Category Archives: Social Media

5 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

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There are numerous social media analysis tools on the market. Radian 6 seems to have cornered the market at the moment but there are similar products from Alterian, Meltwater and a host of other companies all offering similar features. They do generally come with a hefty price tag, though, normally involving a recurring annual licence fee.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are tools available that have similar functionality to the big players but are free to use. Granted the interfaces aren’t as elegant and a lot of the cool functionality is missing. But if you need a quick and dirty answer to you social media monitoring needs why not try these out… Continue reading →

Measuring The Results Of A Social Media Campaign

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Over my last few posts I’ve explained how to plan and run a social media campaign. In this post I will cover the final stage of the campaign – measuring the results. As an agency you will be expected to provide your client with a return on their investment, and if you are running the campaign in-house you will be expected to show similar results to senior management.

results against KPIs

You will have determined the KPIs in the campaign planning stage. Now each month you should measure your results against those KPIs to ascertain how successfully the campaign is in reaching the set targets. For example, a KPI might be to increase the traffic to a website by 10% in 6 months. Monitor the traffic to a website, calculate the percentage increase (or decrease) and report back to the client.

monthly metrics

As well as providing clients with results that match their KPIs you should also provide the following statistics where possible on a monthly basis:

  • Number of fans, followers, subscribers etc.
  • Number of video or content views
  • Volume of user comments posted to a blog, profile or posted content
  • Retweets or peer-sharing statistics for related content and posts
  • Comment or retweet resonation (number of user comments multiplied by how many followers or friends each user has)
  • Company website traffic statistics (where you have has access)

These statistics can usually be found in the dashboards of the social media channels you are using. Alternatively freely available tools such as Hootsuite can provide you with them.

ROI

The direct ROI will usually be measured by the client rather than their agency since it will involve them comparing things such as revenue gained from social media channels against revenue from other channels. Generally they will not want to share this type of information.

conclusion

Measuring the results of a campaign not only shows whether it is a success or not but can also indicate which specific channels are more effective. With this information you can either abandon less successful activity or change it. Likewise if a particular social network is producing outstanding results you can ramp up your activity in it.

Recruitment Of Social Media Followers

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My last post explained how, as an agency, you can set up social media channels for your client. This post refers to the recruitment of fans and followers for those channels.

By now you will have a campaign strategy, you know where your target audience can be found online and you’ve activated channels to reach them. Now you want to get people following your client. There will be plenty of potential followers but you should begin by seeking out the most high-quality ones.These can be defined as thought leaders within the client’s sector who are active in social media channels and have a sizeable following already.

I’ve categorised them into four groups:

  • key bloggers
  • Twitter influencers
  • Facebook Group moderators
  • website and forum owners

I’ll explain how to find them, contact them and give advice on recruiting them below. Continue reading →

Setting Up And Using Social Media Channels

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Expanding on my last post which concerned the development of a coherent strategy for social media campaigns, this post will address the setting up and use of social media channels.

It is not my intention to discuss technical issues, instead I will explain how the channels can be used tactically as part of the overall strategy. It is written from the view of a specialist digital or PR agency who will be providing social media marketing services for their client. Continue reading →

Creating A Social Media Strategy

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My last post covered the effective planning of a social media campaign. This next phase of the campaign sees the results of the research being used to inform a social media strategy.

Without a strategy untargeted messages will be posted in channels where the intended audience might not be active. It ensures that there is a common tone of voice used across all the social networks pertinent to the campaign, and that any content posted is relevant. Finally, it determines the results that will measure whether the campaign has been a success or not.

The key stages of strategy development are: monitoring, theme development, channel selection, content planning, setting KPIs and defining the engagement policy. These stages are described below.

Continue reading →

Planning A Social Media Campaign

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Social media continues to sweep through the marketing departments of businesses large and small. Eager marketers are commissioning digital and PR agencies to build Facebook apps, Twitter pages and blogs, and then populating them with a seemingly random range of comments and promotional messages that so often fail to have the impact expected.

If you are developing a social media campaign for your client it is crucial that it is well planned before a single status message, tweet or video is uploaded. This ensures that the stakeholders’ expectations are managed and that the scope of the project doesn’t creep beyond its original scale and budget.

The campaign planning stages are described below. Continue reading →

Using Web Widgets For Brand Building

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Also known as a badge, app or gadget, a web widget is a small standalone application that is typically created in DHTML, JavaScript or Flash and installed on a webpage by a site owner. Although the widget displays on the page, it resides on its developer’s web server, being referenced when the page loads.

Examples of simple widgets are stock tickers, clocks and calendars. But widgets can be far more complex, using the various rich media functions of JavaScript and Flash to perform as mini applications in their own right.

In social media, people use widgets to enhance their personal pages and add them to blogs, profiles and community pages.

Because the functionality and design are completely controlled by their owners, widgets can be branded and contain embedded links that click through to specific web pages. And being free of charge, easily installed by pasting a few lines of code into a page, and lightweight, widgets offer an opportunity for brands to create something that can be shared.

Branded widgets should reflect the business that built them. The Expedia widget, for example, acts as a search tool that will take users to holiday and hotel offers on the main Expedia website. The Apple widget displays product reviews and downloads.

By developing a useful, engaging widget you create a mechanism for your audience to promote your business at a relatively low cost. Potentially a widget could spread virally across the web, being passed from user to user, and the more websites your widget is on the more people are seeing your brand without ever visiting your own site.

How Financial Services Can Use Social Media

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As we are all aware, social media has radically altered the way businesses can market to their customer base. Some brands like Pringles and Skittles have been able to create a fan base that happily interacts with their various social media activities, but these tend to be in the FMCG sector where entertaining, shareable campaigns are more easily accepted by their customers. What about more “serious” sectors, how can they use social media to reach out to an audience?

This post presents findings I’ve discovered specifically about the issues facing financial services organisations with regard to social media marketing and offers some  recommendations for how they can improve their activity. Continue reading →

8 Ways You Can Use Virtual Worlds For Business

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I live in Birmingham whose famous sons include Ozzy Osbourne, Joseph Priestly, Edward Burne-Jones and J.R.R. Tolkein. Tolkein of course was famous for his tales of Middle Earth, that fantasy land populated by trolls, elves and dwarves. That got me thinking about virtual worlds and their place in business.

Generally virtual worlds aren’t particularly popular for business. If marketing managers are aware of them, they tend to regard them as games or gimmicks. According to research carried out by Forrester in 2009, only 11% of companies are using virtual worlds in any kind of business activity.

However there are examples of virtual worlds being used seriously for marketing. Computer networking firm Cisco used Second Life, probably the most well known virtual world, to save over $100,000 when they launched a new server.

what is a virtual world?

A virtual world is a three-dimensional, web-based simulation of the real world (though usually with a few sci-fi elements, such as teleporting thrown in). Its population is made up of graphic depictions of its users, called avatars (the Sanksrit term for an incarnate god!). Avatars aren’t necessarily true likenesses of the individuals they represent; your avatar could be a man, woman, creature or object.

Although a virtual world might look like a game, it’s not. You don’t compete against other players and there is no particular goal that would make you a winner. The purpose of the virtual world is to interact with other users and form relationships as you would in real life.

So how exactly can companies use virtual worlds to promote their products and services to customers? Read on to see my top 8 business uses for virtual worlds. Continue reading →

Should Your Blog Be Integrated With Your Website?

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Should your blog be integrated with your website or have a life of its own in the blogosphere? There is no right or wrong answer, it depends on your strategy. Here are the pro’s and con’s to help you decide:

The pro’s

  1. Content, as we all know, is good for SEO. Google likes sites that are periodically updated because they have lots of content related to the same cluster of keyword phrases that your target readers search for.
  2. A content-rich website is good for the “Long Tail” – rather than focusing all your efforts on the most popular words and just a few pages, concentrate on making lots of pages serve different keywords niches. There is less competition and you’ll appear more often in Google’s SERPs.
  3.  You might convert your readers into loyal customers because you will have gained their trust as a thought leader.
  4. The more content you have on your website, the longer your visitors are likely to stay which can lead to higher conversion rates.
  5. If you decide to go for a stand-alone blog, you might upset your readers if they follow your blog and they realise that it’s linking to your website. This won’t happen here.

The con’s

  1. People tend to trust corporate blogs less than independent blogs – social sharing will be more difficult.
  2. Because writing a coherent blog that supports the company’s goals is very time-consuming, the blog could fall in the hands off someone who has time on his hands but doesn’t have much to say and thus affect the reputation of the company.
  3. Similarly, because independent blogs are seen as being non-commercial, they tend to receive more user comments which is good for customer insight.
  4. You cannot use another domain name that contains the keywords you’re targeting and that’s unfortunate since the URL and page title are the most important SEO ranking factors.