The Coca-Cola Company’s Digital Manager of Communications, Natalie Johnson, shared how they monitored conversations about their brand on a global scale across the web.
Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition
As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.
In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue (85%) and increase sales and partnerships (58%). An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.
Social Media ROI Metrics Still Chaotic
Brand marketers continue to struggle with determining return on investment for social media campaigns. Eighty-eight percent admit to gaining positive ROI on campaigns, but a study released Wednesday from Wildfire, a social media platform company, shows that the metrics remain all over the map.
While inconsistencies make it difficult to create and follow industry standards, Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom said 75% of survey participants said they still plan to increase their social media budgets this year.
Gaining positive ROI is great, but what do marketers measure?
Are You Afflicted With Social Media Proliferation?
Between Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms, the average enterprise-class company has 178 corporate-owned social media accounts.
That’s according to a new report from Altimeter Group, which surveyed 140 companies with more than 1,000 employees. Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter and the lead author of that report, says 178 are way too many, particularly because such accounts often lose steam after a while and go dormant.
“It’s just a poor customer experience, because it’s been abandoned,” he says.
It’s time to take a hard look at your company’s social media presence and pare down its accounts. A new Altimeter report offers an eight-point resource checklist to help.
Study Predicts Growing Use Of Social Media In Healthcare
A recent study concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers while at the same time, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media
Once these hurdles are overcome, the PwC report said, social media “will open new opportunities to improve health delivery and outcomes
What where the top strategic priorities for social media marketing in 2011
A study recently released by Marketing Sherpa polling CMOs (Chief Marketing officers) reveals the top strategic priorities for social media marketing in 2011
- Recruiting interdepartmental staff to perform social marketing activities 8%
- Improving the quality and cost efficiency of customer support programs 9%
- Integrating social media monitoring and analytics into a single dashboard 11%
- Integrating social marketing data with CRM and other marketing systems 21%
- Achieving or increasing measureable lead generation from social marketing 43%
- Achieving or increasing measureable ROI from social marketing programs 46%
- Improving search engine ranking positions 50%
- Developing an effective and methodical social marketing strategy 53%
- Converting social media members, followers, etc.into paying customers 63%
- Improving brand awareness or reputation 66%
- Increasing website traffic through social media integration 71%
Is Facebook killing corporate websites?
Several recent studies point out to a decrease in traffic to traditional corporate websites and an increase in traffic to Facebook.
Does that mean that web users are turning their back on traditional websites or that they are spending more time on Facebook and are more likely to visit the corporate Facebook page rather than the corporate website?
It is worth noting that if the trend is very noticeable with traditional brand focused static websites, the trend reverses when it comes to transactional websites.
Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay
Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.
Facebook’s estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook’s revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.
But most of its ads were for small advertisers, such as local businesses and small-scale websites, according to comScore Inc. Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising on a grand scale, and to snag the sort of big brand names who now drive billions of dollars to TV, radio and print campaigns
LinkedIn reports earnings, base growing to 116M
LinkedIn reported its first earning since going public in May. The company reported a $4.5M profit for the second quarter (2c a share) on $121M revenue, a 50% increase over last year.
Don’t get too excited on the earning side, at least in the short term, the company declared that they were willing to sacrifice short term earnings to invest in new technology and product development.
On the user side, LinkedIn announced 116M users, a 61% increase over the same time last year.
The user numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Over the last year, we have seen spammers creating massive numbers of fake profiles to spam discussion groups and infiltrate personal networks.
LinkedIn has been notorious for their lack of action against spam and spammers, one might argue, to ring up higher number of “users”, it will be interesting to see if they will change course in the future and tackle that growing issue before it has an impact on their real base.
Let’s hope for us users that some of the investment in technology and new product will address that growing problem.
Marketers want better social media analytic tools
A recent Web Liquid survey shows that although 95% of respondents state that monitoring social mentions is a priority, only 74% have strategies in place to do so.
The most used social monitoring tool is Google Alerts, used by 59% of respondents, followed by Radian 6 with 9% of respondents.
Not surprisingly, only 23% of respondents were satisfied with to monitor social mentions and only 23% are “very” satisfied with their social media analytics tool.
In an environment still ruled by traditionalists driven by traditional metrics, analytics still are the weak link.