Tag Archives: social media marketing

Best time to post on Facebook

When is the best time to post on Facebook?

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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 →

Facebook Search Engine

Facebook launches search Engine with “Graph Search”

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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.”

Facebook Search Engine

Continue reading →

Using Social Media for B2B

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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!

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Social Round Up – Facebook Special

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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.

Social Media Round Up 2012

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:

  • The social media landscape has stabilised: the large sites are getting larger and the small ones are getting smaller. Consumers are only prepared to create new accounts for sites which offer unique functions (such as Pinterest and Instagram).
  • The mobile (r)evolution increases the adoption and usage intensity of social media.
  • Consumers just love to link with (a limited number of) brands.
  • 80-90% of consumers want to be involved in co-creation, open innovation and structural collaboration with brands they love. Brands are not yet sufficiently open to this.
  • Consumers are major fans of market research communities where they can collaborate with companies. After Facebook a research community is the second most preferred platform. Reason is that consumers want their feedback to have an impact; and they are convinced that research communities can have such an effect.
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Insta 2

Using Instagram to drive brand awareness and engagement

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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.

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Social Media for Events – Tips, Tricks and Tools

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Social media is undeniably revolutionising the way event managers are having to plan, promote and review their events. Previously events followed a fairly static format – You would be invited via post, email or word of mouth, you would attend the event and be spoken at and then you would leave after perhaps filling out a quick questionnaire to let the organisers know how you found it.

Nowadays, there are a multitude of channels that you can find out about an event through Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing platforms, when you are at an event you can follow a live stream via a #hashtag to gain insight into how other people are finding it, pick up highlights and find and follow other attendees and most significantly you can vent any frustrations very publicly and in real time. All this means event managers need to quickly pay attention to these valuable and often free channels that can help them plan better events and understand what attendees like and don’t like about them.

This presentation is designed to help event organisers from the planning stages right though to monitoring the back channel and engaging on the day.

Continue reading →

What is Online reputation management?

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The advent of the digital age has made it much easier for customers to share their opinion of a brand. With an estimated 1.6 million new blog posts every day, consumers are constantly sharing their views, impressions and experiences, both positive and negative of every conceivable product or service. Whilst this is great for consumers as you can quickly and easily access unbiased product reviews, it’s having a detrimental effect on brands who are suddenly open to attack from unhappy customers whether there is truth in their claims or not. Online Reputation Management

“The actively disengaged customer is four times more likely to post to a blog or website about their poor customer service.” Ultimately, you want to avoid creating this sort of customer. Something has happened to change them from engaged, passionate customers to disengaged, irate customers.

The challenge with social media is that you have no control over what consumers say about your services, comments or accusations can be completely unfounded but get picked up and take momentum across the internet causing damage to the brand. As a result it is vital to have a strategy in place to effectively manage negative mentions.

This is known as Online Reputation Management and refers to the practice of monitoring the online reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of neutralising negative mentions entirely and therefore putting their reputation in better stead to change the slant and create a positive image, this is known as reactive reputation management.

Considering the vast amount of people who deal with brands online and offline it is not possible to ensure everyone has a positive experience, however if someone does voice a negative experience online it is possible to minimise the damage most of the time. This can only be achieved by responding in a manner that will address the problem, clarify the situation and put the company in a positive light without encouraging further criticism; Good crisis management requires responding with substance behind what you are saying.

The most important thing to understand and consider are the risks and do you have processes in place that you actually use, to manage with these risks should they occur.

Common ORM proactive techniques include online promotional activity through creating new content, promotion of existing positive content, as well as deeper involvement in the social web sphere through forums, blog and other high profile social networking forums such as Twitter and Facebook.

Read more about best practice for online reputation management here.

Top free tools for community managers

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One of the biggest challenges I have faced whilst working in social media is how to maximise my outreach and measure success. Social media measurement is still a relatively grey area but as long as you are clear on what your goals are then there are a number of social media tools that can be utilised effectively to help you make the most of your campaigns.

Along the way I have come across a number of free tools that I have found hugely helpful. I have listed some of my favourites below and hope they help you too! Any additions are always welcome so if there are any others that you know of, then please feel free to comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

Finding Followers or influencers

One of the biggest challenges people face is finding people who share the same interests or are in the same area so they can start conversations and engage. For brands, this may be finding their target audience so they can better understand their needs or what they are talking about or it could be to find local people to promote an event or launch.

Twitter directories are a great way of finding relevant influencers to engage with, search for people who share the same interests or find followers in the same local area as you.

Those listed below have been the most effective for me but I’m sure there are others out there as well.

http://www.wefollow.com

http://www.twellow.com

http://justtweetit.com/#

http://nearbytweets.com/- Useful tool for finding people in the same area.

My favourites

http://export.ly/ -

Exportly is my favourite tool of the moment! It allows you to export a CVS spreadsheet of all your followers. This allows you to have a proper look at who they are, where they are from and who are the most influential. You can do this by sorting the data by number of followers. Once you know who of your followers is the most influential you can target your engagement at them in the hope of increasing your reach.

Klout- http://klout.com/

Calculates the level of influence your Twitter account has taking into account reach, followers vs followees and level of engagement
Kurrently- http://www.kurrently.com

Useful tool for searching for keywords or competitors on Twitter and Facebook.

http://twoolr.com – Gives good stats with regards to tweet times, see followers and recent interactions. Find out what times retweeted the most.

http://twileshare.com/app/share – upload docs to twitter, pdfs, ebooks, images and gives back stats.

http://twtpoll.com/ – Twitter poll. Great different way to get customer feedback. Share poll with twitter followers and Facebook friends. Can later post this onto a blog or Facebook page to gain further followers and fans.

Measurement

http://twoolr.com – Gives good stats with regards to tweet times, see followers and recent interactions. Find out what times retweeted the most.

http://twiangulate.com (gives diagram + compares 3 profiles followers) Great way to compare twitter profile followers and friends. Finds who follows who, who your most influential followers are and compares.

http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/# – great visual of followers/ connected conversations via hasthtags

http://www.foller.me – Shows tweetcloud of @mentions + world map of engagement

http://twileshare.com/app/share – upload docs to twitter, pdfs, ebooks, images and gives back stats.

http://manageflitter.com/ – manage followers

http://friendorfollow.com/ – manage followers

http://twitterfeed.com/- Feed your blog/ news into Twitter

A Beginners Guide to Social Media

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Some beautiful music to inspire you whilst you read!

As a language and communication graduate, with a specific interest in communication and globalisation, social media has always held a fascination for me. However, it wasn’t until I started working for a digital marketing agency and managing social media accounts myself that I had considered I might get paid for ‘doing social media’.

But what is social media and how does it work for companies and brands who are starting to recognise it as an unavoidable part of their marketing strategy?

I have started this blog as a way of mapping everything I have learnt over the past couple of years and hopefully answering these questions. I am doing this partially for myself, as a way of keeping track of such a rapidly evolving media but also with the hope that I can impart some of this knowledge on others who are making their way through the social sphere, and who can learn from my experiences and trials.

I am by no means a social media expert (although who actually is?!) but I love what I do and I enjoy the fact that there is constantly something new to learn about and try. I have worked with some fantastic clients on some really interesting campaigns and I now want to record these experiences and understand how social media has affected us.

From the early days of msn chat to the launch of Facebook whilst I was at university, I have constantly involved myself in social media channels and watched with interest in the way it has shaped the way we communicate as individuals and as a global community.

Social has made communication instantaneous, informal and in demand 24/7. Before, you were lucky if you had 10 to 15 close friends who you stayed in touch with regularly. Now the average Facebook user has over 150 friends across the globe and we all have constant access to every aspect of our ‘friends’ personal lives.

But what truly interests me, is the way the social sphere has empowered us as societies and consumers, giving us a voice that was previously unheard and forcing those in power, whether governments or big brands to listen to respond to what societies and consumers want.

Social media is predominately user generated and allows people to share information with an ease and speed never seen before. Information is available at our finger tips and can be categorized, tagged and shared in seconds.

There is currently no way of avoiding it or controlling it and in the space of just a few short years everyone from politicians to police have embraced this new media to impart information and get their message across. Spending on online media advertising has increased at a phenomenal rate over the previous 5 years, in 2009 with the global economy crashing, marketing budgets across the board were cut massively and for marketers, the opportunity of the essentially free advertising space presented by social media was compelling.

For me, social media should be about providing a platform to aid user generated content and communication where everyone is equal, there is no status quo and information can be shared easily and for free. It has allowed smaller companies and causes to reach a mass audience they would previously have been unable to engage with. From a purist perspective, social media has allowed a two way dialogue to exist between the masses and those in power that has made companies and individuals have to work for respect and open to criticism in a way that never existed before.

The social sphere is arguably owned by no one but the online communities who use it, and as this has exploded it has become a fight for a share of voice in a noisy and highly populated environment. Agencies and marketers are having to think outside the box and provide more and more innovative solutions to dominating the social space and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have succumbed to advertising in a way never before seen. Ads can be tailored to unbelievably specific demographics which are then only shown on the pages of those who fit constraints outlined by the advert creator.

With brands, the media and marketers jumping on this new media how long will it remain pure and in what direction will it move? This is what I want to follow and find out.

Watch this space.

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