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

Free Tools To Measure Social Media

Below are the 14 free tools to measure social media influence on the World Wide Web. 

SEMRush: What does your site rank for?

Just plunk your blog or website URL into the search field a top of the page and SEMRush will show the keywords it ranks highest for. SEMRush will show you what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what Google AdWords you might consider buying and the terms you should be focusing on in your blog posts.

Woopra: How are your visitors behaving?

We like what we’ve seen of Woopra, a Web analytics tool that provides real-time data about how users are interacting with your site. While the visitor moves through your site, you can see where she came from, her approximate location, and the actions she performs and where she goes off to next. Woopra has a freemium model: While the free version of Woopra is severely limited, you may soon want to move up to the Bronze ($4.95 per month) or Silver edition ($14.95 per month), which let you segment your visitors (say, referrals from Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon), print out customized reports and track trends over time. Like SEMRush, Woopra helps you get your own house in order before moving on to your outposts on the social Web.

Klout: Scoring across three networks

Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as re-tweets, follower counts, list memberships, and unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Facebook Insights: Stats you can use

Facebook beefed up its Insights service this year, to good effect. Now Facebook Insights resembles Google Analytics in many ways. As a Page admin, your dashboard gives you access to a trove of data: daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, and daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of your visitors (broken down by country, city and language), external referrals, internal link traffic and more. When you have spikes of user engagement, Insights will show you caused them. It’ll show you what content most interests your readers, and it’ll let you and your team understand and analyze growth trends. One big limitation is that you can’t access a lot of the data older than a week.

Bit.ly: Are your promotions working?

Our favorite URL shortener, bit.ly, provides double duty by offering analytics and click data for every link shortened. Click data lets you see how effective your social media promotions are. Nothing much, just log into account to see click through numbers. A new feature, bundles, lets you group similar links together. Both the free version of bit.ly and Bit.ly Pro handle our metrics needs without the need to upgrade to Enterprise ($995 per month).

TubeMogul: Who’s watching your videos?

If you’re familiar with TubeMogul, you probably think of it simply as a way to upload your videos to multiple sites, saving you the hassle of uploading videos over and over. But TubeMogul has developed a rich set of metrics lately, letting you see stats on how many people have watched your videos across networks. Real-time analytics include views, viewed minutes, audience geography, embeds, referring sites and search terms and more, all via your dashboard. It helps us to cross-compare by category, content delivery network, advertising mix or video player. And it’s free!

YouTube Insight: What parts of your video are ‘hot’?

YouTube Insight is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos that you upload to the site. Use the information to analyze marketing your efforts — both on and off YouTube — and determine how best to optimize your campaigns. Watch the video (natch) and see metrics around views and popularity, how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, which parts of your video are “hot” and “cold,” demographic information and community engagement.

Google Analytics: Powerful & easy to use

Google Analytics has become such an indispensable part of the analytics landscape that it’s not surprising we get a little blasé about it. But let’s not forget the genius of this tool: You get super-rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness — for free. Create better-targeted ads, track sales and conversions, measure your site engagement goals, track Web-enabled phones and mobile apps, integrate business info and develop applications that access Google Analytics data.

Alexa & Compete: How do you stack up?

When was the last time you looked to see how your site or blog was doing over time? Google Analytics will provide traffic data more accurately than analytics services like Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, but these firms also show trends, a different set of demographics guesswork and, most pointedly, how your site measures up against your competitors’. Alexa offers search analytics showing the top queries driving traffic to your site from search engines.

Feedburner: Are your feeds radiating out?

Now owned by Google, Feedburner is the easiest way to roll your own feed — and then sit back and watch the stats roll it. It’ll tell you how many people have subscribed to your blog or site — or even a section of your blog, if you set it up that way. Dig deeper and you’ll find your Feed Stats Dashboard, revealing average subscribers, reach, popular feed items (recently and all time) and other interesting factoids. For instance, we didn’t know Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television was aggregating Socialbrite’s open content via our feeds until we spotted it in Feedburner.

Twitter tools! A wealth of options

There are a ton of third-party Twitter apps to measure your Twitter grandiosity. Here are a few of my favorites:
Twitalyzer works for any Twitter account and gives you information about their impact score (percentile score) and the type of influencer they are.
Grader.com is a suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts. It shows the bio, location, history and the number of followers of the Twitter user you’re researching, and more.
Twittercounter lets you count registrations and comments on a particular campaign you’re running.
Backtweets shows you how many people you reach on Twitter and helps you understand how people interact with your brand and your content.
Type your Twitter ID into Twitterholic (where you can also see the most popular Twitter users in your city) or Twinfluence or Twittorati to see what kind of impact you’re making.
How far did your tweet travel? tweetreach offers reach metrics, statistics and analysis for marketing and PR professionals. Retweetrank, Tweetmeme, Twitturly and Retweetist also measure how often you get retweeted.
Tweeteffect determines which tweets make you lose or gain followers.
My Tweeple is a basic tool that lets you manage who you’re following and who’s following you.
Twittersheep analyzes your follower profiles to assess their likelihood of engagement.
Plus, a whole lot of other Twitter analytics apps.

PostRank: A modest tracking dashboard

PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, Diggs and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s suited to blogs and websites with a lot of content. Under its free plan, you can Track and compare your sites and your competition — up to five sites in all — to get the full picture of your social engagement. You can also track your static and offsite content (PDFs, YouTube videos, SlideShare content) for up to 10 sites.

Flickr: Are your pictures trending?

Flickr was one of the earliest social networks to provide metrics about how many people are viewing your photos. For instance, you’ll be able to see such statistics as views for your photos, sets and galleries — today, yesterday and all time (3.4 million for me, how about you?) — Your most viewed photos and videos and how many have been geo tagged or have comments. I just wish Flickr would tell you how many people are embedding your photos on their sites.

Soovox: For brand lovers

Soovox has a slightly different take on the Klout model: Discover your Social IQ, share your likes and earn rewards. Your “social influence quotient” measures your online social presence footprint and assigns it a value that gets translated into rewards. The money you make can go to your organization or to your favorite charity. Soovox is more geared to individuals who like to share their opinions about brands and products they love, but it’s worth a look.

Other tools - A worth look

Here are some other metrics tools we like. Not all of them are free:

Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web publishers who deal with search engine optimization and Internet promotion of websites. Seoquake allows users to assess important SEO parameters of an Internet project on the fly.

Social Report offers a social network performance tracking, monitoring and reporting tool. It comes with a 30-day trial and prices starting at just $9/month.

Foursquare and Yelp provides business dashboards that have the ability to review check-in data and other metrics.

Technorati and BlogPulse are blog search engines. Look for metrics around bloggers’ influence and authority.

Google Trends provides information on Web search trends around key terms and topics. It shows how often your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic region people have searched for them the most.

Xinureturns provides a dashboard overview of your site’s standing in social media. Run a report and you’ll receive information on Technorati, Googe PageRank, Diggs and even backlinks to your website.

Tribe Monitor is a social statistics aggregator that helps yo keep track of your fan base on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

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

Trends in Online Advertising

Following up on the Top 10 Tech Trends Of The Decade and drilling down on trend item five, in this post we’re going to look at the evolution of online advertising and what we might expect to see in the coming decade. At present, the online advertising industry is at $55 billion, and mobile advertising is at $2 billion. With the rise of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mobile advertising will gain momentum.

Below are the top ten trends;

1. Paid Search Rules:

Google ruled the past decade with paid search advertising. There is still no better, more effective form of advertising on the Internet. Keywords are becoming expensive, but if you know what you are doing, you will still be able to find cost-effective ways of acquiring customers using PPC.

2. Organic Search Gains Momentum:

Increasingly though, marketers are starting to understand the importance of organic search. Almost 90% of the entire Web’s search traffic flows through organic search, yet the search marketing industry are generally obsessed with PPC. This decade, some sanity and rationalization will take the place of this weird dichotomy.

3. Display Advertising and Vertical Ad Networks:

The best trend I have spotted during the past decade is the rise of vertical ad networks like Glam Media, Federated, HotChalk, Travel Ad Network, and others that focus on specific verticals. This is pretty much the only way for advertisers to do brand advertising across the fragmented spectrum of blogs and other online hangouts for audiences, including social media. In the coming decade, vertical ad networks will get better at providing more value to advertisers through advanced technology for audit, measurement, analytics and optimization, as well as richer engagement capabilities like interactive and video ads.

4. Social Media Advertising:

Social networks, especially the big ones like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, have a lot of information about individuals. They have not yet figured out ways to monetize this information and create a safe, non-intrusive, yet personalized framework through which advertisers can do high-precision targeting. This is definitely coming in the next few years.

5. In-Game Advertising:

Consumers are spending excessive amounts of time online playing games. We foresee a significant uptick in in-game advertising this decade.

6. Advertising Apps and Games:

Now that apps have taken over the mobile web, and is even coming on to PCs, advertising apps and games are a natural progression. Marketers will see it is obvious that instead of a 30-second prime-time advertising slot, a branded app or game that can engage users for three minutes is a far better use of ad dollars.

7. Interactive Infomercials:

Television infomercials are an effective way to market products. But the Internet offers significantly more cost-effective and targeted ways to market using the same concept, but delivered through display ad networks, viral videos, and so on.

8. Video Advertising:

Whether they are about political campaigns or consumer brands, YouTube videos have a viral power, and everyone knows it. This decade, we will see a huge amount of creativity deployed on this art form.

9. Mobile Advertising:

The rise of the mobile Web – through mobile apps on smart phones and tablets in the West, and through the avalanche of cell phone adoption in the emerging markets from Brazil to Indonesia – opens the door for mobile advertising as a category to gain tremendous momentum this decade. In particular, location-based advertising, coupons, and special offers at highly targeted and precise moments – all look very promising.

10. Better Analytics, Optimization, and Targeting:

Powering all this and more, we will see a vastly more sophisticated analytics, optimization, and targeting infrastructure that doesn’t quite exist today. There will be innovation in affordable tools to optimize PPC, SEO, mobile advertising, social media advertising, and every other conceivable online customer acquisition method.

Source: www.sramanamitra.com