Examples showing the benefits of a multi-page social network communications approach
There is no doubt that social should be an important factor in digital marketing strategies going forward. Whether you are trying to improve brand awareness, build customer relationships or stay on top of the search rankings, social media should not be omitted from your digital marketing campaigns.
There are a few big brands that don’t invest in multiple pages, or can get away with minimal investment in social media. For example Apple, who according to Branddirectory.com were the No1 global brand last year don’t have an official Twitter page and although they are on Facebook they have obviously made the decision that updating it is not on their to do list for now. With a reported $1billion marketing budget in 2012, they most definitely have a vast array of other options than most marketers…
Better mobile support and a richer use of imagery
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook 7th March announcement
Our commentary on Facebook’s latest update
At Smart Insights we aim to only cover the major updates to Facebook that are likely to have a big impact on marketers using Facebook. It’s now around around a year since we covered the marketing implications of the new Timeline - still worth checking to see whether you are using all of the 9 features we cover to the maximum.
We weren’t expecting this update to be as significant since it doesn't directly relate to company pages, with rumours suggested it would cover the Newsfeed, so would have an impact on advertising and visibility of updates from company pages.
As always Facebook’s design team faced a delicate balance between increasing average ad revenue per user against improvement to usability and experience.…
5 time-saving tips to make your social media activities more efficient
Social media can be perceived to be time-consuming given its returns and we can all have limited resources to manage our social media platforms. I hope my 5 tips give you some ideas to make your use of social media more efficient and effective. Please share your approaches in the comments.
1. Define a clear social media strategy
Being active on social media does not require you to activate 20 different accounts across various platforms. If you are just getting started or have not ventured much beyond Facebook and Twitter, venture slowly and give yourself time to develop the best practices on each of your chosen core platforms.
To start, take the time to:
Focus on 3 or 4 relevant platforms where you know your customers or key influencers are engaging.
Create a spreadsheet of all the accounts, complete with the usernames and…
Agencies give their views on how companies can get social engagement in six seconds
Last month Twitter announced its entrance into the video sharing arena, with the introduction of Vine, a mobile app that allows users to capture and share short six-second looping videos. In this post, I'll look at how marketers view the potential of Vine and advise on how it should be integrated into campaigns.
Currently only available on iOS, but with plans to bring it to other platforms in the future, iPhone and iPod touch users can download the free Vine app from the app store, recording videos and sharing them on the Vine network itself and Twitter.
Already dubbed the ‘Instagram for video’, initial response to the innovation has been generally positive – though with a few caveats.
“I think Vine is a perfect fit…
A briefing on Facebook Page Post Targeting Enhanced advertising feature
Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting is a relatively new Facebook feature (officially referred to as “Page Post Targeting Enhanced”) that enables pages to deliver more relevant messaging to their Facebook fans.
In short, Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting increases the targeting accuracy of posts by increasing the types of posts segments a community manager can target. Previously, pages could only deliver “one-size-fits-all” posts, or segment posts against locations or languages.
The more robust segmentation criteria allows pages to segment their posts to their audience’s newsfeed using additional criteria, including:
Age
Education
Gender
Workplace
Interests
Language and Location
Relationship Status
Marketing Implications
The low barrier to development and deployment of segmented messaging using this tool allows for micro-segmented, personalized message deployment at scale. This has the potential to dramatically increase your Page engagement rate. As such, Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting lends itself naturally to integration within your Social…
S**t happens...
There's a lot of discussion in the press after the hacking of Burger King's Twitter account, and more recently the same has happened to Jeep, as it has many brands before. What are the implications?
It's time for brands to step up
The talk now of course is about security, protecting brands that use Twitter enabling multi-factor authentication (as Facebook do) and so on. We need to make it *safe*. Haha - Are you kidding me, aren't we missing the point? Do brands need armbands and guarantees before they feel safe in the murky and uncontrollable world of social media? This issue of security is symptomatic of the bigger problem, I feel.
Let's be clear here, it's not Twitter's 'fault', they provide a free service for us all to use, if they can provide additional free features, then great (paid ones if we want…
A briefing on the Facebook Exchange (FBX)
Most social media marketers largely relied on the Facebook MarketPlace Ads to reach out to the billions of Facebook users each month. Although they were relatively effective in marketing, Facebook saw the need of introducing a better and more reliable social advertising option - The Facebook Exchange, otherwise popularly referred to as FBX.
FBX is a system where Facebook sells high quality inventory ads through an auction to many marketing bidders (Real Time Bidding). It significantly helps marketers reach out to the valuable consumers on Facebook.
FBX enables advertisers to serve tracking cookies on users' browsers as they visit advertiser or publisher sites and then retarget those users with relevant ads once they enter Facebook, often for remarketing, i.e. to remind them about a retailer site they have visited for example.
…
Ideas to improve the effectiveness of marketing using social media marketing platforms
Social media marketing is important; enough has been said on the matter. On the surface, many facets of social media marketing through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ seem simple. But effective marketing goes deeper than that. Executing this marketing is a more nuanced affair. It isn't simply a matter of "doing it," there has to be a clear goal in mind, with an overarching ethos and objectives that align with that.
It’s not always a matter of avoiding doing it “the wrong way.” Doing the “right thing” the wrong way can be just as worthless, so let’s let's look at some common misconceptions about how to go about marketing on social media.
1. Myth: update constantly
A social channel with nothing on it is a dead one, and nobody will want…
5 approaches for success in managing social media
Social media certainly isn’t the new kid on the block anymore. And by the end of last year, it was clear that brands were beginning to grow in confidence on the platform, and find their voice.
We're seeing maturity in the way that decisions are made about investment in social media and how it's managed. We talked to specialists on approaches for managing social media, these are the trends that they see.
1. Businesses will continue to shift investments away from Facebook and back to on-domain communities.
“In 2013, businesses that had previously shifted marketing funds away from their traditional dot-com domain towards Facebook will reverse that trend,” predicts Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent. “Research from Forrester Research, Inc., and other leading analyst firms continues to validate the need for organisations to invest in their own…
An experiment to assess what drives organic Reach on Facebook? Likes, Comments or Shares?
I wrote recently about some comparisons I had drawn between different types of post on Facebook with a view to drawing conclusions about the most effective content types on Facebook.
Continuing on a similar theme I've been experimenting this week with two similar posts. One resulted in lots of Shares and Likes but only 1 Comment vs another with lots of Comments (and half the number of Likes and Shares).
Here are the post, they were both classified by Facebook identically (both were Photos - recently downgraded by Facebook in its new variant of the Edgerank algorithm) and both were posted at a similar time of day. The image on the right (with the highest Reach) was posted first. If anything its high success would have driven a higher organic audience for the subsequent post (on the left)…
