Using Tweetreach to find out your main influencers in Twitter
I’m writing this post to share a neat, free tool which as it says in its strapline answers the question How far did your tweet travel? I’m prompted to write this summary since I was recently asking this question after Chris Soames, one of our Smart Insights writers, wrote a popular post on finding the best harshtags in Twitter which was widely shared.
To answer the question of who is influential in sharing your tweets, Tweetreach provides a great simple, tool to help with this. If you enter the URL for the page your tweet links to, it will show you Retweets, new tweets not referencing the original and most usefully which Twitter users contributed the most "impressions":
You can see that this post was successful because it was shared by several…
Facebook releases new marketing advice for businesses
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.facebook.com/business
Our commentary: In the first week of August, Facebook announced "Facebook for Business". While this sounds like an attempt to compete with LinkedIn or Google+, in fact it’s just an update to their guidance notes which has been lacking for quite a while.
10/10/2011 update - New Facebook Page Insights guide
We advised last week that Facebook that was introducing two new features and it hasn't taken long for Facebook to roll these out. The main change is that Facebook Page admins will see a new "People Talking About This" measure on the page and in Facebook Insights:
This measure gives you an overall idea of conversations about a brand within the past 7 days. Facebook have introduced a new guide on Page Insights (below) which explains this measure and how…
LinkedIn brings in status updates for companies
Value/Importance: [rating=5] for B2B!
Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement
Example of new LinkedIn "Company Activity" status updates
Our commentary on the new company status updates
If you use LinkedIn to market your business to other businesses you may remember that LinkedIn introduced Company Follow about 18 months ago. It allows you to setup a company page like in Facebook and others can follow it.
LinkedIn explain:
“Keep in mind your status updates can be up to 500 characters long and can support URLs with multimedia as well. Given that any LinkedIn member can comment, like or share your Company’s status update, this is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike”.
To switch on this feature - administrators should read this. I just added an update about this change to our page which…
Facebook announcements at Advertising Week, 02/10/2011
There were a couple of new features trailed for Facebook this week that this alert covers. They're in the "coming real soon" category and the only info that others are reporting on is this post on the Official Facebook Studio site. Details are a bit "thin on the ground right now", so we will look at them in more detail once full access is live.
#1 New Page Insights
A new suite of metrics are to be opened up by Facebook in the "coming weeks", the two metrics are focussed around the extended reach of your page / content, giving you insights into how friends of fans interact with your content as well as metrics such as virality & engagement to each post. The aim is to empower businesses / page owners to further undertand…
6 reasons why B2B marketing can succeed on Facebook
There is a growing premise in business marketing that whilst your website is your shop window to the world, you increasingly need to promote yourself and engage with your audience where your audience congregates. AKA "Swim with the Fishes". So, with well over 600 million users, where better than Facebook?
The case for using Facebook for B2B marketing
1. You just can’t argue with the numbers. Whether it's 600 or 700 million, Facebook is the perfect place to cast the net wide. It is reasonable to assume that some of your target customers will be using the site in some way, shape or form. Mostly, though, for real time information and recommendations - which proves the continued importance of good relationships and word of mouth.
2. Facebook is viral by design. You want your content to spread, get it on Facebook. If it is any…
6 key questions to ask about how a brand uses social media
I work in the travel industry which, most of the time, seems like a great place to be for a digital marketer. It lends itself to rich, original content and has allowed the pioneering (but not always dominant) brands to develop online in ways never before possible with traditional media (think of brands such as Travel Zoo and Trip Advisor).
On the other hand the travel industry is being squeezed from all sides, (costs are rising almost everywhere let alone in travel) whilst the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and even more competitive. It’s also an industry which has had the way it does business entirely turned on its head thanks to the wide scale adoption of the internet.
In this post, I share my experiences from our initial work with social…
A real-world example of what works for LinkedIn Advertising
What did we do?
I recently launched a B2B social media campaign on LinkedIn and since I noticed there were relatively few live examples, I thought I would share what we found worked or not to help others who are wondering “is it worth it?” and “how do i do it?”.
The background to the campaign was that we had launched a new service for recruitment professionals and we wanted to build brand awareness to associate ourselves with the service and get signups to the service. You will have noticed I can’t be too specific about the service for confidentiality reasons, but I can be more open about how we optimised the ads which I’ll share at the end of the post.
How did we do it?
We were featuring four different products on our website. These were built as Landing Pages with…
Is social sign-on in the plans for your site?
Like everyone else, we’re planning upgrades to our site and have been thinking how to increase interactions with our readers. Social sign-on is one approach of how to do this, so I've written up my thoughts and interested in how you see it. Is it only a win-win through increase participation and conversion rates or could there be privacy concerns for customers?
What is social sign-on?
Social sign-on/login is an approach we’re seeing on more and more sites now, although it's not written about so much. You’ve almost seen this on sites like Mashable or TechCrunch which enable commenting through logging in / authentication through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or OpenID.
When I’ve looked into this to see whether there is wider adoption on sites other than blogs/online publishers like retail or travel transactional sites. I’d assumed this is because of security concerns, but I’ve changed…
As you know, Facebook isn’t just a website, it’s a environment its 400 million active users use everyday. Thanks to the widgets developed through its API, its influence extends much wider than Facebook to the many sites which conversations are shared on. For many, going online means going on Facebook.
So when Facebook briefs journalists to promise that “I have seen what Facebook is launching on Thursday, and it’s going to change the world of social media”, we have to take notice and ask - does this make a difference?
Well, I’ve watched the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg and read the analysis. Does it really change the world for most marketers? I’d have to say “No”. Yes, it offers a much richer way for users to share profile information, but the same underlying features of status updates, business Facebook pages and advertising remain…
21 tips to help you review your approach to getting value from your social media marketing
You hear this question a lot: can social media actually drive sales? It's a key question with all the ongoing interest in social media.
My answer, when asked, is that social media primarily grows permission through lead generation if you're approaching it as a "sales acquisition tactic". But it's actually often a more relevant tactic for customer re-engagement. Once you have permission then you can develop the relationship and earn the right to sell. With this in mind, Dave and I thought it would be good to give you a whole bunch of ideas to think about how you use social media to generate leads.
First, start with an evaluation of you current online lead generation process and figure out how well it’s working through your website. Also, consider where you're turning people off - and correct…
