You brand voice is how your company communicates with the world. You need to have a strong personality and point of view and you have to own it. Confidence is key; this is how you get it.

Establish your character
You can't define your voice until you define who you are. Choose three words as the pillars of your brand and continue to build from there. Decide what you stand for, what you're best at and what kind of people you are talking to. Once you establish your values, your passion will do the talking for you.

Decide what makes you authentic
Most brands/products/services are created with the core desire to solve a specific problem. Figure out what you're solving for and why your solution is better than anything else available. Zappo's made a name for themselves not just by selling shoes, but by showcasing their incredible customer service as a differentiator. That's the kind of story you want to tell.

Make yourself an authority
Don't just sell hats, be a hat expert. Blog about the newest innovations in hat making. Send your customers an email with a guide for which hats to wear in what season. Instagram cute pictures of dogs wearing hats. Compliment what you sell with valuable information that makes you a resource for your customers that builds trust and establishes credibility.

There are hundreds of tools to measure social media and even more opinions about which metrics are the most important. The fact of the matter is that Social Media, though growing at an alarming rate, is still struggling to define standard KPI's across industries and measure them accurately. Not to mention, it's all rather subjective.

Not all companies value the same things
The social media analytics a company pays attention to has less to do with industry standards and more to do with the values of the individual company. Are you driven by sales? You are going to be tracking social conversions. Do you pride yourself on strong customer service? You'll be focused on response rates. Trying to grow a community of supports? Follower counts will be your main driver. It's all about deciding what's important to you.

We still can't put an accurate $ value on social media
Social conversions only measure people that have directly followed the path from one of your social media links to your website and then engaged (either via a purchase, newsletter sign-up or contact form). This leaves a lot of information unaccounted for. Social media sites like Instagram don't direct back to your website seamlessly and it's still not possible to calculate the impact social media has on creating brand awareness and desire to a specific dollar amount. It's frustrating for marketing departments everywhere, but that doesn't mean you should give up on social media. Focus on building your social community and the sales will follow suit, even if you can't quantify them as well as you'd like.

Analytics are only as valuable as what you do with them
The information you get from your analytics should be a huge part of your social listening strategy. Collecting numbers and figures should not just be to appease the C-Suite and show follower counts and conversion. A good social media manager pays attention to things like sentiment and engagement so you can figure out which content is most successful with your audience. And then they make more of it!

So you want to add an Instagram feed to your blog and the idea of anything remotely resembling code gives you the shakes? Never fear, we're here to help!

There is an incredible website called snapwidget.com that makes a simple to use widget that you can embed into your website - it will auto populate your Instagram onto your site. As long as you can handle filling in a simple form and copying and pasting a little bit of HTML code, you're in business.

1. Go to snapwidget.com.

2. Fill out the form. (You can opt to pull in a feed from your account or a feed from a specific hashtag.)

3. Copy the code that is generated when you submit the form. It will be in HTML.

4. Navigate to the back end of your blog and select an HTML widget. Typically there is a widget menu in the "layout" section. If you don't know how to do this, ask the person that helped you set up your blog.

5. Paste the code into the HTML widget. Save it. Make sure the widget is located where you want it to live in your blog's layout.

And you're done!

The web is saturated with ways to get customers' attention, but the power of email marketing is not to be downplayed. Subscription acquisition can be a challenge, and those newsletter templates may make your skin crawl (oh god, please, anything but HTML!) but the end result can be quite rewarding when done well. Here's some simple, user friendly tips to optimize email for your company within minimal effort.

Sign up for an email management service
For as little as $10-15 a month, a service like MailChimp will help you organize all of your subscribers into groups, easily design email blasts, optimize your newsletters for spam filters and track analytics for opens and click-throughs after you hit send.

Create a simple and highly visible call-to-action
Anyone who visits your website should be able to easily sign up for your email newsletter. Make it obvious, make it quick and preferably place it at the top right hand corner of your site where people's eyes are naturally drawn.

Use an incentive
Give people a reason to sign up. Are you an ecommerce site? Offer a coupon or discount code. Are you more of a content creator? Offer a premium white paper download. Whatever you offer, make sure it's automatically sent to new subscribers and that you use a code or link that you can track. This will start the process of turning your subscribers into loyal customers.

Be Clever
It's important that your emails don't feel too invasive. Instead of using aggressive subject lines like "FREE FREE FREE" or "THE ONLY SALE THAT YOU WILL EVER NEED" (which are likely to get picked up by spam filters anyway), try to write something a little more engaging and personal. Email marketing is the perfect place to exercise your brand voice and stand out amongst the spammers.

Track your stats and use them to your advantage
Do emails you send on Friday at 3pm have a 30% higher open-rate than those sent on Monday at 9am? Are image links being clicked on 50% more often than text links? Use this knowledge to your advantage and create your email design and schedule based on it. Simply spending 15 minutes studying the statistics from your previous campaign can yield a higher return for your next one.