Social media is 24/7. Someone is always tweeting, posting on Facebook, or uploading a new picture to instagram. However, for social media managers and businesses alike, this can be quite of a challenge. We obviously can’t be online all day, even for those of us who are social media managers or strategist. But how do you know when to best reach your audience? There are a couple different ways to determine when your audience is online: Continue reading
This week I was honored to present at the Social Media Club of St. Charles April event, where I spoke about social media analytics and ROI tracking.
During the presentation I covered three areas of social media measurements:
The full presentation can be found below! Continue reading
Sound too good to be true? It is actually possible if your daily use of social media is built upon a well-developed social media strategy. But, a strong social media strategy does not mean that your brand has to be on every single social media channel out there. Instead, focus on the social media channels that the majority of your customers frequent.
The infographic below explains how having an over-arching social media strategy in place can save you time and make you a more effective social media strategist. This great infographic was developed by the talented Matt Wesson, a Marketing Content Specialist at the marketing automation company Pardot. It focuses on a six channel social media strategy, and how you can build engaged communities around your brand in as little as 30 minutes a day.
So how should you allocate your time on each channel? Well the infographic breaks the recommended 30 minutes down as follows: Continue reading
2012 was a very eventful year for the social media world. (understatement, I know!) Between acquisitions, introductions of new platforms, and grand site design changes, social media was an ever changing environment. Each time things seemed to calmed down, and marketers could catch their breath for a moment, things got flipped upside-down again. But, even though social media last year was a constantly changing arena, it is important for businesses to understand where each of the social media leaders stood at the end of the year; in addition to the opportunities and threats that face each platform during 2013. Continue reading
LinkedIn profiles are one of the best tools available for professionals to start developing their personal brand. Think of it as your online resume for both future employers and industry leaders to learn more about you. However, to grow your professional network, you need to optimize your profile so that industry professionals can find you. The following are five steps to increasing the visibility of your LinkedIn profile and highlighting your personal brand. Continue reading
From the rise of Pinterest to the ups and downs of Facebook post-IPO, 2012 was a big year for social media. The infographic below, courtesy of The SEO Company and Nowsourcing, showcases some of the top social media moments from 2012, including: Continue reading
With many factors influencing the success of the real-time online conversations surrounding your company, social media can seem overwhelming at the beginning. These influencing factors include
By having a strategy in place and investing time each week to maintain and grow each profile, you will be better prepared to create a successful and fun social media marketing experience. Continue reading
With hundreds of applicants applying for every job right now, how do you make your resume stand out from the rest? One way is by creating an infographic resume.
My favorite tool for building a visual, dynamic, and interactive resume is Re.Vu. Re.Vu calls its self the “Cure for the Common Resume”. They not only offer free tools for creating your dynamic resume, they also let you select a custom Re.Vu url to direct people to.
There a many different options on Re.Vu to display your work experience, so you will never see two identical Re.Vu resumes. The idea of creating an infographic resume may seem overwhelming, but Re.Vu makes it very easy. By linking your LinkedIn account to your Re.Vu account, all your past and present work information is imported. This makes it really simple to create all the visual graphs, that make your resume pop.
When you begin building your infographic resume, create a biography that explains who you are and what you do, and upload a traditional resume so employers can download it.
A great feature of Re.Vu is that you can add links to all your social media profiles to your infographic resume, including:
| WordPress | Tumblr | Google+ |
| YouTube | Flickr | Stumbleupon |
| FourSquare | Digg | Blogger |
| Vimeo | Slide Share | Myspace |
| Picasa | Posterous |
You can also create a visual timeline, based on the information imported from LinkedIn. The timeline will visually display your work history. Below is an example of what the visual timeline looks like. You can include a detailed description for each entry that will appear on your profile in a popover window when someone clicks on an event.
On Re.Vu you can create 9 different infographics to add to your resume. You can add one or all of the following infographics to your resume:
Re.Vu also lets you display your portfolio in your infographic and upload work examples that potential employers can download. In addition, you can promote your resume through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also create a QR code to promote your infographic. You can put it on your business card to direct people to your infographic resume. After you start promoting your resume, you can track profile views, resume downloads, and work example downloads on the profile statistics page.
Check out my Re.Vu profile for an example of the dynamic infographic resume you can make. View my profile page on re.vu page!
Using an infographic resume may not be the right approach if you are applying for a job in the accounting or scientific industries, but it is definitely a great tool for applying to jobs in the marketing, design, and media industries. Have fun building your dynamic resume!!!
Each year the Social Media Examiner publishes the ‘Social Media Industry Report‘. The report is based on interviews with over 3,800 marketers. This year, one of the big questions that they focused on was:
“How will marketers change their future social media activities?”
Overall, marketers plan on increasing their use of social media in the future. However, the tools that they utilize and how much the use each tool will change.
YouTube and other video platforms are leading the pack, with 76% of marketers planning on increasing their use of YouTube and/or video marketing in 2012.
Not a big surprise, Facebook came in #2 with 92% of marketers planning on using Facebook in 2012 and 72% planning on increasing the activities on top of that. Only 4%
of marketers do not plan on using Facebook at all; however, this is most likely due to the industry that their client is in. Clients in industries such as healthcare or manufacturing are less likely to include Facebook in their social media strategy.
I found it very interesting that Facebook is the #1 focus of those just getting started in social media. This makes sense because it is most likely the platform that they are most familiar with. In addition, B2C companies plan on increasing their use of Facebook much more than B2B companies. B2C companies are able to reach in customers more easily using Facebook than B2B companies. However, B2B companies can use Facebook for building and monitoring their online reputation. For more information about how B2B vs. B2C companies use Facebook, check out this infographic.
Overall only 69% of marketers plan on increasing their activities on Twitter; however, this increase will most likely be by enterprise level companies and local small businesses. Marketers realize that due to the real time nature, maintaining and monitoring a Twitter account effectively requires a significant time commitment. As such, marketers currently dedicating 21 hours or more per week on social media are more likely to increase their use of Twitter.
Blogs are great for driving site traffic and increasing search rankings. Due to the benefits of blogging, it is no surprise that 86% of marketers plan to either continue or increase blogging. Similar to Twitter, blogging requires a significant time commitment to write, edit, and post articles, as well as monitor comments. Due to the necessary time commitment, marketers who are currently dedicating 11 hours or more a week to social media are more likely to increase their blogging efforts.
The platform that most of us are aware of and probably have an account on, though we probably don’t use it much, is Google+. Some interesting statistics on Google+ usage include:
In 2012 B2B companies are more likely to increase their usage of LinkedIn, while only about 1/2 of B2C companies will increase their usage. As a tool for networking, LinkedIn definitely has more benefits for B2B companies than it does for B2C. B2C companies will most likely use LinkedIn as a tool to increase brand awareness in their industry and search for potential employees.
The industry report states that only 60% of marketers even plan on using photo sharing sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr. 
However, I believe that these numbers no longer accurately reflect where usage is going based on:
I think that there will be a much larger increase in usage, as well as a decrease in the percentage of marketers who have no plans of utilizing photo sharing sites.
Of all the statistics in this section of the report, I found the information on Geo-location services and Daily Deals the most interesting.
Only 23% of marketers plan on increasing their use of geo-location services like FourSquare in 2012. This is particularly interesting since FourSquare just hit their 20 million user mark this week. (Check out more information here)
72% of marketers have NO plans to use daily deals, such as Groupon or LivingSocial. This percentage really surprised me since Groupons were recently very popular. The decrease in usage may be from lack of repeat participation by companies or lack of profitability.
Facebook is the go to social media platform for advertising to consumers. Whether it is an ad in the side bar or creating customer relationships through posts on company pages, Facebook reaches the final customer. The great thing about Facebook ads, is that it allows businesses to create a custom targeted campaign to reach their customers regardless of company size.
While Facebook can target a select group of people for an ad to be shown to, LinkedIn is a unique group of business. LinkedIn is a specialized network for the business world, which is composed of users who are passionate about their industry and are looking to network. For companies looking to utilize social media to reach their customers, the platform they choose to use will be based on which site their customers are already using. If a company is looking reach women looking for a great summer dress, Facebook would be the way to go. However, interactive agency would have much better luck using LinkedIn to connect with potential clients than Facebook.
The infographic below from San Diego Web Design & Marketing Agency breakdowns the differences between the two social networking powerhouses.
B2B Marketing Facebook Vs. LinkedIn Infographic
