5 Legal ways to contact Facebook winners

When Facebook updated their promotion guidelines this past August, they casually removed the rule that stated brands could not contact promotion winners on Facebook via status updates, private messages, chat, etc. This rule was kind of a hassle, especially for businesses with multiple promotion winners to notify, so pretty much everyone we know was glad to see it go. With this rule no longer in existence, some of our users have asked: What’s the best way to contact contest winners now? In today’s blog post, we cover not one, but five great and totally legal ways to contact Facebook promotion winners.

5 Tips for contacting your Facebook winners

Here they are:

1. Post a status update

One simple way to contact promotion winners is to create a post on your Timeline and announce your winners in it. For example, the post would read: 'Congrats Winner Name! You’ve won our…

New features to support content marketing and hiring new candidates

Value: [rating=3] Recommended Link: Showcase Pages and LinkedIn Talent Updates LinkedIn have announced two new features this week: Showcase Pages and Talent Updates. So, how are these new services relevant to marketers?

Showcase Pages are new, focused brand pages

This new feature is most worthy of consideration by marketers. They provide businesses with a more targeted page to promote a specific product or brand, with a maximum of 10 showcase pages, so content can now be targeted and more relevant to specific audiences. At the moment these are free. Microsoft have piloted this with a showcase page for their Office product you can see more examples of Showcase Pages from Adobe and others by following the   Do you need to set these up? We think most companies will decide…

Do you conform to the typical LinkedIn user?

Every wondered how people are actually using LinkedIn? How much time do they spend? Who pays for the premium services? How many groups are people joining? Which features are the most popular? Who uses their company page?

We are not saying that the persona is the same for everyone, since we all have different goals and LinkedIn has such an array of features for brand awareness, lead generation, job hunting and the list can go on. But we are all curious... perhaps this data will help you win an argument or persuade a colleague!

Wayne Breitbarth has produced an infographic, to look at the profile of a LinkedIn user gathering data from Power+Formula and his 2013 LinkedIn Survey.

Some highlights include:

85% of LinkedIn respondents have a free account.35% have joined up…

Twitter opens its advertising to small and medium businesses in UK, Ireland and Canada and adds custom timelines worldwide

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Twitter blog With the virtual ink barely dry on the Twitter IPO, Twitter has sought to increase its revenue per user from advertising by offering its Promoted Accounts, Tweets and Trends products to smaller businesses in a limited number of countries outside the US - we will update readers when more countries are added. If you had previously tried to sign up via this form you would have seen a minimum monthly spend of $10,000, but this has now been removed, opening up more competition within the ad auction.

Ten things you need to know about Twitter's new advertising options

So this is big news for many small businesses, particularly those such as B2B companies whose audiences tend to…

5 key questions to help develop your Twitter strategy

Following the initial public offering for Twitter valuing the company at $140 billion, we now find ourselves wondering  how the social network will become profitable, and how it can help our businesses to profit.

The truth is, despite now having over 280 million monthly users, Twitter is not profitable - yet.

But there is opportunity for your business... The ability to share updates, disseminate content to prospects, customers, influencers or even just people who are interested in your brand, presents you with the perfect tool for real-time brand awareness.

Of course we know there are also many other advantages of Twitter including service, lead generation and relationship building, with many great examples of brands using Twitter for customer care.

So in fact the questions you should be asking are not only how…

Tips for integrating video as part of content marketing

"The next big thing in content marketing is video,"

...so said, nearly everyone in 2013.

Rather than attempt to convince you of this as a consumer of brands or a business, in this article I'd like to show and advise as to how as part of integrated content strategy, video content can work hard for you and deliver results.

The growing popularity of online video

Online video is big business and it's visibility and the demand for it is statistically astounding. The Content Marketing Institute report the following stats to help paint a picture:

On-line video has increased eightfold in five years.In 2016 the gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made in the history of film will move across networks every 3 minutes.It will take 6million years to watch all the video that will uploaded in one month, in 2016.Video will be 55% of all internet…

Who are your audience on YouTube and what turns them on or off?

For any serious video content creator, YouTube Analytics (YTA) is an essential tool. Using YTA regularly is the only way to assess the performance of your YouTube channel and to see any significant changes or patterns in your audiences’ behaviour. The insights that YTA provides are designed to highlight to creators what they need to do to make better videos. If you are approaching your video output strategically, YTA is your means to regularly assessing the performance of your videos and using those insights to constantly improve your content and audience strategies.

This is an introduction to the main features of YouTube Analytics. The guide is divided into two sections; firstly, using YTA to help you build your audience and secondly, using YTA to improve audience engagement.

SECTION A - Building an audience

1 Who are your viewers?

The Demographics feature in…

How brands can use Instagram to connect with customers

Following the news that Instagram is set to bring ads to the service, MyCustomer.com asked a number of experts how this will help brands connect with customers. When Instagram was bought by social media giant Facebook back in March, speculations quickly began about the likelihood that Instagram would follow Facebook’s lead and begin monetising the site. And it wasn’t long before this was confirmed. Last week, Instagram COO Emily White, who joined the company from Facebook, told the Wall Street Journal that the photo-sharing network would start rolling out advertising within the next year. 'We want to make money in the long term, but we don't have any short-term pressure,' she said, adding that the challenge for Instagram would be to integrate marketing without jeopardising the network’s ‘cool factor’. The details on…

An alert about LinkedIn Sponsored Job Listings

Importance: ★★★ Recommended link: LinkedIn Sponsored Job Listings An alert to let you know about LinkedIn sponsored job listings if you're not aware of them. We get quite a few questions about how to expand awareness of new roles outside of traditional recruitment, so thought we'd share this option. These listings are now showing in the main feed on the member’s homepage where historically, they were only accessible in the ‘Jobs You May Be Interested in’ on the homepage and to email subscribers.

'The benefit to these listings is that they have the capability of reaching those who may not be actively looking for work, but happen across the job recommendation on the site or via email, and decide to learn more or apply' These will…

A case study showing how to research the impact of Facebook on sales

The journey of measuring Facebook success has been fast paced. It started with how big your fan page was (counting likes), then to visits from social profiles, to getting very excited by the concept of Engagement Rate. Some opinion believes social media is best used to drive brand awareness, others for customer service. And there are brands that use Facebook as a successful sales channel. There have been frameworks and methodologies as well as plenty of "proof" (largely published by service providers in the social media industry), yet the fact still remains that demonstrating the value of a Facebook page or Twitter account is still hard in 2013, especially if you're not a retail brand. The reason? For travel brands like us it's hard to imagine that anyone is going to see a post of ours on Facebook, click through…