Social Media Management – simar

Correlating Rapport Building and First Impression

Allison Todd — Sat, 04 Nov 2017 20:18:31 +0000

For many young people, socialization can be such an easy thing to do—online. Social media allows millennials to easily reach out to others. The same interests can draw them together and regardless of familiarity, will often allow them to interact freely. Anonymity is another factor that allows them just that. But bringing that into actual conversations, presentations or business dealings is somewhat of a challenge. Building rapport, or harmonious understanding, is the first step to a successful interpersonal relationship and this requires time. By knowing how to create that killer first impression and then, consistently building up such connection will do the trick.

First Impression Lasts

Millennials or not, first meetings can bring out anxiety in anyone. There is simply nothing more unnerving than being sized up by the other party. It is also but natural to want to be liked and be given the amount of attention and respect. But the need to create a killer first impression is the first step in building rapport, a salient aspect in excellent interpersonal skills.

People naturally feel intimidated or unsettled when being entrusted into an unfamiliar environment. But confidence and optimism will help you overcome situations like this. But while many millennials are touted to be oozing with confidence, building rapport still needs consistency and constant practice way beyond the ease of first meet-ups. To build rapport, certain skills set like verbal and nonverbal, motivational, active listening, sense of humor, and empathy must be utilized.

Rapport Building Behaviors

Building rapport is the very process that turns a killer first impression into a lasting one. This is where trust and mutual respect usually comes in. To start, here are some important behaviors to consider:

Be sincere when you meet people for the first time. When you are sincere, your smile is usually brighter, your handgrip tighter, and your warmth can be felt by the other person or the other group.

It is recommended to talk on a first name basis to build rapport but be wary of cultural differences. Japanese, for instance, prefer last name basis for formal talks.

Make good use of easily understood terms so you will not sound condescending. Using jargon not familiar to the other party can easily turn a conversation to a bumpy start.

When talking, try to keep eye contact and let your nonverbal cues mimic what you are saying. Lean towards the person you are talking to. Keep your hands open and your legs uncrossed. A relaxed manner will help the other party feel welcomed. It also makes you feel more relaxed.

Practice empathetic listening by being attentive. Nod every now and then or make appropriate sounds and gestures. Ask questions to make the other party know that you are listening.

Clarify any confusion or unclear matters. This will prevent misunderstanding. When in agreement, always openly say so to motivate the other party and build trust. When you disagree, however, always give the reason why.

Be genuine and be honest. It is best to admit a mistake or acknowledge some points that you have no idea of. This helps to build trust.

Don’t forget to offer compliment and maintain politeness all throughout.

Building rapport by starting strong on your first impression can be tricky. Experts believe that first impressions carry a huge weight in dealing with other people. While it may be true, it still takes a lot of consistency and constant communication to tighten such rapport. Practice and mentorship will help largely on this aspect. When done accordingly, you can guarantee building lasting relations with everyone else—and often to your advantage.

Understanding the Intricacies of Modern Brand Management

Allison Todd — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 09:50:47 +0000

Believe it or not, there is a huge truth in the adage “You are who Google says you are.” in business. When people searched for products or services, they immediately make good use of their smartphones, computers and tablets to seek out Google’s search capabilities. Even searching on complaints and controversies which your brand may be embroiled in as far as the 90s can be easily done via online search.

This only means that your online presence speaks volume about your brand. Your website to your social media profiles, status messages, tweets, pictures, articles, and other stuffs posted online is a reflection of what your business represents, and its culture. While the Internet revolutionizes various aspects of business, this makes branding management even more challenging and arduous in this day and age. To give you competitive advantage, here are some ways to manage your brand without fail:

1. Begin brand-building with your profile in mind. Make your company profile—from account name to photo to cover image—deliver the very imagery that represents who you are, what you stand for, and what you wish to achieve. Be straight to the point in the “About” section. Let your brand ambassadors like employees handling customer service or admin of the page mirror the values of your brand.

2. Steer clear of controversial brand ambassadors. Yes, in this day and age when information overload is notoriously easy, the use of questionable entities will cause more harm than good to your business image. Whether employees or endorsers, it is important to ensure that impression given out must be always on the positive.

3. Policies must be in place particularly in the use of apps. This is to protect private and sensitive information of the business. Part of the policy must be proper venue of the download, data protection, and so on. If you may, consider blocking of free apps to prevent leakage of critical information.

4. Gear your digital team against online trolling. Cyber-bullying is also notorious online striking both individual and business pages. One wrong tweet, like political or sensational topic, can easily blow out of proportion leading to heavy trolling or posting of offensive comments. Do make sure appropriate action plan is in place to handle such situations.

5. Set clear social media guidelines for your team. This will help give your employees or brand ambassadors a clear mandate on what photos, posts, links, and messages to post. It will also help create standard form of replying to comments or reacting to negative comments. Make sure to discuss each item at length with your team to prevent double standards.

6. Be relevant and effective. Share content which are not only significant to your brand but also those that are timely. Keep social media profiles up-to-date and in-sync, too.

7. In everything else, be consistent. In the world of brand building and management, consistency is still the key to gaining the respect of online audience. It also helps to draw in more followers when you give up to date information, organize contests, give freebies, beta testers, and so on.

With the rate this whole Internet and tech-gadget dependency is going, your online reputation definitely precedes the overall aspects of your business. Keep your audience enthralled. Poke on their excitement and curiosity. By keeping them engaged, you may also turn them into your own set of brand ambassadors, like reliable word-of-mouth campaigners on the digital level.

Positive Mindset: Retaining Post-Vacation Vibe

Allison Todd — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:25:39 +0000

All work and no play is no life at all. Taking a vacation is a great way to de-stress. Imagine 1 to 3 days or more of no emails and voicemails, phonecalls in the middle of the night, deadlines to think of, and heady client meet-ups to attend to. Pure bliss! It helps revive the system and get your creative juices going. But while vacation is proven to do just that, the avalanche of work-related issues can also be sweeping once you go back. So, before you go all depressed upon going back, here are some tips to keep that awesome post-vacay vibe going:

Try to ease down on work commitments. The moment you get back, you may want to have a day or two with no meetings or client meal meet-ups. Focus on answering emails, voicemail’s, and other queries needing immediate attention. This is also a good time to reorganize your calendar and check on work or presentation deadlines. It is best to also review back-to-work priorities set prior to the vacation should something more urgent came up. Address the most urgent ones and leave some of the pleasantries at a later time.

Time to give your office desk a face-lift. By the time you’ll be back, request papers, invoices, and folders of reports may occupy a vast amount of your work space. Sign them up. Send them out. There is nothing more satisfying than having a de-cluttered desk at the end of the day.

While de-cluttering may be foremost on your mind, bring also that sunshine with you. Fresh flowers on a vase will add more warmth to a seemingly dreary office space. If there’s no space for flowers, bring anything colorful like a calendar posted on your cubicle wall. A framed picture of yourself immersed in the sea or sand can also maintain that positive vibe egging you to move forward.

Accept the expected but do it in a stride. It is normal to be stressed with the avalanche of work load greeting you back. Learning how to control such stress levels depend largely on your mindset. Address immediate concerns for 20 to 30 minutes and then, take a break for 5 to 10 minutes. This will bring back a more relaxed system while staying productive all the time.

When work concerns simply swamp you to no end, bring out the iPod out and listen to your choice of music. Reggae and tropical beats add more positive vibe as you go chasing deadlines. Others prefer classical songs to sooth the mind when solving gargantuan task.

Bring more than positive vibe with you by picking up one good habit. It may be to do yoga as the sun rises or to meditate during sunset. Some also made a realization on spending at least a couple of hours outdoors or unplugging from technology will add more positive vibe to a full work week. In most cases, vacations also bring about a sense of clarity on how to bring about work-life balance.

There are 101 optimistic ways of retaining post-vacation vibe. The key is to always look forward to coming back. Work is, after all, your bread and butter—and without it, planning your next getaway will be virtually impossible.

Social Media Manager: Do You Know What You’re Looking For?

Allison Todd — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 18:27:00 +0000

Is it time for your business to find a social media manager? Whether big or small, businesses today are becoming more dependent to social media in their awareness, marketing and customer service efforts. With millions, if not billions, of monthly active users constantly connecting with one another and add to that the aggressive technological innovations in the mobile industry, these potential targets are a tad too many for businesses to ignore.

Social media, however, is a highly volatile platform. Newcomers and non-tech business owners can easily get lost in this labyrinth. The scary thing is that– one wrong move and a business can easily find its way to the gutter. No wonder the demand for social media manager continue to rise over the years. When thinking of hiring one for the first time, it is essential to know what to look for to prevent ending up with a pseudo-guru wreaking havoc to your social presence.

To give you an idea, here are some guidelines on how to find an excellent social media manager:

Check for experience. Don’t just hand out the keys to your business social kingdom to anyone. Have the temerity to ask for his or her work portfolio. Look how he or she sends out posts or tweets on behalf of those brands. Keep in mind that this person will be representing your business to everyone– customers, partners and prospects, and the general public.

Check for strategic management concepts being espoused. Social media managers are tasked to uphold a brand’s marketing concepts and goals. See to it that he or she shows focus on meeting business objectives.

Verify how he or she build a social community before. Content management is part and parcel of every social media manager’s responsibilities. Engagement must be their cup of tea and sustainable growth must be its master. The way they interact with followers as well as bashers will help give you an idea if one is right for the job.

Consider giving a crisis scenario for a social media manager to solve. Make it an impromptu request. Keep in mind that social crises happen in real time and often, they caught businesses unaware. Through strategies given, you can easily see how he or she responds to such highly risky scenarios.

Paid social is a common strategy nowadays. This means paying ads for Facebook, Twitter or any social media channel of your choice. Knowing how they handle money spent on ads as well as what cost-effective efforts he or she initiated will give you an idea if, indeed, he or she can lift up your bottom line.

A social media manager must also be adept in measuring results. See how they analyze results to fine-tune initiatives as you move forward. Also, check how frequent and how soon they do report back on metrics of particular campaigns.

Social media managers must be considered as a business prime mover. Adequate care must be done when hiring one. If possible, go for a team as “more heads is still better than one.” Overall, look for a social media manager who can nurture your social presence and mentor you on how this volatile system works.

Social Media Trends For The First Quarter Of 2017: A Look Back

Allison Todd — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 08:33:35 +0000

Having a hard time grasping the full power of social media in your business? You are not alone as there is no stopping the force of business socials in this day and age. With the advent of new technology and growing improvements in the Internet, social media continue to propel forward as a leading platform in sustaining business development. To give you an idea on what’s been going around in social media, here’s a look back on some notable aspects that have happened (and are continually happening!) in the first quarter of 2017.

Video content continue to gain prominence. Both global and domestic- based companies make good use of video content to captivate online audiences. This makes video content marketing one of the most useful platform for businesses to widen their reach. Think of Instagram Stories or Facebook Live. According to Cisco’s VNI or Visual Networking Index, today’s consumers are widely exposed to video content at a whooping 80 percent–and this could stretch up to 2020. So, beef-up your creative videography to deliver more titillating visuals to your social fanbase.

Going mobile is front, back and center in social media engagement. In the first quarter of 2017, more than 3 billion smartphone users have been recorded globally. This somehow increases engagement in various social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on. The same mobile-friendly demagoguery has also made hundreds of other social media platforms and apps to mushroom the Internet. How to make it work for your business agenda? Bring those call-to-action buttons on your mobile platform!

Engagement in more dynamic and robust costumer relation management with real-time “ChatBots”. Think about lightning-quick customer engagement. Now, you can provide round-the-clock attention to your customers, prospects and target market even while your business sleeps. Connecting with your customers via chatbots is not only proven effective in the last quarter or so, but it is also deemed cost-efficient.

Platform security on various social platforms has also been beefed up. Aside from filtering fake content and blocking questionable sites, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are doubling their efforts on strengthening authentication systems. New moves are also being done in sifting through posers, pseudo accounts and shadow accounts to ensure credibility of businesses are intact.

Influencers are here to stay. Still providing a sharp edge in audience engagement and conversion, these people continue to widen its authority in captivating social attention to brands, products or businesses. To tighten your grip with your target market, consider getting on a reliable influencer’s back soonest.

In all these, social media marketing for the first quarter of 2017 continue to point to a more personalized approach. Online audiences are more keen on putting their trust in ads and promotional campaigns that have a hint of “sincerity” and “trustworthiness” in them. With these, creating social campaigns must be custom-fit to a targeted audience