Marketing Strategy

What the most relevant social media articles this week? Read below for our selection of the top articles and key takeaways:

Facebook asks you to please select your emotion

• Facebook status update box began offering the option to “share how you’re feeling or what you’re doing” through a drop-down menu of emoticons and media.
• The button lets you select to share what you’re feeling, watching, reading, listening to, drinking, or eating. Each brings up a sub-menu of emotions, media, or nourishments.
• For business this is an interesting new feature because it makes it even easier to tag business and brand pages.

• Gain a deeper understanding of where your target audiences are spending time on social networks.
• 32 percent of respondents over the age of 65 claimed that they used social networks.
• Two-thirds of online adults are Facebook users, making this social media platform far and away the most popular.

• Facebook announced a new app called Facebook Home that replaces your standard Android’s home screen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications
• The Home home screen experience is focused on Cover Feed, which shows a constant stream of full-screen photos and stories you can just sit back and watch.
• HTC and AT&T will release one of the first phones with Facebook Home on it. The handset is called the HTC First.

What the most relevant social media articles this week? Read below for our selection of the top articles and key takeaways:

Facebook Ads: How Zappos.com Manages a $10 Million Strategy

• Mostly focuses on driving top-funnel traffic to landing pages with an assortment of products except when re-targeting
• Organize campaigns by the audience and know your demographic
• Re-marketing and retargeting are key to reaching mid to late cycle buyers

• Cover Photos can now include calls to action
• Facebook rolls out threaded comments
• Updated Facebook Admin Panel
• Change cover photo from mobile device

• Use your employees’ creativity and social media reach to your benefit but be sure to create a social media customer engagement policy and training.
• Looking to reach female customers ages 25-34? If your brand isn’t on Pinterest you’re missing out! Create an account and consider a contest to engage this audience.
• Develop a social media strategy. By creating a strategy you can ensure you have purpose, direction and regular content that will reach your audience and keep them engaged. Make sure your strategy includes goals and analyzes data so you can see your progress and continually improve.

What the most relevant social media articles this week? Read below for our selection of the top articles and key takeaways:

• A recent e-book online by Hubspot compiles data from conversations in social media, the blogosphere and search engines for 33 different industries.
• Find out what platform the most conversations about your industry are happening.
• Keep in mind these graphs display trends, not exact numbers. Just because it’s the most talkd about subject doesn’t mean it’s the most lucrative platform to be on.

• Facebook is no longer relying solely on what data Facebook users reveal about themselves. Facebook has partnered with outside sources of data to learn more about users and to sell ads that are more finely targeted to them.
• Where are they getting the data? Facebook has partnered with four companies that collect lucrative behavioral data, from store loyalty card transactions and customer email lists to divorce and web browsing records.
• For marketers, having access to more data could mean sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.

• Google plus is laying low, all the while continually experimenting with new functionality, and rolling it out in a highly integrated fashion.
• Gmail, Chrome, Google Hangout, Google Voice, and more:  The functionality offered in Google+ is integrated through all google tools and is (and will) become common place over time making Google+ easier to use than Facebook and so well integrated you can’t imagine using another tool.

What the most relevant social media articles this week? Read below for our selection of the top articles and key takeaways:

Dissecting the Anatomy of a Five-Star Email
Key Takeaways:

• Magill research estimated that marketers earned $39 for every $1 spent on email marketing last year.
• Ensure your email communication is consistent with company branding. This will help to improve your brand experience as well as have your communication stick out from the crowd.
• Add social share buttons to extend the reach of your emails as well as generate new leads.

4 Things You Need to Know About the New Pinterest
Key Takeaways:

• Clicking on a pin will show other pins from the same board and other pins from the same website.
• Pinterest added a suggestion box “People who pinned this also pinned…”
• Hitting the back button will take you to the search results instead of the home page.
• The add pin button has now be added to the pull-down menu.

Facebook Working on Incorporating the Hashtag
Key Takeaways:

• Facebook is testing whether to incorporate hashtags to allow for greater search capabilities.
• This is part of the goal to make Facebook a “personalized newspaper” with the ability to search all public posts.
• This could point to closer integration with Instagram, which Facebook acquired, and already sorts photos using the hashtag.

What do you think? Are there any other great stories we missed? Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter, or the comments below!

Here are our picks for the top social media stories for this week. These articles are timely, relevant and informative. We have also included our key takeaways for each article:

Pinterest Web Analytics Puts Third-Party Developers And APIs Into Focus
Key Takeaways:

• Pinterest Web Analytics aims to “help pinners see what content is resonating best on Pinterest.”
• Web analytics is currently only available to verified business accounts.
• This is the first step in helping brands interact more effectively on Pinterest. The site planning to introduce more analytics in the future.

Facebook Update Gives Users More Control Over News Feed: What Marketers Should Know
Key Takeaways:

• Photo are featured with photo albums receiving a “facelift” for greater effectiveness and richer user experience.
• Stories, such as a liking a page, will now pull in elements of that page such as their Facebook Timeline.
• Links and content shared via third-party apps will receive more prominence in the News feed.

Facebook Testing Posts From Pages Users Haven’t Liked Referencing Pages Users Have Liked
Key Takeaways:

• Facebook is testing organic posts about pages that are talking about pages you like, rewarding the tactic of tagging other pages.
• It is not a sponsored story, but acts like one in that it encourages a user to like the page.
• Facebook is also testing “similar page suggestions”, “more pages you might like” and other methods to increase page liking organically.

What do you think? Are there any other great stories we missed? Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter, or the comments below!

Below are the key takeaways from the social media articles we found to be the most relevant this week:

Facebook Will Launch Content-Specific News Feeds, Bigger Photos And Ads On Thursday
Key Takeaways:

• Facebook is announcing on Thursday new ways to filter the news feed, including specific feeds for photos and music.
• Dedicated photo feed will offer greater integration of Instagram images.
• To help create a “richer” News feed, Facebook will begin displaying images and link posts in a larger format.

19 Sure-Fire Ways to Amplify Your Social Reach
Key Takeaways:

• Tailor your content not only for social media, but also each specific platform such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Include social sharing and follow buttons links on all marketing collateral, ensuring that these buttons are visible on mobile devices.
• Create high quality content and maintain a daily posting frequency to engage your audience.

Facebook explains how 20% text overlay policy for ads is enforced
Key Takeaways:

• Facebook’s rule is to allow no more than 20 percent text on ad images.
• Text on actual products doesn’t count toward the 20 percent text rule.
• Facebook is developing an external version of its grid-based tool to help designers detect whether images comply with the rule or not.

What do you think? Are there any other great stories we missed? Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter, or the comments below!

Below are the social media articles that we found to be the most relevant for this week. Read the articles below with our key takeaways:

Secrets of a Lucrative Social Media Campaign
Key Takeaways:

• Main challenge for the campaign was to make a medical insurance company relate to younger people in a highly competitive industry.
• Results from their social media campaign lead to a 96% growth in revenue.
• The company found people have an expectation of how they want to interact with a brand. Instead of a hard sell, relate to your customers and their interests.

How My Site Gets Tons of Traffic From Pinterest
Key Takeaways:

• Don’t use just “good” or “great” images, but the best images available.
• Put the article title on BOTH the description and the image.
• Organize your brand’s pinboards. As customer’s may not want to follow each board, so be sure to curate boards with well defined categories.

Instagram and Top Brands: Engagement Up as Audiences Grow
Key Takeaways:

• 59% of Interbrand Top 100 brands use Instagram, up 5% from November 2012.
• 41% of these brands post at least one image per week, an increase in activity on the platform.
• Facebook is still critical to the growth and engagement of a brand’s Instagram account. 98% of the images created by the top brands were also shared on Facebook.

What do you think? Are there any other great stories we missed? Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter, or the comments below!

Here are our picks for the top social media stories for this week. These articles are timely, relevant and informative. We have also included our key takeaways for each article:

Losing Likes on Your Page? Don’t Worry, It’s Just Facebook Cleaning House
Key Takeaways:

• Facebook is purging “fake likes” from pages, leading to a temporary decrease in fans for some pages.
• The accounts being deleted include accounts derived from malware, duplicate accounts and compromised accounts.
• Facebook is improving their security systems to prevent further fake accounts and increase greater site integrity.

An App That Shows Why Videos Go Viral
Key Takeaways:

• TubeRank combines meta deta with YouTube video content and shows why viral content was shared, who shared it and how many times.
• Tool does not provide viral ideas, but is focused on being an “inspiration filter.”
• Tools aim to create a framework for creating future viral videos.

Free Vine Reporting Tool
Key Takeaways:

• Free report from Simply Measured which includes comprehensive Twitter data for accounts up to 100,000 followers.
• Analyzes how Vine content compares to Instagram, YouTube and other visual media on Twitter.
• Reports on how Vine is engaging your followers and which videos are being shared the most.

What do you think? Any articles we missed? Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter, or the comments below!