Digital Marketing Digest

Identifying and activating influencers in your space is super important for a successful marketing campaign. We've been testing out tools like Traackr as well to find the different influencers in our space. 

Influencers are people who not only have large followings, but actually are able to have an impact on that following and influence their behaviors. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! Leveraging existing influencers in your field is much easier than trying to become one from day one. That said, though, building relationships with these influencers will help you gain a similar status in your community. 

Anonymous login for third party apps: users can now log into an app via Facebook without actually giving away their information if they just want to check it out. Then, once they do create an account via Facebook, they have more specific choices concerning the information they share with the app.

Facebook Audience Network: allows Facebook advertisers take their ads beyond the Facebook platform and display them within other mobile apps with similar targeting and analytics.

A shift in focus from consumer to software developer tools.

The question about how Google views content curation is one that's often debated - and often very passionately.

SEO and curation expert Jayson DeMers has a few solid facts to back up the argument that curation - when done right - can only help SEO.

Did you know that curated content, when combined with original content (like Scoop.it insight) ca rank just as well as original content alone? If not - or even if you did - read this post to find out more.

While most of these stats aren't exactly new, it's always good to be reminded of what works and what doesn't - especially when you're trying to up the engagement on your Facebook page.

For me, I'm consistently trying to increase engagement so that I have a higher reach which ultimately will lead to higher brand awareness and hopefully conversions into users/paying customers.

One thing I learned from this post that I didn't know before is that use of the words "should and would" garners more responses than "why and how." I think it's because the reader is given the opportunity to give valuable advice, rather than just asking a question. I will definitely be using this technique.

What's your number one technique for increasing Facebook engagement?

Many different types of online "influencers" exist, as outlined in this post by @Stephanie Frasco. While this article was posted almost a year ago, the principles still stand true.

An interesting exercise could be to either (a) consider what type of influencer you are (I'm a social butterfly!) or (b) consider what types of influencers you should be targeting to help achieve your business goals through a social engagement strategy.

Here are some of my best tips on what your business goals can tell you about the types of influencers you should target:

Goal: Host events, parties, networking functions to spread brand awareness

Influencers to target: Social Butterflies. Chances are, they know people in almost any major city you'd want to host an event in, and are likely to have large networks of people who will show up. You can take it from there!

Goal: Launch a new technology

Influencers to target: Early Adopters. They spend all of their days on Kickstarter and TechCrunch trying to figure out what the next gadget, site, or invention is going to be and how soon they can get it. If you let them in on your next big idea, they're the ones who will be the most psyched about trying it out and sharing how great it is with the world.

Goal: Validate your value prop/need for your offering.

Influencers to target: Experts/Gurus. These are the ones who people turn to for advice on certain things. If you're trying to convince the market that your product is necessary for social media, then you're going to want a social media expert to agree with you.

Goal: Get popular.

Influencers to target: Celebrities. Everyone loves pop culture. It's human to admire celebrities, and they're the ones that become influencers without even trying. Think about the fanbases of people like Beiber and Lady GaGa. Whatever they say, their fans do. Like Stephanie points out, this could get pricey, but if you've got the money, will result in massive publicity.

Goal: Spend less time & money on word of mouth marketing and online content.

Influencers to target: Content Creators. These are the ones who are constantly writing, blogging, etc. They love spreading the word about things they like, and also make great guest bloggers (hello, #leancontent!)

Goal: Promote your content

Influencers to target: Broadcasters. If your content leads to business leads, you're going to want it to promote it as much as possible. Broadcasters might not always be the ones using your product/service or even maintaining relationships with your brand, but they are the ones who are sharing as much content as they possibly can, and usually have lots and lots of followers. (Sometimes, though, like Stephanie says, they over-share and get lost in the noise. Extra tweets can never hurt, though!)

Goal: Engage your existing audiences and create new influencers & ambassadors

Influencers to target: Your customers! Your customers might not be influencers yet, but they're the ones who will require the least amount of effort to connect with. Once you communicate with them enough, they'll become the next generation of brand ambassadors, and eventually, influencers of your own!

In case you weren't sure why you needed to be using Google Plus pages (and you should!), here's a great list of some of the business benefits put together by @Mike Allton.

Some benefits of using Google Plus Pages include 

An increased brand presence

Personalized search results

Ability to host live Hangouts with your community

Ability to target messaging via circles

Worth noting, also, is that you can now post directly to Google Plus pages with Scoop.it!

Of course, the Super Bowl is a unique event in terms of advertising, but I'm sure that some of these concepts can be applied to traditional advertising at other times of year as well.

Interesting stats include:

-56% of viewers will be posting on FB about the Super Bowl during the game.

-38% of viewers look up Super Bowl ads before the game, mostly because they're interested in the brands or because the brands announced their ads in advance.

-73% of viewers are more likely to follow the brands from the advertisements they see during the game rather than the teams themselves on social media. (Could this be applicable to TV shows in general?)

Infographics are just the best! So much data to use in here.

Key stats:

- Emails with social sharing buttons increase click through rates by 158%

- 67% of B2B content marketers consider event marketing the most effective strategy

- Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%

- B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those who don't

- Visual data is processed 60K times faster by the brain than text

Proof: When someone creates a social network - any social network - marketers will figure out a way to advertise on it.

Retargeting, the future of social advertising (in my humble opinion), is the use of browsing history to target users with advertisements.

Twitter is finally joining the crew and allowing marketers to submit their cookie data through an advertising program - likely one that they're already using for Facebook - to retarget users with their ads.

This is big for Twitter following their IPO which left something to be desired, especially with their lack of revenue.

Here's a great chart that explains the different types of advertising posts you can create on each social network and what value each one can bring to you.

The perceived values (of SMBs) of Facebook and LinkedIn are directly correlated with the respective market caps of the platforms. If the case is to be the same for Twitter, the IPO valuation could be about 4 times too low.

From the article:

Don’t let aggregation give curation a bad name, though. Cutts points out that it’s a different story if your curated content is “content that nobody else has access to, or if you’re writing your own content, or if you’re really putting a lot of effort into curation.”