UK marketers rate social media advertising platforms in new DMA research

The DMA has created a new social media scorecard based on a survey it ran amongst UK Social Media marketers to rate the usage of social media platforms. The scorecard summarised in the infographic is split into 3 areas: campaign planning, execution and post campaign analysis. The Infographic shares the findings: For campaign planning, Youtube and Google+ are the least favourable for individual targeting, compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. For campaign execution, Google+ scored low as businesses are still not sure how to use it, whereas Facebook and Twitter are higher due to ease of use and available insights. For post analysis, it's interesting that Twitter ranked low as marketers have to use third party tools as Twitter is limited. Facebook and LinkedIn ranked top.

According to Lynsey…

A larger ad format aimed at increasing ad response

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: New Facebook Ad Format in the right-hand column Facebook have launched a new sponsored ad design in the coming, with more visual designs, to increase engagement for Advertisers. The ads will appear in the right hand column for more prominence of ads and videos making them consistent with newsfeed ads:

 What's the buzz about the new Facebook changes?

According to Facebook, these are the reasons behind the improvements: Improved clickthrough rates?  Facebook is looking to increase its CPC revenue and increase competition between advertisers with this new format. So Advertisers will have a greater opportunity to get their message across. Some tests have seen…

An update on 10 major changes in LinkedIn that B2B marketers and professional users need to be aware of

LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social networks, it recently announced that in March 2014 it had over a quarter of a billion members of which 66% are outside the United States:

85M+ EMEA65M+ Europe50M+ Asia and the Pacific9M+ Southeast Asia4M+ DACH​10M+ MENA

So, LinkedIn demands attention for professional use to advance your career and if you're involved in B2B marketing. If you’re looking to catch up on the changes in LinkedIn, here is a quick summary of the features that LinkedIn has added (as well as dropped) during the last 12 months

1. Status updates re-located: It is no longer possible to post status updates on your profile. Updates can only be posted on the home screen…

How to review and improve the engagement of your Facebook fans and impact on your business

As the largest global social networking site, Facebook opens up a huge opportunity to engage with your customers and increase affinity with your brand. Engagement is the key indicator of a successful Facebook page, with high levels meaning that you are posting content that your fans find both relevant and interesting. More engaged fans are more likely to be converted into paying customers. The question is, how do you measure how engaged your fans are and what are the best tools around that can help you measure engagement on Facebook? Follow this step-by-step process to start measuring how engaged your Facebook fans are.

1. Start off – Define your KPIs

To make sure you have targets to work towards, set out some KPIs that you can use to measure your progress against. There are many metrics available online, for example:

…

Will you be creating Showcase pages or...?

Importance (for B2B marketers): [rating=5]

Recommended link: Showcase Pages replacing 'Product and Services Tab' from Company Pages

In November, we alerted you to the new Showcase pages on LinkedIn where businesses can create a page for each brand, so Microsoft can create a separate Showcase page for each of Office and Windows, for example. 

Following on from this, LinkedIn have now announced that Showcase pages will become the only option for businesses to directly feature specific products and services via a page.

If you're a page admin you will likely have received an Email from LinkedIn alerting you to this, but if not...you need to be aware that although company pages are remaining, they are removing the 'Products and Services Tab' from…

Building the business case for more investment in Instagram marketing

Instagram recently announced that it now has 200 million monthly active users who between them, are sharing 60 million photos every day generating a mind-boggling 1.6 billion Likes. That's over 20 billion photos shared since its launch in 2010.

What's more, since releasing figures at the end of 2013, the platform is said to have added around 50 million users in the last six months - a staggering 170 million since its acquisition by Facebook for £1bn in April 2012.

If we compare it to the growth statistics for other social media platforms we can see that it is currently the fast growing social network in terms of active users.

So with this apparent unstoppable growth, what does this really mean for marketers, and should your brand be joining…

Also adds Pages to Watch feature to enable competitor review

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Facebook - New Brand Page Layout change 26th March update: The new layout still hasn't rolled out for us yet, but Facebook has posted a blog answering some FAQ about the new brand page layout. This suggests that apps will be in left hand column so may be more prominent than the previous grabs below suggested, so maybe good news. Is anyone seeing the new version yet? This is big news since most brands now have a Facebook page which is a primary way of engaging with prospects and customers. Facebook have announced it will be changing the layout of the Facebook Brand Pages starting this week. Keep an eye out this week, as it is rolled out. So what will it give us and look…

Combining conversations from different platforms

It started with a moan over dinner. I was chatting with sometime Smart Insights blogger Yusuf Bhana about how well things were going on the Musicademy Facebook Page but how frustrating it was that we end up hosting one (somewhat limited) conversation about a blog post on the blog and then another (altogether more animated) conversation about that same blog post on the Facebook Page.

"My philosophy has always been to host conversations in the places where your community want to have them and over the years as Facebook has become such a mainstream place for content marketing for many consumer brands, inevitably a lot of the buzz we create online has moved there, away from the blog".

Centring your content sharing and discussion on Facebook has advantages in terms of virality (albeit organic reach right now is shockingly poor do to yet another algorithm change…

A step-by-step guide to integrating Facebook with an online store

You will know that worldwide, Facebook is the largest online social network, there are over 1.5 billion active Facebook users. This data from Global Web Index on active social media network platform active usage  shows the continued dominance of Facebook. How can retailers best take advantage of all these Facebook interactions? This post looks at Facebook fan engagement for e-commerce websites specifically - I hope the examples I show will give you some new ideas.  The Smart Insights Guide to Facebook marketing has more details and guidance with retail examples too. We will explore how to structure your page and what types of status updates to choose in order to gain the most relevant and loyal audience of your future customers. You will also find out what applications work best. 1. First…

Successfully combining paid advertising and organic content on Facebook in 2014

Marketing professionals all around the world, whether online or offline will know that the marketing environment can change significantly at any given time. Social media is a notoriously flexible and changeable medium, as users and owners try to figure out how to best optimise the sites. Just recently we have seen Facebook introduce a new brand page layout. The latest change in the world of social media is one that was perhaps inevitable from the conception of social networking but has now set the bar for the future of social media marketing. In December 2013, Facebook released a document called 'Generating business results on Facebook.' In this document the company advise that they 'expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on…