5 tips to avoid drowning in social media
I am fortunate to be working in an agency environment, so I hear stories from various industries and brands related to digital marketing. It keeps me on my toes as it forces constant learning and hones my listening skills! One of the most common trends I hear and read about at the minute is how stressful and overwhelming people and brands are finding the management of "social media". It's my job in those circumstances to help give clients clarity and focus. I thought I would share my 6 tips for ensuring you don't fall into the same trap many others seem to.
I think that in recent years as more people in businesses have become alert to Social Media and even using it themselves it has forced it into the limelight for marketers. CEO's who want to have more likes…
An approach and tools for deeper social media analysis
When it comes to social media, many marketers are still struggling to measure the success of their efforts. In fact, Pivotcon’s State of Marketing Report suggests that 53% of marketers do not even make an attempt to measure success. So, what should social media analysis look like? In this post I explore two approaches to social media analysis and provide examples of how to look beyond the numbers and find value in social noise.
Why Measure Social Media?
It is a no brainer really. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Dedicating time and business resource to social media means that you need to be clear on what impact it is having on your business.
You need to provide success metrics and understand what value social media is providing to your brand.
If you have a Facebook brand page you…
Social media ROI is a messy business
How do you bring some order to it? There’s no getting away from it. The higher up the sales funnel, the harder and messier it is to make decisions on measuring ROI. Social media is, like any channel (if you choose to view it as one) not perfect to measure, though far from hard to get a good handle on it, and to compare channels with channels using techniques like Google's Multichannel funnels or social reports. It’s the scale of choices that become complex. It’s much easier to post rationalise and retrospectively connect the dots, but not easy to plan for it - otherwise why is ‘viral’ still so remarkable in social media - and why we don’t see the experts doing amazing campaigns repeatedly.
It’s always been a challenge, attributing the value of visitors through multiple channels, social media has made that more…
5 practical techniques to help get your message through...
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Research from Bit.ly Blog
I remember reading a while ago in Tim O’Reilly’s book on Twitter marketing that most people most responses or tweets happen within 5 minutes of the original tweet - scary! Much worse than Email marketing where at least you have responses for hours rather than minutes.
I’m not sure companies using social networks realise this unless they’ve looked at specific social media marketing reporting tools like Bit.ly which give hourly reports. The reason is obvious, most people have so many sources they follow in their stream and if they don’t see the message while browsing their stream then it’s gone. Life is too short to browse your whole stream
To show how big this challenge is URL shortening service Bit.ly published some interesting research across different media. It's useful too, since…
New data shows relative importance of different social channels on volume and quality of Ecommerce site visits
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: E-commerce Monetate 2013 Quarterly report
We're alerting you to this regular research from Monetate since it gives potentially useful benchmark data for Ecommerce marketers to compare themselves against. It also highlights trends such as the impact on Ecommerce sites of increasing mobile usage and the influence of social media which we focus on in this alert.
The data is based 500 million visits amongst their clients who include Ecommerce brands such as Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority, and PETCO.
The focus of the Q1 2013 Ecommerce Quarterly report is social media, VP of Marketing Blair Lyon explains:
'We focused this EQ on social commerce since the data show that companies have not yet cracked the code in leveraging social media to drive e-commerce traffic. We know that social…
Social media: why you need to consider ROE on Social Media
The days and ways of traditional marketing are changing. While companies are still pumping hard cash into print, TV and radio ads, Social Media has become a key ingredient of any marketing plan. However, there is a major difference.
While in traditional marketing, once the ad/s have hit the medium, there is not much one can do but, to sit there and calculate the return on investment (ROI) using various campaign measurement metrics. On Social Media it is a different story altogether. As Social Media is always alive', the marketers need to remember that they have to engage with the customer 24/7 and 365 days of the year. This 'constant contact' allows you to approach, respond and react in real time.
Hence to achieve better results a continuous effort has to be made by businesses to satisfy the ever intelligent customer on…
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…
Is that really the case?
This headline from Business Insider has to be the most misleading of the year for me. It’s certainly engaging, but what's it based upon? When Andy Lloyd Gordon shared it through Twitter yesterday I couldn’t resist clicking to see what this claim was based on.
The report by Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research showed that less than 1 percent of the online transactions amongst US customers could be traced to a social media post.
The article states:
"Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers.
While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers.
In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions for both new and repeat shoppers could…
Why marketers aren’t giving social media marketing the credit it deserves
Despite how important social media has become to marketers, Adobe are suggesting that it still isn’t being recognized for driving website traffic, engagement and conversions like it should be. The solution, Adobe suggest, might be as simple as making adjustments to how its contributions are captured and measured. In short, some attribution modelling might help you see social media marketing in a whole new light.
Remember that you don't need a paid service like Adobe Sitecatalyst to apply attribution thinking; you can demonstrate the value of social media marketing through Google's new Social Reports (tutorial) which helps show assisted conversions influenced by social media.
Because social marketing is still so new, and let's not forget that, best practices for measuring the effectiveness of social efforts are still evolving. We've written before about ROI of social media, the IAB also developed…
Using RACE to structure your social analytics
Social analytics is still relatively new and yet there are already many tools offering to give you the insights to empower your marketing.
Often, these tools won't give you a full picture of how your social media marketing is contributing to your business since they only look at one channel like Facebook. As I work with clients, I find you need to use a range of tools and integrate the data to provide a unified report. As with everything in analytics, 20% of the data will generally give you 80% of the answers you need. So it's necessary to identify the "measures that matter". In this post I'll outline the process and measures I use at First 10 to enable the required level of analysis for our clients.
It all starts with…
