How investing in social media creates profit for companies

The time has come; social media is here to stay, and those who don't jump aboard will get left behind. At least, that's the forecast from bloggers web-wide. At this stage of the day, social media appears to be more must-do than should-have. This is a daunting concept for some businesses, who have resisted the tide of hashtags and likes, and are keen pass social media off as just another fad. Sadly for them, social media has got quite a grip on the modern world, and it's unlikely it will budge any time soon. The virtual world is continuing to grow, leaving in its wake a tide of new jobs, marketing strategies and communication tools. Social media is the future of marketing and promotion, proving itself as an essential tool for any company. At this point in time, it's not enough to just be on social media, you really have to understand how it works, and use this to create profit for your company.

If you're still sceptical, let's have a quick look at some of the reasons why your business can benefit from investing in social media:

Exposure - Over 80% of online marketing firms report that social interaction between customers and businesses is the key to social media networking. Through digital word-of-mouth marketing, you are bound to boost your brand awareness

Reputation Management - Social media allows you to see what your customers are competitors are saying about you in real-time. This is a huge advantage, enabling you to fix any issues that may pop up, show the human side to your business and avoid any bad hype. 

Branding - Social media can help you to generate a recognisable identity and build up a larger consumer base at the same time.

Monitor - A stable online presence enables you to track engagement and view your progress year-on-year. 

Given the rapid growth of social media over the last few years, it can seem an impossible task to undertake. More importantly, time is money, and it's hard to know where to invest such a valuable resource. 

It's key to understand your brand, and to understand your audience. After that, you can explore different social media platforms and decide which suit your brand best. It's important to understand what platforms work best for your company/brand, and to act appropriately from there.

Nowadays, it's not just about utilising Facebook, Twitter or Google +. For instant feedback, or to trial marketing and test products, these platforms are a great way to reach a wider audience. On top of that, you can expect instantaneous feedback from your followers. 

If you're looking for a platform to advertise and sell products, an image-centric network would be an appropriate choice. Visual content is set to be the big thing of 2014, and are great for driving traffic directly to your website and selling products. Such platforms also have a good success rate for niche markets, enabling business to display images of their products. A network like Pinterest make it easy for users to create wish-lists of products or get gift ideas.

As much as these big names should be integrated into your social media strategy, the smaller niche market should not be overlooked. With social media platforms popping up for everything from wine to trading, there are so many great ways to interact directly with your target audience. You need to ask yourself what platforms your targeted audience use, and set up an online presence there.

Once you have established yourself on your chosen social media platforms, it is essential to learn how to use them well. You shouldn't just jump into doing it all at once; build-up your accounts gradually, interacting with your consumers and learning how to use the platform fully. That way, you can really build a connection with your target audience, and monitor the profit this will bring for your company.

A few success stories, should you not already be persuaded:

Groupon

Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website, which features local and national coupons. It shows you money-off offers for everything from hotels to restaurants and services. It started in the USA, and is now worldwide.

Groupon have a well-established online presence, connecting with fans across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even niche websites like studentbeans.com. They have become so big now that they even feature their own holiday during the holiday season, "Grouponicus", offering holiday deals and shopping tips.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day

                                                               Source: vivacommunications.com.au

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day is a global campaign that "aims to raise awareness about the importance of good food and better food education for everyone by focusing on three simple actions – cook it, share it, live it." The campaign managed to reach 74 countries thanks to social media, allowing the project's community and supporter base to grow.

The campaign had a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but also engaged with users on other charity websites like Food Day, the Edible Schoolyard Project and Just Food. This enabled them to engage with more users within their target audience.

Graze

Graze is a company that offers healthy snacks (nuts, fruits, flapjacks and so much more) in a letterbox-sized box directly to your desk or door. They offer freebies as an incentive for consumers to start using the product, and then offer them money off with a unique promotional code if they recommend the product to friends and family.

What's more, in each box they give their customers referral cards, containing a unique code, so that they will pass them on. The company has a huge Facebook and Twitter presence, and any current customer can post their code to their wall or feed. Each time their code gets used, they get £1 off another box of goodies.

The product itself is flexible; consumers can tell the company what snacks they like or dislike, love or want to be sent soon. They can delay boxes, if money is an issue, or if they are going on holiday. This makes the consumer feel in control, and will make them keen to continue using the product.

The combination of online/offline promotion, empowered, happy customers and a great social media presence has led to viral word-of-mouth marketing, enabling the company to grow exponentially.

by Charlotte Callaghan

Source: http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/02/social-media-news-how-investing-in.html#.U7ttkLHm7JV

Read More

Reasons Why Social Media Listening Is Important For Your Online Marketing Campaign

The advent of social media has radically transformed the way brands market their products and services. The business owners have become increasingly aware about the importance of using the social networking platform to reach out to the wider audience base and tap new customers. Furthermore, the brands are also becoming more aware about the importance of listening to know how their brand is being perceived in the online world by the customers.

 
The inability or incapacity of the brand owners in controlling what is being said about their brand online and their products make its crucial for all businesses to keep a close tab on all the social networking channels to ensure that the mentions are dealt with appropriately and in a time manner. From the online marketing campaign perspective, the business experts consider social media as the most amazing platform to communicate with the target audience at a personal level. Apart from personalized communication there are several other reasons why social media listening is important for online marketing campaigns, which are discussed below,

The key to success of any online marketing campaign is the attitude of the target audience towards your brand or organization. Today, since people spend a significant amount of time online even a single negative comment can affect the reputation of your business and your campaign. In such circumstances, social media monitoring can come in handy to tackle to reputation issues better before it turns out to be a major crisis.

While planning online marketing campaign, you need to monitor social networking sites at different stages including the initial market research. It is crucial to determine the overall sentiment of your target audience. You also need to monitor social networking channels while carrying out competitor analysis. This would help you have valuable insight about how customers are reacting to your competitor's product and know how it would affect your business.

As a business owner while you are running any online marketing campaign you need to be constantly on your toes to monitor the mentions on the S M platforms. Since the customers can post and share their comments with people in their network, the negative feedback can become viral faster than you can imagine. Social media listening would help you avoid this situation and tackle the issue at its roots.

Social media monitoring can greatly help in the evaluation of success of your campaign by analyzing the key aspects like sentiment, location and preference. This in turn, would help you in creating better strategy for your future campaigns.

Last but not the least social media listening is a wonderful way to use the negative comments or feedback for creating positive publicity. Business owners are well aware of the fact that it is impossible for them to please everybody. Hence, they work smartly by responding to the comments in quick time and providing them the right information and tools and thereby reflecting their proficient customer service and their dedication for complete customer satisfaction.

Germin8 is a leading data analysis company that offers top-notch media monitoring and social media analysis tool, Explic8 to help brands determine what is being said about them in the online world. The tool provides you valuable information than can help you in increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

by Girish K

 Source: http://goarticles.com/article/Reasons-Why-Social-Media-Listening-Is-Important-For-Your-Online-Marketing-Campaign/9130687/

Read More

Father Sees His Oldest Son Graduate Thanks To Reddit

 Can social media help fulfil your wishes?

Many are quick to criticise the internet, saying its making us stupid, unsocial drones who are fast becoming careless but this heart-warming story from Reddit makes a refreshing change from all that pessimism and goes to show that this so-called demon of humanity isn't so evil after all.

Source: today.com

It started as a simple posting on Reddit from user 'branch455' about his dream of seeing his oldest son graduate from high school. On a thread from Reddit about helping people cross things off their bucket lists, he posted: " I want to see my son graduate from high school. Don't have the resources to travel the 300 miles. Graduates Friday May 30th." Due to his finances being drained on medical bills, he could not make the journey himself. What happened next proves just how incredible the internet can be.

Quickly, Reddit users were inspired into action and immediately came to the father's aid. Some users helped to secure him a cheap return journey ticket with Megabus. Another Redditor generously used his Holiday Inn points to get the him a hotel room and yet another offered to drive him from his stop in Orlando to his hotel.

Thanks to some very generous people from the world wide web, on May 30th 'branch455' got his most desired and treasured wish: to see his son graduate. The happy father later posted pictures online of the time he spent with both of his sons. His oldest son and new graduate said that the news of his dad's expected arrival 'means a lot to him'.

In the pictures of him and his son was one of a piece of paper that read: 'Thanks Reddit' with a drawing of the Reddit logo.

Source: BuzzFeed.com

See, the internet isn't always a bad place.

Read More

Is Emma Thompson Wrong About Social Media?

 Oscar winner shares unsavoury thoughts on social media

Hollywood actress Emma Thompson revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that social media is killing a generation. She clearly has very strong views on the most popular way to communicate, but is she right in her extreme opinion?

Source: variety.com

The two-time Oscar winner says that she would “rather have root canal treatment for the rest of my life than join Twitter,” and would prefer “putting my head in the toilet and flushing it repeatedly” to Googling herself.

The 55-year-old actress later reveals that social media is destructive to society as a whole: “Listen, I’d rather have root canal treatment FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE than join Twitter. That’s not my scene at all. I can’t bear the thought of being connected all the time. God knows what it’s doing to us. I hope that everyone does realise that we are all just one giant human experiment at the moment. We are just a great big bunch of little gerbils on wheels.”

Thompson shares her opinion with a lot of people despite the increasing popularity, and it is clear that she is a non user of such networks. It makes her argument a difficult one to follow in a sense, as she has no experience as to what social media can achieve in society.

To a degree, she is right, and far too many people are allowing social media to dictate their lives, but where Thompson blames social media itself, the real blame lies at the individuals door. It is all about consumption, and like anything, if you consume too much, you will see the negative impact as opposed to the benefits.

Thompson’s attitude is one of someone who does not posses the education in that specific field also, and if she had done her research instead of launching an attack from the off, then she would see the picture in a more rounded fashion. Recent campaigns on Twitter including the Stephen Sutton story and the search for Gareth Huntley show that there is an intelligent community online who strive to help others, whilst utilising the tools given to prosper for themselves also. With these possibilities in place, why would anyone bypass such a tool?

Source: socialstrategy.com

Emma Thompson cannot see past the obsessive folk who refuse to put their phone down, and struggle engaging in any type of dialogue which doesn't include a device or a hashtag. What she doesn't see is the positive things that are born out of social media campaigns, and also how social media helps the film industry. With the help of networking platforms, the film industry has pushed marketing to a new level, and through this cinema has been born again. Ironically Thompson is a part of the film industry that sees the benefits out of social media, and she starred in a film for Disney, who also launched one of the biggest social media campaigns ever for their successful animated movie Frozen.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and Thompson has never held back when expressing hers, one can only feel that she has gone in too hard in this social media argument, and she has missed some vital points when developing her argument. Social media is popular for a very good reason, and that reason is because it helps people from all over the globe connect with each other. In a time where cultural differences are high, social media could be that form of communication that allows different groups to respect one another, and the last thing we all need is an A lister shouting negative, uncooked arguments about a tool so important for the development of society.

http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/06/is-emma-thompson-wrong-about-social.html#.U5Bm4ChZj8Q

Read More

LinkedIn's New Profile Design Takes a Hint From Facebook and Twitter

Image: Mashable composite, Linkedin

LinkedIn is taking some design inspiration from Facebook and Twitter.

The professional network is rolling out a new profile design for its premium members Wednesday, a new look that includes a larger profile photo and a customizable header image that spans the width of the screen. Users can either upload their own image, or select from a gallery of header images provided by LinkedIn.

The new look is similar in style to other major social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which are becoming more visual in their designs. Twitter began rolling out its new design in April, and just recently completed the transition for all users last week.

LinkedIn's new profiles are only available for premium members right now. The rest of LinkedIn's members — those using the service for free — are expected to get the new look in "a few months," according to a company blog post.

LinkedIn's new profile design (top) is more visual and looks more like similar profiles on Facebook and Twitter.

Image: LinkedIn

New profiles weren't the only update premium members received on Wednesday. The new design was part of a larger suite of tools added to the premium service, including enhancements to how premium users appear in search results.
Premium users can now pick from a set of personalized keywords to add to their account in hopes of showing up more frequently in search, and when they do, their profiles will be twice as large as members who are using LinkedIn's free service. LinkedIn has 300 million registered users, and "a little competitive edge can go a long way," the company wrote on its blog.

Premium users can now add keywords to their profile in hopes of appearing in more search results.

Image: linkedin

Premium users can also set their profile to "open," a setting that will allow them to receive messages and make their profile visible to anyone on the platform. Premium members could previously opt-in to this feature, but now it will come standard with premium subscriptions (users can always opt out). Unlike the profile redesign, these other features are exclusively for premium members.

Wednesday's announcement places a greater emphasis on paid memberships. LinkedIn also announced a new premium service called Premium Spotlight, a much cheaper version of the premium membership with fewer perks. The company is calling it a "starter package."

Paying members have always received superior service on the platform, but membership fees are the smallest of LinkedIn's three revenue streams, making up just 20% of total revenue in Q1. LinkedIn makes the bulk of its revenue from an area of its business known as Talent Solutions, the recruiting side of the service for businesses posting jobs and seeking qualified candidates. Talent Solutions makes up close to 60% of LinkedIn's revenue.

As LinkedIn continues to grow — and competition for jobs and visibility on the platform increases — it's likely the paid membership portion of LinkedIn's business will grow as well. Adding new features to distinguish paid memberships from free ones will be important for the company moving forward.
LinkedIn's new profiles will be available to premium members beginning Wednesday. Others interested in receiving the profile early can request one here.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

http://mashable.com/2014/06/04/linkedin-new-profile-deisgn/

Read More

Myspace Uses Surprising New Tactics To Win Back Old Users

 Remember us at Myspace?

You may remember the old social media haunt, Myspace from way back in the noughties when it sported its garish looks but now it’s making a comeback... and it’s coming straight for users inboxes. Yes, you read that correct. In a bid to bring the old times back and save itself from the grasps of certain doom, the social network has started sending its dormant users’ old pics of themselves to their inbox with the cheeky tagline; “The good, the rad and the what were you thinking,” in a somewhat desperate bid to get them logging back in.

Source: myspace.com

This move comes as the company desperately tries to revamp and rework its image since its new takeover in 2011, when singer Justin Timberlake took a stake in the company along with ad agency, Specific Media. The network has struggled since losing its edge over Facebook back in 2005 and with its questionable blackmailing attempt to get users back, it seems like the site is setting itself up for a further fall.

The site was snapped up in 2005 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corp for a whopping $580 million however this proved fruitless and ended up in it’s resale in 2011 for a noticeably smaller sum of $35 million dollars. Since then, there have been countless attempts to relaunch the site and regain interest but to no avail until this latest cheeky attempt which seems to almost force the user’s hand by using the cringe-factor and trying to get in on the new ‘throwback’ bandwagon.

They are attempting to relaunch in a massively saturated market, a market which has changed dramatically in the years since Myspace was knocking about on the web. One clear and unmistakable change is that of the power share in the social networking environment. Even it’s old rival, Facebook, is facing potential problems with a reported fall in user interest thanks to other apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat. And Facebook’s rival? The social juggernaut, Twitter. With a total average of over 600 million registered users sending out 58 million tweets in a single day, there is no mistaking the sheer domination of this microblogging social machine.

So with this is mind, Myspace needs to up its game considerably if they fancy their chances against the likes of Twitter. New owners, Justin Timberlake and Chris and Tim Vanderhook, have took to the site’s defence saying that it aims to be “a social network for the creative community to connect to their fans” and to have a bigger focus on both signed and unsigned musical talent.

Source: myspace.com

However, with a controversial new campaign to add to their already fragile image, as well as a tagline of ‘the good, the rad and the what were you thinking’, Myspace may have to face the inevitable question of ‘what were you thinking?’ for themselves.

http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/06/myspace-use-surprising-new-tactics-to.html#.U49blShZj8Q

Read More