Tag: social media

Posted on

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%

 

Posted on

What is concidered acceptable content on Facebook

I often get the question:  What is considered acceptable content and what will get me in trouble on Facebook?

There is no easy or clear cut answer. The Facebook TOS (Terms of Service) concerning acceptable content, as with many Facebook rules are pretty vague and murky and their application, at Facebook’s discretion with little if any recourse.

The TOS states: “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence,”

The interpretation is subjective and left to a committee based in Ireland, one of the most puritan countries in Europe.  As we have seen in the past, the interpretation and application has been at best random, without due process and recourse.

To stay on the safe side, the best advice I can give is:  do not post anything you would not want your mother or grand mother to see.

If you are not confused enough as most of us are, this article titled: “Too far for Facebook? How the site decides what to ban” goes into more details.

 

Posted on

REI: Going Local on social media

REI’s Digital Engagement Manager, Jordan Williams, discussed how they utilize social media sites for each REI store to develop a better local connection with their customers.

A must see for retailers and any company that ventures into social media

Posted on

The days of low cost marketing on Facebook may be counted

It’s not a coincidence that Facebook first half profits doubled to $1.6B and the trend will likely accelerate.   Over the past few years Facebook has been slowly but steadily paving  the way for increased profitability

For the past three or so years, most of the changes Facebook has implemented have made it made it increasingly difficult for organization and brands to put their content in front of their “Fans” or as Facebook now calls them “Likes”

It started with the structure of the wall on profiles.  We first saw the wall being segregated in two sets of posts with the default view to what Facebook deemed most important to users to the last change in the past month.

The latest little known or noticed change in Facebook “Pages” has big implications.  As of September 30, 2011, Facebook stopped allowing pages to communicate to their “Fans” or as Facebook calls them “Likes” via messaging.

The feature that allowed page owners or administrators to send targeted messages into users’ inboxes has been removed, officially to , and i quote : ” connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible” which is through public communication on the wall.

So Facebook says.  In reality, it’s been a slow and calculated approach to remove free means of communications between pages and their followers and quoting facebook again, “using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience“.

If the past is any indication, we can expect that Facebook will find more ways to curtail free interactions between pages and users as an incentive to use paid Facebook advertising, coming around full circle, back to traditional advertising, only this time with a captive audience…. of advertisers.

Posted on

Social Media 001: Page or Profile? That is the question

As more organizations get on the social media bandwagon, it becomes more and more obvious that there is some serious confusion as to what type of page they should use for their online presence.

Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook (Google has only allowed a few organization to test the Google + business accounts and is seriously enforcing their policy of not allowing businesses and organizations using personal accounts), users are confused, misinformed or uninformed about the differences between profiles and pages.

Few users read the TOSs and who can blame them, pages after pages of boring legal mumbo jumbo that would put to sleep a toddler on a sugar high.

Not knowing the differences can have costly repercussions.

Before going public, LinkedIn was notorious for enforcing its TOS, especially when it comes to organizations using personal profiles.  Facebook was enforcing as well, but with the vastly higher number of users, enforcement was spottier.

One can expect that enforcement will become stricter again in the future as the companies start focusing again on quality versus quantity.

What is the big deal? You might ask.

The big deal is choosing the wrong format can be costly in many ways.  Imagine logging on to your page only to find out that your account has been suspended and there is nowhere to turn to have it restored.  Imagine having to do the work all over again, rebuild your network of followers, your content, earning comments and ratings.

What figure can you put on rebuilding your social media presence?  What is the cost in term of time wasted, lost goodwill, lost followers?

The rule:

Generally speaking (most social media platforms use the same basic principle)

  • A “profile” is a “personal profile”, a live individual, not an organization, not a company.
  • A “page” in the Facebook lingo is for an organization, company, brand.  Public personalities, artists, athletes… when using the account for business purpose should use the “page” versus “profile” for one good reason, they are usually doing it to promote their brand. LinkedIn has its own version of the “page”

Using the wrong format will also limit what you can do.

Due to their original design, pages and profiles have different built in tools and using a profile for a business entity can seriously limit your reach in term of communication, exposure, engagement, measurement and visibility and that’s the subject of an upcoming post.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Goodbye Facebook Places

Less than a year after Facebook deployed “Places” to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook is pulling the plug on Places over the next few weeks.

Despite its 750 million members, Facebook could not leverage its mass to make “places” work

Facebook Places never really got much traction compared to other self standing geolocalization platforms like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and other niche platforms.  Places though is not going the way of the dinosaurs, Facebook opted to integrate the localization feature directly in the post, on the wall.

The new feature will allow any user to tag locations in their posts.  They won’t need a smart phone or be near the place for that matter.  They will be able to use the feature from a computer, tablet or any other device giving them access to the internet using the “Places” icon at the bottom of the post

What does that mean for users.  As Facebook changed its aim from Foursquare to Groupon with the deployment of the Facebook “Deals”, we can expect a closer integration of “Deals” with the posts and more online offers.  Hopefully these offers will not clog the wall

Good news though, after the uproar on Facebook privacy settings and the bad habit Facebook had to make new features “opt-out”, Facebook seems to have listened to users and the location feature will be “opt-in”

Who knows, they may even start a new trend that will lead more companies to adopt the “opt-in” model rather that the “opt-out” model.

Proudly powered by WordPress