According to Bazaarvoice’s “The Conversation Index: Volume 6” study, shoppers who read helpful brand responses to reviews are 186% more likely to make a purchase and show 157% higher average product sentiment. Also, 41% of consumers see a brand’s response to an online review as a sign that the brand really cares about its customers.
Google Plus Social Media Relevance
Google + is an interesting beast and as a platform, the question remains, what is Google Plus social media relevance?
As more and more data comes out, the question is still up in the air. It’s not that Google is not trying, they have been shoving Google + down our throats by integrating (very poorly)successful social media properties like Blogger, Picasa, Google Places and You Tube into one platform: Google +
In doing so Google + has shown impressive growth in terms of registered users but when it comes to social media, growing your base is only one part of the business model. Most social media platform do so by providing a platform where users want to spend time and and share content with their friends increasing relevancy of the platform and creating an incentive for users’ friends to join.
Google failed at that part and fell back on the second option; using properties users love to use and forcing them into Google +. It could have worked if Google had not made it more difficult to use the already successful properties and tried to make it as difficult as possible to share them in platforms other than Google +.
The result? A recent study from Shareaholic shows that high user growth is not translating in higher use, engagement and sharing. Continue reading “Google Plus Social Media Relevance”
How to Preserve Your Privacy on Facebook
In light of the changes Facebook recently sneaked in privacy settings, it is important for users to adapt and understand how you can still preserve your privacy on Facebook, at least some if not most of it.
If you elected to keep your profile private and out of the Facebook search feature, well no more. Now anybody can find your profile if you have one of Facebook.
The change was announced in a Facebook blog post (see bellow) by the company “Chief Privacy Officer”??? Michael Richter. Yes, they do have a CPO although it seems privacy is really a second thought when it comes to Facebook and some other social media platforms.
“The (previous)setting also made Facebook’s search feature feel broken at times. For example, people told us that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally and couldn’t find them in search results, or when two people were in a Facebook Group and then couldn’t find each other through search
Although I can see the second point, the first point was what keeping a profile “private” was about.
Now mind you, let’s say only 5% of Facebook 1.2B users opted for that privacy setting, that’s 60 million users, roughly the population of a country like France.
If you elected to keep your profile out of searches, well, it’s not going to happen but there is a lot you can do, it’s going to take some work though.
The first thing you need to do is segment your “friends” list. Segmenting is another word for creating groups of friends (called “Lists” on Facebook) based on their interests in order to show them what they will be interested in.
If you don’t have hundreds, that will be really quick, otherwise it will be time consuming but well worth your time if you value your privacy. And if your profile was set as private I assume you do. Follow these quick steps Continue reading “How to Preserve Your Privacy on Facebook”
Edit Facebook Posts… New Feature
Sometime ago Facebook added a feature allowing users to edit their comments and the general reaction was how about letting users edit Facebook posts?
It’s happened to all of us, we write a Facebook post, publish it and… darn… there is a typo we did not catch and darn again, we already collected a few likes, shares and comments, some of which mocked our mistake.
What could we do, write a “Oops” comment or delete the post, rewrite it, proofread carefully this time and post it, all the while losing all the likes, shares and comments. One of the reasons was that editing could potentially change the meaning of the post and mislead readers, commentators and sharers and that could lead to excesses.
No more, Facebook is deploying a new feature allowing us to edit and correct the mistakes
To edit a Facebook post: Continue reading “Edit Facebook Posts… New Feature”
How Consumers Find Websites
With the on going debate on SEO vs SEM vs Social, a recent study by Forrester Research released in July 2013 sheds some very interesting light on how consumers find websites The study was conducted in 2012 and show the fast rise of social search
- 54% of consumers find websites through natural search results, up from 50% in 2011 but still 7% less than in 2010
- Social networks are the second-most preferred discovery resource, with 32% using them in 2012, up from 25% in 2011 and 18% in 2010.
- 50% of 18-24 year old and 43% of 24 to 32 year old are using social media as their main internet discovery resource
- Links are the third important means of website discovery, with 28% saying they found websites from links on other sites, down from 31% last year.
- Just 18% of those surveyed said that they use ads for website discovery, an improvement from 2011, when paid search was the least popular form of website discovery, with only 8%
- One-third of Americans are using Facebook and Twitter for discovery.
Are You Gambling with your Online Presence?
Centering your digital strategy around social media or any other platform you do not control is not a good idea and akin to gambling with your online presence .
Terms of service do change, so does their interpretation and social media companies have been known for taking pages or accounts down without warning and without recourse (like in this story).
Your website is the only platform you have full control over, assuming you did not use a website “farm”, meaning a company selling you a template or canned site they host. It should be the center of your digital strategy and your blog should be a part of it, not a separate entity hosted on a different url.
Use social media platform to create conversations and drive traffic to your site where you can convert visitors into customers.
How does that translate in real life?
You post stories and blog post on your self hosted blog, part of your website, publish a teaser on your social media platforms with a link to the page on your website driving traffic to your website. Each new visitor to your website, each new visit is an opportunity to convert.
You can lose your Facebook account and all the pages attached to it, you can lose your LinkedIn account or any other social media account, your website (meaning self hosted) is the safest place for your content and the safest place to build your online presence.
Nine Excellent Free Cloud Generators
Cloud generators can be a fun way to create graphics, they can also help you insure that your content is on target and will be seen as such by search engines.
Cloud generators will transform your text, be it blog post, web page, resume or PR release into a visual image of your content helping you visualize keywords and their weight. and letting you literally see if your content is on target
Wordle
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
tagCloud generator
This can generate your tag clouds in html and flash online with just a few steps in downloadable form.
ImageChef
With tool, you can create a different styled and shaped word cloud and send to your friends etc as a post card.
ABCya
A word cloud is a graphical representation of word frequency. You can type or paste text into the box showing on their home page and press the arrow button to view the word cloud generated. The appearance of a word cloud can be altered using the graphical buttons above the cloud. It is also easy to save and/or print the cloud by simply pressing a button. This is specially designed for school kids.
Tagul
Tagul is designed for web masters who want to place nice clouds on their web pages. Tagul clouds have numerous advantages against ordinary text clouds like custom fonts, cloud shapes, colors, etc. and thus Tagul clouds have much fancier look. Tagul clouds are more entertaining for your web site visitors provide better user experience.
Word Cloud
ToCloud is an online free word cloud generator that uses word frequency as the weight. Hence, the generated word cloud of a page gives a quick understanding of how the page is optimized for certain words. ToCloud is also smart enough to extract phrases and works much better than most other word cloud generators on the web.
WordItOut
WordItOut lets you transform your text into word clouds. You can then save and share them, so everybody can find and enjoy them.
Tagxedo
Tagxedo turns words like famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.
TagCrowd
TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any text by creating what is popularly known as a word cloud, text cloud or tag cloud. It specializes in making word clouds easy to read, analyze and compare, for a variety of useful purposes.
Physician Reviews: Patient Experience Trumps Skills
How important are physician reviews
In healthcare, branding sometimes is reduced to its most basic component and it’s not what most physicians would thing about first.
Unless a patient is victim of malpractice, it’s very difficult for them to evaluate a physician medical skills.
On the other hand, patients have expectations in terms of experience and oftentimes, that experience will drive their perception of the physician or the healthcare facility.
According to a recent study of physician review websites released in April 2013 by Vanguard Communications, poor customer service and bedside manners are the biggest complaints on online medical review sites, trumping by far poor medical skills
- 43.1 percent of the negative reviews complained about doctor indifference and bedside manner
- 35.3 percent were about poor customer service including staff rudeness, erroneous billing, unprofessional dress and facilities not being hygienic.
- 21.5 percent highlighted a lack of physician skills
To stand out of the crowd, just like any business, healthcare professionals need to start thinking about their brand holistically, in term of patient experience from beginning to end.
What does that mean? That means evaluating and improving each point of contact with the patient, from the website, social media, printed material, telephone demeanor, front office staff, assistants, nurses, bedside manners, parking lot, waiting room … to improve patient and caregivers’ experience
Think in term of great experience and patients and caregivers will flock to review sites and sing your praise.
What’s in it for you? Increasingly patients are going online for healthcare information and to choose healthcare professionals based on peer reviews and referrals.
In addition, positive reviews improve your website organic search rankings which in turn, means better visibility and more patients and referrals.
There is no downside
Social Media Strategies And Tactics For The Job Search Slides
Social media strategies and tactics for the job search presentation InlandNet, May 15
What is social media?
Understanding social recruiting/social job search
Understanding the main platforms in the context of the job search
Social job search strategies and tactics
- What happens in Vegas… ends up on social media, find out what you don’t know that may hurt your search
- Listen
- Understanding the platforms to identify the ones that fit your job search strategy
- Developing and managing your online brand
Tools to help you maximize your social media time
- Monitoring:
- Social media platforms
- Blogs
- Facebook Job search apps
- Twitter Job search apps
- Twitter directories
- Is your content on target
Social Media For Business Mainly a Brand Builder
Social media for business study
Social media plays a significant role in small and medium-sized businesses’ (SMBs) marketing efforts, providing both free and paid exposure to a wide-ranging—and often receptive—audience.
According to a January 2013 survey from online magazine Social Media Examiner, Facebook continues to be the most important social network for most business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers worldwide, given its enormous user base. However, for business-to-business (B2B) marketers, there is a healthy competition among other
platforms. Among these marketers, LinkedIn tied with Facebook as the most important social network, while blogging followed 10 percentage points behind.
Interestingly, while YouTube was only the most important social platform for 4% of SMBs total, it is where the greatest percentage of businesses planned to make future investments. Nearly seven out of 10 marketers said they planned to increase their use of YouTube this year.
The greatest benefits of social media:
- 89% increased exposure
- 75% increased traffic
- 43% increased sales.
This points to social’s role as a brand builder, first and foremost.
And even as social media may seem like old hat to many marketers by now, quite a few are relatively new to the platforms. About one-quarter of marketers said they had been working with social media for a year or less. And another 30% were 1 to 2 years into their social media marketing tenure. But SMBs have quickly caught on to how important social is as a marketing tool: 79% said they had already incorporated social media into their traditional marketing activities.