As I’m the ‘social media person’ at my company I was just sent this video by a colleague and had to share it. Massive cringer all round but a fairly accurate representation of the various social networks and an apt summary of social networks as a whole.
Understanding when the best time to post can have a huge impact on your engagement rate and consequently increase the reach of your content. A recent study by social campaign management company OfferPop looked at approximately 500,000 Facebook posts by major brands using their platform, examining the day of the week and time of the post to look for how engagement levels were affected.
They found that engagement level – calculated by the number of fans who liked, shared or commented on a post – on a Friday was 64% higher than posts added on a Monday. Continue reading
Yesterday it was announced the Facebook are launching their own search engine known as “graph search” which is designed around the concept of discovery and making it easier for Facebook users to find information. This is designed to allow users to make “natural” searches of content shared by their friends for example “photos of Tom in 2000” or friends who live in Brighton. At the moment Search Graph isn’t going to be available on mobile but once it does there’s going to be one of the most powerful search moderators in history available ‘near me’.
Watch Facebook’s introduction video for an overview – It’s all a bit euphoric for my liking but you get the idea of their bigger vision.
“One way of thinking about Graph Search is less like a search engine but more like a super-powerful filter of the newsfeed of the past.”
Today Twitter announced a fantastic new service that allows you to access all your old Tweets.
Your Twitter archive will be downloadable and allows you to view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.
To get your archive, go to the Settings area and look for the new “Your Twitter archive” feature. You can then request to access your archive – due to high demand at the moment there is a bit of a back log so you might receive an error message first time around. As I said, this hasn’t rolled out completely yet and I haven’t been able to have a play but It’s promised to go global over “the coming weeks and months.” Watch this space!
I just came across this interesting infographic from based on the results of a survey of more than 500 B2B marketers conducted by Eloqua. The results highlighted that 64% of UK businesses use social media as a marketing tool, with the most popular reasons being for brand awareness (83%), encouraging social sharing (56%) and gaining trust and followers (55%). Less than a third (32%) said they use social for lead generation and just 16% use social to assess market perception of their brand.
In my experience using social media for B2B can be more of a challenge and requires an effective content strategy to ensure you are able to establish thought leadership or add value to what you are saying and gain the attention of your audience.
Eloqua have created a rather sexy micro site to show the results but the main one have been summarise in the infographic below. I thought it was interesting that 43% of companies still have no strategy in place for their social media activity. Come on now!
So I’ve been meaning to write a weekly post on all the useful things I’ve learnt each week as I’m constantly reading blog posts and news articles on all things social and I’ve finally got round to it!
This time it seems to be pretty Facebook focused as Facebook HQ appear to be having something of a shake up and there a few important updates to be aware of. I also came across the following Social Media round up summarising global trends in social usage.
This week Insights consulting released their ‘Social media round the world’ report which highlights some great insights into how we are using social media on a global scale and what the key trends are.
To summarise This year’s main conclusions are:
Instagram is a mobile application that allows users to take a photo and apply a digital filter to it allowing the most amateur photographers to turn into a photography whizz in seconds. It recently grabbed the world’s attention in April when it was snapped up by social networking giant Facebook fora respectable $1bn a sure sign that it is something keep an eye on. It was originally available only on iphone but launched to Android users in 2012 which has seen its number of users grow from 15m to 80m since the beginning of the year, an increase of over 400% in just seven months.
The use of Instagram among top brands has also increased, with new data from Simply Measured showing that 40% of the brands on the Interbrand 100 now have an account on the mobile photo sharing service. Brands such as MTV, Starbucks, Burberry, Tiffany & Co. and Nike have a huge following with numbers topping or near half a million followers. This is unsurprising as it offers them the chance to generate user generated content with an edge that is far more likely to receive positive feedback. Econsultancy have highlighted some recent examples of how these brands have used it, although I would question the supposed creativity of what they have done.
Instagram should be treated like all other social channels and should be considered as an element in a holistic social media strategy. It has the means to build your brand, share news and engage in dialogues and it allows companies to engage with their peers and customers by sharing snapshots of their products, culture and people in an intimate and creative way. Pinterest has shown that image–based posting can be extremely valuable for brands, so it would be foolish to ignore such a readily available stream of content.
Facebook now accounts for 52% of the 4bn pieces of content shared everyday through social which means marketers need to work hard to understand how to make the most of this opportunity and maximise the exposure and engagement around their content.
Additionally, social “signals” on Facebook and Twitter, such as likes, tweets and shares, are now know to correlate “very strongly” to higher rankings in Google search. The idea being that as more people share content on social networks it becomes a better indicator of the ‘best’ and most valuable content the search engines want to return.
The presentation below from the Facebook Marketing Conference 2012 by Nils Mork-Ulnes and Judith Lewis highlights the 7 types of ‘social sharers’, explains why and where they share and offers some explaination for how marketers can use this information to shape their content strategy.
A really useful infographic from Raka analysing the best time to Tweet and post to Facebook. Understanding when your audience are on-line can save valuable time and ensure you are maximising the impact of your message on social channels.
