Monday, 14 November 2016

How to Add & Manage Multiple Instagram Accounts for Your Brand

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Friday, 11 November 2016

#SproutChat Recap: Measuring the Impact of In-Person Events

The internet and social media has connected strangers far and wide by allowing us to engage in quick or in-depth conversations. But this doesn’t mean that connecting in-person isn’t important. Your brand still needs to physically connect and interact with its customers. But how do you measure these touch points? This week, we discussed just how to attribute ROI to in-person events.

Create Buzz With These Best Practices

Make sure that your connecting the digital world with the physical world by incorporating your brand attributes and an event hashtag throughout your space. Brainstorm and document your strategy beforehand and really understand what your goals and objectives are before investing your time and resources into an event.

Take What You’ve Experienced at Events & Apply Those Learnings

Branded or not, we’ve all attended an event. Think of what you’ve loved and disliked about the previous business events or conferences you’ve attended and apply these special touches to your own in-person marketing opportunity.

Understand How Events Can Impact Your Bottom Line

Events can have a long term impact on business contacts. Attribute ROI to your in-person efforts by tracking referrals, maintaining relationships, measuring attendee engagement and facilitating a digital conversation before and after your event.

Make Authentic Connections

Networking can be a daunting task, even for marketers. Seize your in-person event opportunity to make authentic connections by just being yourself. While this is often easier said then done, attendees and peers will appreciate a host who finds commonalities between themselves and others and follows up after the event.

Interact & Engage With Attendees

Make your brand memorable by interacting and engaging with attendees in way that’s natural, yet unexpected. Invest in an eye catching, interactive booth or swag that guests will find useful. When executed properly, both can keep your brand top of mind.

Be Personal

It’s important to follow-up with attendees after an event. Sending a personalized, handwritten thank you note or email is a good way to stand out. However, make sure that you tread carefully and aren’t being too invasive or going right for the sale.

See you next week to social media and analysis. Join our Facebook community to continue the discussion beyond Twitter and to view weekly topics and discussion questions.

This post #SproutChat Recap: Measuring the Impact of In-Person Events originally appeared on Sprout Social.



source http://sproutsocial.com/insights/in-person-events/
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Sprout Named Top Workplace by Chicago Tribune

Each year, the Chicago Tribune highlights the best places to work in Chicago. Sprout Social is honored to be included on the list for the second year in a row. This recognition is particularly exciting because it is based on the results of an employee feedback survey that measures several aspects of workplace culture.

“We pride ourselves on creating an employee-first environment at Sprout,” said Jim Conti, Director of Talent. “We’re really grateful for the Tribune’s recognition of these efforts and the way that our culture has evolved organically along with our team.”

Sprout—the company, team and platform—is built upon the value of open communication, and our culture is a testament to that. People at Sprout are empowered to take on projects and challenges that interest them and support their growth, both professionally and as engaged members of the greater Chicago and technology communities.

We take pride in solving problems and building world class products, but we also find time to come together, celebrate one another’s interests and connect at events like our monthly happy hour, regular Lightning Lunches and annual canoe trip. Many of our team initiatives, like all-company volunteer days and hosting community events, have stemmed from employees’ interest and leadership.

Thank you to every member of Team Sprout for their hard work, vision and dedication.

This post Sprout Named Top Workplace by Chicago Tribune originally appeared on Sprout Social.



source http://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-places-to-work-in-chicago/
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Thursday, 10 November 2016

Meet Team Sprout: Arlo, Lead UI Designer

“How can we make what we did yesterday better?”

This is the question that stood out to me when I first spoke to Arlo Guthrie, Lead User Interface (UI) Designer, for Meet Team Sprout. As the head of our UI team, Arlo works primarily with the design and engineering teams to ensure that Sprout users enjoy a beautiful, consistent and user-friendly experience every time their use our platform.

Read our interview below and watch this clip to hear Arlo’s thoughts on curiosity, cooking in a sous-vide and where he finds inspiration.

Name: Arlo Bryan Guthrie
Department: Design
Started at Sprout: June 2013

How did you get to where you are today?

Like so many Chicagoans, I moved here to pursue a career in theater. I had aspirations of becoming a playwright and a director, but I also knew that I had to have another career. I started working in marketing for theater and realized that my favorite thing to do on any show was to design the poster and update the website.

I went back to school for graphic design, where I met my wife, and embarked on a career in the event industry. I worked on trade shows and big conferences and did everything from building applications to coaching speakers to designing graphics.

Now, as the Lead UI Designer at Sprout, I get to focus on one really great product as part of a team that thinks every day.

How can we make what we did yesterday better?

Arlo Bryan Guthrie
Lead UI Designer @ Sprout Social
@arlodesign

So, you and your wife are both designers?

Yup. We met in school and a lot of our dates in the first two years were homework dates. We actually find a lot of joy in talking shop. That sounds depressing but it isn’t—we draw a lot of professional inspiration and new ideas from each other.

Do you have any recommendations for resources for fellow designers at any point in their career?

There are so many places to learn about what I do; it’s overwhelming. I find the most inspiration—and the least distraction—in museums. I like to go back and look at old art movements, like the Bauhaus or even further back, to see how they solved simple problems. Those problems still exist today, we just have different sizes of screens and different methods of interaction.

We have a lot of information, we need to consume it, and our responsibility as designers is to help it make sense for people. We can look back hundreds of years and find inspiration for how to solve these problems.

Tell me about the UI team at Sprout and what you’re currently excited to work on.

In some respects, our team is the glue that holds engineering and design together. Collaboration with those two groups, and across the organization, is absolutely the most important thing on our team.

Right now we’re working on building a design system: making sure that all the choices that we make for user experience, user interfaces and our brand are based on a consistent, cohesive set of principles. Ultimately, that provides a better user experience, because a user can rely on a pattern of action that’s consistent throughout the entire application. The pattern library we’re creating helps our customers learn to use Sprout faster, and it also allows our team to build our applications much more rapidly than we would if we had to design it bespoke every single time.

What are the qualities that make a really good UI designer?

You have to be curious. At Sprout, we’re always looking for a way to make things faster and to make them work better for our customers. Anyone who is thirsty for knowledge and excited to discover new things can make a great UI designer.

How would you describe the culture here at Sprout?

I feel like this is the funniest office I’ve ever worked in. Every day I laugh with someone, whether we’re talking about an internet meme or an oblique take on the work we’re doing.

But in all seriousness, Sprout’s culture is all about sharing what we know. People here are so generous with their knowledge. On Friday afternoons, the entire design department gets together and shares our work and talks through new ideas. A few teams host Lightning Lunches where people talk about everything from 3D printing to how to become a professional barbecue judge. We have Lunch and Learns for the whole company that cover everything from how to give a good public speaking presentation to how to learn a new programming language.

Outside of the office, how do you learn and stay inspired?

When I have downtime, I want to play with my kids. I want to build Legos with my son; I want to try and figure out who my two-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend is.

The sense of discovery is what keeps me moving in my work, and sometimes I need to rediscover it through my children. Everything is new and exciting for them.

You recently got into some cooking adventures with your son. What have you been making recently?

So I’ve gotten on the sous vide bandwagon. I absolutely love vacuum-sealing something and leaving it in a pot of water for eight hours, and then having a finished product that I can just cut with a fork.

Now recently, my son, who is six, asked for sous vide octopus for dinner. He enjoyed preparing the raw octopi, and he actually ate most of it!

You’re also quite the whisky connoisseur. What’s your favorite scotch?

It would have to be the Bruichladdich Octomore 7.1. It’s the most heavily peated scotch in the world. It’s fruity but leathery, and there’s almost a little bit of cigar smoke in it. I had it on a date night with the Mrs. She said it smelled like the worst Sharpie ever…but to me it smells like heaven.

Thanks so much, Arlo!

To learn more about the design team at Sprout, follow their work on Dribbble and check out open positions on our careers page.

This post Meet Team Sprout: Arlo, Lead UI Designer originally appeared on Sprout Social.



source http://sproutsocial.com/insights/meet-arlo-guthrie/
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EP#61 Tom Hunt - Everything You Need To Know About Outsourcing

I met Tom Hunt when Dave (cofounder of NinjaOutreach) introduced him to me a few months ago and I thought, this guy had built a successful business himself so maybe I should feature him in our show and people can learn from his experience too.

So we got in touch via some email exchange, however, the interview got delayed for some time until recently.

I’m very happy that we got to sit down and talk about everything outsourcing because, although I’m sold on this topic (we have a remote team), I’ve learned a lot of new valuable insights from him that I can use to improve my business.

In this interview you will learn:

  • Why Outsourcing works for startups
  • How to hire the right VA for your business
  • What’s the best on-boarding process
  • How to manage your remote team
  • How to increase your team’s productivity
  • How to develop a company culture in a remote team

And that’s just to scratch the surface! Listen to this podcast in order to get a more in-depth understanding of everything you need to know about outsourcing.

Interview Links

@tomhuntio
http://tomhunt.io/
https://asktina.io/

The post EP#61 Tom Hunt - Everything You Need To Know About Outsourcing appeared first on Ninja Outreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/everything-about-outsourcing/
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Wednesday, 9 November 2016

The 5-Step Social Media & Online Reputation Management Plan

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Top 15 Productivity Resources for Content Marketers

If there is one requirement that content marketers need to fulfill these days, it’s productivity. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools and resources for content marketers in order to increase productivity.

workdesk-with-a-mac-pc

People are hungrier than ever for great content, and since they are consuming it more and more using mobile platforms, it needs to be available on the go, as often as possible, which is why all successful content marketers cannot afford to rest on their laurels.

Instead, they need to be able to create awesome content, week after week, without exceptions.

On top of that, they are also required to provide diverse content, which means they need to be able to wear many hats, so to speak, and switch between them seamlessly.

Check out our list of top 15 productivity resources for content marketers.

1. Slack :  Messaging App For Teams

slack is one of the important resources for Content Marketers it allows managing team and work flow

 

Swift and clear communication is everything, especially if you are managing a team project, and Slack has emerged as one of the finest communication tools for the job. Collaborate with your team members in real-time, send each other texts, and images, and plenty more.

Slack has a set of different integrations which are useful for different activities online.

For example, Slack supports Google Drive integration, which allows accessing any document stored in Google Drive without opening a web browser.

Besides this it provides an easy way to monitor your social presence using Notify tool integration and receive notifications about all mentions of your company on social channels. These are not all possible Slack integrations; you can check the full list here.

2. SEMRush : Competitive Data For Digital Marketing Professionals

semrush with competitive-data its also one of the key resources for content marketers

Figuring out the most popular keywords in your niche can take ages, unless you rely on SEMRush to do that for you. Not only will it save you a ton of time, but it will also allow you to take a peek at what your competition is doing.

This popular software gives you all needed for the development of SEO strategies and PPC advertising campaigns, as well as helps to improve your website performance and evaluate issues and errors you are currently having.

Moreover, analytical tools of SEMRush let you not only to develop strategy, but also to assess success and re-target your activities.

3. Hemingway : Makes Your Writing Bold And Clear

hemingway-makes-your-writing-bold-and-clear

While there are other, more conventional apps that will check your work for grammar and spelling, we have chosen Hemingway, because it will help you improve the readability of your content and make it concise.

This tool is built around the simplicity of texts, and will help you to divide compound sentences, where it is possible, into simpler ones. It also suggests using simpler words instead of complex ones.

Moreover, it will help you to learn proper usage of adjectives and adverbs as well as help to eliminate passive constructions.

4. NinjaEssays Custom Writing Service

ninjaessays-custom-writing-service

They have some of the best writers and editors you will find anywhere, which means you can rely on them to provide you with some ace content, in case you don’t want to fall behind on your regular posting schedule. The NinjaEassays service is affordable and their writers have years of experience in different types of writing.

Furthermore, they do have different guarantees, which assure you that you won’t be dissatisfied with the resulting paper. Read review here.

5. Buffer : A Better Way To Share On Social Media

content marketers work got efficient with buffer

Timing is everything when you are posting on social media, but since you are not able to be online 24/7, you can schedule all your social media activity with Buffer, and get the most out of every single post.

Also, Buffer provides analytics for your posts through the platform, which will help you to evaluate your social presence and choose the best strategy.

Free and paid plans are available, and if you are working on a bunch of projects you can rely on Buffer's Awesome Plan and keep all your activities under one simple to use interface.

6. WordTracker : For Longtail Keywords

wordtracker-for-longtail-keywords

Wordtracker is great for writers who want to improve their SEO and visibility online. It helps you find out which keywords are most popular for your audience and your product or service so you get the most out of your marketing strategy.

7. Death to Stock Photos : Free Photos By Emails

death-to-stock-photos-free-photos-by-emails

Nowadays, it is mandatory to enhance your posts with some stunning images, and this awesome image library will send plenty of good ones to your email every month. Additionally, you can get an access to all images of Death to Stock Photos  with a premium subscription.

It costs only 10 USD monthly, which is very cheap comparing with photo stocks on the internet.

8. Canva : Simple Graphic Design Software

canva-one essential tools for content marketers to create custom graphics

Canva should rank high in your list of tools for content marketers. If you want to create original images, cover photos for your social media accounts, or some eye-popping infographics, Canva is the right tool for the job.

Canva (free to use online web based software) is a simple way to design almost whatever you might need for your online activities.

It has user friendly drag-drop interface and allows you to purchase images from a stock for 1 USD only or use your own for free.

9. Brightcove : Online Video Platform

brightcove-online-video-platform

Creating your own original video is no longer impossible, because Brightcove offers a multitude of tools and solutions that can help put together professional-looking footage.

The software has all needed to edit video clips, descriptions, and keywords quickly from a single interface.

Moreover, if you host an event and in need of powerful online streaming solution the Brightcove is the best choice.

10. Google Analytics

google-analytics

Google Analytics is The most important and essential tools for content marketers. Every serious content marketer should know all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, because it will help them figure out what sort of content works best for what audience, which will result in a much more focused marketing effort.

Google Analytics provides everything needed to measure the web page success and performance, see how your traffic goes and what goals work for your business.

Moreover, intelligent insights of the platform will help you to make your campaigns profitable and understand deeply how your traffic reaches your web page and what obstacles visitor meets during his browsing.

11. LinkedIn : World's Largest Professional Network

linkedin-world-largest-professional-network

If you are looking for professional and skillful collaborators, LinkedIn is the largest place online where you can find top-notch talent, regardless of your niche. Its an absolute essential resource for content marketers and marketers in general.

Today, it finally allows posting and distributing content not only on official company's pages and groups but also through a personal social profile.

Stay connected with LIONs in your niche to increase your content reach, and of course, post relevant and interesting content and avoid spamming.

12. MindNode : A Visual Representation Of Your Ideas

mindnode-a-visual-representation-of-your-ideas

In content marketing, ideas are more precious than gold, and one of the best ways you can develop them in visual form is through mind maps. We recommend MindNode for that. Never let a good idea go to waste again.

The MindNode is now available for all Apple devices, so you can download it from the AppStore.

13. Prezi : Online Presentation Software

prezi-online-presentation-software

Slide shows and PowerPoint presentation are always a favorite among audiences, and Prezi will take you step further and enable you to create presentations which are a visual feast for anyone willing to take a look.

Furthermore, according to the scientists, presentations are one of the most effective ways to create engaging and memorable content, so Prezi is very handy for any of your content marketing initiatives.

14. Todoist : To Do List And Task Manager

todoist is another important among various tools for content marketers

Todoist is a simple, yet effective task manager that will help you access and keep track of all your personal and professional obligations, allowing you to make the most out of your time.

The time management with Todolist will become simpler and more effective.

15. Quora : The Best Answer To Any Question

quora-the-best-answer-to-any-question

Although Quora came in #15 in our list of resources for content marketers, it certainly do not rank so.

With Quora, not only will you be able find some great ideas for your next article or post, but you will also be able to get an expert opinion on plenty of complex subjects and topics.

In addition, it allows you to share your content with the audience and get a professional opinion on the topic discussed.

So you can use it not only for inspiration but also for distribution of your ideas.

 

Conclusion

Although there are numerous resources for content marketers out there. With these 15 helpful tools and apps, you can rest assured that you content creation process will be more productive and efficient than ever.

As a result, not only will your business grow, but also your audience, and that’s what every content marketer wants.

 

Julie Petersen is a blogger and an avid content marketing specialist. At present time she is running her educational blog where she shares her AskPetersen writing services reviews, samples, tips and guides. She is also working on her first ebook dedicated to online learning.

The post Top 15 Productivity Resources for Content Marketers appeared first on Ninja Outreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/content-marketing-tools-resources/
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