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Social media provides a platform for businesses to work from, gives consumers a voice, and helps bridge a connection between seller and buyer. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are just a few outlets for social media.
Following this list will help you stay up to date on industry news, articles, advice and tips on social media marketing.
Aseem Chandra, VP of marketing of the Omniture business ?unit at Adobe Systems, and Mathieu Hannouz , senior product marketing manager at Neolane, discuss whether social media measurement is necessary.
Aseem Chandra, VP of marketing of the Omniture business ?unit at Adobe Systems, and Mathieu Hannouz , senior product marketing manager at Neolane, discuss whether social media measurement is necessary.
Last week I was involved in what one tweeter characterized as an “ROI smackdown.”
I was speaking on a panel for Social Media Week New York when one of my fellow panelists said “This ROI stuff is just a bunch of crap. I’m so tired of it. You can’t measure what you’re doing and people should not even try.”
I began to twitch.
“I agree,” said the second panelist. “Too much focus is placed on measurement.”
My head began to throb.
“As a social media marketer, I can’t measure what I do,” said the moderator. “I just do it.”
At that point, the dam broke.
Rapportive, a startup that makes a Gmail add-on that displays social media info about contacts as you email them, confirmed on Wednesday that it had been purchased byLinkedIn.
Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, confirmed the acquisition onthe company’s blog. “In business, partnership is dating — and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love,” Vohra wrote. Vohra wrote that despite the new ownership, Rapportive will continue building its product. “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.”
The confirmation comes after a report earlier this month from All Things D pegged the purchase price in the “low teens” of millions of dollars. Vohra did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
In this post on Mashable written by Lauren Indvik, the role of Facebook in online retail is highlighted along with some interesting facts about the past year in “F-Commerce” and why some retailers are shutting down their Facebook stores.
From the post, “A Bloomberg report this weekend pointed out that Gap, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom and GameStop have all opened and closed shops on Facebook within the past year — undermining expectations that the social network will become a major revenue driver for retailers over the next decade.” The author points out that Facebook commerce may not be completely responsible for the failings of online retail stores on the social site. “In most cases, retailers have entered the f-commerce market by importing their online catalogs and making them available for purchase in a Facebook app. The experience is nearly identical to shopping on their websites, with two major differences: 1) Shoppers can complete their entire browsing and checkout experience without leaving facebook.com; and 2) the Facebook apps tend to work more slowly. In other words, consumers have little to no incentive to shop via these Facebook apps.”
Let’s keep the conversation moving forward, is F-Commerce a dying entity or are retailers just going about their selling on Facebook in an ineffective manner?
Most people view Twitter as a way to converse with others and publish useful information that others are hopefully interested in reading.
Have you ever thought of it as a highly useful competitive research tool?
Here are a few ways to use Pinterest to boost your search ranking.
Engagement. It’s the buzzword du jour, particularly in regard to Facebook. It may have been good enough a year or two ago to just get a lot of people to like your Facebook Page but now you have to somehow occupy the attention of those people as well.
But just as marketers are feeling the pressure to boost engagement, Facebook is raising the stakes. In early October, the social networking giant introduced some new engagement metrics including People Talking About This. As the name suggests, PTAT (also known as just “Talking About This”) measures user-initiated activities, like posting to a Page’s wall, liking, commenting, sharing a Page post or content on a Page, answering a Question posed to fans mentioning a Page, liking or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.
What is happening with Facebook Marketing? Facebook has become the default social network to focus your promotion efforts on when it comes to marketing on social media. In fact Facebook is now the single largest publisher of all US display ad impressions. It delivers 28 percent of all display ad impression which is more than Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and AOL combined!
Users of social networks are getting tired of sharing — but that doesn’t mean sharing is on the decline. A new study analyzes sharing behaviors on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and makes predictions for the future of sharing.
This post on Mashable by David Berkowitz discusses tips to avoid making mistakes when taking your marketing campaign to Twitter. Berokwitz writes about “hashtag marketing” campaigns becoming high jacked thrusting them towards irrelevance. His first tip is to figure out why you might be using a hashtag in the first place. He says, “Brands tend to use hashtags, predominantly on Twitter and sometimes other services like Instagram, either to create a centralized discussion around their campaign or event, or to jump into conversations that are already happening. Assess what you want to get out of the hashtag before diving in.” The post goes on to speak about other tips for hashtag marketing including determining what kind of hashtag makes sense for your goals, thinking of the worst-case highjacking situation, and more. Berkowitz points out the future of marketing campaigns will certainly incorporate hashtags, so learning from other brands hashtag campaigns is important for campaign success.
Let’s keep the conversation moving forward! What hashtag campaigns have you seen succeed on Twitter or Instagram?
Building up your brand’s social media presence takes time, effort and sometimes a little bit of luck. All of that hard work, however, can be undone by these five common social media mistakes. To avoid a public relations disaster and keep your followers and fans happy, make sure you aren’t committing any of these social media sins.
Looking to double your number of retweets? Here are some best practices to higher retweets and adding followers to your Twitter account.
I doesn't get much easier than this. We've taught you what QR Codes are and how they can benefit your business, now we want to give you some ideas how to use QR Codes and what kinds of products they can be printed on. Feel free to contact us and discuss your creative ideas.
In what may be the first test of Twitter‘s new international censorship strategy, Brazil is suing the company over tweets that warn drivers of police roadblocks and speed traps.
This article posted by Andrew Hanelly on Socialmediatoday discusses four techniques to use when trying to build a strong social media following. First on his list is to “Become a Social Journalist,” stating “Rather than view Twitter or Facebook as potential resource guzzlers that threaten to siphon time away from your reporting, use these tools to animate the editorial thought process for your audience—build communities, increase your readership, gauge reaction to controversial topics, interact with fans and critics alike, and make your content stronger!” Also included on his list is “Start a Conversation,” “Big Fish. Small Fish” and “Be Real.” He says under his “Big Fish” header that it may not always be best to target the largest followed users on Twitter, rather engage in conversation with people who will respond or re-tweet your post to spark interest. Let’s keep the conversation moving! What are your social media strategies in building a strong social media following?
by Robert Gembarski on February 6, 2012 Starbucks has a big brand presence online. Not because they have millions of dollars for Marketing and Advertising, which they do have, but because they are one of the most engaging companies online. If you are fan of Starbucks coffee, and a bit Internet savvy, then chances are you have come across one of if not all of Starbuck’s Social Media Pages. Starbucks has made it a point to take its successful offline branding strategies and implement them online. Its online image and messages have stayed consistent with their brand values, which are honesty, sincerity, and connecting with its consumers on a level unlike any other brand. The offline Starbucks Culture has taken to the airwaves of the Internet and Social Media. Lets take a look at how they became one of the most engaging brands online.
Have you been trying to figure out how to integrate Social Media into the email communications you send out for your Restaurant? Fear not! It's actually far easier than you think.
Social media works best for B2B companies when people connect directly around topics they are passionate about. Connections work even better when no one in the group is pushing a particular agenda. This allows the focus of the communications to be around joint learning, which draws crowds, versus thinly disguised sales pitches, which drives everyone toward the metaphorical door. There is no group better to foster these learning discussions than a company’s channel partners, especially for those companies lucky enough to have built out strong channel partner programs. Channel partners know the niche and know the clients. They also have an independence that provides both authority and authenticity. These partners looked at all the solutions they could sell, and with their reputation on the line, chose to include your offering. When they enter a discussion, and a prospect checks out the channel partner’s background, the fact that they didn’t create a particular product makes it easier for them to be established as providers of valued advice.
Pinterest, the website which lets people collect and share photos online with a “virtual pinboard,” has steadily amassed a very dedicated following of users that spreads far beyond the app-obsessed early adopter crowd. On Tuesday, a new study out of content sharing company Shareaholic showed just how powerful the Palo Alto, California-based startup has become. Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge) Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.
Paul Allen, a Google+ watcher, says the network will hit 100.8 million users by Wednesday evening. Google’s most recent figure for Google+ was 90 million, which Larry Page announced on Jan. 19.
In a blog post (on Google+, of course), Allen noted that the network has grown more than 10% in that two-week period. Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, takes an unusual approach to come by his estimates: He and his staff run hundreds of queries on surnames they’ve been tracking since July and then extrapolate the size of the network. His method seems to work: Allen’s numbers are often very close to figures that Google cites a few days later.
Allen has also predicted that Google+ will hit 400 million users by year’s end. That’s half the number that Facebook currently claims.
In this post on Contentmarketinginstitute, Barry Feldman offers his essential playbook to winning the content marketing Superbowl. Feldman writes, “We’ll call it the Super Content Marketing Bowl, where scoring points means expanding your audience and establishing authority in the things you do best. Before we play ball, we’ll meet at the 50-yard line and introduce some new rules for taking home the content marketing trophy.”
The top three points stated include, “You need a great site to compete,” “Go for the goal” and “Score points.” He says of scoring points, “Promote your blog relentlessly by using the social media tools available to you, creating links where you can, and joining relevant conversations on other blogs. Write guest posts for other blogs, and syndicate your content by finding relevant outlets for publication. Forge relationships with strategic allies,” and more.
Let’s keep the conversation moving forward! With the big game around the corner, do you find this playbook the key to content marketing success? What are your favorite points?
Marketers’ Super Bowl strategies are locked up by now, so consider the suggestions below more of a wish list than a guide. These apply to far more than the Super Bowl, though, so print them out or save them in Evernote and use them throughout the year ahead.
Once you have begun to develop your social media strategy, it does not take long before you realize just how much time and energy it is going to take to develop a marketable following. I am not going to lie to you, getting quality followers is hard work unless you’re a celebrity. In fact, it will devour a good portion of your time and you will come to understand why many of us become social media/marketing experts along the way. If I have scared you a little, don’t fret too much as I plan to...
This post by Alicia Eler on Readwriteweb discusses reasons Pinterest seems to be a more effective platform for social commerce than Facebook. The post discusses Pinterest’s ability to draw interest from its users in brands, not just becoming “fans.”
From the post, “Still, Facebook wrongly conflates the social graph with the interest graph, assuming that if your friends like it you will, too. Facebook is organized around the social graph first, whereas Pinterest is focused on the interest graph. Sure, your Facebook friends are probably all on Pinterest, but the true focus of Pinterest is not social. It's interest.” The article says Facebook is more wrapped up in the user experience and being “social,” while Pinterest understands how to gain brand engagement from its users. According to the post, “Only 1% of Facebook "fans" engage with brands.”
Let’s keep the conversation going! Do you think Pinterest is a better social commerce site than Facebook?
One of Facebook's core missions is helping users share their lives and their favorite things, including brand products, music, movies and more. This type of sharing got a lot easier last fall when Facebook launched Frictionless Sharing, which lets users post activities from around the web to Facebook in real-time.
Frictionless sharing is getting a lot attention from users, and it's changing how brands approach advertising on Facebook.
The concept relies on a new breed of Facebook applications that integrate directly with the content, helping users share the songs they listened to on Spotify or the article they read on the Washington Post. The combination of new apps and sharing data are increasing the accuracy of the Facebook Like, helping advertisers engage with their audiences and deliver better-performing ads.
Articles about B2B social media marketing adoption often paint a rosy picture of the current landscape, but when you dig in deeper, there are many challenges in effectiveness and understanding the results. In a recent survey of 5,000 B2B marketers from all industries, Penton Marketing Services found some pretty revealing statistics. Click the link for the full report (registration form required). 1. 81% of B2B Marketers find online marketing moderately to extremely challenging. 2. 77% of B2B Marketers said their websites are not that effective at generating leads.
Written by Jeff Bullas - Coca Cola has been part of popular culture for over 100 years and has been called a “Vision Brand“. Recently they have realised that their marketing strategy that has worked well for them for decades needed to evolve and as such they are moving from “Creative Excellence” to “Content Excellence”.
Women are earning, spending, and influencing spending at a greater rate than ever before.
Guest Post by {grow} community member Lauren Schaefer She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers. But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over 10 million page views! How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months? Pinterest!
In a big swerve in policy, Google has decided to allow people to sign up using nicknames or other pseudonyms on its growing social network, Google+.
This summer, Google took some flak for booting users who had used fake names on the 7-month-old site.
Members of the tech community, who as early adopters had flocked to the search giant's Facebook alternative, argued that some people are better known on the internet by their assumed names. They also noted that people who used social media as part of social movements, such as those in Iran and Egypt, need to be able to conceal their identity for safety reasons.
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