9 Interesting Digital Marketing Stats

Live streaming is becoming a popular tool for brands

1. Lots of brands have tested Periscope and Meerkat

Live streaming marketing vendor Brandlive surveyed 200 executives from retail and consumer goods brands and found 44 percent of their businesses ran a live streaming event last year. Meanwhile, nearly 25 percent of businesses were impressed enough with the results on apps like Periscope and Meerkat to increase their live streaming budgets this year, and 39 percent stated the video tactic is integral to their larger marketing mix.

2. Facebook adds 1 million advertisers in one year

The social network said 3 million businesses have now advertised on its platform, up from 2.5 million just six months ago. A year ago, Facebook had 2 million advertisers. 

3. Social advertising continues to blow up

Facebook-owned Instagram revealed that it now has more than 200,000 advertisers on the visual social platform. What's striking about that figure is that the app only opened its advertising to all marketers about five months ago. 

4. The Internet of Things is burgeoning

Marc Jones, chairman and CEO of Aeris Communications (which provides machine-to-machine Internet of Things services), said at Mobile World Congress his company has 7 million devices on its network, doubling last year's 3.5 million connected devices.

5. BuzzFeed's growth is crazy

Also at Mobile World Congress, BuzzFeed chief Jonah Peretti said the viral site now has 6 billion monthly content views, up from 100 million in 2012.

6. Long live the e-reader

It's been more than five years since the iPad debuted, but e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook are not yet obsolete—even though many predicted their demise when Apple launched its tablet. New York research firm eMarketer prognosticates that e-reader users will actually increase by 3.5 percent, to more than 86 million people this year. 

7. Apple finally gets social

The Cupertino, Calif.-based electronics giant was averse to social media in recent years while every other brand jumped into social media with both feet. Well, Apple launched a Twitter page on Thursday morning, and it garnered 25,000 followers in the first two hours. After the first six hours, that number grew to 65,000 followers. 

8. Mobile retail ads on the rise

RetailMeNot learned that 87 percent of merchants planned to increase their mobile advertising budget this year. Two-hundred retail decision-makers participated in the digital coupon vendor's study.

9. Digital lead generation wanted

Sixty-one percent of marketers say increased lead generation is their top automation goal. That's according to Direct Marketing News, which cited an Ascend2 study that surveyed 239 executives. 

  Follow on twitter : @patosins

 Source : http://bit.ly/1TUScNs

Marketing on the move: The 6 principles of engaging mobile consumers

It makes sense when you think about it: Customers are on the move, and in order to reach them, marketers need to be on the move too.

Settling down into a staid, predictable routine seems to be the death knell for any mobile marketing strategy. That was the takeaway from a panel I was part of at VB’s Marketing.FWD summit earlier this week, entitled “How to structure your technology, and your marketing strategy, to win in a mobile world.”

Joined by Kim Feil from Bizhive, Erica Seidal from The Connective Good, and Rishi Dave from Dun & Bradstreet, we discussed challenges and opportunities in mobile marketing — and how marketers can get the most out of their campaigns by being agile, adaptable, and creative. For me, it boiled down to these six essential principles if you’re going to succeed in our mobile-dominant world.

1. Adopt a ‘live for change’ motto

In order to acquire and engage as many quality users as possible, mobile marketers need to be nimble and proficient with a wide variety of sources and formats, to optimize and revise, to respond to changes in inventory and user habits — and, above all, to refine their approach and stay on the move.

One important point we discussed was how creating a marketing campaign is not — and cannot be — a “once and done” proposition. The key to successful mobile marketing is to stay agile and versatile and not become too reliant on one format of ads, or invest too heavily in a single traffic source.

2. Diversify your traffic sources

Regardless of what you may have read, there is no “one” ideal way to source traffic. Social media, programmatic and non-programmatic advertising, and real-time bidding all have their respective advantages and drawbacks. Diversifying your traffic sources is crucial, as is constantly engaging with users you’ve acquired, and measuring engagement is key to discovering what works for you.

Likewise, while it can be tempting to rely entirely on video and display ads, since those are tried-and-true and are chiefly the formats that marketers use, there’s a vast field of other tactics — such as native, playable, and text-based — that provide untapped opportunities for marketers willing to roll up their sleeves and get creative.

3. Monitor, optimize, and monitor again

With all these possibilities available, it is essential to constantly monitor performance and optimize your campaigns. Even in optimization, though, too many companies can get locked into the routines of using familiar creatives and traffic sources without diving deep and taking advantage of a myriad of other ways to improve performance on mobile.

As the mobile marketing landscape evolves, other effective optimization methods will become more useful including whitelisting and blacklisting sub-publishers based on who delivers the best traffic; optimizing to ROI by looking at in-app purchases to calculate ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and identify the most profitable users; and utilizing real-time optimization to automatically update campaigns based on their performance.

4. Personalize or die

When it comes to engaging users, there can be no one-size-fits-all model. Personalization with laser precision is the name of the game. Mobile usage unlocks untold reams of data about the customer’s habits, preferences, likes, and dislikes. It is incumbent upon marketers to leverage this glut of information to deliver ads at the right times, through the right channels, in the right formats, and at the right frequencies.

5. Know that automation is your friend

Placing such a high emphasis on optimization does not mean that mobile marketing has to become a labor drain. There are several automation tools available to help marketers and app-makers streamline their campaign creation and optimization process, so that they can focus on what counts — and not be bogged down by the distractions of minute-by-minute operations.

Embracing automation allows you to redirect human energy where it needs to be: on constantly learning about the changing marketplaces and applying those lessons to creating new and better strategies. A successful strategist is never satisfied. Marketers must be committed to testing, experimenting, and reiterating elements of their campaign; it’s not a matter of achieving the perfect method, but of finding that frictionless alignment between your marketing practices and your business goals as the two develop in tandem.

6. Hire those with mobile brains

As to that human energy I mentioned, what steps can you take when building your team to make sure that it is prepared to meet the challenges of marketing to consumers on the move? In practice, this might mean keeping an open mind for potential team-members who lack the management experience of more seasoned candidates but have grown up in a mobile environment and are more attuned to its nuances and more open-minded to embracing new ideas and taking things in new directions. It’s far more important that you find that crucial balance between — and combination of — old experience and new savvy, rather than relying on traditional hierarchy structures.

The field is ever changing, and branching out in new creative directions — in other words, it’s pretty mobile.

Source : http://bit.ly/1QGMlEO

3 Myths About Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is widely regarded as one of the most effective forms of marketing.

Inbound marketing is widely regarded as one of the most effective forms of marketing. The term first emerged as a buzzword in the midst of the online marketing frenzy, as marketers started to realize fully the value of the digital world in attracting leads, nurturing prospects, and even generating conversions without the hard-core sales methodologies of the past.

While some may believe that inbound marketing is just another one of those passing Internet fads, it's anything but. The concepts, methods, and best practices that comprise the core of inbound marketing aren't going anywhere as long as there's a need for marketers to reach prospects and buyers at critical junctions and touch points throughout the buying journey to influence decision making.

Consider the fact that consumers are increasingly tuning out traditional advertisements and the importance of inbound marketing--in which marketers engage consumers with relevant, intriguing information that educates or entertains, earning their interest instead of buying it--and the importance of inbound marketing becomes pretty clear. In fact, 84% of 25- to 34-year-olds bounce from websites when they encounter an intrusive or irrelevant advertisement, and 86% of people skip over television ads, according to an infographic by Voltier Digital.

Despite the growing importance of inbound marketing, there continue to be myths permeating the industry about what inbound marketing is, its effectiveness, and how it works. Let's examine three of the most prominent myths about inbound marketing.

1. Inbound marketing is free.

While it's true that inbound marketing can be more affordable than outbound marketing, it's not entirely free. You won't be paying for advertisements, but you'll still need to pay professionals to produce top-quality content, manage your social media presence, organize and host webinars, design compelling infographics, research white papers, and the like.

You'll also need to invest in tools such as inbound marketing automation software, CRM systems, and other tools of the trade that increase marketing productivity. In fact, Raka points out that "companies that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451 percent increase in qualified leads," and companies that automate lead management processes "see a 10 percent or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months."

"Yes, there's an investment required to do inbound marketing. But if done well, brands will see a return on that investment that can last for a long time. Unlike outbound marketing, where a paid advertisement lives only for a short period of time, inbound marketing has a longer shelf life. It's an investment that provides much higher returns over the long term," said Navin Nagiah, President and CEO of DNN Software. Inbound marketing is a complex function that encompasses multiple marketing channels and strategies, from SEO to content marketing, social media, and more; arming yourself with the talent and tools to get the job done is half the battle.

2. Quantity trumps quality.

In the early days of SEO, it was possible to produce an abundance of (let's be honest--crappy) articles stuffed with target keywords and rank for your desired terms in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Those days are long gone, yet the notion that quantity is more critical to success than quality still permeates the inbound marketing industry.

Of course, inbound marketing is more than just content marketing, and it's more than just SEO. (According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2016 B2B Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends--North America report, B2B marketers are using an average of 13 different content marketing tactics--and that's just content marketing alone.)

But the belief that the best way to realize inbound marketing success is to do simply "more" of it couldn't be further from the truth.

Today's consumers are savvy. It doesn't matter whether your business is B2B or B2C; your audience knows when you're putting out poor-quality content or posting updates on social media for the sake of creating "more." Your audience wants quality; they want something valuable that engages, educates, and entertains--something that's so good that it compels them to share or hand over their email address just to get the rest.

It's like the, "If you build it, they will come," mentality common in the early days of the web. You simply can't skimp on quality in inbound marketing; you have to bring your audience to you and to do that you must stand out from the hundreds of other companies attempting to engage the same target market. Whether you're designing graphics, creating slide decks, or writing industry reports, cutting corners is the surest way to alienate your audience.

3. You can't measure the ROI of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is one alternative to the traditional outbound advertising methods such as billboards or radio advertising. Interestingly, one of the common beliefs about inbound marketing is that it's not measurable, yet it's really radio, billboards, and similar traditional advertising methods that make proving ROI a challenge.

In the early days of digital marketing, we didn't have the advantage of Big Data, but today practically any action you take online is measurable. Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, you can determine how many visitors arrived on your landing page and then converted to leads or paying customers. You can determine how many attendees participated in a webinar, how many users engaged with a Twitter chat, how many Facebook users watched a video, and even how many recipients clicked on a particular link in an email marketing message.

Everything is measurable, and that means ROI is easy to prove although the factors that one business uses to determine ROI may differ from the equation relied on by another. That's why it's critical to determine your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) before launching a campaign and identify the metrics used to evaluate performance.

Inbound marketing isn't free, but it can be incredibly effective for both B2B and B2C companies. However, if you're prioritizing quantity over quality or you're not measuring ROI, you're doing it wrong. Focusing on quality coupled with clearly defined goals and performance metrics, along with the tools to measure results, is the surest path to inbound marketing success.

Source : http://bit.ly/1mwo8cv

Top Trends in Marketing for This Year

At the start of every year, many inbound marketers like to take a glimpse into what the future holds. It’s exciting to see what new software, hardware, and strategies are at the forefront, and make predictions about what will become the next best thing … and what will fizzle out.

The marketing trends for this year will not disappoint, so here’s a look at what to expect and how to plan for what’s ahead.

Video and images are essential.

Much like the last two years, imagery will continue to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert sales. However, some marketers are still getting on board to use video and images, so you’ll be competing with many more companies for customer attention. Plus, Google is now incorporating in-SERP video ads, giving your content much more exposure.

Virtual reality and 3D are the next major shift.

Video and images will continue to be essential–even more so as developers launch products enabling virtual reality and 3D technology for marketing. While the market will generally focus on gaming, there are opportunities marketers must seize. Integration with social media and video channels will lead to more direct messaging for users.

Make sure you’re optimized for mobile.

Users of portable devices will become even more reliant on mobile usage as compared to desktops, so your pages must be developed accordingly. Use responsive design techniques or create a separate app for users to ensure smooth, glitch-free navigation.

Marketers must embrace the omnichannel approach.

Marketing has always been about reaching your potential customers in the places they’re hanging out. In 2016, they’ll be all over and expect you to be there with them. An integrated approach to the customer experience is important–one that blends interactions for a seamless encounter, instead of a series of connections through your website, social media, and app separately.

This is especially important for businesses with a brick-and-mortar location in addition to online marketplace. If there’s a disconnect between the two experiences, there will be a disruption in your messaging.

Social media is a channel, not a strategy.

For years, marketers have used social media as a strategy for reaching customers. However, these platforms aren’t an approach on their own; rather, your social media profile is a part of your comprehensive marketing strategy–it’s a channel for messaging, not a separate tactic. Think of it as a microphone that supplements and amplifies your content.

Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) will dominate.

Wearable technology means your customers are never without their smart device; the IoT is turning everyday objects into network connections. These solutions gained some traction in 2015 and you can expect them to boom in the coming months. The landscape of local marketing will see the most impact as the lines between online and traditional marketing become blurred.

The 2016 Outlook

If there’s one common theme tying together all of these sales and marketing trends, it’s that marketers must focus on the customer experience in their efforts. Your content must meet the desires of demanding customers, delivering relevance and context through the channels they want. They have high expectations and limited patience, so your strategies must meet their needs and expectations to get a leg up over the competition.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PIPq7o

8 Web Design Hacks for Entrepreneurs

That Want to Attract More Traffic, Conversions and Revenue

Having a website in today’s market is no longer an option, but different businesses utilize their websites differently. Some use their website for instant revenue generation e.g. ecommerce sites, while others simply rely on their website for lead generation through phone calls or email subscriptions. However, one thing is common for all website owners: you want to use your site to grow your business.

There are a number of strategies business owners can leverage to attract more traffic and build that traffic into leads and eventually conversions through sales. This article provides eight seemingly simple but critical web design strategies that have the potential to improve your traffic, leads and conversions.

#1. Find out what elements visitors are clicking and scrolling to

Knowing which areas of the site visitors are clicking and scrolling to will help you to position your offers and CTAs in places where they are likely to attract the highest number of clicks. You can use heat map tools such as CrazyEgg which will show you not only which areas are being clicked on, but also the origins/sources of those clicks. CrazyEgg can also show you how far down your webpages visitors scroll.

Using this tool, you can carry out split testing to identify which locations are most lucrative for your CTA buttons i.e. areas where conversions are most likely to happen. Conversions don’t just come by having CTAs somewhere on the page, gaining insight into what places actually attracts your visitors and leveraging that is what brings conversions.

#2. Site conversion audits

Is your current web design structure optimized for traffic conversion? In reality, many web designers know how to create great-looking sites, but few understand what elements are required to maximize conversions. As a site owner, engaging a user experience (UX) expert to perform a comprehensive conversion audit is worth the investment.

Such experts will help you pinpoint conversion hurdles and recommend design changes that will maximize conversions prior to launching your marketing campaigns. In turn, you can deliver optimized targeted messages and minimize the amounts wasted on ineffective strategies and elements. You can learn how to split test different elements of your campaign to determine which are more effective for campaigns. With a strong foundation on your website, all future campaigns will be more effective.

#3. Trust signals and testimonials

Visitors are more likely to make purchase or submit opt-in information to businesses that they trust. You can contribute to development of trust by including real testimonials from previous customers and/or noteworthy industry partners. Showcase any accreditations, recognition and awards prominently, communicating to consumers that you can be trusted. Stay away from giving fake testimonials, which can be spotted easily and will immediately cause customers to distrust your brand.

#4. Split testing

The importance of split testing cannot be overemphasized. Very often in website design, small changes, like tweaking the color or wording of CTA buttons can lead to significant changes in conversion. There are a number of simple tools which allow you to create multiple versions of your landing pages with slight variations to determine which ones lead to better conversions. You can do this even if you don’t have advanced coding or development skills.

#5. Call tracking

Where you rely on multiple sources for lead generation especially relating to phone calls, it’s advisable to have unique phone numbers and dedicated landing pages for the different sources, this will enable you to track which source was most effective in phone call generation. However, given that the call track numbers are all routed back to the main lines, there will be no disruption to the handling of your phone leads.

Almost all call traffic service providers can give you a record of calls made, and you can then use this information to determine which aspects of your campaign are effective in lead generation and which need improvement.

#6. Google Analytics metrics and data

Google analytics provides valuable information on which sources of traffic are effective in giving conversions and what your traffic engages in prior to conversion. This insight can help you to make significant changes to your layout and strategy e.g. you would know which of your social media traffic is converting and hence be able to direct more resources towards the channels that are leading to more conversions.

Suppose for instance you could tell that most of your successful converts interacted with you on the blog before converting. You would know to focus on generating more high quality content and utilize available distribution outlets like Taboola and Outbrain to lead even more traffic to the blog.

Your Google Analytics data is a gold mine that can help you get rid of traffic sources that convert poorly and scale up efforts on those sources which have higher conversion percentages.

#7. Exit popup offers

Getting traffic from any source to your site is no small investment, even if you’re not running pay-per-click campaigns. The time, resources and effort directed towards social media marketing and SEO essentially means that there’s a monetary value attached to each website visitor.

Most of the time, visitors who leave are unlikely to return; it makes sense to try and convert them through any way possible. Setting up a popup exit offer can actually improve conversion rates, which over time contributes to a significant boost in your ROI.

#8. Live chat

Live chats are not the preserve of e-commerce websites. True, they’re important for providing clarifications that can save sales as well as opening up another avenue for your employees to guide consumers to make a purchase and perhaps cap it with related purchases. However, live chat facilities is useful for other sites as well.

For instance, a restaurant site can use their live chat to iron out details of reservations as well as provide directions on locations for customers. Ensure that your live chat is accessible on mobile devices, given most of such customers may need this information while on-the-go. Cheap to implement, live chat can significantly improve conversions for businesses across the board.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PUVaxi

How social media changed teens’ lives forever

Social media is one of the fastest-growing industries in today’s interconnected world, attracting more users every day. At the forefront of this movement are teens—a Pew Research Center study stated 92 percent of teens report going online daily, making them the most active social media participants of any demographic.

“For people entering college next year, social media will be ubiquitous—next year’s freshman class will have largely been born in 1998,” said Paul Booth, associate professor of media and cinema studies at DePaul University. “They will not remember a world without YouTube, Facebook or Twitter … They’re certainly more ‘plugged in’ than earlier generations because that’s the world they grew up in.”

As a result of this ubiquity, teens have seen a monumental shift in nearly all facets of adolescent life.

Changing relationships

Lyons Township junior Elly Cooper said she thinks that social media often detracts from face-to-face communication.

“I think it definitely makes in-person relationships harder because of people’s attention given to their phones or devices instead of their boyfriend or girlfriend,” Cooper said.

Beyond diminishing a couple’s time spent together, some think there’s a greater possibility for things to get lost in translation over social media.

“You also lose a more personable experience because if half of your relationship is over social media, you don’t really know how the other person is reacting, and it may not feel as intimate as other relationships,” St. Charles East junior Sienna Schulte said.

Though there may be a greater risk for disconnect in teen relationships over social media, some argue that bonds are more easily initiated and accessible through the online platforms.

With this accessibility, teens are able to generate relationships with anyone, regardless of location. St. Charles East senior Beth Kaplan met her long-distance boyfriend of a year through social media. He currently lives in Scotland, but with the help of social media, they’re still able to frequently communicate with one another.

“I can feel close to someone that I’m talking to via FaceTime,” Kaplan said. “I can be miles away from someone and feel like they’re in the room. Social media has made this virtual intimacy a reality.”

While social media has made it possible for some teens to grow closer together, it can also cause problems in the event of a breakup. St. Charles East senior Jake Battista said his ex had an anonymous Twitter account that she used to share the details of their breakup with her followers. Battista said he didn’t know about the account until a friend showed him.

“Relationships are personal and the problems that occur in the relationships don’t need to be broadcasted to everyone. You know?” he said. “It ain’t cool. And it definitely makes you lose trust in people.”

In light of this dilemma, Facebook recently introduced a tool to help make it easier to separate from an ex. When a user changes their relationship status to single, he or she is now given the option to see less of that person in their feed and keep Facebook from automatically suggesting their name in tagging.

Tricky parenting

M.J. Wallace is the mother of two teens, one of whom is a Cary-Grove junior. She said she thinks social media is beneficial in the way it keeps people connected.

“Family out of town gets to see as they grow up (with) activities being posted like choir, plays and stuff,” Wallace said. “Family out of town used to have to miss performances and then never got to see it.”

On the other hand, Wallace said she recognizes the danger in how much teens post on social media. Future employers or college admissions officers can search and find whatever kids put online. Despite this reality, she said she doesn’t actively supervise her kids’ social media accounts but she does try to be aware of what’s going on.

“I don’t have time to monitor their social media things, but I am on Facebook so if I do see something that’s a little inappropriate, I will give them a call to take it down,” she said.

Wanting to be ‘liked’

The rise of social media has granted more opportunities to meet new people and begin relationships, but it also has changed the way teens view themselves and compare each other.

This trend made news recently when 19-year-old Instagram star Essena O’Neill announced that she was quitting social media because it made her miserable and obsessed with appearing perfect online.

Negative posts or comments also can do great damage to a teen’s self-esteem. According to a Livescience Health study, about 23 percent of teens report being targeted in some means over social media.

“I’ve seen social media lowering a teenager’s self-esteem,” adolescent therapist Kathy Catenacci said. “They can’t escape the constant barrage of negative posts, how they should look, dress and act without being able to escape it for very long.”

In particular, anonymous apps such as Yik Yak function as incredibly large and easy outlets for cyberbullying and targeting. The app allows users within a five-mile radius to create and add to discussion threads about anything and everything. Cooper said that teens targeted anonymously on these sites can’t help but feel embarrassed and hurt.

Opening new doors

On the other hand, Lyons Township junior Armin Korsos takes advantage of the feedback he receives over social media. Korsos runs his own YouTube channel and uses the reactions and comments to his video—positive or negative—to help him improve his channel for the future. Through social media, his videos reach people across the world.

“Social media can help people show themselves and their talents to the world in a way that has never been possible before,” Korsos said.

Nonetheless, Korsos recognizes the distraction that social media has become.

“People begin to forget that social media isn’t a necessity to live,” he said. “Yes, it helps people connect with their friends and stay updated on what’s going on, but it’s not all necessary.”

Social media has forever changed teens’ lives, making them more connected—and disconnected—than ever before. But for everyone labeling social networks a social disaster, Booth said it’s just the latest change in technology.

“And in 60 years, when a new form of communication technology comes out, people who are teens today may look at each other and think about how much better it was when people were texting and sending emojis back in 2016,” Booth said.

Source : http://bit.ly/1P6N1ma

3 Social Media Metrics You Need to Monitor Right Now.

Success on social media is relative, but knowing what metrics to measure is critical for uncovering weaknesses and improving your strategy where others fall short. Here’s a look at three important social media metrics you should be monitoring right now.

Social media is a constantly changing landscape, and as it matures, the way social media success is defined and measured evolves with it. Remember the race for acquiring as many fans as possible? Today, merely having a social presence is not enough, and building communities needs to be just one aspect of a brand’s social strategy.

Now social media managers have data at their fingertips to measure a wide range of performance metrics from engagement and reach to customer care and deep advertising demographics across countries and regions. The challenge lies in focusing on those metrics that truly matter – some of which aren’t the first ones that come to mind, and require a little bit of digging to uncover.

By now social marketers are very familiar with engagement – in Socialbakers Analytics, we use the Interactions per 1,000 Fans metric to track engagement, which enables marketers to compare the engagement on their Pages’ posts against one another, and broadly paint a picture of performance across fan bases. It gives a more accurate depiction of how brands compare to competitors that have a much larger Page size by way of more fans.

Here are three less-familiar metrics that nonetheless provide an interesting perspective into how you’re performing on social.

3 Important Social Media Metrics to Measure 

Frequency

Engagement has been an important metric for understanding if your audience is interacting with your brand. However, if you’re stuck on only analyzing the numbers of those who have taken an action on your content (like, comment, share, click) then you’re not seeing the complete picture. Reach and frequency are arguably just as important as engagement. When it comes to brand marketing, it’s all about striking that balance of reaching the appropriate number of people at the right amount of frequency.

Repetition is key, and reaching larger audiences and exposing them to your brand messaging is what strengthens brand awareness and grows revenue. Frequency is calculated by dividing Total Reach(the number of times your content appeared in Facebook users’ News Feeds) by Unique Reach(unique Facebook IDs to which your content was displayed, not counting multiple views by the same Facebook user).

It shows you the average number of times your post (or ad) was shown to each person. It’s important to monitor your volume of posts because a high frequency can result in negative feedback, which can hurt reach and lead to ineffective spend. Looking at this will put you on the path to finding the ideal amount of posts for publishing based on your content quality. The better the content, the more Facebook will show your ad to a given user, thus giving you more value for your budget and allowing you to publish more in a given period.

Negative Feedback

This metric measures how many people are hiding your content from their News Feed. This clearly affects your reach since it tags your content as uninteresting or spammy, and it will become shown less frequently. No matter if you put money behind your post or not (paid or organic), this number shows whether your content is resonating with your audience. **If this number is quite high, take it as a sign that you are likely targeting the wrong audience. **

Deep Demographics in Paid

This metric segments other top-line metrics such as CTR (Click Through Rate), CPC (Cost Per Click), reach and so on by demographic. This enables you to measure your ad performance by region, so that you can benchmark and identify where your ads were the most effective and ineffective.

Source : http://bit.ly/1XUs70z

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