Feeding the funner with Facebook (Infographic)

Pinterest Deconstructed (Infographic)

5 Social Media Biz Strategies You'll See This Year

The way businesses use social media in 2013 will change the way customers and companies interact on the medium. According to social intelligence firm newBrandAnalytics, here are some of those changes.

1. Goodbye, Surveys: "Many of the more progressive brands have already decided to eliminate surveys and instead focus on social feedback as their primary source for customer experience information," said Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics.

2. Industrial Espionage Is now Legal and Free: "In 2012, we saw the hot brands using competitive data in new, previously unimagined ways," Muhlner said. "We predict that more than one-third of businesses adding products or menu items will be inspired by their competition's online customer feedback."

3. So Long, Traditional Performance Evaluations: "Sharing online feedback places psychological control on employees," said Randy Stanley, vice president of Parasole Restaurant Group. "They recognize and accept that everyone is a critic and that they can read about their performance online daily, good or bad. They see now that they have to be 'on' all of the time. Every experience counts. That's powerful."

4. Social Media Isn't Just for Marketing Anymore: "Last year we helped several organizations save new locations from the brink of disaster by enabling them to make swift changes in management and operations based on social intelligence," Muhlner said. "This trend is sure to take off in 2013."

5. Everything's Local: "Tip O'Neill said 'all politics is local,'" Muhlner said. "It's no surprise, all customer experiences are local, too. Savvy companies will use location-specific social reviews and alerts to quickly pinpoint trouble spots and react in a way best suited to deliver the best possible customer experience in that location or store."

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By: David Mielach, BusinessNewsDaily Staff Writer for BusinessNewsDaily

The Real Relationship between Social Media and SEO

Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.

Comments and ideas welcome! We are all learning together here.

Ranked Results versus Display in SERPs

The first thing we’ve been trying to do is distinguish between rankings and display visibility on Google SERPs.

• Ranking optimization is the traditional way of thinking about SEO. We apply a set of activities to specific URLs and domains in ways that leverage Google’s search algorithm and improve the ranking position of particular pages of web content.
• Display optimization applies to making content visible in new/other sections of Google SERPs – personalized search, time subsections, and search subsections such as “Blogs” and “Discussions.”

Google is now giving much greater emphasis to personalized results, at the expense of traditional results. Social content, such as Google+ postings and blog posts, appear prominently in SERPs. As time goes on, it’s likely that Google will give equal weight to content in SERPs that is both subjective (i.e., content that is favored by people in your social networks) and objective (i.e., content that is indexed and ranked according to Google’s traditional algorithm).

In light of all this, here are three strategic points worth thinking about from a social and SEO perspective.

1. Social shares – Tweets, Likes, Google +1’s, etc. – carry weight in Google’s ranking algorithm, but as yet it’s hard to establish more than a ballpark impact.
2. In contrast, social media content and shares have a clear and significant impact ondisplay visibility. Original Google+ and/or blog content is indexed and displayed in regular, personalized, time-sensitive and social subsections of a SERP. Content endorsed with shares by your social connections is visible. (Original Twitter content has been devalued lately, but I think in the long term it is likely to gain prominence.)
3. User behavior and preferences are critical element in devising SEO strategy. The importance of display visibility depends largely on whether a user is logged into Google, and the extent to which a user has an active social media network. If your target market is not logged in and/or has few active relationships, traditional search results are all that will matter to them.

10 Social SEO Action Steps

In terms of focusing on social media activities that have SEO impact, here are things most worth doing.

1. Add Google+ buttons to your blog and most sharable web pages. Make social sharing as easy as possible across all popular/relevant social platforms.
2. Create a Google+ company page and share your content on it.
3. Write keyword optimized, original content on Google+.
4. Shares and original content on Google+ matter more if your company page is circled by many users. It therefore may be helpful to make a strong effort to build your Google+ community.
5. Encourage people to +1 your content.
6. For Facebook and Twitter, having an active social media presence is useful IF social sharing is generating links to your content. Links, not shares, are the more important social media metric from an SEO perspective.
7. Content that is unlikely to be shared on social media, such as a company’s About page, should be optimized in the traditional way. Pushing social shares is not worth the effort.
8. Content that is likely to be shared, such as a blog post, should, conversely, be promoted heavily through social media activities.
9. If your target market isn’t active or interested in social media, focus less on content sharing through social media and more on traditional link acquisition activities. If your target market is active in social, balance the two.
10. Measuring traditional rankings is pretty straightforward: what we need are ways tomeasure display visibility. Any tips for how to do this?

By: Brad Shorr from Straight North.

Advertising on the Go: Facebook & Mobile Ad revenue

In the United States alone, companies spent close to US $4 billion dollars on mobile advertising. Many experts believe that by the virtue of being delivered on our cellphones – an object most of us consider personal – mobile advertising is an intimate way of reaching out to consumers. While banners ads and SMS text ads are equally common, the latter, because they’re usually chosen by customers, perform better.

Mobile Search, of course, is the next big thing in search. Almost everybody who can use search on mobile is doing so. Despite this, target advertising is still rare in the mobile marketing world. So it’s not, by nature, interactive and mostly relies on text and banner ads. However, experts, like ABI Research practice director Neil Strother, believes that the future of mobile advertising is going to be much more focus and target specific. Right now, interactive ads are expensive and may not even be reaching the right consumer; certainly, a huge risk for marketers in the current economic environment.

Mobile ads need focus

Temporal and Spatial information is a valuable source for marketers. It helps them get to understand the consumer better, many times over. Tapping into this to create more effective mobile advertising will boost mobile advertising revenues. Strother predicts a future mobile social, in the form of a personal cloud, where social sharing and purchase could be done right from the device in one’s hand.

In recent years, mobile phone, by nature of its affordability and portability, has become one of the most widely used media device. Interestingly, it is also one of the least used media by marketers. Consider these figures: Mobile phone receives just 1% of the global marketing budget, despite the fact, that the total number of mobile phones in the world, are three times more than TV sets and 4 times over internet-based Personal Computers. Despite the fact that mobile isn’t as targeted, and interactive, as the other mediums, the sheer rate of return on investment is fabulous. The median CTR for Text Messaging is 14.06%, where as the median conversion rate is 8.22%; both rates many times higher than TV and Internet.

It sure gets attention

Because mobile advertising is an opt-in, where subscribers choose what they wish to receive, businesses can customize and offer real-time solutions and offers. For instance, a comforting Asian massage could be followed up by a lovely sushi meal. And indeed, more and more users would be open and available to receive this information on their mobiles, as it is believed that the average adult in the United States is spending more time on his mobile phone, as compared to the newspaper or magazine.

With the IPO just around the corner, Facebook needs to find ways to up its revenue. Given all that we have heard of mobile advertising, there’s one stream of revenue just waiting to be cashed by Zuckerberg and co. The company claims that out of its 800 million users, about 300 million use the social networking site on their phones. That’s one helluva revenue base just waiting to be tapped through mobile media.

 Going Facebook mobile

Nobody knows yet, how Facebook mobile will integrate advertising with it. It’s quite likely, of course, that the current PC formats, which may be highly customized, but are relatively non-obtrusive, could be adapted to Facebook mobile. Another possibility maybe sponsored stories that appear in the mobile news feed. For instance, actions like check-ins, posts, writing on the wall, could turn into sponsored stories.

Given Facebook’s huge edge in terms of what it can offer mobile marketers, i.e. customer information, users may indeed soon see Facebook advertising on mobile. Marketers could tap into the temporal and spatial variable advantage that Facebook offers and create ads that are better targeted. Facebook friendships could also be used to influence mobile advertising in some way. For instance, friends could ‘like’ a brand or offer real-time opinion, while a friend is at a store. Again, this works against marketers. But the advantages of mobile advertising outweigh its disadvantages for marketers.

Late-comer disadvantage?

While it may seem like the right time for Facebook to enter into the mobile advertising market, many may think the new-age companies rather late embrace of the new technology may be off. However, there are a number of reasons why Facebook may have chosen to hold off on mobile advertising.

One of the reasons, according to Dan Frommer of Business Insider, is that Facebook was originally conceived and later marketed and expanded as a desktop device. The mobile access was a mere convenience. However, given that there are 95 million monthly active users, it is a pleasant surprise for Facebook and now they’re going to use the handheld popularity to their advantage.

According to Frommer, Facebook must now make the site increasingly relevant and just as much popular on mobile devices, as it is on the computer. Navigating between the two media, should be a comfortable experience for users. This ease will help Facebook retain its leadership in social networking, even if the preference for the medium of access changes. It may be easy for experts such as Frommer to say, and while this may be valid, it is not as easy for Facebook itself to adapt to an entirely new medium so easily. Despite the figures of users staring them in their face and extra revenues seemingly so close, they must have chosen to remain focus on their core medium. Although, it is now time to adapt and change.

It’s all about the user

Mobile advertising on Facebook, like Facebook itself would be led by the user. The user will have to voluntarily talk about a product. For instance, at an apple store, a user has seen a new ipad and has posted the picture on his wall. This takes the brand, marketing and mobile advertising to the next level. Thus Apple is reaching consumers who are actually likely to appreciate and buy the iPad and Facebook gets paid for it. While users get to share information about products that they like.

At this point, Facebook’s web partners are Coke, Levi’s Playfish, among many others. It has also tied up with non-profits, such as Amnesty, UNICEF and so on. In fact, many brands can tie-up with non-profits and increase their profile on Facebook. For instance, IKEA has been trying to get Facebook users into its store by advertising that every Facebook friend invited to the IKEA store would be leading to a donation of $1 to Save the Children. This can easily translate to a Facebook mobile campaign!

As a late entrant, Facebook has some serious competition. Google’s Admob, Millenial Media’s Ad network and Apples’s iAd are all potential competitors. In fact, Google gets the biggest share of the mobile revenue pie in the US – about 24% of the $630 million in mobile advertising goes to the Google treasury. But then, Facebook has shown potential for exponential growth on the Web, it may just do them in mobile ad revenue.

Source: Preetam Kaushik - Daily Deal Media

Facebook Commerce Holds Promise for Retailers

Social networks don’t account for much ecommerce yet, but heavy Facebook users see it as a one-stop shop

Social media and ecommerce have evolved since 1-800-FLOWERS launched the first Facebook storefront in July 2009. Internet users have become more comfortable with online buying on Facebook as they spend more time on the site.

“It is not surprising that shopping and socializing—activities that complement each other in the real world—are beginning to converge online as well,” said Krista Garcia, eMarketer analyst and author of the new report, “Facebook Commerce: Reaching Shoppers Where They Socialize.” “As social media, and Facebook in particular, plays a larger role in consumers’ lives, people are becoming accustomed to performing routine tasks like reading news, watching videos and listening to music, as well as discovering products and shopping, all while staying logged in to a single site. Instead of compartmentalizing daily routines, social media users are treating Facebook as a one-stop platform.”

Retailers are still in the early stages of using social media as a sales vehicle, but the channel is poised for growth. Booz & Company estimated that $1 billion in goods would be sold through social media in the US in 2011. That figure is expected to triple in 2012 and reach $14 billion by 2015.

While social commerce still represents a tiny percentage of overall retail sales, and Facebook is just one social site, that site is the clear leader and already offers retailers a variety of options for converting users into consumers. Some of those consumers are warming to the idea of buying products and services while on the site.

In a Q4 2011 Oracle survey of North American internet users, nearly one in five respondents said they would buy through Facebook or had already done so, while 15% were not aware they had the option. Approximately a third said they would never purchase products via Facebook, however.

“Facebook’s role in ecommerce is currently in flux,” said Garcia. “Brands are beginning to realize its capabilities, while users are growing accustomed to mingling with companies online and sharing shopping activities with friends. Even though social media is still more of a marketing tool than a sales vehicle, Facebook’s influence on shopping behavior extends beyond triggering conversions on the spot.”

Source: emarketer.com

Social Media and Small Business [infographic]

Five Companies that are Rocking Social Media

Google and Social can be together!

Social websites, especially Facebook and Twitter, are now serious competitors for Google’s audience and subsequent advertising revenue.

So Google has tried (but failed) to ‘do’ social eg, with Lively, Google Buzz, Orkut, Dodgeball, Google Wave and Google Me.

Google+ is its latest effort and this time it might succeed. We’ll see.

With +1 buttons, Google is trying to integrate social with search. If you visit a page or see a search result you like, Google wants you to click a +1 button (similar to Facebook’s ‘like’).

And Google explicitly states:

“+1s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query.”

That means that if a searcher’s friend +1s a page it will move up the results when you search.

Exactly how and when +1s, Facebook likes and tweets will affect others’ results is not yet clear and will evolve. Whatever the answer ...

Social is now part of search and therefore part of SEO.

Social 

All forms of engagement including comments, likes, tweets, +1s and mentions, either:

• Might be found by search engines and directly used in their algorithms; or

• Share your content with a person or website (it may be automated) that then might mention or link to your website in a way that is used directly in search engine algorithms.

Also, such engagement might also lead to repeat and new direct visits and response.

That social might work and work for SEO is clear. The question then becomes: is it significant? And the answer is: yes.

A simple piece of evidence to support that answer is that Facebook is now the most visited site in the US and therefore more popular in the US than Google.

It’s not hard to see why Google would like a piece of that social action.

Google Finally Wins One Against Facebook (Infographic)

Nielsen: Discounts Drive Brand Love on Social Media

Nielsen recently conducted a survey to understand what drives users to Like a Facebook Page or follow a brand on Twitter, and it came out with pretty much expected results. Deals and discounts are single biggest factor for Liking/Following a brand followed by the love and the support towards a brand/celebrity. Different regions of the world echoed similar results. Users from North America showed the greatest interest in deals and discounts followed by asia-pacific.

Last year, Exact Target found similar patterns on social media where it saw about 43% of Facebook users liking a Page to receive discounts and promotions.

And in the backdrop of debate about daily deals sites and their questionable business models, Nielsen found out that more people visited sites like Coupon.com, Living social and Groupon in September than previous months thereby thrashing all the negativity surrounding these companies.

The End of Social Media 1.0

I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.

From Social Network Fatigue to Deals Fatigue to Follow Fatigue, businesses are facing a crossroads at the intersection of social and media. Following the path of media continues a long tradition of what Tom Foremski refers to as “Social Media as Corporate Media.” Following the path of social is a journey towards relevance.

As Foremski states, “Social media is not corporate media…if corporations try to turn social media into a corporate sales or marketing channel then they risk losing the naked conversations, and the insight into customer behaviors.”

His point is that there’s more to social media than clever campaigns and rudimentary conversations. Talking isn’t the only thing that makes social media social. Just like adding Facebook, Twitter and other sharing buttons will not magically transform static content into shareable experiences. Listening, learning and adapting is where the real value of social media will show its true colors. Listening leads to a more informed business. Engagement unlocks empathy and innovation. But it is action and adaptation that leads to relevance. And, it never ends.

Indeed, there really are more examples of media than there are that of social media in many of the celebrated examples out there today. Even though distributing corporate media in social channels sets the stage for dialogue, there really isn’t much that’s social about it. In fact, study of many social media initiatives have led me to believe that much of what we benchmark against is actually anti-social in its approach.

The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing. eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.

Don’t get me wrong, people are still embracing social networks. However, the severity of competition for consumer attention is now unmistakable. Once liberal with their likes, Retweets, and follows, consumers are becoming much more guarded and realistic. Therefore brands will now have to more effectively listen to markets to make more informed decisions about how social media impacts the enterprise and in turn customer experiences.

The GlobalWebIndex “Wave 5 Trends” report delivers insight into how consumers are using social networks and technology in general. According to the report, growth in social network usage among 16- to 24-year-olds in the US is stalling. And, in a few countries usage within this group is declining. In fact, one of the key insights shared in the report is subduing, “Facebook is no longer the one stop shop for the total internet experience.”

However, the report is not a harbinger of social networking’s demise. It is merely a lens into how behavior is changing. This is important for any business to realize that business as usual in social networks is in fact anything but.
Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity:
- Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide.
- Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide.

- Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world.
Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.

When asked what consumers want from brands, knowledge and entertainment soared to the top of the list. Additionally, The GlobalWebIndex Wave 5 Trends report tells us that online consumers want brands to provide services that fit with their lifestyle. They also want brands to listen to them.

What can we learn of this?

1) Businesses must first realize that there’s more to social media than just managing an active presence, driven by an active editorial calendar. Listening is key and within each conversation lies a clue to earn relevance and ultimately establish leadership.

2) Consumers want to be heard. Social media will have to break free form the grips of marketing in order to truly socialize the enterprise to listen, engage, learn, and adapt. You can’t create a social business if the business is not designed to be customer-centric from the outside-in and the inside-out.

3) Social media becomes an extension of active listening and engagement. Strategies, programs, and content are derivative of insights, catalysts for innovation, and messengers of value. More importantly, social media becomes a platform for the brand and the functions that consumers deem mandatory. From marketing to HR to service to R&D, brands will expand the role they play in social networking to make the acts of following and sharing an investment in a more meaningful relationship.

The end of Social Media 1.0 is the beginning of a new era of business, consumer engagement, and relevance.

"Like" it or not, online ads are getting personal

Is the future of online advertising one of incredibly targeted advertising based on your interests, online activities and Facebook "likes," or is it one dictated by robust privacy controls that keep those details out of the hands of marketers?
Increasingly, it seems to depend on who you ask.

In the past week, both Google and Mozilla (the organization that makes the Firefox browser) have introduced ways to opt out of so-called behavioral advertising -- industry speak for ads that target users through the use of cookies that can track your internet browsing and shopping history, among other activities.

Google's solution is an extension for its Chrome web browser that lets users proactively block certain advertisers from serving them behavioral ads.

Mozilla's approach would bundle a "do not track" feature with its browser, but require websites and ad networks to agree to recognize such requests from Firefox users. Microsoft has previously announced its own plans for letting users opt out of such ads. These efforts come at a time when the Federal Trade Commission is considering a formal Do Not Track list that would work much in the same way in the online marketing realm as the Do Not Call list works in telemarketing.

They also come at a time when the social media world is moving in the direction of highly personalized ads based on your activities, relationships and profile information.

Facebook has just rolled out a feature called Sponsored Stories that lets marketers repurpose activities such as "liking" a fan page, checking into a retail store or interacting with a branded app as advertisements that users see when they log in to the social network.

And this happens automatically -- any time you interact with a brand on Facebook, your action could be used as an ad that entices your friends to do the same. For the moment, there's also no way to opt yourself out of being featured. Facebook's not alone in this type of targeting, however. Business-focused social networking site LinkedIn has added the ability to target ads based on job titles, company name and group level, features that the company says have resulted in three to four times more clicks than standard ads during initial testing.

Meanwhile, research firm eMarketer predicts that Twitter will bring in $150 million in revenue this year, driven largely by the Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends ads that the company introduced last year. Much like Facebook's Supported Stories, these ads showcase users talking about a given brand, with advertisers paying upwards of $100,000 per day for the privilege.

The next logical step in all of this, it would seem, is for the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to utilize this data outside the walls of their own sites and either create their own ad networks or license their data to third parties that want to enhance their personalization capabilities.

Of course, that's even further at odds with proponents of "do not track," who are already highly critical of ads that, among other things, "retarget" you based on shopping sites you have visited.

But it seems all but inevitable that personalization is here to stay and is only going to get more intimate. Sure, a small percentage of internet users may use tools that opt them out (if such options even become available in meaningful ways), but the vast majority will continue shopping, browsing and "liking" things on the Web without a second thought. Legislation could conceivably force advertisers to offer more in-your-face alerts about when you're sharing information that could be used in ads, but you can bet that user experience designers will be ready to create prompts that get users to click "continue," as has been the case with endless terms of service agreements and, in more recent times, Facebook applications.

Of course, that's only if it gets to that point -- most of the key players in this debate are all spending big in Washington to make sure any new regulations are as unrestrictive as possible.

Soon-to-be former Google CEO Eric Schmidt caught flak in December when he told CNBC that, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." While that might be a short-sighted way of looking at the current debate on online privacy, it does represent a reality of where things are headed, especially within the advertising realm. As users, the smartest path for now may simply be to heed Schmidt's advice.

Fuente: CNN tech / Adam Ostrow

The Social Networking History

The Social Networking History... Visit: http://actimediadigital.com/social_media_history/

Social Media Revolution... enjoy!

Cómo promoverse en Twitter!

Todos sabíamos que, tarde o temprano, la publicidad iba a llegar a Twitter. La cuestión, más que el “cuándo”, era el “cómo”. Este vídeo, encontrado en esTwitter.com, explica muy bien la manera de financiarse de los creadores del Tweet

Social Media vs Pornografía en Internet...!