Social Media Marketing Trends

Social media marketing disappears

Social media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.

Integrating social media to corporate websites

Brands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.

More support through social media

The integration of social media will lead to people reporting their problems in their channel of choice. Social media integration lets some of those problems be handled by the peers. However, companies should find ways to avoid their social media channels becoming a glorified helpdesk.

Social CRM will make inroads in larger organizations

Social data will be added to the CRM systems to find trends in sentiment and individual preferences of customers. The goal is to engage the customer in a conversation and give value that binds them tighter to the brand. As brands lose control of online interaction social CRM will help them react and predict how conversations are taking place. Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Social media will influence more sales

Social media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.

Social commerce on mobile devices

We will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.

Social media budgets will grow

Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services and part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook.

Social media advertising will grow

Social media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Social media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising.

Social media ROI is a must

More result oriented. Still less than half of the marketer’s measure results from social media. Social media ROI is a hot topic but less than half of the marketers report seeing it. We see that the budgets will grow and social gets more important in the brand’s marketing mix. This means that C-level will demand results. Dollars in sales - It can be as easy as direct sales from Facebook or a bit more vague as in conversion rate of people from social channels is higher than average.

In the course of our conversations with CMOs worldwide, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers; create lasting relationships with those customers; and measure marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

Rise of the branded content

Next to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curetted and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, and has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.

Content Curation and Discovery

Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what’s important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers. Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.

Tabletizing and mobilizing websites

Not exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did; now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried).

Social gaming will grow and spill over to real world

Social Media Games have more players than prime time TV shows have viewers. In-game ads and branded game items will become important promotional tools. As social media will become more mobile so will social gaming. This means that games that are hosted on social networks, such as Zynga and EA on Facebook, will be playable on mobile devices. 

These kinds of games will be played on-the-go – when you’re traveling by bus, sitting in a boring lecture, waiting for your lunch. Social gaming will be integrated with real life to physically perform tasks offline that have effect in the virtual world. Engage real friends; go to locations, flash mobs, etc. The potential growth of mobile social gaming will be huge.

Location! Location! Location!

Location based services will be everywhere. The Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more all tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.

Most social media usage will be on mobile devices

Social media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smart phone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smart phones give us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!

Group buying sites will add location based services

Let’s face it, it is a brain dead model. Grow a huge list by offering really cheap deals and then sell that list to businesses to get really cheap deals. Group buying will not go away but businesses will understand better what it is and use it accordingly. To spell it out: businesses buy an opportunity to let potential customers sample their offering at a hugely discounted rate in hopes of repeat business. New layer of value can be added by integrating with location based services that will alert users to deals when they are in the neighborhood.

Interacting with live TV in social media

Live TV shows will react to user interactions such as votes, suggestions, etc. We have the ability to change what’s happening by providing real-time feedback on social networks. TV is going to be everywhere through mobile apps.

News will be social

News websites will gradually be replaced by applications integrated with social media technology such as Facebook’s Open Graph. While this won’t happen instantly, we’re going down that road as we speak. People will be reading news from their dedicated applications such as iPad’s Flipboard or Washington Post Social Reader.

Mobile apps will become more social

All of the successful new mobile apps will be deeply integrated with social networks allowing you to share and engage more than ever before. We will be taking in a lot of suggestions and recommendations from our friends, colleagues and other trustworthy peers.

Your social media footprint will grow

Frictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don’t share, your friends will. Some may raise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.

Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark

Where do those more than 1 billion Facebook users come from? The countries with more than 20 million people and Facebook penetration below 20% will add most of this growth in 2012. Add the potential growth of other countries and you get to a cool billion or 1.1 billion even. And that does not include China.

Source: www.dreamgrow.com

How To Measure Your Organization’s Social Media Success

Your organization or business knows that it’s important to measure the progress you’re making with your social media program or campaign, but what do you measure, why and how?

There’s no single, simple answer, but today we’ll offer a framework to guide you through the thicket of differing approaches you should consider before implementing a metrics program. (If you have other approaches that have worked for you, please add them to the comments!)

Creating goals to advance your mission

First off, don’t obsess about metrics. In fact, forget about the data altogether. What you’re really trying to do is advance your organization’s mission. Metrics are just a tool to help you do that.

Before assigning someone on your staff to take ownership of metrics, ask yourself: What are the key items we need to track to determine if we’re moving the needle? Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization’s strategic or business objectives? Once you have a set of goals in place, then, and only then, should you begin considering which tools to use for your measurements.

Start by listing a series of specific, concrete, short-term, measurable, achievable goals that advance your long-term mission. Most of these goals should be short-term and modest in scope. Your organization may want to:

• Grow traffic to your website or blog
• Grow your newsletter list
• Motivate people to donate
• Move people to take a specific action, like signing a petition
• Turn supporters into volunteers
• Increase sale of a product or service
• Build visibility and authority for your brand or cause
• Solicit micro-loans
• Boost your following on Twitter or Facebook
• Spur people to register to attend an event
• Reduce operational costs by crowd sourcing tasks
• Test the efficacy of one donation button vs. another
• Enhance your site’s search engine rankings
• Increase the number of blog comments people post
• Reduce your site’s bounce rate (and increase stickiness)

All of these goals can — and should — be measured. And you’ll notice that while social media will be used to pursue and measure your progress in achieving many of these goals, others don’t involve social media at all. That’s OK. Social media should fold into your overall metrics program, not the other way around.

KPIs: How you’ll measure progress

Now that you have a list of goals, you’ll want to map them to Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is simply a metric that you track to assess whether you are accomplishing your business goals. There are literally hundreds of KPIs that you could be tracking in a spreadsheet, but your team will want to identify only a handful that matter most — the ones that will specifically help you achieve your goals.

For instance, if you want to grow your list of supporters, you’ll be able to measure the number of newsletter or RSS subscribers. If you want more interactivity on your blog, you can measure the average number of comments that people post.

Following is a partial list of KPIs/social interaction metrics

• Blog comments
• Downloads
• Email subscriptions
• Likes or Fans
• Favorites (add an item to favorites)
• Followers (follow something / someone)
• Forward to a friend
• Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
• Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc.)
• Personalization (pages, display, theme)
• Ratings
• Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
• Reviews
• Time spent on key pages
• Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)

There are dozens more, but you get the idea. Some of these social interactions may map to multiple goals. Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a document detailing social media metrics and definitions.

Get strategic: Determine formulas for calculating success

We know of a lot of nonprofits and companies that simply maintain a spreadsheet, check it occasionally to see if the numbers are trending in the right direction and pay little heed to what they could be learning if they dug a little deeper. That’s what the rest of this article is about.

In an April 2010 whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified and the Altimeter Group, the authors propose aligning KPIs to social business objectives and offer formulas for calculating success.

They set out a simple framework of four Social Business Objectives and associated KPIs:

• Foster dialogue: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement, Conversation Reach
• Promote advocacy: Active Advocates, Advocate influence, Advocate Impact
• Facilitate support: Resolution Rate, Resolution Time, Satisfaction Score
• Spur innovation: Topic Trends, Sentiment Ratio, Idea Impact

How to measure: Yes, social media can be quantified

You may have heard the cliché that social media can’t be measured. Let’s bust that myth. Here are some practical metrics methodologies to get you on your way:

Super Six Steps to Measurement

• Set your objectives
• Define your stakeholders
• Determine which metrics to use
• Benchmark against yourself over time or your competition
• Pick your measurement tool/technology
• Analyze the results and start over

Don’t overlook keyword search

Finally, don’t forget keyword search! It’s one of the key components of search marketing and should be a part of any metrics program you undertake. By analyzing your site and social media accounts for key words and phrases, you’ll be able to correct bad keyword choices and begin to drive more traffic from people searching for information about your cause or sector.

Source: www.socialbrite.org

How Social Media helps to grow the Small Business 

The business press is full of stories about how small companies are using social channels to attract and engage customers. But while there are plenty of individual success stories, the confidence in what to do specifically is not always clear for small business owners that are strapped for time and online marketing resources.

Case study:

I was talking with a small business owner recently who was lamenting not updating his website and also that his competition was showing up “all over the place” online.  The nature of his product requires some education and an effort to dispel common misperceptions. The rapid advancements in technology of his particular product category are not very well known amongst his target consumer market. But there’s a substantial amount of search volume and interest in the solutions his product provides.  He’s also a small business with limited time and budget.

To me, this was a classic opportunity for the power of influence through storytelling.

My tip for him was to start a blog that answered the most common questions prospects and customers ask.  And to do so in a compelling way that his competitors were not:  with video, images and text. Each new blog post would be another potential entry point to his website via Google and social networks where people share links. With 1 post a week, he’d have 52 more pages and videos on his website in a year, each offering interesting, useful content that could position him above the competitors. Along the way, he’d be able to gather insight from web analytics, social shares, comments and interactions with the blog posts to refine message effectiveness.

A few key questions to start with his blog content plan:

• Why do current customers buy your product? This can come from sales people and/or the business owner.
• What are the misperceptions & objections? Document the things that are educational opportunities.
• What type of information helps them change the perception?  What are the tipping points from skepticism to confidence? Is it demonstration, 3rd party data, credibility of the company, word of mouth?
• Where do prospects look for information on this solution? Talk to sales people, look at website stats and any logged information about lead sources.

By answering these fundamental questions, this small business owner can create a blog content plan that specifically addresses the questions, concerns and triggers that will influence prospects to trust, buy and refer.  Understanding the key features of the product most relevant to the target customer as well as prospect tendencies towards finding a solution of this type can literally translate into topics for him to write or talk about on the blog.

Those topics can be run through Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify the keyword phrases that people are searching for most often. Relevant search phrases can inspire blog post and YouTube video titles, categories, descriptions and tags.

Some basic next steps might include:

Set up a WordPress Blog, template and hosting (Genesis, StudioPress & Synthesis make this a no-brainer). Plan to write one blog post or publish/upload 1 video per week (2-3 minutes) that answers a key question prospects and customers ask.  The video can be captured using an iPhone or other smartphone and iMovie can be used for editing. If you’re on PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video.  For people not comfortable just talking to a camera, have an employee ask the question(s) and answer them while being captured on video.

Create a YouTube Channel and start connecting with other channels and video publishers on relevant topics, 5-10 min a day. After uploading a video, embed on the blog, and share on existing social channels like Twitter and Facebook as well as through email to existing customers or opt-in prospect list. Ashley posted some great examples of SMB Twitter promotion yesterday. When embedding the video on the blog, write a description of what is talked about in the video so search engines can make it easy for people to find.

The initial focus for a basic video and photo blog should be on getting used to the habit of creating useful content on a regular basis.  I know many readers might be thinking that more substantial SEO and social media tactics should be setup as well, but without good content, social networking and optimization won’t work to convert prospects to customers anyway.  Time is usually limited for small businesses, so getting a small base of content built is a great starting point.

Creating a cycle of listening for questions, answering them through content and refinement can go a very long way for small business content marketing. Once things are setup, 20-30 minutes per day can be spent interacting with blog comments and social networks. Establishing a feedback loop means you’ll always have ideas to blog or talk about. It also means you’re connecting with real people, interacting with them and providing something of value that they can share and act on.

In time other promotion channels can be added starting with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as SEO best practices with more specific keyword research and link building. If the initial customer research identifies Twitter as a substantial opportunity, a Twitter Marketing strategy might be involved at the same time the blog and YouTube channel are created. The reason I’m keeping these suggestions simple and basic is that I know how much small business owners can get overwhelmed. Needs to grow outside online marketing consultants or training can always be used to speed up things up.

What else? An email newsletter that re-purposes blog content and the Q/A that happens on Facebook, the blog and Twitter can be delivered to existing customers. Viewing every channel of participation as an opportunity to interact and share will help grow networks, trust and credibility as the “go to source” for the product category being promoted. It’s important to create value, but also to not lose sight that this is business. Don’t be afraid to suggest solutions or promote offers. Just do so in a relevant way.

Finally, make sure web analytics (Google Analytics is free) and basic social media monitoring (Trackur starts at $18/mo, search.twitter.com is free) are set up to assess how people are finding and interacting with blog content. Watch for trends in network growth like fans, friends and followers but especially with quality of interaction through comments, likes, shares and the effect on blog/website traffic that drives inquiries and sales.

For a lot of small business owners not used to online marketing, SEO or social media, these suggestions might be out of their comfort zone. But with the way consumer behaviors are changing and increased competition, getting out of the comfort zone and into a place where direct customer interactions drive content and inspire business outcomes is an essential investment.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

How To Make Money From Blogs – Indirect Methods

Many of the following methods are the result of the profile and perceived expertise of the blogger themselves.

Building a profile as a blogger doesn’t happen quickly and starting a blog with some of these hopes should be seen as a long term thing.

Consulting – when you are perceived as an expert on a topic you will find that people naturally come to you for advice – some of them willing to pay for it. Some niches are probably better positioned than others for their bloggers to get into paid consultancy work of course.

Business Blogging – Similarly there are some businesses that employ people to blog for them either as their main role or part of their role. One example of a company who employed a couple of bloggers was Vespa who now have two blogs. Blogger Jobs is one site worth following if you’re looking for these types of jobs. Most of the jobs there are from blog networks but occasionally they include businesses looking for bloggers also.

Book Deals – Some days as I read through the RSS feeds that I follow it seems that every blogger I read has a book either in progress or coming out. Once again it’s about being seen as an expert in your field – if you can achieve this you will find publishers are more receptive to having an idea pitched to them and at times will even seek you out. This is becoming more and more common with publishers as they are seeing not only some great writers but that many of them already have large amounts of content on their blogs ready to be pulled together into a book!

Offline Writing Gigs – Manolo from Shooeblogs recently landed a writing gig in the Washington Post Express after he was discovered via his blog. These types of opportunities can be in the form of newspapers, magazines, trade publications etc.

Online Writing Gigs – Similarly some bloggers also land jobs writing for other forms of websites as a result of being discovered from their blogs.

Selling e-resources – I wasn’t sure whether to classify this as direct or indirect (and depending upon how you do it you could probably go either way) but some bloggers are leveraging the expertise they have in an area by putting together their own ‘e-products’ such as e-books, tele-seminars, courses etc and selling them to their readers.

Business Partnerships – One of the benefits of blogging about a niche topic that interests you is that you will begin to connect with others who have similar interests and expertise. As you interact with them it’s amazing to see the opportunities for working together that arise.

Speaking Opportunities – Once again this is dependent upon the topic you’re writing about but some lucky bloggers end up with all kinds of opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars on their topic of choice. Sometimes they are freebies, other times the conference will cover costs and on other occasions there are speaker’s fees.

If you’re planning to use some of these indirect ways of making money because of your blog it’s important that you think seriously about building your own profile and credibility as a blogger. Think about the types of people that you respect and look to as experts and consider what they offer in their fields.

These people are generally original thinkers that not only report what others are doing, but who provide answers and vision for their industry. They are also often well networked and have the ability to draw others along with them.

Use your blog not only to report and rehash news but to also show initiative in proposing solutions. Be proactive in your blogging and lead the conversation rather than just react to it.

Source: www.problogger.net