By James Pruitt, Senior Staff Writer

• Be Comfortable with Failure. It will Happen:

Forget the aphorism “failure is not an option.” Failure is an inevitability. Most social media campaigns fail. Social media campaigners should understand this inevitability and plan accordingly.

Knowledgeable professionals generally run many social media/marketing campaigns simultaneously, and plan for mostly dead ends. However, when success comes, the payoff should more than compensate for the effort.

Resilience counts. For example, in 2012, a clothing company did a promotion offering 20% clothes in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Were customers in relevant areas amused? No. Did this spell the end for this clothing brand? Absolutely not. They even survived a bankruptcy in the meantime.

This clothing apparel company continues as a viable brand. In other words, if at first you do not succeed, try, try again. In learning from mistakes, business owners should ensure their social media content is memorable, understand their target, and use relevant data. Finally, appreciate the power of social media to reach a large, targeted audience more efficiently than ever before in the past.

• Stay Within your Budget- But Have One:

Back in the day, a social media campaign could start from scratch. Now, the competition can outclass even the most talented independent business proprietor on the advertising front. These days, going alone rarely works. Successful online advertisement requires some sort of a budget.

One good use of funds is social media expertise. Maybe someone you know has succeeded in their small business through social media. Social media consultants abound. Best practice is to find the right match.

Other worthwhile expenditures may include social media campaigns. Social media sites such as Facebook allow users to boost small business posts, sending advertisements for goods and services far and wide. Many sites even provide tools for targeting certain demographic and interest groups. While these resources are within your means, their wise use may determine the fate of your enterprise.

• Know your Goals:

A money-making business must consider its bottom-line. Companies may have various goals for growth and product development. These goals should remain aligned with the capacities of the business owners.

Different platforms have various ways to quantify short-term goals. Perhaps in the short term, clicks may take precedence. On Facebook and Twitter, you can even track posts that lead to sales.

Just remember your strategy and bottom line. These measures, such as tracking “clicks” and “likes,” are mere stepping-stones. Your company needs to succeed.

• Know your Platform:

Effective use of social media requires intimate knowledge of the relevant platform. Professional users should consider which platform can best reach their target audience. Detailed, specific knowledge of one resource unlocks a full range of social media capacities. This expertise allows the most detailed and specific advertising campaigns and outreach efforts. Each social media platform has its ins and outs. Owners who understand their platforms the best develop the most precise marketing skills.

The more time you have spent on a given platform, the more you are likely to know about its capacities. Once you start a small business, your social media “habit” could become a porthole to make your dreams a reality.

• Reaching your Bottom Line:

Social media remains a means to an end. However, as various platforms have developed, different marketing strategies have emerged to best exploit each of these platforms. Small business owners should carefully research methods to get their word out, correctly, through the right channels. The earliest days of “going viral” are behind us. What remains are marketing strategies that provide careful, well-considered paths to deliver your goods and services to just the right interested customers.

VAMBOA, the Veterans and Military Business Owners Association hopes that this article has been helpful.   We work hard to bring you important, positive, helpful and timely information and are the “go to” online venue for Veteran and Military Business Owners.  VAMBOA is a non-profit trade association.   We do not charge members any dues or fees and members can also use our seal on their collateral and website.   If you are not yet a member, you can register here:  https://vamboa.org/member-registration/

We also invite you to check us out on social media too.

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By Debbie Gregory.

Millions of social media images are posted daily.   Unfortunately, very few of the images are interesting enough to make people to stop and notice them. Most of them go completely unnoticed often because the images are low-quality, unappealing, not worth sharing, too sales-pushy, or just plain boring.

As a business you need to stand out and grab people’s attention. If your posts aren’t captivating your customers, it is time to change what you are sharing. We have compiled a list of some of the most popular free or inexpensive online tools to help you build a library of quality images, gifs, videos, templates, and more to boost your business’ social game.

Adobe Stock

Adobe Stock is a huge marketplace for stock imagery. They currently have a collection of over 90 million high-quality assets that you can choose from including photos, illustrations, videos, and templates. They offer a free pack of items when you sign up, however, there are fees to use the Adobe collection.

BeFunky

BeFunky offers a lot of graphics tools, layouts, and templates for just about any need. You can get 125 effects for free or sign up and pay for access to their entire library of high-resolution image effects and templates.

Canva

Canva is pretty versatile and offers preset image sizes and ready-made layouts for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest which adhere to their specific size guidelines. You can also use it for larger projects as well. They offer both a free limited version and a subscription version that provides you many more features.

Creative Market

Creative Market offers fully finished and ready to post graphics, fonts, website themes, photos, mockups, and a lot more. Everything has been assembled from tens-of-thousands of independent creators that submit new designs on a regular basis. They do offer some of their creations for free, six new free items every week, but most of their downloads cost money.

Easel.ly

Easel.ly is a source for infographics and reports; including charts, maps, graphics, and dashboards. They offer a much different set of visuals than either Infogram or Piktochart (both discussed below). You can start for free or choose their paid option.

Giphy

Giphy is a giant, growing collection of free animated gifs that are great for adding some movement to enhance your social posts. Motion makes things more memorable and posts with video or gifs are more likely to be shared.

Hootsuite Composer

Hootsuite Composer is a social media image editor and library that helps you create and prepare images that are appropriate to post across different social networks. Composer is a feature within Hootsuite that provides you access to a large library of images to enhance your posts with all of the usual functions including resize, crop, rotate, transform, filters, and more. You can even add your own logo. It comes with whichever Hootsuite package you’ve signed up for.

Infogram

Infogram is a great source for infographics and reports; including charts, maps, graphics, and dashboards. You can start for free which allows you to create a limited number of items or choose one of their paid packages.

The second part of this article will provide you eight more free or inexpensive tools you should consider using to create better social images.