Facebook sees ad revenues increase year-on-year, Google has new GDPR complaint lodged against it, Facebook "blocks" third-party apps from monitoring political advertisements and Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp set to join forces with combined chat functions
This week's news roundup is fairly Facebook-heavy as the social media platform has been fairly busy. While its ad revenues may have increased in the final quarter of 2018, it has also come under fire some recent changes that blog third-parties from monitoring political ads.
Other than Facebook, Google is now in more hot water with yet another GDPR complaint lodged against it. It has been accused of using sensitive information to target ads at users, something that it is denying.
Take a look at these stories in a bit more detail below.
Facebook reports strong ad revenue growth
Facebook may have had a particularly touch 2018 in…
O2 experienced a major network issue, the UK government has published a selection of Facebook's internal documents and Iceland's banned Christmas advert has been named 'most powerful' of the festive offerings
While the news has been fairly slow this week in the digital and marketing worlds, Facebook's ongoing struggles following the Cambridge Analytica scandal are continuing. The UK government has now released some documents seized from the social media platform, which includes some interesting internal emails.
One of the biggest stories of the week is O2's massive network issues yesterday (Thursday, December 6th), which left millions of customers without access to their data and many people unable to make calls or send texts.
Ending on a positive note, Iceland's banned Christmas advert has been named the most powerful of all the festive adverts of 2018 - leaving many of the big-budget ads at the bottom of the pile.
Find out more with this week's news…
Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 7 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at aligning social media with other marketing channels; in this blog, I discuss what resources you need to manage your social media marketing and how you scale a social team sensibly.
To frame the conversation, you need to find answers to the following questions:
How many people do you need and in which roles?
What business processes are required?
What KPIs should you use and what resources do you need to measure them?
What tech and tools are required for your social media plan?
How do these resource demands change in the next few years?
Approaches to resourcing
There are two main ways to plan your resourcing:
Bottom up
You’re governed by the resource currently at your disposal, so you shape your scope of work around this. For example,…
Examples of social media workflow to review and respond to online comments about a brand
A while ago, I received this question by email, it describes a common concern of managing brand reputation given the growth in consumer comments in social media:
"I would be interested in any case studies or examples of controlling social media discussions, especially in a case of negative flow".
The questioner went on to explain that in her case, in the health sector, and many health and looks treatments etc. create a lot of social media input. Experiences, questions, complaints etc. Also, in some cases, competitors are creating negative posts. She explains that example is where companies have faced non-satisfied customers that are creating a lot of noise in social media.
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Example flowcharts for managing…
Use these Social Media Campaign Tools to run more effective Social Media Campaigns
Social Media campaign tools give you flexible campaign and advertising tools for running campaigns on all the major social media platforms. They provide a quick and easy method for setting up customer engagement campaigns, from templates for quizzes, surveys, and sweepstakes to white label options with full CSS editing and iFrame functionality. These tools can focus on a number of campaigns goals (e.g. driving engagement or collecting leads) and have powerful social sharing features out the box but with custom options ensuring each campaign can be tailored accordingly.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
Whilst these tools provide a quick and easy option for many brands, ultimately these tools act as a third party between you and the customer limiting your control of the customer…
A social media policy is crucial if you want to be in full control of your social media interactions
One social media gaffe can ruin the reputation of even the strongest brands out there. No marketer wants to face a host of outraged consumers. Social media might be the best thing that ever happened to branding, but one wrong move and you can be sure that a PR disaster will drag behind you for years. The internet never forgets. How to avoid that risk? By building a social media policy to set up standards for social media usage at your enterprise. Here are some practical tips for developing a social media policy.
1. Set out the basic rules
Developing a social media policy requires a clear understanding of your main goals on social channels. Here are a few questions to help you:
What is…
Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Sprout Social are top rated
There are many social media management products in the market, both paid and free, available to manage your activity across your social media channels. Sometimes it feels like there is too much choice. It can be difficult to choose the right tool unless you have received a firm recommendation from a colleague or a review. Previously this week we have given our reviews in these recent posts of 6 free social media tools and 7 less-well known social media marketing tools.
G2 Crowd, a industry-leading review platform company, have recently surveyed their user community to rank the social media management tools which they use, in terms of customer satisfaction. Together with vendor information on market share, vendor size, and social impact, they have compiled some interesting reviews along with a summary of key features, customer satisfaction…
Insights and examples of how the top 500 UK and US corporates integrating social media into their corporate comms strategy
This extensive research from Investis is positioned as one of the first reports to showcase how large companies in the UK and US are using social media specifically for corporate communications. We're recommending it to readers since it provides case studies and visual examples of how these public corporates are using the 8 main social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare and Pinterest), for corporate communications. Companies are scored to an index and the top 100 companies are ranked, with exploratory comments on best practice tactics.
It shows that there has been a rise in the FTSE 100 companies linking their corporate websites to social media from 35% three years ago to 72% today, and a rise of US SEP 100 linked companies from 61% to 89%.
There are some interesting…
Why Social CRM could be better than traditional Social Media management?
Social media is a big deal for businesses, but that’s not exactly groundbreaking news... Consultants and strategists have been talking about the importance of social presence and social marketing for years now.
It’s simple math, really: 74% of online adults use social networking sites, there are about 500 million tweets sent every day. That adds up to a lot of missed opportunities if your business isn’t doing something intentional with social media. But there are many different opinions on what exactly that something should be.
A 2014 study from TNS Global revealed that over 80% of U.S. small businesses try to leverage social media for growth and have increased spending to do so. But many businesses have a difficult time measuring their return-on-investment (ROI), according to a…
An interview with Bill Gerth plus a review of social media management tools
When we think of social media, we often imagine a Social Media Manager or Community Manager simply posting marketing content and engaging with their community.
However, our guide based on 22 end-user reviews and ratings across 23 different social media management software products shows many more applications. The table below shows how we’ve identified 3 key ways enterprises are leveraging social media: Social Customer Care, Social Listening and Social Media Marketing.
Most companies fit more than one use case. For example, some companies that manage a social customer care program use a second tool that specializes in social listening along with a customer care tool that provides engagement capabilities.
…
