Essentials of creating a social media strategy for small businesess

Everything and anything is social now. Companies and brands need the social media to generate leads and conversions. To achieve this, they will need a social media strategy to create brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, and increase revenues. Individuals need to list their websites and blogs high on Google page rankings and attract followers and likes and become thought leaders.

The following are a few tips on how you can devise a social media strategy:

• Goals and objectives: Along with the company goals and objectives, you need to know for sure why you want to use the potential of social media. You need the KPIs to measure the success of your company’s social media strategy. You also need to know how you can achieve success on social media. 
• Demography: Users rule the social media and their behavior dictates whether your content can go viral or not. You need to know who your users are, where they come from, their habits, and which social media they use. You need to create user personas to know your customers. 
• Social media audit: For beginners, competitor analysis is a good start. You need to evaluate how your competitors are doing, on which social media platforms they are on, in what ways they use these platforms and what are the conversations the customers are having about their products. You need to identify which keywords your competitors increasingly use on social media. A well-planned social media audit will help you devise your social media strategy in line with your company’s overall goals. 
• Timing: For maximum impact, you need to know the best time to post on social media in order to receive the best response and impact. It may vary from one social media platform to another. 
• Analyze your strategy: After you start implementing your social media strategy, evaluate its impact and engage in continuous improvement of your strategy. Listen to social social media conversations, identify the thought leaders and influencers in your domain. In collaboration with your customer support and marketing teams, manage all negative conversations and answer feedback carefully. 
• Gap analysis: Do a gap analysis to find out the areas where you need to prioritize and optimize. Find out whether your content in web pages or social media platforms lack in any aspect. Ensure you are using all the available media for social conversations. If you are auditing your social media strategy, identify the gaps and customize your strategy in line with your company’s objectives. 
• Content strategy: The most crucial part is your social media content strategy. Text alone will no longer suffice and you need to have a strategy to use different types of content such as videos, podcasts, and infographics. Remember that good content helps in building relationships with your customers, and you must have plans or content calendars to publish content that your customers need and want to know. 
• Create great content: Great and relevant content can bring in new customers or generate prospects, get brand advocates, and create an active online community that engages in conversations about your products and brands. You must also plan how you will measure engagement from the content that you post. You may have to use Google Analytics or other tools to do that. You must also plan to test the impact of different call to actions on your customers. 
• Review: Finally, you will have to set KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy, its success, gaps, and pitfalls. You need to set KPIs for individual social media channels and for the ones that were the most effective for the campaigns you have done. 

Three Days Grace and the Human Race

Some pop music songs remain in one’s head after you hear it first time. These rock or pop songs then replay automatically in your brain so that you want to listen to them again and again. Until another rocking song captures your attention.

As a music buff, I have a long list of such rock songs. A long list. A cherished list spanning more than 20 years. First heard on radio when there were no CDS, internet, and mp3s.

They include:

• Tom Sawyer – Rush
• Who Made Who – AC/DC
• Hysteria and Photograph – Def Leppard
• Sweet Child of Mine and Welcome to the Jungle – GNR
• Turbo – Judas Priest
• Neon Lights - Kraftwerk

Such songs are always special. Special to that kid 20 years ago.

When I heard the song Human Race by Three Days Grace, I remembered my cherished list of rock songs in a flash and this one belonged to that list. I liked this track from this Canadian rock band with its anthemic quality, good vocals and muted lead guitar solos. And they have a new vocalist in Matt Walst. The song belongs to the band's new album Human released March 2015.

I culled the song from the Billboard Hard Rock Albums chart. On the day of writing this, the album is at number 4 on charts. I would rate this track higher than the single Painkiller released on iTunes in 2014.

So, I will listen to the song again until another one displaces it.

10 things you must know about Phosphate pollution

Last week, the media reported the alarming situation in Bengaluru city's Varthur lake as polluted foam from the lake spilled into the roads and surrounding areas. Similar reports appeared in the press about Bellandur lake pollution.

The following are the 10 things you must know about phosphate pollution in lakes and streams:

1. Phosphate along with nitrogen is a known naturally occurring ‘nutrient’.
2. Phosphorus helps in the growth of plants like algae in aquatic ecosystems like lakes. Fish and other species feed on algae.
3. Higher levels of phosphorus lead to faster growth of aquatic plants like algae. If you see weed like growth covering a large portion of a lake nearby, you can suspect nutrient pollution.
4. Such growth of algae results in toxic algal blooms that are recognized by changes in the color of water.
5. Faster plant growth in water bodies reduces the concentration of oxygen in these waters, and results in a condition called ‘Hypoxia’.
6. Hypoxia results in the death of animals like fish in aquatic systems severely polluted by phosphorus and nitrogen.
7. Eating seafood from lakes or streams high in algal blooms is a risk to human health. The effects reported include deaths and neurotoxicity.
8. High levels of phosphorus reaches water bodies from agricultural actives, fertilizer overuse, untreated sewage, human waste, and storm water runoff.
9. Household detergents, pet waste, and lawns in urban areas contribute to phosphorus pollution.
10. It took more than 40 years to reduce phosphorus pollution into the severely polluted Lake Erie.