Well, it seems as if Google Plus is here to stay. This chart tells its own story, although Google had a huge head start in awareness that Facebook and Twitter didn’t have originally.
Like many others, I’ve been trying to work out how to best use Google Plus to stay informed. Within Google Plus a big part of this is deciding on who goes in which circles. I’m putting most people more or less well in a “digital marketers” circle, when they add me, but I also have more focused circles which are to help me find out what’s new in the different areas of digital marketing.
On Twitter, Wefollow - digital marketing example is useful if you’re new…
Q. How effective is Facebook advertising?
I was recently asked this question by a student putting together a budget model for an online marketing campaign. I pointed them in the direction of this post on online ad clickthrough rates, but they specifically asked about Facebook, so this post is to answer the question and help others.
The best public source on Facebook advertising effectiveness I’m aware of, is the analysis of 2.2 million clicks from 4.5 billion impressions that Webtrends track as part of their analytics system which I’ll summarise here.
Well, the overall number of clicks compared to impressions above give their own story - response rates are low - around than 1 in 2000 page views results in an ad clicks. No surprise since banner clickthrough rates are low and we’re mostly online to socialise.
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We saw this post on Open Forum, and then Mashable and thought that it was a great question to ask by Mashable, since there’s a wealth of potential for some markets.
You may have seen in the past that we have compared the features of the main social media monitoring tools. Well, there's now a new tool to add to the list! Cruvee is the first vertical social media monitoring tool, that we’re aware of.
This approach seems proven and popular for the wine market with around 30% of US wineries using it. With that evidence, why aren’t we seeing more platofrms like this for other markets? A gold mine, surely. That said, Cruvee remains free, for now!
What makes Cruvee so special?
Paul Mabray, VinTank’s chief strategy…
Six key questions to answer in your social media strategy
Assuming that you're clear on what you need from social media in terms of goals and objectives, there is often a key missing ingredient from a social media initiative - a fully considered strategy. It sounds a little glib, and yet it remains important to be clear on the how and why of implementing and integrating social media marketing into the business.
There are multiple benefits to getting this right:
Get buy in from budget holder, project sponsors and senior management
Clarity on vision, purpose and direction with business context
Ability to scale both the size and scope of the social media programme
Budgeting and resource management against objectives and goals, to understand the return against any other marketing activity
I find that strategy is generally misunderstood, and it appears that this is even more the case in social media where focus is so often about…
Having only recently got an invite I was wondering how the messaging worked and came across this on Mashable. Thought you may find useful!
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How should we manage social media conversations in the real world?
Did you see the publicity late last year around the launch of these "command centers" by two megabrands? Think nuclear power station or space shuttle consoles, very futuristic. I thought their launch campaigns were really interesting in the way they were used to highlight, the importance of listening and responding, both to consumers and other people within the company.
Gatorade Mission Control
Here is a great example of how one brand uses social listening not only to monitor, but to engage and influence too.
Mashable wrote-up the thinking behind this. If you take a look at this promo video, you can see how they emphasise the importance of listening to ALL conversations, but not only to monitor negatives, but find a way to engage and create dialogue. You can also see the scope of the control centre is not just…
Some of the best in digital marketing offer their social media advice
We're always cautious of rule-books - but when Eloqua team up with JESS3, Steve Rubel, David Armano and Scott Monty (amongst others) then it's certainly worth stopping to read. This ProBook is an evolution of the PlayBook that was created a year ago - having read both I'd say this latest piece is designed for people with some idea of social media marketing
The book is a corporate guide to organising a brand or business to succeed in social media marketing, it also doubles as a who, where and how of the social media landscape with fun features such as a 'day in the life'. The book seeks out to specifically answer:
How to optimise your Facebook newsfeed
How to scale a social media marketing programme
How to measure social media success beyond Likes
How to create infographics that wow
How to…
We introduced Google +1 on our Google updates page back in March when this was announced, but it only became live in the UK on June 29th. So it's time to take another look and think through the implications for marketing.
June 30th update: When I originally wrote this post, I asked about methods of measuring +1 interactions, well Google were on the case and next day announced methods to measure +1s which I've linked to at the end of the post. This is a fantastic new feature in Google Analytics since it also shows Facebook and Twitter interactions - both on your site and in the network.
Google's original announcement explains how it works, but let's take a look at an example from when it went live - not many yet. You will have seen that Google has a new interface with a grey bar and a "+1" icon to…
A brief update on Google's Facebook competitor
Well, Google's latest project to grab a greater share of our online social interactions has finally been unveiled. We may soon have to talk about five major social networks which are a priority for online marketing: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube AND Google+. This will likely be THE biggest development in 2011 for digital marketers to think of new marketing approaches for, although I suspect it won't go live until 2012. Will that be fast enough?
There have already been several in-depth, breathless, mostly sycophantic writeups from Google briefings to Mashable, Searchengineland and Techcrunch. Each of their headlines positions it squarely as a serious competitor to Facebook.
So I thought we'd focus on the essentials you need to know to answer questions from colleagues. Everyone will be forming their own impressions, these are mine so far :) Let me know if you think different,…
Hitwise data reveals the importance of Facebook marketing for online retailers
In a recent post Robin Goad of Hitwise reminds that "Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and is now the second biggest source of traffic to other websites as well. 1 in every 6 page views from UK Internet users goes to a Facebook page, and 20 million hours are spent on the website every day from UK users alone."
So far, so good - we know Facebook is big! There's no question of the importance of social media, content and inbound marketing, with Facebook being an important part of that ecosystem. The Hitwise research data stresses the value of Facebook for multi-channel marketers. According to Hitwise, the same names are dominating - Topshop, ASOS etc - the majority being own or one-brand online retailers.
The context here is…
