A checklist and examples of good practice for 9 new features
It’s now around a month since Facebook business timelines were introduced. We explained the main marketing features here.
We’ve been checking out some of the best uses of the new features for marketing, plus we’re seeing some of the new features aren’t being implemented. It’s rare to see a Facebook page that combines all the features in the most effective way. That’s natural, there’s quite a lot for page owners to “get their heads around”, plus the usual time, budget, technical limitations.
In this post I hope to give some guidance to help you review your site and to combine looking at some examples to learn from, plus showing what some are missing. So from top to bottom, I’ll mark what are potentially the most important.
Well, most…
The 4 most important tools for LinkedIn & your business
LinkedIn is the most important social networks for B2B marketers who are taking online marketing seriously, particularly in the UK and US. LinkedIn now has an array of tools to help bridge the gap between the network and your own website, they're getting better and better and I wanted to share them with you.
With 5.5 Million users in the UK alone (growing daily) there is an opportunity for all B2B businesses on LinkedIn.
As part of integrating LinkedIn on your website you need to also consider how you connect and interact on LinkedIn. You should checkout a recent post on Oatmeal that made us all chuckle, it highlights how so many companies take a very lame approach to Facebook, the same principal applies to LinkedIn. You have to remember…
Five top tips to ‘twitter’ more effectively
Social media marketing can be a difficult beast sometimes, but small and medium businesses who struggle with social networks can take comfort from the fact that even the big brands get it wrong too at times.
Effective use of social media is part art and part science – there are techniques and procedures that work, but creativity and flexibility are also an integral part of any successful campaign.
Here are five of the most common Twitter mistakes made by major brands who ought to be big enough to know better...
1. Only Tweeting during office hours
B&Q have made no secret of the fact it has invested heavily in its social media presence over the past couple of years, and made it a key part of its overall marketing strategy.
Below is a Xefer graph…
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid
A now established process within some of the world's mega brands, social listening is now a highly competitive market in itself. With so many experts and software options it can be difficult to decide what option is best for you.
While social listening creates many opportunities I believe it is less obvious for smaller less talked about brands or industries, hopefully sharing my learnings from running this process at First 10 for a number of clients will help you design it into your SME. It all starts with keeping it simple.
Listening
Listening to your customers has always been important, social networks have just changed the scope and places in which that feedback can take place. Within this article I focus purely on social listening which I will explain in more detail shortly. Before I do, you should remember that their are…
How to answer common objections about the value of social campaigns
I was working with a business a few weeks ago that wanted some help with its social campaigns.
Its latest campaign produced disappointing interaction levels.
And, because of the campaign’s failure to attract a significant following, the business was tempted to pull out of social media altogether and focus on other areas - at least until people in their vertical market sector were deemed to be 'ready for social'.
Disappointing social campaign results can prompt good questions
The failure of the campaign prompted some interesting questions, such as;
“Did the business’s potential clients (people working in hospitals / health care) have the ability and inclination to access social networks.“
“Was it feasible to be 'friends' with businesses? Was it possible that customers didn't want to form this kind of relationship with a business entity?”
Finally, the business outlined…
This video does it well we think
Earlier in the year, I described how consumer brand Burberry communicate their vision for how they seek to use social and digital media to transform their company.
Recently, I’ve seen another good example from B2B technology hardware and services company EMC (See their Social @EMC hub). Take a look; it’s tackling the tough job of convincing sceptical employees who ask “what’s the point” in a light-hearted way. As you can see, it shows that social media is nothing new, simply that technology now helps us to communicate in a way we always have, since the time of the caveman and cavewoman...
I found out about this video on the blog of Keith Paul (@Kempipa), the “Chief Listener” at EMC. It’s an interesting blog, if you’re working in a large company and dealing with big company issues. In this …
A case study of how a family-run business gets an edge by using the latest social media tools
I love this recent campaign pointed out to me by Pritesh Patel. It shows you don’t have to be a big business to run big campaigns in social media. You just need to think big!
McKay Flooring are a family business established for 40 years. I think they give a great example of how smaller businesses can be creative in using social media marketing to expand their reach.
What caught my interest was the way that they use some of the newer social media marketing platforms like Pinterest and Instagram for competitions. These are all promoted through their blog, which is also a great example of how a specialist blog can act as a social hub for campaigns, while also building the credibility of a company by using testimonials and linking to product categories…
Infographic showing the growth of Slideshare
Here's an interesting infographic from Slideshare, reminding us of their reach to professionals, and those marketing to professionals. Are you using Slideshare? Some of the active B2B marketers put it to really good use as an external hub for their content: See Eloqua, and the less creative Dell.
7 reasons to take a serious look
Assuming that you're a B2B marketer, and have good content that can be directly used or re-purposed for Slideshare, we think that Slideshare is a grossly under-utilised tool, especially since the "Pro" version launched, after all if it's good enough for the White House...
Here are the reasons we think it may be worth a look:
Slideshare presentations are highly shareable and embeddable. It's similar to loading video content to YouTube - you get your content in an external hub and…
Are you dormant, testing, co-ordinating, optimizing or empowering?
On Smart Insights, Paul Fennemore recently recommended his social media adoption framework which was popular, so I thought I'd alert you to a new approach to review social media maturity. Forrester have released a report that offers a social maturity model to help illustrate the common stages of change that occur as marketers optimize their social activities from dormant to empowered workforce.
Where are you on the 5 stages of social maturity?
Customers and employees are becoming increasingly empowered by social technologies, dramatically changing the way they communicate and collaborate. We know now this isn't a fad - it's a fundamental shift. To succeed in this new world, companies must make fundamental changes to resources, skills, tools, processes, and culture. Forrester calls this process of change 'social maturity', and it consists of five stages:
Dormant
Testing
Coordinating
Scaling and optimising
Empowering the workforce
…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
