10 steps for managing social media marketing leading to sales transactions

How social media interactions can lead to sale has been the focus of many a discussion in recent years as social media has grown to become a major customer touchpoint. Since the VP of Coke recently made the claim that Social did not lead to any significant direct sales for them, this has had the knock on effect of some questioning the power of social marketing.

What I aim to cover in this post is how a focused, stepped approach to social media marketing should be directed towards sales and how you should plan this into your marketing strategy.

What most people assume is that social is not is a direct sales tool. The reason for this is because if you think about a classic sales funnel from Reach, interest, evaluation, conversion, referral…

LinkedIn launches University Pages to help career-minded students find the right college

LinkedIn, the network that aims to link professionals with potential employers just launched its University Pages. These new pages are meant to help prospective students find the college or university that fits those best. Connecting with those institutions, their alumni, current students or even prospective students are some of the features students will be able to use starting September 12. Additionally, LinkedIn has brought down student limit age from 18 to 14 in the US and Canada to help grow its base of professionals networking on its platform. Two hundreds colleges and universities got the beta University Page. Among them, a few Canadian universities, including York University, McGill University and the University of British Columbia. Thousands of additional schools are expected get access to University Pages in the coming weeks. …

Facebook Embedded Posts follow the Embedded Tweets model

Value: [rating=3] Original 31st July announcement: Facebook developer blog Facebook has now announced that this feature was now available to all on 20th August 2013 and has given more examples. We couldn't demonstrate it when we first alerted readers to it, but can now show how easy it is to add to blogs. This example for "everyone's favourite band" shows how images and video are supported, just click on the down arrow on the "Like Page" button to image. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); Post by Mumford and Sons. This is a neat feature since the Twitter Embed Tweets feature has proved popular for adding tweets or pictures to blogs or campaign sites - they’re a great way…

Examples of how the new Rich Pins in Pinterest are being used in retail

Value/Importance: [rating=3]

Recommended link: Pinterest releases Rich Pins

Pinterest recently released a new feature called ' Rich Pins' which allows companies to add Product price and availability information to their pins. We thought it worth alerting readers to, since it appears to provide a useful way to link Pinterest pins more directly to prompt purchase.

Ecommerce businesses, particularly in fashion and style categories are increasing their traffic and sales orders via Pinterest - according to this research from Shopify, visitors referred from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy compared to other social networks.

Given this, it's common practice for retailers to feature products with the relevant URL to drive pinners back to their website to purchase.  This pin from HomeDepot shows this. The new Rich pins feature now adds pricing and stock information.

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3 examples of integrating social media and email lead generation from small and medium businesses

Many businesses are wondering what they’re really getting from the time they spend marketing on Facebook and, more importantly, how they can turn their hard-earned fans into customers. To support the integration between social media and email marketing, Constant Contact created a tool, Social Campaigns, specifically designed to make it easy to get measurable results from Facebook marketing. With Social Campaigns, businesses can offer current and potential fans something special, such as exclusive content like prize draws or discounts that help grow their fanbase and generate sales, leads, brand awareness, and social word-of-mouth. The tool integrates with email to help capture email leads too. Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights asked me to share the examples since they show how Social and Email marketing can be used for Permission Marketing today using our tool or others. Editor's…

New "Story bumping" and "Last Actor" ranking changes

Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook news feed announcement It seems that for some businesses, gaining visibility in Facebook’s news feed is now almost as important or more important than gaining visibility in Google’s search results for your target pages. Like Google, it’s a challenge, in their briefing this week Facebook revealed how much of a challlenge it is… “Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all… we prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day.”. If you’re concerned with encouraging more sharing of your content through Facebook you will know how it’s controlled by the EdgeRank based on the affinity, weight and decay of posts. Marie Page has given some great guidance on…

4 steps to encouraging influencers for your Twitter campaigns

Influencers are vital to the success of your Twitter campaign. But exactly who are they, why do they matter and how can they be identified? Whether you’re a retail outlet or a business professional, a school or a mail order business, being on Twitter presents a challenge. It’s a conversational platform where you’re supposed to talk to your customers. But how are conversations going to drive sales? And who has the time to have online conversations with hundreds or thousands of individual customers? And that’s where Twitter is misunderstood. You don’t actually need to talk to a lot of people, you simply need to talk to the right people: People your target audience follow People your target audience engage with and respond to. These people are known as influencers. When you talk to an influencer on Twitter, it’s like sitting on stage and having a public conversation…

LinkedIn July 2013 updates: New Sponsored Updates and Company Page Analytics

Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: LinkedIn sponsored updates and Company Page Analytics update  Here are a couple of LinkedIn announcements from July that are both useful for B2B marketers to be aware of. They're both related to company pages. First, you can now sponsor updates to give them more visibility in people's feeds - like Promoted Posts on Facebook and Promoted Tweets on Twitter. Spotting a pattern here? In this case, they're Sponsored Updates. All companies with a business page can now reach out further to members on the network,  similar to existing paid advertising on LinkedIn, and reach a targeted profile of LinkedIn members outside of their Followers or groups who may not be familiar with them. These will likely get much higher clickthrough rates and so more revenue for LinkedIn compared to the existing incidental ads which are easier…

A tutorial on Facebook's updated business page insights

I was very excited to finally get Facebook's new Insights rolled out last week. Well worth the wait. Not sure if you have the new Insights? Take a look at your Admin panel and you should see this:

If not, then you are still awaiting the roll out. It's worth hitting the "Check out the new Page insights" button as it will simply tour you through the new features using your very own data. Facebook describes the update this way: "Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts' performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and…

Social media ROI is a messy business

How do you bring some order to it? There’s no getting away from it. The higher up the sales funnel, the harder and messier it is to make decisions on measuring ROI. Social media is, like any channel (if you choose to view it as one) not perfect to measure, though far from hard to get a good handle on it, and to compare channels with channels using techniques like Google's Multichannel funnels or social reports. It’s the scale of choices that become complex. It’s much easier to post rationalise and retrospectively connect the dots, but not easy to plan for it - otherwise why is ‘viral’ still so remarkable in social media - and why we don’t see the experts doing amazing campaigns repeatedly. It’s always been a challenge, attributing the value of visitors through multiple channels, social media has made that more…