In 2017, the world is more connected than ever. Social media has been completely ingrained in modern society and is here to stay...for personal and professional interactions.

On a personal level, social media lets us maintain community and sense of group identity, and keep in touch with people all over the world. On a business level, it provides an excellent opportunity to learn about the goals and pain points of prospective customers. Since your best-fit buyer personas are already out there posting their wants and needs online, why not engage with them on those very channels? It’s time your team begins to master the practice of social selling.

If you're looking to add online video to your social media marketing mix and need a strategy and plan, look no further. In this week's edition of Thought Hive, you will get the answer to those burning questions that allow you to jump in and execute like the pro that you are.

Social media is a vast hub where you and your potential customers congregate with their friends, family , and fellow colleagues online. There’s billions of people posting and sharing their thoughts online—making you wonder how in the world can your brand stand out online. In today’s Thought Hive, learn how to use social media to create and nurture an engaged audience around your brand.

In today’s social media landscape, you can measure your social influence, analyze your community engagement, and refine your marketing strategy. There are plenty of opportunities to adjust your social media marketing technique as you develop more campaigns. But you may be wondering on just how to do that especially when incorporating thought leadership marketing into the mix. In today’s FAQ Friday, we have the answers to your social media marketing when it comes to building an effective strategy with thought leadership in mind.

Most marketers, business owners, and professionals understand that there is a need for consistency within the content you are publishing. Consistency in your voice and tone should not only apply to your business blog or content offers. Consistency helps to (re)establish your brand's message within every piece of content you publish while building an engaged community around your brand.

Especially with your thought leadership, you need to have a community to nurture, and you need to have consistent brand messaging in order to build that community. In today’s In-Sites, let’s define thought leadership by breaking down how community engagement and brand messaging work together for your benefit.

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if so, then what is a video worth? Your brand’s message is how your audience can relate to your brand. Meaning that whatever you create whether it’s a blog post or a video, it needs to tie in with your message. In fact, why not take your audience on a journey behind the scenes in order to create new ways to engage with them online? And what better way to do that than with social video. In today’s Halloween Thought Hive, let’s review some key brand messaging tips that will booost your engagement and see how some great examples throughout the various social video platforms.

Most everyone in the business world has heard that social media is the place to be. Since crowds of marketing professionals and agencies alike are pounding the metaphorical social pavement, it can become a bit muddied with poorly-developed strategy and content.

In order to properly develop a winning social media strategy, you should understand the ways in which your business, product, or service can best build a social community using social market analytics to study what, when, how, why, and where your brand should show up and engage with your audience.

In today’s FAQ Friday, we’ve got the answers to your social media questions on how to measure success within the current social landscape for your business.

It’s been over 10 years since social media first graced the world with its presence. Marketers and business owners alike have battled long and hard to develop social media insights to better navigate the world of social engagement.

Building community, extending organic reach, creating a holistic brand, scheduling, time management—all of these are issues at the top of social media marketers’ minds.

With that being said, let’s breakdown the social media landscape with tips from the following thought leaders so that you can master the social media space in your industry.

There is no denying the evergreen importance of social media. It hasn’t graced us with its presence for long but has made an astronomical impact on the way we do business today. According to recent studies:

• Twitter has 313 million people that use its platform
• Instagram has 500 million monthly active users
• Facebook has 1.71 BILLION monthly active users
• 90% of young adults (ages 18 to 29) use social media
• 82% of online adults within the same age group use Facebook
• LinkedIn usage is higher amongst the ages of 30 to 49 and has a higher percentage of users from people who have graduated college than that of a high school diploma.

Yet as staggering as these statistics are, they don’t tell the whole story. In fact, read on for more social media statistics and use these key takeaways for your business as well as for your colleagues in order to share these quick nuggets of information.

Although social media has only been around for about ten years, it has made a HUGE impact on the marketing world. From inbound marketing to content marketing, using social media is impacting better content distribution, community building, and nurtured community engagement.

But you may be asking yourself, what do I need to know specifically about social media in 2016 that will help my online presence? How can I build a socially engaged community with today’s audiences especially with all the innumerable amounts of social platforms out there? And do my x amount of followers, likes, shares, and other engagement analytics really matter towards my overall marketing goals?

As a marketing manager or business owner, it is your job to develop a highly-engaged community, which are the center of your content marketing and inbound marketing efforts. But with all that noise on social media, how can you feel the noise, take it lessons and use it for your own marketing strategy? Well, in today’s blog, we’re giving you the inside scoop on how to have a successful social media marketing strategy for your business in 2016.

When a trending topic hits, the initial impulse seems to be to run to the nearest computer, analyze what’s being said, and write about how that topic is related to your company.

However, sometimes that’s not the case. From your brand to your audience and even within your industry, knowing your brand identity in the digital space is crucial to attracting and converting the right people. Because taking the time to write a blog post using a trending keyword, which in the short term boosts your SEO, it may hit you later in the long run.

In fact, let’s take a look at social media listening and how it will help crush the bandwagon effect in your marketing strategy.

If you have heard it once, you have heard it a thousand times. The fact is that video is here to stay, and the tech boom is allowing us marketers the ability to use it in an innovative way. Every big brand who wants to stick around for the long term is finding great ways to incorporate video into their marketing mix, and the latest buzz in the video industry is live streaming video, and more specifically Periscope, Twitter’s still fairly new baby.

Today’s FAQ Friday zeros in on answering your questions that are new to marketing or new to video, but want to leverage live streaming video as a viable marketing tool for your business.

However, before we get started, not every single Periscope question is answered in this FAQ. But if you have  question that is not listed below, let us know in the comments and we will use your submissions in future FAQ Friday sessions. With that being said, let’s take a look through the window of your brand and get social with Periscope.