4 Social Hub Examples

As the number of social networks increases, brands have started to look at ways in which they can bring all their social networks into their brand owned websites. Contrast this with the more common situation where the only reference to social media on the main site are the ubiquitous  Facebook,  Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ share buttons. These don't give any impression of the type of interactions and communities developed on these networks or customers own networks. Social hubs can give customers a snap shot preview of the activity on each of the chosen social networks. This is a growing trend among the bigger, global brands which have active social outposts, often country-specific and they clearly want to bring that conversation and activity to their own site.

What is a Social Hub?

Social hubs tend to be content aggregation pages on a brands own website. Pulling feeds from any or all…

Presentation downloads

The talks explain 7 Steps for creating an integrated social media strategy based around the Smart Insights Ebook of the same name. You can also download the free social plan summary ebook  featured in the talks.

7 Steps for creating an integrated social media strategy (TFMA 2012 Keynote London and Manchester)

This talk features several examples from Smart Insights Expert commentators I'd like to thank and list here - a bit of a joint effort! Dan Barker shows the importance of Google Plus Pritesh Patel shows how to use Google Analytics to attribute value to social media Marie Page explains how Vets Now use Facebook to engage prospects Dan Bosomworth introduces the RACE content marketing approach Paul Fennemore on the McDonalds Twitter promotion gaff Dave Chaffey summarises the CIM social media benchmark research Tim Watson on the secret weapon that social media experts never mention Here is the presentation,…

What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search. The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business. One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work. This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…

An infographic showing how to use content marketing to grow your business

What do you do at a time when paid-for media is neither reliable nor scalable, earned media is super-competitve and owned media properties require constant investment to engage your visitors? We believe you should do one thing, first and foremost; invest in the very best branded content that you can afford to create, seed and syndicate. This is particularly true if you're a small business or startup who can't afford substantial media investment, but many large brands are also profiting from content marketing. I've written before about marketing with using content to add the human factor to your brand, and Chris Soames post last week showed the contuining rise of content marketing. Spurred by the feedback and popularity of our inbound and content marketing blueprint, we wanted to share our ideas on using content with specific stages of the buyer process…

There are many excellent social media blogs providing great content to keep you up-to-date with the latest social media marketing trends and advice. SocialMediaExaminer is one of these sources of great information. So its no surprise they have 47,513 followers on Twitter and 76,391 people have liked them on Facebook, however they have a secret weapon. In fact this same secret weapon is used by the top 7 of the top ten best Social Media experts as judged by SocialMediaExaminer themselves that they picked from over 600 nominations. So, what is the secret weapon?  Email communications! Whilst their Twitter and Facebook stats are impressive, their email following is bigger at 129,329 people. They are so keen to have you as a subscriber that the email sign up gets the prime real estate on their home page.

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Social media is about MUCH more than the tactics

This instagram has been doing the rounds during February, there's a fair chance you've seen it?

I like it! It has been shared tens of thousands of times and rightly so. Anything that simplifies our increasingly complex marketing approaches has to be a good thing. Or does it? It maybe oversimplifies, it it's applied to social media marketing?

Well for one thing - it perpetuates the myth that social updates from people or brands are just broadcast, rather than interactive. If I were to grab a marker to explain social media interactions it would look more like this:

From social tactics to social strategy

But a bigger issue I fear, it's yet another…

To 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 yesterday. It showed  that while some companies have a clear champion or a dedicated resource for social media, few have this focus. That's where our recommendations start.

Social media marketing plan recommendations

1 - Have a purpose and a vision - why are you doing this, what are your goals? Is it a marketing directive, or are you evolving into a social business? Make sure the vision is communicated across the business so that people are comfortable and understand who,…

 Two apparently contradictory reports on UK digital ad spend

Two stories in the marketing press caught my eye recently because they appeared to contradict each other and each is from an impeccable source. One set of figures comes from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and the other from the Advertising Agency Register (AAR). The IPA story states UK digital ad spend is still increasing and senior marketers expect this trend to continue. Indeed, according to the respected IPA Bellwether report, online display spend forecasts were revised up 13.4% and paid search budgets revised up 14.9% during the last quarter of 2011. And this despite the fact that marketing chiefs are, overall, more pessimistic about the year ahead than they have been in nearly three years. The second piece of news appears to contradict this picture. According to the latest…

A review of the main web crowdsourcing services for marketing, design and development

These service sound scarier than than the title suggests. I'm sure many consultants, agencies and companies are using services such as Upwork and 99Designs already. But I thought these were worth grouping and sharing for those not in the know or so that others can be shared. The crowdsourcing approach where you put your tender out to anyone who wants to bid tends to be much more cost effective.  In this blog post I want to open your eyes to some of the potential with outsourcing, my experience of it and highlight some of the services you could utilise. The outsource / crowdsourcing industry is seeing huge growth as more business are willing to change their processes. Elance reported a doubling of the number…

New European Facebook marketing pages launched

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook UK Marketing page We’ve found the global / US Facebook Marketing Page useful for ideas on Facebook Marketing - it seems others do too - there are nearly 900,000 Likes for this page - that's a LOT of people following Facebook marketing. Until recently, most posts and examples referenced, the US market, but similar sites have now been created in some European countries which we thought we’d alert you to - it could be worth putting them in your Feeds. In the UK version, it’s good to see Facebook practicing Permission Marketing with a gated page to get access to their resources. These are the other countries which now have a special marketing page - you can access them from the bottom of the UK page: …