Categoría: socialmediatoday.com

Advertising on Social Media via Nielsen


 

The Nielsen 2012 State of Social Media report was released earlier last week. I previously went over the report’s findings about the largest social networks of 2012. The report also contains some interesting information about advertising on social media and what it means for consumers.

Consumer Sentiment towards Social Media Advertising

Nielsen found a surprising statistic about consumer sentiment towards social media advertising. Nearly one-third of users believe that ads on social media sites are more annoying than other ads online. Social media isn’t supposed to be annoying. It’s supposed to be meaningful.

There are a few things this statistic tells me. Number one is social integration. In an attempt to make advertising more social, many social networking sites “hide” advertising within other content. An example of this is promoted trends on Twitter. These ad units are tied into other trends and tweets on Twitter. To some consumers, this might appear to be deceptive. The result is an annoyance and distrust of the brand advertising, when it should in fact be upon the social network.

This number also tells me some businesses aren’t using social media advertising correctly. Many social media platforms offer robust targeting options to their advertising. The goal is to display the right ads to the right people. Many businesses fail at this, and the result is irrelevant and sometimes irritating ads. It becomes frustrating when you see an ad in a language you don’t speak, an area you don’t live in (I’ve had ads for NYC bars in Facebook), and when the ads surely shouldn’t be targeting someone your age. Businesses can avoid this frustration by developing targeting strategies that make sense.

Finally, there is the aspect of spam and quality businesses advertising. For example, I have noticed a big drop in quality brands advertising on Facebook. The more lesser quality businesses advertising on a site, the less likely consumers will find these ads trustworthy and relate able. The result is a drop in engagement and an increase in frustration. It’s up to social media sites to develop ways to increase the quality of ads being served on their own sites.

Consumer Actions after Seeing Social Media Advertising Leer más “Advertising on Social Media via Nielsen”

Twitter Hack: 5 Ways to Automate Twitter | by Thomas Samph


http://socialmediatoday.com/

About Thomas Samph
Writer
Grovo Learning Inc.

When IFTTT launched in late 2011, tech publications lauded the startup as a haven for nerds. Almost a year later, the same may be true for IFTTT, a website that connects digital channels, from RSS feeds and social networks to cell phones and email clients, into an “If This Then That” formula. But these days, IFTTT is catching a lot more commercial success, in part due to its simple, powerful and easy-to-use interface, but mostly because it simplifies everything.

In celebration of simplifying social media, here are the top 5 ways that IFTTT Twitter automations can simplify your life:

1. Automatically greet a new Twitter follower
Instead of sending messages to new followers individually thanking them for following you, use this IFTTT recipe. First, connect the Twitter channel to IFTTT, then enable the recipe and customize the message that’s sent to new followers. In using IFTTT, you can turn recipes on and off as you like, so if the recipe isn’t working as you’d like it, just turn it off to edit it, then turn it back on when you’re ready.
Leer más “Twitter Hack: 5 Ways to Automate Twitter | by Thomas Samph”

Why We Pin It? Takeaway Lessons from Pinterest | by David Urmann


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Pinterest is now the third largest social network. It’s ahead of both Linkedin and Google+, as measured by number of users, according to a new report from Experian. Its rapid success has led to a proliferation of clones. Will any of them come anywhere close to garnering the same attention? If they do, it won’t be because they just copycatted Pinterest, it will be because they understood and integrated the same formula for success. Let’s take a closer look at 6 key factors driving the success of one of today’s largest social networks..

1) Continuous Involvement – Most social networks have you create a profile and once you’re done filling out your basic sign-up data that’s literally the end of the engagement process. The signup process at Pinterest is just that and then the real fun begins.

2) Self Expression – On the surface Pinterest appears to be just about pining individual pictures to boards. However, this is one case where the sum is greater than the parts. Your complete collection of boards and pins can effectively highlight an individual’s tastes and style all in one web page. The information conveyed about your personality by your Pinterest profile is a leap ahead of the text based information that other social networks compile when it comes to actually capturing some essence of your character.

3) Social Feedback Loop (…) Leer más “Why We Pin It? Takeaway Lessons from Pinterest | by David Urmann”

Engagement ain’t nothing but a number. Why 1% Isn’t Good Enough

The headline calls attention to everything that’s wrong with how businesses measure engagement in social media today. Businesses that invest any level of marketing resources in networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like (get it?) are being groomed to focus on soft metrics instead of the relevant activity that signals the strength and worth of a community. By weighing conversations, interactions, and views, businesses are fed raw numbers that demonstrate KPIs but they do not offer the insights necessary to glean ROI or deep understanding of what people do and do not want, need, or value. And that’s part of the problem as marketers and developers are focusing on stimulating movement, which by default becomes a game of competing for attention, moment by moment.

A recent study published by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based research group found that less than 1-percent of Facebook “Fans” actually engage with brands. Researchers looked at the top 200 brands using Facebook’s “People Talking About This” metric as a proportion of overall fan growth over a six-week period in October 2011. As a result, the team discovered that the percentage of People Talking About This compared to overall fans was only 1.3%. While this metric and approach is only one way to measure supposed engagement, the truth is that even by Facebook’s own standards of measurement, marketers are already boxed into a reporting process where each report serves as a benchmark for future activity. That’s the problem though. Engagement is confused with incidents and not outcomes or influence, the ability to cause desired effect or change behavior.


 

http://socialmediatoday.com

The headline calls attention to everything that’s wrong with how businesses measure engagement in social media today. Businesses that invest any level of marketing resources in networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like (get it?) are being groomed to focus on soft metrics instead of the relevant activity that signals the strength and worth of a community. By weighing conversations, interactions, and views, businesses are fed raw numbers that demonstrate KPIs but they do not offer the insights necessary to glean ROI or deep understanding of what people do and do not want, need, or value. And that’s part of the problem as marketers and developers are focusing on stimulating movement, which by default becomes a game of competing for attention, moment by moment.

A recent study published by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based research group found that less than 1-percent of Facebook “Fans” actually engage with brands. Researchers looked at the top 200 brands using Facebook’s “People Talking About This” metric as a proportion of overall fan growth over a six-week period in October 2011. As a result, the team discovered that the percentage of People Talking About This compared to overall fans was only 1.3%.  While this metric and approach is only one way to measure supposed engagement, the truth is that even by Facebook’s own standards of measurement, marketers are already boxed into a reporting process where each report serves as a benchmark for future activity. That’s the problem though. Engagement is confused with incidents and not outcomes or influence, the ability to cause desired effect or change behavior.

Businesses Take a Medium’alistic Approach Leer más “Engagement ain’t nothing but a number. Why 1% Isn’t Good Enough”

The 4 P’s Redefined: Social Media Now Rules Promotion


http://socialmediatoday.com
social media as promotion

Most business owners are familiar with the 4 P’s: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The 4 P’s are widely used to define a company’s “marketing mix,” a general phrase used to describe the different kinds of choices organizations have to make in the whole process of bringing a product or service to market. The three basic objectives of promotion are to 1) present information to consumers as well as others, 2) increase demand for a product (or service), 3) differentiate a product.¹ If managed properly, companies can use social media to accomplish all three objectives more efficiently and less expensively than any other means available.

SOCIAL MEDIA-AS-PROMOTION Leer más “The 4 P’s Redefined: Social Media Now Rules Promotion”

Google Drive and the Future of Your Online Marketing | Social Media Today


See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

The introduction of Google Drive Google’s free Cloud Storage service should have little to do with business and marketing. Storage is like a tool, no different than say a spanner, and when was the last time you saw the launch of a new spanner bringing into question the marketing strategy of the car repair business?

Yet, this is exactly what is happening here. The reason for this is that the launch of GDrive is the clearest signal yet that Google has transitioned from a company which used to make great products we all loved to use to a company that is building an ecosystem we are all being herded into.

Now vertical ecosystems are nothing new. Apples is one, Facebook another and Amazon yet a third. There is some overlap amongst them and some competition but each is geared to do specific things and do them well. Google is unusual in that it’s creating a vertical which is as wide and deep as the web itself. The Google environment different because Google links everything to search.

Google Drive, for instance, allows businesses to enjoy true Cloud portability with on-the-go device synching totally free. The 5GB storage can easily be increased for a competitive monthly fee, GDrive integrates instantly with Google Docs and unlike any other Cloud storage solution to date this becomes a truly Personal Cloud one by allowing selective collaboration of anything in it.

From a business point of view this is great. Google’s computing power coupled to free or very low costs makes for a proposition that is truly hard to resist and that is exactly the problem. Unlike any other ecosystem out there, Google’s environment is search and website ranking sensitive. As Google collects information its different services cross-reference it in ways which they didn’t a month or so ago before the company changes its privacy rules and this is now leading to the building of internal authority rankings for users much the same way that websites had a PageRank. Leer más “Google Drive and the Future of Your Online Marketing | Social Media Today”

Discussion: The Heart of Small Online Communities | Social Media Today


See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

The notion that discussion is the foundation of community is not a new one. In fact, it’s fairly consistent theme with the some of the most influential bloggers dealing with community management, including Richard Millington over at FeverBee and Patrick O’Keefe at iFroggy. Despite the fact that it’s a topic that has been written about extensively, it’s important enough that I think it’s excusable to be repetitious.

Beyond that, however, I think it is incredibly important for small online communities. Much of the excitement and attention in community management these days is focused on brand-related communities and particularly the B2C space. There’s a lot of discussion about user generated photos, art, and video. There’s a lot of excitement about contests and gamification. And there’s plenty of advice and strategy around content generation and planning. But as someone whose primary focus is on smaller online communities, and specifically communities run by associations or clubs, I often feel that much of this is not relevant, or at least is not where the primary focus should be.

The communities that I am most interested are more about sharing information and learning from one another. Discussion is clearly the most important type of interaction in this environment, but even I sometimes overlook it. At AssociCom, we think think we have some pretty good tools for content aggregation and social curation. These are necessary tools if you have a community in which information sharing is going to be a significant activity. So when describing AssociCom to people we often put a lot of focus on these. However, we sometimes fail to point out that even for information sharing, it is generally not the sharing itself that makes the community vibrant, but the discussions that spring up around that information. And this really is reflected in the way that we built it because content items actually serve as the locus for discussions; we just sometimes forget to point out to people how significant that is. Leer más “Discussion: The Heart of Small Online Communities | Social Media Today”