This week on Sprout Social Insights we tackled guides for Facebook, Twitter, and small business to help you better reach your customers with the social media tools that make a difference.

Check out our articles below to find out more about each one and how they can help you with your social media goals.

And check in every day to Sprout Social Insights for more how to guides and breaking social media news.

Here’s How 3 Successful Brands Schedule Facebook and Twitter Posts

Social media is providing brands with the opportunity to stay connected with their customers around the clock from any location, and exactly when to engage seems to be on everyone’s minds lately. It’s different for every industry, but most research finds that many businesses miss the mark when it comes to timing.

Recent studies by sources like Buddy Media, eMarketer, and even from Twitter have consistently shown that consumers are heavily involved with social media after 5 pm and on the weekends. If you don’t have someone available to manage your social networks during the highest levels of engagement, scheduling tools are a good alternative. [ Read More... ]

How to Add a Pinterest Pin It Button to Your Company Blog

As Pinterest continues to explode in popularity, more businesses and brands are launching accounts on the network.

While having your company involved on the platform is an important first step, you may also want to make it easier for people to share content from your company blog on Pinterest. Not only will a Pinterest presence be helpful for your online reputation, but it can be a powerful way to increase your sales.

Even if Pinterest members are using Pinterest’s browser widget, adding a “Pin It” button to your blog articles may increase the amount of sharing (and traffic) your blog receives. Here’s why you should consider adding the button to your site and how you can do so. [ Read More... ]

Think Locally, Tweet Globally

This week we suggest that even if you do business locally, you don’t need to limit your tweets exclusively to a local audience on Twitter.

According to the U.S. Small Business Association, small businesses make up 99.7 percent of all employer firms. Whether it’s a local restaurant, a motel, a clothing store or a consulting business, many of these small companies do business with local customers.

We live in a globally connected world these days. Through the vast reach of social media, a local customer of yours may be just as likely to be friends with someone from another country as they are to be following you on Twitter. So, although you must never lose sight of your ideal customers, sometimes they may be reachable and influenced by other tweeters far beyond your local community. [ Read More... ]

An Ethical Dilemma: Should Social Media Affect Google SEO Ranking?

Between Google+ and Microsoft’s integration of Facebook into Bing, it seems that big brands’ product teams believe social search is the way of the future.

Since day one, Google has strived for relevance in its PageRank algorithm. But what is relevant to one person might not matter to another. As a result, Google has attempted to filter and curate the search results we see based on what knowledge it can ascertain from us.

The idea is that the more it knows about us, the better it can serve us. Will the introduction of social media in search improve search, or does it run the risk of making it worse? Let’s take closer look at the issue to help you draw your own conclusion. [ Read More... ]

5 Sports Teams Doing Social Media Right

People love talking about sports, whether it’s trash-talking the opposing team, sharing stats with fellows fans, or sharing their team pride.

While TV and radio have done a great job of keeping fans entertained, social media has evolved the way fans interact with leagues, teams, and players. More than 80 percent of sports fans interact with social media sites while watching games on TV, and more than 60 percent do so while watching live events.

Sporting organizations and athletes have had to adapt their marketing campaigns to take advantage this new medium. From real-time coverage and fan forums to pre-game sneak-peeks and offline tweetups, these five sports teams are doing social media right. [ Read More... ]

3 Powerful LinkedIn Features You Didn’t Know About

LinkedIn can be a useful tool for finding a new job or for making long-term career plans. But in order to take full advantage of all that the social network can offer, you should invest some time in getting to know the site. You’ll want to make sure your profile and job title are updated, and that you know about all of the platform’s features.

Whether you are a job-seeker or a recruiter, LinkedIn has much more to offer its members than just a system of cataloging business connections. Here are three features that you might not have known about that can turn you from a casual LinkedIn user into a business powerhouse. [ Read More... ]

Spotlight on Startups: hiredMYway solves the #1 problem of recruiting

At Sprout Insights, we comb the web to bring you the most up-to-date and actionable resources on how to use social media to grow your business.

To that end, we’re pleased to present the Sprout Insights series Spotlight on Startups. We’ll find the most innovative, useful startup companies out there, get the inside track on what they’re doing, and tell you how you can leverage their products and services for your own business.

This week we’re pleased to cast the spotlight on hiredMYway — an online recruiting and referral job board with offices in Detroit, MI, and Chicago, IL.
[ Read More... ]

Why Your Company Needs an Internal Social Network

Most articles here at Sprout Insights offer advice and recommendations about managing your brand’s social media presence. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and their ilk are important for building connections with customers and broadly sharing information about your business.

But more and more companies are realizing that while public social media has many benefits, there are also perks to implementing a smaller, private network just for your brand. These perks range from improvements in everyday work processes to intangible changes, such as better bonds among your employees. Here are a few reasons why an internal social network is worth considering. [ Read More... ]

How to Schedule Facebook Page Posts to Automatically Publish Later

This week we’ll show you how to schedule updates to your Facebook Page like posts, photos, and more to automatically publish at a later date and time.

To do this on Facebook‘s own website, just visit your Facebook Page and find the field where you type in your status update at the top of your Page’s Timeline — just like any other post. Enter the content you want to publish, whether it’s a simple text update or some kind of rich media like an image.

Once everything’s all squared away, look to the bottom-left corner of your status update box. You’ll see a little time icon in grey — barely visible! Click it to bring up the scheduling menu

Facebook’s interface for this is actually pretty bad, but it’s at least functional. You have to use separate drop-down menus to select each part of the date and time. Click “Add year,” then select your year. Click “Add month,” then select your month. You’ll then do this for day, hour, and even minute. [ Read More... ]

[Image credits: Buddy Media, Emilian Robert Vicol, Cupcakes & Dreams, Sheila Scarborough, hiredMYway (FB), lululemon athletica]