#Pinterest Marketing, How To Measure Success
Pinterest - It needs no explanation. By now you’ve likely been inundated with best practice guides and case studies. We won’t weigh you down with more how-to’s; we’re more interested if Pinterest is a valuable time and resource investment. Outside of Pinterest follower counts, there are few ROI metrics available to explore. Pinterest is still a marketing experiment, with its potential currently being explored by brands, businesses and retailers alike. Here’s what the statistics tell us so far: From Q2 2011 to now, Pinterest has grown from representing 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites to 17.4%. This figure is predicted to grow to 40% by Q2 2012; Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ - with its share of social media referrals growing steadily; A report by RJMetrics found Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3 times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in history; Over 80% of pins are repins, demonstrating ...
How to Optimize Email for Mobile Audiences
With the surge of mobile uptake in recent years, email subscribers are now viewing emails in a diverse ecosystem of desktop, mobile and social contexts. Therefore, it's imperative to design your email marketing campaigns with mobile in mind, to ensure that your mobile recipients are getting the best user experience from your messages. If you’re not optimising your email marketing for mobile, you could be missing valuable opportunities. Read on to find out how to optimise your EDM campaigns for mobile audiences. How do I know if I have a mobile audience? Web analytics and surveys can help you decide. Most email marketing software includes email analytics to collect information on which email clients and devices your subscribers are using to view their emails. A gener...
4 Ways to Generate B2B Leads Through Social Media
B2B social media is on the rise, connecting businesses to prospective clients and providing value to current clients. However, despite its relationship-building benefits, many businesses have trouble converting social media interactions to leads and sales, and proving their social media programs are contributing to business revenues. According to a White Horse marketing survey, 86% of B2B firms are using social media, compared to 82% of B2C firms. However, B2B firms aren't as active in their social media activity - only 32% engage on a daily basis, compared with 52% of B2C firms. In addition, a BtoB Magazine survey found that 59% view lead generation as their greatest online marketing channel. But, it doesn’t have to be difficult. So, how do you make social media an efficient, cost-effective channel for finding new customers and clients online? Step 1: Consider Your Staff, Channels and Customers To ensure your business or brand is maximising social media for lead generation, you need a dedicated social media team or group who can plan, create, monitor and measure on a daily basis to ensure your social media presence is timely and relevant to the ta...
Marketers Guide to Facebook Timeline for Brands
Within the next month, everything you know about Facebook Fan Pages will change. Facebook Timeline for Brands is now being rolled out, and will be the default by March 30. It’s different to what you’re used to, with the demise of popular features including the famed default landing tab, but with all new layout, marketing and administration features to take advantage of. Read on to discover the new changes, and best marketing practises for brands transitioning to the new fan page format. LAYOUT: COVER PHOTO AND CHRONOLOGICAL TIMELINE Facebook Timeline for Brands is similar to Timeline for personal profiles, focusing on the past as much as the present. This feature presents an opportunity for brands to emphasize chapters in their history that are relevant and interesting to fans. Did you know American Express began as a courier service in the late 19th century? Or that Coca Cola was invented as a treatment for headaches? Sharing a brand’s back story - right back to it’s humble beginnings - stimulates conversation, and helps humanise a faceless business. Go through your company’s history and mark milestones (business founded, product launched, store openings, new staff) to construct a narrative for your audience. Accompany your milestones with images for full effect. For example, Ben & Jerry marked the introduction of "More Fantastic Flavours" as a milestone in 1999. When users navigate via the timeline sidebar, they can view key events throughout t...
Google Social Search: Time to Rethink Your Strategy
If you thought Google Plus was going to fail, think again. Google has made a big move into the social space with Google Search Plus Your World, which transforms Google “into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships”. This is the Googleverse, after all. But what does this change mean for your social and SEO strategy? Read on to find out. What is Search Plus Your World? Google Search Plus Your World is the integration of Google Plus with Google Search. When you’re logged into Google Plus, the new social search algorithm returns “more relevant” results by aggregating data from your network - such as people in your circles and the pages they have recommended - and bumping these personalised results to the top of the search results page. Google calls this access “your web”, because “you should be able to f...
News Feed Optimization, Be Noticed on Facebook
Facebook, the best known and most widely adopted social network, is a crowded place. So crowded, that the average fan page status update only reaches 7.5% of it’s fan base. 70-90% of your fans will never see your status updates because Facebook categorises content with an algorithm to hide content that it assumes users won’t want to see. If a user has never visited your fan page or interacted with you, he or she won’t see any new content you publish. If a fan has commented once or twice, they might see one third of your new status updates. However, to get the most out of Facebook, you want all, or at least most of your status updates to be visible in your fan’s streams. In this blog, we’ll break down Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm to show you how to beat it. Let’s start with some definitions The EdgeRank Algorithm is relatively straight foward. A status update is called an Object. When a user interacts with an Object, they create an Edge (i.e. like, comment, share). To find an object&rsqu...
Social SEO, Integrating Social Media and Search
To stay relevant in 2012, we’re moving toward a more focused and cohesive approach to social media; one that intersects social media marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to create Social SEO. In a nutshell, it involves optimizing your social presence for search engines, effectively killing two birds with one stone. But how are they related? The social web and search engines are becoming increasingly linked, as Bing and Google’s search algorithms advance with how we use the Web. Social networks, in particular, produce an immense amount of data. In this way, linking to and from social networks is influencing a URL’s ranking in search results. Therefore, any digital content shared on social networks is an opportunity for optimizing your visibility in search engines. Take Blendtec for example. The brand’s “Will It Blend” YouTube series has attracted thousands of links on Facebook and Twitter, resulting in a top ten ranking on Google for the word ‘blender’. ...
Top 5 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Increasing traffic to your website is a challenge, given the “If you build it they will come” mentality no longer applies in the crowded online marketplace. The issue isn’t your website design or development; the issue is you’re not investing time in earning visitation. That’s right - If you want to attract more qualified traffic, you need to find your users first. Read on for our top five ways to increase your online visibility. Submit your website to search engines Ultimately, your website will be visited because it is visible in search engine results, not because it’s nice to look at. Yet, contrary to popular belief, you have to tell Google that you exist. For inclusion in organic online searches, the trick is to get a competitive rank...
SMM vs. SMO, What's the Difference?
Social networks are growing exponentially, carrying millions of conversations and social interactions and presenting a huge opportunity to increase your brand or business’ exposure. But, this growth means that the online realm is becoming more saturated with media messages and more complex to navigate. Newfangled approaches like gamification, QR Codes and NFC technology are springing up to capture user interest, but often the best approach is to pare your strategy back to the basics - findability and content (which have never been more important). These two concepts are reflected in Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO), two terms used interchangeably to describe marketing through social media. However, SMM and SMO do not mean the same thing, ...
Klout Perks Gaining Clout
Our world is becoming increasingly cluttered with advertising and marketing messages. Which is why it’s only natural that brands are looking for new, non-intrusive ways to promote their products and services online. The next frontier? Social recommendations. Personally, a lot of purchasing decisions are made based on friend’s recommendations, rather than listening to a celebrity endorse the product. Katy Perry, we all know you were paid to say that about Proactive. Do you even know what acne is? So instead of ‘pushing’ the message on consumers, why not have them advocate for you? The difficulty here lies in identifying and targeting those advocating consumers. But, thanks to Klout, that just got a whole lot easier. Hold up, what is Klout? It’s an online measurement tool for influence. Using data mined from a user’s active social networks - including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Tumblr, Flickr and ...
