Time is Money: Cost of Social Media Marketing for Businesses

Small business owners are lucky. Since they are small, they don’t need a million dollar budget and a 15 person team managing their marketing. They can do it themselves, hire an individual internally or outsource it to a marketing professional in the community. But I’d like to address the common misconception that social media marketing doesn’t cost a lot. If someone is telling you that they can take over all your social media marketing initiatives for $100 a month, they’re lying to you. If you want to hire a college student for $7.25 an hour to do the job for you, go ahead. They don’t have the skills or know-how to do a good job and won’t care about doing a good job because you’re paying them minimum wage.

Social Media Marketing Is Impossible Without Good Content

Social media marketing is impossible without good content. Social media is a like a beast with an insatiable appetite for content. Good content. Yet many organizations yield to the pressure to add social media to their marketing mix without figuring out what content they will share and where it will come from.

You knew that, right?

How to use Social Media for Employer Branding and Recruitment

Strategic HR entails attracting, developing and retaining high-performing candidates to your company. Previously, companies would communicate with employees and candidates via traditional push messages, but now they are required to adapt to the changing consumer and employee behavior, where the tendency is to rely on and trust peer recommendations.

How To Improve Visibility, Communication & Accountability of Social Media Within Your Company

Do you want to improve visibility, communication and accountability of social media within your company? It’s as simple as sending a project dashboard on a regular basis to a broader team.

Really. That’s the magic pill.

It seems so simple yet not enough of us do it. Instead, we complain that there are silos or that people don’t understand that corporate social media is more than just tweeting and status updates. While there are many other ways that you can take your internal critics and turn them into your biggest fans, sending a project dashboard on a regular basis can be one of the simpler ways to increase visibility, communication and accountability for you and your team.

Never Trust Sentiment Accuracy Claims

Social media monitoring and research companies too often claim impossible accuracy numbers

Sentiment analysis plays a key role in social intelligence (a generalization of social-media analytics) and in customer-experience programs, but the disparity in tool performance is wide. It’s natural that users will look for accuracy figures, and that solution providers — the ones that pretend to better performance — will use accuracy as a differentiator. The competition is suspect, for reasons I outlined in Social Media Sentiment:

Social Media Success Needs Evidence-based Testing

Behavioral economics plays out everyday in social media. We see clear expressions of the lessons that drive human behavior made popular by Cialdini, the Heaths and Dan Ariely in the use of social networks by major marketers like Ford, Unilever, Nestlé and others.

We have taken learnings like how reciprocity, authority and scarcity can drive persuasion and action (Cialdini concepts) and how “finding the bright spots,” “shrinking the change,” and “pointing to the destination” (Heath Bros. concepts) and built them into a sensible way to plan predictably great social programs.

The 4 Bs of B2B Social Media

It's all about business for any company engaging in social media. Sometimes we forget that these platforms are a means to an end. That end is revenue. All the effort to win fans, followers, interactions, comments and click-thrus is part of a comprehensive effort to increase visibility, generate leads and sell products.

So, why is social media so important for companies selling products and services to other companies? It's all about the 4 Bs.

Social CRM: How Can It Make Money?

Once the consumer world shifted primarily online, the business world followed. The move to relating to the customer who absorbs and shares products and information in 140 characters or less culminated with the rise of social customer relationship management (CRM). The market for social CRM, and the applications it has produced to track customer habits, relationships and activity via social media platforms, has drastically orbited into relevance in the past year.

Branding Your Business Through Social Media - 3 Keys to Getting Started

Gone are the days when having a highly ranked web site was enough to make waves and attract new business. Just like people, company brands now need to communciate, to "network" and to reach out beyond their normal comfort zone.

This shift means moving from the two dimensional apect of a static web site, to the three dimensional realm of engagement and interaction. It starts by identifying the type of social media sites that best reach your target audience. Here's how to start...

Social Media for Business Takes Time

Many companies thinking about getting into social media to grow their business are stymied from the beginning because of the overwhelming challenge that faces them.

Those of you in that very position right now: I have great news for you. Everyone started where you are right now. Don’t be put off by what lies ahead. A solid social media presence is like any other successful thing: It takes time to build.

The 2011 Social Media Marketing Report said that 58% of the 3,300 marketers surveyed are using social media for more than six hours per week, while 34% invest 11 or more hours weekly. 15% spend more than 20 hours a week blogging, tweeting, etc.

Social Media and Litigation

For many businesses, social media has become an indispensable part of their culture as well as an integral part of their marketing strategy. Social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn are affordable and effective ways to promote a business, draw in new customers and keep connected with existing ones. Cost-effectiveness, popularity and ease of use makes staying connected with social media a high priority and a smart business decision.

Best Social Media Marketing tips to increase your blog readers

Social media marketing helps to increase your blog readers because social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, etc… are used as the common tool for communication,it is the platform for internet users who can share various types of data and can communicate with each other. Getting website traffic through social media sites is known as social media marketing. This type of marketing helps in building links and is considered to be one of the key seo strategies. The more blog readers you get the more web traffic you receive.

Scaling Social Media by Changing Your Mindset

With the emergence of companies moving towards becoming a social business, scaling social media within the business becomes even more important. If done correctly, social media becomes embedded into most functions within the business ranging from customer support to sales to email marketing to communications to product marketing and so on.

Social Media Advertising: Should Bloggers Bother?

Social media has proven its worth as a networking tool and a means of raising brand awareness, but the future of sites like Facebook and Twitter depend on convincing brands that that it’s worthwhile to invest in advertising on their sites in addition to interacting with customers.

Ads on Facebook usually appear in the right column, though Facebook has been experimenting with more socially-based ads that show up in the streams of users. With its simpler interface, Twitter relies on promoting tweets that show up in the tops of users’ update streams.

When, Why, and How You Should Start a Forum

Should you start a forum? When I first started getting into blogging, I noticed that many experts advised new bloggers to join forums and start talking. Not to directly promote your blog, but to be helpful on the forum, include a link to your blog in your signature, and you will start getting more traffic and loyal visitors. Having experience with this method, I know it works well enough, but there are better ways to driving traffic to your website – like starting your own forum!

When to Start a Forum

Using Social Media to Find a Job: Five Personal Branding Best Practices

After being laid off in February 2011, I had to devise a strategy to differentiate myself in a job market crowded with talented and creative individuals. I started by leveraging the power and reach of social media.

Coming from a predominantly traditional marketing background, I was in the midst of rebranding myself as a social media marketer. I put a major emphasis on producing and curating content that demonstrated my knowledge and understanding of the industry, while demonstrating social media savviness.

I built the website HireDaveCutler.com, featuring a video and PowerPoint resume, writing samples, and references, to provide a more holistic view of myself than a traditional resume would provide. I created a Foursquare venue promoting my search and an app that aggregated my various content channels.

Search. Social. Mobile. Optimized!

Don't silo your digital marketing efforts

Leading brands have matured beyond the search bar as they seek solutions to optimize their online presence. Today’s leaders are searching for solutions that reach customers and their behaviors using a more holistic approach to search, social and mobile marketing. To successfully position and grow brands online so that the investment of digital assets are reaching the level of awareness and sales necessary to compete in today’s digital era, we need to stop approaching online optimization as separate silos and consider the full life cycle of the customer’s journey.

Today’s silos include three types of optimization experts.

1. Search
SEO experts dominate the search bar implementing a keen knowledge of algorithyms and generating content, specifically important keywords and links.

2. Social
Social experts top the social streams on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms by implementing expertise like Edgerank and more through sharing likes, photos and more.

3. Mobile
Mobile experts provide not only mobile sites, but develop apps and other technologies needed for the 1.2 billion mobile users.

  Today's brands require a mind shift when it comes to optimization.

The State of Social Media and Social Media Marketing in the Second Half of 2012

The rise of social media has led to a complete shift in how people communicate, enabling us to create online versions of ourselves while engaging with friends, strangers and everyone in between. Social media has not only affected our communication habits, but it has also transformed and created entire industries.

As the social media landscape expands and evolves, businesses debate its potential to influence consumer behavior. Traditional methods of marketing and advertising have been around for decades and most companies are comfortable with the idea of TV ratings and billboard impressions. But making sense of social media? Well, that's not easy, especially for executives and entrepreneurs.

Social Media: Comparison between Facebook and Twitter?

In reality, social media is a very broad term which is difficult to define exactly. But in simple words we can define it as the medium for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. It is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate with the world around you. The evidence reveals that there is rising craze among the people for social media.

The people are running behind the different social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace and many others, to reveal their identity and status. The craze for social media has led every bloggers to actively participate on various social networking sites. But in this modern era, where in the social networking sites are growing too much popularity, it has become too much difficult to choose which one is the best. It is really hard to say which social network should be followed. We are presenting here graph which will show you the continuous rise up of time spent by the people on the social networking sites.

Why social media means customer service can make or break your brand

Customer service is often the lesser cousin to self-congratulatory brand marketing, and for a long time customers have simply endured this situation as they were effectively powerless to do anything about it. But no more. Increasing customer frustration is being match by growing pressure on brands to service the customers they have says the newly released 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer.

Not surprisingly, social media is instrumental in this shift. Consumers are using social media are wielding growing influence, telling more people about their service experiences, good and bad.