Posts tagged “small business marketing

InformationWeek.com Reviews Tips for Business Facebook Pages During the Holidays: 51% of Consumers Are More Likely to Buy From a Company After Becoming Their Fan on Facebook

Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D

The holidays are just around the corner, and businesses are finalizing their marketing campaigns to optimize the shopping rush. Here is an article from InformationWeek.com, written by Kevin Casey, about how companies can prepare their social networking sites in time for the holidays.

4 Tips: Prep Your Facebook Page For Holidays

holiday InformationWeek.com Reviews Tips for Business Facebook Pages During the Holidays: 51% of Consumers Are More Likely to Buy From a Company After Becoming Their Fan on FacebookWill your company’s Facebook page help you take advantage of the holiday shopping rush? Consider these tips for SMBs and fine-tune your strategy.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), like Santa Claus, should be making a list and checking it twice. But rather than sorting out who’s naughty or nice, consumer-focused concerns should fine-tune their Facebook presence in advance of the holiday shopping rush.

Among the reasons: The bevy of market research showing shoppers increasingly turning to social sites before they make purchase decisions. Consider this recent study, which found 51% of consumers are more likely to buy something from a company after becoming their fan on Facebook. With the annual flurry of capitalism known as holiday shopping looming large, it’s time for retailers and other consumer-focused SMBs to make sure they’re ready to reap the rewards.

That means doing a bit more than putting up a page and hoping it connects with customers, according to Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that emphasizes a quantitative approach to performance advertising, with a particular focus on Facebook. The firm recently added LinkedIn to its mix, and is considering the likes of Twitter and Google+.

Socialcode itself has an interesting SMB story. The 50-person agency was born as an internal department of The Washington Post Company, which owns–in addition to the flagship newspaper of the same name–a number of media, education, and other businesses. O’Shaughnessy said that the results of Facebook programs for the company’s various brands were so strong that it began shifting money away from its Google adverting and spending more on social. Later, Socialcode was spun out as an independent subsidiary and began signing on external customers.

In an interview, O’Shaughnessy shared these four tips for optimizing your Facebook activities in the coming weeks.

1. Set goals. The businesses that get the most out of their Facebook presence are the ones that have goals behind it. “Step one is deciding: Is my goal to drive people into my restaurant, is it to drive people into my store, is it to introduce a new product, is it to get people to buy my product?” O’Shaughnessy said. Without a clear sense of what they want to accomplish, SMBs, can’t make efficient use of their resources.

2. Design a campaign with a “viral accelerant.” O’Shaughnessy said the most powerful, effective Facebook campaigns place heavy emphasis on sharing. That often means developing an application, game, or a related microsite to encourage people to spread the word–no matter what the word is. “You want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the sharing activities that are going on,” O’Shaughnessy said.

While a development-intensive application might require a bigger budget, O’Shaughnessy noted that there are sharing-oriented things marketers can do on a smaller scale. She gave as an example a nonprofit client that found strong results simply using a light application aimed at sharing badges on Facebook walls.

“The most important thing about Facebook is really perpetuating that social sharing–getting one friend to spread, in this case, a badge to another friend,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Then all of that person’s friends see that action, so you get this immediate lift.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Major Facebook Updates at F8

Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development

Over the years, Facebook has been known to make small changes to how users operate on the social networking site. With Google+ becoming a threatening competitor, Mark Zuckerberg made serious changes to Facebook. On September 22, Mark Zuckerberg explained exactly what the 800 million users could expect from the new and improved Facebook at its annual developer conference including:

Timeline: a stream of information about you
Facebook Gestures: turning any verb into a button, similar to the “like” button. Example: Reading a book.
Open Graph: third-party companies can connect their apps and services to Facebook using a one-time permission from the user to share stuff on Facebook
Subscribe: subscribing to strangers or celebrities to receive posts from them without being Facebook friends
Ticker: a real-time list of what your friends are posting
Media: watching TV and movies, listening to music and reading news all within Facebook

Watch the whole video here

fb 416x252 Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Major Facebook Updates at F8


How Social Media Has Changed the Game for Search Engine’s: 1/4 of Twitter’s 5 Billion Tweets a Month Contains Links to Content

Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development

Sharing and finding content over the Internet has become easier then ever, and now social media is changing the ways search engines track quality content. This article from Mashable.com takes a look at how social networks have impacted search engines.

How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search

guide to seo part2 385x252 How Social Media Has Changed the Game for Search Engines: 1/4 of Twitters 5 Billion Tweets a Month Contains Links to ContentOld school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.

“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).

“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”

Search Engines Adapt to SurviveSince the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.

Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.

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Location-Based Mobile Services Becoming Increasingly Popular: Over 25% of Americans Have Used Location-Based Services for Recommendations

Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development

Using location-based services to find the closest restaurant or to get directions is becoming the newest trend in mobile technology. Here is an article from The Washington Post on how Americans are using location-based services.

Over a quarter of American adults use mobile location-based services

checking in 354x252 Location Based Mobile Services Becoming Increasingly Popular: Over 25% of Americans Have Used Location Based Services for RecommendationsNot many people are “checking in” using services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, but over a quarter of Americans are checking out their surroundings using location-based services.

The latest research from Pew’s Internet and American Life Project found that 28 percent of American adults have used mobile or social location-based services to get recommendations such as the best-rated nearby cafe or directions from their current location.

Only about 5 percent of those surveyed used services that post their current locations, though smartphone users were more than twice as likely to signal their location to their friends. In a similar vein, about 9 percent of all users used the location-tagging options on social media.

As once might expect, younger smartphone users are more likely overall to use check-in services, but there was no clear divide on age when it came to hitching a location-tag to a Facebook or Twitter message.

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CNN: Smartphones Make Up 35% of U.S. Mobile Market

Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
According to a recent story on CNN.com, smartphones still do not make up the majority of the U.S. market. However, we cannot ignore the value, power and influence of these mobile devices that are about to change the way we conduct business, review products, make buying decisions, and most importantly, interact with our friends.

Why smartphones still haven’t taken over the U.S. market

iphone 5 300x207 CNN: Smartphones Make Up 35% of U.S. Mobile MarketSmartphones may attract nearly all of the marketing hype and news coverage, but comScore’s latest statistics show that smartphones still comprise only a minority of the U.S. mobile market — about 35%, as of July 2011.

The other 65% of U.S. mobile handsets in use are “feature phones” — which tend to be much less expensive to buy and own. Often, these phones do not require a pricey two-year wireless service contract with hefty early termination fees.

Even though smartphones cost much more, these devices have been getting popular with U.S. consumers, even in light of the country’s economic recession. After all, a 35% market share is nothing to sneeze at — especially considering that smartphones have only been widely available in the U.S. for about five years.

At some point, a majority of U.S. mobile users will indeed own smartphones. But that shift won’t happen as quickly as early forecasts anticipated.

Back in March 2010, the Nielsen Company proclaimed that smartphones would overtake feature phones by 2011. Specifically, they predicted that by the end of Q3 2011 (about a month from now), most U.S. mobile users would own smartphones.

That ambitious prediction doesn’t seem to be panning out.

For over a year, comScore has been publishing monthly mobile-market-share statistics that show the percentage of U.S. smartphones. I’ve been tracking these figures. Based on this data, it looks like it’ll be roughly October 2012 before smartphones actually take over as a majority of U.S. handsets.

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Social Media and Mobile Applications: 8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top-Ranked Mobile App

Posted by Micah Pratt: social networking research and development

The convergence of social media with mobile applications has led to cross promotional marketing, and if done correctly, can lead to major success. Here is an article by Krishna Subramanian from Mashable.com about eight ways to make sure your mobile application gets noticed.

8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top-Ranked Mobile App

one billion apps hero 20090418 456x252 Social Media and Mobile Applications: 8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top Ranked Mobile App

Developing a mobile app is the easy part. Getting that app noticed is difficult. And getting the app to go viral is like winning the lottery. Yet many developers get millions of downloads time after time. How?

It’s all about app store SEO, and some developers have mastered it. Here are a few tips and tricks of the trade to help get your app to the top of heap.

Time Is of The Essence

The first two weeks of an app’s life are critical and will likely determine its future visibility in the app store. Top applications develop popularity within two weeks of release, and most applications have a tendency to drop in chart position over time. Remember, whatever you do — marketing campaigns, cross distribution and so on — the quicker you do it, the bigger the impact.

1 488x252 Social Media and Mobile Applications: 8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top Ranked Mobile App

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Valuable Data: More than a billion opinions posted online about products & services last year

Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development

Today, more and more marketers are turning to online marketing programs because of the noticeable role that peers play in consumers’ purchasing desicions. What many of these interactive marketers are failing to realize is the volume of social data created by the influence of peers in purchase decisions. Here is an article by Nate Elliott, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, about how to effective utilize social data.

HOW TO: Utilize Social Data More Effectively

onlinemarketing Valuable Data: More than a billion opinions posted online about products & services last yearLast year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.

However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.

Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes
With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.

For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.

To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.

If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.

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5 Tips to Maximize Revenue From Your Landing Pages

Posted By: Kerry Phouthavong

For some businesses, it might be difficult to seek out solutions as to why they aren’t generating as much revenue as they expected. Author and consultant Mikal Belicove, from entrepreneur.com produced a helpful video which offers tips that can maximize revenue for your landing pages.jblog1 401x252 5 Tips to Maximize Revenue From Your Landing Pages

  1. Align your source message to the message that’s on your landing page
  2. Make sure the source that is driving traffic page to your landing page, the message from that source is aligned with the message that’s on that landing page. There’s nothing worse than getting to a landing page because of a promise for something and not being able to find that item.

  3. Make your copy short, sweet, and to the point, (it’s not a sales letter)
  4. For businesses and startups, it’s more ideal to 8 seconds or less to get somebody to do something.

  5. Have a strong call to action
  6. Make sure the call to action is visually stunning and present on the page. There should be no question on anyone’s mind on why they’re on that page. They are there because you want them to do something. Also, don’t be afraid to ask.

  7. Use a light background color
  8. Don’t make people feel like they are inside of a cave when they get to your site. Dark colors are out and light airy colors are in. Make sure you are using color to your advantage. You may need to do research and identify what colors customers in your space are going to identify with.

  9. Don’t ask for too much information
  10. Be very careful with how much you ask for. It’s fine if you ask for their name, email, their zip code, etc. If you’re going to ask for their buying demographics, their age, and their income, you’re starting to add obstacles. Establish a dialog with that customer before you dive too deep. Fulfill the promise that the landing page offers, which is to deliver a white paper, give them a call back, etc. Engage them enough to produce an effective relationship where you can ask them those more in-depth questions.

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10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

Posted by: Micah Pratt

I would like to share an article from mashable.com, by Grace Smith, about 10 infographics that present social media tools in an appealing format.

10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe, Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here.

Infographics help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format. With social media growing at an ever increasing pace, there is now a wealth of data about how people interacting with one another on the web. Naturally, infographics have proven an excellent aid in expressing high volumes of social web information in a clear, visually appealing manner.

Here are 10 infographics that prove as beautiful as they are interesting.

1. Social Web Involvement

Picture 14 441x252 10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

This is a global map of social web involvement which illustrates that hundreds of millions of web users are creating and sharing content every month. It provides a clear visualization of the ways in which social technologies are adopted differently across the world, showing the number of active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo uploaders and microbloggers.

Interestingly, it reveals that despite the Twitter hype, microblogging is still not a mass social activity and is nowhere near the size and scale of blogging.

2. Social Marketing Compass

Picture 16 466x252 10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

A compass is a device for orientating oneself and guiding physical direction. The social marketing compass points a brand in a physical and experimental direction, allowing them to connect with their customers, peers, and influencers, where those users already interact and seek guidance online.

Created to illustrate social marketing within the book Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, this infographic was also available as a poster to celebrate the book’s pre-sale.

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CEO & Entrepreneur Valerie Jennings of Jennings Social Media Marketing Interviewed: How to Viralize Videos

Posted by: Micah Pratt

Picture 15 409x252 CEO & Entrepreneur Valerie Jennings of Jennings Social Media Marketing Interviewed: How to Viralize Videos

Thank you to Sarah Shaw at The Entreprenette Gazette for compiling the 57 best ways to use videos to market a business. Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media and Marketing, was included in the list with “how to viralize videos”.

57 Ways to Market your Video

How many of you use video to market your business? Have you thought about all the ways you can use your videos? Thanks to my Entreprenette Experts, here are 57 ways to use video to market your business and possibly get them to go viral…….that would be awesome right? I am working on my own videos now and getting ready for a big launch over the summer ……. we devoured all these tips and I am sure you will too!!

(READ THE TIPS)