Several months have passed since Facebook introduced Graph Search, making a major footprint into the Google-dominated search world. Now, consumers can find what they need based on what their friends enjoy and recommend, and easily form connections with people who have mutual interests.
Not surprisingly, Graph Search was on the minds of search and marketing experts at the SES Conference in New York City at the end of March. Glenn Gabe, Digital Marketing Consultant at G-Squared, and Clayburn Griffin, Organic Search Director at GroupM, shared insights on how Facebook’s new search tool will impact brand and consumer interactions as well as page ranking. Both speakers made it clear that among the many search-ranking factors, the quality of Facebook Fans—people who value the brand’s updates and actively engage with its content—will greatly impact a page’s ranking. To succeed, organizations need to fully integrate themselves into the Facebook community by publishing consumer-centric content that motivates engagement. (read more…)
Twitter is a powerful presence in the world of social media. But the network that built its popularity around 140-character tweets is still having trouble figuring out how to make users stick around. Social media users spend considerably more time on Facebook than they do on Twitter. Even other social sites such as Tumblr have a greater stickiness factor than Twitter. Now Twitter is hoping that the addition of its new #Music feature is going to change all that.
Twitter #Music: A new spin on an old song
While there are other free, customizable music services — such as Pandora, Slacker Radio and Spotify — that let you create playlists or “radio stations” based on your tastes, Twitter’s service comes with a social twist that could enhance the experience.
Tell Twitter which singers you want to follow and you can see who they follow. You can also listen to tracks of your own choosing or access the Twitter charts of 140 most popular songs or the list of emerging talent. (read more…)
Facebook launched Timeline in February 2012 and ever since, Facebook has had strict rules for business pages and their cover photos. The photos couldn’t contain calls to action, price or purchase information, contact information or references to Facebook features. You were limited to posting just picture — so you had better be creative.
Well, times have changed and now business owners can (almost) forget those rules. Facebook relaxed their cover photo guidelines recently. The only rule left standing is that your text cannot take up more than 20% of the cover photo space. This is great news for page admins who are eager to leverage cover photos to their full potential.
Six ways businesses can take advantage of the new cover photo rules
1. Ask your fans to “like” you.
It seems simple, but up until recently a call to action like this was forbidden on cover photos. Take this opportunity to be straightforward with your fans and give them the most direct call to action out there: “Like us!”
We recommend packaging your request around a human face and using an obvious arrow or line to point toward the “like” button on your page. (read more…)
As users and marketers are maturing in the use of social media, platform providers are also entering a new stage in their life cycles. Here are three social media trends that will shape the social media world as we know it. Taken together, these three big ideas will lead more and more marketers to embrace Google+.
Maturity
For many social media marketers, the effects of “shiny object syndrome” have worn off when it comes to social media. They now realize that social media is just another tool in their tool kit.
They’ve also realized that social is not free. Many users are starting to flock to marketing automation and CRM systems to help them measure the effects of their social media activity. This can be difficult for those using social media for business, especially at large companies with multiple systems and at small companies with limited budgets. Many are struggling to keep up with this sophisticated new marketing reality, even as new innovations such as mobile marketing keep everyone on their toes. (read more…)
When you are confronted by the challenge of managing your organization’s social presence, it’s natural to first think, “What are the features, functionality and user experience that I value most?” We’re all familiar with HootSuite, TweetDeck and other tools that are consumer or SMB-focused. We bring our frame of reference and biases to the process.
Now, if you are responsible for the social presence of a small organization, have a small social team (with no plans of growing), don’t have many social accounts on many channels or don’t get much volume in the way of social messages, those tools will make sense for you.
At scale, however, the picture is quite different. What works well on a small basis will oftentimes fail miserably when numbers grow by an order of magnitude.
How scale changes priorities and requirements
Before we jump in, perhaps an example will help illustrate my point.
Let’s say you have three bricks and you need to move them across town. (read more…)
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