Are you at risk of social spamming?
It's well over 10 years since Facebook launched. The behavioural patterns of user groups are now well understood, the advertising platforms are highly developed and the business world across the planet has increasingly become 'social'. Yet the ways in which so many businesses have adopted social media and how they use it for ongoing communication with their customers, is often, in my experience, fundamentally flawed.
While as a marketing community we have learnt so much about social media, when it comes to applying that learning into practice, only comparatively rarely do businesses appear to demonstrate real understanding and consideration of their audience’s requirements.
It is time we re-evaluated our approach as the foundations on which these strategies were built have become eroded. In the following paragraphs, I will pose a few searching questions and outline what I regard as key…
Four ways to prove the value of social media to your CMO
So you have ambitious plans for a new social media program that will build brand buzz and drive business impact? There’s just one problem: you need a big budget to match your big dreams. Though social media budgets are projected to double in the next five years, many social media marketers still report feeling underfunded. How can you convince your senior marketing leadership to invest in social?
4 Steps to gaining social media buy-in
These proven tactics can help you prove the value of your social media efforts and win buy-in from your CMO.
Step 1. Prove social media ROI through direct sales. Social media ROI: often talked about, but rarely proven. But if you want your CMO to increase your funding, you’ll need hard numbers that demonstrate your impact on the bottom line. Use your web analytics platform to …
A structured approach to implementing a successful social media marketing strategy
A recent survey suggests that 93% of marketers have transitioned to the world of social networking. But this does not mean that we all currently understand its place in our marketing mix, how we should be using it and how to generate an ROI... The shift from one-way outbound messages to real-time dialogue has caught many of us off guard, so much so that 20% of businesses still don't even have a social media strategy in place. In this post I discuss some of the planning decisions we can make to improve management of social media comms. The reason many brands do not utilise social well is that they don’t think about strategy, because we use these tools ourselves to connect with people we immediately think it is easy for brands. Unfortunately…
5 Findings from the Social Media Examiner 2014 report
Are you interested to find out where other marketers are focusing their efforts on social media to grow their business? Which techniques are proving effective and why? This regular, annual report from the Social Media Examiner is a useful summary of what is effective from over 2,500 marketers, so in this summary I cover 5 main findings from the report, which can be downloaded from the Social Media Examiner's website.
1. Benefits of Social Media?
In terms of business benefits, the top two benefits are increasing exposure (brand awareness) and driving additional traffic.
'92% of marketers have increased their exposure through social media and 80% had positive results in terms traffic'.
The graph below shows the range of benefits:
Respondents share their benefits…
UK marketers rate social media advertising platforms in new DMA research
The DMA has created a new social media scorecard based on a survey it ran amongst UK Social Media marketers to rate the usage of social media platforms. The scorecard summarised in the infographic is split into 3 areas: campaign planning, execution and post campaign analysis. The Infographic shares the findings:
For campaign planning, Youtube and Google+ are the least favourable for individual targeting, compared to LinkedIn and Facebook.
For campaign execution, Google+ scored low as businesses are still not sure how to use it, whereas Facebook and Twitter are higher due to ease of use and available insights.
For post analysis, it's interesting that Twitter ranked low as marketers have to use third party tools as Twitter is limited. Facebook and LinkedIn ranked top.
According to Lynsey…
What can we learn from brands who were early social media adopters?
As many of the savvier global brands have found, being an early adopter of a new social media site can be an unprecedented opportunity for branding, visibility and platform building. In fact, doing so is a key strategy for staying relevant in an ever-changing business and marketing environment. In essence, being early means getting to be a real leader, determining just how companies will use that new space; it also means getting to connect directly with key influencers before the platform gets too crowded with competitors.
But with that leap of faith comes real risk, and there's always the chance you could fail at a very public level. That, after all, is why many staid brands hesitate to join in, clinging to advertising models that are fast becoming irrelevant. The irony of being a successful early adopter is that you…
Examples showing the benefits of a multi-page social network communications approach
There is no doubt that social should be an important factor in digital marketing strategies going forward. Whether you are trying to improve brand awareness, build customer relationships or stay on top of the search rankings, social media should not be omitted from your digital marketing campaigns.
There are a few big brands that don’t invest in multiple pages, or can get away with minimal investment in social media. For example Apple, who according to Branddirectory.com were the No1 global brand last year don’t have an official Twitter page and although they are on Facebook they have obviously made the decision that updating it is not on their to do list for now. With a reported $1billion marketing budget in 2012, they most definitely have a vast array of other options than most marketers…
Responding to the four biggest legal risks of social media to business
With legal cases involving social media are on the rise, businesses need to manage the potential risks. To help review the challenges and solutions to managing the risks of social media, we have recently published our benchmark study on social media and the law. We hope marketers can use the data to evaluate their knowledge and establish the risks they may need to manage.
We’ve summarised the risks of social media in this infographic showing the four main risks as we see them against the awareness of the law.
We see three main takeaways from the research:
Many marketers know the risks, but don’t have company buy-in. Over 50% of companies don’t consider social media legal risks to be an issue or a priority. This was unexpected when respondents made it…
Social Business Index 2012 shows Top 20 Social Businesses worldwide
Through 2012 there has been a shift from discussing narrow social media tactics such as engaging audiences through social networks to broader strategies of integrating social interactions between customers, employees and partners across business processes as social business. At the start of the year, as one example of a social business leader, we shared this video from Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts where she explains her vision of how Social Business will transform her brand.
This new infographic shared by Forbes shows the World’s Top 20 social brands as rated by the Dachis Group Social Business Index. Most of the organisations are US-based, but there are some European and Asian businesses further down the list.
To find out more about the scope of social business see this post from Jim Hamill, where…
Spredfast release Social Engagement Index Report which shows different company roles for managing social media status updates
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Download 30 page PDF research summary - registration required
This report from Spredfast highlights some interesting trends in how businesses are utilising social media channels. The title is a little misleading since it suggests degree of consumer engagement with social media, it goes have some info on this, but we didn't find it so actionable. What we found more interesting is how businesses are managing social media. Spredfast defines 5 roles:
Admins have access to all features and functionality in Spredfast including the ability to monitor, publish, configure, and make administrative changes.
Managers monitor and publish content and manage basic account settings (add and edit users, groups, streams).
Editors monitor and publish content.
Writers create original content and respond to network engagement (content created by this role is often sent through an approval path).
Viewers can…
