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You’ve heard all about the importance of using Facebook to grow your business. You know that it has a large user base. You realize that it can help you find new customers. But actually doing marketing on Facebook is a whole other story. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little pocket guide to navigating Facebook?

To help you break through all the clutter on Facebook and actually start seeing results, we put together the infographic and tips below. Check ’em out.

To learn more about how to use Facebook for business, download our free guide here. 

Do’s and Don’ts for Marketing on Facebook: How to Use Facebook for Business

1) Do: Use a Recognizable Profile Picture

Being recognizable on Facebook is important to getting found and Liked. Because your profile picture is at the top of your Page and used as your thumbnail for all of your posts, you need to make sure it’s something that your Fans will actually associate with your brand. Usually, it’s best to just go with your company logo. 

2) Don’t: Leave Your Company’s “About” Section Blank

A preview of your “about” section is shown beneath your profile picture, and it’s one of the first places people will look when they’re scanning your Page. Make sure yours displays relevant information about your company — what you sell, your website, what times you’re open, etc. — to help answer people’s questions right off the bat.

3) Do: Coordinate Your Cover Photo, Pinned Post, and Profile CTA to Promote Marketing Campaigns

These three things are the most immediately visible parts of your Page. If you want to maximize engagement with your marketing campaigns, try matching your copy and creative across all three.

So if you’re promoting an ebook, for example, you could create a cover photo featuring an image of your ebook, publish an organic post to your page that contains a link to your landing page, and make sure the profile CTA has a link to the landing page as well. 

4) Don’t: Use a Dummy Account

There’s no way around this one. Dummy accounts violate Facebook’s terms and conditions — so just don’t create them.

If you’d like to avoid post publishing mishaps, set up different publishing settings for different employees on your Page. Check out this help document from Facebook if you’d like to see what roles you can set for different members of your team.

5) Do: Tailor Your Organic Posts

Targeting on Facebook isn’t just for paid content — you can also use them for organic posts too. Instead of blasting out all of your posts to all of your Fans, think about ways you can use Facebook targeting tools to segment your organic posts by age, gender, education, etc. By being more specific with your targeting, you might be able to generate even better engagement. 

6) Don’t: Post Too Often

According to one of our previous studies, companies with fewer than 10,000 Facebook followers receive 60% fewer interactions per post when they post 60+ times per month. So don’t overwhelm your customers by posting more than a few times per day. Instead, spend more time crafting higher-quality Facebook posts, and, you know, getting to the other thousands of things on your to-do list. 

7) Do: Use Tracking URLs and Facebook Insights to Analyze Your Page Performance

You can’t improve your Facebook Page if you don’t know how your posts are performing in the first place. Use tracking URLs with UTM codes to identify which posts are driving traffic and conversions to your website. And for Page-specific data such as your engagement rate per post, head over to Facebook Insights. 

Once you have insights from these analyses, you can tailor your content strategy to post more of what works — and less of what doesn’t.

8) Don’t: Forget About Multimedia Posts

You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: visual content is essential to succeeding on social media. 

And don’t just take my word for it. Research has a shown the use of visual content in Facebook campaigns can generate 65% more engagement after only one month.

9) Do: Post During Strategic Times of Day

While the best time of day can vary from Page to Page and audience to audience, there has been some data released that shows that posts published between 1 – 4 p.m. have the best clickthrough and share rates. Use this as a jumping-off point to discover which time of day works best for you.

10) Don’t: Be Slow to Respond

Did you know that 42% of consumers who complain on social media expect a 60-minute response time? Whether your audience posts negative or positive comments, ignoring them only creates possible anger or disappointment. So take a few minutes out of your day to monitor your Facebook Page and respond to any issues that crop up. 

11) Do: Try Using Paid Budget to Amplify Successful Organic Posts

Get better ROI for your ads by promoting content that you already know works. Putting budget behind organic content that’s performing well can expand your reach and attract more people to your Page.

12) Don’t: Make Assumptions

The last thing you want is for your posts to blend in with the rest of the clutter on a customer’s News Feed. Just because a strategy works well for one industry doesn’t mean it will work well for yours. Test your assumptions — even the ones we’ve outlined in this post — to see what actually works for you. 

What do’s and don’ts do you follow on your Facebook Page? Share your best tips with us in the comments. 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Creating and maintaining a presence for your brand on social media can be a 24/7 job for an entire team of people. But what happens when you’re on a content team of one? How do you find time to dedicate to social media without neglecting your other responsibilities? 

That’s the position I’ve found myself in. For me, checking in on social media happens between editing articles, managing freelance writers, building gated content, optimizing our CTAs, distributing our content, and growing organic search referrals.

Thankfully, I’ve learned some approaches that scale social production and minimize time spent. While I primarily apply these tips to Justworks’ Twitter account, they’re applicable for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. 

Why Does Social Promotion Matter?

Despite limited bandwidth, keeping our social accounts active is a high priority. Why?

Research has shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. Providing social users with interesting, informative content helps bring in quality leads.

Not to mention, social fans are powerful: 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow. But more than half of Twitter users expect audience responses from brands within an hour. Staying engaged with users is a straightforward way to earn and retain that brand loyalty.

6 Helpful Tips for Scaling Your Social Media Strategy

1) Automate routine social media tasks.

IFTTT —  short for “if this, then that” — is a go-to tool for anyone looking to streamline social processes. Users can build “recipes” according to their needs, or leverage the recipes that already exist.

Want Twitter mentions sent to you via Slack? IFTTT can do that. Want every Facebook image you’re tagged in sent to Dropbox? IFTTT can do that, too. 

Not only does this tool help me keep our company’s accounts active without constantly being online, but it also helps me automate social “admin” tasks. Here are a few of my go-to recipes:

• New Twitter followers in a Google Drive Sheet. This recipe is straightforward, and incredibly helpful. It saves our Twitter followers’ names, locations, follower count, following count, and profile link. I can easily review top followers from the continually updating document.
• Save all #justwomen tweets to a Google Drive sheet. We host a quarterly event celebrating female entrepreneurs called Justwomen, which I live tweet through the #justwomen hashtag. This recipe saves the author, text, and post URL of all #justwomen shares for easy post-event analysis.
• Add all #justwomen mentions to a Twitter list. This recipe helps me stay engaged with influencers interested in the Justwomen (and Justworks) brand. It also ensures I don’t miss adding accounts to the list in the chaos of a live hashtag promotion.

IFTTT has 232 channels and endless options for recipe triggers, actions, and ingredients. If you can think it, you can most likely automate it.

2) Auto-publish to social media when a blog post goes live. 

Automatically posting new blog posts is a quick way to kick start social promotion. The goal here is to get the word out.

While my auto-shares to Twitter are simply the headline and link, I always go back and promote with more engaging copy, a funny GIF, or a pull quote later.

The best part? This only took me a few seconds to set up. If you’re a HubSpot customer, all you have to do is simply enable the auto-publish function in your Social Media Settings. If you’re using a different content management system, you should be able to simply turn on the function just the same. 

3) Create multiple social posts for one piece of content.

Appearing to promote a large variety of content doesn’t require publishing more content. For each blog post I publish, I draft four different versions of social copy. Doing so gives me the most bang for my buck with each piece of content.

I generally write copy using:

1. The post headline
2. A snippet or quote from the article
3. A subheader or thoughtful question
4. An attention-grabbing statistic

For instance, the social copy I crafted for the blog post, “3 Surefire Ways To Make Your Remote Employees Loathe You,” looked like this:

1. 3 surefire ways to make your remote employees loathe you. 
2. .@Forbes says “telecommuting is the future of work.” But what does that mean for teams working w/ remote employees? 
3. What communication tools does your team use? @Slack is our go-to tool for communicating with remote employees.
4. Remote workers can be 20% more productive than in-office employees – so make sure you manage them effectively. 

Having a variety of copy has multiple benefits. Our social accounts don’t look repetitive. Our promotions appeal to a larger variety of followers. And we can promote one blog post more often.

Writing this copy takes me about five minutes in total. I draft it as soon as I’ve edited and scheduled my blog post, so the content is fresh in my mind.

4) Schedule in bulk.

Once I’ve written my copy, I schedule social promotion through the next six months.

Yes, through the next six months.

Scheduling multiple promotions for one blog post — with multiple copy variations — is guaranteed to boost its social reach. In fact, CoSchedule shared how repeated social promotionof one blog post doubled their social referrals to that article.

For Twitter, I rotate all four drafts through:

• Two tweets today
• One tweet tomorrow
• One tweet next week
• One tweet per month for six months

For Facebook and LinkedIn, I choose two drafts to publish:

• One post each today
• One post each on the next “off day.”

(An “off day” is any day we’re not publishing a blog post: weekends, holidays, and certain days of each week.)

Memory on social is short, but a well-written blog post deserves longevity. While this approach helps me save time and ensure my content has a longer shelf life, it’s important that you don’t use this as an excuse to neglect your social accounts for six months. Even though you’ve scheduled out posts in advance, you should continue to review their performance, and make adjustments to you schedule based on they engagement they’re receiving.

It’s also a good idea to pepper in timely, relevant posts as they surface to accompany your scheduled content. While your content might be really useful, sharing fresh content from other respected sources will help bring a new level of value to your social media feed and help you build and strengthen your relationship with other blogs and publications.

5) Review and repost top posts.

As a content marketing manager, I’m always reviewing what works on social and what doesn’t. And if one post is particularly effective… why not repeat it?

Reposting top-performing posts takes less than a minute. And the repost regularly matches or exceeds the success of the first post. I check into Hubspot’s Social Publishing tool often to review recent social posts’ clicks and interactions. Once I find a top-performing post, I “clone” it to create a new, identical post to reschedule.

Alternatively, you can review top performers in Twitter analytics and Facebook insights. Export recent posts and sort accordingly, looking for posts that hit your social KPIs. Then, copy/paste the text into your social scheduler.

Disclaimer: this works best in moderation. As a one-man team, I rely on reposting when I’m in a crunch: sick days, holidays, or exceedingly busy days.

6) Organize and monitor your Twitter followers.

Segmenting your social media following makes it a lot easier to monitor and identify opportunities to engage with your audience. I’ve organized my company’s Twitter followers into the following six Twitter lists:

• Influencers
• Justworks customers
• Justworks team members
• Journalists
• Competitors
• Justwomen

While sorting through our followers took a lot of time, it was a one-time commitment. Now, I add each new follower to a list as they come in (or rely on IFTTT). Most of our lists are private; the benefit is primarily to organize my social listening.

Thanks to this approach, I don’t have to scour my newsfeed to engage with our community or resurface recent newsletters for relevant articles to share. These lists help me congratulate customers on successes, reshare pertinent articles, and engage with influencers.

Are you running a content team of one? What are your best tips for managing social media? Share them in the comments section below.

This post originally appeared on Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.

The marketing and advertising industry is obsessed with shiny objects — the shinier the better. Our attention is focused on hiring employees who understand the latest platform, process, tool, or software. We compete for talented superstars with startups, technology, design, product companies, and more.

But the landscape of talent has dramatically shifted. The truth is — you can’t buy all the talent you need any longer. Competition is fierce for the savviest of contributors, and there simply is not enough talent to go around. So what do you do?

Innovative companies are now actively developing the skillsets they need. But beyond this, many leaders have discovered that behavior and mindset development are essential because how employees act — behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values, and readiness — makes all the difference.

The 7 Mindsets to Develop in Top Talent

Below are the top mindsets for you to consider training for with input from a few industry leaders:

1) Human-centered: attention to needs, wants, and limitations of end-users of a product, service, or process.

As the landscape shifts to the consumer brand co-construction, the employee who understands behaviors, needs, wants, and actions of a diverse group of consumers ­­wins.

“After 20 years of designing experiences I believe that success in the field comes down to two core tenets: 1) Design things for people, 2) Those people are not you. The first tenet, designing for people, is an important craft with best practices and established methods that will generally lead toward viable solutions for customers. However, it takes humility and strength to step outside of yourself to truly recognize and embrace the specific goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people that you are designing for. It forces teams to approach the craft in a more holistic manner. It makes your team more curious, your insights sharper, and your solution more relevant. This often means the difference between good work and great work.”

– Tim Allen | President, North America Wolff Olins

2) Adaptable: able to readily adjust oneself to different conditions.

Change is omnipresent. Employees who are able to flex, adjust, and experiment survive and thrive. The more adaptable the individual contributor, the better.

I always talk to digital veterans — people who’ve built lots of things, lived through all the design and tech trends (remember ‘write once, run anywhere?’ remember several waves of it?) — and everyone agrees that there are no silver bullets and that most things which are true today will change in 18 months. Your products aren’t just in perpetual beta, so is your skillset, mindset, and toolkit.

– Kip Voytek | CEO, Rumblefox

3) Curious: strong desire to know or learn something.

An employee who seeks out new experiences, absorbs, transforms, remixes, and challenges herself to learn is the person to retain.

Curiosity is critical to creative thought because most creative thinking in any field begins with interrogating a situation to understand if you have defined the problem properly. In marketing communications, this often begins with a category question: How do people go about searching for a new mobile phone? What triggers the need in the first place? Who or what influences selection? What are the barriers to purchase? Once we have defined the problem, we can search for the right solution. And that inspires a new set of questions. You have to be curious to create. You have to be hungry for information and driven to find answers.

– Bruce Henderson | Chief Creative Officer, Jack Morton Worldwide (starting 2016)

4) Receptive: willing to consider or accept new suggestions and ideas.

The receptive mind leaves ego at the door and remains open to the full spectrum of opportunity finding and problem-solving. Individuals who are receptive to new ways of working, iteration, and experimentation are often the most innovative contributors.

An increasingly important quality we seek to understand when evaluating a new team member is the ability of the individual to receive and synthesize ideas that challenge their existing biases. The individual who has mastery over their biases and who is receptive to new ideas will see around corners for us.

– Toby Krout | Executive Director, Boomtown Accelerator

5) Discriminating: differentiating, analytical, and mindful.

A discriminating mindset is an asset. These employees are able to focus on deeper dimensions of work such as the aesthetic, cognitive, and connectedness. In a world vying for our attention, directed focus is essential for all roles.

Discriminating is a mindset developed over a lifetime of comparisons — scrutiny of what humans produce such as things, events, institutions, and personalities. It is a critical thinking skill and requires the courage to not always be popular. Rudimentary command of judgment, analysis, synthesis, and communication are required. Not included is the use of ‘I like it’ or ‘I have the power, so I know best!’  — two common examples from corporate culture. Discrimination also helps the critical thinker to combine domain skills, theoretical knowledge, and earned business smarts on a problem in an efficient, collaborative, and hopefully meaningful or novel way.

– Lori Kent, Ed.D. | Learning Experience Director, smith & beta

6) Empathetic: the psychological identification of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of others.

Humans are connected: We work in teams. The ability to empathize helps us understand a broader spectrum of experience and contribution. Having empathy leads us down the path of great design, ideas that resonate, and experiences that matter.

As we create more ideas that are digital at heart and powered by new technology, we need a wider range of skills embedded in our agency teams. This often means generalists and specialists who’ve never have worked together before with wildly different backgrounds must find instantaneous chemistry. This can either be a car crash or a wonderful orchestra-like production depending on the level of empathy everyone brings to the table.

– Adam Tucker | President Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, New York

7) Geeky: a digital-technology expert or enthusiast.

We’ve shifted from a mechanical age to a more elusive yet connected digital age that often centers on data, code, and making. “Geek” was a diminutive label until Silicon Valley made us aware of its importance within highly competitive fields. Geeks dig in, explore, tinker, solder, build, and experiment ­– we should go to battle to hire more of them.

It’s no longer just about building the thing right — process, aesthetics, distribution, etc. It’s about building the right thing. This requires a willingness to replace the Madison-Avenue-Don-Draper mindset with the Silicon Valley hypothesize-test-iterate-optimize approach.

– Leslie Bradshaw | Managing Director Made By Many New York

If you want to evolve your company’s capabilities, design an education program to develop these employee mindsets and watch what happens with collaboration, ideas, and innovation. Employees want to stretch and contribute beyond just the obvious skillsets. Give them a chance with mindsets curriculum that matters.

This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

Have you ever had a day where you just feel like you haven’t made any progress?

Everyone goes through these peaks and valleys. But if you’re not careful, that feeling will carry over into the next day … and the next day … and the next … until you decide to make a change.
You have to do something to make that feeling go away. But what?

According to Richard E. Cytowic, accomplishment is the key to self-esteem. Regardless of what it is you accomplish — no matter how large or small the task — the positive feeling you get from crossing a task off your to-do list adds up throughout the course of the day.

So with this in mind, I have some simple advice for you: Take the two minutes and make your bed — every morning. Before you brush your teeth, or make your coffee, or whatever it is you do when your alarm clock starts buzzing, just make your bed.

Believe it or not, this incredibly simple and mundane task can set you up for a productive and successful day. Here’s why.

How Making Your Bed Influences Your Productivity

1) Achieving one small task leads to accomplishing larger goals.

In a speech to graduates of the University of Texas, Navy Seal William H. McCraven told the crowd, “If you want to change the world, start by making your bed. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task will have turned into many tasks completed.”

Accomplishing several small things not only adds up over time, but performing a simple task can give us a feeling of satisfaction. In fact, each time we complete a task, we get a rush of dopamine sent through our bodies, rewarding us for the effort. And because we’re all dopamine junkies by nature, completing one simple action sets us on the course to get another hit by accomplishing even more.

2) Being organized leads to greater productivity.

Reaching max productivity comes down to being in control of and efficient with your time. Although it’s a small thing, having your bed, desk, or room organized actually leads to feeling like you have more control, thus making you more productive.

Dana Gionta references studies in occupational health that say the more control you think you have, the less stressed you are, and the more energy you have to complete essential tasks. So by staying organized, you’re giving yourself control and the extra energy necessary to get more work done. 

Unfortunately, as we all know, developing a habit out of thin air takes time and a whole lot of work. If you need help, here’s how to start making your bed every morning, courtesy of Jerry Seinfeld.

After reviewing the research, it’s clear that achieving a small task — even a simple one like making your bed — can set you up for success. The question now becomes: Are you going to take advantage of this productivity trick?

Surprisingly, most people aren’t. In a recent survey, 59% of people said they don’t make their bed, while 27% said they did. The study went on to conclude that the 27% of bed makers are actually happier and more successful than their counterparts. Pretty cool, huh?