Would You Rather be Social or Interesting?

 

The “Interest Graph” is not the “Social Graph”. But what does that mean and why should you care?
Despite the rapid ascent of Interest-based platforms, such as Pinterest, Sulia, WeHeartIt and Wanelo, we rarely see dialogue about the Interest Graph except in a Social context. However, The Interest Graph and Social Graph are two fundamentally different infrastructures with different underlying assumptions for marketers.

Sure, they often overlap, but it’s time we come to appreciate their differences, so that we can be more effective marketers on a social web driven by people’s passions and interests.
So should you be social or interesting?

The social graph is about who you “know”

Friends, followers and connections represent some degree of familiarity, ranging from a spouse to someone you met once at that thing you went to. If you think in High School terms, the Social Graph is all about getting in with the cool kids, so you can multiply your reach and borrow from their swagger.

The basic assumption of “Social Marketing” is:

“If someone knows someone else, they will be interested in similar things”

The interest graph is about “passions”

In high school, the “Interest Graph” is like clubs or sports teams- a group of people coming together because they love to do the same thing. They may or may not be friends, may or may not know each other, but they share a common passion that brings them together. The more passionate they are the more likely they are to create, share and comment.

The basic assumption of Interest Marketing is thus:

“If someone is interested in something, people who are interested in similar things will be interested in that thing”

Social marketing is about reach

The more people who see your message, the further it will spread. This means you will need to continue to grow your social networks on Twitter to remain ahead of the competition. It’s about building an online distribution network.

Interest marketing is about relevance

If you hit the right audience with the right message, you can connect with valuable customers through a trusted authority.

Studies show that traffic from Pinterest is more valuable than traffic from Facebook and Twitter, likely because the audience is better qualified to begin with. That said, Facebook and Twitter still have substantially larger user bases, so if your strategy requires very broad reach, it may be easier to find it through the social web.

By digging deeper, other critical differences between Social and Interest-based marketing emerge. Let’s compare Facebook and Twitter, the preeminent Social networks with Pinterest, the preeminent Interest-based network to illustrate a few distinctions:

1. Content: Real-Time vs evergreen

Information about Interests becomes dated less rapidly than what’s trendy on the Social scene. If you’re interested in gardening, chances are an article about how to optimally plant daffodil seeds will be as relevant five years from now as it is today. Conversely, most news articles, events and other timely posts about the new blockbuster movie we’ll all forget in six months isn’t.

Cool comes from knowing what’s hot now; Interesting comes from knowing quality information.  That’s why content on Pinterest lives longer than content on facebook.

As marketers, we need to differentiate our content strategy. All too often at Tailwind we hear “Pinterest doesn’t work for us. We’re sharing the same thing there as on facebook but not getting results.” It’s not that Pinterest “doesn’t work for you;” you’re just doing it wrong. Start with the audience on Pinterest and ask yourself- what content does this audience need? Chances are, it’s different from what your facebook audience needs. And if done properly, it can pay dividends over a much longer period of time- more similar to your SEO content strategy.

2. Discovery: Search vs stream

When Pinterest first gained notoriety, publications focused on their unique, scannable visual feed. While that feature has been very important in establishing Pinterest’s identity, interestingly Pinterest has recently focused on raising the profile of other methods of discovery – namely, Interests and Pinterest search. And this makes perfect sense: In Interest-based discovery, depth of content matters.

You may passingly decide to check out Breaking Bad, but once you get hooked, you may find yourself researching everything from the actors’ backgrounds to blue crystalline cake toppings for your next house party. With topical content, it’s rare that users go beyond the first article, and even more rare that enough information will be organized and accessible to dig deeper if you wanted to.
As a result, the stream is the thing- you want a wide variety of new content, but don’t need or expect to dig deeper on most social platforms. 

3. Tools: Don’t ask your butcher to remove your appendix

Sure, surgeons and butchers both cut flesh daily, but when precision is necessary, call a surgeon.  In the same vein, you shouldn’t look to tools built for Twitter or Facebook to develop your Pinterest strategy. As CEO of the leading Pinterest Analytics and Marketing tool, this suggestion probably seems self-serving. But if we didn’t see that the Interest Graph requires unique tools, we wouldn’t be building Tailwind in the first place. Let’s examine a few cases in point:

Analytics

Tailwind initially took off as the go-to analytics tool for marketers on Pinterest. Today, over 12,000 brands rely on us for insights that inform their campaign strategies. At first our approach was similar to advanced Social analytics tools, but over time we realized that metrics need to be thought of differently for Pinterest. For example, Facebook and Twitter tools tend to focus on recent content, in a real-time feed, to help you understand which posts were more or less successful. For Pinterest, though, immediate analysis of content can lead to incorrect conclusions. Consider this case study of a pin that went viral six months after being posted.

Due to the evergreen nature of content, one must constantly refresh engagement data on past posts, as an individual pin may look like a dud after an hour or a day, but after connecting with the right interest group can become a star 14, 30 or even 180 days later. For this reason, we’ve built capabilities to be able to track the life of a pin over time, so when your late blooming content comes to life, you’ll (a) notice it and (b) be able to understand how and why it went viral.

Community management

Social CRM tools frequently emphasize who has the most followers, so you can amplify your message as quickly as possible. In a real-time, reach-based environment, this makes sense. Conversely, when you’re trying to amplify a message on Pinterest, what topics a user is influential about matters far more. Someone may have 2 million followers, but if their authority is in Men’s Clothing and Home Décor, paying them to pin your wedding pins isn’t likely a good use of marketing budget. At Tailwind, we solve for this, by showing our users what topics influencers are trusted about and helping identify impactful pinners for a topic, not just ones with high follower counts.

Discovering content to pin

Given the longevity of a pin, emphasis on visual content and focus on curation over creation, it might not surprise you that the top sources of content on Pinterest are quite different from the top sources on Twitter or Facebook. Topical, news-oriented content performs very well on platforms powered by the social graph, as timely content can spread rapidly through social circles.

On Pinterest the question is often- what are the best sources of content for a given topic. Thus, in order to help Pinners discover better content to pin, we had to dig deep into understanding the best sources of content on a given topic- often this means content is a bit less newsy in nature, as the news cycle doesn’t allow for deep coverage of many topics.

Which should I choose?

So, should you focus on the Interest Graph or Social graph?

Most likely, the answer is both. Most businesses need both broad reach and targeted marketing to fill their funnel. However, you may lean more heavily into…

Social if your business involves short blasts of intense promotion of unique products or content (e.g. concert promoters, news media), your audience knows each other well in real life (e.g. University Student Affairs Office) or the economics are driven more by volume alone (e.g. CPM-based publisher in non-niche category).

Interest-based Marketing if your business rotates products frequently but sells into the same audience (e.g. most retailers), serves customers with a specific hobby/passion (e.g. category-driven media publication), needs to be recognized as a subject matter expert (e.g. most service businesses) or targets an audience with common interests that’s geographically fragmented (e.g. camera manufacturers targeting photographers and wedding photography targeting brides).

Social Startups: Pie Is Your Company’s Social Pinboard

“People in ad agencies are exposed to an incredible amount of information every day, from videos to articles and infographics to everything else,” says Pieter Walraven, co-founder and chief product officer of Pie, a Singapore-based startup changing the way companies share knowledge “They’re constantly scouring the web for inspiration and looking for the next big trend.”

Walraven and his co-founder, Thijs Jacobs, noticed email and chat were used for sharing and organizing ideas within teams. But he says these platforms get too noisy once the group reaches a certain size. They found Pinterest and Dropbox are not ideal, as people ended up using personal accounts for work. Intranet platforms Yammer and Chatter posed other challenges, including being dull and complicated, which led people to give up using them after a few days.




  “It’s a shame, because here we had all these people collecting inspiring, important things, but without a tool to make these things easily accessible, all their time and effort was being wasted,” Walraven says.

Founded in February 2013, the free Pie app is designed to help teams collect, organize, share, and discuss the business-related links, visuals, content, and more that they find in and out of work every day. “Social media agencies and ad agencies are among our most active users on Pie,” says Walraven. “For example, Proximity (a digital agency owned by BBDO) uses Pie to create a library of everything for work. They have a board for competitor news and campaigns, one for marketing trends, a board for UX best practices, and so on. Many people throughout the agency contribute to those boards, so the entire team is creating a company library packed with information, which they use to germinate new ideas and reference old ones.”

Besides internal sharing, Walraven says agencies use Pie boards with clients. “This drastically reduces the number of back-and-forth emails with their clients and eliminates the nightmare of managing a project through huge, bulky email threads with attachments scattered everywhere. Agencies use Pie to create boards that neatly contain everything for a client project: Google Docs, Dropbox files, relevant articles, competitor references, and so on, including all the discussions on each item.”


Let’s say you’re starting a new infographic project, and you’ve found a few visual references that will help your designer. Instead of sending your designer an email every time you find a reference, you can create a board on Pie called, “Infographic Project.” This board would contain all the relevant information for the project: a link to the creative brief on Google Docs, Dropbox links to previous revisions, and even links to similar infographics. You can copy and paste links directly into the Pie web app or use the “Post to Pie” Chrome extension. When you post something you can select which board you want to post it to as well as the coworkers with whom you’re sharing it. Since Pie is free to companies of all sizes, you can create as many boards as you want, and invite as many team members or collaborators to a board as you’d like.

When you post something to Pie, it will appear in the company stream for your coworkers to see and discuss. Every day, Pie sends email digests of the most popular things posted by you and your coworkers so you never miss a thing.

“Our long-term vision for Pie is to build a social layer on top of your content by building smart integrations with other services you already use,” Walraven says. “We think teams are eventually going to want a solution for bringing together all of the different services they use to create and collect content, and we want to be there when the market is ready. Some of the much-requested integrations in the pipeline are Evernote, Google Drive, and Dropbox, to name a few.”
Watch a video of Pie in action here.

5 Ways to Increase Your Brand’s Exposure on Social Media

Because of social media, you have more options for your marketing budget than ever before. This is a double-edged sword, however; while this plethora of choices gives you more opportunities to connect with your existing clients and draw in new business, it can also be difficult to prioritize your time and money.

However, no matter what strategy you ultimately choose, there are five things that should definitely be in the conversation.

 

1. Create Valuable Content

While this might seem obvious, it’s worth stating because creating valuable content is possibly the most important thing you can do to increase your brand’s exposure on social media. To this end,”value” comes in many forms. The content could be funny, informative, controversial, or inspiring. As long as it enriches the people who see it, they will be more likely to share it with their friends giving you free “word of mouth” (or, in this case, “click of mouse”) advertising.

In addition to word-of-mouth advertising, creating valuable content for your blog, Facebook page, or other social media outlets will reflect positively on your brand. Like a bottle of wine with a fancy label, creating valuable content shows that you’re invested in creating a high-quality product.

2. Interact With Your Community

So people have started to notice your valuable content? That’s great, but it’s not worth much if you don’t follow it up with some good community interaction. Ideally, at least some of your valuable content ends with the opportunity for user interaction, also called a “call to action.” A call to action could ask the users to share the piece, it could ask them to join a debate, or it could just answer a question.

Basically, start a dialogue. It might be difficult to get people talking at first, but once you do, your posts will be a lot more interesting for other users to read and it will be more fun to maintain as well!

3. Localize Your Social Media Pages

Ideally, you should create blogs or websites for each locality in which you do business. This is especially important for large businesses that span cities, or even states, but this tactic also can be valuable for smaller businesses with locations in different parts of a single city as well. These localized blogs will, of course, have locally relevant content, which will be valuable to the people living in the area. Localizing a blog will also increase your social media ranking for searches in that area and will make your website more tempting to other local businesses for cross promotional deals.

If you don’t want to spend the time or money building and maintaining a blog for each of your locations, it is still a good idea to build local social media pages that will share locally relevant content. This can be a good compromise for those who don’t want to mess around with buying a lot of domain names but still want to take advantage of local internet traffic.

4. Target Mobile Social Media Users

Of the 317.2 million people in the United States, fully half own a smart phone or tablet and of these people, half actively use social media on that device. That’s a potential audience of 79.3 million people — definitely not something you want to ignore. Unfortunately, native ads don’t show up on the Facebook mobile interface (not yet at least). If you were relying on native ads, therefore, you’re missing a large part of the market.

Also, Facebook has recently started using a program called StoryBump, which decides what Facebook users will see first in their News Feeds. The old program tried to pull posts that would match the interests of the individual and, while story bump does this to some degree, it relies more heavily on how many times an article is shared and when it was posted.

5. Consider Hiring a Full-Time Social Media Manager

If you’re thinking about bumping your social media marketing efforts up a notch, you might want to consider bringing a full-time social media guru onboard. For small businesses that are operating on tight margins, it might be prudent to check all the financial factors before creating such a position. Make sure your company has the most affordable business rates for cutting  energy costs to ensure you have enough room in the budget to make such a hire. Otherwise, you may want to just consider hiring a freelancer.

Either way, however, with these five tips under their belt they’ll be well on their way to building your company a large social media following.
What other tricks do you know for maximizing a brand’s social media presence?

How to Increase Your Social Media Following by Over 700%

Are you looking for creative ways to grow your social media following?

Are you dealing with limited resources?

Then you’ll want to study what Microsoft Dynamics did.

How is a giant like Microsoft the same as everybody else when it comes to social media marketing?

They have the same challenges as any company. They have to figure out:

    Whom they’re talking to
    What their needs are
    Where and how to talk to them

And even though they’re Microsoft, they still have limited resources to do it all. So how does Microsoft do social media? They start by trial and error, and then see what works and what needs changing. Sound familiar?

Over the past two years, Microsoft Dynamics, a business group of Microsoft, pruned their social channels by half, but now reaches more customers.

I spoke with Kelly Rigotti, senior marketing communication manager of social media for Microsoft Dynamics, to learn how they did it.
microsoft vine video

Microsoft Dynamics uses Vine videos as visual elements in their Twitter stream.

Social Media Handles and Stats

    Website
    Blog
    LinkedIn showcase page – 1,488,797 followers
    Twitter primary account – 13,813 followers
    Facebook primary account – 31,013 followers
    YouTube – 6,319 subscribers; 904,542 views

Highlights

    In 2011, had over 40 social accounts and blogs. Now has 23 accounts and blogs
    Up to 75% of followers of their LinkedIn showcase page see their updates
    YouTube views per month increased 700% over the last 15 months
    Facebook fans increased 900% over 15 months with 99% unsponsored posts
    Twitter account started from scratch in 2012 grown to over 13,000 followers

#1: Who’s in Charge of Social?

Before Rigotti was hired two years ago at Microsoft Dynamics, they had over 40 social media accounts and blogs spread over multiple platforms. A lot of people had social media as part of their job. But no single person was responsible for it as a whole.

Rigotti sees the way things evolved at Microsoft Dynamics as similar to what happens at many companies.

“Nobody would dream of going off and doing his or her own website,” she said. “You don’t go off and do your own advertising campaign.” But teams would start their own social channels because it was so easy.

“Somebody would hear about something new, like a blog, and get the okay from their manager to start it,” she said.

But the company realized they needed to start thinking strategically about social media. They created a new position and hired Rigotti, who had consulted for them previously. Her sole responsibility would be to manage social media.
microsoft social acccounts

Microsoft Dynamics started looking at social accounts strategically.
microsoft pared social acccounts

Microsoft Dynamics pared social accounts and groups to 23 from over 40.
#2: Storytelling vs. Talking About Products

Rigotti’s hiring coincided with a shift in marketing strategy for Microsoft as a whole. She characterizes it as a storytelling approach vs. a product-centered approach.

“We wanted to start talking to customers about what their needs are as opposed to what our products are,” she said.

Instead of talking about individual products, they would listen to their customers and then show how they could help them do their jobs better.
microsoft customer service update

Microsoft Dynamics shifted to addressing customer concerns with their social updates.

Many of the existing social accounts had been started by product specialists and had a product-centered approach. The shift meant these accounts would need to be cut, tweaked, repurposed or updated.

This required a diplomatic approach on Rigotti’s part. But first she needed to track down and evaluate what they had.
#3: Selling the Idea Internally

She searched to find all of the Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and other social accounts containing “Microsoft Dynamics” and figure out who owned them.

At the same time, she and her team of two were developing the messaging and talking to the people managing the accounts.

Since they would need to give control over to Rigotti and her team, she made special effort to bring everyone on board with the idea.

“We were not saying, ‘Thanks for your two years of work, but that doesn’t matter anymore,’” Rigotti explained. Instead she touted the benefits of letting her team take over the time-consuming tactical aspects of social media.

“You share your expertise with me and I’ll make sure we grow the audience for that content,” was her message.

It wasn’t always an easy sell. “People are really rational when they see you’re not abandoning something, but instead bringing things together,” she added.

By the end of the first year, Rigotti’s team had pruned their social media accounts to four platforms, focusing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Rigotti said she is often in the role of traffic cop, tracking down unofficial accounts that still pop up. “It’s a constant effort through education and communication,” she said. But she explains the reason for curbing additional accounts this way:

“We always ask, ‘Can we reach an audience with this account that we can’t reach on our other channels?’”
#4: Content + Connections

The company has a range of audiences, including end users, purchasers and solution partners in each of five priority industries.

“We don’t have specific social media communities for each one of those audiences,” said Rigotti.

So how do they reach more people with fewer social accounts? They think about what ties all these audiences together.

“We asked, ‘What’s the story we can tell that will appeal to as many of these people as possible?‘” Rigotti said.

The message they developed was that the technology you use makes a difference in the way you work. That story is the common thread they use in all their content on all their social media channels.
microsoft linkedin update

Even when talking about products, the focus is on solutions, not features.

For content, Rigotti and her team rely on product and industry specialists, such as manufacturing industry experts who know what that audience cares about. Then they think about how they can socialize that information.

About 30 people contribute content as determined by an editorial calendar. “It’s all about great content and great connections,” Rigotti said.
#5: Evaluating Results

The link between social media and product sales at Microsoft Dynamics is not direct, because end users typically purchase through a solution provider.

To evaluate social media activity, Rigotti said they approach it similarly to PR. The focus is on awareness and engagement.

They use the enterprise social media management program Sprinklr to track metrics such as reach, hashtag use, etc., and NetBreeze, which Microsoft Dynamics acquired in 2013, to track sentiment and mentions.

Though their measurement data is proprietary, Rigotti noted that they are getting great visibility with LinkedIn. Up to 75% of followers are seeing content from their LinkedIn showcase page. That translates to over a million followers getting their updates.

Their main Twitter account was started from scratch in 2012 and has grown to over 13,000 followers to date. Facebook and YouTube followers have grown to 10 times and 8 times their previous numbers, respectively, since mid-2012.
microsoft parature tweet

The Microsoft Dynamics Twitter account, new since 2012, has an engaged follower base.

Rigotti stresses that whatever metrics you evaluate, the most important thing is to be consistent over the long-term. Looking at a snapshot of data or a small sampling of posts won’t tell you much. Pick something to measure and evaluate it over time.

“Even if [the criteria] are not the most accurate, we can measure over time to see progress,” she said.

What do you think? Is your company overextended on social media? Could you benefit by pruning your accounts and focusing on storytelling to your core audience? Include your comments and questions below.

The Rules of Engagement: How Social Media Has Changed the Landscape

Brand awareness and loyalty are critical pieces to the marketing puzzle for every small business. Consistent efforts to engage can result in lead generation, customer retention and long-term growth. However, so often the branding focus gets lost in the mix and companies become online billboards, focused on sending out messages while forgetting about the importance of real, true engagement. Are you doing what it takes, as a small business owner, to reach the right demographics through a system of targeted engagement? Do you have a process or are you throwing things out hoping something catches on?

Social media should play a large role in external branding efforts. It makes sense; chances are high that the public any given small business owner is looking to reach is spending the majority of their online time on multiple social networks. They’re looking for connections, they’re looking for information and they’re looking to engage. Most companies understand this and have started to at least build company social network accounts and pages, but, what about taking it one step farther?

Many larger companies have designed internal and external Enterprise Social Networks or ESNs: networks designed to foster connectivity, communication and knowledge sharing inside a branded community structure. Internal ESNs focus on employee connectivity while external ESNs reach out to targeted publics, a perfect structure for small businesses looking for growth and solid online ROIs. In fact, according to a recent Deloitte study, by the start of 2014, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies will utilize an ESN in one way or another.

The Statistics

It’s become apparent in recent years that targeted engagement is the best way to increase growth.Towers Watson revealed that companies with highly effective communications – like those encouraged by ESNs – demonstrated a 47 percent higher return rate for shareholders over the last five years than those without.

Increasing External Engagement

Chances are that your target markets spend time on social networks. The usage rates can be surprising at first glance: there are over 1 billion Facebook users and 500 million Twitter users, the average online users spends one third of all online time on social networks. Seems like a great way to engage right? But, what about the distractions?

The larger, more traditional social networks were built to connect individuals; businesses were an afterthought. While businesses can and should create accounts to build connections on these sites, the ability to truly engage is limited by distractions. The problem? Because users are exposed to so much information at a time, their attention is spread thin. Even if you get a friend or follower to check out the information you posted, you’re likely to lose them to a friend’s status update, a link to an external site, a photo tag or an advertisement. Social networks are meant to be distracting, this takes the focus away from your company and limits the effectiveness of a social media strategy.

This does not, however, change the desire of your customers and potential customers to engage through social media. Customers want to learn about the brands they do business with. They want to sense that they are seen as important and they want to know that their opinions are heard, recognized and valued, especially by the small businesses they start relationships with. The need for engagement exists in a real and urgent form, but the traditional forms are inherently limited, sometimes even counterintuitive.

Instead of turning into a real lose-lose situation, small business owners can use the paradigm to their advantages. If your potential customers are spending time on social networks, they understand how to communicate effectively through them. They know when they are expected to respond, how to reach out and how to connect. Why not integrate social technologies into your own branded environment?

Social media tools that can be incorporated into customized social communities, or external ESNs, allow brands to set up social networks that are open to the public, allow for instant communication and sharing coupled with relevant, helpful content marketing/blogging. Creating an environment that puts the focus on your small business, without external distractions, using formats that your customers are already familiar with (and can be integrated into traditional social networks) allows for the creation of brand ambassadors who spread your company’s message on their own.

Building a Community of Engagement

Are you ready to take your engagement tactics to the next level? To be a leader among small business owners and your competition by creating an inviting online environment where you can direct the focus? Now is the time to get started.

Look for online blog templates and platforms (Social HubSite, for example) that allow you to upload your company logo and encourage connectivity. To take a more integrated approach, search for a local web designer who would be able to work toward your specific goals.

Create an atmosphere where your customers and potential customers can come to ask questions, learn about specials, gather information related to your industry and to get to know more about the brand you’re building or have built. Engagement fosters connections, connections foster conversions, the link cannot be overlooked. Put effort into marketing your community and consistently give reasons for users to return. Because of the importance of consistency, working with a high quality virtual provider to manage your ESN may be something to look into for long-term success.

Creating a custom ESN is a new yet proven way to shift the branding focus away from the distractions of traditional social media and toward your brand, exactly where you want it to be.

Larger companies have caught on and switched the focus in this way. Sephora's "Beauty Talk" allows fans to gather to discuss trends and to get access to exclusives. Startup Revolution created a networkfor business owners to connect, share ideas and find information easily. Each of these examples allows users to create profiles, like traditional social networks, offering a different experience than a traditional blog.

Branding matters now more than ever, focusing on building internal brand ambassadors may be an important and effective initiative to make this happen. The time to try something new, to think outside of the box and to build a community that functions in a way that allows you to engage your target market like never before, is now.

Marketing on Social Media: Tweeting in 2014

It can be the thing of nightmares for anyone managing a social media account: your Twitter activity has screeched to a halt.  After a few minutes of panic, you have come to realize that it’s all your fault. If you are anything like me, you may start diving head first into books or articles to learn more about marketing on social media, and then feverishly start trying to implement something new.

While it may be hard to look back at your Twitter stats for 2013, with just a few tweaks and a little strategy, you can make a New Year’s resolution to bring your sluggish Twitter account back to life.  Here are some ideas for getting the engagement you’re looking for.

Create and Share Quality Content.It’s great to retweet other user’s quotes, images and articles.  What’s better? Creating your own quotes, images and articles.  Social media users follow brands because they are either seeking deals on a product or information about a topic.  By sharing relevant content that your users find interesting and useful, you will be seen as an industry leader – a trustworthy and reliable source.

Make Like My Toddler and Be Polite.
My 19-month-old tells us thank you all of the time: when we give her something, when we do something for her, when she hands us things, etc.  All. The. Time. I love good manners and such courtesies have a place on Twitter.  Handing out a thank you or responding to a tweet is an easy way to engage with your followers. Another bonus: you look less like one of those automated robot accounts.

Change Up Your Style.
What do your tweets look like? How many characters are you using? Do you include pictures or links? Tweets that are repeatedly too similar in style are going to bore your users to death.  They may even get so bored that they do the dreaded and unfollow you.  What can you do to liven up those tweets?

An easy way to make any tweet more interesting is to add an image.  According to Quicksprout, engagement for tweets with images is 200% higher than those that don’t include images.  If you aren’t using links, that’s another way to increase engagement for your tweets.  There is an 86% retweet rate for tweets with links and 92% of engagement of a brand’s tweets came from link clicks.  Another way is to keep your tweets under 100 characters – easy peasy.

Timing Is Everything
There isn’t much point in posting on Twitter when your followers aren’t even there to see your posts; this will ultimately prevent you from getting the retweets and @mentions you seek.  It’s good practice to know the best posting times and when your followers are most likely online.  There are several tools you can use to track this information, such as Tweriod or Buffer.  There are also lots of handy infographics on the topic, like this one.

A new year is a clean slate and a chance to make things better.  If you experienced a slow-down in your Twitter engagement during the holidays, changing up your method could be all you need to see the results you want.

Great Social Apps to Create and Manage Content

If you're managing the social media network and blog for your business or brand, in addition to other responsibilities—such as running your business—to create engaging content, and to manage it simply and quickly is not an easy task. Especially if you don’t have the technical or artistic know-how.

In my quest for simplicity and versatility in content creation and social media management, I've found some great social apps and tools that help me create great looking content, including promotional material such as contests and surveys. I also have my favorite applications that I use to easily schedule, post and manage across several social media platforms.

Best Social Apps for Content Creation

Pagemodo

I first used Pagemodo to create a free Facebook tab graphic. But the social media platform offers much more. In addition to Facebook cover designs and tabs, Pagemodo also offers social media post scheduling, contest creations, and a post designer. Its simple interface makes it easy to find content to post to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by searching with keywords within the Pagemodo platform. The contest publisher comes with ready-made templates--just fill in the blanks, and upload images. The post designer, in beta stage, offers a plethora of predesigned posts that can be modified, or you can create your own with a library of images, or uploaded photos. You can access analytics of your social posts, and more in-depth Google Analytics with a paid account. A free account gets you one tab and Facebook cover, and limited post scheduling.

Pagemodo's Post Designer comes with predesigned posts, and editing is super easy. Choose photos from the free library of images.

 

Canva

Speaking of Facebook covers, the new kid on the block Canva has a fantastic drag and drop editor to make all sorts of infographics, including Facebook covers, social media cards, blog graphics, invitations, photo collages, postcards, and business cards. It's super easy to use, and they offer a huge library of photos for purchase at $1 each. Right now Canva is in beta stage, and you have to request to be on a waiting list, or have a friend refer you. I was able to open an account just a few days after requesting one.

With Canva, you can choose from tons of ready-made layouts, drag and drop images from its library or upload your own, and modify text to create great looking graphics. Download the finished product to upload to your social pages or blog.

 

Shortstack

A daunting task for many might be creating promotions and applications for Facebook. Shortstack is a great alternative to paying for a developer, and makes the process as easy as one, two, three. You can create promotions, surveys, contests and other campaigns with its easy-to-use templates. Applications can integrate with MailChimp to capture subscribers emails, as well as with other platforms, including Google Analytics, RSS, Twitter and more. You can use it for free, or pay for more options.

Best Apps for Post Scheduling and Management

Buffer

Buffer is one of my favorite social media message scheduling and sharing applications. Install the extension on your browser, and with one click you can share content and schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. With Chrome, you can share posts directly from Facebook news feeds. It’s free, but with a minimum number of days you can schedule ahead of time, and you can only connect up to four social media profiles. However, for only $10 a month, you can schedule as many posts as you want, use up to 12 social profiles, and have two team members assigned to manage an account.

If you use Chrome, install the Buffer extension to share posts directly from Facebook.

Bitly

It's better to have shortened links when posting and sharing stuff so it looks better. It also gives more space for your Twitter messages. This handy application will shorten those unsightly, long links to external pages and sites that you want to share. It is also useful for tracking clicks, and bookmarking your favorite sites and pages. Bitly's link shortener can be used across multiple platforms, including Buffer. Best of all, it's free!

SproutSocial

Last, but not least, is my newest favorite, SproutSocial. The social media management platform is not perfect, but it offers almost everything I need to manage, post, monitor and analyze social media accounts from one place.  I can search for content within its Feedly integration, schedule posts, reply to messages and comments on Facebook and Twitter, and monitor all messages across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn personal profiles from one place. If they could add YouTube and LinkedIn business pages to the mix, it would be almost perfect. The platform also provides pretty looking social media analytic reports, but it does need to upgrade its Google Analytics integration--right now the metrics it imports are pretty skimpy. But of all the social media management tools out there, I find it to be one of the most comprehensive.

Tips for Building Loyal Brand Advocates

Consumers are influential. They have the power to influence their peers to buy or not buy your products – both offline and online. How is this determined? Based off their experiences with your brand. Creating a brand advocacy program can help you take steps towards turning your customers into advocates. Here are some tips to help you get started:

Know Your Content

Before you decide on what you say to your advocates, you should know the story you’re trying to tell. It’s important to determine your tone of voice, narrative, platform and even your content creation process. Understanding the process of content ideation, creation, approvals and distribution can be demanding – which is why it’s important to create a structure. The combination of everything outlined above will allow your advocates to help you tell your brand story.

Appreciate and Thank Often

At the core of building brand loyalty is rewarding and thanking users for their activity and engagement. Taking the time to say thank you forms a positive reciprocal relationship between you and the consumer, and brands that take advantage of this early on can create loyal advocates. If someone is taking the time to support your brand, you should ask yourself how can you say thank you?

Evangelize internally

In an earlier post I shared the importance of embracing employees as brand advocates. Employees continue to be one of the most under-leveraged resources for many brands. From experience, I’ve found that this is often caused by departments being siloed, which creates a lack of communication. Building a successful brand loyalty and advocacy program includes a company-wide initiative. You should ask yourself, if your employees won’t buy your product, then why should anyone else?

Listen and Learn

If there is anything word of mouth marketing has taught us, it’s that customers want to be heard, and not only that, they want to make sure you’re actually listening. Advocates are not only keen on sharing experiences about your product or services, they can also provide insights and suggestions. If you’re listening but not doing anything with consumer feedback, you’ll build brand critics, not brand advocates. The importance here is engaging and adding value for your customers. In turn, they will appreciate your efforts and recommend you to others.

Are there other tips I’ve missed? Share them in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Jenni Rodger

New Facebook Marketing Research Shows What Works

Are you wondering what works with Facebook and what’s a waste of time?

Do hashtags make a difference?

What about sponsored stories?

There’s recently been ton of research to understand howFacebook marketing is helping (or hurting) businesses.

Here are five noteworthy Facebook findings we uncovered from the latest published research.

#1: 78% of U.S. Facebook Users Are Mobile

Facebook is at the center of a sizable shift to mobile. In the U.S. alone, 78% of all Facebook users (just shy of 100 million people) logged into their Facebook accounts via mobile this year (TechCrunch).

Research from eMarketer predicts that this number will continue to grow and by 2017,154.7 million Americans will be using Facebook on their mobile devices.

The future of Facebook is in mobile.

Key Takeaways:

Mobile and social go hand in hand. If your target audience is in the U.S., you should follow Facebook’s lead and adapt a mobile-first strategy. Here are a few tips tooptimize your Facebook page for mobile users:

• Take a look at your Facebook page on your mobile device to see what others are seeing (Public view, not Admin view).
• Since the mobile experience doesn’t show your complete timeline, highlight your best content with a pinned post.
• Photos are the best-performing post types on Facebook, so be sure to add colorful, interesting images to all your posts, offers and ads.
• If you have a local business, encourage customers to check in on Facebook at your location (more on that later!). Mobile searchers tend to make local buying decisions (e.g., where to eat, where to shop, etc.). Recommendations and check-ins from mobile users’ friends appear first on their mobile devices, making it a fantastic tool for word-of-mouth marketing.

#2: Paid Ads Improve Reach and Post Performance

According to the 2013 Social Rich Media Benchmark Report (ShopIgniter), promoting your Facebook posts with a paid ad increases organic and viral reach significantly but reduces click-throughs.

This is true for all post types (video, offers, photos, links and questions) except status updates. In the case of status updates, unpaid posts have a much higher reach than paid posts.

Promoting Facebook posts with paid ads increases reach but reduces CTR.

Key Takeaways:

Paid ads make a big difference on Facebook—at least in terms of reach and impressions. But before you start investing in Facebook ads, think about your target audience, focus on your marketing goals and understand how different post types perform when they’re promoted with ads.

Paid ads are used for promotional content, which by default draws less engagement than non-promotional content. If you’re more interested in driving brand awareness or increasing your customer base, then by all means use paid ads because of their viral nature.

But if you’re trying to build your email list (you’ll need folks to click through to a landing page), then paying to promote the post might be a waste of cash, according to the research. And don’t forget, whenever you want people to click, give them lots of images!

#3: Negative Feedback Hurts Conversion

Facebook doesn’t have a Dislike button. However, users can show their aversion toward your content by hiding it from their news feed.

More research from ShopIgniter shows that negative feedback—which includes the following actions by users: Hide Post, Hide All Posts, Report as Spam, Unlike Page—increases (hurts conversion) the more you add paid media to your posts.

Negative feedback increases as paid ads are applied to most post types.

The chart shows the negative feedback rate for paid and organic Facebook posts. Longer bars are bad as they indicate higher negative feedback.

Key Takeaways:

• For most post types except links, negative feedback increases when paid ads are used.
• As far as paid posts go, notes are most disliked (hardly anyone uses them anyway), followed by video.
• Although photos are popular on Facebook, not all photos are created equal. As a marketer, you should know exactly what your audience’s preferences areby posting photos they will enjoy, like and share. If you’re not sure, do some A/B split tests with various images to find out.
• The ‘Question’ is king—You can’t go wrong with asking questions on Facebook. At best you’ll get lots of responses, and at the very worst you’ll get little or no negative feedback.
• Surprisingly, Facebook Offers generate less negative feedback than links! That’s because everyone likes a good deal, even if it ‘interrupts’ your news feed through an ad.
• The best thing to do is mix up your posts. Try both paid and unpaid versions of the same post type. At the end of the day, only your Page Insights can tell you what will work for you and what will not.

#4: Facebook Hashtags Are NOT Working

According to EdgeRank Checker, Facebook hashtags have done nothing to help with additional exposure for your brand. In fact the opposite is true.

The research indicates that posts with hashtags are not only less likely to go viral, but also make people less likely to engage with the content.

Facebook hashtags could actually be hurting, not helping, your brand.

Key Takeaways:

EdgeRank doesn’t tell us why Facebook hashtags are failing. We only know that people are not clicking them. Here are some possibilities:

First, for a lot of people, hashtags feel out of place on Facebook. There’s even a Facebook page called “This is not Twitter. Hashtags don’t work here” where 15,000 fans are making a strong case that what works on one platform doesn’t necessarily work on another. They argue that hashtags on Facebook “interrupt the flow of communication and people tend to abuse them.”

Second is perception. Before the official launch of hashtags in June of this year, people or brands who used hashtags on Facebook were perceived to be clueless. Other users figured they didn’t understand how to use Facebook. There have also been complaints that status updates with hashtags are nothing more than automated posts created by lazy marketers on Twitter.

So based on the research, if you want your fans and their friends to share yourFacebook posts, you may want to avoid using hashtags or at least do a lot of your own testing to see if they’re helping or hurting your brand.

#5: And the Highest CTR Goes to… Sponsored Check-in Stories!

Sponsored check-in stories, where users are shown an ad in their news feed for a place they previously checked in, received by far the highest click-through rate (CTR) among all ad types and sponsored stories.

The Facebook Ads Benchmark Report (Salesforce) shows that at 3.2%, this CTR is even higher than sponsored like stories, which are very popular with marketers.

Average CTR of sponsored check-in stories trumps all other ad types.

Key Takeaways:

Sponsored check-in stories are used to reach your fans’ friends on their news feed. High CTRs could be indicative of peer influence. When a Facebook user sees (on her news feed) that her friend has checked into a particular store, she’ll be curious to learn more about that location and will probably click through for more information.

As the owner of that business, you want to encourage more people to take the same action, so you’ll pay to highlight the original action of checking in.

So if you’re thinking about building a local fan base, engaging and rewarding customers, or reaching your customers’ friends, why not design a campaign around the check-in stories that your customers are generating? Fair warning—sponsored check-in stories are very expensive (in terms of cost per impression or CPM), but the investment could be worth it if more customers come to your store and buy your products. It’s something to think about!

Your Turn

What do you think? Which of these trends or insights do you agree or disagree with? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.

Selling With Social Media: A New Direction for Businesses

Do you use social media to grow your business?

Are you wondering how social media can help yousell more products and services?

To learn about why you need to rethink the sales process in this social age, I interview Tom Martin for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Tom Martin, author of The Invisible Sale: How to Build a Digitally Powered Marketing and Sales System to Better Prospect, Qualify and Close Leads. His agency is Converse Digital.

Tom shares the concept of painless prospecting and propinquity.

You’ll learn how to succeed in the changing social media sales landscape, and how your business can embrace these new strategies.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:
Selling With Social Media

How the online world has changed the way businesses sell

Tom believes it’s more about how buyers buy than the way businesses sell. With the Internet, people can hide behind the anonymity of Google search.


You can do all your pre-purchase research without having to talk to a salesperson. You only have to talk to a person once you’ve made a short list of companies you are interested in and want to close the deal.


Buyers use Google search for pre-purchase research.

Today’s buyer prefers this process, as it’s easier and more efficient. With this in mind, companies have to adjust.

In the early days, the power was with the salesperson, but with the knowledge available online today, the power is in the hands of the consumer.

Tom says as a business, you have to stop thinking about how you sell because you don’t really sell anymore. Instead you help buyers make a buying decision. When they make their decision, hopefully it will be in your favor. Although it won’t always be the case.

You’ll discover how your system needs to be set up properly and the approach you need to consider.

If you have a really good product or service, more often than not, you will win the conversion. Most people are turned off by people selling to them. The best way is to show them that you’re willing to help and that you always have their best interests at heart.

Listen to the show to find out more about how the approach to sales has changed.

An example of a business that has embraced new ways to sell

Tom talks about a camera store called Adorama based in New York that he used as a case study in his book, The Invisible Sale. Adorama only has one store, but does business in all 50 US states and 5 countries.


The camera store Adorama is used as a case study in The Invisible Sale.

Adorama has two sides to their business, B2C and B2B. Regardless of which side you look at, they approach it the same way. Their philosophy is to sell by sharing original educational content.

Even though it’s a photography store, they sell more than just cameras. They’ve built a Learning Center that includes Adorama TV, which is one of their huge content pieces. The Learning Center is a treasure trove of educational content.


There is everything from learning how to shoot a photo to discovering the best equipment.

Although their approach is to educate, when you watch one of their videos, you’ll notice easy-to-follow links to products below the video. You’ll find out how they used YouTube to allow people to reach that product.


All products mentioned throughout Adorama's videos are linked below the video for easy access.

In 2010, they saw a general growth curve, mainly due to the educational content they provide.

The moral of the lesson is that if you can make your buyer smarter and betterbecause they are doing business with you, then Tom believes you will succeed in selling more to that buyer.

Listen to the show to hear why Tom relates it to fly-fishing and how it’s the same with modern content marketing.

What is a social agent and why is it important?

Tom describes a social agent as someone who doesn’t necessarily buy from you, but recommends you to a friend or colleague who might buy from you. A lot of the time, social agents can be your most valuable customers that you never do business with. They’re the best customers you’ll have.

You need to draw in your social agents through educational pieces. A relationship is formed with your brand or company when they see value in what you are doing.

You’ll learn how Tom became a huge social agent for Adorama.

Listen to the show to find out the importance of empowering everyone to be a social agent for your company.

In The Invisible Sale, you reveal a process that helps people sell without cold-calling and advertising. Can you explain the process?

Tom calls the process “painless prospecting.” The concept is a spin on inbound marketing. The core difference is that most content and inbound strategies leverage search and keyword optimization.

As more and more businesses discover and deploy keyword optimization and SEO strategies, Tom believes that only so many will win the battle. It’s going to get more competitive and much more difficult.

Whereas painless prospecting is built on the concept of propinquity.

Propinquity is a scientific theory that powers the formation of relationships. It says that if you bump into someone a lot, the higher the likelihood of you touching them more often, reading their content or meeting them in person, the more likely you are to like that person, providing you like them each time you meet.


You need to build your business on the concept of propinquity.

Tom’s painless prospecting philosophy is that you don’t walk away from SEO, but do get off your own blog. You need to think and care more about putting great content on other people’s blogs. Tom advises you to treat every blog as your own. When you put content in these places, they are called Propinquity Points.

You’ll learn how to develop a strategy for this to make sure you stay top of mind.

Tom shares a quick overview of where you can find places to provide content, but there is a whole chapter (Building a Painless Prospecting Platform) in his book where the process is laid out.


Check out the chapter on Building a Painless Prospecting Platform.

If you pay attention to your industry or your prospects’ industry, you can usually sit down and list all the places that your prospective customers congregate online and offline. You’ll learn where these places might be. If you know your industry well enough, you will already know of 7-10 places without thinking. This is your first list.

You’ll discover how social listening software such as Radian6 or Sysomos can be beneficial to finding propinquity points for you.


Sysomos can help you find propinquity points for your business.

Once you find these points, you can create more opportunities for people to stumble across you and your brand. It’s a great way to get a good positive impression.

When you get off your own blog, your buyer doesn’t have to be in active research mode to stumble upon you. They might then click through to your blog and possibly sign up to read it. You’ll learn what can happen if you only stay on your own blog.


You could have people sign up to your blog who weren't in active research mode.

You’ll discover why you do your best content work when you write for someone else.

Tom advises you to write 4 or 5 posts for other blogs, staged over a 2-week period and keep an eye on your Google Analytics to see what happens. You’ll notice that youdrive more traffic back to your site.

The more you write for these larger audiences, the bigger your chance of people coming over to your site to check out your content. For every 100 people who read your content somewhere else, around 5% will convert to signups. This is how to build propinquity at a blog base.

Tom is convinced that the way to win today is to get out there and treat yourself like a media empire.

Listen to the show to learn about the invisible component in Tom’s book title.

What marketers should avoid when using content to try to get a sale

Tom says there are two things marketers should avoid. Most people produce content at the wrong level. It’s normally the same single unit of content across their blog and podcast. So most feel that one blog post a week is enough without writing for others.

First you have to think about content creation as an ecosystem. You should never create one piece of content once. You should look for ways to repurpose it or even rechannel it.


Make sure you repurpose your blog content.

You’ll learn about the ways you can turn one piece of content into more content.

Secondly, Tom states that there is a belief, especially among inbounders, that every piece of content needs to have a call to action. Although research proves calls to action get more conversions, Tom doesn’t really believe it. He feels there is still value in pure education.

You need to go out and educate your buyer. Don’t ask or expect anything in return. Tom states that most buyers know how to buy; you shouldn’t need to rely on a call to action for them to have enough confidence to contact you.

Listen to the show to find out why your content should always be of value.
This Week’s Social Media Question

Debra Keirce, a professional artist, asks, “As an artist, sometimes it will take years between contacting potential collectors and receiving a commission or a purchase. Are there specific social media tools that can be used to help develop, encourage and maintain these long-term relationships, so that the leads don’t go cold and people will recommend you to their friends, when at times they are not necessarily looking to buy themselves?”


DebKArt.

This is a great question on how to keep top of mind with prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

The first thing I would recommend is to make sure you listen to this particular podcast for some great ideas. Here are a few examples of what you could do with your business.
Create time-lapse videos that showcase your processes
Create educational pieces
Become the conduit to prospects

When you put yourself in the position of the resource person rather than the salesperson, every time you communicate with prospects, it’s a way to stay top of mind. If, and when, they are ready to buy, they are more likely to come back to you or pass your details on to another prospect. You need to have regular touch points.

You’ll hear an example of what I received from people in the voice talent industry when I was a prospect and how my realtor markets his business using social media.

I hope you find this helpful.

Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.
Other Show Mentions

Social Media Success Summit 2013

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a special online conference designed to help you master social media marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner).


Social Media Success Summit 2013.

Forty-five of the world’s leading social media pros will show you how. Instructors include Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Chris Brogan (co-author, Impact Equation),Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Mark Schaefer (author, Return on Influence), Jesse Stay (author,Google+ for Dummies), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies) and experts from General Electric, Sony, E! Online, Kelly Servicesand Discovery Channel–just to mention a few. Fully online. Click here to learn more.

We have finalized our brand panels and here are a few killer ones.
Instagram panel with Sony and E! Online
Online video panel with Discovery Communications and Salesforce
Pinterest marketing with Whole Foods and Target
Twitter marketing with GE and American Express
Facebook marketing with Walmart and NASA

We’ve got some incredible brands that will share what they do with social media. This is just a sample. There is an enormous amount of how-to content.

It’s an online conference, which means you don’t need to travel anywhere. It’s spread over an entire month and it’s live. If you want to learn more about it, be sure to check it out.
Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:
Connect with Tom Martin on his website.
Read The Invisible Sale.
Check out Adorama and Adorama TV to see how they link their products.
Read more about propinquity and Propinquity Points.
Use HubSpot or Marketo to help build a dossier on a person.
Try Radian6 or Sysomos to discover your propinquity points.
Check out Copyblogger‘s content.
Use Google Analytics to keep track of your traffic.
Head over to DebKArt.
Learn more about Social Media Success Summit 2013.


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What do you think? What are your thoughts on selling with social media?Please leave your comments below.