Tag Archives: Social Media

5 Ways for Job-Seeking Millennials to Clean Up Their Social Media Profiles Today

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by Christie Carton and first published on Recruiter.com

Graduation has come and gone. If you’re like so many young people today who were unable to secure professional employment in the field of their choice before leaving college, you’re likely still hunting for those ideal job postings, submitting applications, and going on as many interviews as possible.

Resume in order? Check. Networking events attended? Check. Social media accounts cleaned up? Hmm.

If you haven’t done so already, you might want to seriously rethink what you’ve put out into the social media universe as well. This, believe it or not, is a critical part of the job search.

A recent survey conducted by my nonprofit, the 1,000 Dreams Fund, via Toluna Quicksurveys found that half of job seekers polled between the ages of 18 and 25 don’t plan to clean up their social media profiles before applying for jobs. This is a big mistake, especially given that employers say they use social media to screen and possibly eliminate candidates, according to another recent survey.

The bottom line is this: Don’t let some social media goof overpower your stellar application and prevent you from becoming the next promising employee at the company of your dreams!

Here are five tried-and-true tips from other successful grads about cleaning up your social media profile during the all-important job hunt!

1. Google Yourself

Search yourself to see what comes up. Be sure to dig deep and see what each page contains. What you see may surprise you – and it’s the quickest way for you to gauge what employers are seeing.

2. Keep It Private!

Depending on what you find during your Google search, it may be a good idea to make your Facebook profile private so that only those in your network of friends can see all the fun you had in school.

3. Delete, Delete, Delete!

Your employer can access pretty much anything online. If you wouldn’t want them to see a specific post, tweet, or picture, delete it. If you find something on a third-party site you don’t want out there, reach out to the publisher or editor to see if they’ll remove the post. In most cases, they will, especially if you are clear that it could impact your ability to find a job.

4. Keep it PG

Getting ready to post an update, or maybe a pic from that girls’ night out? If it’s something you wouldn’t want your teenage cousin or grandmother to see, you should probably reconsider! At the end of the day, there’s no way to gauge who is looking at your pictures or posts, so you should be sure to avoid posting anything controversial.

5. Leave It to the Pros

Cleaning up your social media presence can be a time-consuming process, so it’s important to know that there are professional “scrubbing” services you can lean on. These services are especially useful when you’re dealing with something that’s hard to remove, because they pride themselves on cleaning up messy digital footprints.

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Christie Garton is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, and creator of the 1,000 Dreams Fund.

9 Questions To Consider Before Developing a Social Media Strategy

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By  and first published on business2community.com.

Most marketers already understand that the biggest benefit to adding social media to their marketing strategy is that a brand can join its customers where they meet and exchange information.   One billion people are talking to each other on Facebook.  They’re discussing everything from the movie they saw last night to the horrible customer service person they just dealt with on the phone.  Brands can sit back and let their customers control conversations related to their product or service – or they can join the discussion and become an active participant in the shaping of their brand’s image.

If you’re a marketer who hasn’t implemented a social media strategy (yes, they do exist), the first thing you’ll want to do is develop a written strategy.  By developing a strategy, you’ll avoid common pitfalls down the road.

To develop an effective social media strategy, you’ll need to address these 9 questions:

1.    Who is your target market?

This seems like an easy task, but you’d be surprised how many new business owners don’t know who their target market is.  Spend time giving this some serious thought.  If you already know your target market, think about additional markets you can tap into.  For example:  You currently sell women’s shoes.  Have you ever thought about developing a specific strategy that targets African American women?  Once you’ve determined your target market, do you know which social networks they use?  Establish a strategy for approaching your target market without coming off as a pushy salesperson.

2.    Who are you?

Do you really understand what your organization does? Do you understand how your organization’s product or service benefits the consumer? I’ve trained a lot of marketers at the senior level who didn’t comprehend the full scope of their organization’s products and services.  A marketer can’t successfully promote something he doesn’t understand.

3.    What are you trying to accomplish?

There’s a reason you decided to use social media as part of your marketing strategy: what is it?  Are you trying to launch a new product?  Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to build brand awareness?  Whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish, set specific and measurable goals that will help you determine the success of your social media campaign.

4.    Who will create, implement and manage your campaign?

Some organizations are large enough to afford a social media team that consists of marketing professionals on all levels.  The executive level person develops the strategy, the senior manager implements the strategy and the entry-level person manages the day-to-day tasks of posting updates and responding to community members.  Some organizations outsource one, or all, of these tasks to a third party.  Regardless of who you choose, those people (or that third party) must have extensive knowledge of social media and must be passionate about building and maintaining relationships.

5.    What tools will you use?

There are hundreds of social media tools on the market – many of which are free to use.  Some of the tools you might want to consider using are blogs, your own website, video sharing websites, social media press releases, content management and tracking tools, apps developed for your smart phone or tablet, and content curation tools.

6.    Where will your content come from?

The one concern I hear often from business owners struggling with their social media campaign is “I sit at my computer and try to figure out what to post on my business page, but I always draw a blank.”   The main reason these business owners sit staring at a blank screen is because they didn’t establish a social media strategy before they added social media to their marketing strategy.  If they had, deciding what to post on their business page would be simple.

I always advise business owners and marketers to establish a content marketing strategy as an addendum to their social media strategy.   This content strategy will include a plan for developing content and it will include a content calendar.  Your content should be a good mix of your own content (blogs, pictures, videos, promotional items) and other people’s content (OPC).   Before you post any content, you should always ask yourself:  will my community find this content useful, informative or entertaining?

7.    What milestones will you establish?

Establish time-frames for accomplishing short-term (3 – 6 months) and long-term (1 year) goals.  Consider timing your milestones with product launches or major corporate initiatives.

8.    How will you measure your progress?

Measuring your progress is extremely important, especially since you probably have a boss you have to answer to.   Besides having a boss who will want to know exactly how the company’s social media strategy is progressing, you’ll want to know your progress so you can build on the activities that are working well and discard any tasks that are wasting time and money.

Use Bit.ly or a similar URL shortener to track clicks on links you’ve posted on your social networks.  Tracking tools, like Bit.ly, will help you track how often your content is shared and these tools will help you monitor the level of engagement with your content.

You’ll also want to track any leads generated by your social media activity.  And of course, you’ll want to track any revenue related to your social media activity.   Tracking other conversions, like the growth of your e-newsletter, will provide you with a clear picture of the success (or failure) of your social media strategy.

9.    How will you manage your brand’s reputation?

Assign a person to assume the responsibility of monitoring the social media sphere for mentions of your company’s name.  That person should also watch for mentions of any key executives at your organization.  There are dozens of social monitoring tools that will help you stay alert.  If a problem arises, your brand manager should put out that fire quickly.  She should respond to questions, comments and complaints from your social community.

Brands that take the time to write a solid social media strategy will develop a great relationship with their social community.  Those brands will also avoid common pitfalls that damage a brand’s reputation.  By establishing an effective content strategy, brands will generate content that gets their community engaged and keeps them returning to the brand’s web properties time and time again.  A successfully implemented social media strategy will turn a brand’s community members into brand evangelists who, by default, sell the brand’s products or services to their friends and family.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/9-questions-to-consider-before-developing-a-social-media-strategy-0468673#xhGbckEVKXRAibx4.99

The Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions

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This article was originally posted on hubspot.com by Anum Hussain.

The rapidly growing user bases of photo-centric sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and the recent image-focused redesign of Facebook’s News Feed are two of many indicators that visual content is a force to be reckoned with in marketing.

According to 3M Corporation, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. And on Facebook alone, our own research shows thatphotos generate 53% more likes than the average post.

Recent trends and studies are clearly highlighting a new wave of visual content consumption patterns. Even if you’ve never designed anything before, or never even dreamed of being a designer, in order to succeed in today’s marketing world, you need to create visual content. And not having enough budget is no longer an excuse either, as improved technology and access to tools and software has made it more and more possible for mere marketing mortals to work on their design chops.

To help you get started with visual content, this post will specifically give you a helpful cheat sheet you can bookmark and reference when creating the cover photos for your business’ various social media accounts.

The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions

Fortunately, most social networks automatically re-size the photos you upload to your company pages. Here is a list of instances in which youdon’t have to worry about resizing images or creating visuals using a particular dimension:

  • Facebook album photos
  • Facebook mobile image uploads
  • Facebook Timeline image uploads
  • Pinterest pins
  • Pinterest album covers
  • Twitter photo tweets
  • Google+ news feed photo uploads
  • LinkedIn photo links

However, if you upload a cover photo to one of your business pages that is the incorrect dimension for that given social network, your image may get warped or cropped. This is definitely not ideal for brands looking to put their best foot forward in social media.

The following cheat sheet, created by our inbound designer Desmond Wong, will highlight the different dimensions you should be using for your various social media cover photos. And to help make things easier, we’ve also built free-to-download, pre-sized PowerPoint templates for each of the following social networks for you to use as your design canvas. Just add your creative to a social network’s corresponding slide, save it as an image file, and upload it ensure your design is optimized for that social network. Easy as pie!

Essential_Cheat_Sheet_to_Social_Media_Cover_Photos

You can download your free cover photo templates in PowerPoint here (template example pictured below). The download also includes our new free ebook, Design it Yourself: The Marketer’s Crash Course in Visual Content Creation, which walks you through everything you need to know to start designing visual content yourself — no previous design experience required!

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Reach of Organic Posts Is Down, Engagement Is Up

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This article first appeared in AdAge’s online edition.

By: 

Posts Are Now Seen by Smaller Group of Brand Loyalists

Over the past year, a hard, cold fact has sunk in for brands about Facebook: If you want to reach your fans, increasingly you have to pay for it.

That’s a growing concern for agencies doing business with Facebook, so now one of the very biggest, WPP media-buying unit Group M, is investigating the matter.

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they “like” was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

While those findings won’t be heartening to brands, researchers found a silver lining: engagement on posts in the form of comments, likes and shares is up significantly, from 0.76% before the algorithm change to 1.49% after. That’s nearly identical to the results of aEhrenberg-Bass Institute study of 200 top brand pages earlier this month.

The result is that while fewer fans are seeing organic posts in their news feeds, those who do are more likely to have a real affinity for the brand, as opposed to users who may have clicked on the “like” button to enter a contest.

The bottom line is that many brands will have to ante up more ad dollars to maintain the reach among fans they were accustomed to. But the study also digs into the change in newsfeed reach by post type to give brands insight into what content performs best in the new environment. It finds that links took the biggest hit from algorithmic changes and were being seen by 68.19% fewer fans after Sept. 20, but text status updates started getting viewed by 19.48% more.

The conclusion is that brands that change up the mix of their posts to rely less on the ones that saw the biggest drops in exposure can maintain their newsfeed reach at above 12% and thus use “paid advertising as a supplement, rather than a full replacement,” according to the paper.

“If you reallocate, you can make some of [your reach] back so it’s not 40% that you’ll have to go out and pay for,” said Brandon Fischer, Group M Next’s Director of Predictive Insights. “You’ll still need to supplement with some kind of paid strategy.”

Group M Next didn’t provide a list of brands in the study but says they represent a cross section of categories and have Facebook fan bases in the multiple millions at the upper end. Group M agencies MindShare, Maxus, Mediacom and MEC boast clients like Unilever, IBM and Volkswagen.

The findings are at odds with Facebook’s continued rebuttal of the contention that organic posts are reaching a smaller portion of fans. (The related inference it most objects to is that the change was made to encourage use of its ad product “promoted posts” to offset the lost reach.) Facebook contends that algorithmic changes were made to weed out spammy, non-engaging content, but that median reach of pages hasn’t changed.

“A few times a year we perform quality checks on the news feed algorithm to ensure high-quality and relevant posts,” Facebook said in a statement. “Based on a recent quality check, we made an adjustment to the news feed algorithm to respond to the negative feedback signals of spam and people hiding posts. Current signals show the adjustment has been successful. Median reach of Facebook pages has remained the same, while spam complaints and stories hidden by users have fallen significantly.”

But if the higher post engagement Group M Next observed is true across a wide spectrum of pages, the case can also be made that Facebook’s news-feed algorithm changes are a net positive for brands.

“It allows us to hone in on the segment of the audience that truly is interested and engaged,” said Jeff Semones, president of the Group M-operated social-media agency M80, who also observed that the change in news-feed exposure for a client with a sizable and consistent Facebook ad spend had been “neglible.” “What we’re seeing now is a benefit to marketers in spite of the reduction in reach.”

Group M agency Mediacom’s client Pennzoil has observed both reported phenomena of diminished newsfeed reach and increased post engagement over the past two months, but Global Associate Brand Manager Suzanne Clerkin says her team doesn’t intend to increase Facebook ad spend as a result. She says the increase in post engagement is a desirable outcome.

“We understand that not everyone who likes our page will able to see every post we monitor, but we’re hoping that Facebook will help us continue to monitor the fans who appreciate us the most,” she said.

Are You a Digital Native or Digital Immigrant?

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by Mike Dickman

 

Have you noticed that in the last 5 years, electronic gadgets no longer come with user manuals? If you want to learn how to use your new iPhone or Xbox, you jump on your computer and ‘Google it’. That is because the majority of users are considered to be Digital Natives – those whom have grown up with electronic devices. The rest of us are Digital Immigrants, those whom have had to immigrate into the new world of technology. That is why this thing we refer to as Social Marketing seems to be so foreign, so scary, and childish. And by the way, when did Google become a verb?!

Recently, I spoke before a group of business people regarding Social Marketing and how they could become engaged, without being overwhelmed. The first thing I wanted to clarify was the difference between Social Media, Social Networking and Social Marketing.

Social Networking is something all of us have been doing for years. We all have been participating in local Chamber events and fundraisers. And, while some may think they are doing it to support the cause, the real motive has been to network, right? The only difference is with online networking, you don’t need to leave your home or office. It’s quite a bit less personal from what we are all used to, but it works. And, in some cases, it can actually provide the social courage to join a group or participate in a conversation.

Social Media can be defined as the software which is used to participate in social networking. So, think of the Media as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the latest, Google+. These are the tools that marketers use to market their brands and products, socially, online.

Social Marketing is the act of preparing a marketing plan based on the use of Social Media and incorporating the social aspect with the business’s overall marketing objective.

Notice that the words ‘Networking, Media and Marketing’ are all words that we have used as part of our Marketing dialogues for years. However, the key to Social Marketing is in the word ‘Social’. Social Marketing is just that – SOCIAL. It is word of mouth marketing, peer-to-peer. It is all about a conversation, referrals and sharing.

So, some of you are probably thinking that you don’t need to be chatting with a bunch of high school and college kids on a social network. “They are not my client or prospect demographic.” But did you know that the fastest growing age group on Facebook is 55-65 years old? And, a new user joins LinkedIn (considered to be the ‘professionals’ social network) every second. This year, more than 93% of marketers are using social media for business. And it’s major brands that are doing this. Why? It’s because they can have a persona. They can appear to be human. They can influence thoughts and behavior because we think of them as peers or friends – because we LIKE them.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because you are participating on a social network on your computer that you have everything covered. Social Marketing goes far beyond the social networks and desktop computers and extends your marketing into the mobile realm. Are your business and personal reputations mobile ready? In my next article we will discuss taking your marketing mobile. And we don’t mean sticking a magnet on the side of your car!

This Is Google Changing All of Information Sharing

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by  

This post originally appeared on gizmodo.com

Google announced a new social sharing project today called Google+. It’s among the company’s most ambitious ventures to date, up there with Gmail, Android, Chrome and, yes, Search. It represents Google’s very future. It’s going to be huge.

Google+ is a concerted effort meant to turn the ship around. Google famously has a poor social track record. Buzz and Wave were failures, so it needs to get this right. But Google+ goes far beyond just sharing status updates or photos with friends: It aims to change the very way we share and communicate. As it notes in a new blog post today, “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests.”

While there is much more to come, there are three major pieces announced today:

Circles

Circles let you share selectively with certain groups of people. You create a new circle, add contacts to it, and can share with just those selected people. As Google says “[t]he problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in friend paper—and sharing really suffers.” This seems to be somewhat like Facebook’s friends lists. But the big difference is that it isn’t a walled garden. You don’t have to opt into Google+ to be included in a circle. If I want to add someone to it who’s not a Google+user, I can do so via email and they can still take see the things I want to share with them.

Sparks

Sparks is essentially a topical section that delivers news videos and blog posts on subjects you define. But moreover it lets you discuss those things with other people, or as Google puts it, “nerding out and exploring subjects together.” This is something that Google is almost uniquely positioned to deliver. If you think about your Facebook feed, or, say a Tumblr tagged feed, they contain items placed there by humans. Google can deliver an endless supply of newly relevant items using an algorithm.

Hangouts

Hangouts is an online meetup space with live video that includes up to ten people. But it’s designed to let people come and go, dropping by at will, rather than be locked into scheduled meetings. It sounds a bit like Campfire with video.

Mobile

Mobile is the last major component announced today, and it has several moving parts. The table stakes are that you can always add your location (or not). Instant Upload automatically adds your photos to a private album online. Finally, Huddle is a group messaging tool that lets you communicate with a self-selected circle on your mobile device.

But these are just the beginning stages, the initial rollouts that are part of a much larger project led by Vic Gundotra. Wired’s Steven Levy followed Google+ from the inside for more than a year, and has the inside scoop. As he notes, it’s a huge drive by Google. In fact it is, more or less, Google’s future—an internal Manhattan Project meets moon shot.

Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.

The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy—there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all—lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.

That overall strategy will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment—revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited “field tests” outside the company—will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long slog to remake Google into something more “people centric.”

“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted – orders of magnitude more investment in terms of people than any previous project,” says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s social efforts.

The entire story is worth a read, complete with outsized personalities, massive stakes, and secret murals. But the takeaway is that this isn’t just about social networking. As Levy notes, it’s much bigger than that: It’s about organizing information around people.

As Tim Carmody points out on Twitter, “Google doesn’t actually care about social. Google cares about identity. Social (such as it is) is a means to an end.” And: “Not accidental that social, identity, apps, & browser are all linked. This is Google’s play to control the whole stack like Apple does.”

I agree. Google’s biggest screwup wasn’t ceding social space to Facebook. It was ceding identity.

Google wants to get to know you, and help you to get to know yourself. It wants to be the go-to place where you show who you are and what you care about to your friends, your family, your coworkers and the entire world. It wants to be the key you use to unlock the Web and the internet as a whole, the passageway through which all your interactions flow. Today is a big step in that direction.

Making Data Relevant: The New Metrics for Social Marketing

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by Prashant Suryakumar

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.

However, businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth: There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.

A structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign. Initially, however, companies need to invest in infrastructure to make such a learning cycle possible.

Invest in Data

Measuring the impact of social media campaigns is systemically different from that of traditional marketing campaigns. Since the medium touches all the aspects of the customer purchase cycle, a holistic measurement of awareness, transactions and brand impact is essential.

Additionally, social media is a two-way communication medium and businesses need to invest in listening capabilities that capture the activities of their existing or potential customers online. Several paid and “freemium” tools that monitor online chatter can be found online.

While data is abundant, it is by nature unstructured. Integrating listening data with internal web behavior metrics captured by JavaScript tags, customer care logs, brand surveys and transactional data can enable a business to get a 360 degree view of the activities of customers across all of the purchase touchpoints.

Real-Time Monitoring

A typical online conversation has a life span of about one to two days. As a result, it is imperative for companies to respond to conversations in nearly real time. During this short window, they not only need to understand the context and content of the conversation, but also create an effective response mechanism. All of this underscores the need for real-time monitoring and analysis.

Companies like Dell and Best Buy are adopting different strategies for listening to InternetInternet chatter. These investments help keep a finger on the pulse of every conversation active on the networks.

Sentiment Analysis

Text mining and sentiment analysis are the flavor of the season for social media analytics and a common complaint is that the current tools are not able to classify a high percentage of the comments about your brand.

Step back and think about a conversation you had in the last 30 minutes. How many statements in that conversation were unambiguously positive or negative. Not many, right? Getting a 20% sentiment mapping for individual comments is a very high number.

On the other hand, think about the same conversation; Was the overall sentiment of the conversation positive or negative? That is far easier to cognitively classify. If businesses shift their focus to a conversation-based, rather than a comment-based sentiment analysis, they will be able to get a far better read on the aggregate sentiment of online chatter.

New Metrics

The need for improvisation and identification of new metrics is high. Currently, three categories of metrics need to be developed to enhance our understanding of social activities.

  • Metrics that help understand conversations and engagement (e.g. aggregate sentiment, conversation heatmaps),
  • Metrics to spot influencers in a community (e.g. influencer score, Klout score), and
  • Metrics that help in measuring holistic impact of social media activities on the business.

The Interplay Between Buzz, Branding and Sales

Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups. For example, the Old Spice social media campaign saw an 800% increase inFacebookFacebook interaction and a 107% increase in sales. The numbers are related, but not necessarily 1:1.

Testing Mechanisms

Social media is a fertile testing ground, and businesses need to appreciate the importance of a robust testing protocol for social media-based actions. Having a mechanism to measure the effectiveness of comments will ensure that businesses can learn quickly and adapt to the social dynamics.

A key point to remember is that the instance and context of the test is as important as the test itself due to the temporal nature of conversations.

Some of the tests that can be conducted are:

  • Who are the right “influencers” to target for a particular product or service?
  • What is the right time to message these influencers?
  • What is the impact of competition activity on our buzz?
  • What is the impact of traditional marketing on social media and vice versa?
  • What are the type of comments that work for selling a product?
  • What are the type of comments that work for selling a service?
  • What are the right pricing strategies?
  • How should the business tap into current affairs?

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral targeting dramatically changed with online advertising, and now social media can take this effectiveness to new heights. Activity-based segmentation is far different from traditional demographic segmentation, and this is typically driven by a difference between the purchasers and the consumers of a product. Businesses can draw parallels from traditional marketing (targeting kids so that they can influence their parents) and build a unique social targeting mechanism.

Crowd Behavior

Businesses have tried to artificially stimulate a conversation by mettling in their own communities or creating artificial hype. This approach usually fails miserably. They need to understand that social networks emulate real-world interactions, and excessive policing of user generated content can be detrimental to the natural growth patterns of a network.

Math, business technology and behavioral sciences are the key ingredients for good decision making. Understanding organizational dynamics, flock behavior and complex adaptive systems are all directly applicable to social media. Integrating analytics with a deep understanding of how humans interact in a sociographic and psychographic sense can help a business stimulate a conversation within a community, or trigger flock behavior amongst customers.

Integration Into Existing Business Models

Once companies understand the impact of lead indicators, like buzz, on transactional metrics, like revenue, they can include such metrics into their forecasting models and predict short-term revenue with greater accuracy. Additionally, since a good social media campaign will improve the brand health, the long-term impact of these campaigns can be assessed.

While every business wants to understand the impact of its social media spend, it might not be so easy to integrate that into a media mix model. A good social media campaign might manifest itself in increased brand scores or customer loyalty and will impact the lifetime value of the customers more than the immediate transactional metrics. Including indirect metrics like buzz or sentiment might be one way to capture social behavior.

Product Design

Social media can be a direct line of communication with the end user of your products. Businesses can leverage this very effectively in product design by soliciting input from the end user on what features they prefer in the product. Getting feature specific intelligence from the customer can help in building a product that caters to most of the population and also helps in building a sense of loyalty among the user base. Good examples of this include Ideastorm, Vitamin Water and Fiat.

Conclusion

The framework above is the first step in helping companies understand the who, what, when and where of social targeting. The obvious next step is to integrate all this knowledge into traditional marketing and CRM.

Prashant Suryakumar is a Social Media Engagement Manager at Mu Sigma and is currently focused on social media analytics. This post was co-authored by Dhiraj Rajaram, the founder and CEO of Mu Sigma.

 

What to Consider When Building an In-House Social Media Team

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by Amy-Mae Elliott

This articles first appeared on MASHABLE.

The Social Media Marketing Series is supported by Webtrends Apps, which lets you quickly create and publish Facebook, iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Learn more about it here or keep up with all Webtrends Social products by following its blog.

Building any kind of team is a challenge, but pulling together the people who are going to represent your company in the social media arena is a particularly tricky task.

What is the ultimate purpose of your social media team? Do you hire experts from outside the company or utilize existing employees? What do you look for in a social media executive?

We talked to professionals who have gone through the process — from big global businesses to small companies — to try and find some answers to these questions.

Have a read of their advice and let us know any useful experiences you’ve had in the comments below.

1. Set Clear Goals

 

Before you consider the question of who, you need to have already established the answer to why?

“Firstly, before you set up a team, you have to be clear who you want to talk to and engage with and what your internal goals are,” says Jakub Hrabovsky, head of web relations for Vodafone UK. “Is your main aim to entertain and engage, or are you considering using social media as a sales channel? You should be clear on what you want to measure. Engagement levels, buzz and sentiment or an increase in the number of sales — or perhaps both?”

Hrabovsky also points out that your social media team members will also need to be able to help customers — they may be the point of call that connected consumers head to. “If you’re a consumer-facing organization, you should include a customer care element to complement your social engagement team as well.”

2. Create a Social Media Policy First

Every company with a presence in the social space should have a social media policy, even if it’s just a few lines advising employees how you’d prefer they reference your brand online.

Creating a social media policy before you get a team in place will help you in deciding who to employ to implement it.

“Be sure you have a social media policy in place, so that your team is clear on how the company wishes to be portrayed in the space. A social media policy should be available to all staff too,” advises Dave Delaney, marketing specialist, online communications and promotions at Griffin Technology.

“You should first consider how you want your brand represented. Your social media team is going to be speaking for your brand, so it’s important that they are able to communicate in a way that shows the personality of your company,” says Kristen Studard, social media coordinator at Threadless.

“At Threadless we’re a very friendly laid-back company and we’re very excited about our products, which is why we use so many exclamation points in our tweets and status updates.”

If you are going down the friendly, excited, exclamation points route with your social media policy, then be sure to hire people who will find it easy to express themselves that way; if you’re aiming for a more staid, professional approach, then don’t pick someone who can’t pen a line without adding a smiley at the end.

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8 Ways to Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

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By Kevin Nakao

The Small Business Tips Series is supported by Bantam Live, a web-based collaboration workspace with “Social CRM” for small business teams. For more information visit BantamLive.com.

With the explosion of social media sharing and help from smart search engine optimization, many web users are bypassing businesses’ home pages and landing directly on product pages and blog posts. Thus, businesses need to optimize their “first impressions” at all entry points in order to reduce bounce rates.

Bounce and exit rates are often confused, but have different definitions and purposes. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a page and don’t visit any others within the same site. It should be used to measure the effectiveness of landing pages and is connected to SEO and paid advertising campaigns. In some cases, a page may be designed to give the consumer the information they need and nothing else. In this instance, bounce rate may not be a relevant metric.

Exit rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page. It should be used to monitor specific pages in a process, such as a “shipping options” page that appears during the checkout process. A high bounce rate means you are making a bad first impression; a high exit rate means you have a leak in the process.

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says a bounce rate of less than 30% is good, but with 60% or higher, you have a problem.

Bounce rate stats will differ depending on the type of sites and pages you’re measuring. In Google Analytics, there is a benchmarking section that allows you to compare your site’s bounce rate and metrics to other sites based on size and category.

A blog that offers all of its content on one page will have a high bounce rate. Generally speaking, blogs are reported to average an 80% bounce rate, and this paired with other metrics like time on site and number of comments could be more helpful. The best standard is to measure an individual page’s bounce rate over time.

Here are eight ways to lower your site’s bounce rate. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

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4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

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by Jim Tobin

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, a leading social media agency, where he works with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nike, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party. Follow him on Twitter @jtobin.

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, “We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible,” to the more pragmatic, “We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible.”

You’ll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you’re doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you’re ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let’s start with the “Why,” as in “Why you should care about SMO?” As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from GoogleGoogle. How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

 

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Image credit: Gigya

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience.  Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn’t just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

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