Social Media Stats

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:

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 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!

For a professional writer the success of Pinterest could be terrifying. In half a year it has exploded to become the third most popular social medium in the world. Out of nowhere the network is expanding faster than even Facebook’s initial growth. Marketers gush about its potential; Forbes just declared it a $7.7 billion company. In the month of March Pinterest received over 100 million visitors. The suddenness of these figures is striking, but the real concern for writers is a fact behind the growth: it came about almost entirely without words.

The site hardly uses them. Everyone who’s visited it knows instead of headlines and pithy copy Pinterest relies on imagery to draw in visitors. Anyone who’s analyzed the metrics knows it retains them better than Twitter’s abrupt wall of text. Comic book advertising long ago revealed that photos engage people better: a sea-monkey illustration continues to sell plastic jars of brine shrimp. The benefit of good imagery is undisputed fact, but writing has never looked as comparatively obsolete as it does now.

The New York Times cheekily reminded readers that a picture is worth “about seven Twitter posts.” Marketers have always understood that a well-created image is more valuable than a sentence, but the success of Pinterest implies they’re not even comparable. The network doesn’t just use pictures; it relies solely on them and still succeeds. With a pigeonholed demographic (80% of pinners are women), this site can’t devalue language on its own, but it does reveal a larger, more expansive trend.

Pinterest isn’t as important as a case study in itself; it’s more useful as a portent, a sign or warning that visual revolution is in the air. For a site to succeed so tremendously without language proves humans have entered a new cultural era. Communication is rapidly evolving. The old exchange of information is no longer viable. Words continue to matter, but only as contextual frames for imagery. A company or brand with any hopes of success needs to see this, accept it, and begin to strategize accordingly.

The attention spans of people may have shrunk over the last century, but more likely they’ve changed. Browsing pins and boards is entrancing. Some have called it an addiction to images. The mind remains focused, but it’s now trained to concentrate on pictures not sentences. Pinterest flourishes because of this shift, and while it might someday dissolve, its use of imagery is enduring. It succeeds now because it reflects a cultural evolution, and any brand that doesn’t adapt itself will die out.

Technology is the driving force behind this change. Expanding 3G networks and high speed Internet have made the distribution of photos and videos possible. Capturing attention and selling products both relied on imagery for centuries, but consuming and sharing them have never been easier. As more brands leverage this, language as a foundation is eroding. Visual content will continue to rise as a prominent form of strategic marketing. Writers probably won’t encounter a sudden burst of unemployment, but they may begin to replace photographers and graphic designers as the world’s supplemental artists. The marketers not in this field aren’t facing doom; they just need to invest in good visual content creation, and soon.

Earlier this week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook was buying Instagram, people balked. Market analysts publicized the $1 billion price tag; bloggers questioned the motives; and most others were just furious about the conglomeration. Twitter exploded with people declaring they’d just deleted their Instagram accounts. Facebook comparisons ranged from a monopoly to an imperialist force to the Borg. Calmer voices like The New Yorker theorized the move was nothing more than a power play, and the fact that The New Yorker weighed in so quickly (or at all) seemed to strike no one as strange.

Facebook is, after all, just a social network, but we don’t need another blog analyzing its power and influence. Zuckerberg himself has said he wants Facebook to be a site where all online needs are met. Already users can read articles, stream music and videos, and e-mail friends. Over 483 million people use the site daily. It’s the most popular online destination in the world, which is why some people fear it like a fascist regime. The social network possesses immense power, but people forget that despite his lofty ambitions Zuckerberg isn’t a fascist. Even if he was, other e-mail, video, and news platforms are individually more popular. Facebook is still a diversion at best, a business at worst.

From an economic standpoint, the acquisition makes sense. Instagram is all about sharing photos, which has arguably always been the main allure of Facebook. Grandmothers create profiles to see family pictures; disinterested users keep their accounts to access old photos. TheFacebook.com was first created to browse others’ portraits. Instagram works under the same premise. They’re both social networks that share images; of course the larger network would acquire the other. The most interesting element in all of this was the cost—something Jon Stewart pointed out (see below) as seemingly absurd. Facebook paid $33/Instagram user. Whether Zuckerberg saw the app as that worrisome of a competitor or that complimentary of a platform depends on whom you ask. But it needs to be asked in business terms, not hyperbole.

This deal isn’t, as some people claim, a conspiracy. The people who rail against Facebook are descendants of the people who railed against e-mail, television, and the telephone in decades past. It isn’t the Matrix or Skynet. It’s a business, and its purchase of Instagram had nothing to do with world domination. Not everyone likes Facebook, but most people use it, and those who don’t miss out on events, social updates, and news generated by friends and brands. The public outcry about Instagram will fade, and people will keep using the app, happily or not.

The only real reason this deal caused a hullabaloo is Facebook’s immense popularity. Commercially, politically, and culturally, the site has become an engrained part of our society. This is an age where the Secretary of State submits memes and Internet tycoons are featured in celebrity magazines. Of course Facebook’s acquisition of an app will make headlines. Everything Facebook does will face scrutiny. It isn’t an apocalyptic sentient being, but it is a powerful social and economic force, and every billion-dollar ripple it makes will create cultural tidal waves.

–By Justin Albano, Director of Business Development at Bonfire Social Media–

B2B marketers and business owners often ask me if the benefits of social media only exist in the B2C realm. The answer is a resounding no. The core concepts of social media: establishing your brand as an industry influencer, engaging with your customers, leveraging brand advocates, and nurturing leads along a sales cycle are just as powerful in connecting with companies as they are with consumers. In fact, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not [1], and 57% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn [2]. However, just like any other marketing tools, here are some best practices that will get you started in the right direction.

1) Know Your Objectives

What do you want? More customers? A better relationship with your customers? Both? As a biz dev guy I love “to do lists,” strategies, and most of all accomplishing objectives. Often, companies that I talk with are either focused on driving more leads or improving their brand’s perception and share of voice. Dependent upon your company’s objectives, you need to understand which, or both, of these categories your company falls into. Without defining your objectives, you stand no chance of measuring success or understanding the effect of your actions.

Action Items:

• Start macro and go micro. What do you really want out of your business? Do you want to grow a secure company that can be passed on to your kids? Do you have a quick profitable exit in mind? Start with your vision and let it set the framework for your strategies in every business facet. Then develop your bottom up action items, i.e. what will it actually take to get there?
• Set success metrics and milestones and review your progress regularly, not just at the end of the year.

2) Understand Your Demographics

It may seem obvious, but it never ceases to amaze me how few companies actually understand who their demographic is, what their buying cycle looks like, what motivating factors/events cause them to take action or where they get information on products and services.

Action Items:

• Create customer profiles that allow you to examine your demographics in a more intimate way. For example, Suzie is a mother of two who works full time, loves to play tennis and hike, cares about the environment, and prefers to watch movies rather than TV. Setting up these profiles gives you a great demographic snapshot and helps to focus your marketing efforts.
• Once you understand your demographic’s buying cycle, what info, education or resources can you provide to make their buying decision easier? This is not only important for brand awareness and brand perception, but should be the driving force behind your lead nurturing cycle.
• It is crucial for you to understand your industry’s keyword landscape. Which keywords are your demographic using to search for the products/services you offer or information related to your offering? Which keywords are obtainable? How do you currently rank for those keywords? Google provides some free tools for the Do-it-Yourselfers, but any digital marketing shop should help you build the list and give you the analytic insights that will enable you to make sense of it all.
• Discover which social platforms your demographics are already engaged with and focus your efforts there. Currently, there are over 800 million users on Facebook, 300 million users on Twitter, 116 million users on LinkedIn and only 60 million users on Google+ [3]. If you currently have an email database, run it through some social networks to discover who is already using which networks. This could save you mountains of time in the long run and allow you to target your unique demographics.
• Listen via social networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and forums, as well as online news sites. Once you know your demographic’s hangouts and keywords, you can listen to social conversations via CMS platforms like HootSuite/TweetDeck and by setting up Google Alerts that monitor articles, blogs and forums that are currently talking about your keywords.

3) Create Value Based Relationships

Social media is not the place for old-school messaging tactics, and the concept of protecting your secret sauce is dead. Company decision makers typically go to your website, not social networks, to learn the benefits of your products or services. Companies and consumers alike are actively searching for value-based content that makes their lives and their buying decisions easier.

Action Items:

• Offer value-based content. If you help companies streamline their processes, don’t just talk about how you do it; offer them free templates or How-To whitepapers that teach them how to be more efficient. Providing this type of value will convert prospects in to fans of your company and customers in to loyal brand advocates.
• Understand the difference between relevant content (e.g. interesting articles, company update s, etc.) and compelling content that provides value and motivates visitors to take action (either by providing contact information or requesting a demo).
• Monitor conversations within social communities, like LinkedIn discussion threads, and offer advice or input wherever possible.
• Don’t be afraid to give away the secret sauce. As we all know, understanding how to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. Some of Bonfire’s best clients are those who tried to do it themselves first and quickly realized that their time and resources are much more effectively spent doing the things that they already excel at rather than learning how to develop custom Facebook tabs, constantly managing social networks, writing blogs or producing webinars.

4) Leverage Your Current Marketing Mix

A common and dangerous myth is that social media replaces traditional and costly marketing channels with free messaging. This is simply not true. Social media is at its best when it is amplifying other marketing efforts or when integrated in to a well thought-out campaign.

Action Items:

• Install social plug-ins throughout your site. These allow visitors to share your content on their preferred social network quickly and with a minimum of effort.
• Utilize landing pages to capture leads and initiate your lead nurturing cycle.
• 59% of B2B purchase decision makers have used their smartphone to research products and services when they are considering purchases [4], so optimize your content and landing pages for the increasing number of mobile users.
• Include QR codes on in-print advertising and articles with compelling calls to action.

This is not rocket science and it’s not revolutionary. Instead, this is a new application of what the heart and soul of American business was when companies took the time to connect with their communities and develop relationships with their customers. As a B2B marketer your audience might be smaller than your B2C counterparts, but that means you can be much more targeted and strategic with your marketing. While a B2C marketer may segment their demographics down to niche communities, you can target specific decision makers within your target companies and develop a value-based relationship that not only nurtures the current sales cycle but also sets a positive framework for a long and supportive business relationship.

—-
Stat Citations
[1] Source: Hubspot, State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, 2010
[2] Source: http://www.hubspot.com/social-media-monitoring-in-10-minutes-ebook/?source=hspd-affiliate-PID-3701805-txt-ad-social-media-10-min-day-ebook-20110819&AID=10933127&PID=3701805&SID=skim1024X498223X8a5f920e568fa93e07c8561649950bf2
[3] Source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/b2b-social-media-marketing-statistics-to-ponder-099980
[4] Source: http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/09/b2b-decision-makers-smartphones/#ixzz1jmUIeJul

When it comes to real time messaging, there are few better networks available than Twitter. Twitter is easy to understand, navigate and search for conversations. But some media outlets use Twitter as a crowd sentiment tool and here is where I think it may fall short. Twitter messaging can be very temporary. If a user is not paying attention, millions of pieces of information will pass them by in seconds. That is why it seems sometimes conversations with critical mass are poorly orchestrated visually with Twitter. Take the Occupy Wall Street (or #occupywallstreet) movement as an example. Growing press coverage would lead you to assume Twitter chatter has steadily increased over the past 30 days. But in reality there have been very distinct spikes, followed by times of low mentions.

In contrast Google Trends gives us a much better visual interpretation of online mentions because Google indexes everything online. You can see a much more sustained growth in mentions and activity that was absent in the Twitter graph.

My point to this very short post is to always cross reference your research. Twitter is only used by 13% of online U.S. users and many of those users are not active. Open up your scope and investigate the truth in numbers.