Social Media Posts That Engage and Get Clicks

We've encouraged you, on many occasions, to get active on social media to promote your business. While our previous blog posts have offered valuable advice on what to post, it can be tough to know how to craft a compelling message if you're not a professional wordsmith. The following tips offer helpful suggestions on how to grab your customers' attention and get them to interact with your business more deeply:

• Use more action words. Posts filled with verbs and adverbs tend to engage readers and deliver better results than those that have a lot of nouns and adjectives. For example, the headline
       Mask Your Ticket Quickly and Easily
  is likely to get a higher click-through rate than
       Traffic School is a Good Way to Mask Your Citation
• Post more links. It may seem obvious, but…accounts that post more links get more clicks. If you want to drive more traffic to your site, at least half of your posts should include a link to your site. But don't go overboard; keep the number of posts with links to your site to under 80% of your total social media activity. If every post you put up includes your link, you'll come across as "spammy."
• Complete your profile. Inexperienced marketers neglect this simple but effective step. Be sure all of your social media profiles include a professional photo, a brief but compelling bio, and a link to your site. Accounts that provide all three of these items have more followers and more engagement than those that don't.
• Don't talk about yourself (except in your bio). A business's social media posts that are too personally self-referential may catch the interest of your family and close friends, but may not necessarily draw potential customers. Talk more about them to get them to click, share, and engage. (If you participate in some activity that your clients might find interesting, it's certainly okay to share those experiences with them. It's attention-grabbing and provides a connection. But make the post relate to your audience somehow, not just all about you.)
• Provide a clear call to action. If you want more clicks, ask for them! Don't just provide a link, explicitly tell readers how to follow up. For instance, you might change
       3 Tips for Safer Winter Driving: www.link.com
  to
       3 Tips for Safer Winter Driving? Click here to learn more: www.link.com!
  
  Further, be creative with your calls to action. Don't use "click here" all the time. Try alternatives like "Check out this new [post/product/etc.]:" or "What do you think about [some event/claim]?" to encourage a response.

Greater social media engagement and more clicks can help you to draw more customers. Make these simple tweaks to your social media activity to get the marketing results you want!

Make Sure You're Mobile-Friendly

Are you leaving money on the table because your outdated technology isn't optimized for today's consumers? Just 51% of small businesses have websites. And while four out of five consumers use a smartphone to shop, a recent survey found that over 93% of small business websites aren't compatible with mobile devices.

TSC Has You Covered

If you've taken advantage of the Web design services of Traffic Safety Consultants, Inc., (TSC) you're ready for the future! TSC provides our affiliated partners with sites—including the "front end" and the educational content presentation—that are engineered to be mobile-friendly. Our Web- and curriculum development teams deploy state-of-the-art Internet technologies to ensure that you and your students enjoy the best online experience possible.

If You're Providing Your Own Website...

Driving schools and traffic schools who have developed their own websites could be missing out if the site isn't optimized for the mobile era! Nearly half of mobile consumers won't return to a site that doesn't load properly. And Google recently began expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.

If you haven't yet taken steps to ensure that your customers are having a good mobile experience, consider these points:

• Is your site easy to read on a mobile device? If your users have to pinch-to-zoom to read your content, your site isn't mobile-friendly.
• Is your site easy to navigate? Navigation should be intuitive and smooth. Thirty percent of mobile shoppers will leave a site and go to a competitor's if they have a bad experience.
• Is your site designed to be responsive? This means the code will adjust the presentation according to the screen size of the user—whether they are on a desktop, tablet, or phone.
• Does your site load quickly? As with 0-to-60 and quarter-mile runs, every second counts. Users will become frustrated—and leave for a better site—if they have to wait a long time for your pages to load.

If you don't know if your site is ready for mobile users, consider taking Google's mobile-friendly test. Google will grade your site by looking at how "Googlebot" sees your home page, and a good score means your site is ready to go!

The Bottom Line

Today's shoppers are using mobile devices to search for products and services, and the next generation of consumers is even more dependent on these technologies. Make sure your business gets found and that your site makes it easy for visitors to get what they need!

Important Reminder: Changes in CA Booklet Administration

This post details changes to traffic violator school (TVS) administrative procedures. Please read it carefully. Schools are responsible for implementing these changes, effective April 4, 2016, and may be subject to regulatory actions for failing to comply.

New Regulatory Requirements

Under new regulator-imposed requirements, TVS students completing a booklet-based home study program will be required to pass (rather than merely complete) the "Participation Questions" portion of their student materials. This is intended to fulfill the regulatory mandate for "procedures used as an equivalent to the classroom requirement for student participation" (California Code of Regulations (CCR) §345.30(e)(2), §345.31(f)(3)(B). Consequently, booklet students, going forward, will be required to correctly answer at least 70% (16 of the cumulative 22) of the participation questions before their final exam may be graded. Further, regulators have determined that TVSs must actively present students with feedback on the final examination (CCR §345.30(d)(1)(J)), rather than merely passively addressing student queries about the final exam questions that they might have missed.

TSC's Simple Solution

As your TVS curriculum provider, Traffic Safety Consultants, Inc., (TSC) has made these compulsory changes easy to address with an update the CA Course Provider Administration website.

Administering the Participation Questions

TVS personnel administering book students will have to grade each student's Participation Questions response form and, if a student gets a passing score, check the box in the student's record in the CA Course Provider database to indicate that. The system will not allow a student's final exam to be scored until that student has achieved a passing score on their participation questions. Students who fail to achieve a passing score on their participation questions must have their student materials returned to them so they can correct any wrong answers they provided. Students should return corrected answer sheets to the school so the participation questions can be graded again.

Providing Reasoning and the Correct Answer on the Final Exam

Administrative personnel must also enter students' answers to the final exam questions. The computer will score the students' test and will automatically generate and send an email to the student specifying: the question(s) that student answered incorrectly, the incorrect answer given, the correct answer, and the reasoning behind the correct answer. If a student did not provide your school with an email address, this information must be sent to the student's mailing address.

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TSC representatives will be contacting schools to explain the administrative website updates and provide training on the new procedures.

New sample instruction sheets (the first page of the student forms sent to booklet students), in English and Spanish versions, are available for download from the CA Course Provide Administrative website booklet materials download page (must be logged in).

Please inform all administrative staff working for your school of these procedural changes and ensure that they are properly trained to distribute the new instruction sheets and use the new functionality on the CA Course Provider Administration website. Schools are responsible for these changes, effective April 4, 2016.

If you have any further questions about this mandatory administrative procedural change, please feel free to contact your TSC representatives.