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.
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.
With an observable self-awareness of how ridiculous some might feel about Apple’s obsession to detail, Tim Cook introduced two videos during the company’s Spring Forward event .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for recruitment, other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Vine can be highly effective to utilize for your recruitment efforts as well.
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?
There are a huge number of variables that are influenced by the quality and value of your content, so it’s understandable that you might feel compelled to obsess over every detail of your latest video, photograph, blog post, Facebook update, tweet, pin, or podcast until it is absolutely perfect.
But, when creating social media content, the pursuit of perfection – for most businesses – will yield diminishing returns.
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.
It’s as simple as this… If you’re into social, digital or content marketing, you should really read the following blog posts.
Leaving high-quality comments can demonstrate your expert knowledge, earn you increased exposure, and encourage reciprocation of contributions in your community.
What will Graph Search mean for businesses and brands on the world’s largest social network?
When planning your social media activity, it is critically important to understand your consumers’ natural behaviour on social media, with technology, and in the offline world to maximize the effectiveness of your efforts.
The goal for any organization involved in content, digital or social marketing should be to create a culture of content creation by which everyone is responsible for contributing strategically relevant, compelling, and meaningful content.
A key step when developing a social media strategy is to thoroughly understand your targeted consumers and community members so that you can determine how to engage and interact with them, what content will be seen as valuable and relevant, and how they use social media and technology.
When developing a social media marketing strategy, it is important to give thought to your relationship strategy, and include this as part of you broader plan.
What business you are in, in the context of social media?
Without acknowledging exactly what business you’re in, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to identify a set of attainable goals and objectives for your social media marketing efforts.