#SproutChat Recap: Advancing Your Career in Social Media

How to Open Your Online Store with WooCommerce + AWeber

Let’s face it: online shoppers have lots of buying options, and, with all of the technology that exists today, their expectations are higher than ever.

If your ecommerce site doesn’t meet their expectations, it could mean the difference between a sale and fail. In fact, 43 percent of consumers visit a competitor’s site after a negative mobile experience, and 51 percent of online shoppers say site slowness is the top reason they abandon a purchase.

To grab shoppers’ attention in a crowded online marketplace, you need a feature-filled, lightning-fast, mobile-optimized and beautiful online store.

But building and maintaining an awesome online store can be difficult, especially when you have a limited budget.

The solution to your ecommerce frustrations: WooCommerce

If you lack the resources or time to create a winning ecommerce store, WooCommerce could be the perfect tool for your business.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce store WordPress plugin. With the WooCommerce plugin and a little help from WooCommerce’s knowledge base, anyone can configure their own ecommerce site.

Just download the WooCommerce plugin, install the plugin on your WordPress site and customize your new online store.

What will you need to open your WooCommerce store?

• WordPress
• A website hosting service
• The WooCommerce plugin

If you don’t have a hosted WordPress site yet, WooCommerce partnered with Bluehost to offer you a simple package deal.

What makes WooCommerce stand out even more? The plugin is free. That’s right. The plugin is free.

With your free WooCommerce plugin, you receive all the essentials of an ecommerce store – like a payment gateway, customer geo-location for calculating shipping costs, product listings, discount and coupon features and much more!

While the WooCommerce plugin itself is entirely free, WooCommerce does charge fees to add certain advanced features (called extensions). The prices, however, are reasonable. And the features you get? Way cool.

For example, Supercrown Coffee Roasters sells weekly and monthly coffee subscriptions on their WooCommerce site.

Since the WooCommerce plugin doesn’t include a subscription payment option, Supercrown Coffee Roasters purchased WooCommerce Subscriptions, an extension that adds subscription functionality.

The extension allows Supercrown Coffee Roasters to automatically and securely collect recurring payments from customers’ credit cards or bank accounts each month or week.

An inside look at a WooCommerce store

If you’re feeling some slight skepticism at this point, I don’t blame you. It seems too good to be true, right? An inexpensive, customizable, upgradable, easy-to-set-up ecommerce store? What’s the catch?

To dispel your skepticism, here’s a WooCommerce store in action. It’s a really sweet store (sorry, pun alert).

Asheville Bee Charmer, a small-batch, artisan honey store, sells its honey and honey-related products on its WooCommerce store.

Features on their ecommerce store include organization by product categories, a search field, a cart total on the right-hand side and product listings.

After you click on a product, you’re redirected to a product page with a larger picture, a product description and product reviews.

When you scroll further down the product description page, you see related products that you make like. This encourages site visitors to view other products and potentially buy more.

On the checkout page, you can login if you’re a returning customer, which means you won’t need to retype your billing information. Time-saving features like these can make the difference between a sale and lost opportunity.

The sweetest part? Asheville Bee Charmer leverages the WooCommerce coupon feature to grow its email list.

On its homepage, it greets every visitor with a pop-up email sign up form. As an incentive, site visitors receive a 10 percent off coupon on their first purchase when they subscribe.

How to Connect AWeber + WooCommerce

Easily create an online store and build relationships with your customers when you connect your WooCommerce and AWeber accounts today.

After you’ve connected WooCommerce and AWeber, your WooCommerce customers will join the AWeber email list of your choice as soon as they purchase.

Already have an online store? How are you using email marketing to boost sales? Share your story in the comments below.

The post How to Open Your Online Store with WooCommerce + AWeber appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Why Social Recruiting Doesn’t Belong Solely to Recruiters

We’ve known it for years: Nothing is more effective than word of mouth marketing. Nielsen repeatedly drives home this message in its annual survey of audience preferences for advertising. Sharing information through personal networks is by far the best way to a get a message across and move people in meaningful ways.

Recruiters, however, have missed the memo.

In fact, while companies clamor to find the best talent through job postings, online ads and in-person networking, they often overlook their top tool for recruitment: current employees.

According to a new data report from Bambu by Sprout Social, companies that implement strict social media policies are mismanaging resources and preventing their HR teams from creating a pipeline of talent. These companies are also doing a great deal of damage to current workers in the process by making them disenfranchised in shaping their company’s culture.

Consider this: 44.5% of people say they are more likely to apply for a job if they discovered it through a friend’s social feed rather than some other medium. Meanwhile, only 9.4% of employees say they use social media to help their company with recruitment.

Where is the disconnect? And how can recruiting and talent teams bridge the gap?

To start, most employees (77.3%) don’t feel encouraged to share company news on their personal social profiles at all. More revealing, 15.6% are actually afraid to share anything about their company on social media, fearing they might make a misstep that could cost them their job.

The problem appears to be twofold:

1. Companies have failed to make social media a priority throughout their organization.
2. Companies do not empower employees to speak out on their organization’s behalf.

It’s not a lack of desire on the employee’s part either. In fact, Sprout’s data shows that 3 in 4 employees want their company to keep them more updated about what’s going on. Employees say this will not only make them more successful at their job (42%) but also more committed to the company as a whole (36%) and more likely to share information with their networks (17.8%).

With so many people hoping to be more engaged, companies that don’t empower their employees to digest and share information are effectively shooting themselves in the foot.

Recruiters’ misplaced efforts are also costing their companies money. According to a report on social recruiting by Jobvite, employee referrals have a 40% conversion rate, a tactic that most employers say makes the whole recruitment process much more efficient and cost effective.

What can be done to boost your organization’s social recruiting efforts?

First, make it easy for employees to read and share information. A central hub of curated content, powered by a formal employee advocacy platform such as Bambu by Sprout Social, will make your distribution efforts seamless and measurable.

Second, consider your employees’ perspectives. While most are interested in staying abreast of the latest news at their organization, incentivizing them to take the extra step to share that information requires you to think in terms of WIFM (what’s in it for me?). Employees need to understand and value the importance of personal branding, which today more than ever rests on deep social participation. By targeting industry-relevant content to different segments within your organization, you can start to position your people as experts in their respective fields; all they have to do is regularly read and share your company’s curated content across their social networks.

Finally, reinforce your advocacy program through ongoing education and perhaps even some old-school tactics, such as promotional posters around the office that feature testimonials from individuals about the program’s personal benefits.

The result of this ongoing investment will be a steady stream of talent, as your employees naturally share job openings alongside relevant industry information. After all, the act of socially sharing an employment opportunity should be viewed as beneficial in and of itself.

But there will be another important byproduct of this effort: Your current workforce will be more engaged. This isn’t just a warm-and-fuzzy idea either. In fact, it directly impacts the bottom line. Gallup estimates that each year US companies lose between $450 billion and $550 billion due to actively disengaged employees. Meanwhile, ClickZ shows that organizations with highly engaged employees reduce turnover by 87% and improve performance by 20%.

Companies therefore need to relinquish some control of social—and soon. Just as social media doesn’t belong solely to the marketing department, social recruiting doesn’t belong solely to recruiters. Wise talent officers will wake up and realize that while they may be the overseers of a larger social recruiting strategy, the agents who will make the most change are the very people they attracted in the first place. Your organization already vetted them during the interview process; now trust them to speak out on your behalf.

This post was originally published on Bambu by Sprout Social. 

This post Why Social Recruiting Doesn’t Belong Solely to Recruiters originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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Twitter killed Magic Recs, the only useful bot there is

Twitter has discontinued Magic Recs, its bot that alerted users via DM about trending posts and popular accounts. In a written statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson had the following to say about the company’s new direction with regard to bots: @MagicRecs is no longer regularly sending recommendations through Direct Message. Recommendations that were previously shared via Direct Message are now delivered via push notification. Magic Recs (which Twitter always tagged as an ‘experiment’) was one of the few useful bots around, but required you to follow the account (you know, DMs and all that). It also didn’t have many followers: 112,000.…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Social Media News You Can Use: Messenger Chatbots & Screen Sharing On Blab

Sprout’s Spring Service Day

There are more than 660 public schools serving almost 400,000 students in the city of Chicago. Among them is Chicago Collegiate Charter School, which currently serves 225 students in grades 4–7. Chicago Collegiate’s mission is to prepare 100% of its students to attend and graduate from college.

Three years in and their approach is working: Despite students entering Chicago Collegiate on average dramatically below grade level, students have shown growth in the top 1% nationally for math and top 2% nationally for reading.

At Sprout, we believe in the power of education and the importance of making a high quality education accessible to all students. We want to do what we can to encourage young people to continue their education, and that includes helping schools like Chicago Collegiate foster an environment that enables learning for their students, staff and community.

Earlier this month, a group of Sprout Social employees headed over to Chicago Collegiate to enhance their playground, clean up the hallways and redo their reception area: in short, to beautify their campus so that students can have a clean, organized place to learn.

We decided to develop a formal corporate giving program at Sprout nearly two years ago. To kick it off, we surveyed the entire team to ensure we were supporting the causes people cared about. The results showed that youth, education and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) were clearly important to our team, and since then, we’ve partnered with one Chicago school each year to invest hours, effort and dollars into projects that serve the needs of the school community.

Over the course of our year working with Chicago Collegiate Charter School, we’ve hosted a full team visit in the fall, a book drive around the winter holidays and a smaller on-site in the spring. Members of Team Sprout have helped with projects ranging from organizing the classroom libraries to debugging and repairing some of the school’s computers to presenting on their career paths.

We’re proud to support a culture of giving back to the greater community and looking forward to more service days, drives and projects as Team Sprout continues to grow.

This post Sprout’s Spring Service Day originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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3 Simple & Quick LinkedIn Tips to Get More Reach

If you’re a B2B brand looking to promote your content, LinkedIn is the place to be. With 414 million users, it’s chock-full of active business professionals, providing plenty of opportunity for your content to reach a wider audience. However, it also means that it can be tough to stand out in the crowded news feed.

Increasing reach and engagement on your LinkedIn Company Page content can take a lot of trial and error. If you’re looking to make an immediate impact on your performance, start with these three quick and easy LinkedIn tips.

1. Use Large Images

You’re probably already well aware that using images on social media increases the effectiveness of your social media posts.

Based on our own Uberflip data, I can conclude that this is especially true on LinkedIn — after running an analysis on our LinkedIn Company Page posts, we discovered that uploading large images to posts (as opposed to simply using a link’s thumbnail image) can substantially improve a post’s performance.

You can certainly see the difference between the example of the image in the post above and the one below. Larger images tend to draw more attention to the eye, which can be extremely beneficial when posting content on LinkedIn.

On average, our posts with uploaded images received 35% more impressions, 32% more interactions, and 54% more clicks than posts with thumbnail images.

This is probably owing to the fact large images take up a lot of real estate on LinkedIn, and any sort of color tends to stand out against the grey-blue background. If you’re ever in need of the right LinkedIn image sizes, check out Sprout’s always up-to-date social media image size guide.

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The catch: Many social media scheduling tools don’t allow for pre-scheduled posts with full-size images on LinkedIn. If you’re looking for a breakthrough on LinkedIn, or are looking to amplify your distribution using LinkedIn, I’d recommend taking the time to manually upload an image to a LinkedIn post—our data is proof that it could be worth it.

2. Leverage Group Announcements

If your B2B business has its own group (which it should), be sure to use LinkedIn group announcements. Announcements can be sent once per week to your group members. These members will receive a notification in their inbox as long as they have their email notifications turned on. The announcement will also appear as a discussion in the group so all group members can be looped into the conversation.

One brand that does this really well is Rainmaker Digital, which was formerly known as Copyblogger. Rainmaker sends relatively consistent email announcements from its group and makes sure to change the headline so it’s not overly promotional and encourages discussion.

There’s a noticeable difference in overall engagement for their group posts that haven’t been promoted via an announcement versus those that have had some sort of promotion.

• Pro tip: Beyond driving group engagement and reach on LinkedIn, you can also leverage announcements to drive traffic. Track any URLs you include in your announcements so you can properly attribute referral traffic and better measure your LinkedIn group efforts.

3. Involve Your Entire Team

Content promotion is a team effort, and LinkedIn is no exception. Sometimes a boost from your team is all your LinkedIn content needs to take off.

So, how can you easily enable your team to share your content on LinkedIn?

• Communicate when you need a social boost: Leverage your organization’s internal messaging system or send a daily/weekly email that includes easy click-to-share links so everyone can easily share the right content with the right messaging. Our team has a “please share” Slack channel dedicated to content that we’d like the team to help promote.
• Onboard your team: If social sharing is important to your company, then include an onboarding session when you bring on new hires. This is especially helpful when educating sales reps on social selling. Be sure to inform them of best practices for posting, like sharing from your Company Page directly and tagging your page name as much as possible to increase exposure. If they’re interested in automating social shares, teach them how to use social scheduling and brand advocacy tools like Bambu. You can also help your team set up an IFTTT recipe for automatic content sharing from your blog’s RSS feed.
• Gamify sharing: Admittedly, this tip is less quick and easy to implement than the others mentioned in this post, but it can still generate great results. Create a little bit of fun competition with your team to see who can generate the most engagement on LinkedIn. Provide unique tracking URLs to anyone who wants to be involved, select a prize, set a timeline, and you’re off!
• Implement Sprout Social: With Sprout’s LinkedIn management tools, you can collaborate with your social sharing so everyone is on the same page. Sprout makes it easy to manage multiple profiles and content as a team. Keep your social team together with the right management tools.

• 

Getting in the Groove With LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a tough social platform to crack, and some of these tips (though relatively quick and easy to implement) might eventually lead to necessary process changes. On the bright side, big changes usually see big results. Luckily, there are LinkedIn management tools for businesses that make scheduling, publishing, collaboration and audience targeting simpler and more effective within your social strategy.

You can’t discount LinkedIn for other social networks. Simply put, if LinkedIn is where your audience is, it’s probably worth your time and effort.

Do you have any LinkedIn tips that help your business? Feel free to comment below!

This post 3 Simple & Quick LinkedIn Tips to Get More Reach originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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4 Ways Interactive Content Can Up Your Email Marketing Game

It’s not a new concept, but it’s getting a lot of hype lately amongst the email community. It’s even been coined the “next big thing” in email.

We’re talking about interactive content.

Interactive content brings a fresh approach to email, a channel often looked to as static and dated. (We know that’s not true.) Personalization, animation, segmentation; the possibilities are endless. And it’s not just about creating really, really, ridiculously good-looking emails.

Interactive email can:

• Make your content more compelling
• Improve your engagement
• Delight your subscribers

So why aren’t more brands doing it?

The TL;DR version: It’s difficult. Creating brilliant, engaging emails isn’t for the faint of heart – but it can be done. Here are four examples of how we’ve used interactive content in our own emails (and how you can recreate them for yourself):

1. Dynamic Twitter Feed

The email design community was abuzz when Litmus launched a live twitter feed inside one of their emails for The Email Design Conference. Anyone could engage with the feed by simply tweeting with the #TEDC15 hashtag. New tweets would show up in the feed in realtime.

For last year’s ASCEND Summit, we decided to test out the idea in one of our pre-conference emails:

The results? Pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves. (Really Good Emails agrees!)

Kelsey P., the design lead on the project, explains: “We had never really done an interactive email. With the upcoming conference, we wanted to give our audience something to engage with, something to get them excited about. Adding the live twitter feed not only pulled in that social proof, but gave the email a personal touch and got people talking.”

Skill Level: Advanced

Want to try it out for yourself? Head over to Litmus for the full breakdown of instructions. We won’t sugarcoat this one: it’s hard. But the results? 100 percent worth it.

2. Email Sentiment Widget

Gauge subscribe reactions right from the inbox by adding an email sentiment widget to your next campaign, like this one:

“We were aiming to find a way to let our subscribers tell us how they feel about the emails we send them with the least possible friction,” says Chris V., Creative Director at AWeber. “The simple, two option sentiment widget not only gives them the ability to register feedback on an email without feeling like they have to commit to filling out a traditional survey, it’s also pretty darn delightful. It was such a success that we decided to build and share a tool for anyone who loves email to make one of these widgets on their own.”

Skill Level: Intermediate

We’ve done the hard part for you! Get the code (and instructions to add it to your emails) here.

3. Email Survey

Ok, so technically you can’t embed a survey into your emails. (At least, not yet!) But you can use this hack from SurveyGizmo to allow your subscribers to answer the first question of your survey within a message. Here’s an example:

As Chris explains, “We survey our subscribers fairly regularly and are trying to find ways to improve both the quality of the the responses we get and the experience for our readers. We decided to include our first question in our survey emails for two reasons: First, it removes an unnecessary step to get to the survey, thus saving some valuable seconds and attention for our subscribers. Second, we were hoping to increase completion rates by having respondents who clicked an initial answer feel like they were already invested in the survey. Our initial experiments have worked out well enough for us to model all of the surveys in our campaigns to use this pattern.”

Skill Level: Intermediate

Have some basic HTML knowledge? Check out SurveyGizmo for the instructions. (Note: You’ll need a SurveyGizmo account to use this feature.)

4. GIFs

Using animated GIFs in your emails is a great way to add an element of delight to your emails. But they can be used for so much more than a few laughs.

GIFs can also help illustrate a product or feature. Take a look at this example from one of our recent Curate email campaigns:

While the GIF doesn’t tell the whole story, it gives subscribers a little more context into what the app can do. You can even use a series of GIFs in place of lengthy copy to build out your idea. We love anything that helps turn a complex concept into something that’s easier to digest.

Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Even if you’re not a designer, you can still use GIFs in your emails. Check out Giphy for a large selection of animated GIFs, or create your own using an app like GIFMaker.me.

Want more email inspiration?

From welcome messages and re-engagement campaigns to great uses of GIFs in email, we’ve got a whole Pinterest board full of beautiful email campaigns.

How are you using interactive content in your emails? We want to know! Leave us a comment or tweet us @AWeber and tell us how – or better yet, show us!

The post 4 Ways Interactive Content Can Up Your Email Marketing Game appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Measure Productivity With the New Task Performance Report

In addition to revamping our Team Report, Sprout is excited to offer the Task Performance Report—a new breakout report focusing on agent productivity. Available on Team and Enterprise plans, the Task Performance Report measures productivity based on Tasks. The report analyzes task assignment and completion rates across your Sprout account so you can track efforts at the user level.

The New Task Performance Report

The Assigned vs. Completed section of the report visually shows your team as a whole. Use the chart and totals to understand if your team is staying on track and completing Tasks. Leverage the comparison percentage to recognize trends in task usage.

The Task Performance, by Team Member previously lived in the Team Report. Use this section to track important touch points and see which team members took a task from assignment to completion.

Increase Productivity Using Sprout’s Tasks

The Task Performance Report works in conjunction with your team’s use of assigning tasks in the Smart Inbox. Follow these steps to increase productivity and best use Tasks and the Task Performance Report:

• Your team can use Tasks within the Smart Inbox to work more collaboratively and ensure that inbound messages requiring a response are addressed. To do this, triage messages using Task, assign the charge to a specific user and designate the Task Type.
• When replying to inbound messages, stay organized and avoid duplicative efforts by having team members mark both the message and task as complete.
• Use the Task Performance Report to analyze productivity and completion rates, benchmark performance and adjust your productivity goals as necessary.

Does your team use Tasks? Are you excited to start measuring performance with our new report? Sound off in the comments and don’t be afraid to ask any questions. As always, be on the lookout for more updates to Sprout’s reporting suite.

This post Measure Productivity With the New Task Performance Report originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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Evaluate Social Care Efforts With the Enhanced Team Report

Sprout’s Team Report has been redesigned and enhanced to include powerful new reply metrics for analyzing customer service efforts. Offered in the Team and Enterprise plans, the report enables teams to better evaluate efforts of individual social agents.

What’s New?

In addition to the current publishing metrics, the enhanced Team Report breaks down response metrics by agent so you can easily distinguish your rockstars from individuals that may not be fully contributing to the team. With the new profile picker, you can view agents across all of your networks but still dig deep into individual profiles.

View agent-level metrics across all selected profiles. Within the Team Report, Replies, by Team Member lets you analyze an individual’s total response number, average response time, reply thread size and more.

The Replies, by Profile, by Team Member sections helps you to understand how agents are responding to incoming messages within their assigned networks.

How to Use the Revamped Team Report

Whether you’re a local support team with regular business hours or a global team with coverage around the clock, the Team Report enables you to analyze efforts across your full social customer service spectrum.

Reactive Communication

Monitor reactive customer care and ensure customer service levels are met and goals are reached. Track the response efforts of each agent in the Replies, by Team Member and Replies, by Profile by Team Member sections of the report.

Preemptive Communication

Preemptive communication is important to keeping customers informed when problems or disruptions arise before they come to you. Ensure your team is communicating preplanned or known service issues using the Publishing section.

Proactive Communication

Stopping issues before they start is a big win for social customer service. Use the Publishing section to benchmark efforts of employees that post “how-to” and best-practice content to proactively surprise and delight your customers.

The New Task Performance Report

To compliment our enhanced Team Report, we’ve also released a new Task Performance Report. By transitioning the task activity data into its own dedicated report, you can now dig deep into how your team is using Tasks to stay productive. The Task Performance Report is available in Team and Enterprise Plans. Learn more about our latest report.

As always, if you have any questions please sound off in the comments section.

This post Evaluate Social Care Efforts With the Enhanced Team Report originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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