The Social Media Marketing

Excerpted from article:
"Here are 9 insider tips for creating a killer explainer video that clearly describes your business and drives more sales.

1. It’s All About the Script:
A well written script is the key to a successful explainer video. It’s the foundation upon which everything else is built. In most cases, it helps to have an “outsider” write the script. Choose someone who can take a fresh look at your company and explain it in a way that anyone can understand.

2. The Shorter the Better:
According to writer and creative director, Helen Klein Ross, “the less you say, the more likely people are to remember.” We realize you have a lot you want to tell people about your business, but this video is meant to be an overview, the “hook” that gets people interested in taking the next step.
The typical rule of thumb in the industry is 150 words per minute.

3. KISS (Keep it Simple Silly):
Good explainer videos focus on 4 simple things:
- The problem – Address the pain your customers are having (0:00-0:20)
- The solution – Introduce your product or service as the answer (0:20-0:25)
- How it works – Briefly describe how it works or how to get started (0:25-0:50)
- A call to action – Tell people what to do next (0:50-0:60)

4. Benefits, not Features:
It’s the benefits that really matter to customers.
Instead of droning on about technical nonsense, tell people how your product or service is going to make their lives better.

5. Use a Professional Voice:
There are plenty of options out there, but a good place to start is Voices.com.

6. Have Some Fun:
It’s important to develop a video that resonates with your audience. But we’ve found that regardless of who’s watching one thing is always true – people love to be entertained.
Adding something a little different to your video, whether it’s humor, a surprise, or something downright wacky, can go a long way.

7. Visuals are Secondary:
The key is using visuals that help illustrate the story and reinforce the voiceover. You’re not looking to create the next Avatar. In fact, too much detail and whizbang visual effects can distract from the message

8. Set the Tone with Music:
Most of the time we research music after the video is complete, locating a tune that fits the mood. We often use services like Premiumbeat.com, Tunefruit, or audiojungle that have thousands of options for $100 or less.

9. Plan for the Launch:
A successful video launch consists of 3 things:
- Select a video host...
- Have a marketing plan...
- Integrate the video on your website..."

 

Read full original article here:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/creating-a-explainer-video/

 

 

Via Giuseppe Mauriello

Excellent blog post from the Dachis group outlining 4 approaches to measuring social media marketing 

 

Read the full article here: http://bit.ly/SxPWKG

Via David Wesson Evolve Social

Robin Good: If you are looking for ways to sell your own merchandise, product or service on Pinterest here is new service that helps you do just that.

 

ShopInterest.co is an e-commerce platform that lets anyone turn their Pinterest boards into online stores making it easy for anyone to sell most any kind of merchandise to their Pinterest followers.

 

How it works: "The easiest way to describe what the service does is to call it a “Shopify for Pinterest.” Like Shopify, ShopInterest is a DIY service, but in this case, it’s not about building a traditional online store – it’s about turning your Pinterest board into a store.

To get started with the service, users sign in, select the boards where their products are shown, add a description, price and shipping charges, and select how they want to get paid.

The rest of the setup is handled by ShopInterest."

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/25/shopinterest-the-startup-that-lets-you-sell-from-your-pinterest-boards-gets-500-startups-backing/

 

Check this video on how to set up your store: http://www.shopinterest.co/how

 

Try it out now: http://www.shopinterest.co/

 

N.B.: For now the service is open only to US-based individuals.

 

 

Via Robin Good

Robin Good: If you are wondering why engagement on your Facebook page is so hard to come, with few questions and comments sparking up your page, here is a number of good questions to ask yourself, before buying into Promoting your posts which is what Facebook is trying to get you to do.

 

“How do I get my Facebook fans to participate more on our page?”

 

Motivating fans to like, comment on, and share your posts not only strengthens your bond with existing fans but also helps get you in front of a new and bigger audience: their friends. If no one’s talking to you on Facebook, it’s hard to know if your social media marketing efforts are going anywhere — and it’s definitely not much fun.

 

The key reasons for our failure on this front is generally a lack of creativity and perseverance on our end to utilize the right ingredients that spark engagement for our readers. A few little changes can make all of the difference in the world.

 

Useful read and reminder of what to look at. 7/10

 

Full article: http://marketingland.com/14-reasons-no-one-talks-to-you-on-facebook-13660

Via Robin Good

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

Sometimes I think brands carry this philosophy into the social media realm. Several case studies have pointed to brands ignoring their customers on social media, believing their small, individual voices won’t be heard by others.

 

Social monitoring helps you tap into these conversations to capitalize on positive sentiment and mitigate negative sentiment, while understanding how competitors are perceived and industry trends are changing. Ignore it at your own peril.

 

I know how overwhelming tracking this vast and never-ending stream of information can be when you have never-ending lists of tasks to perform (All the late nights I’ve worked overtime are testament to this!).

 

To help make it easier for you to stay on top of this information overload, here are the social monitoring tools I use to quickly connect with the information I need to effectively manage SocialMotus".

 

Read More At: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/how-to-use-social-monitoring-tools-to-track-brands-and-competitors-0307620

Via Antonino Militello

Engagement marketing refers to the marketing strategy of directly involving the customers in a relationship with the brand.

For small and medium businesses, engagement marketing is especially important, as so much of their business comes from repeat customers and word-of-mouth referrals.

 

The new book, written by Constant Contact CEO Gail F. Goodman, centres around the Engagement Marketing Cycle, a three-step approach to driving word-of-mouth referrals and turning them into socially visible, public endorsements that bring new customers to a SME’s door:

 

In Chapter 1 of Gail outlines The Engagement Marketing Cycle.

What is the Engagement Marketing Cycle? It's 3 steps to help you get repeat business.

 The steps are: 

1. Provide a WOW! Experience - When  a customer walks into your business, make that an experience one they'll remember. 

2. Entice people to keep in touch - Keep the experience going even after they've left your business. 

3. Engage people through content that inspires sharing - Once you've created the relationship, make sure you nurture it.

“SMEs are customer-centric by their very nature and many see the majority of their revenue come from repeat sales. For them, Engagement Marketing is simply growing the 99% of their business that comes from repeat sales and word-of-mouth referrals – and when done properly, this can be a huge source of new customers.” Tamsin Fox-Davies

Based on her book this Infographic explains why engagement marketing is important, and how social media tools can make it easier.

 

Download The Engagement Marketing Cycle. Chapter 1. http://bit.ly/RvGR37

Source. http://bit.ly/PW02RY

Via maxOz, John van den Brink, Gladys Pintado

Robin Good: By leveraging the Google Translator Toolkit, YouTube has made it now extremely easy for anyone to generate caption text for any video and to then translate it in any of the 300 world languages supported by YouTube.

 

Here's how to do it: "You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here. Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.”

We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster."

 

"For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.

 

...

 

Click “Publish to YouTube” when you’re finished, and we’ll publish the translated caption back to your YouTube video. If you’re not the video owner, we’ll notify the owner via email that there’s a pending translation waiting to be approved and published."

 

 

Check this short video: http://youtu.be/z4tj423M7b0

 

More info: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2780526

 

Also: http://youtubecreator.blogspot.it/2012/09/build-global-audience-on-youtube-by.html

 

 

Via Robin Good

From The Original Article: "Facebook has regained domination for traffic driving over StumbleUpon, in fact, StumbleUpon seems to have dropped off quite dramatically this past year, but despite that fact, it still comes in as the number two traffic driver in social media well ahead of Twitter and edging out both Youtube and Pinterest.

 

With the tremendous buzz that Pinterest has been generating over the past few months and the fact that it was recently recognized that Pinterest drives up to 4x as much retail buying traffic as Facebook, the fact that StumbleUpon still drives more traffic than Pinterest is a big deal.

 

Then you look to YouTube, arguably the world's largest search engine, and it comes inbelow StumbleUpon as well, but just a hair ahead of Pinterest for the third place spot in real traffic driving among the major social media".

 

Read More: http://socialmediatoday.com/reyactive/650306/surprising-results-which-social-media-really-drive-more-traffic

Via Antonino Militello

This infographic was created by Awareness Networks that illustrates some of the great information you'll get in their white paper that I found to be excellent containing  strategies and case studies that can  help brands dominate Pinterest and Linkedin.

 

Excerpt:

 

"In our newest white paper, Beyond the Big 3: Five Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest, we build on concepts shared in Five Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube."

 

Pinterest & Linkedin are catching up to the big 3 social networks Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, it's time to take these two social networks more seriously for many brands that don't have a strong presence there.......

 

Here are a few takeaways:

 

Strategy #1

 

Pinterest

 

**Register your profile on Pinterest Directories:

 

**WPin.org - based on specific interests

 

**Repinly.com - lists stats on Pinterests users

 

Linkedin

 

**Start a Linkedin group - they give an example where Civicventures, a non-profit started a group called "Encore Careers" for 50+ year-old adults to discuss issues of concern to them in a safe and spam-free enviornment.

 

1,500 people joined the group in a very short period of time 

 

This gives you an idea of what's possible for your brand or group.

 

Strategy #2

 

Increase Content Engagement

 

Pinterest

 

**Aim to become the top pin-board on one or a few topics

 

They use the example of Whole Foods and how they used their pinboards to become a thought leader for recipes, reused and recycled items and green live.

 

Linkedin

 

**Be Unique! Use a video or appropriate profile modules to showcase your company

 

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

 

See infographic here: [http://bit.ly/M7ATkT]

Via janlgordon

The classic sales funnel has long been used to describe website development strategy.

 

However, the deployment of content marketing in a sales funnel with a campaign focus is a relatively new concept to many.

 

It’s not as simple as writing lots of blog posts every day and distributing them on social channels.

 

In fact, the goal of strategic content marketing should be to identify, qualify, segment, score and, ultimately, close leads in an accelerated and predictable fashion.

 

In order to strategically deploy content marketing it requires the right software, a defined sales funnel and a campaign structure.

 

Read more: http://bit.ly/MjFpfA

Via Martin Gysler

Via Robin Good

Robin Good: If you are interested into "digital storytelling" and in how it can help your company tell its stories about itself and its products most effectively to the world, here is a great collection of presentations all focusing or related to this topic.

 

Published by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, this collection brings together the best of the many digital media training sessions hosted by KDMC, the Knight Digital Media Center.

 

This archive collection contains many unique recording such as David Pescovitz (BoingBoing) on "The Future of Technology and Storytelling", "How to Tell Sories with Data" with Edward Segel and "Digital Storytelling: New Media's New Storytellers" by Amy Hill among many others.

 

A treasure trove of good stuff. 8/10

 

Full collection: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/presentations/cat/storytelling

 

P.S.: Check also Karen Dietz unique newsradar on Digital Storytelling right here: http://www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it

Via Robin Good

Today, businesses define social media marketing in many different ways. Some businesses see it as an extension of offline and online advertising.

Others use social media as a way to interact with current customers. But no matter how your business uses social media, there is one thing you should remember: social media is a place to be social.
If your business has a presence on social media, but is not actively communicating with consumers, you could be missing out on reaching potential customers and boosting customer loyalty with those who already follow you on social media. This infographic illustrates 21 social media marketing tips your business should remember in order to get the most out of your social media efforts, and give the most to your fans and followers...

Via Lauren Moss

Excerpted from article on KISSmetrics:

"Getting quality traffic on the interwebs is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. We can spam Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn all day. We’ll get a ton of traffic. But that won’t get us anywhere. We might go from 100 visits to 10,000 visits and still have only 2 customers.

Luckily, we have another option…

 

Get more customers with the traffic we already have:

The key to making this work is the marketing funnel.

Remember, funnels measure the number of people who move through a series of steps in order to become a customer.

...

Funnels help you find the bottleneck in your customer acquisition.

 

Once you know where people drop off in large batches, you’ll know which part of your business needs the most improvement. And once you fix the problem, you’ll get more customers with the same amount of traffic. That’s the beauty of tracking funnels.

 

5 Best Practices for Building Funnels

1. Fewer Steps is Better than More Steps:

One of the easiest ways to increase the percentage of people who get through your funnel is to eliminate a step. Yup, just hack it out completely. Even if you have an amazing design, world-class copy, and a perfect product, you’ll still lose people at each step.

I want you to be RUTHLESS with your funnels. Hack and slash every unnecessary click, field, button, and page you can. Have no mercy.

 

2. Start With a Benchmark:

This applies to ALL your metrics, not just your funnels.

Based on your industry, business model, target market, and the alignment of the stars, you’ll find a huge difference in metrics from one site to the next.

 

3. Look for Bottlenecks

I already alluded to the best way to prioritize your funnel improvements.

When you’re looking at your entire funnel and trying to decide which step gets your attention first, start with the bottlenecks. In most funnels, there are one or two steps that aren’t really steps. They’re brick walls.

Your mission? Find your bottlenecks and patch them asap.

 

4. When A/B Testing, Track the Impact on the Entire Funnel

Once you find your bottlenecks, you’ll want to start launching improvements to see if you can fix them. The best way to do this is with an A/B test.

A/B tests typically track only the next step.

As soon as you start testing improvements in your funnel, test your changes on the ENTIRE funnel instead of just the next step. This way, you won’t slow your customer growth by accident. And yes, I’ve seen this happen.

 

5. Track People

There’s a myth that most marketers automatically believe. As soon as you start to track your funnel, you’ll assume that customers move orderly through it.

This is false.

People bounce around in funnels.

So how do we get around this? Use customer analytics so you can track people. Then you’ll know how many people moved through each step, even if they’re bouncing around beforehand..."

 

The article is analyzed with more information, examples, and some tools. Read full article here:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/use-conversion-funnels/

 

Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Beth Kanter

Social Media: Important Element in the Business? A Survey of Companies in Asia

Ogilvy Asia together with research firm IPSOS study surveyed 153 senior executives from 14 countries across the Asia Pacific region to understand whether the companies in Asia consider social media as essential part of their marketing plan.

Key takeaways:

- 43% of senior executives in Hongkong believe that social media is extremely important
- 60% of companies spend less than 5% of their marketing or communication budgets on social media
- Out of the 153 senior executives suryeved, only half of them have a crisis plan for social media

Via Jonha Revesencio

From The Original Article: "One of the greatest joys of site migration is discovering that your social share counts don’t follow 301 redirects. But those Facebook Likes, Tweets and Google +1s that we’ve worked so hard to capture don’t have to evaporate with a click of a mouse.

 

As social metrics mature within search engines, there is worry that site migrations will cause these metrics to be discarded. It is of no leap of logic to assume that search engines will pass the value of the social share through a 301 redirect.

 

Therefore it should be enough to maintain the social shares on the original URL and display them at the new one.

 

Essentially for each of these you will want to identify the URL of the original page and set an attribute on social share button to show the shares of the old URL".

 

Here’s how you do it: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration

Via Antonino Militello

Robin Good: If you are looking for great examples of Facebook marketing at work, you may want to check the Facebook Studio, an official gallery/catalog of marketing campaigns using FB.

 

"...a place where creative agencies and marketers can deposit examples of great campaigns that leverages on the online social network to connect with audiences and have authentic conversations.

So far Facebook Studio has over 750 examples submitted and approved from around the world, and Facebook also holds the Facebook Studio Awards every year to recognize and laud the best work in the field.

 

Agencies can create an online profile on Facebook Studio that shows off their creative digital work, along with any of the awards accorded by Facebook.

 

These profiles go into a directory which is searchable and accessible, so you can preview the work.

 

Creatives who have worked on those projects or campaigns can be “tagged”, so people know who’s been involved in them. Creative individuals can also build their own profiles – which is separate from their regular Facebook profile (although they can be linked) – so that they can be tied to the work they’re involved in."

 

Source: http://www.youngupstarts.com/2012/07/13/digital-creatives-can-build-credibility-with-facebook-studio-and-facebook-studio-edge/

 

Get inspired.

 

Check it out here: http://www.facebook-studio.com/

 

 

Via Robin Good

Everyone thinks their blog post is the most entertaining, informative, must-know compilation of research and Internet fodder on the planet. And that’s good, to a point—everyone should be lucky to have that much confidence.

But in reality?

Your blog post isn’t about you; it’s about everyone you want to read it. Based on this great Infographic there are 15 questions to ask before you hit that “publish” button.

Chloe Thompson of TMG has added a few to the mix.

 

Consider this as your blogging checklist: [Part 1.]

1. What was the main point of this post? Have I made it clearly?

If you can’t articulate your main points in the time it takes to brew a coffee, take some time to hone in on your point. Content, fashion, product reviews – content consumers need to know WHY they’re reading your post, and they need to know quickly.

2. Have I written something useful?

Think to yourself: Why are others going to share my post?

3. Have I written something unique?

Do yourself a 5-second favor before you hit publish and Google your topic. Has someone else written it, and done a better job? Rework yours until it’s different, relevant and much better than your neighbor’s.

4. Has this post taken me closer to or further away from my blog’s goals? Does it reflect my blog’s brand?

Every blog has a voice, and a purpose. If your blog post doesn’t suit the current blog’s voice, it decreases the connection you’ve made with your readers. Plain and simple.

5. Have I used a title that draws people into my post?

 

By Chloe Thompson - http://bit.ly/L73w7z

Source: http://bit.ly/KHggvA

Infographic - http://bit.ly/Qxym7V

Via maxOz