There are so many opportunities for marketers to build their brand and business using social media platforms. In regard to those that offer live streaming, there has been has been a lot of discussion about the growth of these channels. This week’s posts dive deeper on Facebook’s new live streaming feature and how to do Snapchat right, in addition to some great posts on tools to up your Instagram marketing game, documenting content marketing workflows, and conversion rate optimization. Here are five interesting posts that stood out to me this past week:

In part 1 of this series, we discussed ways how small or 1 person marketing departments can do more in less time. Now, we will pull back the curtain and share 11 of the actual tools that make the magic happen. These resources all meet one of two basic needs: doing more professional-quality marketing in less time, and cutting down on time spent completing administrative tasks.

Being a one-person marketing department forces you to master many complex trades. First, you must be a marketing strategist and business analyst who comes up with the big picture goals, campaigns, and calendars. Next, oftentimes you must also be a graphic designer, SEO expert, copywriter, event planner, media buyer, vendor, staff trainer, and overall customer service savant in order to tackle the day-to-day activities.

Looking for a few tips from copywriting experts or ways to help prove ROI for your content marketing efforts? Are you someone who is tasked with generating social media content for your business, but struggle with finding or creating quality images? My favorite posts this week touch on these topics as well as a few others that I found incredibly useful, and I hope you do too.

Facebook Audience Insights is an incredible analytical tool that when used to the fullest, will provide you with a large amount of demographic and behavioral data about your audience and competitors. Facebook Audience Insights is my go-to tool for researching personas and identifying the right audience for Facebook ads. Insights can be accessed through Facebook Ads Manager and is free to use.

In part one of my series on setting up the new Facebook pixel on your website, we focused on creating a pixel and adding it to your website. If you are a marketer that is currently running Facebook ads, these two steps are critical because they allow you to track actions people take after viewing your ad across different devices. By placing the pixel on important pages of your website (like the checkout or thank-you page), you will have access to the information needed to understand who converts as a result of your advertising. In part two of this series, we are going to focus on custom conversions.

If you are a marketer that has incorporated social advertising into your marketing plan, it’s likely that you’ve heard about Facebook’s new conversion pixel that was rolled out in the summer of 2015. If you are new to social advertising, it is important to understand how conversion measurement allows you to track actions people take after viewing your Facebook ads across various devices. By creating a Facebook pixel and adding it to the pages of your website where conversions happen (like a check-out or thank you page), you’ll get a clear picture of who converts as a result of your Facebook advertising.

Just when marketing professionals thought they had a handle on using social media to build brand recognition and sales, social advertising gets thrown into the mix and adds both optimism and confusion. While social media has been an effective way for individuals to learn about new products, brands and services, more and more marketers are accepting the shift in advertising strategy it presents. With the opportunity for hyper-focused segmentation and visual interaction that social ads offer, the percentage of overall marketing budgets spent on social will jump from 10.7 percent in 2015 to 14 percent in 2016. Consider the following stats when making decisions on the best social ad platforms for your product or service.

Facebook is notorious for making frequent policy and security changes, particularly for business pages. Over the past year, our agency has made a considerable effort to educate ourselves on the policies that directly effect our clients as well as ensure that they are setup correctly with a Facebook Business Manager account. As we ramp up and make more recommendations that include Facebook advertising, it was essential that we took the necessary steps that included following Facebook best practices.

In a recent post announcing HubSpot’s launch of their new inbound experience and content optimization system, we gave a brief overview of a tool called Social Inbox.  It’s a resource we’ve been testing out with some of our clients and have found that it has an incredible ability to allow sales and marketing representatives to make social initiatives what they always intended to be – a way to personally connect with and address prospects and customers’ needs. While weeding through the clutter can be a challenge, social media and email marketing are highly recognized by company executives, marketing and sales leads as a way to grow business.  Social inbox incorporates functionality that allows for social conversations to be organized and prioritized in a way that better examines marketing analytics and represents ROI.