4 Social Media Trends You Need to Know About for Next Year

2018 is just around the corner. Are you ready for it?

The rise of community media – and why social networks don’t work

Before we get started, I’ll let you in on a secret. This guest post ends on a triumphant note, so don’t let the sobering beginnings get you down. I’m going to tell you a story, built on facts, scaffolded by speculation, and heavily painted with a rare color rarely seen on the Internet called logic.

Social media is broken for most of us. The myth of it being a democratic or meritocratic system isn’t holding up to scrutiny. We’re learning that it’s not the place to start thoughtful discussions, vet new ideas, or find complex solutions to niche problems. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wondrous place for serendipitous snark between celebrities, world leaders, and the public, but the majority of us are spectators.

How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business

In his book Tweet Naked, online marketing expert Scott Levy provides the critical information entrepreneurs need to craft a social media strategy that will boost their brand and their business. In this edited excerpt, the author briefly describes the top social media platforms and their pros and cons.

When it comes to choosing which social media platforms you'll utilize, select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you've decided is best suited for your company. Most people and companies can't be amazing on every platform; that takes a huge amount of bandwidth and resources. Instead of having a sub-par representation in a lot of places, be awesome on a few of them.

5 Social Selling Tools that Deliver Real Leads & Closed Business

You can spend all day, every day, wasting an enormous amount of time on the social web.

Or, you can focus your time and energy on tools that deliver measurable value for your business—real, qualified leads, growing sales pipeline and closed deals. Sales & marketing professionals that leverage social selling techniques close more business, and you can too. In fact, InsideView reported that IBM saw a 400% increase in sales in 1 quarter after launching a pilot social selling program.

The Single Most Important Step to Getting Good Conversion from your Visitors

I have for the past couple of months been posting here about an ongoing MBA class on content marketing called Marketing with Social Media. The class is being taught by me, Bill Belew, at a university in San Jose (Yes, I know the way).

I don’t know of anybody who has been able to gather a lot (73 MBA students) of bloggers and put them in a controlled setting (controlled inasmuch as they do what I tell them to, which they don’t always) in an academic environment. The students pass or fail based on whether they do the work or not. It is an international university and many of the students’ immigration status is dependent on their final grade. In other words, they are motivated. If they fail, they literally get deported.

The Silver Bullet for Effective Social Media Measurement

I have been doing a lot of work lately with clients on social media analytics and using several different tools to do so.  Thus, I thought it would be worth passing on some of my latest thoughts as it relates to leveraging different social media analytics platforms and actually making them useful for your business.

First off, I have had experience with many of the major social media anlaytics platforms (including Radian6/Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Sysomos, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Google Analytics and others).  I actually really love most of the platforms and they all are exceptional... at something. So what is the silver bullet for social media measurement?  Sorry to get your hopes up, but there isn't one.  Regardless of what a sales rep might tell you, there just is no silver bullet for social media measurement. Here are six reasons why: 

5 Ways to Get Visual on Social Media

It’s become clear that a dynamic visual presence is essential for develop a successful social media campaign and just as essential to your fundamental social strategy. But stunning visual campaigns don’t have to be just for the big-name brands with money to burn on fancy lighting, editing and production costs. Even a small brand can make waves with thoughtful and visually powerful multimedia. Here are 5 ways that almost anyone can start introducing multimedia elements into your social media presence.

1. Expand Onto Visual Platforms

5 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media

When my agency started doing social media audits three years ago, we weren’t exactly sure what to expect. What we soon discovered is that, big or small, B2B or B2C, many companies seem to be making the same mistakes, regardless of the department leading the charge.  Here is a quick overview of the five most common mistakes we’re seeing, along with notes on how to correct these self-defeating faux pas.

1. The Wrong Metrics

The most common metric mistake is emphasizing the number of fans you have over other markers, an approach that is symptomatic of a larger problem: viewing social as another mass medium through which branded content can be pushed. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how large your social footprint is if fans aren’t talking about your content on Facebook (PTAT) and sharing your videos, tweets and or LinkedIn posts.  Enlightened brands use and monitor several more illuminating metrics, including brand sentiment, speed and quality of customer service resolution and engagement (comments, shares, CTRs, etc.).  

Real Time Understanding

Being Proactive at the Speed of Social

We all know that social media data is driving us towards thinking about our business differently.  Whether it is engaging your consumer demographic in new ways: engaging with customers on a Facebook fan page or managing up to the minute attacks on your brand; handling a viral twitter crisis or simply peeking in on those talking about your brand; listening to people talk about what they like on forums or becoming a trusted resource in those communities; your world is now upside down.  To add insult to injury, all of this is starting to become necessary at the speed of social.  To put it bluntly, this means real time baby.  It isn’t enough to simply track your brand week by week now, it is becoming moment by moment.  And you can’t simply look at key attributes at only the highest level, you need to look at the attributes you know as well as ones that you may not even know exist.

Τα 5 websites που είναι πρώτα σε κλικ!

Με το Facebook να ηγείται, πέντε ιστοσελίδες κατέλαβαν το 20% του συνόλου των κλικ στις μηχανές αναζήτησης στις ΗΠΑ (Google, Bing, κλπ.), κατά το τέταρτο τρίμηνο του 2012, και περίπου 500 ιστοσελίδες κατέλαβαν σχεδόν το 50% των κλικ αναζήτησης, σύμφωνα με μια νέα έκθεση από την Experian Hitwise.

The Internet, Social Web and Human Media: An Opportunity for Change

The internet has entailed a paradigm shift in our lives, not only professionally but also personally. Suddenly, a new world of professional opportunities opened up to us while we looked on at what was going on in disbelief. From a personal perspective, the internet provided a tool with which to express ourselves to the world; we began having a voice. This sent shivers to the status quo, as it threatened its existence.

System Interruption

Facebook Search - Guide to Searching Facebook

 

Graph Search is Powerful, not Simple

Facebook search is more powerful now than in the early days of social networking, but only if you know how to use it. Effective Facebook searching has grown trickier since the social network's Graph Search was introduced in 2013, because the new query syntax includes many more options.

Investors Turn to Alternatives to Facebook

The Financial Times reported on Feb. 12 that investors are turning to alternative social media networks, and Facebook is no longer at the top of the list. Benchmark Capital and Greylock Partners are two recent examples of companies that are branching out beyond Facebook. Bloomberg reported on Feb. 12 that David Sze, who was an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn, has decided to support the startup Nextdoor.

Building Customer Communities Is the Key to Creating Value

What are your customers telling their friends and colleagues about your business? As I described in my last post, your prospective customers and buyers increasingly learn about you from their peers — including your current customers — while tending more and more to ignore traditional sales and marketing communications from corporate. Companies are now taking advantage of this new marketing reality, becoming more skilled at getting their customers to advocate for them, create peer influence in their markets, and make important contributions in areas like product development and services.

Creating and capturing such value from customer relationships doesn't just happen, no matter how stellar your products and services are. It requires an enhanced value proposition, what I call a Level 4 customer value proposition.

40 Ideas for Your 2013 Social Media Plan

Ready to become a truly social business that stands above the competition? We’ve combed through hundreds of pieces of content and hand-picking 40 popular, useful and creative ideas you can put into action in 2013. From tracking and measuring social media leads, to creating a social media playbook, here are 40 points from our ebook, 40 Ideas for your 2013 Social Media Plan.

Top Social Media Mistakes, According to the Experts

Heed their advice and avoid these pitfalls at all costs

Nearly 90% of U.S. companies are using social media, according to eMarketer. Clearly, we’ve come a long way since the days when businesses debated if they should be participating in social media. Now, it’s about how businesses are using social and whether those efforts are effective.

There is no dearth of advice on best-practices in social media. For marketers, this generous supply of tips can be overwhelming and even contradictory. Therefore, it’s not surprising that many brands on social networks make mistakes that result in low community following, sub-par engagement levels, and customer alienation.

So, how to sort through all the noise and hone in on the most valuable social media best practices? The solution: focus on advice from the folks who have long established leadership and expertise in social media.  We asked ten social media strategists whom we follow to identify the top mistakes they see businesses making on social networks.

Facebook drives most social B2B traffic, but Twitter is top for conversions: report

Despite the huge attention lavished on social media, it still accounts for only a fraction of the traffic and leads for US B2B websites according to a new report from Optify.

Overall, social accounts for 1.9% of traffic compared to 41% for organic search, however there is potential for it to become a more important and effective channel.

This is a topic we touched on recently in a post about how to use social media to widen your sphere of influence in B2B and in an infographic looking at how B2B companies are currently using social.

Optify’s report found that companies that actively manage social media campaigns (as measured by companies who had more than one lead from social or more than 10 visits per month) have seen comparatively high conversion and engagement rates.

12 Unexpected Social Media Tips

Believe it or not, social media extends beyond Facebook and Twitter. It’s any website where people can discuss content. YouTube is social media. Your blog is social media. Pinterest is social media. And yes, Facebook and Twitter are too. So if you want to leverage social media in a big way in 2013, consider these strategies:

1. Talk less about you and more about others. Share more about others, and you become a curator. You become a source of the best from everyone else, and a person who attracts attention.

It's Time to Cut Back on Social Media

I recently got back from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Scheduled before the massive annual CES gathering, it's a powwow for bloggers and other social media enthusiasts, early adopters who are quick to jump on board the next great thing. So imagine my surprise when I realized one of the undercurrents of the event, burbling repeatedly to the surface, was a desire to cut back on social media efforts.

Οι τάσεις που θα κυριαρχήσουν στο brand marketing το 2013

Οι τάσεις μάρκετινγκ που μπορεί να δημιουργήσουν σημαντικές ευκαιρίες ή να αποτελέσουν μεγάλες προκλήσεις για το brand marketing αυτή τη χρονιά καταγράφηκαν από τους ειδικούς του χώρου. Πόσοι άραγε είναι έτοιμοι γι αυτές;

Λογοδοσία

H διαχείριση της φήμης στα social media δεν ήταν ποτέ πιο σημαντική, η διαφάνεια για κάθε brand είναι κρίσιμη. Το 2013 ακόμη και το μικρότερο λάθος μπορεί να γίνει ένα τεράστιο πρόβλημα δημοσίων σχέσεων. Οι άνθρωποι του μάρκετινγκ θα πρέπει να είναι έτοιμοι με σχέδια αντιμετώπισης δυνητικών προβλημάτων για να προστατεύσουν τη φήμη της μάρκας τους.