Social Media Marketing Strategies

This is a keeper... Oodles of links. 

The awards have just announced the nominees for the 2013 edition. While there is still a strong US presence, emerging market countries such as Brazil, Russia and China are increasingly evident among the nominees.

Among the more interesting campaigns from those nominees is one called “You are Blind” from the Hungry Boys agency in Russia, which aims change the treatment of blind children, by giving people insight into what they go through. The primary way of doing this was with a website that challenged people to navigate a character through a virtual city using only sound.

Knowledge Networks Illustrates People Learn About Products using Social Channels:

Social media influences brand perceptions of 38 Million U.S. shoppers

23.1 Million discover new brands or products through social media (up 22% from 2010)

22.5 Million people use Social Media to learn about unfamiliar brands or products (up 9%)

17.8 Million are strongly influenced in their purchase decisions by opinions in social media (up 19%)

15.1 Million refer to social media before making purchase decisions (up 29%)

Social media is no magic formula. Getting the ROI you’re looking for will take work. But if you’re prepared to invest time and money into social media, the potential is there, and the returns can be enormous.

Even if other people in your business aren’t convinced about the value of social media yet, you now have the tools to prove that it adds value and has the potential to grow your business.

Hands down, LinkedIn is the best social network for B2B marketing. LinkedIn is the only real B2B social network that was developed purely to develop direct B2B sales relationships for B2B marketers.

The other social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube – all should be in the toolbox of any serious B2B marketer. But if you're on limited time and resources and looking to greatly increase your bottom line, you should invest wholly in LinkedIn.

Use the 50/30/20 Rule

Weintraub and Litwinka’s spin on Facebook content calls for 50/30/20 rule.

1. 50 percent news: Include a custom blend of third party, non-competitive content from sites such as AllTop.com and Buzzfeed.com industry

2. 30 percent personality: Highlight a sparkle of strategic personalization and personality with real time journalism that can only happen on your Facebook Page.

3. 20 percent business: After you’ve given away all the friendship bracelets, it is time for business and put on the most tasteful type of branded, self promotional content.

Public relations is more than about selling, of course. It’s also about managing reputation. It’s about getting audiences to maintain a certain point of view. Social media provides the opportunity to talk to customers and the public directly by using technology to dis-intermediate the traditional gatekeepers.

Communication has to be a two-way street. If one party refuses to listen, then it’s not communication. Here are some methods that can sometimes defuse the situation, and get a dialog flowing, though.

To see real results from social, you need consistency.  No one is perfect and you won’t follow a strict schedule in most cases, but you do want to develop a pattern of consistency.

As with most areas of running an online business, a little creativity and a lot of planning will help you deal with those times when you just don’t have the time to be as social as you would like.

The top five are

1. There is no silver bullet

2. You can play offense or defense

3. Content marketing is the great equalizer

4. You don’t have to be on all platforms

5. Subscribers rule

Awareness – Will be the driving force behind your brand.  From using guest posts, PPC, video, audio… anything and everything that shines the light on your business. Use your SEO, article marketing and video buzz wisely. Don’t put crap out there. It’s not worth it. Start building your community… it takes time.

So, whether you’re still struggling to measure social media effectiveness or simply want to declutter your measurement efforts, here’s your minimalist guide to social media metrics.

Define Your Goals

The bedrock of minimalist social media metrics is knowing what you are, what you do, and what you want.

In other words, you have to start by working out how social media fits into your brand’s overall business goals and objectives. Is social media the introduction, the deal-closer or something else altogether?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns, it’s critical that youknow your objective.

Ask yourself why you are considering including social media in your overall marketing campaign in the first place. How will your efforts impact your revenue and grow your business?

You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place along with a timeframe in which to achieve the goal

This is what we learned. People want to be connected with through true genuine interaction, not have products thrown at them all day. At times we can be hesitant to get creative and go the safe professional route but our reach was further when we took some risk. By giving our employees creative freedom they gave us an awesome product that displays their personality and personifies our business.

Our intention for creating these profiles were giving companies one more reason to pick us over the competition but we found that Facebook interaction was a huge plus.

Another brilliant post by Bill Slawski "How does Google know what to show about these things? One hint from the patent, echoed in the video, is that what people ask about in Google can determine what Google will display in the knowledge panel. If people tend to ask about Abraham Lincoln’s height, for instance, the search engine will show it in the knowledge panel"

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. ‘For the first time in my life,’ Ng says, ‘it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime’.”

Social media management is a constant and ongoing process due to the nature of the instant, online world in which social networks live. When it comes to developing a content strategy for social media channels, it often works best for passionate, dedicated people to collaborate across departments, rather than handing the task off to the marketing department. By getting input from a variety of sectors within a company, a social media content strategy can really succeed.

Another fantastic TOP SEO nominee for you to know. Keep in mind, it’s a pleasure and always an honor sharing these great women with you. But now without further ado, let me introduce you to this week’s #TSW2013.

OK, so Google Alerts is free, but that’s part of the problem with it – it doesn’t make money so Google isn’t putting any resources into maintaining quality.

Mention also has a free tier, which gets you three alerts, 500 mentions per month, and 1 month of history.

The next tier is the Pro Plan. This is the plan I reviewed, as Mention comped me a month when they saw me say I was trying it out on Twitter. The Pro Plan is $19.99 per month and gets you unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions per month, unlimited history, and access to stats and data export tools.

Could this be true? "Despite the growth of social recruiting on Facebook, Bullhorn Reachmaintains that LinkedIn still dominates the field, and that Facebook still trails Twitter, as well."

With social media it is key to continuously evaluate and monitor what people are talking about that is relevant to your company and respond to them appropriately. There are hundreds of tools available that you can use to measure basically everything regarding your social media campaign, but in reality it’s a waste of resources, time, and money if you fail to monitor only selective metrics that matter to you.

There are many metrics you can use to measure your campaign and many of the tools that measure this will have their own metrics, but which actually matters? Find below a couple of metrics that I use as a baseline for all my social media campaigns.