YouTube recently launched Community to enable content creators to engage audiences in new ways beyond video. What does this mean for business?
The introduction of a Facebook-esque feed algorithm on Instagram isn’t something you should be losing sleep over 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.
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?
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.
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.
There are numerous tools and services available that make filling your social media feeds with content incredibly easy, but just because it’s easy, doesn’t necessarily mean you should use them.
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.
It’s time again for an other episode of 3 LINKS, where I share some of the better blog posts that I’ve read in recent history on the subjects of social media marketing, content marketing, traditional marketing, business, or anything related.
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.
Of the 104 articles published on the RGB Social blog in 2013, the following 10 received the most number of views.
How can businesses effectively provide customer service on social media while not having their profile be overrun by negativity?
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.
If we stop thinking about the ‘return’ of ROI as end sales, and start thinking about ‘return’ as a sum of the value of all of the relevant aforementioned factors – which ultimately lead to sales – then calculating an ROI of social media can be much more achievable; not simple, but achievable.
Believe it or not, while I took the week off of social media, the world kept spinning, my business survived, my face didn’t melt off, and no other catastrophes occurred as a direct result (as far as I know anyway).
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.
Nobody cares that you have an account on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
If you’re solely broadcasting and republishing readily accessible information, nobody will care because there is no added value to ‘liking’ your Page, following your business, or subscribing to your social media channels.
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.
I know that you’re probably thinking there’s no possible way that an Ikea catalogue could possible be anything close to being considered ‘killer content’, but I think if you check this out for yourself that you’ll agree with my thinking that this is pretty cool.
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.
Unfortunately, for all of the awesome Twitter tips that are shared, there are a number of recurring tips that I feel are ill advised.
Following are 5 common Twitter tips that your business should ignore.
For 72 percent of consumers, online reviews are the number one driver when making a purchase decision.
Let’s discuss how you can go about getting more online reviews from your consumers or clients to favourably influence consumer purchase decisions.
I’m not going to spend time in this post to discuss all of the measures by which success on social media can be measured; instead I’ll cut to the chase.
The real reason you’re probably reading this article is because of what’s promised in the title, so here we go.
The silver bullet for acquiring Facebook fans is…
There are some amazing businesses and brands pumping out absolutely killer content every day, though I can’t think of many that do it with such regularity as Red Bull. This article will showcase the awesome episodic video content series ‘Imaginate’ by Red Bull, featuring Danny MacAskill.
There are amazing businesses and brands producing absolutely killer content every day. This post will highlight the awesome video, ‘Ship My Pants’, created by Kmart to raise awareness of their free online shipping, what makes it so amazing, and present a few strategies and tactics that can be applied to your business.
This is the fifth installment of 3 Links. Day-to-day I spend a fair bit of time reading other people’s blog content. These are 3 blog posts that I’ve read in the last week or so, that I recommend you read as well.
Pinning a post on your Facebook Page keeps an update at the top of your Timeline for 7 days which keeps it visible to your community, encourages engagement, and allows you to increase impressions for the pinned content amongst other benefits.
No matter how you view the receipt of negative comments, don’t panic when you see them inevitably appear.
There are actually a number of reasons why the receipt of negative reviews can be very positive.
To many, the thought of maintaining a blog for business can be daunting. Contributing to a blog, keeping a regular posting schedule, ensuring content is relevant and topical, and figuring out how a blog can fit into your social media marketing strategy are just a few of the many perceived barriers.
5 ideas for how to drive your social media community to your retail locations or brick and mortar business.
After doing a quick audit of Facebook Pages for some of the local businesses in my neighbourhood, I was surprised to discover how few of these pages had a cover photo.