There are many barriers that keep marketers, advertisers, and business leaders from personalizing content; technology, resources, data, bandwidth, and more. The good news is that each of these barriers can easily be overcome.
We aim to provide clarity about what in fact a strategy is, its purpose, and the role it plays in helping organizations to achieve meaningful results.
What is good content? Understanding and agreeing to the universal characteristics of ‘good content’ is critical for anyone involved in the planning, creation, and measurement of content.
Social reach does not necessarily equate to influence. Thinking holistically about the array of people that can have significant influence will strengthen your social media activity.
Live video is a HOT topic. Here are 8 considerations to maximize the success of your business or brand’s foray into broadcasting live video.
The introduction of a Facebook-esque feed algorithm on Instagram isn’t something you should be losing sleep over for your business.
There are important considerations to take into account when identifying the social media networks that are right for your business.
Directly connecting social media activity to sales is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. The problem is that attempting to find a ‘direct connection’ to some extent ignores the ‘social’ aspect of social media, as well as the non-linear path to purchase.
Without context, social data and analytics won’t tell you much of anything that is useful for your business.
Another week, another social media blunder. How to avoid being in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons.
Frequently, we gauge brand-related success on social media on awareness, perception, affinity, or other similar measures.
But, is this good enough? Is this what we want for our businesses and brands?
For many businesses and brands, success on YouTube remains elusive, and to many, the challenges the platform presents can seem insurmountable.
There are, however, some powerhouse brands that are thriving on the platform.
Why are we all so eager to spend as little time as possible on our business’ social media marketing efforts?
There tends to be a strong correlation between the time, energy and effort put toward implementing a smartly crafted social media strategy, and expected results.
Twitter’s downloadable analytics are far from being as robust as social media juggernaut Facebook’s, however, there are still a number of ways that you can slice and dice the data provided to glean deeper Twitter insights.
It is important to be clear about the distinction between strategy and tactics because misinformation leads to bad decision-making. There is too much at stake for this to not be perfectly clear.
Failure is not an option, it is going to happen, which includes some of your efforts on social media. And that’s okay… it’s maybe even good.
There are many ways that you can use social media to great effect that have absolutely nothing to do with creating content.
An overview of what you can find within Twitter’s native analytics, as well as how to find them, so that you too can benefit from having additional insight and information about your tweets and Twitter followers.
There are a huge number of ways that social media advocates can have a positive impact on your business.
The challenge is that identifying advocates isn’t always a simple task, and more challenging still is finding ways to encourage those advocates to sustain high-levels of involvement within your social media communities.
Building trust can lead to increased loyalty, build advocacy, create evangelists, improve the potency of your marketing messages, mitigate customer churn, and generally strengthen the emotional connection people have with your brand.
The problem with ‘engagement’ is that it doesn’t tell us much at all. It’s not really a definitive indicator of anything except that someone clicked a button, or mashed a few keys on their keyboard.
Thinking small about social media marketing is about dedicating yourself to affecting real business results in small increments, day after day, for great long-term impact.
Properly responding to audience-initiated dialogues on social media is a great opportunity for you add value, increase affinity, build advocacy, and develop relationships with individual members of your community.
It’s clear that engaging your business’ audience on mobile social media is becoming increasingly critical.
The trouble I find many businesses have isn’t about realizing that mobile is an important platform on which to have a solid presence, however, it’s how to establish that presence, and where.
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.
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.
As the volume of content being created and published continues to explode, finding every opportunity to place your content in front of as large a proportion of your audience as possible is of utmost importance to maximize results.
You shouldn’t simply follow best practices.
Of the 104 articles published on the RGB Social blog in 2013, the following 10 received the most number of views.
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.
For a medium that is supposed to be intrinsically social, much time can be spent on social media without having meaningful conversations.
This is particularly so for businesses and brands, where many use social media platforms not necessarily to be social, but to broadcast their message.
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.
Through social listening, reading reviews and comments, and paying attention to competitive communities you can learn what you’re doing well, what needs improving, and gain a stronger understanding of what you can do to enhance the performance of your business.
Despite having an amazing opportunity to initiate and sustain meaningful dialogues with their consumers, many brands treat social media primarily as a broadcast platform.
Social media marketing is perfectly suited to sustain relationships with your consumers, even after they’ve made a purchase.
An effective social media strategy that accomplishes this will result in sustaining and strengthening loyalty, and will ultimately result in higher repeat purchase intent.
As I’m sure you have, I’ve been exposed to a number of ‘best practices’ about how many tweets a company should publish each day. The number given has varied widely, but I’ve seen numbers as high as 30 or more being recommended to maximize engagement.
Consider re-thinking best practices for how many tweets to publish each day.
The people around us influence our behaviour, and the same holds true on social media.
Failing to properly promote your content means you’re missing out on maximizing the ROI of your social media and content marketing efforts.
So, what to do?
Consumers’ brand preference and purchase intent is being influenced in the pre-market stage of their purchase path. That is, they are making critical decisions that will influence their purchases even before they are thinking about making a purchase.
Powerful stuff.
Conducting consumer research via social media affords many benefits versus traditional methods such as recruiting for in-person focus groups. It can be significantly less expensive, you can question your audience at a moment’s notice, you are more likely to get genuine responses, you’ll avoid having a single overbearing participant sway the opinion of a larger group, and it’s more flexible and adaptable.
You’re creating an abundance of highly valuable social media content for your business’ blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile, Pinterest boards, and YouTube channel.
However, your audience just doesn’t seem to be engaging with it. They’re not liking, commenting, sharing, pinning, or re-blogging any of it.
It’s amazing content, so what gives?
For some time, the inclusion of the word ‘media’ in ‘social media’ has sort of rubbed me the wrong way.
It’s that word ‘media’ that I find causes some people to lose sight of how social media can most effectively be used and how it should be measured, and instead they start trying to compare ‘media’ and ‘social media’ on common ground.
It’s as simple as this… If you’re into social, digital or content marketing, you should really read the following blog posts.
I frequently find that there is a tendency for some businesses and brands to gravitate toward creating content that is relevant to them, and not necessarily their audience.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s pretty ridiculous that I’m writing a blog post about not writing blog posts.
Anyway, indulge me, and maybe you’ll find something of value here.
The very thought of wanting to ‘remove your business from social media’ is completely missing the point.
You can’t remove your business from social media.
The value for any business or brand of attracting only the most relevant followers and fans on social media – be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, or any other platform – is easy to understand.
So, what’s this article all about then? Why would you ever want to attract irrelevant fans and followers on your social media properties?
The 2013 Grammys were a social media juggernaut, but out on one very big opportunity.
Leaving high-quality comments can demonstrate your expert knowledge, earn you increased exposure, and encourage reciprocation of contributions in your community.