Latest Social Media News

Customer Loyalty and Advocacy are Not Interchangeable Concepts - A loyal customer is not necessarily an advocate...

If you define influence by the size of your Klout score, you can stop reading this right now. If you believe influence is driven by the creation of a re

Andrew Grill talks about why you need a Social Business Strategy.

So impressed was I with a recent report from Altimeter group on Social Business titled “The evolution of social business – six stages of social business transformation”, that I decided to do a multi-part blog post. The first post can be viewed at lc.tl/asb1. In this second post, I am looking at the section of the report that looks at defining a social business strategy. The Altimeter report looked at 698 companies in medium-large sized companies, as well as deeper interviews with 26 executives and social strategists at 15 companies. The Altimeter definition of a social business strategy is the following: the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives.

Though some forward-thinking businesses are already using Instagram, chances are you aren't yet, and neither are your competitors. With its universal appeal, however, Instagram is not a medium marketers should ignore. And you'd better move quickly if you want to make an impact.

To maximise a tweet's effectiveness you need to use the 140 characters in the most efficient manner possible. This post offers five simple suggestions to optimise tweets for engagement and ultimately CTR. 

The number one rule before applying these quick fixes is ensuring your tweet content is relevant to your audience. Although these are generic tips applicable to any industry your tweets must communicate the value of your product/service to your customers.

As the hype of social media begins to die down and companies re-evaluate their efforts with a steely-eyed look at the cost versus benefits, I think it is time to re-visit this important question: Does every company really need a social media marketing plan?

This is a very complex question. So to help answer it, I looked at a few companies with brands that might not be natural fits for a social media presence. Adult diapers. Coal. Hazardous waste clean-up. Playing cards.

Let’s explore this important question by taking a romp through some unusual case studies that stretch the boundaries of social media marketing thinking.

Did you know there is a lot of work that has to happen before one begins creating a content marketing strategy? There is and I am going to give you some strategies that will help you begin and also explain some important “non-negotiables”, as I call them.

First, Create a Team

Your business will need at the least a team of two people. This is especially true when your are writing/rewriting the content for the main pages of a website. They need to work together to create the content you need. There should be brainstorming and as they say, two brains are better than one. Seriously, this task is a two person job at a minimum.

There is Work to Be Done Before Your Team Begins:

There are no short cuts for effective and organized content marketing. The non-negotiables below have to be completed before writing begins. They apply to the writing of main content pages of a website and all other forms of content marketing.

Read more: http://bit.ly/M0gEc7

You don't need more content. You need old content. I know, that's not what you usually hear, so stick with me and we will look at some numbers to see why it is so important.

Think different. ;

Social Media doesn't work for the vast majority of small businesses.

That was the main message in the USA Today article titled, Study: Social media a bust for small businesses, published on April 17th, 2013. From the news item:"About 61% of small businesses don't see any return on investment on their social-media activities, according to a survey released Tuesday from Manta, a social network for small businesses. Yet, almost 50% say they've increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time. What businesses are trying to get out of social media: 36% said their goal was to acquire and engage new customers, 19% said to gain leads and referrals, and 17% said to boost awareness. Facebook was most cited as the hardest to maintain social-media platform, according to the survey." There is a big lesson in this data...

What you want from social media may be very different from what it is.

Here's our admittedly tongue in cheek list of reasons your small businesses still might not be using Pinterest. Join in the fun.

Recent reports suggest Pinterest is well on its way to being one of the biggest social networks ever.

A study last month indicates that while Facebook still maintains its domination with 67 percent of American Internet users, Twitter, the second runner up with 16 percent of the same audience, may soon be overtaken by Pinterest, which now has about 15 percent.

In my last four posts I’ve shared some of the lessons that I’ve learned from helping set up lullubee.com, a new business that makes and markets kits for making crafts. After we launched the site and figured out how to take ordersand ship products, the next task we faced was to get more visitors to the site, and ultimately more sales. In the next few posts I’ll cover several of the techniques we implemented, but in this post I’ll focus on Facebookmarketing.

The first thing we did was to set up our Facebook Page, as recommended in Facebooks “Four Steps to Business success on Facebook“.

Once you set up your page, you need to get users to visit it and, hopefully, to “like” it. The reason you want people to like your page is that your posts will then appear on that users news feed. Over time this will allow you, according to Facebook, to start “building loyalty and creating opportunities to generate sales.” The first method to get likes is to promote it on your own website using Facebook social plugins. As this costs nothing, you may as well do it, but the percentage of visitors that click on these is typically very small. The second is to purchase Facebook Ads that persuade people to visit your page and to like it. The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page instead of our site was not lost on us.

Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

In my role at Twitter, I work with a spectrum of businesses – both large and small. This year, I’ll be traveling around the world and am particularly excited to meet with smaller businesses to share how Twitter can help them. This week, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention in New York City, I spoke about the future of retail during the “Main Street Retailing Forum” keynote.

What’s a social business all about? Is it about having your brand on Twitter or Facebook? Is it about private social networks? Certainly, these all play a part.