You may have heard of this! It’s transforming marketing, for the better most would say. We’ll help you navigate social media with a strategic approach sharing approaches from the leading commentators and companies.
You’ll know Facebook is the most important consumer social network in most countries. For many companies, the Facebook presence has become more important than the web presence, so getting Facebook marketing right is a priority.
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Although launched end June 2011, Google Plus is the fastest growing social network ever, so it’s worth keeping a close eye on even if many of the early adopters are people like us!
As the premier business social network, LinkedIn is one of the most effective ways to market to other businesses today. Here we explore techniques and new approaches that work best.
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One of the biggest questions in social media is “how do we measure the ROI?“. We show the range of measures to help you answer this question for your business.
There are many companies “doing social media” but without the right policies in place to help manage it effectively. You need to respond to customer ideas and complaints and involve staff in a positive way, but if you’re too relaxed there are plenty of examples where it can go damagingly wrong.
Monitoring online conversations through social media listening is often rightly advised as the starting point for developing a social media marketing strategy.
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Many companies have a presence on the different social platforms, but want to take it to the next level. Our advice gives you the structure you need to optimise.
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We cover each of the “Big 5″ social platforms, in their own Quick Guides on Social Media Marketing. In this section we cover niche social media platforms, tools and emerging services.
Many companies are doing social media, but few have a strategy. We’ll show you how a strategy can help and what’s involved.
Some doubters thought Twitter would be part of Facebook or Google by now, or replaced by their services. But Twitter is still growing rapidly and is popular with both consumer and business audiences alike.
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Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in many countries. Here we cover all aspects of YouTube marketing to increase your awareness and engage more customers.
We think the CIPR Social media panel defines social media marketing well:
Social media is the term commonly given to Internet and mobile-based channels and tools that allow users to interact with each other and share opinions and content. As the name implies, social media involves the building of communities or networks and encouraging participation and engagement.
Their definition emphasises that we need to use different digital media channels to encourage our prospects and customers to interact to form communities. It also hints at the challenges of encouraging engagement.
Michael has defined 7 different product categories for brand reputation management and social media monitoring software which you can see in the 7 colour coded sections of the table.
Reputation managementSocial media listening10 tactics for effective Facebook pages you can implement by 30th March Value/Importance: ★★★★★★★★★★ Recommended link: Facebook’s Pages intro Our commentary on the new Facebook business pages With just one month before switchover to a completely new page layout for companies on Facebook, we’ve rated the impact as 10 out of 5, although that depends on how important Facebook
Facebook MarketingTo celebrate the launch of our new social media strategy guide, Dave and I thought we’d share our top 21 tips to help with social media planning. We’d love to hear your thoughts from recent experience, too… This post follows on from the new research on how businesses use social media from the CIM we summarised
Social media strategyExamples showing how building your network in Google+ gives you more visibility in the search results This post highlights part of the importance of Google+ for SEO purposes. It does so by contrasting 2 screengrabs of Google search results pages, illustrating how H&M have managed to use Google+ to radically affect results for their network of
Google Plus marketingSEO strategyA short guide to help review if and how you use Pinterest Prompted by interest in my first post on the marketing opportunities for Pinterest a couple of weeks ago, I thought a more considered ideas post might be useful. So I’ve summarised the key points that I feel are relevant to consider if you’re set
Social media platforms5 Examples of Facebook Brand Pages to learn from As marketers constantly look for better ways to use social media to engage with customers and generate positive word-of-mouth and sentiment, a well-designed, thought-out Facebook page is a key platform to target consumers. Facebook brand pages can offer businesses, both large and small, an excellent opportunity to create
Facebook MarketingUsing Facebook for marketing – this post is a showcase of businesses of a range of sizes from a range of sectors who are using the recently revamped (Feb ’09) Facebook pages which now look more like individual profile pages.
Facebook MarketingAnd what to do about it Social media is not a standalone skill-set, nor is it even a vocation in its own right. It’s a mindset, a set of specific tools and most importantly, it’s a process weaved into content and social media marketing. Our post showing the scope of Social CRM shows how social media marketing
Social media strategyNew research also reveals which social media tactics are working best The Social Media Benchmark is a new, six-monthly study exploring how marketers are adapting to, investing in and getting value from social media. This is a major, ongoing initiative from The Chartered Institute of Marketing which is supported by Ipsos ASI and Bloomberg. You can see
Social media governanceGoogle Social Analytics – an in-depth review Value/Importance: ★★★★★ Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York this week, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote. The majority of the
Google Analytics SetupSocial media analytics…from notepad sketch to more than 140 million active users… If you’re based in the UK, you’ve likely heard the announcement this week from Twitter about UK usage of Twitter from the traditional media. As a big fan of Twitter …..
Twitter Marketing Read moreSocial media marketing gives new options for segmentation Since the 1950s, when the practice of market segmentation began, it has been the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. Accurately define your market segments and then the follow on activities of targeting …..
Customer segmentation/targeting Read more Social media strategy Read moreBritain’s online beauty brands find discounts, coupons and samples drive social media engagement – a quick insight to Mintel’s latest social media research report As we are well aware, British consumers are increasingly incorporating the Internet into their daily lives. The …..
Social media platforms Read moreThe UK is 2 years behind with social media! Having spent two days at the UK Social Media World Forum recently it seems to me that UK industry remains roughly two years behind North America and many countries in the …..
Social media strategy Read moreUsing the LinkedIn Skills feature for career development or identifying influencers This is a relatively new feature in LinkedIn that pulls data from its now enormous user-base to create both an interesting and useful tool. In this post, I’ll first take …..
Linkedin marketing Read moreFacebook releases new marketing advice for businesses Value: Recommended link: http://www.facebook.com/business Our commentary: In the first week of August, Facebook announced “Facebook for Business”. While this sounds like an attempt to compete with LinkedIn or Google+, in fact it’s just …..
Facebook Marketing Read more1. Set business goals for your social media – it’s best not to experiment without a clear idea of how social media will support your business goals.
2. Create a social media strategy. A strategy will help you to deploy social media in the best way to reach your goals by prioritising on the channels in our RADAR which are most effective.
3. Active social listening and reputation management. Most advice on social media marketing strategies advises to start by listening to your conversations. We prefer the term coined by Brian Solis in his book Engage of “Active Social Listening” since this shows the need for a feedback cycle within social media marketing.
4. Define content and engagement strategy. We’ve noted that encouraging engagement and participation are the biggest challenges to social media marketing, so clear strategies are needed to show how to achieve these.
5. Define communications strategy. In the social media era, a continuous communications strategy is necessary to engage your audience through the many channels available. Key issues here are defining the types of content value you offer through different social channels and the frequency. Integrating different digital channels including email marketing through a social media marketing hub is also a key issue here.
6. Deploy best practice approaches for the core social media platforms. Each social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has unique characteristics and audience needs. There is also a bewildering array of tools to deploy and etiquette to follow so you won’t be seen as a spammer.
7. Social media optimisation. You may have a presence established, but this is only the beginning in your journey to optimise your presence to deliver real value for your business.
Please let us know your comments on our Quick Guide to social media marketing. Tell us what you like, don't like or other ideas of what it should include. Thanks!
