer identification and management shows how Zoho has integrated CRM across its social platform. You can go even further in the Settings tab on the top right of the dashboard, where you can automate social lead generation further by clicking into the lead generation module and setting pre-defined rules and triggers that will automatically add leads from Zoho Social into your CRM.

On the reports front, beyond the Brand Health scorecard there is a substantial amount of analytics baked throughout the Zoho Social experience. Scroll down the main dashboard below the report card and you'll see your last post on each social network with the same metrics below each, broken down by network.

If you click on the details button, Zoho will dig into the post details section showing some more metrics like potential reach and link clicks, and give you a more detailed view of post engagement via pie chart. The data differs depending upon network, and you can email out a report of that data via PDF by clicking the Export button.

The Reports tab itself is where you'll find the most detailed social analytics. The basic reports are each specific to social network, but you can create exportable custom reports incorporating stats from different brands and networks. I liked that the reports are all presented in natural, relatable language. Stats differ by social, like a "How is your brand performing?" line graph, or a "Where are your connections located?" bar graph, or a "How many people are talking about your posts?" engagement chart. There are also reports showing associated keywords with a particular brand, a demographic breakdown of the different industries your followers are in, and A/B testing metrics of whether a post worked better with a link, an image, with only text, etc.

There's also a CRM report for users linked to a Zoho CRM account, whichshows leads created, contacts created, potentials, and revenue generated on particular days laid out in a table with the day, lead name, lead contact, and social source. If you click on a particular lead from there, the URL in the browser bar shows a Zoho CRM profile address. While enterprise-grade social listening platforms like Synthesio, Crimson Hexagon, or Talkwalker can run more complex queries on social data, rendered in a wider array of reports, Zoho Social holds its own in the SMB tier, matching Sprout Social and Hootsuite for post-specific analytics, with dead-simple usability on par with Buffer for Business and seamless CRM integration.

A CRM-Integrated Social Collaboration Hub Social media is a collaborative experience within an organization, and Zoho Social gets the idea that colleagues should be able to discuss specific posts, larger trends, and social strategy within the platform. That's why the Collaborate tab is my favorite part of Zoho Social. Throughout the Home, Posts, Monitor, and Reports tabs, each object has not only an "Add to CRM" option when relevant, but a "Discuss" button to embed that object in the Discuss tab for comment. Add a post, a user or lead, or a specific report or chart to the tab, and a discussion can sprout from there in a feed reminiscent of a basic company intranet page for easy discussion.

Zoho Social also offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. For the most part, Zoho Social is a standard social media management and analytics platform. The publishing, analytics, and reporting features leave nothing to be desired, but aside from Smart Q automation, there's nothing that'll blow you away. Where the tool really stands out is in its built in CRM and collaboration features, and all at a very low prices for SMBs or SMEs. Zoho Social is an easy-to-use social media management and analytics platform with enough smart publishing and reporting features to satisfy social or brand managers looking for straightforward metrics. If your business is already a Zoho CRM customer, it's a no-brainer.

Here´s the deal:

Less than 9 months ago Twitter shared a list of the features most requested via #helloworld on the official Twitter blog, which may have given us something of a road map as to where Twitter could be looking to make changes in the near future.

As per the #helloworld feedback, the most requested Twitter features are:

That´s not all...

Today we finally see some of the #helloworld features come to life. Twitter recently announced an upcoming update that will make big changes to the way people (and brands) create content and engage on the social media platform. Here are the main changes from twitters announcement.

• Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
• Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
• Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
• Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

We’re always looking for ways to create and share great content that will engage our audience. Creating good content is an art in itself, but so is curating and sharing content.

Discovering, curating and sharing great content that your audience will find interesting is hard enough as it is. But it doesn’t stop there – when you find good content, you need an easy way to add it to your social sharing pipeline. Meet Zoho SocialShare, the new browser plugin from Zoho Social, designed to help your brand easily curate and share content.

Here are some of our top tips for curating and sharing content with Zoho SocialShare.

Share content pronto, without switching browser tabs: Whenever you come across an interesting article that is relevant for your audience, all you have to do is click on the Zoho SocialShare icon in your browser. Once you hit publish, the article will be instantly shared from all your social media channels.

Save as draft idea or discuss later: If you like an article but aren’t sure whether you want to share it right away, you can use Zoho SocialShare to save it as a draft. Draft posts can be published anytime in the future.

What’s really cool about this feature, is the ease with which you can share these drafts for internal discussion with your team. All it takes is one click to share a draft post to your Collaborate tab in Zoho Social. You can even tag your team members so that they can take a look and discuss it with you right there.

Schedule sharing: There are times when you’re sure you want to share an article but can’t do it right away because you already have a lot of content scheduled. Or because you know now is not a good time to engage your audience.

In situations like these, Zoho SocialShare lets you schedule the article to go out at a future time when a majority of your audience will be active. If you’re not sure about what time is best, just use the SmartQ feature and we’ll automagically schedule it to go out when most of your audience is likely to engage with it.

Pick your favorite lines to share: If you loved reading an article and want to make sure your audience reads it, don’t just share the title as the main piece of content. Select the lines that you felt were most powerful, the ones that you think will make the maximum impact on your audience, the ones that you believe will make the reader want to click and read more. I guess you get the picture.

Yes, those are the lines that you should share. Just select these lines, even if they’re at different places in the article and we’ll share them for you.

Zoho SocialShare is available on Firefox and Chrome web browsers and comes for free with all our plans. And, of course, all the content you share from it will show up in your Zoho Social dashboard so you can track how your audience engages with different articles and figure out what’s working best for them. Simplify your social sharing now.

This entry was posted in Zoho Social and tagged brands, content marketing, social media, social media marketing by Meera Sapra.