10 social media myths to quash.

Though business owners and organizational execs have begun to embrace social media, many misconceptions still exist.

As more and more consumers use online platforms to access information and interact with organizations to purchase, volunteer or support, social media is an increasingly important part of communication efforts.

Many PR and marketing pros are adding social media proficiency to their skill sets to attract employers and clients, so it’s important to dispel falsehoods that can hamper campaigns and branding efforts.

Here are 10 common social media myths—and the truth behind them:

1. I don’t have the resources for social media.

Even though many small and mid-sized businesses have bestowed their social media tasks onto small (or solo) teams, there are many ways to scale your social strategy without missing out on effectiveness.

2. My organization must be on every social platform.

Not every social platform will suit every organization’s needs. Each social platform requires a certain level of attention and curation—and each appeals to a different audience for a different reason.

Find the platforms that can benefit your organization the most and focus your energies (and money) on them. If a platform isn’t working for you, or if you don’t have time to keep up with it, remove the account. Don’t leave dormant accounts in your wake.

3. My customers aren’t on social media.

Professional online activity can vary by industry or job role, but chances are, some (if not most) of your customers are on social media personally. eMarketer estimated that almost 20 million Canadians will be using social platforms by the end of 2015.

Though only some users are active contributors, many more—roughly 90 percent of them—are lurking. These users might not post or interact with content, but they use social platforms for news, research and entertainment, just like the rest of us.

4. My fans are my customers.

It’s fun to have a healthy amount of fans and followers, but numbers are only one piece of the social media pie. The quality of your followers is also important. Are they influencers and opinion leaders? Do they engage with your content? Defining these influencers takes time.

5. Social media is only a promotional tool.

On social media, it’s almost never all about you. Use social posts to overtly promote your brand, but remember to keep the “social” in social media.

This means that you must pay attention to engagement and conversation. One-way communication strategies are better suited to a press release or white paper. As with all good conversations, make sure you respond to users in a timely fashion, especially anyone who seems angry with your company. However, not every user will warrant a response.

6. Hashtag everything.

Although engagement doubles for social posts that include hashtags, don’t go overboard. You don’t want to look like you’re spamming your users, and a post full of hashtags is hard to read.

Instead, use 1-3 hashtags per post.

7. Social media doesn’t generate leads.

As much as social media is about brand enhancement, it’s also a great way to bring people into your marketing and sales funnel. One in 4 businesses saw a revenue increase when they used social media for lead generation.

Need ideas? Sprout Social created a comprehensive guide for generating sales leads on each major social platform.

8. We need content constantly.

It’s important to post consistently on social media, not constantly. Twitter even has rules about spamming, which includes aggressive following and re-tweeting.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the continuous requirements of your social media accounts, but there are many management tools and features that can help you navigate into easy social seas. Focus on being present and consistent, even if that only means a couple of posts each day.

9. Social media analytics aren’t useful.

Measurement has come a long way in PR, and analytics are essential to demonstrating your business value.

To understand social metrics, you first need to wrap your head around terms such as engagement and reach. Each social media platform is equipped with analytics to help you track your likes, re-tweets, click and other forms of interaction. 

10. Social media marketing is free.

Adweek said it best: “Social media is free: Social media marketing is not.”

Like any marketing strategy, social media requires an investment to see significant returns. Social media is most effective when assigned to communicators with good judgment and writing skills. Don’t delegate your social presence to people with the least brand experience.

In addition, results tend to improve when you combine both paid and organic strategies. Rome was not built in a day and neither are your social profiles. With the right time and resources, you’ll can see results.

What other social media myths have you encountered?

 Source : http://bit.ly/1TJ6Dom

6 Very Expensive Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Every business has a product or service worth promoting, but a prolific marketing presence should not be your main goal. A thoughtfully planned and well-executed campaign can easily outperform lazy, mass-media ad buys.

To save money, time and headaches, entrepreneurs eager to attract an audience and acquire customers at scale need to be wary of poorly-executed campaigns and advertisements done in bad taste that can cause more harm than good.

Examples such as Groupon’s 2011 Super Bowl commercial, Sony’s white PSP ads and Molson Coors’ college drinking campaign earned each company widespread public backlash and will forever haunt these brands. To be more effective at marketing, businesses must be mindful of embarrassing themselves and offending customers. Ultimately, bad marketing can be ruinous for customer loyalty and sales.

1. False promises negatively impact brand affinity.

Companies like Allstate Insurance, Avis Car Rental and RadioShack set themselves up for failure with their alluring taglines but poor service.

While Allstate suggests, “You're in good hands with Allstate,” paying customers aren’t convinced. On ConsumerAffairs.com, the insurance company receives an average rating of 1.1 out of 5.0. Avis’ slogan, "We try harder," is similarly far from believable. It, too, maintains an abysmal rating of 1.2 out of 5.0. Prior to 2014, Radioshack touted, "You've got questions ... We've got answers." Unfortunately, its broken promises have awarded it a customer satisfaction rating of 1.4 out of 5.0.

Although a clever motto can be enough to motivate customers to walk into your store, the experience you offer and the value deliver are what matter the most. Make only promises you intend to keep to effectively manage consumer expectations and improve customer satisfaction.

2. Bad data nets zero ROI for potentially profitable campaigns.

 Companies simply cannot afford to operate with bad data. According to Econsultancy, “New research from Experian Data Quality shows that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88 percent of companies, with the average company losing 12 percent of its revenue.”

In advertising, unique creatives are often tested against a control audience. In this instance, clean data might reveal that certain ads drive high engagement and positive ROI while others underperform. With the flip of a switch, data-driven marketers would then turn off the creatives that provide negative ROI and scale up spend on the high-performers. But without these sorts of insights, many marketers find themselves paying a fortune for traffic that does not convert.  

3. Inconsistent experiences confuse customers.

Different things make different customers tick. In a world where technology allows us to personalize every marketing touch point with consumers, many brands still fall short. Email blasts include links to products that are no longer available. Ad creatives direct audiences to unrelated pages on your site. At checkout, the coupon that should have automatically been applied to a purchase is nowhere to be found.

Marketers need to regularly walk through the customer acquisition and engagement funnels to spot any errors or inconsistencies which may confuse customers and deter audiences from completing their purchase.

4. Aggressive email blasts affect deliverability.

For mid-sized businesses, email marketing offers a 246 percent return on investment. Yet, some marketers forget the importance of proper audience segmentation. An email blast to your entire list of subscribers may cause recipients, in droves, to mark your mail as spam.

Of course, losing subscribers is the least of your worries. If you regularly receive complaints from recipients who mark your email as spam, your email service provider may temporarily disable or permanently delete your account. According to Campaign Monitor, “The industry standard for an acceptable percentage of complaints per email campaign is less than 0.02 percent.” Anything above that is cause for concern.

5. Marketers fly blind when they operate in silos.

Marketers sometimes find themselves operating alone and on their own terms inside a bubble instead of interacting with their peers to build a better product and increase overall customer experience. Marketers, for their own purposes, should reach out to their colleagues in finance, sales, customer service, product and engineering for valuable help and guidance.

Marketers operating in a silo may not realize which products customers rave about most, which offerings have the highest (and lowest) markup, and tools or services that are currently experiencing bugs or downtime.

6. Marketing to desktop users neglects a larger, growing audience.

Most advertisements and creatives are built and optimized for a desktop audience. What many marketers forget is they leave money on the table when they fail to optimize their campaigns for mobile users.

In the U.S., consumers spend more time on their mobile devices than they do on desktop computers. The future of marketing is mobile, as audiences have long shifted their attention towards smaller screens with lightening fast Internet connections.

Marketers waste millions each year on desktop-optimized ads that are delivered to mobile audiences. Companies, instead, should prioritize developing mobile-optimized ads first, and worry about desktop traffic later.

Source : http://entm.ag/1R36HfJ

How to Discover Social Media Influencers

Discover Social Media Influencers

 Ian Cleary  Created: March 26, 2014  Updated: June 17, 2015

You’ve probably heard that if someone doesn’t have a Klout score of above 80, then you should ignore them.

Or have you heard that Klout should be ignored? Read on and find out the truth…

There’s nothing like a bit of controversy to kick off a blog post!

Influence is important in social media, and social media influencers are people who have a lot of this highly-prized influence.  If you’ve got a large, relevant audience that listens to you, then you’ve got influence.  How much of it you are considered to have depends on what action your followers and fans take as a result of what you say.

If you can build relationships with people who have influence over your target audience, you can generate sales on the back of this.

But how do you assess influence and know who to approach?

This article could be very long so we’re making some assumptions:

• 1.  We’re assuming that the influencers you are looking into are influential with the audience you want attention from.
• 2. We’re assuming that this is online influence: someone might have one Twitter follower and be hugely influential in the real world!
• 3.  There is no tool that can measure influence accurately: it’s an art not a science.  How influential is a person offline and how can you measure that? It’s not easy!

Before we delve into this article here’s an interesting slideshare presentation on influencers     

So, bearing in mind those assumptions, the way to assess somebody’s degree of influence involves asking the following questions.

1.  Which other influencers are engaging with them online?

Influencers follow other influencers, so one of the best ways of finding them is looking at who they hang out with.

I recently tested out Littlebird and was impressed with the lists of influencers it produces.  You enter the topic of your choice, and then Littlebird will find out who is participating in that topic.

It then ranks them by how connected they are to their peers, on the assumption that if you are very influential, more people will have followed/connected with you.

Find the insiders!

Littlebird uses an ‘Insider’ score to display how many other influencers are connected to a person.  The theory is that the higher the number, the more influence the person has.

So this is a good way of building up your list of influential contacts.

Here are some of the other helpful features of Littlebird:

• Identify popular content – Based on the influencer list, you can view the most popular content shared on Twitter and then share some of it yourself.
• Discover connections – Find out who you are following who is not following you back, and vice versa.  Identify targets to connect with.
• Blogs – Browse through the latest posts shared out by the influencers.
• Location – Browse influencers by location so you can build up your network within a country of your choice.
• Network Visualization – View the network in a chart where you can view all the connections between all the influencers.
• Export your reports – Depending on your subscription level, you can export a set of reports.

2.  What is their Influence score?

There are tools that try to calculate a person’s influence and quantify it in a number, or score.  The higher the score, the more influential  you are meant to be.  These systems are not perfect and should never be used in isolation, but they do have smart algorithms that analyze your activity online and give you an idea of potential influence.

Klout – Klout gives you a score out of 100 and assesses which niches you are influential in.  You connect each of your social networks through the site and it analyzes all your activity. Klout notes who is sharing your content, the likes, comments, shares etc you get, and then a score is calculated.  This score can go up or down over time.

A rating of your Klout score over the last 90 days

Kred –  Kred offers 2 scores, calculated by your Twitter activity over the last 1,000 days.  If you connect your Facebook account too, this can also contribute to your score.    The two scores are:

• Influence – This is how much you get retweeted, replied to, mentioned or followed.  If you connect your Facebook account it will measure posts, mentions, likes, shares and event notifications.
• Outreach – This is how much you are engaging or sharing with other people.  You could be retweeting, replying or mentioning others.

Kred provides you with details of how it is measuring your score.  For example, you can view which of your tweets were shared by other people, and tweets where you were mentioned, and then view points that are awarded towards your score for those tweets (in the very right hand column).

This shows where your content is shared and how you are rewarded with points

The scoring systems do have some value and take away some of your groundwork.  It’s not something to use on its own but it can be one indicator that helps you to build a broader picture.

3. How much sharing happens on their site?

If somebody has a blog and its content gets shared, the level of sharing will help to assess influence.  This can also help you to identify topical influence, because you’ll see the kind of content people are sharing on their blogs.

If you find a blog that gets a lot of shares, then this is a good way of measuring influence.  If they write an article about your product or service then it’s likely to get a lot of shares, too.  If this audience is relevant to your business, then you can potentially get sales out of this sharing.

Social Crawlytics is a useful tool that crawls through a competitor’s website and creates a report based on social shares for all their blog posts.  You can then see a list of these posts and all their shares across each of the social networks.

View a chart showing what is popular. You can also view this in table format

4. What is their domain authority?

This is particularly important if you’re trying to find influential bloggers.   A blogger’s website is assessed by Google, which then decides if it deems the blogger to be influential enough to send it lots of traffic.  You are competing for traffic against other influential blogs, so the higher your domain authority, the more traffic you will get.

Moz are a company that develop inbound marketing and SEO software.  They have a rating system where they rate millions of websites out of 100 and allocate them a domain authority score each.  The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to be able to compete with your competitors online.

You can check your domain authority using Opensite Explorer.

Check out your domain authority!

If someone approaches you and says they are an influential blogger and you find that their domain authority is 20, this means not many high authority sites are linking to them.

This is similar to the premise of Littlebird: influencers connect with influencers.  As your blog develops, if your influence is growing you will get more links to your site and your authority will go up.

5. How much traffic do they get?

The only 100% accurate way of finding someone’s traffic is getting access to their analytics.  However, there are tools out there that will give you an estimate of a website’s traffic.  And if you use the same tool to compare competitors, you’ll be using the same formulas to estimate their traffic so, although it may not be totally accurate, you should be able to compare sites successfully.

Getting a lot of traffic and having a high domain authority are generally linked.  It’s unusual for a very low domain authority website to get a lot of traffic because it’s hard for it to rank for content on Google.  If it gets a ton of traffic from social media, that’s not going to affect their domain authority.  However,  as people get to know about you through social media they will start linking to you from their websites, which is where the two factors are connected.

If you are looking into a relatively big site, you can use Compete or Quantcast (US focussed) to get an estimate of traffic.  Another tool that is useful for assessing traffic volume isSEMRush.  All these tools give estimates, so are not 100% accurate, but it’s great for comparing competitors to see who gets more traffic and how much more they get (e.g. 5 times as much).

6. How much influence do they have on a topic?

A key influencer may be able to change the direction of an entire industry, which can have huge revenue implications for companies.  But you don’t usually see an immediate revenue impact so it’s very difficult to measure this level of influence.

For example, recently Mark Schaefer wrote an article about a concept called ‘Content Shock’.  It’s about the fact that we’re coming to a stage where there is far too much content for people to consume, so companies will soon find it difficult to get attention.

This was an extremely popular article that was written about hundreds of times on many sites that have large audiences.  This influential post from Mark could affect the decisions of many companies considered their investment in content marketing going forward.

Twtrland categorizes people into 60,000 categories.  You can view somebody’s influence based on each category, so you can filter the most. Having so many categories is great, because it can really help identify the most appropriate people in your niche.

When you search based on category, you can then view people’s amplification, reach and relevance based on that topic.

You can hover your mouse over each person to get an understanding of how influential this person is

7. How much they do in sales!

This is a really interesting measure of influence.

If somebody talks about your products/services, and they then start to sell, that person is influential.  So you need to have some way of measuring this type of influence so you can track it and try to build relationships with the most useful people.  For example:

a). Check where your traffic is coming from, and the conversion rates that result from this traffic.

b). If you’re working directly with an influencer, set up an affiliate program so they can use an affiliate link when they share your content.  With an affiliate code they will get commission on sales, and you’ll be able to track how influential they are too!

c). If they are not comfortable sharing affiliate links, you could provide promotional codes that they can offer to their audience. The redemption of these codes can then be tracked.

Summary

Influence, and the measure of influence, are really hot topics and yet it’s a very difficult thing to measure.  Through a combination of several indicators you can identify and make a list of key influencers.

As you start tracking results, you may add some influencers onto your list and take others off.  There is no magic formula: you start with a good, well-researched list and adapt as you go!

Source : http://bit.ly/1EvzXbq