
If you don’t know PewDiePie, just look at any list of top subscribed YouTube channels and look toward the top of the list.
With over 22 million subscribers – only bested by YouTube category channels for ‘music’ and ‘popular on YouTube – Worldwide’ – there’s no arguing that this is what ultimate YouTube success looks like.

Real-time marketing is here, and it has been here, to stay. There is huge opportunity for businesses and brands to interact with their audiences in real-time.
Businesses and brands, however, shouldn’t one day per year get a ‘real-time war room’ together and hope for some serendipitous opportunity to present itself, or worse, shoehorn their message into a less than memorable moment.

Visible Measures reported that Super Bowl ads saw a total of 370 million online views last year, and ads released ahead of time received between 200-600 percent more impressions than those that didn’t
So, this is all well and good, but what can be learned from this phenomenon and applied to your business?

In effort to shed some light on how Twitter can help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Twitter engaged Market Probe International to conduct research in hopes of proving how their platform can lead to real business results.
Some interesting findings emerged that – surprise, surprise – demonstrate that Twitter can indeed have a positive impact for SMBs.

A problem that many of us have is that we create or crop our images to look best on the original site of publication, but don’t take into account the many places our content may be spread.
There is a work around for this, however, which is pretty simple, and will all but guarantee that wherever you see the image associated with your blog post, that it will look great.

In my experience, job descriptions tend to kind of just… well… be job descriptions.
What I mean by that is that they’re not exactly the first thing that businesses think about when conceiving of ways to push their business forward, promote and lead innovation, build and sustain brand advocacy, and ensure employees and coworkers are driving forces behind organizational social media success.

Setting goals and objectives to guide your social media marketing activity is critical to ensure that your efforts are making a meaningful and positive impact on your business.
Without well-defined goals and objectives, there is no way to determine what success looks like, no way to measure success, and no way to optimize. In short, without established goals and objectives, you’re completely flying blind.

No matter how much time you spend thinking about every conceivable scenario that might play out on social media, it is impossible to think of them all.
Opportunities arise, competitors emerge, trolls attack, sites go down, preferences change, and sometimes, pigs fly.
This is the nature of social media and the world in which we live and our businesses operate. Things change fast. Really fast.

It’s no secret that people are making more purchases, and purchase decisions, online. Consumer purchase behaviour is undergoing a dramatic shift that is getting more pronounced every day, and unprepared retailers are seeing declines as a result.
Over the course of the last week or so, there have been several revealing statistics released to support that consumers are not only spending more time shopping online, but that brick and mortar shopping behaviour is being influenced by digital interactions, which of course includes social media.

While you’re undoubtedly busy planning your personal social schedule with family and friends, now is also a perfect time to be planning your social media activity for the coming weeks. Planning can be critical to ensure you’ve got your ducks in a row for when you inevitably take a bit of time off to enjoy the season, and to sustain activity and engagement with your audience during this time.

By their nature, best practices tend to be generalizations. Typically, they don’t specifically address your unique situation, opportunities and challenges. And getting too caught up in following best practices can affect your comfort and willingness to take a chance and do something amazing that may be contrary to conventions.

The observation of Remembrance Day shouldn’t be seen as a social media opportunity. If you want to pay tribute to the soldiers that have served your country on your organization’s social media properties, it is my recommendation to do it tastefully, in a tone that is appropriate for the day, and keep it solely focused on honouring those deserving of being honoured.

Every day there are businesses and brands producing and publishing amazing content, and tightly integrating traditional media with their digital and social programs.
It wasn’t long ago that I was writing about Ikea’s awesome 2014 augmented reality print catalogue, and Ikea has knocked it out of the park again with their second-hand furniture campaign.

Interacting and engaging with your current and prospective consumers at events gives you opportunity to further prove your brand’s promise, build affinity and awareness, showcase your value proposition, humanize your brand, and much more.
Additionally, the proper utilization of social media can serve as an amazing support and amplification tool to optimize your results and ROI when running events.

The secret is out! Running promotions on social media can be an effective way to reward existing fans of your brand, further prove your brand’s promise, and attract new people to your brand.
To maximize the ROI of running a promotion, however, you’re going to want to promote your activity to boost awareness and attract a maximum number of relevant participants.
Amp Up Sociability on Your YouTube Channel
YouTube shouldn’t be viewed solely as a video publication platform.
It should be just as socially driven as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social media network.
Read more…