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June 25, 2012
5 simple techniques to consider to increase your Twitter following
I’m often asked how you can build followers on Twitter. The truth is that there isn’t any secret to doing this and buying followers or using autofollow systems is a short sighted cheat which isn’t a good idea. Buying followers is like hiring people to line up outside your bar to make it look busy. You might get some new people lining up because of the crowd, but if your bar sucks, they won’t be staying no matter how many people you’ve paid to get in line.
Leveraging Twitter for your brand marketing simply takes hard work and effort. Here are five ways I've found effective to build your brand on Twitter:
#1 Participate in chats
There are regularly scheduled Twitter chats on just about any subject you can think of. Whether its industries or special interests, there’s a good bet there’s a regular…
New social media benchmark research reveals which social media tactics are working best for businesses
The Social Media Benchmark is a rolling six-monthly study exploring how marketers are adapting to, investing in and getting value from social media.
We first reported on Wave 1 in February 2012 when the results from an Autumn 2011 study were published. Wave 2, the first survey for 2012 was published in June 2012. I have updated our summary below, showing the changes between Wave 1 and 2.
Purpose and methodology
This is a major, ongoing initiative from The Chartered Institute of Marketing which is supported by Ipsos ASI and Bloomberg. You can see from the names behind this research is not just, a poll, instead it's a major research programme.
It's intended to help companies understand how they can get value from social media marketing through publishing regular waves to benchmark against. The first wave of 1500 marketers…
New report highlights the top luxury brands and the challenge of ongoing engagement
Firstly, it's important to remember that the luxury market really has been slow to adapt to social media marketing. Largely ignoring the channel in the early days, most likely since it's nothing akin to the world that luxury brands are used to, advertising orientated essentially. It's what they know, and how the communicate to the mass audience.
For a short period it seemed that luxury brands had come to truly appreciate social media’s ability to reach its customers, brands like Porshche and Burberry have started out and done very well, and let's not forget is was only 2010 when Prada, Jimmy Choo, Hugo Boss and Marc Jacobs set up their first online storefronts!
Today the most aggressive, or forward looking, of these companies are Macy’s, Sephora, Lancôme, Michael Kors and IWC,…
Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation?
June 2012 update - a new service for benchmarking Facebook customer service:
On June 20th at LeWeb, Socialbakers introduced a new service, Socially Devoted, which gives an idea of what are good and bad levels of customer service within Facebook.
Here is the worst from the retail category which shows there is still plenty of room for improvement:
The most responsive show how it can be done:
I originally read this post by Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, in October 2011 about the lack of interaction of brands have on their own Fan pages. Apparently only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand - shocking really! It's really shooting yourself in the social foot…
Have you considered Facebook Promoted Posts? Examples of results from tests.
Another new feature that Facebook is offering (and yet more evidence of its post IPO drive to monetise) is Promoted Posts.
As I reported here recently, most fans are only seeing 17% of a brand's posts. This data has always been available in the Insights dashboard, but Facebook are now choosing to bring it to brand page admin's attention far more by displaying the percentage to date under each post.
Brand page managers have been less than delighted to discover that they are now having to pay for the privilege of their earned fans seeing their updates. But, even with the best optimised posts on the platform, you will be limited in getting your message out there. Enter Promoted Posts.
It's pretty simple to promote a post. Create your new post and either at that point (or up to three days later) selecte "Promote". Depending…
How to use the new Facebook scheduling feature for weekend engagement
Despite Facebook engagement rates in multiple sectors rocketing at the weekends, on Sunday in particular, reports from organisations such as Buddy Media show that very few brands are in fact posting content at the weekend. Those brands that do post outside of normal business hours enjoy 20% higher engagement rates.
One of the reasons for this tardiness is likely to have been the lack of ability, until recently, to schedule updates on Facebook without using a third party tool such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.
Furthermore, using these may not be a great idea. The Facebook Edgerank algorithm appears to favour posts inserted directly into its platform rather than those scheduled via Hootsuite. Eloqua claim that there is 61% less visibility when a third party tool is used rather than manual…
Or is it simply a case that we've now no excuse, fellow marketers?
I've seen this graphic (below) appear a few times now and the general consensus appears to be:
"wow - how insanely complicated is social media"
see an example here.
I really disagree that this is in any way negative, so much so that I'm eventually compelled to post on the topic.
Update 15th June 2012: A new diagram has also been released this week by SMI which shows that it's not so complex in reality. We like the attempt to simplify!
But, back to my main point, I feel some people are missing the gilt-edged opportunity…
It's nowhere near as complicated as it looks. Why? As marketers we should be using a process to focus on our own consumers/personas and not get obsessed with the vast array of channels and tactics, you'll quickly shorten…
Improving EdgeRank factors for a Facebook company page updates
Last week we looked at how Facebook's EdgeRank alogrithm works for marketing. This week we look more specifically at how to improve a page's Edgerank. So, let's get straight into it... I'll review the three factors of Facebook update affinity, weight and decay that I introduced previously.
Improving Affinity
As I explained in my previous post, affinity refers to how interested a friend is in a brand’s page or how much of an online friend you are. Facebook gathers this data based on the clicks you have made in the past to that page /friend’s feed plus the number of likes, shares and comments you have made.
Affinity can drop off relatively quickly so the challenge is to continually be building affinity with your fans. Think about posts more like a dripping tap than a single big splash.
"If you haven’t had the dripping tap…
By
May 31, 2012
New media can learn a lot from old media…
I spent 15 years behind a mic in radio and I’m amazed by the similarities between radio and social media – be it Twitter, Facebook or Email.
It may surprise you that social media shares some qualities with the more traditional medium of radio. Obviously the technology is very different, but there is a good deal which social channels and those who employ them can learn from radio done well.
Here are five key things social media can learn from radio:
One-to-One communication
Good radio is a one-to-one communication. That is to say that any host who knows their stuff is going to stay away from referring to listeners as a mass audience. You focus on making it a casual conversation between two friends and you talk directly to that one person. Mmm!…
An explanation of why Edgerank matters to Facebook marketing - Part 1
So you’ve got a great piece of content all ready to go on your Facebook page. You post and wait expecting the likes and shares to come rushing in. You’ve got several thousand fans but you appear to have generated online tumbleweed moment. Why?
Well, research from allfacebook.com and Edgerank Checker shows that, on average, 83% of your fans may not even be seeing your posts. Facebook suggest as few as 16% of fans are actually reached. That might explain the tumbleweed feel you can get on Facebook.
Data from Pagelever at Inside Facebook suggests the situation is even worse, and the larger the number of fans, the less likelihood of the post being seen.
Whatever the actually figure, getting your…
