​Social media is an incredibly important tool for increasing your audience and building connections.
These connections can then be leveraged into sales. Most business people know this. But how this gets done can be a bit of a mystery.

If you feel a little lost on what you should be doing on a daily and weekly basis, read on.

Daily Social Media Actions
First, before presenting the daily to-do list it's important to understand these things needn't be
performed all at one time. You don't need an hour first thing in the morning. These tasks can be tackled in those stolen moments throughout your day when you find yourself waiting on something else: waiting for a meeting to start, waiting on a friend for lunch, waiting on a conference call for the
speaker/host to arrive, on your morning commute, or over your morning coffee. You can even do them at night when watching TV or while you use one of the machines at the gym.

However you decide to fit these actions in, you want to do the following on a daily basis:

• Respond to all comments on your social media and blog posts. Don't just like them. Use the comment as a first-step for communication. It's a way to reach out and show the social media algorithms that you and your audience are engaging with one another.
• Post something of value for your audience and use a lead in. The lead in should invite further engagement. For articles, the lead in can tell them what you think they'll get from it or ask a question about it. For images, ask a question or invite them to share their own. For video, use a teaser like "I would love this if it happened to me."
• Comment on a blog post, post to a group, or answer a question on a site other than your own.
• Follow at least 2 people who could be helpful to your business. This means someone who falls into your ideal customer demographic or someone who can teach you something that will be beneficial to your business. Comment on one of their posts to begin establishing a relationship.

If you have more time, just do more of these activities.

Weekly Social Media Activities
Social media is not an exact science. While there are best practices, until you start experimenting with posting, you won't know which ones apply to your audience. For that reason, there's a lot of analysis required to understand what you should do more of and what isn't working. So...

On a weekly basis you want to make time for:

• Noting the details of your most popular post. What was it about, where was it published, at what time, and on what day? These important factors can help you better understand what works for your audience and when they are most likely to engage with you.
• Schedule posts for the week. Yes, you do want to interact with people on social media in an unplanned way but you should also post at strategic times and experiment with off-business hours.
• Check Google Analytics to see what social media site refers the most traffic to you. That should become your primary post location (outside of your own space).
• Clean your follower lists. Are any of your followers bots? Are any spamming you with sales messages? Remove those who fall into these categories. No reason to have inflated following numbers for people/bots that will never buy from you.
• Look over new followers and interact with those who are in your ideal customer demographic or those who can add value to your business.
• Look for good content and add it to your content file for future use.

Social media, like any other relationship, takes time. It's the long game that matters. Look for ways to add value for your followers every day. If you give more of yourself, you'll get more in return.

Christina R. Green
teaches small businesses, chambers, and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives' Magazine. She is a regular blogger at Frank Kenny. We purchase rights to this content for Chamber Nation customers.

According to a recent survey from Manifest, an online business guide, 53 of businesses are using content marketing as part of their marketing strategy. But is it worth the time investment?

What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is creating content your ideal customer is interested in, in a medium they enjoy, that will inspire, educate, or entertain. The goal of content marketing is to become a resource for your target demographic in order to help them know, like, and trust you and thus want to do business with you. It is a long-term play, not a short-term win. In content marketing, you use content to create a trusted relationship with your potential customer and that can't be done overnight.

Done correctly, it's a large investment in time. But does the investment pay off?
The answer to that depends on how you "do" content marketing. You can do it poorly. In those
situations, it's best not to attempt it at all. Consider the investment in content marketing worthwhile if you... Research Your Ideal Market Ahead of Time The beauty of content marketing is providing your ideal audience with resources they need. You are solving a problem or helping them solve it. The more personalized advice you can offer, the greater the return.

If you're just going to churn out generic pieces, don't waste your time.
Will Commit to It You want your potential customer to remember you as a resource. If you publish or share something only on occasion, it will be difficult to build a reputation as a helpful site. Instead, commit to whatever type of content you can and publish consistently. It needn't be every day but your audience should be able to follow your posting schedule.

Strategically Share It
Most businesses get stuck on the content creation but that's not the only part you have to commit to. If you create content that nobody sees, it doesn't matter how great it is. Use scheduling software to make sure each of your posts is shared with your social media profiles. As your content library grows, don't forget to use an evergreen retweeter to reschedule older posts that still have value. You spent a lot of time creating those posts, don't let them die because they fall off the main blog page.

Track the Popular Posts
When creating your posts for your audience, pay attention to what they like. What resonates with
them? Long posts or shorter ones? Meaty research posts or stories? Words or video? Images or
podcasts? Noting what your audience responds to is one of the pillars of good content marketing:
Create something of value in a medium they enjoy.

Create What They Want
Content marketing is not about what you want to publish. If you want it to be trusted, you need to show both sides. For instance, if you sell AC units and even though you want to sell a new AC unit to everyone in the county, you can't produce content that says the minute the AC unit is on the fritz, it needs to be replaced. Yes, that might be the ultimate goal and mean more revenue for your comp
any but the content you create needs to be formatted around something believable and trustworthy. Break down what goes into deciding when you need a new unit. People will trust you more if you say replacement is not always the most cost-effective option.

Finally, the trend in content these days is one-stop shopping. People don't want to spend hours
researching things on the Interwebs. They want one "ultimate guide" to addressing their problem. They want one place to find everything they need to know about the subject. This is great news for content producers because your business likely has tons of best practices in the buying process and educational information about your products. In content marketing, quality wins over quantity so well-researched and thought out content beats slapped together drivel any day.

Are you still wondering if all this work in content marketing is worth it?
If you can commit to the necessities listed earlier in this article, there's a good chance that content
marketing can help you win more customers and improve your word of mouth and social media shares.

But you won't really know without trying and you can't just experiment with content marketing over a
week-long period. You need to make an investment in it for at least six months. If you don't think you can do that, ask yourself if you want to be one of the 47% of businesses who aren't doing it. Maybe that's okay. But you should definitely find out which group your competition is in before you decide you can't take it on.

Christina R. Green - teaches small businesses, chambers, and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ Magazine. She is a regular blogger at Frank Kenny where Chamber Nation buys rights to this content for its customers.

​Dear Customers,

We have just added the ability to have $0.00 renewals.  In the past we, did not create invoices for members with $0.00 member plans or overrides; now we can create them for $0.00 member plans.  ($0 overrides will still be excluded.)

To enable this, you only need to check the box for " Allow for $0.00 member sign-up " in the New Member Registration Config menu.

This will probably be used most often for organizations who want to give members the first term for free and then start collecting dues the second term.  (You'll want to use this in conjunction with "change to at renewal" in the member plans.)  It can also be used if the org wants to have an expiration date for full members even if they don't pay dues.  (List-Only and Prospect types will still not be invoiced.)