5 reasons to take your business communications to the social network

Before the term social network was even coined, there was MySpace. Then, Facebook became known as the social network. Now that there are websites like Facebook, the definition has expanded to include Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and a plethora of others around the net. Defining exactly what a social network is has become a lot more challenging.

How Travel Brands can make friends and influence people using social media

With social media being an essential tool for brands to communicate with their customers, it goes without saying that many travel brands look to social media to satisfy their customers’ needs and solve problems timely. Customer query and complaint handling has taken the travel industry to a new level altogether. The reach and potential of social media platforms is evolving rapidly, which gives the travel brands a great opportunity to target a large audience online.

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 Ways Real Estate Agents Fail At Social Media

Using Social Media Properly

The way we communicate on a daily basis has changed radically over the last ten years. In our ever changing world of communication, social media is what’s in vogue. Everywhere you turn you can’t escape it whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin or one of the many others that are cropping up daily. Social media is a way of keeping in touch with the world around us just like reading the daily newspaper used to be. How many people actually sit down and read a newspaper cover to cover anymore? Probably not nearly as many as there were going back even five years ago. How we deliver news is no longer the same.

With new forms of communication, come new rules of the game. While social media is an information delivery mechanism, it is also a way of socializing as well. Those that are really good at social media will tell you being “social” is what matters most. Building relationships is a big part of what social media is about. 

8 Social Media Blunders to Avoid

Are you still making these major social media mistakes? Here's how to stop, or at least control the damage.

You would think that by now most people would have learned the dos and don'ts of using social media in business. Certainly some are more careful than others in managing messaging, but there are still plenty of people who seem clueless about communicating effectively on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In the last few weeks I personally witnessed each faux pas listed and am sharing below remedies to fix each one. Next time you experience an error, help the offender by sending him or her this column. Perhaps you'll inspire them to stop annoying other people and doing damage to their own reputations.

1. Your Picture Sends the Wrong Message About You

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: 

The Top Social Media Topics On the Minds of Real Marketers

In Marketo’s recent Social Marketing Rockstar Tour, we visited 15 cities to talk about implementing, executing, and measuring social strategy. We met marketing interns and CEOs and all levels in between; spoke to marketers from every industry; and networked with marketers from large companies with 10,000+ employees and small companies with fewer than 10. The common denominator? An intense interest in social media and a desire to learn how to use it more holistically in every marketing campaign.

Every organization uses social in a different way. At each stop on the tour we collected insights from over 2,000 customer attendees on how they are using social in their marketing today, plus any tips and lessons that they have learned along the way. We have gone through each entry and have compiled the best of the best! For the full list, be sure to download our ebook 50 Tried and True Social Insights from Real Marketers.

So what are the top six social subjects that our customers cared about? Let’s take a look!  

11 λόγοι για να αναπτύξετε μία στρατηγική Social Media Marketing

Στο άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζονται κάποια από τα πιο βασικά οφέλη που μπορεί να έχει μία επιχείρηση ή ένα άτομο με την παρουσία στα κοινωνικά δίκτυα (social media marketing).

Πιο συγκεκριμένα, το τελευταίο διάστημα γίνεται πάρα πολύ λόγος για την κοινωνική δικτύωση (social media). Παρόλα αυτά υπάρχουν πολλές επιχειρήσεις στην Ελλάδα αλλά και άτομα που διστάζουν να κατευθυνθούν και να επενδύσουν χρόνο στα διάφορα κοινωνικά δίκτυα.

Για το λόγο αυτό παρουσιάζω μία λίστα από κάποια οφέλη που μπορεί κάποιος να έχει με την παρουσία του στα διάφορα κοινωνικά δίκτυα, είτε πρόκειται για μεμονωμένη άτομο, ατομική επιχείρηση, μικρή, μεσαία ή μεγάλου μεγέθους επιχείρηση.

Social Media Marketing : Τα οφέλη για τις επιχειρήσεις

5 Ways Hotels Plan to Use Social Media & Review Analytics to Grow in 2013

A key focus for ReviewPro over the past year was building an engagement program that helps our clients use insights from the social web in all areas of their business – from sales & marketing to operations to revenue management. In conversations with executives at the thousands of hotel companies we work with around the world – as well as strategy sessions with innovation teams within those companies – our team has identified five key opportunities for using social media and review analytics to grow in the year ahead.

1) Social analytics will be incorporated into strategic revenue management decisions

Pick Your Fights: The Right Social Media Platforms for Your Goals

Too many communications departments are focused on providing real time responses.

It’s a 24/7 world that we live in. Our customers/supporters come at us any time of day, from multiple local or global locations with their accolades/issues/complaints/questions. Supporters using multiple channels of communications especially online further complicate this scenario. As a result, businesses and organizations react by trying to be everywhere at once all the time. Even with a strategy this is unsustainable for those of us without bottomless pockets.

So what is there to do?

Social Media Marketing: Social login or traditional website registration?

Janrain, a social Web user management platform provider, recently released its Social Identity study with the research conducted by Blue Research.

The study involved a final sample size of 616, with respondents recruited by email and screened to ensure they either purchased a product online within the past 30 days, or read articles or watched video from major media outlets in the past 30 days.

A key element of the survey was finding out how respondents felt about using a social login — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. — instead of having to register individually at multiple websites.

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.

What's Next? Better Engagement and a Marketplace Without Boundaries

2012 has seen social media continue to gather pace, with even more social channels hitting the market. Even with all this buzz, there is still a level of scepticism and uncertainty amoung businesses who still fail to understand the power and the enormous opportunities that social media presents. This situation is somewhat similar to the late 1990s when a large number of businesses believed they didn’t need a webpage, which resulted in many missed opportunities.

Within this world of change in how we communicate, connect, and engage what does 2013 have in store for us? There are a number of technology driven shifts underway, and these will continue to have a major impact on how we work and how we engage using social media. Here are some of the trends that will impact us in 2013. 

Buffer - A Social Media Marketing Time Saver

Social media is becoming more important on a daily basis when it comes to online marketing. I'm often asked, "Laura, where do you find the time?" I used to feel the same way, in between writing and a full time job it's hard to stay connected. One thing I was noticing was I wanted to share things I was reading, but I'm a typical Type A personality, I live my life on a schedule when I can which often means I'm reading articles and blogs the same time everyday. I'd share a few of those items via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ but then I would stop worried I'd overload my feeds and lose followers.

Solutions to Social Media Marketing

The truth of the matter is the way current social media strategies and campaigns function, they simply do not always work. How can social media become the tool it was designed to be and do the job it was created to do? How do you fix something that is continuously changing? The simple answer: be real. When companies push aside the “game” of social media and show they are genuine, they can see real results that will work in their favor.

The simple answer explained