Category: social media
Don’t believe what your friends say, OF COURSE it matters.
I’m always a bit surprised when I see organisational Twitter accounts with less than 100 followers, there’s plenty of them, I think to myself, are they really trying here?
Follower Build:
It’s really not so hard to do, all you need to do is follow some relevant people, a proportion of those will follow you back, those who don’t follow back you stop following over a period of time and then repeat. Pretty soon you have a few thousand.
Content:
Perhaps then a follower build isn’t the main stumbling block, being so easy and all, perhaps it’s a content issue, Twitterer’s block perhaps, faced with 140 characters and not wanting to seem superficial, what the devil do I write. And yet there are limitless options, photos, videos, links to blogs and articles, so it can’t be that can it?
Organisational Politics:
Maybe there’s a concern that their organisation will not approve of the content, or perhaps all the relevant stakeholders cannot agree. In these still pioneering Twimes, anyone with a Twitter account or Facebook page thinks they’re an expert because in the land of the blind, a one eyed tweeter can be king.
The Business Development dude scratches their head, they know who they want to talk to, but how to do it?
The Big Cheese won’t take a phonecall, their email is screened, you can’t exactly just turn up in the foyer – can you? Follow them out of the building, effect a chance meeting in Starbucks? No, that’s not sales, that’s stalking. However, The Big Cheese did put their profile on LinkedIn last year, right around the time the company was being taken over and lately they set up a Twitter account, hmm…
Research from B2B Magazine suggests that this little scenario is becoming more familiar to B2B marketers searching for leads – at least in the US. At Feb 2012, 57% said online was contributing the most qualified leads to their businesses. While email is still out in front, social media is now the second most widely adopted strategy.
Weirdly, only 5 percent thought their social media efforts were well optimised though. That seems very low and suggests that businesses are not yet at the point where they will commit a dedicated resource to social media – labour intensive that it is. More »
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 »
