Social Media Resources for Business: Twitter, Mobile, and Restaurants

This week on Sprout Social Insights we tackled guides for Facebook, Twitter, and small business to help you better reach your customers with the social media tools that make a difference.

Check out our articles below to find out more about each one and how they can help you with your social media goals.

And check in every day to Sprout Social Insights for more how to guides and breaking social media news.

How to Hire a Designer to Make an Infographic for Your Company

If there are two things in the digital marketing space that have really exploded of late, they’re the increasing proliferation of data like Facebook metrics and visuals (think Pinterest and Instagram). Savvy individuals and businesses have discovered an effective way to combine the power of this data with the visual appeal of graphics into the hybrid medium of infographics.

In order to leverage this growing trend, think about topics related to your business that would make for good infographics. You could go the DIY route and create an infographic yourself, but beware: crafting an effective infographic is more than just creating an image in Photoshop and tacking a few random statistics on it. The layout, copy, data, size, shape, and even the colors can affect how the graphic is perceived by your target audience.

How Sprout Social Helps Find the Best Time to Publish Twitter Updates

The articles here at Sprout Insights keep you informed about ways to improve your social media presence. But beyond this publication, Sprout Social has tools that help you track and control that presence.

While it certainly might seem like the Twitter world never sleeps, it’s important to know your audience and the best times to reach them when developing your social strategy. We’ve all been up at 4 AM and watched a commercial about sleeping remedies, or been bombarded by toy advertisements just as schools let out.

This kind of targeted marketing is just as relevant on Twitter, as user activity and engagement changes throughout the day. Luckily, Sprout Social takes some of the guesswork out of this process with tools to help you schedule your content and suggest the best times to post your tweets.

If you want to try it out, start a free trial. In the meantime, here’s how it works. 

3 Reasons to Use Twitter on a Mobile Device

It’s Twitter Tip Tuesday — every Tuesday we’ll focus on one Twitter Tip and show you how to integrate it into your social media strategy. This week we provide three reasons why it’s a good idea to use Twitter (at least occasionally) from a mobile device.

Do you have a smartphone? How about a tablet? If you do, you’re one of the growing number of people accessing the web on devices other than a desktop computer.Applications for getting things done from your mobile device are also growing in number (and utility) and Twitter is no exception. Here’s three compelling reasons why you should give Twitter a try from a mobile device.

3 Brands Knocking it Out of the Park with Branded Content

Branded content is one of the new trends in the media world, and it’s a great symbiotic relationship for brands to consider. Partnering with a blog for sponsored posts opens up creative new ways for a business to get on potential customers’ radars.

Like any other type of marketing, launching a branded content initiative requires some planning and forethought. Not only is the message of your sponsored post important, but so is where you share it. You’ll need to think about what blogs are the best matches for your company, in terms of industry, readership, and voice.

We’ve covered why this type of marketing material is successful and how your company can assemble a strong team of branded content bloggers. Now we have some examples of brands that have put all the pieces together and created killer strategies for the new media marketing form. Each company has taken a different approach to executing branded content on blogs, which shows just how unique and clever a business can be in leveraging the trend. 

4 Creative Restaurant Twitter Accounts

The rapidly growing culture of food lovers gives restaurants the chance to get imaginative with their social media strategies. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like have opened up many new avenues for chefs and cooks to get in touch with fans, build customer bases, and develop brand identities.

Of all the top social media networks, Twitter has the least focus on visuals, which is so often the bread and butter of restaurant promotion. With the 140-character limit and the emphasis on real-time interactions, Twitter poses an unusual challenge for restaurants. These four restaurants have gone beyond sharing mouth-watering photos of their dishes and taken unique angles on how to promote and connect on Twitter. 

Spotlight on Startups: Advanced Mobile Care Tweaks Your Mobile Phone

At Sprout Insights, we comb the web to bring you the most up-to-date and actionable resources on how to use social media to grow your business.

To that end, we’re pleased to present the Sprout Insights series Spotlight on Startups. We’ll find the most innovative, useful startup companies out there, get the inside track on what they’re doing, and tell you how you can leverage their products and services for your own business.

This week we’re pleased to cast the spotlight on Advanced Mobile Care — a smartphone optimization and security app from system utility software vendor, IObit — based in San Francisco, CA.

How to Use Instagram to Make a Virtual Menu for Your Restaurant

New York City restaurant Comodo made a splash in October by launching a virtual menu composed of customers’ Instagram photos. The idea of this virtual menu combines the spirit of crowdsourcing with the power of great visual content. It was a clever way to take advantage of how many people enjoy documenting their meals in order to build good buzz for the company on social media.

The good news is that it’s an idea that other restaurants (and other businesses) can emulate too. Let’s take a look at some of the specific tactics Comodo used and see how you can apply these to your own Instagram marketing campaign. 

November in Review: 13 Facebook Stories That Matter to Business

It’s Facebook Friday — each week we’ll offer one tip for leveraging Facebook to increase customer awareness of and engagement with your brand or business.

November was a busy month at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, CA; there were a few game-changing announcements from the social network that will affect the way you do business. We decided to round up some of the most critical developments for you to review as we move into the heart of the holiday shopping season.

And since Facebook is such an important tool for the readers of Sprout Insights (and for Sprout Social‘s customers), we’ve also produced several helpful resources, op-eds, how-tos, and other articles about the world’s biggest social media platform. 

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