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We love the Olympics, but an international social media showdown is a little more our speed. Ignite Social Media is back with the 2012 Social Network Analysis Report, breaking down demographic, geographic and search data that shows which networks are the underdogs and which are mounting the winners’ podium.
Via John van den Brink
Fiona Milburn: "As a creative practitioner, you're probably familiar with twitter as a key social media platform for marketing your projects to today’s internet-savvy audiences.But did you know it’s also a great storytelling tool?"
Via The Digital Rocking Chair
From company blogs to Pinterest boards, social media and content marketing integration is a must-do for today’s businesses. Strategic content marketing
Via Neil Ferree
PR excels at messaging, but advertising focuses on results. So where does that leave your social media marketing?
The police department’s stream of tweets ended up being the best defense against misinformation and Bostonians’ lifeline for communication about the men terrorizing their city.
This single Twitter account, perhaps more than anything else on the Internet, memorialized the horror of the bombs and the joy of the capture in real time.
Via Deb Nystrom, REVELN Consulting
Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.
Via gdecugis
Visual Social Media Marketing: learn how to share more visual content and create a visual conversation with your audience. Have you noticed more photos on social networks? Do you have a visual component as part of your social media marketing strategy? Do you need some help in getting started or maintaining momentum in sharing more visual content and in creating a visual conversation with your audience?
Via Martin Gysler
It’s been a while since SocialTimes did a round-up of the various tools that helped users manage their Twitter accounts by finding who to follow, following new people, unfollowing many people at once and organizing groups of users they follow into lists. Since our last round-up, Twitter has restricted use of its API significantly, causing several tools to shut down. No longer functional areUntweeps, Just Unfollow, Twit Cleaner, Who Follows Whom and Tweet Effect. Tweeter Karma is still functional but has had to remove its bulk unfollow tools.
Via Frédéric DEBAILLEUL
Here some very good stuff about community-building for your online business. Great points and great advice, including an awesome infographic. I recommend this content for any small business online trying to establish greater reputation and crediblity for itself, as these are in my opinion, the key winning traits of successful web companies. Excerpted from the original SEOmoz article: "It's not that SEO is dead or that links are obsolete, or whatever all that crazy talk is that's been going around.
It's that there's a way to integrate all the pieces into the big picture of building a better company by building an online community around it.
There are lots of benefits to building a community around your company, but if I had to choose a few, here are my top five: 1. It will help you weather Google’s algorithms; 2. It will add equity and value to your business; 3. It will help you have purpose; 4. It will help you stand out; 5. It will put the focus on goals, not tools.
*Some key points extracted from the article: [2] Elect your team. Here’s a few tips for getting the right team in place so that you can start working toward achieving your goals: 1) Understand the roles; 2) Elect, don’t just assign; 3) Work together as one, big, happy family;
[4] Empower your team. Do not skip this step. I repeat. This step is important. You can empower your team for success by addressing a few simple questions: 1) Why are we doing this? 2) How much work is involved? 3) When will we see results?
[6] Create value. ...Value that focuses on your customer and their experience is what attracts people to your business, your brand, and your community. Foundational content is the more static stuff on your website... The challenge with foundational content is to listen to your customer. Observe their needs, the things in life that they struggle with, and then communicate how your products or services address those things. ..It’s the content that is less about what you do and more about what you know.
[7] *Curate* (to create value) *before* you Share. It works like this: 80% of the time, share other people’s great stuff. But don’t just retweet it or hit the share button and place it on your feed. Read it. Internalize it. And then curate it. Tell people why it’s good. This helps you learn and also keeps the focus where it belongs: on the value that you're providing for the reader."
Must-read. Right on the mark. 8/10
Full original article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-an-online-community-for-your-business (Thanks to Pino Mauriello for having scouted it)
Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Alessio Carciofi, Robin Good
Scoop.it is fun and valuable tool to curate content ... and it seems to be exploding across the web.
Via Ally Greer
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A massive survey of internet users reveals trends in social media usage across numerous platforms, ages, races, genders, population density and which social media sites do they frequently visit. The Pew Research Center has released the results of a comprehensive social media survey, conducted over several years to evaluate which demographics were using social media, and on which platforms. Which social networking sites emerged on top? Of the online adults surveyed at the end of 2012: 67% use Facebook 20% use LinkedIn 16% use Twitter 15% use Pinterest 13% use Instagram 6% use Tumblr A decent amount of Americans appear to be using social media, but which demographics use social media in greater numbers? It appears that women use social media 9% more than men do, at a whopping rate of 71%. Other frontrunners with the highest social network activity in their demographic include city dwellers(70%), Hispanics (72%) and adults with a household income below $30,000 annually (72%). The most pervasive and consistent divider amongst social media users remains, unsurprisingly, their age. 83% of the young adult demographic (18-29 year olds) use social media, which is well over double the activity of online adults over 65 years old (32%).
Via Jonha Revesencio, Deb Nystrom, REVELN Consulting
Whether you have created a website because you own a small business, you want to support one of your hobbies, or you are becoming interested in affiliate marketing, there is one thing that you need that is content. One of the easiest ways you can add content to your webpage is through the addition of a blog. This infographic explains why blogging matters?
Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com, Steven Hughes, Esther Turón Perez
Brian Anthony Hernandez: "Tribeca Film Festival challenged people to use Twitter's Vine app to create six-second films — with a "beginning, middle and end." Here are the winners."
Via The Digital Rocking Chair
A 10th Grader Explains How Social Media Can Replace Textbooks (A 10th Grader Explains How Social Media Can Replace Textbooks.
Via Susan Bainbridge
7 Actionable Social Media Marketing Tactics If you’re looking for your customers, you’ll find them on social media because that’s where they spend the largest portion of their time online.
Via Neil Ferree
Discover 18 new social media marketing statistics to help improve your inbound marketing.
Via Tocquigny
Though some forward-thinking businesses are already using Instagram, chances are you aren't yet, and neither are your competitors. With its universal appeal, however, Instagram is not a medium marketers should ignore. And you'd better move quickly if you want to make an impact.
Via Martin Gysler
Social Media doesn't work for the vast majority of small businesses. That was the main message in the USA Today article titled, Study: Social media a bust for small businesses, published on April 17th, 2013. From the news item:"About 61% of small businesses don't see any return on investment on their social-media activities, according to a survey released Tuesday from Manta, a social network for small businesses. Yet, almost 50% say they've increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time. What businesses are trying to get out of social media: 36% said their goal was to acquire and engage new customers, 19% said to gain leads and referrals, and 17% said to boost awareness. Facebook was most cited as the hardest to maintain social-media platform, according to the survey." There is a big lesson in this data... What you want from social media may be very different from what it is.
Via Martin Gysler
Excerpted from article by Heidi Cohen published on Social Media Examiner: "Here are seven steps for crafting calls to action to get your social community to do what you’d like them to and transform your social media marketing to get the results you want.
#1: Determine What You Want Prospects to Do: Your call to action should encourage readers to engage with you further. Make readers an offer they want. You can consider offering white paper downloads, ebooks, ongoing emails, discount coupons and/or free consultations.
#2: Create a Great Hook: You’ll need to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” This is what your prospects want to know. And your request must make sense to them. This means not asking prospects to purchase if they’re still in an information-gathering mode.
#3: Motivate Prospects to Act: Remember, you want to give your readers a reason to act. Provide sense of urgency. Make people an offer they can’t refuse. Give them a one-time offer to encourage a response. Realize, however, they may only buy when you provide coupons going forward.
#4: Optimize Your Call to Action: Like other aspects of your content, formatting matters! Here are some points to consider. - Use a contextually relevant presentation; - Make your call to action stand out visually; - Qualify your offer; - Limit selection choices; - Place calls to action in multiple locations on your pages; - Keep calls to action above the fold; - Put call-to-action options in order of importance; - Include social sharing.
#5: Maintain a Consistent Presentation on Landing Pages: This is one of the biggest reasons calls to action don’t work. Send prospects to the appropriate step in the purchase process. Make sure you use the same wording and graphics. The goal is to show continuity. Don’t let the reader think that you’ve sent them to the wrong place or they’ll leave.
#6: Test to Maximize Results: Every element of your call to action can be tested. When testing, only modify one factor at a time or you won’t know what caused the change.
#7: Measure Results: How can you measure your results? You want to track the impact of your social media calls to action back to your original objectives. Here are some metrics to track: - Impressions; - Click-throughs; - Click-through rate; - Completions; - Completion rate..."
Each step is analyzed with detailed information. Read full article here: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-improve-your-social-media-calls-to-action/
Via Giuseppe Mauriello
Taking a business idea from the drawing board to the launching pad takes a great deal of time, dedication, and hard work. Today, entrepreneurs have the benefit of social media, allowing them to con...
Via Michael Cudahy
Aside from being fun, optical illusions actually play a role in education and in visual literacy. They help illustrate that we see by learning to see. While our brains relay information taken in through our eyes, we learn to interpret what we see by recognizing and storing patterns we learn as we continuously interact with the world around us. These patterns enable us to identify faces, dangers, friends, directions, routes, and opportunities around us.
Via Meryl Jaffe, PhD
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See my comment in the stream.