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

3. Keep it clean and simple

It may be tempting to equate creativity with flashiness, but the results can end up being overcomplicated. A clean and simple design that presents users with only a handful of options like Harley Davidson’s can still be visually impressive…see Harley Davidson Facebook page

4. Promote a cause

Facebook is an ideal setting to promote any charitable tie-ups, as Heinz Ketchup is currently doing with its Wounded Warror Project partnership. Its landing page uses clear, striking calls to action, which perfectly fit Heinz’s distinctive branding. Conducted correctly, philanthropic tie-ups can have remarkably positive effects on engagement, but be aware of the risk of coming across as self-serving…see Heinz Facebook page

5. Encourage a user journey

Visitors landing on Oxfam GB’s page are presented with a clear and colourful series of options that direct them to relevant areas of specific interest. A useful tactic for organisations with lots of content and resources to share, this is an enticing invitation to journey on with a brand. Notice also Oxfam’s prominent placement of a call to action to sign up to its email list…see Oxfam Facebook page

Bonus Tip: Note that each example within this crop employs unique tabs, created within the company pages, that act as fixed landing points for the user. The results are instantly more engaging and sticky than arriving at a standard Facebook Wall.

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.

We’d love to hear if these findings fit with your own experiences and plans for social media activity. Is your business planning to ramp up its strategy this year? Will you be making any additions to your social media team, or are the company purse strings still restrictively tight? Please post your comments below.

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Everybody gets the importance of SEO to drive traffic to your blog; adding keywords is standard practice. But in a persuasive article for Clickz.com, Lee Odden argues that it is possible to become blinkered in the pursuit of top keywords.

Social media optimisation (SMO) – essentially optimising social content to drive direct traffic to blog content – can also push up search engine rankings for blog web pages.

But before you embark on making your blog (and website) social media friendly – here are six questions Odden suggests considering:

· Who is the blog intended to influence? Are you trying to reach prospects, customers, employees, industry analysts, reporters or fellow bloggers within your sector?

· What blog content will you offer to meet the needs of your target audience?

· How will you develop a structured blog content plan while addressing those customer needs and telling your brand’s story?

· What search keywords and social topics are relevant to your target audience?

· Where does your blog content fit in the customer lifecycle of communication with the brand?

· If the blog content is properly optimised and socialised, how will it influence (directly or indirectly) measurable business outcomes?

Remember, it’s one thing to attract people to read your blog, but getting them to engage and share your content is quite another challenge. Ask questions, invite your target audience to share content ideas, and always offer recognition to those who participate.

Once you stop focusing on your own brand story, and turn the spotlight onto your community – they will start to tell your story for you. And with the mechanics of social media working for you, so will their friends, and their friends’ friends – and the rest of their online networks and communities.

A brand new study of 2,500 participants from the New York Times in conjunction with Latitude Research reveals the top 9 reasons (or skip straight to the end for a somewhat surprising Key Takeaway):

1. Your customers don’t trust you

Corporate mistrust is rife. Globally, only 56% of people trust businesses “to do what is right” (Source: 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer), falling in the US, the UK and Japan from 2010 to 2011. People won’t share your content if there is a lack of trust, so use the social space to drive honest and open public conversations.

2. Customers don’t care about your brand

Sorry, but customers are a fickle bunch. If you don’t offer at a minimum: valuable information, great deals and a forum to meet other like-minded people, they will look elsewhere. Don’t just feed them what they want; actively exceed their expectations.

3. Your posts are boring

Intriguing and funny content gets the most shares. Look to Volkswagen for inspiration. Their Star-Wars spoof video ‘The Force’ racked up over 40 million views. Of course, it helps to have an established power brand behind you, but the principle is to create ‘got to share it’ content.

4. Your content lacks passion

Generally speaking, people care about causes more than brands. Whether it’s eradicating poverty, saving the Polar bears or helping a local charity, many people give their time and money to advance things they care about. Your brand may not have a humanitarian cause, but reveal the passion behind your product or service to get people excited about something bigger.

5. People share to build their social networks

Research has found that people value relationships with other people over relationships with brands. Since they’re seeking an online community, you can use your brand to help create a platform for that community. Offer content that facilitates people in finding kindred spirits and then staying connected to those people. Red Bull did just this recently, creating a weekend playlist and inviting people to share YouTube links to their own favourite dance tunes.

6. Consumers, like everyone, seek validation

We’re all still just insecure, gawky teenagers at heart. We want to build credibility in the eyes of our peers, and come across as experts – and content sharing is the perfect medium for both. Some 68% of the New York Times study respondents said they share content as an advertisement for themselves (or to better reveal who they are). Appeal to customers’ vanity by offering intelligent, cool content that will boost their kudos by sharing it.

7. People share to manage information

Social media marketing scientists have found that people process information more “deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully” through sharing it, and also understand and process information better through reading others’ responses to it. Be sure to offer thought-provoking content and invite feedback and comments from your audience.

8. You’ve misunderstood your audience

Think back to marketing school and the concept of a marketing persona. The concept encourages understanding your audience by creating detailed pictures of your ideal target customer. The New York Times study came up with six sharing personas. Interestingly, five of these sharing types actually identified email alongside social channels as a preferred sharing tool.

9. People love to share content via email

This study confirms that social media users have by no means abandoned email. In fact, they see it as a valuable and personal means of sharing content. With this in mind, it may help to look back to last week’s post on integrating social marketing with email.

Key Takeaway:

People’s primary motivation for sharing content is the relationships they have with one another. Therefore, aim to create content that enhances consumers’ relationships with one another rather than with your brand.

Source: Socialmediaexaminer.com

The study from social media marketing solutions firm R2integrated in November 2010, shows that of those surveyed, more than two in five said that time and resources was the greatest barrier to social media marketing. Return on investment was also a concern.

The findings indicate that although companies in the first instance are attracted by relatively low initial costs of a social media programme, internal time and resources to maintain and monitor a company’s online presence is often under estimated.

Matt Goddard, CEO at R2integrated, quoted in eMarketer said “Most marketers understand the basic need to provide useful content to social spaces, but they aren’t able to keep up with the ongoing publishing demands, and don’t know how to manage conversations around their content within a community of interest.”

The demands of producing relevant online content to engage consumers, is not a problem that is going away soon, since consumer demand to engage with the content and share it with others continues to grow. However there could be an answer for the savvy marketer in 2011 according to another survey … 55% of companies outsource content marketing,

Significantly the dramatic rise in fans over the past 16 months followed the company’s decision to regularly update the content, as well as create more than 200 different fan pages. The overall number of fans are spread across the company’s pages which feature all of Disney’s films and characters – Disney’s main Facebook page has 15,060,404  fans followed by the Toy Story page with 11,416,127.

Statistics for the company’s social media activities are similarly impressive. Fans have commented more than 1.5 million times and ‘liked, shared or commented’ on Disney’s content more than six million times. Disney achieved 60 million Facebook ‘likes’ in its first year, and now attracts about five million new fans every month. 70% of the company’s fans are women.

Notably, in December 2009, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer joined the non-executive board of Walt Disney, regarded by many as an effort to improve Disney’s consumer internet and social networking offerings – especially as it is one of the few such companies with such an iconic and personal relationship with its customers.

The findings relate closely to a recent survey from King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42 – the 2010 Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability” study, which showed 73% of US companies with a social media strategy using branded content in their campaigns.  Nearly half of respondents regarded original content as an “extremely important” part of a successful social media campaign.

A full report is to follow but the sneak preview further shows that companies with 1000+ employees are 60% more likely to outsource content marketing than micro companies (less than 5 employees).

While understandable, the post suggests that all companies should be outsourcing part of their content marketing for the following reasons:

1) Someone out there will have better ideas than you do.

2) You don’t have time to do everything.

3) You will not be as focussed as your appointed content marketing agency would be.

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”