Author: Gurpreet Kaur

Gurpreet Kaur is the CEO and Founder of Social Cubicle, a social media marketing company built on creativity, strategy, and community connection. With strong hands-on experience in social media marketing, she believes writing is one of the most powerful ways to share ideas, inspire audiences, and drive meaningful engagement. Through her blogs, Gurpreet decodes the latest trends, platform shifts, and industry changes to help brands and marketers stay ahead. Passionate, bold, and highly creative, she blends insight with storytelling to make complex digital strategies easy to understand and apply.

How to Run an Easy Social Media Audit

Everybody’s life today involves social media in ways that were unimaginable 10 years ago. Initially, what started as networking tools, has evolved into an amalgam of multiple services on one platform. Businesses discovered this opportunity and started creating multiple Social Media strategy to generate brand awareness and online presence. But, if you want to start you have to start right. Therefore, running a Social Media Audit is important. Doesn’t matter if you are small or big, in the city or remote location, brick & mortar or online service, today every brand needs to have a social media presence. No matter whether you are starting a business or you have been in the Social media game for a long time you need to run a social media audit. Running a free social media audit is something you can do on your site. It is a way of internally checking out whether your Social Media strategy(if you have one) is working or not. If you are just starting a business and do not know how to strategize and which Social media platforms to prioritize. This analysis will give you an idea of where to begin and which pitfalls to avoid. If this hasn’t answered your question of why you should do a Social Media Audit, let’s give you some more reasons to nudge you in the right direction Why run a Social media Audit? To get clarity about your online presence Social media nowadays can be overwhelming for businesses. To be frank, we have several Social media platforms where you should have a brand presence. There are some traditional ones (like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter) and some up-and-coming ones(tik tok, Byte, etc.). Every social media platform doesn’t need your presence. So, how can you decide which Social media platform to be on? For that, you should know your audience. Create “User Personas” for your brand. Know the demographics of your audience. If you are a B2B brand, then LinkedIn should be your focused platform rather than Instagram. Know the behavior and interests of your audience. What are your brand values? Everything related to your brand will give you hints about where you should set up space so that your target audience reaches you. Build Content around your social media marketing strategy Doing Social Media Audit also helps you to segregate which content is generating more response and which is not that interactive for the audience. As a brand owner or a marketing specialist, you always try to create engaging content, hoping that it will generate interactions or fulfill your target. However, to be honest, not everything works. Doing a Social Media audit will always help you weed out the content ideas and Social Media strategy that is not working. You can stick to the ones that are working and giving you results. Creating similar content to the one that’s working can further engage the audience and help you achieve your set targets. Enhance your social media plan Based on the Social Media Audit you run you can draw out your Social Media strategy for the future. These audits will make your social media campaigns seamless and effective. (You can see our all-inclusive guide on how to create Social media strategies here.) Which in turn means that you save money and generate somewhat organic traffic. Finally, doing these audits can also help you plan your paid campaigns as you can take ideas that are working organically and take them to the next level. Now that we have understood why it is necessary to run social media audits, let us understand how we can run them? Summarization of doing Social media Audits across various platforms Make a list: Make a list of all the social media platforms you are on right now. You might have an idea of the active ones which you are using, however, there might be some inactive handles that you stopped using in the past. Dig out those handles and make an all-inclusive list. Here you have to again do the analysis where you have to maintain your presence and where you have to unfortunately stop focusing. If you are putting in efforts where it is not necessary, you will likely burn out time and resources without yielding any results. Assess all Social media handles: Once you make a list of all the Social media handles open each one of them and see if they resonate with your brand values. Set out a goal for that Social media outlet and understand what is the use of that particular platform. What is the ultimate purpose that will help your business? It could be anything, building a community, deriving traffic, engaging userbase, or providing help and customer support. Make sure the bio and description that you have of your brand are crisp and show what you stand out for. The profile and cover picture you have used are in trend and clearly show your brand information and depict which service you are providing. Try to use a username almost the same as your brand name. If the desired name is not available do not use a completely different name. Pick a username added with your service industry, and location and added words such as official. Be as creative as you can but be relevant. Mention all Social media channels and website addresses in your bio. Use all the free features and organize the content so that it is easy for users to locate your services on social media. For eg. You can segregate videos on YouTube into playlists according to the service that you are providing. Similarly, highlights on Instagram can help you save your stories. Use all the available services. Keep track of new updates, policy changes, and community standards and use them to your advantage. Keep track of Analytics and Insights Every Social media handles have built-in analysis tools and dashboards for businesses. You can use these tools to your utmost advantage. You can look out… Continue reading How to Run an Easy Social Media Audit

How To Sell on Facebook Marketplace: A New 2023 Growth Channel

In the last decade, the growth of Facebook & Facebook Marketplace has been magnanimous. Facebook’s userbase now comprises 2.936 billion active monthly users worldwide. This userbase will continue to grow on the same trajectory. Initially, in 2015 Facebook came up with the idea of buying and selling groups. The idea was a huge hit, however, it had a few drawbacks such as limited control over the products which were bought or sold. Facebook evolved “buying & selling groups” and revamped the idea and came up with the “Facebook marketplace.” The idea was to facilitate and create a free market for its users. Facebook already has the userbase and community. Since 2016, the Facebook marketplace has grown and now has more than 1 billion users who are either buying or selling on it. Some of the key statistics* to consider before using Facebook Marketplace which will change your mind and sway you towards using Facebook Marketplace in 2022: Facebook is used by over 78 percent of the USA citizens 30 percent of the users admitted that they would purchase via Facebook 1 in 4 businesses has now started selling through Facebook There has been a 48 percent increase in Facebook revenue, which is around 26 billion dollars. In total market share, Facebook has a userbase of 14%, whereas popular site like Craigslist owns merely 6 percent. *These statistics have been taken from renolon & Hootsuite to create a better understanding of how significant the Facebook marketplace is. If these statistics have increased your curiosity to sell on Facebook Marketplace and how the changing dynamics can help your business grow. Let’s talk about: Benefits of selling on Facebook Marketplace 1. Facebook marketplace has not cost of listing One of the most important factors why businesses are choosing Facebook Marketplace to sell their products is because of no listing cost. Brands like Amazon and Craigslist charge a decent amount from sellers to put their products listing. However, Facebook doesn’t charge any fees from the sellers. This makes it so much easier for the sellers as well as buyers to engage. 2. One-on-one conversations Generally, most buyers choose Facebook Marketplace because they can get directly in touch with sellers using Facebook’s messaging tool “messenger”. If the buyer has any questions related to the product or if they want to negotiate the price. The buyer just has to simply drop a message and the seller can respond quickly and they can go through with the process. Engagement is an important part of growing business on Marketplace and we will discuss this further along. 3. Facebook Marketplace’s Algorithm engages users: Facebook’s Algorithm engages users so that they can become engaged prospects. Let’s suppose that you are looking for a car to buy within your location. The Algorithm based on your recent searches and the products that you have seen will start filling up your marketplace with similar suggestions. This engages the user and piques their interest. This makes it important to optimize your Ads which we will talk about later. 4. Creating Brand Awareness You can create brand awareness by using Facebook Marketplace to sell your product. As there is no listing cost you can list as many products under the correct category. The products will start getting visible to potential buyers. More products with the right description and headline along with your Brand logo and details can help create a Brand image within the user’s mind. However, make sure you have a good Facebook presence so that if anyone visits your Facebook page they can know more about you. See our guide on 10 Benefits of having a Facebook business page 5. Use your payment gateway Facebook Marketplace currently doesn’t have any in-built payment gateway. This means you can use your payment gateway of choice to complete the sale. You can use any other methods such as Bank details, cheques, or even cash however using secure Payment gateways should be preferred. 6. Leverage Facebook Ads on the Facebook Marketplace Lately, the buyers have devised a new strategy that helps them to get more conversions from Facebook Marketplace. The concept behind this is that every buyer will come to the Marketplace with an “intent of purchase”. This makes it so much easier for the brands to convert potential buyers into customers. With the right targeting methods and good Ad copy, you can generate a huge business from Facebook Ads on Marketplace. 7. Wide variety of products you can sell on Facebook Marketplace One of the major benefits you now have is that they have increased the categories which you can place your product under. Specifically in the US and Canada, you can now even sell Vehicles and property. This widens the horizon of Facebook Marketplace and makes it even more useful. You can also post Job listings to sell on Facebook Marketplace. 8. Automated product listing and chat tools You can automate the product listing on the Facebook marketplace if you are using the following tools only: Shopify CommerceHub Quipt ChannelAdvisor ShipStation BigCommerce Zentail However, it is possible that the products which are performing better on Shopify might not perform better on Facebook Marketplace. Always keep testing new products before posting on Marketplace and keep optimizing to get the best results. **Let us see some more statistics below which will help us understand why the Marketplace is such a unique concept and how it is helping businesses: **above-used image is fetched from Thrive my way site to convey how businesses are using the Facebook marketplace. Now, as you might have understood the benefits and reasons why you should choose Facebook Marketplace to sell now, let us see: Step by step on how you can create a listing on Facebook Marketplace: Setting up a listing on Marketplace will not take more than 10 minutes of your time. This is one of the benefits to sell on Facebook Marketplace. However, other sites like eBay and Craigslist will take more time to set up a listing, On Facebook… Continue reading How To Sell on Facebook Marketplace: A New 2023 Growth Channel

10 Popular Social Media Platforms To Grow Your Brand

It’s pretty helpful to know about the most famous social media platforms. Whether you are a social media marketing company or a business owner it’ll be valuable to know about the popular social media platforms to grasp advantages over them. Once you know which platform to go with, you can maximise your brand’s online presence. It is not only about the popularity of the social media platform, but also about your business type and target audience. Most businessmen and social media marketers have this misconception that social media marketing has nothing to do with the types of business. However, it is crucial to see if the social platform fits your brand image and whether your target audience uses that. This guide is to help you to decide which famous social media platforms you should go with. Facebook YouTube Instagram Snapchat Twitter Linkedin Pinterest TikTok Reddit Whatsapp 1. Facebook Facebook has nearly 2.5 billion active users, and with this number, you can guess the popularity of this platform. Considering the numbers, Facebook is the largest social media platform having nearly more than 65 million business pages. It means a lot of business owners are actively using Facebook for the growth of their business. Facebook You can post any form of content like videos, images, content, and stories because everything works on Facebook. However, your content in any form should be appealing, eye-catchy, and meaningful. But be sure to follow the strategy that works for facebook marketing. 2. YouTube YouTube is the most widely used search engine in the world. YouTube is a video-sharing platform where you can share unique and engaging videos such as motivational, instructional, tutorials, etc. It has over 1.9 billion active users. To start with YouTube, you need to create a channel either by your name or your brand’s name and you should know the keys for effective youtube advertising. You can then upload many videos targeting your audience, and it is always important to analyse your target audience first. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so, to boost growth it is advisable to focus on YouTube SEO. 3. Instagram Instagram is the home of bloggers, content creators, influencers, small and big businesses, and many more. Well, with this, Instagram has crossed one billion monthly users, pretty popular. You can share anything on Instagram like videos, short reels, stories, and IGTV videos. If you own a business, you can create a business profile on Instagram to get regular insights. It can be helpful to determine how many visits you get and your account reach. Moreover, you can schedule your posts according to the time your target audience remains most active. Depending on your target audience and market, you can consider prioritising Instagram. 4. Snapchat Who does not know about Snapchat! This booming social media platform has around 255 million monthly users. Snapchat is massively used by the younger generation of the age group of 18 years to 25 years. It is one of the heavily used platforms where people share snaps. You can prioritise Snapchat if your business targets young demographics under 25 years of age, Engaging content like short videos, snaps, and storytelling entertains the audience the most. So, follow the proven ways for snapchat marketing if you think of using Snapchat to reach a younger audience. 5. Twitter Twitter is also a famous social media platform, and it has nearly 300 million per month active users. Twitter is more popular when it comes to news and information sharing. It is a pretty famous social media platform for tech-savvy people. Twitter is a platform for a wide variety of businesses. It is different from the other social media platforms, as it accentuates news, entertainment, and real-time information. So, before choosing Twitter as your social media marketing platform, see if your audience actively uses Twitter. You can also take the help of twitter marketing experts for the same. 6. LinkedIn It is not only used to post jobs and search for them, yes, you heard it right!. LinkedIn has gained a lot of popularity other than being a resume and job hunt site. Linkedin is used for personal branding, and today businesses of all types are using LinkedIn to share information about their brands and their uniqueness. Well, LinkedIn is a famous platform to attract right-minded talents and skilled humans. Thus, businesses leave no chance of utilising it to attract the gems. According to the Microsoft reports, the revenue of LinkedIn increased nearly 21%. LinkedIn is a business-focused social media platform, where you can send personalised ads to different inboxes, you can boost your content and even run ads on LinkedIn with proper strategy. 7. Pinterest Pinterest can give you out-of-the-box ideas that can be a saviour. Anyways, Pinterest is a famous social bookmarking site where you can save a lot of ideas related to any field. Pinterest successfully made it to the top 10 famous social media platforms. In the year 2020, Pinterest saw tremendous growth, and now it has around 320 million active users per month. You can share images and save the ones that you like. Pinterest can be an apt platform for brands who want to share information about their brand or creative content. Pinterest is an important platform as it helps to get links, conversions and much more. It is the most friendly social media environment, and different brands can easily earn organic traffic if the content is engaging and eye-catchy. 8. Reddit Reddit is a social media platform where no matter what, you are going to find like-minded people. This platform suggests, educates you, and is fun at the same time. Reddit is an old social media platform, more like a social discussion forum where you can upload images and write answers to different questions. It is an informational platform used to read and share information. There are dedicated forums in Reddit known as subreddits, and currently, Reddit has nearly 2.2 million dedicated forums. Furthermore, as per business… Continue reading 10 Popular Social Media Platforms To Grow Your Brand

Surprisingly Shrewd LinkedIn Marketing Strategy For All Businesses

Founded in 2002, LinkedIn is a Mecca for professionals and businesses. Not only does it provides an opportunity for working professionals to seek jobs and opportunities, but also it is widely used among businesses to find prospective business opportunities. Thus LinkedIn is much more than a Social Networking tool. Hence, deriving a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy becomes paramount. Whether you are a small business or a large conglomerate, if you are a B2B organization, LinkedIn is the first place that you choose to put the word out. In this piece, we will explore all the LinkedIn marketing ideas and strategies for businesses. So, what are the aspects that make LinkedIn such a unique branding tool? We have found some mind-boggling stats related to LinkedIn that will set you on your ways to use LinkedIn for business: According to Kinsta LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter. Surprisingly, according to Foundationinc LinkedIn consistently sees a 28% lower cost per lead than Google AdWords Also, according to the same source, LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites & blogs. Lastly, 97% of B2B marketers utilize it as their content marketing strategy. These statistics are a great indication of what the business marketing trends are. We have to be on the same trajectory and contemplate LinkedIn marketing strategy accordingly. Source Fundamentals of LinkedIn marketing LinkedIn can be overwhelming sometimes. The common conception is that you always see your peers succeeding or outgrowing you on LinkedIn. Well, that’s not true. People who are good at selling themselves, their ideas, or their business models are the ones who have a good presence on LinkedIn. So, as a professional or business, you have to learn how to optimize your profile/page. So, the first part of your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy should be creating a fully optimize Linkedin business page. We have given some steps here to set up a Fully optimized LinkedIn marketing page: Start with a high-quality profile picture and cover photo. If you are using LinkedIn for business, use the logo of the company. On the cover, you can use a pic, showcase your work or choose a message describing the voice of your brand. Include every detail related to your company. From website, to address to the number of employees. Everything related to your company should be mentioned clearly on LinkedIn. Everything should resonate with your brand voice. These little details make a huge difference. According to LinkedIn, companies with a complete profile get 30% more views than competitors. So make sure to add all these points to your LinkedIn Branding strategy. Claim the custom URL so that you can share your organization’s LinkedIn Page link conveniently and it is easy for the prospects to find you. Also, it is easy on the eye. Now, let’s come to the juicy part. One of the most important aspects of a clear LinkedIn Marketing Strategy is to: SEO optimize your LinkedIn Page Sounds weird but it’s true and works wonders. So, how you can implement SEO on your LinkedIn Page? Use Keywords in Description and Specialities. Do duly research beforehand. You must have already ideas related to service in your mind. Use those keywords accordingly. Create links to your pages. Well, there are popular SEO techniques that work quite well on LinkedIn. Build backlinks to your company’s professional page. Use the LinkedIn page link outside of the platform(in email signatures). Pass the guidelines for the employees to connect their profile with the job designation to the company page. Networking is Key to a good LinkedIn Marketing Strategy On LinkedIn, the right networking coupled with the right interactions gives you extraordinary results. Choose to connect with the people and businesses who are in your niche to keep you up to date. Get in touch with people who can add value to your business or your work. Start interacting with them. As LinkedIn is a space for professionals, thus queries related to work life, profession, or an ideal workspace can intrigue your followers. Post something of value that they cannot find elsewhere and which gives your audience something different. Everything mentioned above should be an important part of your LinkedIn content strategy Credibility and Brand Value building are Important Building Credibility or building a brand value is important on LinkedIn. Joining new groups and posting your company’s achievements and milestones can help your brand grow. Whether you are throwing an office event or something you have done for your employees showcase it. All your initiatives among the rest should be updated on your company’s profile. Ask your employees to connect to you and increase the interaction. Now as we have covered the basics of LinkedIn for every business. We decided that we should dive more deeply into and help you figure out the use of LinkedIn for different kinds of Businesses. So let’s start with: LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses This one is an intriguing topic as small businesses rely a lot on LinkedIn to grow. So we have shortlisted certain points for small businesses on what they can do to grow on LinkedIn. You can start by: Source Do a comprehensive Competitor’s research This one is important. As all businesses do, take a sneak peek into all your businesses. Try to audit their marketing strategy and their growth. See what content is working for them and how you can adapt to your style. You can use social media management tools to understand your competitors or you can do social media audits on your own. Moving along Constantly Engage with new People You have to do this task manually. Bit tedious? Yes, but worth it. You can send up to 50 connection requests per day. Your message that you send as a business shouldn’t be too formal or too casual. It should have a mix of just the right words. You can add a link to a landing page to sign up. However, there… Continue reading Surprisingly Shrewd LinkedIn Marketing Strategy For All Businesses

How to use Pinterest for Business: Beginner’s Guide for Marketers

Pinterest has now been gaining immense popularity amongst content creators and designers. But Pinterest for business has been gaining a huge amount of popularity because of its unique features. Also, Pinterest’s ability to group and showcase ideas is a contributing factor. A person can find a “board” of their interest and can get hundreds of ideas in a matter of minutes. Brands have taken a notice of this and start using Pinterest to reach a wider set of audiences. In this blog, we will cover some basics of Pinterest and some of the more advanced things related to Pinterest which is causing a major disruption. Pinterest has become a go-to for businesses because of the charm of the visuals. Ideas that can be. Pinterest is the creative hub with an array of ideas “pinned” for viewers. If you still have hesitation as to why you want to use Pinterest for business, let’s give you some reasons: What is the purpose of Pinterest? Pinterest is a Visual Search Engine. As simple as that. Some dynamics are similar to other Social Media apps. However, you can use Pinterest for almost any creative activity. You get multiple creative ideas on Business. From clothing to recipes, and art everything is covered on Pinterest. You can pin your interests on your “boards”. Just like we said it is a “graphical Search Engine.” Now, as you have got a fair idea about the purpose of Pinterest, let’s understand: Why use Pinterest for business? Let’s start with some juicy stats which will help you understand just how large the potential for businesses on Pinterest: Pinterest ads can help marketers reach a potential audience of 225.7 million people. The largest age demographic on Pinterest is those aged 50 to 65, comprising 38 percent of all users. In 80% of cases, men who use Pinterest report finding “something unexpected that surprises and delights them.” On Pinterest, 97% of all top searches are unbranded. Source All these stats showcase that Pinterest is a growing brand and has an untapped potential that is yet to be explored by businesses. However, the early bird gets the worm and we want you to successfully tap the potential within Pinterest. As you have understood that you can use Pinterest as a business tool, let’s understand how to get started: Image Source What is a Pinterest business account and how to create it? As it is with other Social Media Platforms, business accounts have to be registered or signed up separately. A business account comes with a host of other benefits such as: Ad-running capabilities Monitoring Analytics & Insights Set up Shop button on Pins Let’s understand the steps how to create Pinterest Business Account: There are two ways to create a business account on Pinterest. So, if you have an existing account on Pinterest you can change that to a business account or you can sign up as a new business account. Change existing account as a business account: To convert an existing social media account to a business account follow these steps: Log in to your “existing account” and open the “settings” by clicking on the “menu” on the top right-hand side of your screen. Once Settings is open, select “Account Settings” on the left-hand side of your screen Scroll down to the “Account Changes” and click on the “Convert Account” button. Then choose the option of “Convert to Business” Once you click this you will be asked the information related to your business. You can also link your account to any other business account and click on “Add an account” after going to the “Settings” and then “Account settings”. Create a new Business Account To create a new business account you have to simply visit the Sign-up as business page of Pinterest. Enter your professional Email address. Set up your password and enter your age. Make sure that the email address you are adding is unique and official. Then it will ask you to describe your business from the description. Furthermore, add the link to your website. This is important as you can display this link to your site with different posts and pins. Now you are ready to run a Business account on Pinterest with all the marketing tools that are available on Pinterest. How to use Pinterest to promote business? Pinterest is a great medium to get the word out. Recently a lot of brands have started promoting content on Pinterest. There are multiple ways to promote your business on Pinterest. However, we will discuss a few of them to build a much greater understanding So let’s start with: Get your basics straightened out Like every other Social Media handle, it is necessary on Pinterest to have a great Social Media presence. That starts from your Profile logo, cover picture, Description, and “feature board”. A feature board is something unique to Pinterest. It showcases an amalgam of all your ideas. This is important as visitors will come to your page and see the feature board and decide whether you are worth keeping an eye on or not. Build Engagement to grow business on Pinterest: Group boards are a great way to get in touch with the relevant audience on Pinterest. You can also create a group board to attract the relevant audience and also, hold control over the board as well. Usual sharing of the content, and liking competitors’ pins can help tremendously to attract a relevant audience to your profile. Watch out for trends prediction by Pinterest. You can hear what’s going to work on the platform straight from the horses mouth. Try to build engaging content around it. Image Source Be as creative as possible We are not going to lie. Pinterest is a creative space. People who do follow Pinterest are passionate about one thing or the other. So as a business, If you are unable to provide engaging or unique content on Pinterest then chances are slim for your business to do well. On the… Continue reading How to use Pinterest for Business: Beginner’s Guide for Marketers

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