5 Tools For a Social Media Makeover

by on May 21, 2013

If you aren’t seeing the ROI you are looking for, it’s time for a social media makeover.

Follow the tips from this blog and I can guarantee you’ll have more profitable social media.

social media makeover

social media makeover

5 Tool for a Social Media Makeover

By Ian Cleary, Contributing Columnist to {grow}

In the world of social media it’s important to step back and review what you have done and implement changes on a regular basis. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time for a makeover.  Here are five cool tools you can use that just might deliver some new “oomph” to your social media efforts:

On average only 16 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates.  Suck!  This is a well-known number but something you should completely ignore because there’s no reason why you should be average!

But even if 50 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates there’s still the other 50 percent that don’t see them at all. And on top of this are they actually reading them? How often do you read all the updates on your Facebook page?

One strategy for ensuring more of your fans see your updates is converting your fans to eMail Subscribers.  This means you can communicate with them over both channels and have a better chance of reaching them.

You can add a customized application to your Facebook page with a provider such as Heyo, Tabsite or a run a competition using Shortstack and start building those email subscribers.

Social media is not necessarily all about sales but I’m sure you’d like to see some action from the updates you make.  This may be visits to your website where you get people spending time there, subscribing to your email list or buying your products or services.

See full story on businessesgrow.com

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How Do You Calculate ROI?

by on May 20, 2013

How do you calculate ROI (return on investment) for social media marketing?

Start by understanding the process, and knowing your goals

How to Calculate ROI

How to Calculate ROI

How Should You Calculate ROI?

Marketing is increasingly metrics-driven. This has been a terrific evolution for our profession because it enables us to sit at the C-suite table with equal legitimacy and credibility, not to mention the fact that we operate far more efficiently than before. Enterprise executives love anything that demonstrates achievement in concrete terms. But the discussion of which metrics to use, how to define them and when to use them is far from finished.

Marketing return on investment (marketing ROI), otherwise known as return on marketing investment (ROMI), seems like a straightforward concept that borrows from our ethren in finance. But if you peel this onion you’ll uncover a raft of questions that marketers frequently struggle with. For example:

We’re not going to play Solomon and make those choices for you, but we do want you to consider what goes into those numbers and how you should represent them to your peers in the C-suite. Sometimes you will be ordered by non-marketers to assemble those numbers in a particular way, and your options will be limited or nonexistent. In other companies, no one will have a clue. But whatever you do, transparency is your best ally. Spend plenty of time explaining your underlying assumptions and soliciting feedback.

Our own working definition is this: Take the revenue attributable to marketing efforts and divide it by marketing spend, which includes the costs associated with advertising and effort. We obviously want positive results greater than 1.

Another distinction to keep in mind: The investment portion of the calculation is not investment as we understand it in other business functions (plants, inventories, etc.).Unless marketing is buying some kind of durable infrastructure, everything is expensed. But here’s what is most important: Marketing expenditures should be understood as risk. For some people, this may be a distinction without a difference. In reality this implies that past experiences are more important for marketing decisions than it is for other functions. As an aside: The nature of risk and managing it appropriately are topics that are not well-understood by most people. This can make the discussion even more difficult.

In March, 2012 the Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association undertook a study of 243 marketing executives to understand if and how they use ROI measures for budgeting. The study found that 57% do not use ROI in their budgeting process. Instead, 68% base their decisions on historical spending and 28% “go with their gut”.7% don’t use anything (except, perhaps, avado).

We are not surprised by these numbers. But there’s no one to blame. Marketing measurement science (for lack of a better term) is still in its infancy, even though we speak frequently about being “metrics-driven” and the evolution of our thinking over the last decade or two. There are lots of good ideas out there, but our profession has a long way to go before we reach even a modicum of standardization. The chaos notwithstanding, you still need to emace ROI calculations to show your bosses and peers that you are taking seriously the need to demonstrate marketing’s value to the enterprise.

See full story on leadformix.com

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4 Best Practices for Brands Sharing Content for Twitter Yahoo News

by on May 19, 2013

Twitter Yahoo

Yahoo now including Twitter in News

 

Twitter Yahoo Partnership will Bring Tweet into Yahoo Newsfeed

By Victoria Harres, Published May 17, 2013

Last month a single 61 character tweet (12 words as a matter of fact) caused the S&P 500 to drop $136 Billion in mere minutes.

It boggles the mind and makes one try to find some sense in it. What does it mean?

Well, it certainly proved the tremendous reliance we all have on the content that comes from Twitter. Some would say investors rely too much on automated trades based on tweets.

It also proved the great value our society places on Twitter as a provider of content and information.

Tweets will now be featured in Yahoo’s news feed.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that it was taking Twitter very seriously indeed.

In her blog, Merissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo stated, “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to ing Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed.”

She went on to say that over the next few days users would begin to see Tweets “personalized to their interests and preferences” appear in their content stream, delivering on earlier promises that the search and new aggregation giant would move toward more personalization of content for its users.

Yahoo’s big search competitor, Google wasn’t able to keep its former relationship with the microblogging giant. Twitter results disappeared from Google some time back, making this an quite a win for Yahoo.

See full story on business2community.com

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In Japan, Twitter is As Big as Facebook

by on May 19, 2013

twitter japan

Japan Twitter uses rivals Facebook in size

 

Jim Dougherty Contributing Writer

A report from globalwebindex this week showed that Twitter is nearly as popular as Facebook in Japan. I really don’t know what to make of this information, but here is a table describing the popularity of social networks in Japan.

While this is an interesting development, Twitter’s Japanese popularity reminded me of the 1984 international hit song “Big in Japan” by German synth-pop group Alphaville. The song itself is a tribute to the British band, Big in Japan which featured band members from the KLF, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but it seems as good a song as any to celeate Twitter’s success in the land of the rising sun. You might have thought otherwise, but “Big in Japan” was Alphaville’s greatest international hit, although their song “Forever Young” was covered by Laura Branigan and sampled by Jay-Z, in addition to being a staple of high school dances in the mid-eighties (although my personal favorite was Flock of Seagulls “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)”).

(If big production isn’t your thing, check out this version of the song from Hungarian Idol):

BioTwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedInLatest PostsJim DoughertyWriter and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.comI aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.@jimdoughertyWriter about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdoughertyJim Dougherty+Jim DoughertyLatest posts by Jim Dougherty (see all)Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed – May 19, 2013Report: Twitter is big in Japan (Facebook big) – May 19, 2013Infographic: Is the value of Foursquare overstated? – May 18, 2013Infographic: Size isn’t everything when it comes to social platforms – May 18, 2013Infographic: Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and G+ – May 17, 2013

BioTwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedInLatest PostsJim DoughertyWriter and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.comI aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.@jimdoughertyWriter about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdoughertyJim Dougherty+Jim DoughertyLatest posts by Jim Dougherty (see all)Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed – May 19, 2013Report: Twitter is big in Japan (Facebook big) – May 19, 2013Infographic: Is the value of Foursquare overstated? – May 18, 2013Infographic: Size isn’t everything when it comes to social platforms – May 18, 2013Infographic: Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and G+ – May 17, 2013

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdougherty

See full story on leaderswest.com

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Radio Show Host Warren Whitlock Named Top 10 Influencer by Forbes

by on May 12, 2013

Las Vegas: Radio Show Host Warren Whitlock, publisher of this blog and others has been named a “Forbes top 10 social media power influencer”

Forbes Top Influencer Warren Whitlock

Radio Show Host Warren Whitlock

Whitlock, active online for the last 32 years, best-selling author, speaker and serial entrepreneur in publishing, advertising and marketing consulting and more commented “I am always happy to be acknowledged by these lists. None of these accolades suggest that there’s some competition and a winner but it’s nice to be included with colleagues that I know are helping business take advantage of the revolution in marketing that we currently call social media

“Social media tools that we have today have helped to enable a change from the 20th-century model of doing business where a centralized organization could push out a marketing message to the masses, limited only by the large budgets it took to communicate one way

“thanks to the Internet and especially these tools, consumers have the expectation that communications will be two-way conversations. Those businesses that learn to implement this in every part of their business will see their best years ever while those who continue to try to control a message and push consumers into old models will go downhill.”

Radio Show Host

Whitlock is the author of two best-selling books on social media, including the first book about Twitter and mobile marketing “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing are Changing the Way We Do Business” and “Profitable Social Media: Business Results without Playing Games”

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5 Tools Send Marketing Opportunities to Your Inbox

by on May 8, 2013

Once I got my email inbox organized, I found that it’s the best place to get regular information and marketing opportunities.

I’m now adding tools like the ones show here and each day find marketing opportunities coming to me.

Marketing Opporunites Sent to Your Inbox

Are you tired of checking multiple analytics accounts, social networks, ranking monitors, and other tools on a daily basis? Whether you are a small business owner trying to run your business, a marketer managing several client accounts, or anyone looking to increase efficiency and productivity, you will want to try out the following tools that…

Are you tired of checking multiple analytics accounts, social networks, ranking monitors, and other tools on a daily basis? Whether you are a small business owner trying to run your business, a marketer managing several client accounts, or anyone looking to increase efficiency and productivity, you will want to try out the following tools that will deliver your online marketing updates straight to your inbox.

One of the easiest ways to monitor mentions across the web for your business, your clients, or your competitors is by setting up alerts. Google Alerts will send you email whenever a new page on the web with the keywords you are monitoring appears.

Talkwalker Alerts is a similar service if you would rather use something other than Google, considering Google’s history of shutting down their products. While Google hasn’t announced the end of Google Alerts, they are shutting down Google Reader, a product that was tied directly into Google Alerts RSS subscription options.

Whether you are managing one website or multiple websites, yourself or your clients, it’s tough to keep up with all of the new followers, friends, updates, mentions, etc. across multiple social media accounts along with your analytics.

SocialReport.com connects all of your social media information and analytics in one place. Best of all, you’ll receive a daily email with a summary of all your activity. This includes your new Twitter followers (along with their bios), Twitter mentions, LinkedIn connections, LinkedIn company page and group activity, Google+ activity, Klout, YouTube activity, and Google Analytics.

People who sell through Shopify, Ebay, and Etsy can also connect to those accounts to monitor their sales activity. Everything is organized by project, which makes it easy to manage multiple websites and related accounts. When you log in to your tool, you will get even more details about all of your account activity in individual reports and summarized in a graph so you can see if a spike in Twitter activity also results in a spike in website traffic.

There are certain types of activity that you might want to get notified about immediately, such as activity on your Facebook page. A part of beating the EdgeRank algorithm is to encourage engagement, and the faster you respond to comments on your wall posts or pages, the more discussion will happen.

AgoraPulse is a Facebook CRM tool that allows you to monitor your Facebook page analytics, updates, and competitors. They send you emails in real time when your Facebook page receives a new post, comment, or other update.

Getting immediate updates can also help you respond to reputation management issues, such as negative comments, as quickly as possible to diffuse a bad situation. It can also help you monitor your Facebook pages for spam comments and have those removed (and the users banned).

See full story on iacquire.com

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Social Business is the Collaborative Economy

by on May 7, 2013

Here’s a post by my friend Jeremiah Owyang about social business.

When I first saw the tweet about it. I asked “how can you be social without collaboration?”… I had my usual problem with the terms we invent. However, Jeremiah is a real though leader, he defines the trends he sees and I admire how he takes the risk of naming these things.

Social business IS business. Collaboration IS the essence of life. (We make connection and we share stories). Looking past the semantics, I read the article and the chart at the end of his post. He’s got the trend right.

What’s next?

social business

Above Image: Market Opportunities for the Collaborative Economy by Vertical, from Sharable Magazine

Social Business is the Collaborative Economy

What’s the next phase of Social Business?  That’s the question I’m frequently asked.  Without a doubt, the next phase is the Collaborative Economy.

What’s that?  That’s where ands will rent, lend, provide subscriptions to products and services to customers, or even further, allow customers to lend, trade, or gift anded products or services to each other.  This unstoppable trend is fueled by the social web, the specific features include relationships, online profiles, reputations, expressed needs and offerings and ecommerce. Customers are already starting to conduct these behaviors among themselves using TaskRabbit, AirBnb, Lyft, and many others tools –some of these are disruptions and opportunities to ands.

[The next phase of Social Business is the Collaborative Economy; Brands will enable customers to share, trade, lend, gift products and goods using social technologies]

While this movement will have oader global and economic impacts, at Altimeter, we’re focused on disruptions to corporations.  We’re knee deep in interviews for our next report on the Collaborative Economy, and have interviewed startups, VCs, ands, social business software vendors, authors, thought leaders, and are dissecting data of 200 sharing startups, for a oad overview of what it means to business.

Matrix: Phases of Social Business

Caveat: There are many oader impacts inside of the company that also impact HR, recruiting, supply chain, IT, and more, the above is just a sample of the most well discussed impacts.Brands Already On Board: Toyota, Barclays Card, Avis, BMW, WalmartWhat are examples of companies that are already taking advantage of this new social business trend now?  Here’s a few from the Master List of Brands Participating in the Collaborative Economy:  To stay current with car sharing or lending services like Lyft, RelayRide, Zipcar, Uber and more Toyota, OnStar and BMW are allowing cars to be rented.   Barclays Card sponsored and supported bicycle sharing in the city of London, associating their and with the movement.  And retail giant Walmart is considering allowing customers to deliver goods to each other, to compete with Taskrabbit and Amazon.

[The first phase of Social Business impacted anding and PR, it shifted to support and product development.The next phase impacts core business model]

Mindset Change Required in CorporationsSo there you have it, the next phase of Social Business goes beyond marketing and customer support, it changes the fundamental business models and relationships that we will have with our customers. The big change that ands will struggle with, as is it means that ands will have to care about the relationship between customers as they trade and rent your products between themselves.

See full story on web-strategist.com

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How Does LinkedIn Work? [Linkedin Infographic]

by on May 1, 2013

This Linkedin Infographic has been one of the  most popular feature here.

When we see an update, we’ll update this post so you know it’s the latest Linked Infographic

Linkedin Infographic

Beyond the LinkedIn Infographic

  • The site officially launched on May 5, 2003. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network.
  • The company is publicly held and has a diversified business model with revenues coming from talent solutions, marketing solutions and premium subscription products.
  • Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., LinkedIn also has U.S. offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Omaha and San Francisco. International LinkedIn offices are located in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New Delhi, Paris, Perth, São Paulo, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.
  • LinkedIn is currently available in nineteen languages: English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
  • LinkedIn has 3,779 full-time employees located around the world. LinkedIn started off 2012 with about 2,100 full-time employees worldwide, up from around 1,000 at the beginning of 2011 and about 500 at the beginning of 2010.

 

Worldwide Membership

  • LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 225 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
  • Professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second.
  • Sixty-four percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the United States.
  • There are over 30 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn. They are LinkedIn’s fastest-growing demographic.

Membership by country
Globe Graphic Member Statistics 16May13
Regional membership

65M+ EMEA
50M+ Europe
39M+ Asia and the Pacific
6M+ Southeast Asia
3M+ DACH

 

Product Metrics

  • LinkedIn counts executives from all 2012 Fortune 500 companies as members; its corporate talent solutions are used by 88 of the Fortune 100 companies.
  • LinkedIn members did over 5.7 billion professionally-oriented searches on the platform in 2012.
  • More than 2.9 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.
  • There are more than 1.5 million unique publishers actively using the LinkedIn Share button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform.
  • LinkedIn members are sharing insights and knowledge in more than 2.1 million LinkedIn Groups.
  • In the first quarter of 2013, an average of 30 percent of unique visiting members came through mobile apps, versus just 19 percent a year ago.

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Visual Twitter. 36% of al Links are Images [inforgraphic]

by on April 23, 2013

Research shows that social media is using images and graphics even more than past reports. The following infographic show the effects of a visual twitter:

From AllTwitter

Did you know that more than one-third (36 percent) of all links shared on Twitter point to an image, but that as many as three-quarters (77 percent) of tweets that link to an image from a brand do not reference the brand by name?

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Coca-Cola, but soft drink brands are the least likely to be tagged by Twitter users who share photos of their products, followed by beer, luxury and sport brands.

However, you have to wonder: does that really matter? It certainly might be an issue if you’re a new business where every mention of your brand is essential to your growth, but Coca-Cola, Inc. is the absolute definition of a global marketing terminator. As for why, I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s famous quote:

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

So I’m not sure there’s much of a need for Coca-Cola to be tagged by Twitter fans who are sharing images of Coca-Cola products, nor do I think it matters all that much to the brand. But for a mom and pop business it absolutely does matter – visuals are processed up to 60,000 times faster than text, but potential new customers still need to know where to go to buy the products.

Check the infographic below for more detail on why images have become ubiquitous on Twitter.visual twitter

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What to Do About Twitter Unfollows

by on April 4, 2013

unfollow on twitterI read a story about someone getting unfollowed on Twitter and couldn’t believe the fuss about Twitter unfollows.

Asking why someone unfollows you, or even just monitoring it seems like too much effort and not profitable, so for those worried about such things.. I give the following response:

There is way too much fuss over the etiquette of who “should” follow who. I think it comes off like Miss Manners telling people how many phone numbers should be in a address book.

Back in the early days when we were writing “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing are Changing the Way We Do Business” we saw two arguments going.

  1. “You’re a jerk if you don’t follow back”
  2. “No one could possibly follow more than 50 people”

There’s some logic in any approach one takes.. but it’s their business, not mine.

We ended up starting the book with the two words I still live by — NO RULES — who you follow and unfollow is your business. Who I follow is my business.

I have wasted a lot of time “trimming” my follow account. Above 100k, the most likely criticism is “you look like a spammer if you follow everyone” — I translate this a “YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE”

I took on the trimming project to see if I could get a more realist view of people. Now at 60k + I can’t see anything different than when it was 90K. Which seems obvious to me. I also can’t tell the difference from when I followed 3000. There’s way more tweets than I’ll ever see, and I read lists and mentions.

Still, I can easily respond to EVERY tweet with my name and probably could with triple the tweets. I have to occasionally filter out #FF tweets and other things with lists.. I’ve never seen the point of posting a list anyway (if I want to know who you think is a super BFF, I’ll just read your profile :)

My standard response for #FOLLOWMEBACKORIWILLCRY tweets is “I follow who I want” .. since they talked to me, I’ll probably follow them.. as I follow people who I have conversations with.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had numbers like “how many people you talk to” and “how many you’ve helped”

Follower counts don’t count.. the only number that matters it ONE.. the one person I’m in conversation with at any moment… the others are just “potential conversations”

Do you track Twitter Unfollows?

Share your thought in the comments.

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