Tag: roi

9 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros

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The Social Media Examiner recently posted a great article about the 9 best Social Media Marketing Tips:

  1. Draw attention to your custom tabs in the new Faccbook timeline – they share great applications to create custom tabs, such as: Lujure and ShortStack.
  2. Add the LinkedIn company follow button to your site
  3. Use Bufferapp to manage your social media marketing – I really like the Buffer app for managing your Twitter account because it spaces out the tweets nicely, but I did have trouble using it for Facebook because the share option did not appear in my posts.
  4. Get YouTube subscribers just by asking
  5. Create a Facebook plan you can stick with – don’t plan to post 5 times a day if you can’t keep up with it. It is better to post once every day than a bunch every 4 days.
  6. Be consistent
  7. Prepare now for tough ROI questions
  8. Focus on dollars
  9. Fix the appearance of your links on Facebook – links with pictures have a higher share rate than those without!

This is a great article with great recommendations from the pros that use these tools everyday. Check it out! 9 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros | Social Media Examiner.

Top 10 Favorite Takeaways from SXSWi

This week, my twitter feed was full of quotes from SXSWi. I was not able to attend the conference myself, but agencies from all over the country have been tweeting and blogging about their experience there, so… I thought I would share some of my favorite takeaways that they have shared.

Agencies

  • Moosylvania – an independent full-service agency in St. Louis.
  • 4orce – a digital agency in St. Louis
  • Big Fuel – a social media and branded content company in New York

Top 10 SXSWi Takeaways

  1. Look forward to scary awesome targeting of ads – Moosylvania
  2. It’s becoming even more vital that brands focus on additional value and continued relationships with their customers. It’s all about the experience, and the ways a brand engages on an emotional level. – Moosylvania
  3. Social media ROI discussion haven’t evolved. Ever. Your social ROI comes down to determining which KPIs are important to your brand and what you need to measure to determine success, there isn’t a magic bullet ROI formula that works for all brands. – Moosylvania
  4. Agencies must migrate away from vertical hierarchy to horizontal hierarchy… Resist large teams at all cost. – 4orce
  5. ROI metrics are to validate not to justify social media spend. 4orce
  6. Lots of debate and confusion regarding social media ROI. Bottom line: we should measure results against upfront benchmarks. 4orce
  7. So your brand is sharing content, but is it also capturing content? Makes it less promotional & more authentic – Big Fuel
  8. Think of your brand as a host to a conversation. Morph and change with it. – Moosylvania
  9. Providing value on an ongoing basis creates relationships. Be authentic, be relevant, but don’t be creepy. – Big Fuel
  10. Products are the new marketing. We’re seeing a shift in leading-edge agencies understanding that to succeed they need to be creating digital products that benefit consumers, clients, and the agency, not selling services. Brands are starting realize this too. – Moosylvania

What have been some of your favorite blogs or quotes from SXSWi?

Social Media Marketing Trends

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Social media is constantly evolving and changing, including:

  • How individuals use the different platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc)
  • How companies communicate with customers
  • How to measure success and ROI
  • How much to invest into a social media strategy and implementation (what is the value of social media?)

The Social Media Examiner published a great article on how to prove the value of social media for your company based on new research studies. In the article, they breakdown the five newest social media marketing trends:

The Benefits Derived From Social Media are Increasing

The top benefits of social media from a marketing perspective are increased brand awareness and the ability to engage in dialogue directly with their customers. Also, the amount of small businesses using social media has been constantly increasing the last two years. I definitely expect the amount of companies using social media to continue to increase this year. So, if your company has not started to develop a social media strategy to implement, this would be the year to start.

More Businesses are Investing in Social Media

It is estimated that both small and medium sized business will at least double their budgets for social media in 2012. Based on this estimation, I would predict that there would be an even larger budget increase for large and global size companies, who are already seeing the benefits of social media.

Measuring ROI is One of the Top Challenges Face by Marketers

A concerning trend is that approximately half of marketers are not measuring their social marketing to determine its’ success. Simple ways to measure the success of your social media strategy are tracking

  • Twitter Followers
  • Tweets are Re-Tweeted
  • Facebook Likes Shares
  • Comments on Facebook posts
  • Blog post views and comments
  • YouTube video views
  • Re-pins on Pinterest

More advanced measurements that you could calculate are lead generation and sales directed from social media, but this will require specific goals set implementing strategy.

Marketing Agencies View the Value of Social Media Differently

I am not surprised that research shows that blogs have the best benefit for increasing search results, especially when social sharing buttons are included. The more shares of an article the higher up it will appear in search results. Also, blog posts increase the amount of content on your website (the amount of content that search engines will crawl) so this will greatly benefit your rankings.

An Integrated Social Media Plan Leads to Greater Financial Results

In 2012, I hope to see more companies begin to fully integrate social media into their business process. Many companies are just beginning to use and understand social media, so it often falls into this “side project” category. In order for a social media strategy to be successful in increasing conversations, brand awareness, and financial goals, then social media must be fully integrated into a company’s marketing efforts.

It is going to be very interesting to see how these trends play out in 2012. Check out the full article and all the infographics here: 5 Social Media Marketing Trends: New Research | Social Media Examiner.

Image: Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net