Upgrade your Social Media Status Updates

Your status updates may not be seen by all of your contacts at any given time, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put some thought when you make one on your local business’ Facebook page. By following certain strategies, not only will your updates be visible to many people, they will also be more effective tools for marketing.

Scheduling your posts is the best way for your updates to be seen by the majority. If you post when people are about to go to work or are about to sleep, the next time your followers log-on to their accounts your update is already going to get buried underneath other posts. Post them at a time when most of your followers are likely to be online. If you are online when most of them are also on, you will be able to interact with them by posting replies to their comments in real time.

More often than not, a post with an image attached to it is deemed more interesting than one that’s in plain text. An accompanying image would also help your post look like more effort was put into it. A post that looks interesting and well-put will always collect likes from generous Facebook users.

Balancing Offense and Defense in Marketing

The German invasion of Poland in September 1, 1939 was so fast that the latter couldn’t respond as an effective fighting force. It only took 35 days for Poland to capitulate, which was expedited by the Soviet invasion from the east. By annexing the country, Germany didn’t have to worry about its eastern flank while it prepared to conquer France next. However, there’s a limit to what a general can do when all he does is attack.

The same applies to marketing; success is not so much about the nature of aggressive marketing strategies as the way marketers use them. In his paper on defensive and offensive marketing, Peter Yannopoulos, an associate professor at Brock University in Ontario, says rival companies often switch between sword and shield. When an aggressive strategy fails, the company on the defense can mount an effective counterattack. In this case, improving a product that’s already a major hit.

Say you developed a new genre for a TV show, which the rival company attempts to emulate due to the former’s success. Your best defensive strategy is to further capitalize on the gains the show has earned over time, writing better skits and the like. When your rival’s show doesn’t gain much appeal as yours, you can keep the initiative by using the improvements as a counterattack. In the end, there’s truly not much of a difference between marketing and war strategies.