Posts on State of Search about ‘Social Media’

Social Media Automation: The Good And Bad #smxlondon

Social Media

Social media has revolutionsed the way we interact with clients, friends, family and peers but at the same time it can also be very complex and time consuming. This session focused on giving and outline of available tools to automate social media sharing. However, leaving those tasks unattended to a machine can also cause various problems if not social disasters therefore speakers provided the audience with best practices to blend the automation of social media with human oversight.

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Turning Up Your Twitter Tactics #smxlondon

Twitter Evolution

Twitter has fast evolved to become a key element in anyone’s social media strategy. The landscape has changed though and the days of simply pushing out 140 character messages in the hope of generating new traffic to your site are long gone. Nowadays we as digital marketers, have to take various considerations into account i.e tweet time, frequency, re-tweets as well as the authority of those that are re-tweeting. Twitter has launched various new service enhancements such as its expanding Twitter promotion program and as Twitter cards. The session’s focus was on techniques and strategies to truly get the best out of Twitter.

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Social Signals, Schmochal Smignals?

Social Signals - do they effect rank?

Last week, I put together a workshop for Receptional Internet Marketing and sparked a very interesting debate: do Social Signals even affect page rank?  Or is it a big Google-myth?

On one side of the table there were the more technical SEO guys  who made some pretty compelling arguments favouring the opinion that Social Signals 100% do affect search rankings.  On the other side, was the side of the table that felt that while Social Signals are important to the online marketing mix, Google hasn t explicitly said that they do yet. (more…)

Questions to Ask Before Taking your Business Social

lets-do-social

It’s Monday. Chances are there are currently many businesses holding their weekly meetings to decide what they will be doing this week. Chances also are that some managers had a nice weekend with meeting friends and maybe even some birthday parties. The talks on those parties used to be mostly politics, but these days the discussions differ a lot. For example Social Media is discussed on almost every gathering. The good, the bad and the ugly of Social is being discussed.

I am willing to bet my entire fortune on it that somewhere on a birthday party some manager, some CEO or somebody else with a decision making role overheard or was part in a conversation about how Social Media is used in business. That person will have heard from his conversation partners what a great business tool it is for them and how their Facebook page reached ‘a 100 likes’ within a short amount of time. When that same manager turned his head at the birthday party he would see a group of kids all looking at their phones. Updating their Facebook status, playing a game or ‘apping’ their friends. In the back of his mind he will have thought: we need to do something with that.

This Monday morning that manager will have headed into the office, into the weekly staff meetings and will have said: “We need to do something with Facebook as well, where is our Facebook Page?”. And then the treadmill starts. A Facebook Page will be set up. Content will be created and will be posted. There will be employees begging their friends for likes and after a few weeks or months they start to wonder why Facebook didn’t work for them as ‘promised’. The manager by that time will have forgotten all about it and the marketing team will need to start looking for solutions.

Because they haven’t thought about it first. Because they lacked a strategy and just chose a channel. (more…)

SocialSafe, the Social Network Back-Up Tool

Where you keep your social bits nice and safe

A few weeks back Bas approached me with a trial for a tool called SocialSafe for State of Search. Due to the nature of the tool, I had to wait a little while to build up enough data to access its analytics features. So, after a bit of a wait, here is what I found out. (more…)

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Maintain a Social Media Presence and Ignore Scaremongering

Australian business fail social media - news.com.au

I’ve been offline for the last week, driving around the wilds of Tasmania in a camper-van with no phone or internet access. It’s certainly refreshing, and my brain feels like it’s seeing the internet in a revitalised way again. Despite spending more time with wallabies than people in the last week, I still didn’t entirely get away from the all encompassing world that is the internet!

Driving along, I heard a news report on the radio, discussed Australia’s SMEs’ failure to get involved with social media, with only a quarter of small businesses using the medium according to a recent survey. More details can be found on the News.com.au website.

AUSTRALIAN businesses are failing to keep pace with social media with less than a quarter embracing online opportunities, research reveals.

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Social TV: New TV or Another Layer on Traditional TV

second-screen

‘The Second Screen’. It is a term which you have been hearing about a lot more in the past year. The second screen many consider to be the ‘new TV’. It is even going to take the place of TV in the end some say. But is that really the case? Or will it be a bonus, will it just change the way we watch TV instead of replace it?

There might be a lot more going on than most people suspect. This was the topic of the keynote presentation at SES New York 2012 by Mike Proulx, Senior VP and Director Social Media at Hill Holliday and author of the book ‘Social TV‘. He claims there is more to Social TV than you’d think and that it will not replace TV, just enforce it. (more…)

9 Pinterest Tips for Business Profile Pages

Pinterest Logo

Having spent some time looking through the State of Search blog to see what areas have not been covered, I was surprised to see that we had a limited number of posts surrounding Pinterest. This up and coming social platform is continuing to gain traction and more and more businesses are starting to take note.

With this in mind, I wanted to share with all the State of Search readers some 9 tips for making Pinterest work for your business profile page.

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BBC 6 Radio Ace Personalised Advertising on YouTube

target-youtube

I use YouTube to listen to music.

I love YouTube: I love its user-driven content, its Comment and share facility, the way it allows massive splurges of innovation and creativity and sends messages. What I hate however are the adverts, whoever is with me, high-five the screen. Don’t break it though.

The advertising on YouTube is as annoying as any other online power-hose advertising marketing technique that tries to get as many of the right target audience as humanly possible with no real regard to where that advertising actually goes and who it actually reaches. Its annoyance boils down to one simple factor: Its irrelevance. (more…)

Activating the Social-Search Dynamic #SESLON

This session discussed:

  • How to develop an integrated social-search strategy.
  • Key points of crossover between search and social marketing.
  • Ideas for achieving synergy and efficiency between both channels with actionable strategic frameworks.
  • The importance of combined measurement and analytics strategy.
  • Client examples from some of the world’s most revered brands.

Bas van den Beld, Marketing/Search Strategist, Founder, Stateofsearch.com

Bas started with a story about his studies in history at university. His professor came on stage and said “don’t believe a single word you will hear over the next four years”. The study of history is more about what you’re thinking. We want to trust what we see and trust what we hear from the people around us. Only 5% of our decisions are made when we are aware of making a decision. We end up relying on the people around us to help guide us to make good decisions. This is especially true in choosing a restaurant. (more…)

Assessing the Non-Financial Benefits of Social Media Investment

internet-money

On Thursday I’m speaking at Digital Content Monetization Europe on a topic that regularly dumbfounds marketers: social media monetisation. My research for the presentation took me down three possible benefits of social media when it comes to Return on Investment:

  • Making Money – Conversions and advertising
  • Non-Financial Impacts – Traffic increases, acquiring more followers/Likes etc
  • Cost Saving –Savings on media spend, business process and customer service (more…)
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