Google+ best practice tips from Cadbury and H&M
Although brand adoption of Google+ is way behind other social networks, notably Facebook and Twitter, some businesses have jumped in and are making waves to stir up interest, engagement and interaction with their fans on Google+.
Confectioner Cadbury UK (see Google+ case study) and clothing brand H&M (see the Smart Insights details of H&M Google+ case study) are leading the way with their Google+ pages and are utlising the network to great effect.
But what is the "secret to their success"? Here are five best practice Google+ tips from two of the network’s leading lights:
Know your audience
Before jumping into Google+ it’s important to have a good idea of your customers and audience beforehand. Every social network is different and each has its own idiosyncrasies, so ensure that you build a platform…
Repurposing with a purpose
Content marketing is a large investment both financially and strategically for any business. This post is designed on the principles that if you are investing a lot into content creation it makes sense to be creative in how you use your content in order to get the most out of it.
Advantages of re-purposing content
There are always loads of things we don’t do simply because we ‘don’t have the time’. I can’t suggest how to find more time, but I do have suggestions about how you can save time and improve your content marketing.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can repurpose content? In an era when content marketing is essential, it is time to start thinking outside the box about how to use your existing content effectively as well as how to create new material. Maximising the usefulness of one piece of content will save you time and…
Social Media from Laurel and Hardy Shhh….
Last week my wife mentioned to me, and I’m not sure how this came about, that Laurel and Hardy, or Stanlio e Ollio to give them their true Italian identity, actually spoke with an English accent, which is why when the English attempt to speak Italian, they tend to find us so funny. Now this might just be my wife’s way of protecting my rather brittle confidence when it comes to talking Italian in her native tongue, but it was a perfect (she wouldn’t have known this at the time) example of delivering content that was both relevant and interesting to the audience, in this case me.
Since 19% of all activity online is spent using social media compared to 6% in March 2007 (comScore, Dec 2011), it goes without saying that…
The FT.com web app shows how HTML5 may make support for different mobile OS easier in future
There are so many posts and articles rating the top iPhone/iPad/Android/Windows Mobile app that it might seem that marketers looking to create the widest audience have to develop specific version available through the app store of each platform.
But, the success of the FT.com web app shows that it doesn't have to be this way and in the future it may not be; the dependence on app stores for each mobile native OS may seem quaint. Here are the latest (July 27th) figures on digital publishing by FT.com
Digital subscriptions to the title, which operates behind a metered paywall increased 31% year on year to more than 300,000.
The number of registered users climbed 29% to 4.8 million.
Mobile devices now account for 25% of traffic to FT.com, while there are 2.7 million FT web app users.
…
Subject lines most popular, but landing pages and targeting most effective
Here's some interesting new research for Email marketers from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report:
The reason for the popularity of subject line testing is obvious, that's easier! The research shows that it's worth finding/making the time to become more sophisticated in targeting and tweaking landing pages, that's harder.
…
6 Recommendations to broaden your playlist
I've found podcasts to be a pretty good way to keep up-to-date on new marketing techniques and tools. I don't travel a lot, so I'm not a big podcast user, preferring working to music, but I do have two regulars I enjoy when on the Tube, etc. These are at the start of my recommendations below.
Update: July 2012. I recently recorded an Episode with the Digital Marketing podcast discussing approaches to developing digital strategy and publishing - thanks to Daniel and Ciaran for arranging this. You can listen here.
I'd really recommend these, but am looking to add a few more to my downloads, so I asked on the Smart Insights LinkedIn Group for recommendations on the best digital marketing podcasts. Thanks if you contributed - my playlist is now longer and better.
I would also be interested to hear about other recommendations to those…
Setting yourself and your marketing presentations apart using five steps and one change in behaviour
According to some estimates, between 30 and 40 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day. If each presentation averages 35 slides, simple math tells us that enough slides are produced to provide every man, woman and child on the planet with a new slide each week.
But of those millions of presentations delivered each day, how many are effective? How many provide information of value to the audience, making the presentation a good use of their time?
The state of the presentation art
During the past 20 years at my workshops and seminars, I have asked more than twenty thousand people to raise their hands to each of the following statements in turn:
Raise your hand if most of the business presentations you’ve attended in the past few years have made extensive use of visual aids.
Raise your hand again if…
Timeline shows the increasing complexity of web standards
This new HTML 5 infographic from Evolution of the Web reminds us about the power, but also the complexity of developing and delivering web services today.
It shows how the web standards delivered through different browsers (show on each timeline row) have changed from here:
to here:
The infographic itself shows the experiences it's possible to create today in HTML 5, but suggests the difficulty in making them compatible across different browsers. On a positive note, it shows that new standards are now generally implemented more quickly across browsers.
I've also posted this infographic since it gives and introduction to different web standards if you rollover the interactive version:
…
How does your Facebook engagement compare and how can you improve it?
For Facebook company pages, Tabs or Views have always been one of the most important ways to engage an audience more deeply. This can be through a Gated Like page (example); competitions encouraging Email or loyalty club opt-in (example) or games to name but three.
New data from Facebook analytics company Pagelever has shown the impact of the time line since it was introduced on 30th March this year. It also gives a useful benchmark for the level of engagement you should be getting:
The analysis is based on data across 500+ pages that had over 10,000+ fans.
The key insights from this report are:
Average tab views per visit are relatively low (now 0.06/6%). This gives a benchmark to compare with and a conversion rate within Facebook marketing to work…
New report shows the level of amplification you should expect from Facebook
I’ve written before that “fans are vanity, engagement is sanity” in relation to Facebook brand pages. A new joint report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works produced by comScore and Facebook has been published that further stresses the effectiveness of engaged fans to a brand’s return on investment. It states
“While the vast majority of large brands today have an active social media presence, there continues to be an over-reliance on simple counting of Facebook Fans as a key performance metric.”
Whilst I am inherently sceptical of any report funded by a platform which stands to benefit financially from many of the activities it recommends, there are some genuinely useful data and insights in this report. It also digs a little deeper into Facebook’s Insights data – available to any Page owner and specifically references the metrics that…
