Although interacting through social media can be time-consuming, stressful even, many aspects can be automated or you can rely on organic sharing. In other words, with just a little bit of setup work and steady management from a company you can reap the rewards without so much effort. Businesses often get caught up in the hype of scheduling tools, analytics, and the numbers game, and while this is important, there are other techniques. Now don’t get me wrong—scheduling tools and careful Social Media analysis is great, and in many cases necessary. You want to make things easier, and these tools really are helpful. However, there are also ways that you can get your friends and followers to do a little bit of promotion and work for you. All it takes it a little bit of preparation.

How to make sure you’re using the built-in advantages of Social Media?

If you want to stop…

Showing how great content generates more backlinks AND social shares

Value: [rating=4] Recommended link: SEOmoz post by DanZarrella Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist” who works for Hubspot these days, has created a lot of interesting analysis over the years which is great for giving practical ideas of how to improve social media communications - the infographic at the bottom of this post on what is effective in Facebook is one example. He recently wrote a guest post on SEOmoz I thought was worth sharing since it gives some evidence to help answer the often-asked question - “(How) does Social media marketing support SEO?” Of course, the number (and especially quality) of inbound links is vital to effective SEO in competitive markets, so this research looks at the correlation of sharing on the social networks with number of backlinks for content share. The results show some positive correlation: …

Four tips to increase Facebook ad efficiency

Your Company is running ads on Facebook and so far you got a decent click-through rate, but where is the conversion? We’ve found this is one of the more common issues confronting Facebook advertisers. In this post, I’ll give some tips on to how to switch this scenario around and make your Facebook marketing more efficient. A large Scandinavian hardware chain, active in the Nordic countries and the UK, wanted to boost its Facebook fan page activity last Christmas. Its campaign aimed to drive traffic to its web shop. At the time of the campaign, most of the company’s fans were its employees. In just a month, the number of fans went up from 2,000 to over 11,000. And, for the first time, the fan page experienced organic activity; people commented, liked offers and…

Is social sign-on in the plans for your site?

Like everyone else, we’re planning upgrades to our site and have been thinking how to increase interactions with our readers. Social sign-on is one approach of how to do this, so I've written up my thoughts and interested in how you see it. Is it only a win-win through increase participation and conversion rates or could there be privacy concerns for customers?

What is social sign-on?

Social sign-on/login is an approach we’re seeing on more and more sites now, although it's not written about so much. You’ve almost seen this on sites like Mashable or TechCrunch which enable commenting through logging in / authentication through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or OpenID. When I’ve looked into this to see whether there is wider adoption on sites other than blogs/online publishers like retail or travel transactional sites. I’d assumed this is because of security concerns, but I’ve changed…

How are you measuring the success of social media? This question remains contentious to say the least. This infographic shares some insight into just how the "R" in ROI can be interpreted. We hope it helps!

We also have a post from earlier in year on the goals and challenges of social media marketing which may also help you in defining the best way to group objectives for social media. If you haven't seen this Altimeter report, then take a look, it's the best free in-depth report on creating a framework for developing a social media ROI measurement system. A Framework for Social Analytics …

Some of the best in digital marketing offer their social media advice

We're always cautious of rule-books - but when Eloqua team up with JESS3, Steve Rubel, David Armano and Scott Monty (amongst others) then it's certainly worth stopping to read. This ProBook is an evolution of the PlayBook that was created a year ago - having read both I'd say this latest piece is designed for people with some idea of social media marketing The book is a corporate guide to organising a brand or business to succeed in social media marketing, it also doubles as a who, where and how of the social media landscape with fun features such as a 'day in the life'. The book seeks out to specifically answer: How to optimise your Facebook newsfeed How to scale a social media marketing programme How to measure social media success beyond Likes How to create infographics that wow How to…

We introduced Google +1 on our Google updates page back in March when this was announced, but it only became live in the UK on June 29th. So it's time to take another look and think through the implications for marketing.

June 30th update: When I originally wrote this post, I asked about methods of measuring +1 interactions, well Google were on the case and next day announced methods to measure +1s which I've linked to at the end of the post. This is a fantastic new feature in Google Analytics since it also shows Facebook and Twitter interactions - both on your site and in the network. Google's original announcement explains how it works, but let's take a look at an example from when it went live - not many yet. You will have seen that Google has a new interface with a grey bar and a "+1" icon to…

and is it something we should be doing?

Social media optimisation or SMO isn't a new term or a new approach, far from it. As the Wikipedia definition of SMO explains, it's been around since 2006 when the search engine marketer Danny Sullivan first used it and Rohit Bhargava developed his 5 rules of SMO which are featured at the end of this post with my suggestions on how to scope SMO activities more broadly. With many companies now having social media marketing in place, SMO is a logical next step to improve the effectiveness of social media marketing. So I thought it would be interesting to see marketers views on SMO - is it a narrow view about optimising integration with a website, is it mainly related to SEO or is it a broader view?

What do you understand by SMO?

These are the results of the poll - thank you to…

There are two new buttons available this week, well technically one new and available now and one evolved and still in the off-ing unless you're in the US... Google +1 is now launched for websites and we'll see it rolling out globally with several early US partners. We covered Google's +1 in a Google round-up several weeks ago, it's essentially a "Like" button for search results and now websites. The launch on 30 March 2011 was about the button appearing next to Google's search results and adverts only, this new feature takes the +1 as a button that can be embedded on your own web site, the same as a Facebook Like. Clicking on any +1 button will allow users’ friends to see what they liked and also add the +1 to anonymised public data. Of course the…

The now ubiquitous and copied Like button just got a sibling - the Send button. One word for this simple addition by Facebook - nice, in fact very nice (OK, that's two words).

Facebook announced this new feature over the Easter weekend in its developer blog with a neat travel marketing example. Typically the button lives next to a Like button at the beginning or end of a page or post. It's purpose is, of course, to let you share content that you are reading or watching directly with specific contacts or to a Group. It's like the "Send to a Friend" or "Forward to a Friend" which has been used for years to make emails more viral. So you could say Facebook has an even stronger viral effect now since these are direct recommendations to an individual or group. If you look at the screen grab below (from Mashable in this case)…