Author: Hayley Pinkerfield
The last few years have seen some epic fails as brands have struggled or tried too hard to nail social media marketing. Especially memorable was an early attempt by Chevrolet to tap into the zeitgeist for crowdsourcing by inviting the online community to create ads for the Tahoe marque. Anti-SUV campaigners quickly made themselves known in what became a car-crash of an online campaign.
Fast-forward six years, and McDonald’s launches its McStories promotion using Twitter this January. Unfortunately, it didn’t pay heed to how many Maccy D haters there are out here. The campaign became memorable for just how much vitriol people could pack into 140 characters or less.
What both brands forgot was that the greatest perks of social media – a real-time channel where everyone makes their opinions known – also present the greatest challenge for brands.
You’d think brands would learn from the mistakes of others over time, yet just last week Coca-Cola Australia launched a Facebook word-association campaign that quickly descended into potentially brand-damaging schoolboy humour.
The question these tales of failure begs is why do marketers fail to learn from the visible mistakes previously made by others? Fortunately for the smaller, wiser companies there seems to be a pattern to the repeated mishaps, from which we can learn some valuable lessons: More »
Time is public enemy number one of small business owners. Undoubtedly, it is one of the challenges cited most frequently by our client base. Who doesn’t need more time to make people aware of their services and products; more time to communicate with clients and prospects; more time to analyse the ROI of existing efforts? Yet your competitors are using social media marketing to grow their business and you risk losing new customers if you don’t keep up.
Here are three efficiency measures that will make every minute devoted to social activity work harder for you:
1. Use Buffer to share links
Time waster: One of the biggest time drains in social marketing activity is content sharing. When you stumble across something so relevant and cool you need to share it across all your networks, productivity and focus take an immediate hit.
Solution: Set aside a dedicated chunk of time first thing every day to select the worthiest, most interesting pieces of content in line with your social media strategy. Then use Buffer to automatically share them via your chosen social networks at pre-determined, optimised times throughout the day.
2. Create a ‘stalker’ list
Time waster: There’s little point in interacting with those who don’t move in the right circles or have any influence within your sector.
Solution: Be more selective about who your target with social activity. Begin by creating a list of the 20 people you most want to interact with in social media. Create lists for these people on Twitter and Facebook, and a circle for them on Google+. You should bookmark their blogs, where applicable, subscribe to their feeds and find them on LinkedIn. More »
Companies that are new to social media monitoring frequently wonder both where to begin gathering data, and what to do with it once they have it. With the relationship between consumer and brand being increasingly played out in the digital space, there is plenty that brands can listen for and monitor across the web. In this post, we explore the real-time and long-term benefits of gauging social data.
1. Real-time data mining
The first and most obvious benefit of a social media monitoring system (SMMS) is real-time data mining. Careful listening, monitoring and gauging can provide a goldmine of information, especially when implementing online PR.
Responding to negative commentary before it escalates can be a real challenge. Armed with real-time data and intelligence, online PR practitioners can successfully correct misinformation and take appropriate action.
This can be pivotal in, say, developing a crisis communications strategy, when a brand will need to track everything being discussed about it in the digital space as it happens.
Brand monitoring (tracking all positive and negative mentions of a brand online) has a range of instant benefits that help with gaining that all-important competitive edge. Companies can discover their brand advocates and influencers, as well as any brand detractors, and act accordingly. More »
There has been a lot of buzz about the latest social media research from YouGov these past few days. Much has been made of the finding that two in five (41%) of the UK’s online population claim to be getting bored of social media. While the majority of reports have been fairly negative, this research in fact highlights the ongoing prevalence of social media use, and creates a call for new ways to offer richer engagement.
The first useful finding is that Facebook is still king in terms of active users, with a staggering 95% of 16-20 year olds accessing the site within the last month. YouTube ranks second behind Facebook, with half (50%) of all UK internet users using the site within the last month, followed by Twitter (23%), Windows Live (14%), LinkedIn (13%), Google + (12%) and Spotify (10%).
Spotify’s rising popularity points towards a new breed of social media channels (while primarily a music service, Spotify recently added social media functions) which offer something of purpose beyond communicating with peers.
Backing this up, we see that consumer financial advice website moneysavingexpert.com, now has as many active users as Twitter. Alongside expert articles on financial issues and products are tools for users to create profiles, leave comments and interact in ways not a million miles away from those on the more obvious social networking sites. More »
As your team plugs away creating regular tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos and LinkedIn discussions and you are held ever more accountable for ROI, you may be wondering if it is all worth it.
Anybody still not convinced of the value of social media marketing should refer to data released at the beginning of the year by eMarketer.
The study revealed that social media campaigns can create immediate improvements in brand advocacy and purchase intent levels, and significantly, that these effects can be long-lasting.
Highlights of the study (which focused on US consumer packaged goods brands) are:
· Exposure to social media campaigns immediately increases brand advocates’ likelihood to recommend a product, from 39% before exposure to 61% directly afterwards.
· 55% of brand advocates were still more likely to recommend a product one year after exposure to the social media campaign.
· Brand advocates’ own purchase intent soared from 38% pre-campaign to 69% afterwards, where it remained for three months. After one year, brand advocates’ own purchase intent remained as high as 61%.
These are impressive results, indicating the profound effect that social media marketing can have on word-of-mouth recommendation and purchase intent. Armed with this knowledge, companies that are already participating in social media will want to ensure their social media strategy is optimised to last, and here’s how:
1. Develop clear overall goals
Unfortunately it is not enough to simply post content, even if that content is excellent and uploaded regularly. Keep your brand’s overall goals in mind and evaluate how each individual social marketing activity is geared towards achieving them. More »
It is often surprising to see how little creative effort companies put into their Facebook marketing, particularly given the level of noise they make about using the platform.
Creative resources can be scarcer at small businesses without big social media budgets, and Facebook does have a somewhat static format to work with. Yet it needn’t be costly to come up with some great landing page manipulation, and here are some tips that should offer some inspiration:
1. Use a large call-to action
The most obvious and relevant call to action is to invite visitors to click on the ‘Like’ button of your Facebook page. BMW has consistently used this tactic on its landing page, always updating the look and feel of the graphics in line with its current messaging. ..see BMW Facebook page
2. Create an interactive, user-oriented page
Depending on who your target audience is, encourage interactivity with suitable competitions, games and interactive video. Disney Pixar has done just this, framing activity on its landing page around its latest Disneyland project, John of the Jungle. Also observe Disney’s use of joined-up activity on YouTube, where visitors can upload photos to a competition…see Disney Pixar Facebook page More »
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still perceived as the holy trinity of social marketing activity, based largely on their reach and popularity. Many businesses assume that the big three act as the cornerstone of an effective social media strategy, but is this a) a true reflection of how people are using social media today and b) the best option for every type of company?
Facebook marketing may be a no-brainer for global brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, but for a law firm specialising in divorce, nobody is likely to publicise their personal situation by ‘liking’ your company page. It may be more useful to create expert video advice on how to prevent divorce, or steps to finding the correct lawyer if separation is unavoidable. This video could then be posted to your own website, and adapted into a company blog post to be shared on Twitter.
These steps will help anyone from a reiki healer to a bookkeeper establish which platforms to make part of their social media activity:
1. Discover and investigate your target market by searching Google, Facebook, Twitter Search, YouTube, LinkedIn (especially the Groups and Q&A sections) and niche specific forums. More »
Marketers are placing both social marketing and content marketing among their top business priorities this year, as both channels are set to mature in 2012.
Some 70% of marketers cited social as their top priority for 2012, followed closely by content marketing, cited by 59%, according to the State of Social Media Marketing: Top Areas for Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012 report by Awareness.
Most encouraging is the approach that marketers plan to take in the coming year. Having already established and grown their social presences on the major channels (Facebook and Twitter), they now plan to extend their social media strategy to include previously overlooked sites such as YouTube, foursquare and Tumblr.
Content is playing a major role in the growth of social. Pairing both channels has enabled businesses to boost interactivity on their sites with social sharing buttons, with shared content proving ready-made fuel for social marketing efforts.
Along with this enhanced approach from companies comes a fresh focus on active social media management to improve lead generation and sales from social media.
Said Brian Zanghi, CEO of Awareness: “We expect less-experienced marketers to follow their visionary peers, adopting established practices as they move along the maturity continuum.”
Staffing remains one of the key challenges, according to the report. Most of the 320 businesses surveyed employ between one and three people to monitor their social media marketing campaigns, and nearly half (45%) claim to struggle to find qualified talent to manage most of their new media activity. More »
With the grand unveiling of the redesigned YouTube last December, 2012 is the perfect time to ramp up your viral video strategy.
While the changes were met with uproar from a characteristically vocal hardcore YouTube user base, they actually offer ripe opportunities for brands.
According to Social Media Examiner, there are only three major changes to get to grips with, so here we go:
1. Redesigned home page
If you’ve logged in to YouTube since December, you’ll have noticed its slicker-looking home page. At its heart is a prominently positioned “Subscription Feed”, replacing the previous trending videos – and much better news for brands.
What this means for marketers: As viewers view, rate and comment on your latest viral video, their followers and subscribers will in turn be exposed to your content. No longer will brands have to compete with cute baby and hilarious kitten clips. We expect this move to create a more relevant, if smaller, viral effect.
How to maximise the change: Be consistently active, posting fresh content to YouTube weekly and use calls to action to drive rates, comments and shares of your videos.
2. New channel page
As well as looking different, YouTube channels are now more likely to feature on search results pages for related keywords. More »
It is easy to feel smug as a marketer when your social media plan seems to be working. Who hasn’t felt a warm glow inside as the Facebook fans and Twitter followers finally roll in? Yet it isn’t always easy to convert fans and followers on social media into real-life clients. Each industry poses its unique challenges to conversion, but certain strategies need to be in place for any business to succeed.
A strong and effective blog
Fans and followers need to be offered the chance to get to know a company before they will buy its product or service. Only once the solid foundations of a relationship are in place will they become clients. This means sharing valuable content (see below) in the less salesy environment of a blog, and being sincere in your efforts to help people; the more value you can offer, the more your online connections will appreciate your company and what it has to offer.
Offer high quality content
Without your content, you have nothing. Your company is relating to people through content and what you write will make them decide whether they want to build a working relationship with you. It has to be as perfect as possible, so consider outsourcing your content strategy if resources are scarce. More »
