Responding to the four biggest legal risks of social media to business
With legal cases involving social media are on the rise, businesses need to manage the potential risks. To help review the challenges and solutions to managing the risks of social media, we have recently published our benchmark study on social media and the law. We hope marketers can use the data to evaluate their knowledge and establish the risks they may need to manage.
We’ve summarised the risks of social media in this infographic showing the four main risks as we see them against the awareness of the law.
We see three main takeaways from the research:
Many marketers know the risks, but don’t have company buy-in. Over 50% of companies don’t consider social media legal risks to be an issue or a priority. This was unexpected when respondents made it…
Using social media monitoring to evaluate the success of your digital marketing campaigns and reach your goals
When planning your digital marketing strategy or campaigns, you probably have a range of targets and goals for social media in mind that you are hoping to achieve, and that will help you measure your success. But how do you assess whether you are reaching these goals in practice? In this post I will outline the type of goals to consider and tools and techniques to assess success.
For example, you might consider one or a combination of the following as goals when approaching integrating social in your business:
Increase in followers/fans
Increase in requests for information
Increase in leads
Increase in sales (of a specific product/service, or of everything, or perhaps in a specific market).
Social media monitoring allows you to add another string to your bow, so to speak, by allowing you to…
My experiences in allocating online ad budgets between PPC, Sponsored Stories, Promoted Posts and Facebook Ads
According to a recent Search Engine Land post, some Google customers are abandoning PPC due in part to rising keyword prices. It's an interesting post, and it claims that the majority of PPC companies are, in fact, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises - SMBs in the US).
The final 2012 financial results reported for Google published on January 22nd 2013 show some evidence for reduced competition in that although paid clicks have increased overall globally, CPC has declined significantly, suggesting reduce competition for bidding or fewer advertisers in some markets:
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 24% over the fourth quarter of 2011 and increased approximately 9% over the third quarter of 2012.
Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related…
LinkedIn Answers and Events are no more, giving new impetus to Quora?
Importance: [rating=3]
A couple of relatively small changes in LinkedIn to be aware of if you use LinkedIn as a B2B marketer or for professional development. The two closures which were not announced by the blog since not positive news, but hidden away in the Help Centre are:
LinkedIn Answers - this closes at the end of January 2013. I personally haven’t used it so much recently and wonder whether the better categorisation, filtering and rating in Quora have been the death-knell. A reminder to take a look again at Quora - which has high levels of activity in some areas, for example SEO.
To help Answer Digital Marketing Questions try the Smart Insights Answers forum and Smart Insights LinkedIn Group where we have Q&A across the full range…
Our experiences with using Social Bakers for social media management
Community management is not an easy job. Anyone responsible for an active Facebook and/or Twitter profile will tell you that. The skill set has evolved quickly and was summed up well in Get Satisfaction’s recent Community Manager infographic.
Despite this skill set emerging there are a number of challenges that community managers face. Facebook and Twitter users want near real-time answers to a wide range of questions which can be on any topic from sales enquiries to specific customer support issues. At TUI, I've believed for a long time that sales questions on Facebook or Twitter should be answered by our sales team, customer complaints should be looked after by our customer services team and so on.
[caption id="attachment_20117" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Content feedback within the Social Bakers dashboard[/caption]
An increasing challenge…
A briefing on the opportunities and limitations of Graph Search to prepare businesses for Facebook’s new breakthrough social search tool
By Carlton Jefferis
You will have been hard-pushed to avoid news this week that Facebook launched Graph Search, a major new feature which Mark Zuckerburg hailed “the third pillar of Facebook” after News Feed and Timeline.
This overview introduces the basics of Graph Search and looks at what it could mean to digital marketers and businesses. Over the coming weeks I’ll cover this feature in more detail as further information emerges from Facebook and from those with early access to the US beta release.
What is a Facebook Graph Search?
Graph Search is not a competitor to Google as some of the newspaper headlines may suggest. Instead it's a completely new concept in performing a search on Facebook. It’s not about finding links to…
with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day)
Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended source: LinkedIn Blog
That's an impressive growth rate reminding us of the importance of LinkedIn professionally, or if we work in business-to-business marketing. It would be useful to know the number of active members and fake accounts to get a truer picture though. We find LinkedIn Group Spam needs daily moderation.
As is customary with user milestones, the company has produced an infographic celebrating the milestone. It shows the member numbers in different industries and shows that if LinkedIn were a country it would be the 5th largest in the world.
I recommend using the LinkedIn Skills feature to see the growth and key influencers in your sector.
Check out our B2B Digital Marketing Guide for guidance and examples from René Power on how to best use LinkedIn for Marketing. We will be…
As another new year begins, marketers naturally look to develop their skills and awareness in the areas they are responsible for. For me, social media is a key area and within this, these are the areas that I believe are likely to effect social media marketing effectiveness in 2013. How do you see it?
1. Embrace social search
The launch of Google+ in 2011 and its continued development in 2012 is just one of many signs that traditional search is becoming increasingly influenced by social signals. Whilst great content and effective link building are still the most effective ways of optimising your website for search engines, genuine social media activity is also playing a part, too.
Google’s Search Plus Your World, its numerous algorithm updates and the introduction of the Knowledge Graph are yet more signs that quality…
A case study of using social media in higher education
In this post I will give a summary of a detailed analysis of some findings from a brief audit Carlton Jefferis and I have recently carried out when pitching for some social media consultancy for the University of Hertfordshire. I hope you find the insights shared useful and in addition to comments and advice throughout you'll also find some great creative ideas for content which can work in other sectors too.
Multiple audiences, multiple departments, multiple platforms
The first thing we notice is that the University utilises many different social media platforms and within each has multiple accounts to reflect different Schools/Departments. The question is, does this lead to a silo-ed, somewhat inconsistent approach or is it necessary?
A University has to juggle messages to multiple audiences - students, prospective students (UK and…
Experiments in reviewing the impact of content types on Edgerank
Along with most commentators on Facebook, I've written extensively about the new Edgerank algorithm in recent weeks. It's clear that many brands have experienced a significant drop in organic reach (although to be fair I'm not the only one who has reported a significant increase in reach since the back-end of November as Facebook appear to have tweaked the algorithm again - see below).
There have been myriad opinions expressed. I tend to agree with Jon Loomer's conclusions that viral reach is particularly affected and that even the tiniest "negative feedback" can significantly affect your reach.
Recommended Guide: Smarter Facebook Marketing
Engage your Fans and use…
