I have been really busy launching an online sports network so my posts have been a little sparse recently. But something happened last month that I thought was worth sharing.
All the talk about social marketing these days revolves around Twitter and Facebook. By being so myopic on these two social networks, marketers are forgetting about the universe of other communities that are online.
I had written a post about the 25 Most Valuable College Football Programs just after Christmas. We did some work making sure the post was visible on the sports social networks, we tweeted it etc. Social media marketing basics. Read more... (259 words, 1 image, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)
Companies “brag” all the time about the number of followers or friends that they have on Facebook or Twitter. But what motivates someone to friend or follow a company?
A December 2009 survey from MarketingSherpa of 500 social network users showed that the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online was to learn about specials and sales, followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.
This data would seem to indicate that Facebook and Twitter is good for reaching people who already have an existing relationship with you, but not as good at attracting new customers. Read more... (133 words, 3 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)
Last week I looked at some of the marketing strategies that are working on Facebook according to the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers.
Today it is time to turn that attention onto what is working on Twitter.
Most marketers are using Twitter to simply drive more traffic to their web site. The most common tactics are direct linking to web pages or promotional pages.
As with the Facebook results, what works in the B2B market does not necessarily work for B2C marketers and vice-versa.
Read more... (291 words, 2 images, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)
I have been going over the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers to see what are some of the more successful tactics that they are seeing work on Facebook.
One thing is quite apparent is that tactics that work for the B2B market will not necessarily work for those marketers who are targeting the B2C market.
For those in the B2B space, the most successful marketing tactics used on Facebook are creating a survey of “fans” and friending customers.
Creating a survey of “fans” was the one marketing tactic that appears to work in both the B2B and B2C markets. Read more... (215 words, 2 images, estimated 52 secs reading time)
Some interesting data from a new report from Ad-ology called the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010”). According to the report, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for US small businesses (50% of respondents), keeping up with the industry (45%), and monitoring online conversations (44%).
The No 1. Roadblock to using social media is the perception that “our customers do not use social networks,” claimed by 31% of small businesses. Nearly as many (29%) say they do not have the time or staff available to do a good job with social network marketing.
Read more... (159 words, 3 images, estimated 38 secs reading time)
A new report from Marketing Sherpa called the “2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report” shows the importance of social media marketing now from a strategic perspective.
As social media marketing has moved from the trial phase to the strategic phase, the ability to measure success becomes more important.
“Defining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle. The other half is aligning those objectives with corresponding metrics,” according to the report. “This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.”
Read more... (133 words, 2 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)
It appears the hockey growth phrase of Twitter is over.
Twitter’s international traffic has flattened. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. That translates into an increase of only 3.5%,
Here in the U.S. the news is even worse. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.
The flattening of Twitter’s growth rate can be seen in this chart from TechCrunch
Read more... (191 words, 2 images, estimated 46 secs reading time)
Last week I had the opportunity to beta test a cool new product from Flowtown. By entering in someone’s email address into the Flowtown system you can find out who a person is: their name, age, gender, occupation, and location.
The cool feature is that Flowtown also lets you know the social media profiles that are attached to that email addres. So you canfind out whether a prospect/customer is on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc and so can tailor a campaign specific to them.
Last week I spoke with Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown to learn more about their company and product and this is part of that conversation Read more... (519 words, 1 image, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)
If your target demographic is college students, there is no better way to reach this group that through Facebook.
According to the “American College Students Survey” Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students; it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics.
Among seven leading social networking sites ranked by college students in the Anderson Analytics 2009-2010 GenX2Z American College Student Survey conducted this fall, Facebook was viewed as “cool” by a whopping 82% of males and 90% of females. All other SNS’ were deemed “lame” by significant percentages of both male and female collegiate users. In particular, MySpace–the granddaddy of SNS’–was considered “lame” by the largest portion of college students (31%). Read more... (339 words, 2 images, estimated 1:21 mins reading time)
Social media has transformed itself in the last 2 years from blogs and forums to Facebook and Twitter. But I see another transformation unfolding in social media as the video market is poised explode.
By video I do not mean repurposing commercials on YouTube. Video is producing original content for the web.
In recent months we have seen an explosion in demand for .TV domain names major professional sports leagues and sports network ESPN have started to acquire of develop .TV domains. For example look at:
