Made me start to think about engaging posts and I found this great puzzle maker.
Give it a try!
10/27/2011
Fun tool for engaging posts!
Made me start to think about engaging posts and I found this great puzzle maker.
Give it a try!
10/26/2011
Priority: Awareness Metrics
Many blogs write about Reach measurements, Awarness metrics and social media ROI is on everybody's mind. The number of options to measure social media seem to be more than the number of coffee combinations on Starbucks.
My personal opinion is that we complicate things too much in life and in business. The most simple things in life are usually the most genious and effective.
Here are 3 questions and 3 answers that can be applied to more or less any business.
1. Why are we going to be active in social media?
2. What platforms are appropriate for our business (Where are our custumers?)
3. What can we offer our audience through our social networks that we can't offer elsewhere?
How to measure our activities
Reach
Why measure reach? Well to be frankly honest this is the only number most executives ask for and you need to be able to tell how many people are in your brand community. But Reach has a minor value to real business. Reach on Twitter doesn't say much. Having 10.000 followers could mean 10 people saw your tweet and one retweeted you to his 10 followers where not a single one of them continued your tweets journey. But hey, this is a metric that we currently can't escape from so let's throw it in there.
Number of Likes on Facebook
Number of Followers on Twitter
Number of unique visitors on Blog
AwarnessNow we're talking reactions. Much more important in my point of view than Reach. This is where we see HOW people are reacting to our posts. Do they like us? Hate us? Want more/less? Can we help them?
Applause rate (read this post for some more details)
Number of comments per blog post
Number of retweets per tweet
Number of shares and likes per Facebook post
Number of +1s
Economic ValueEvery companys goal is different and here is where you need to set up goals in Google analytics.
What is a conversion for you and your business? Is it a sign-up form for newsletters? Is it a business transacion (that somebody actually buys something on your website) or is it lead generation (somebody requesting more info about your product?) Depending on your goals this can all be measured through GA.
Is your business offline? Do you sell chocolate bars in a store or cupcakes in an airport? Well then a suggestion would be to measure social-coupons. Make "only social-media offers" such as offering your customers a free coffe in exchange of a password only availible on Twitter. Count how many came in with the code and compare it with a day/week where you didn't have the campaign. This will definitily boost both Reach, Engagement and Economic Value.
That's it for today!
CheersTweet
10/20/2011
New Facebook Insights
We Social Media Marketers are always looking for new, better and more efficient ways to measure our campaigns that we launch through platforms like Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to name a few.
Recently Facebook introduced a new version of Insights (Facebook’s own analytics package for fan pages). These are great news for us social marketers and just recently I attended a webinar hosted by Wildfireapp to get a better idea of what to expect from the new Insight.
The main goals with this update are to understand the performance of your page and learn what type of content really works.
The new dashboard is availible for all page admins, however if you’re more than one admin the one who accepted the first “test” may be the only one seing it. In my case I was the lucky one
The new dashboard is availible for all page admins, however if you’re more than one admin the one who accepted the first “test” may be the only one seing it. In my case I was the lucky one
In the graph to the right you can first see the“Total number of fans” which is nothing new. But right next to this you will likely smile. “Friends of fans” represents the potential reach of your fan page. It’s the number of fans of the page AND the friends of your fans. In our case we have a potential reach of more than 2 million people.Obviously it’s going to be hard to reach all of them unless you know the perfect formula to end up in the news feed for each one of your fans AND create such compelling content that all of them decide to interact with your page.
We move further to the right and see “People Talking About This” and this is a true engagement metric. This gives you the number of people who have interacted with your page, liked, commented, shared, checked in e.t.c in the last 7 days.
Last we see “Weekly total reach” which means the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with the page in the last 7 days.
If we scroll down a bit we´ll come to my favourite part. Here is the place to really see what resonates with your audience. Does a post that ends with a question generate more engagement than a post with a statement? Does your audience prefer videos or pictures?
The first metric I have highlighted here is “Reach”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve seen the post. So even if we have 10.000 fans it doesn’t mean that all of them are going to see our posts.Secondly is the one I would pick as my absolute personal favourite, “Engaged users”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve engaged (clicked) on your post.
At the end of the day, this is what we should try increase as much as possible.
The number of fans means nothing if they just ignore our posts!
“Virality” is also interesting. Here we see the number of unique people who’ve created a story about the post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it. This is a great place to compare different posts.
Let’s craft better posts!
My opinion is that this should help marketers to know better what works and what doesn’t work with their fans. This will help us craft more relevant and engaging content that will spark more activity and at the end hopefully we will manage to turn that activity into real business.
10/07/2011
The Essence Of Social Media
Why? Because it means I'm not the intern posting the flavor of the day cupcakes to a company blog anymore. I'm not anymore limited to explaining Social Media as something JUST intangible.
I'm also now capable of thinking in business, back-office and reality.
The person referred to me as thinking too much in business and not enough in the intangible form.
I don't know math really well, I kind of suck at Excel and I'm not a great swimmer. But I do understand social media.
What is social media really? The word implies it's something social and it's media, what's that really? Photos? Web? Music? "Media" could be a lot of stuff.
So here is my take on it and I'll round up with a conclusion of why I think social media can't just be flower power love and peace.
Social Media to me is a new (well not really anymore!) environment where the customer rules.
It's a new way of doing business in a BETTER way.
It makes companies improve, in everything from the way they treat their customers and the quality control of their products, to the experience offered to the customer and the way we let them consume our product (on their terms).
Social Media is boring made fun. It's bad made good.
Social Media is feelings and emotions.
Social media is responsibility and attention. Social media is technology but it's even more humanizing.
It takes qualified manpower and qualified manpower is not cheap.
I sometimes see these job offers of companies looking for a community manager and offering 20-30K/month and it's so obvious the company doesn't get it yet.
Qualified manpower take their job seriously and they know the company is investing and that usually means the company expects to see some type of return of investment...at least AT SOME POINT.
Social media is NOT just posting on Facebook and tweeting. A social media job implies making carefully thought-through strategies, having very clear goals and objectives and being able to report on those.
Crafting engaging blog posts about the best place to buy mozzarella cheese or why visit the Eiffel tower all in it's honor, but always with awareness of what this post, this campaign, this investment brings to the company.
YES if the goal is to create good-will, great positive sentiment and positioning the company as THE hub for information then let's focus on these things but keep in mind it may take a long time to see those monthly salaries, application costs, contest budgets make their way back into the company.
Here is the thing. The general budget for social media is still not huge. In fact it's pretty small.And unless you're Starbucks with 40 people full time doing ONLY social media, the resources may not allow you to only bear in mind good-will.
Even more, the boss may ask you to report where those dollars for that Facebook contest or Blog design are entering back into the company. Sorry to break it to you, but the fact of the matter is that most of them won't understand your beautiful explanation of how amazing this is for the online climate and how the brand is being perceived in a positive way.
Folks, let's never turn social media into something that it's not. Let's never forget that the customer is and should be in the center. Let's understand it is an organic channel and should take time and effort to nurse, grow and expand.
But let's also be professional. Let's invest money in the right people to handle social media, then let's give them the right tools to create the greatest experiences for the customer, but then let's also make them accountable for their actions and ask for tangible results.
Do I or do I not understand Social Media?Tweet
Social Media - A Central Role Inside The Company
Social Media is many things. It's Marketing, communications, customer service, PR, sales and human resources. Maybe it's slightly more marketing than anything else but the social media profile in your company should be deeply integrated into every department.
This person should attend the weekly staff meetings in offline marketing to know what campaigns are about to launch, to be able to back them up online.
Also he should know where online marketing is investing their time for example to coordinate the email marketing campaigns with social media campaigns.
He/she should know if the human resource department is hiring, to be able to post that on Linked In or Twitter.
The person should know the general direction of the company to know the tone of voice, the direction, the general feeling of where the company is and is going.
He should also be very close to communications to have access to press releases and have someone to secure the outgoing messages with, so that all are on the same line.
He should know how sales are going and if there are products that can be used for contests or sweepstakes.
He should know what's going on in the customer service department to know what questions are coming in and how the company is replying. AND coordinate the channels for that.
He or she should have support from a copy writer to craft engaging blog posts and he should have an easy to reach person from the legal department (new school preferably) to exchange ideas and secure the usage of email addresses, terms&conditions of contests e.t.c.
He should also be very close to the designers (the product department) to maximize the company's products for social media, may it be logos, messages or website design.
The list can go on, but my point is that Social media doesn't really belong in one place. Which is why I think it's becoming more and more important to have this profile in-house.
If we externalize social media we don't really care enough about it and at the end we don't really care enough about our customers.
An agency is great for many things but I'm against hiring an agency for social media communications.
Hire the agency to design the Facebook page landing page, the blog or to come up with a great contest idea, but care enough about your customer to let them be handled by the brand they think they're being handled by.
Social Media is trust, it's fast and it's a 2-way communication, NOT 3-way. Meaning, talk directly to the customer, it's faster, it's more genuine and it gives you more control of the quality of what's being said.Tweet
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