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On June 30th, The Rocket Group will again lead conversations and fun surrounding Social Media Day in Missouri. This is the fifth annual event hosted by Mashable and the third one we have directly participated in. Social Media Day (or #SMDay) is where we pause as the world to recognize the digital revolution happening every day right before our eyes. Here in Missouri we celebrate our local contributions to the way the world communicates and the work we have yet to do.

This year we are joining with Blank Page Marketing to hold joint events in St. Louis, Jefferson City, and online at the same time. There will be two short live presentations, an online and IRL Q & A session, and then an offline hands-on laboratory to help your social media profiles be the best they can be.

We will also provide lunch at this free event! TWEET THIS

RSVP HERE for the free event and free lunch. Be sure to share this page with any interested friends, online and in the real world, who will benefit from this celebration.

As you may remember, last year Governor Nixon proclaimed June 30th Social Media Day every year until the end of time. Check out the official resolution below:

Monday’s event will feature brief live presentations from five-time certified social media strategist Gus Wagner of The Rocket Group and Danni Eickenhorst of Blank Page Marketing, a real world and online Q&A session, and a hands on laboratory. I personally do not leave events like this until all of your questions are answered!

Sign up, tell your friends, and bring your devices, questions, and hunger on Monday!

Thanks and we will see you soon,

One of the first things we do when we are working with businesses and individuals in our Jeff City Social Media classes who are beginning or struggling with social media is look at their profile set ups.

While it may be easy to set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the other platforms, it is sometimes difficult for some to take the necessary first steps to create a positive first impression. Here are five items to consider doing when setting up your accounts:

1. Use a professional photo or logo for your profile photo

2. Set up a ‘handle’ or account name which represents yourself or your company

3. Fill out all the questions on the Facebook profile questions

4. Be sure to set up your geographic location on your profiles so local customers and audiences can find you

5. Include hashtags of keywords related to your work in your Twitter and Instagram bios

Stay tuned here on the blog, on our Facebook page, and to our tweets for dozens of tips a week to help you improve as a social media communicator!

Why should you use #Missouri instead of #Mo? Click those #’s for a real world lesson. Also: http://t.co/QCmwQ4WlDD

— Gus Wagner (@RocketGroup) February 9, 2015

Great #kimye news jacking ad. #kanye pic.twitter.com/1FrJFz7oHK

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) May 28, 2014

I don’t know, @MatthewKnell and @dberkowitz, what do you think? pic.twitter.com/xhZWtAytFu

— Caroline McCarthy (@caro) December 23, 2014

Here at The Rocket Group the office television is often tuned to MLB Network in the background. I’ve come to the conclusion, based on the commercials, the entire network is paid for by our competitors. Commercials for bulk printers, clip art graphic design, template website, and even social media management companies fill the airwaves between pitches.

These are what we refer to as commodity marketing companies. It’s simple point-and-click-add-a-widget-without-a-creative-thought design. While this approach may work for some efforts and businesses it is not business we are interested in working on.

I spent in almost a decade in and around manufacturing so I know how widgets are made on assembly lines. There is actual little thought which goes into the processes on the line as it is usually all automated by that time.

You can do the same thing to market your company, organization, or campaign – which probably consumes your every waking moment and thought – by buying products from services mentioned above. If you are not interested in taking a creative and original approach to your marketing then you are probably not interested in standing out from your competition.

These commodity marketing services may help you but it is more likely they will grab your money and run. You will be left with an inferior marketing product.

What you need is a real live marketing professional, like ourselves or any of thousands across America, who will look you in the eye, walk your floors, and work with you to develop a brand, a message, and graphic tools for the web and the real world which will connect with the audiences you are trying to attract and retain.

These tools, developed in a partnership with you, will help you succeed in making money, raising awareness, and dominating your market.

If you need creative services for your efforts, contact us or any other marketing professional.

If you need clip art which is probably being used by hundreds of other businesses like yours, then watch the MLB Network to see the companies you should call during every commercial break.

There are more than 500 million tweets sent every day around the world. That’s a lot of information to digest whether you are only looking at you’re the tweets of the folks you follow, by keywords, or by search.

How many tweets a day do you interact with? How many do you ‘save for later’ via @evernote or similar? Asking for a friend…

— Gus Wagner (@RocketGroup) May 9, 2014

We’re able to slow down the firehose of information a lot by using tools like Hootsuite and Evernote ourselves. Another thing we do is hit the ‘Favorite’ button.

You might be thinking, “Gus, you are the ShareThenLike.com dude. Why are you doing something on Twitter which tantamount to Liking something on Facebook?”

I have a couple of reasons (and nice use of ‘tantamount’):

1. I am saving it for later. Hitting Favorite on Twitter adds your message to a compilation list connected with my own profile and I can go back and look for that information at a later date. I often use Evernote for this feature as well but that is a private cloud-based system while the Favorite list is public.

2. I also use the gold star to acknowledge that your great content educated or entertained me. I’d have probably loved to have retweeted the message but it was too long and I didn’t have time or resources to edit it shorter. Remember 120 > 140 and this theory will greatly help your retweets.

3. Finally, I am connecting your content with our News page which is powered by the RebelMouse tool. We like to use this page to add another layer of social sharing to our efforts and your content.

As I’ve said before, Twitter is my favorite social media platform and I use it for almost all of my news, weather, business and fun information gathering. The goal with the content I publish for TRG and clients is to educate, inform, and entertain our audiences. The Favorite feature is another way to do so and to help your content as well.

Keep the great tweets coming and be sure to follow @RocketGroup on Twitter!

UPDATE: This tweet seemed to fit the favor of this post pretty well.

When people favourite a tweet you made 351 days ago. pic.twitter.com/U2fvAmh4Y6

— Adland (@adland) December 7, 2014

Between all the algorithm changes on social media and increased competition from more and more brands committing to online marketing you have probably seen less interaction with your content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook post, a tweet, or content on your blog, the numbers are falling.

Why is that?

1. Do you know when your fans are online? Facebook tells you in your Insights what days and times of days your audience is on the platform. If you are posting when the smallest amount of fans are online you will be less successful.

2. What’s in it for me? Your audience connected with you to support your business, to learn more from you, and to receive special opportunities. If ¾ of your content isn’t answering this question for your audience you will not receive interaction.

3. Your content sucks.

Your online content, especially on social, has to be informative and engaging. Sure, it acceptable to post the random fun item or dog photo (guilty) but if the majority of your posts are taken from George Takei then you will have problems. If you are posting all links, selling all the time, or posting ugly/blurry photos, you will not have successful interactions.

Here are some tools we use to enhance our content. I’m not sharing any trade secrets here as you have the same internet we have and have probably found these tools yourself:

1. PicMonkey is a great tool for editing and resizing photographic images. You don’t need to have a degree in Photoshop to run it either!

2. Canva is a fairly new tool which will help you to manage your images, or use their stock images, to create some rather cool graphics. They also have templates you can use but we try to avoid those as it doesn’t take long for your content to begin looking like your competitors.

3. Getty Images has always been the go-to source for news and file photos. They have recently opened up their sharing tools so you can go to them directly instead of stealing them from Google images.

4. No marketer or communicator these days is worth their salt if they are not using Facebook and Twitter ads. These are both very powerful and very targetable tools which will help you to succeed for very small investments.

If you still need help navigating the ever-changing waters of content management, let’s talk. Feel free to reach out to us at any time about launching your success story.

As always, thanks for the time!