Samsung beats Apple in meeting users’ multitasking needs

Samsung beats Apple in meeting users’ multitasking needs

 

By Rebecca Borison

September 5, 2013

The Keeping up with the Kardashian’s app

As consumers increasingly use mobile applications and mobile Web sites for a variety of everyday activities, marketers are focusing on enabling users to multitask. Yet, Apple seems to be trailing Samsung in catering to this trend.

YouTube recently updated its app to let users watch a video while searching for the next one, and many other apps and sites are following in suit. Yet, while desktop is definitely conducive to multiple tabs and windows being open at once, it is unclear if mobile, especially Apple devices, will lend itself to the same experience.

“Easily being able to share content socially, watch additional content, shop, search for store locations and other multitasking features in apps can be additive to a brand experience, especially when these functions are easy for the consumer to use,” said Nikao Yang, senior vice president of new business development & marketing at AdColony, Los Angeles.

“On one hand, the smaller screens on mobile devices may not be entirely conducive to multitasking,” he said. “Unlike desktop experiences where we have multiple tabs open and jump from activity to activity, the mobile app environment is about curated and purposeful app experiences that hold a consumer’s attention.

“However, it may just be the definition of multitasking that needs to be put into context for mobile. For many consumers, multitasking on mobile may be more about easily moving from app to app as opposed to trying to do multiple things on the same tiny screen.”

Samsung vs. Apple
While both Samsung and Apple face similar challenges in terms of screen size, Samsung seems to be ahead of the game in terms of multitasking capabilities.

According to Mr. Yang, some Samsung devices let users split the screen in half, so they can have their email inbox on one side while running another app on the other side.

The multitasking function is built directly into the device.

Apple devices, however, have not yet offered such a feature.

“In terms of trends, it seems like iOS is more about keeping users focused on one app than trying to do 50 things at once, but you can very easily switch between apps,” Mr. Yang said. “IOS notifications allow you to know what’s going on in your other apps without having to constantly jump around.”

Multitasking apps
Despite Apple not offering split-screen capabilities, marketers are still managing to squeeze multitasking functionality into apps and mobile sites.

On YouTube, for example, the experience is similar to the picture-in-picture experience on television, where one video becomes smaller to make space for other videos or activities. It is pretty difficult to see the smaller video, but the app can be used to listen to the video’s audio while looking for other videos.

E’s Keeping up with the Kardashians app also lets users watch videos while simultaneously looking at other videos or newsfeeds. While watching a video, a user can search through other videos on top of the video, making the original video a kind of background screen.

Here, too, it is a bit difficult to watch the video, but users could listen to the audio while searching for more videos.

Other apps allow users to completely minimize a video while searching through other content.

For example, Comedy Central’s CC: Stand-Up app lets users minimize the screen of a comedy act they are watching and click on discover mode to find related comedians while still listening to the original act.

Pandora even lets users close the app completely while still listening to music. Users can listen while going about other activities on their phones.

Youtube’s multitasking feature

Screen challenge
One of the obvious challenges with catering to a multitasking culture on mobile devices is that screen size may just be too small to accommodate more than one activity.

On desktops, consumers can comfortably open two windows or watch a video while browsing for other information. On mobile devices, this may be less comfortable.

“The smaller screen and the carefully-designed environment of a great app is meant to hold a consumer’s attention, which is a perfect canvas for advertisers,” Mr. Yang said.

“The challenge for marketers in any medium, whether it’s TV, online or on mobile, is to have beautifully-crafted creative and compelling, impactful messages that capture a consumer’s attention,” he said. “The key is to be additive to the experience rather than interruptive and to keep the consumer engaged.”

Matt Garrity, director of business development at Canvas, New York, believes that marketers should focus on providing the best features that offer convenience, efficiency and effectiveness. He does not necessarily think that apps need to directly cater to multitasking, rather multi-features.

“Marketers have the opportunity to connect to their audience with the right app experience,” Mr. Garrity said. “They need to first research and understand what will truly be of use on a repeat basis to the user.  User testing and interviews can go a long way towards avoiding superfluous features.”

Multitasking in the Keeping up with the Kardashians app

Tablets vs. phones
While multitasking may be a bit of a stretch for smartphone apps, tablet apps may have an easier time catering to this culture.

Marci Weisler, chief operating officer at EachScape, New York, believes that marketers can be more successful by incorporating multitasking features in tablet apps.

“The limited screen space on phones limits how many options are offered without cluttering the screen and overwhelming the user,” she said. “I think it’s more easily done on tablets, both in apps and browser.”

Ms. Weisler sees multitasking as becoming more prevalent among consumers and thinks that marketers should acknowledge this trend and try to engage consumers in their app or site.

“People are distracted and busy and while you want their full attention, you’d rather keep them engaged with you and doing multiple things than off somewhere else,” she said.

“We see this on the Web all the time, I’ve got multiple screens open. Brands need to be engaging in their own apps and as ads within apps. App publishers need to find ways to present brand marketing so it’s not obfuscated by mutlitasking.”

14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros

14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros

 

Are you looking for social media tools to get more out of your marketing?

Are you wondering what tools marketing pros are using successfully?

We asked fourteen well-known marketers to share the latest social media tools they’ve been using.

Discover how you can use these tools to help you to get more out of your social media marketing.

#1: Mention

Todd Wheatland

Mention was developed as a user-friendly replacement for Google Alerts. They’re a textbook example of how to build a platform by doing one thing better than anyone else.

As well as being an absolute joy to use, it captures so many more, ahem, ‘mentions’ online than any other platform I’ve used that it’s become my #1 go-to social mention reference tool.

There are many clever things behind the way Mention is set up. They’ve taken the Apple approach to clean and simple UI to give you great functionality as a default and the power to modify settings to really hone in on what’s important to your circumstances.

Mention provides clean and simple functionality.

Apart from doing a fantastic job of identifying online mentions, some of my favorite features are:

• Simple controls to turn specific sources off—but still be able to monitor them in the spam folder in case you mis-classify something.
• Default alert emails that take you straight to source, rather than forcing an extra step by taking you to the Mention platform.
  

  You can see how many online mentions you have in the left-hand column.

Of course, with success, they’re quickly adding features—including an enterprise-level offering—that will make them seem increasingly like a lot of the more established players in the social tools space. So far though, they’ve done a great job of maintaining simplicity and delivering on their core offering.

Todd Wheatland, head of thought leadership at Kelly Services.

#2: Addvocate

Jay Baer

My favorite new social media tool is Addvocate. I like it so much, I invested in the company and joined their board.

Addvocate solves a very common problem in social media, which is the need to decentralize your messengers. Almost always, the employees in your company have more social connections (combined) than the company does for its official social media outposts.

Thus, smart companies need to find ways to ask employees to occasionally share relevant information on their personal accounts. Amber Naslund and I wrote about this in The NOW Revolution, and recommended a “message of the day” email that is sent to all social media–active employees.

Addvocate takes that concept and makes it much, much better. Employees install a simple browser plugin that enables them to receive content recommendations from a centralized marketing team, while also enabling them to recommend content to the marketing team and to one another. The marketing team then gets detailed statistics showing which employees are sharing content on social, how many clicks and engagement actions each employee is generating, etc.

Addvocate enables you to share content with colleagues.

It’s an incredibly easy-to-use, remarkably inexpensive (just a few dollars per month) social media tool that removes the pain of teamwork and content sharing/distribution. I use it constantly to share potential topics for inclusion in our daily email newsletter.

Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert.

#3: Swayy

Jamie Turner

The best new tool I’ve seen in many months is called Swayy. It’s a platform that drops interesting content into a dashboard where you can scan or read the most interesting articles.

The best feature isn’t the fact that the articles are dropped right in front of your nose. The best feature is the sharing.

Swayy finds you the best content to share with your target audience.

At the bottom of each article, you can click the “share” button and it automatically opens up your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

With the click of a button, you’re able to share articles across multiple platforms. Plus, you can schedule your sharing times well in advance. That way, you’re able to share multiple articles across multiple platforms multiple times a day. Brilliant!

Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer.

#4: eGrabber’s Account-Researcher

Viveka Von Rosen

One of the reasons LinkedIn works so well is that it tells us exactly how we’re related to the people in our network and the best ways of communicating with them (messages, invitations, introductions and InMails, in that order).

LinkedIn’s limitation is with the folks who fall outside of our network; especially if we don’t have $10 for each InMail we want to send. Another limitation is that LinkedIn is increasingly hiding our connections from us. First taking away last name, then whole name and picture altogether!

Let me start by saying eGrabber Account-Researcher is NOT a free tool. You can get a free trial, but it’s so incredibly powerful for researching prospects that it’s absolutely worth the $80 a month fee. Can you eventually find the same info on Google with the right algorithms? Yes. Will it take you hours and hours to yield results that aren’t as comprehensive? Yes. Is your time worth more than that? YES!

Essentially, Account-Researcher gets through LinkedIn’s restrictions to better research and find a prospect’s contact and company information.

Account-Researcher helps you research a prospect.

It cuts prospect research time down to a few minutes and will help you:

• Find missing emails and phone numbers of prospects when you have only their name and company.
• Quickly qualify a company and build a list of key decision-makers that includes name, title, email, phone and social media footprint.
• Get talking points from news, patents, blogs, press releases and other sources for pre-call prospect research.
  

  A quick way to find decision-makers within a company.

LinkedIn isn’t about selling your stuff. It’s about finding and engaging with people, developing that feeling of “knowing, liking and trusting.” And once you’ve established a relationship with the person, you can move to the next stage in the game. The more you know about prospects, the better your chance of getting to that next stage.

The power of LinkedIn is that it helps us connect with real people in real life. We need to go old school. Do searches, do research and then pick up the phone! Account-Researcher makes that MUCH easier.

Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day, host of #LinkedInChat and co-moderator of LinkedStrategies.

#5: Compfight

Rich Brooks

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast. Enter Compfight.

Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use.

Compfight is a great tool when searching for an image for a blog post.

Do a quick search for ideas, objects, emotions—whatever will best represent the idea in your blog post. Compfight will even provide you with the HTML code for proper attribution. (Yes, you need to give attribution to the photographer, but that’s a small price to pay!)

If you’re blogging regularly but working on a shoestring budget, be sure to give Compfight a try!

Rich Brooks, president of flyte new media, a web design and Internet marketing company that helps small businesses succeed online.

#6: Tagboard

Kim Garst

Tagboard is my new cool social media tool. To describe it simply, Tagboard is a way to monitor keywords (a.k.a. hashtags) across multiple social media channels.

To monitor conversations that revolve around specific hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and Vine, Tagboard pulls in content from all of these sites based on a specified hashtag and creates a custom board filled with content from all platforms.

Why Is it Useful?

1. Brand monitoring. It’s useful to anyone who monitors their own brand or other people’s brands as a part of their business. It is especially useful for small business owners who do not want to invest in social media monitoring.

2. Content Curation. It’s a great way to find content around a specific topic. For example, if you want to find out what others are saying about breaking industry news, search by keyword(s) and find articles, conversations, etc. Once you conduct the search, narrow the focus to a single social media platform. In other words, view just tweets with that specific hashtag. You can even reply to the conversations right from within Tagboard!

You can reply to the conversation.

3. Real-time Leads at Your Fingertips! Suppose you’re a realtor in Miami and you’re looking to connect with people who are moving to Miami. Search for real-time conversations that are taking place on multiple social media platforms using targeted keywords such as #MovingToMiami. Connect, share some valuable info and start working on building a relationship that will lead to a potential sale.

Search for real-time conversation around targeted keywords.

Best of all, it’s a free tool! Check it out!

Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social.

#7: ManageFlitter

Stephanie Sammons

A cool social media tool that has helped me get a better handle on effectively managing my Twitter account is ManageFlitter.

As you’re probably aware, Twitter can be very noisy! A tool that can help you manage your account while growing your following with the right people is very valuable. The ManageFlitter motto is “Work Faster and Smarter with Twitter.”

ManageFlitter integrates with your Twitter account to help you effectively:

• Find relevant people to follow and connect with by searching Twitter bios, locations and keywords
• Unfollow inactive accounts, spam accounts (you can force them to unfollow you as well) or accounts with no profile images
• Schedule and post tweets at optimal times when your followers are most likely to see your updates
• Monitor keywords, hashtags, usernames and even websites mentioned on Twitter
• Get analytics on your Twitter account

Although some of the above features are paid, you can sign up for a free account and get access to basic features for testing the service. The Pro Plan for more robust individual users is $12/month.

ManageFlitter has several price plans to choose from.

One caveat with ManageFlitter or any Twitter-based tool that can help you manage your account is to understand Twitter’s following rules and best practices. Ultimately you’re responsible for adhering to these rules. ManageFlitter has been working with Twitter for over 3 years and they’ve helped almost 2 million users.

I would recommend using ManageFlitter to build a more relevant following, keep your account cleaned up and prioritize quality over quantity!

Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor.

#8: Socialbakers

Stephanie Shkolnik

Socialbakers has an effective tool called Analytics Pro, which provides an understanding of how your brand stacks up against your competitors, specifically across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—for now.

The simple interface allows you to input a social media channel and gain insights into engagement rates and channel growth, and understand which contributors from your social communities are most active, providing an opportunity to build relationships and enable continued advocacy.

Check out how your brand compares to others in your niche.

An otherwise painfully manual process, this tool also allows you to see how you’re performing against your competitors to learn which campaigns, content and influencers are driving the most effective conversations.

While Socialbakers is a paid tool, a trial period will impress you and show decision-makers how much more effectively your time will be spent on reporting, gaining insights and informing social strategy.

Stephanie Shkolnik, social media director at Digitaria.

#9: Post Planner

Ian Cleary

Post Planner is a content management tool that runs as an application within Facebook. What’s great about Post Planner is that in addition to providing the ability to schedule content, it also provides fantastic facilities for sourcing and adding content to your queue for later posting.

You can search a database of thousands of status updates on a range of general topics, find content that’s trending in your niche or add Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or blogs and easily add content to your queue from these sources.

You can easily add content to your queue.

It also provides real-time analytics on posts, so you immediately see what’s working and not working.

Post Planner is a time saver, enabling you to plan and manage your Facebook content in advance, rather than doing it off the cuff.

Ian Cleary, founder of RazorSocial.

#10: Komfo

Neal Schaffer

There are a lot of Facebook page analytic tools and social media dashboards that include Facebook analysis.

A problem with some of these tools is that they try to do so much that it’s hard to gain simple-to-understand, meaningful insight about your Facebook content strategy from them. Others just provide a lot of data, some in better-looking forms than others, without offering any other handholding as to how that data can be utilized to improve your Facebook engagement.

That’s why it was refreshing to discover a new free Facebook page analytics tool from Komfo—a company claiming to be “the leading tool provider in the Nordics within the Social Media Marketing space.”

Komfo provides analysis with additional handholding to help you analyze your Facebook content based on the following types of analytics:

• Fan Penetration: In essence, this is EdgeRank—a figure that shows what percentage of your fans you’re reaching with each post. If the average EdgeRank on Facebook is said to be 16%, you can easily see an average from your last 30 days’ posts up to a maximum of 100. Of course, you can drill down into each post to see which is working for better or worse.
• Viral Amplification: Don’t be fooled by comparing this to the “viral” analytics provided by Facebook Insights. That number only looks at the percentage of People Talking About This compared to your total fan base. While that’s a nice number to know, wouldn’t you like to know the viral reach of each of your posts as compared to its organic reach? This is exactly what this data shows you for each post, with anything over 1.0 being considered “viral” (i.e., more people saw this post in a news feed via viral reach as compared to organic reach).
• CTR: Once again, although the total number of click-throughs are provided in Insights as “Engaged Users,” Komfo takes it one step further and gives you a click-through ratio for each post as a percentage of how many people saw the post.
• Spam Score: We all know that negative feedback from your fans can have a heavy impact on your EdgeRank. Unfortunately, with the current implementation of Insights, you need to dig deep into seeing the “Engaged Users” for each post to check for mention of negative feedback. Komfo’s tool conveniently shows the ratio of negative feedback as a percentage of total clicks.
  

  Komfo is a great tool to help you analyze your Facebook content.

The tool also includes the “People Talking About This” number, which they call “Stories,” as well as overall Reach. Another welcome feature is the ability to send an email and give others access to your report online without Facebook authorization. This is a nice touch that makes the tool even more useful for large and distributed teams.

Neal Schaffer, founder of Maximize Social Business.

#11: Rignite

Andrea Vahl

An interesting tool I recently discovered is Rignite, which helps monitor several social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—from one place. It was just launched in April and they will be adding features and other social networks.

The best thing about the tool is the team aspect of this product. You can have forums and chats within the tool, and assign tasks to people on the team. So this works well for teams of 3-6 people who are managing the same accounts.

They have tracking and insights incorporated into the dashboard.

You can monitor your fan base within the dashboard.

This tool will become even more valuable as they add some of the features they have planned to help monitor your social media contacts more closely. While the tool works well right now for monitoring and posting to your accounts for a team of people, I think this will be one to watch as it evolves!

Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, uses her improv comedy skills to blog as Grandma Mary, Social Media Edutainer.

#12: SocialOomph

Jeff Bullas

One of the coolest social media marketing tools that I’ve discovered and used is SocialOomph.

The challenge for most bloggers and social media marketers is not just creating the content, but also distributing it. Twitter is a great social media network to assist you with sharing your content to your followers, but having to tweet constantly is time-consuming.

SocialOomph (professional edition, which costs about $25 a month) allows you to not only load and schedule tweets, you can also make them recurring, saving you the onerous and time-consuming task of ongoing scheduling.

Load your tweets once, then set and forget.

SocialOomph is useful for scheduling evergreen content.

SocialOomph lets you load up to 500 unique tweets and the major benefit is that it saves me about 25-30 hours a week, or 100-120 hours per month, of ongoing tweet scheduling!

Jeff Bullas, blogger, author, strategist and speaker.

#13: Zapier

Paul Colligan

Zapier has changed the social media marketing game for me in the most dramatic of ways. This service connects systems in ways once only possible with a massive programming budget.

You can say things across the social networks like “text your email to (503) 405-4415 to get the free video (or just leave a message if you don’t have texting)” and have that sync automatically with whatever email system you’re using (from MailChimp to AWeber) and/or with any CRM you run (from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Salesforce).

You can automate tasks among online services.

Zapier also automatically generates a Google spreadsheet for you that tracks every time a certain keyword is mentioned in Twitter and makes it possible for you to automatically send selected Facebook Posts to your blog. In addition, when you do a webcast (paid or otherwise) through Eventbrite, all of the information collected is integrated into everything else you’re doing (I leverage everything they offer to make my event as social as possible).

The possibilities are endless, and you should see the running list of integration ideas I have.

At the time I write this, Zapier brags of 233 web services integrated. I’m sure they’ll add more before this piece is published. With Zapier, social is now one big ecosystem, and I’m thrilled to play in it.

Paul Colligan, director of content marketing at Instant Customer.

#14: FixYourFunnel and Mobivity

Beth Hayden

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to attend a live workshop given by the fabulous Pam Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, and a world-renowned business coach). At the end of Pam’s talk, she told the audience that she had a handout for us.

Pam surprised me by announcing a phone number and saying “Text your name and email address to that number, and I’ll send you the handout.” I could see people whipping out their phones so they could text her. There were no messy sign-up sheets and people could follow her instructions on the spot—and she got their email addresses right away, so she could follow up with possible leads.

I had never seen anyone utilize text messages for that purpose, and thought it was a great idea, so I followed up with Pam later and asked her how she pulled off this cool process. She recommended two tools: FixYourFunnel (an Infusionsoft-specific tool) and Mobivity.

Utilize text messages for your business.

Avoid messy sign-up sheets and use a text messaging service instead.

As a consultant and author who does regular public speaking and training, I can’t wait to integrate these smart mobile marketing tools into my sales process and see the results I get!

Beth Hayden, author of Pinfluence, a speaker and social media expert.

Who are these social media pros?

The social media marketing experts who contributed to this article are all speaking at the Social Media Success Summit.

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a live online conference that will empower you to use social media to gain more exposure, increase traffic, cultivate loyal fans and grow your business. More than 45 of the world’s leading social media pros will show you how. The event is spread over four weeks in October.

Join nearly 3,000 fellow marketers at the online mega-conference designed to empower and inspire you with social media marketing tactics—brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

Why should you attend Social Media Success Summit?

You’ll hear from 45+ of the world’s top social media marketing pros as they reveal their newest social media marketing tips and practical, real-world, proven examples.

You’ll be able to take your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, blogging, podcasting and video marketing to an entirely new level.

Is Twitter the next big mobile commerce powerhouse?

Is Twitter the next big mobile commerce powerhouse?

 

By Chantal Tode

August 30, 2013

Twitter looks to build a commerce strategy

In a sign that Twitter is looking to extend its mobile and social weight to commerce in a potentially significant way, the company recently hired its first ever head of commerce.

Twitter this week named Nathan Hubbard, who was previously CEO of Ticketmaster, to head up its commerce strategy. With mobile commerce sales continuing to grow quickly and social an increasingly important part of the purchase decision making process for many consumers, Twitter has strong potential to grab a slice of the pie if it executes well.

“At face value, Twitter provides an exceptionally powerful mobile platform uniquely positioned to help both drive and socialize commerce activities,” said Gian LaVecchia, managing partner and U.S. digital practice lead at MEC, Mayville, WI.

“We’ve already witnessed some of the fantastic commerce activations American Express launched on Twitter; simple, yet effective solutions which, I believe, were intentionally designed for mobile engagement,” he said. “Moving forward, I imagine we’ll see a continued evolution of the model with Twitter providing a dynamic creative canvas that will help quickly shift the engagement equation from conversation and social sharing to more ROI-focused commerce activities.

“Of course, understanding Twitter’s massive data pipeline one can easily imagine how the social/interest graph will come into play with personalized recommendation engines and social shopping incentives.”

Retailer partnerships
Twitter has said it is looking to partner with retailers and payment providers as it pursues its commerce strategy as opposed to trying to create a standalone commerce solution.

These players are likely to be eager to partner with Twitter given the social networks significant user base and the opportunity this will provide to learn about how mobile, social and commerce are converging.

“When you look at the number of users on Twitter, that’s where the potential comes in for this to be a big play,” said Jeffrey Green, director of the emerging technologies service at Mercator Advisory Group, Maynard, MA. “Whether it becomes a competitor to others in the space, that is a big hill to climb.

“Look at how long it took PayPal to grow,” he said. “PayPal is partnering with existing players, and in that sense, Twitter is smart to do that.

“These players have an understanding how payments works, the partnerships necessary, the nuances of payments that aren’t always clear to newcomers. There are a lot of things that go on in the background that aren’t obvious. Partnerships are important.”

Impulse buying
Twitter is likely to pursue a strategy that is native to the Twitter ecosystem and integrated into its newsfeed.

One possible scenario would be to position Twitter as a channel for impulse items.

“It’s not a perfect analogy, but you can see a future where Twitter becomes the check-out aisle of mobile commerce,” said Richard Guest, president of US operations at Tribal Worldwide, New York.

“Twitter could be the perfect place to merchandise the digital impulse purchase; items with a low-price point that offer an instant gratification: song downloads, movie tickets or experience upgrades like VIP/priority entrance/boarding,” he said.

Twitter has been slowly moving toward offering commerce with introductions such as Cards, which give users a way to expand Promoted Tweets to see more information or sign up to receive additional content. Going forward, Twitter could start monetizing these clicks.

One of the benefits Twitter could bring to a commerce solution is the information it has about it users. Such data could help marketers drive results from their efforts.

“Twitter has unique access to contextual information of its users,” said Craig Davis, found and CEO of Relevvant, San Francisco. “This access gives them the ability to assign targetable personas to its millions of users.

“Brands will be able to target commerce in the same way as advertising,” he said. “Furthermore, Twitter will be able to collect ecommerce performance to introduce even more user-level variables for optimization.”

Low awareness
One of the challenges Twitter could face is the lack of understanding among many marketers of how to leverage social to drive sales.

Marketers and retailers may also need to add developers, analytics and other new functions to their social media teams in order to develop successful Twitter commerce strategies.

“The biggest hurdle they’ll face is probably not the consumer’s use of the card but getting companies to start thinking of tweets as viable sales platforms,” said Joe Germscheid, director of consumer engagement at Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, MN.

“In the short term, Twitter will need to do a much better job at publicizing their commerce abilities,” he said. “I don’t think many marketers will jump on board quickly, simply because they have pretty low awareness of how Twitter can help or even what they can do.”

One challenge marketers could face is how to position offers so that consumers see value in them.

Another challenge will be how to enable a commerce transaction that is simple and intuitive given the small size of mobile screens.

“One key obstacle Twitter will inevitably have to navigate is simplifying the complexities of the actual commerce experience itself, obviously, one-click purchase would be the ideal but that requires back-end integration with major financial institutions and back-end alignment with the merchants themselves – challenging, yet doable,” MEC’s LaVecchia said.

Twitter will also need to address personal data security concerns.

The big unknown is if Twitter users will embrace the opportunity to purchase goods from within the social network or not.

“How will the user base respond to an even more commercial platform where many Tweets become ‘buy now’ messages?,” Tribal Worldwide’s Mr. Guest said. “Will they spend less time on the platform? Un-follow brands and retailers?

“These are important questions for Twitter that paint a fine line to walk,” he said.

How to Improve Your Marketing With Facebook Apps

How to Improve Your Marketing With Facebook Apps

 

Want to grow your email list or drive more people to your business?

Are you looking for ways to connect Facebook to your business goals?

In this article, I’ll show you common goals of four different industries and how Facebook apps are helping meet those goals.

Why Facebook Apps?

What kinds of apps (also known as tabs) do you have on your Facebook page?

Are you using the right features on those tabs to support your business goals and Facebook strategy?

 

Goals can include having visitors sign up to receive emails, download a coupon or ebook, enter a promotion or make a purchase.

These actions need to be easy to complete. By making it possible for visitors to do this in tabs on your Facebook page, you can increase the rate of visitors successfully completing the desired action.

Using the right tab apps can increase your success!

Give visitors access on Facebook to key tools and information.

Below I reveal common goals of four different industries (restaurants, hotels and travel destinations, local retailers and professional service companies) and outline key tabs that these industry page managers should consider implementing on their Facebook pages.

As you’ll see, there are some commonalities of tab types that can and should be used to increase Facebook marketing success. So if your industry is not represented specifically, don’t fret—common threads do apply!

#1: Restaurants

The opportunity for restaurants lies in catching the attention of fans or targeted consumers via posts or ads that drive them to tabs on your Facebook page. Once you get a visitor to your tab, quickly offer them the information and opportunities they need, and you’ll make all the difference for that customer. Key tab recommendations include the following:

Show Your Menu

Allow customers to see your specialties easily right on Facebook with a tab that includes your menu and perhaps a PDF download of it, or simply use a tab app solution that allows you to add your menu from your website to a tab.

Give visitors access to your menu right on Facebook.

By iframing in your website menu, efficiencies are gained! Simply make changes on the website and the tab is updated as well. Plus, by having the menu on the tab, your page can use features such as a “like gate” so that visitors must take the quick action of liking the page in order to see the menu.

Add Email Sign-up

Add an email sign-up tab to your Facebook page and make users aware of it through posts and tips in the news feed. Your restaurant can grow its email list and then reach potential customers via email as well on Facebook.

Email sign-up with free dessert voucher.

Share Special Offers

Who doesn’t like a deal? Offer an incentive that drives foot traffic—offer a coupon or discount deal on a tab. To get even more long-term marketing value, integrate an email opt-in with the special offer.

Special offer example that extends reach and rewards new fans.

Combine a promotion incentive with an email opt-in to grow your email marketing list more quickly than simply using an email sign-up tab alone.

The promotion serves as an immediate way to potentially increase foot traffic to your restaurant, and the email sign-up gives you an ongoing method to market to those same individuals.

For more information on tying promotions with growing your email list, have a look at Growing Your Email List With Facebook Promotions.

Take Reservations

Is Saturday night packed at your establishment? Do customers want to call ahead to reserve their table? Do you already take reservations via your website?

If not, then consider adding a reservations form to a tab on your Facebook page. By using an iframe or website resizer app solution, you can easily add your website reservations page to a tab and make it easy for Facebook users to get a spot at your restaurant!

There are basically two ways to add the reservations feature to a tab:

• Have your reservations system functionality built into a custom tab, which can be as simple as a form to enter date, time, name and mobile number.
• Use a cost-effective approach of iframing your existing web reservations page URL into a tab which serves to offer the same web feature right in a tab on your Facebook page.
  

  Add your reservations page to a tab.

#2: Hotel and Travel Destinations

Hotels and travel destinations have a wonderful opportunity to engage fans and integrate tabs that help guests complete desired actions. Key tab recommendations include the following:

Show Off Features and Amenities

Give your visitors a view of your best and finest features! Add a tab with a gallery of images and perhaps a quick video to inspire visitors to like your page and connect with you further.

A related idea is to offer an events tab, feature special activities or offers for users to learn about or opt into.

The example below showcases key features of the hotel, while also incorporating the ability for guests to look up availability and check rates—a great combination!

Display your finest points and enable visitors to take action.

Combine Special Offers With Email Sign-up

As noted in the restaurant section, a desired action for visitors to complete that can help grow your business is the ability for visitors to sign up for email lists about specials or events.

When combined with an incentive, the rates of sign-up can be greater. This is a great way to connect with your visitors so that when the time is right for them to plan their next trip, your location can be first on their mind!

Example tab to allow sign-up for email offers.

Book Your Guests for a Stay

A key for hotels and restaurants is keeping the facility bookings up! Why make visitors jump outside of Facebook to get to a reservation? If you’ve captured their attention in the news feed with a post and brought them to the tab, make it easy for them to check dates and get their reservation started.

Use an iframe or website resizer app solution to add your website reservations page to a tab and make it easy for Facebook users to get a spot at your hotel!

Make it easy! Add the reservations web page to a tab.

Contest Tab

Hotels and travel destinations can generate buzz and increase reach and engagement on their page when they host a contest or promotion. Contests and promotions can benefit a page in many ways—from growing the email list to reaching friends of fans, and more.

A contest that’s tied to your location, such as a photo contest to win a free or discounted stay, can be a great way to boost engagement.

Contests can increase reach and reservations.

#3: Local Retailers

A key for local retailers is inspiring traffic to come to their store. As outlined in 11 Checks to Ensure Your Facebook Page Is Up to Date, one important item is to allow Facebook check-ins. This can help you gain visibility in Facebook’s Graph Search and with friends of those who check in.

Tabs can also play an important role for local retailers and here are a few key tab recommendations for retailers:

Highlight Deals and Featured Products

Post enticing nuggets of information to the news feed and include a link to the custom tab where you showcase either a deal or a featured product.

A key decision is to know what the goal of each tab is. Do you want to ensure a user has liked your page, completes an email sign-up, downloads a coupon or something else? Know the action and provide the information to help accomplish that goal.

In this example, a time-specific offer is outlined (to keep the image height limited I’m not showing the form below the offer). The brand used a time-limited offer with a form to encourage fans to act and give them the opportunity to do so right on the tab.

A limited-time offer inspires participation.

Collect Email Sign-ups

As with restaurants and hotels, having an email sign-up tab is an opportunity to grow your company email list. As fans sign up, it adds value and potential to your ongoing marketing.

Offer a simple incentive such as a coupon in exchange for the opt-in to help drive traffic to your tab and increase the number of sign-ups.

Retail locations can add email sign-up tabs.

Give Customers a Map and Directions

With news feed posts that drive interest and build engagement with friends of fans, direct traffic to your location map tab to help Facebook users find their way to your location.

A recommended feature for your map tab is a Get Directions option that will make it easy for Facebook users to plan and come to your location.

Offer a map tab to help fans get to your store.

#4: Professional Services

As we’ve seen thus far, each industry has unique offerings that can be of interest to particular Facebook users.

Professional service companies cover a wide range of business services from trainers and realtors to social media consultants, doctors and more. The key is for each to identify the fan actions that they want and to focus tabs accordingly to achieve those results.

Each professional should consider what product, service, offering or incentive can drive great interest from potential customers, and how that can be offered turnkey on a Facebook tab. Recommendations include:

Increase Email Sign-ups With Incentives

Allure Laser Treatment created a tab with an incentive to refer a friend. The special offer included a lead-capture form from which they could do follow-up marketing.

Incentive tab offers are best used when tied to your company services and specialties, and allow the user to see and respond quickly right on the Facebook tab.

Incentive that is tied to the professional service offered.

Offer Content Downloads

Pam Moore offers free ebook downloads as an educational incentive for visitors to opt into her email newsletters that are focused on a key topical area. Beyond growing her email list, the ebook materials inform, assist and help visitors get to know her company more intimately. This type of added value is a great socially relevant method to win new clients by being helpful.

Professional service providers need to find ways to link their email marketing with assembled content to create ebooks and other package materials that add value and demonstrate thought leadership.

This is an example of a web page brought into a Facebook tab. Again the value is that one created item, a web page, is now used in two unique locations—the website and a Facebook tab.

Ebook offer for email opt-in = resources that incentivize the sign-up.

Display Your Services

Let’s be practical. As a professional service provider, you need to make sure you offer a simple and clear message on the services you provide. Posting tips and then linking to your tab where interested parties can become fans of your page and get clarity on the range of services you offer give Facebook users an easy way to learn about and understand your company.

It’s clear what John Haydon‘s three primary focus areas are from a quick glimpse at his tab!

Tab with a clear and simple outline of services offered.

Build Specialized Tools

A key tab feature that some professional service companies have is the ability for visitors to use their tools to find information for themselves.

Realtor home listings and ecommerce stores are examples of providers using this. Someone making a home purchase is going to want to review homes for sale. Make it easy for fans and interested Facebook users to search for homes while staying on Facebook.

Integrate a tab with a home listing and search feature, either by bringing in a web page or custom-programming a tab to offer relevant and valuable assistance to your consumers.

If you offer services that can be purchased on your website, offer the same purchase capability on a Facebook tab to increase sales.

My mantra continues to be users are on Facebook because they want to be, so give them what you’ve got right on Facebook! Make it easy for them and be a resource on Facebook where they can find answers and take action.

Add your realty listing web page to a tab for Facebook shoppers.

Conclusion

If there’s a pattern you recognize, good! Though industries can vary greatly, there are some similarities in ways that Facebook page tabs can be used.

Common opportunities include the ability to grow email marketing lists, offer incentives and deals and deliver features that can be critical to gaining customers and growing your business. The key, again, is to offer the right information at the right time and in the right method so that a Facebook user can see, learn and complete an action while remaining on Facebook.

While not exhaustive, these tips can help Facebook page managers reflect on ways they can improve their Facebook page offerings for a variety of industries.

After you’ve decided on the Facebook tabs you need for your business, look for the best tab app solutions or get the technical help you need to create your own.

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts From Social Networks

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts From Social Networks

Do you want people to click on your blog posts when others share them on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+?

Is your blog optimized for the best visual display when people share your content?

Are your posts are accompanied by a nice picture with an accurate description so they stand out in social media streams?

Why Does This Matter?

When a link to your post is accompanied by an image and description, it’s more likely that people will click on that link to read the content behind it and share it.

There’s an element that lets you control how your post appears in a status update.

It’s called a “social snippet“. You can manage these social snippets and improve social shareability when you add a few tags to the HTML code on your website or blog.

In this article I’ll examine social snippets and show you how to control the images that accompany your posts when they appear in status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

 

Anatomy of a Social Snippet

Social snippets vary slightly depending on where they’re shared. It’s useful to examine how they look on each social platform.

Facebook Social Snippet

The Facebook social snippet is a combination of the page title, description and image.

Facebook status updates combine page titles, domains, meta descriptions and images.

LinkedIn Social Snippet

Like Facebook, LinkedIn status updates include a title, description and image. Here’s how the LinkedIn social snippet works.

LinkedIn status updates are very similar, combining page titles, domains, meta descriptions and images.

Google+ Social Snippet

The Google+ social snippet also has a title, description and image.

Google+ status updates also combine titles and images, but they use the favicon rather than the URL and they do not show the meta description.

Google+ prefers to display square images. If there are several possible images to choose from on your page, Google+ is more likely to display the image that’s closest to square in dimensions.

How to Add the Tags to Manage Social Snippets

If links to your content don’t show an image, title or description when you publish them in your status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, you can fix it by adding tags into the HTML code of your document.

Use one of the tagging methods below to add the appropriate tags so links to your content will show the right image in any status update.

Note: These are somewhat technical fixes, so if you’re not comfortable editing the HTML of your website, don’t hesitate to send this article along to your web developer.

#1: Use Title and Meta Description Tags

You’ll need to work with some of the title and meta description tags on your blog post. Social snippets in all social networks use these two page elements:

<title>…</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”…” />

These also control the snippets in search engine listings, so they’re important for SEO best practices. Make sure to use them with search in mind, as well as social.

#2: Use Schema.org Microformatting

Schema.org is a collaboration among the major search engines. They’ve created a standard set of tags for all kinds of things. To control your social snippets, you’ll only need these tags:

<body itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”>
<h1 itemprop=”name”>Interesting Headline</h1>
<img itemprop=”image” src=”{image-url}” />
<p itemprop=”description”>Thought provoking description</p>
</body>

#3: Use “Open Graph Protocol” Tags

Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn all use Open Graph standards for tagging content. Add these tags to set the image in status updates:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”/image.jpg” />

Open Graph tags can also be used to set the title and description.

<meta property=”og:title” content=”…” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”…” />

#4: Use Image_SRC Meta Tags

For Facebook, you can use the image_src meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags to manage the images in social snippets.

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg” />

If you add more than one of these links for more than one image, the person who shares will have a choice of images to use in the snippet.

How Do I Manage All of These Tags? Where Do They Go?

Some of these tags go in the <head> of the HTML, and others go in the <body>. Here’s a quick guide showing how to put the tags into the right places so your posts look great when shared in social networks. Contact your web developer if you need assistance.

The tags that drive social snippets appear in several places in the HTML.

Using WordPress? Try These Plugins

Every content management system (such as WordPress) will give you control over the title and meta description tags. For WordPress users, here are the plugins that will add the other tags for you:

• All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets Plugin: This plugin gives you control over tags for social snippets, and may also make your search listings look better when you rank in Google.
• WP Open Graph Plugin: Similar to the Schema.org plugin, this handy little tool will add all of the Open Graph meta tags.
• Custom Image_Src Plugin:
 If your shared content still doesn’t look right in Facebook, try this one. By creating the image_src tag, this plugin will force Facebook to use image of your choice.

No need to touch the code, just install the plugin and manage the tags from within WordPress.

Still not working?

After making sure you have all of the code for these tags set up on your site, if you still don’t see the images in your social snippets, the old version of your page without your new tags may be stored in your browser. You may need to clear your browser cache.

You can also clear your Facebook cache using the Facebook URL Debugger.

Now, try sharing again and you should see your tags in action.

Why so many options?

There are lots of ways to tag content, and social networks do their best with the tags they’re given. Since they consider many page elements, a web designer has to consider many types of tags. There’s no single official set of tags.

It reminds me of the old programmer’s joke…

Q: What’s the best thing about technology standards?
A: There are so many to choose from!

Mobile is the great unifier as cross-device advertising takes off

Mobile is the great unifier as cross-device advertising takes off

 

By Chantal Tode

August 22, 2013

Mobile plays key role in cross-device campaigns

Marketers are increasingly eying cross-device campaigns, with mobile acting as the glue that connects the various elements together to ensure a seamless user experience. However, challenges still exist such as mobile tracking and how to tailor content for each platform.

While interest in cross-device advertising has been around for several years, efforts have taken off in 2013 as consumers increasingly engage with a variety of Internet-enabled devices throughout their day. Marketers are also more eager to funnel a growing portion of their digital budgets to cross-device campaigns because of the strategy’s effectiveness.

“Interest in cross-device is a trend that has been creeping up the past couple of years, but 2013 seems to be a bit of a tipping point,” said Jeremy Levine, senior vice president of digital sales at Live Nation, Beverly Hills, CA. “With the increase in smartphone and tablet usage, brands want to reach consumers where they are naturally spending time while making sure their message is consistent across platforms.

“Given the technological advances in geo-location, mobile ad serving/tracking and better and more engaging ad units, brands can now create consistent messages while allowing the creative/ad solution to be distinct to each platform leveraging that platform’s core strength,” he said. “This will only become bigger over time.

“Mobile is the one device that consumers have on them almost all the time, at home, work, commuting, during the weekend, out to dinner, at concerts, sporting events, shopping, etc. Given that computers and tablets still remain devices primarily used at home along with the TV, utilizing mobile allows advertisers to be consistently connecting with consumers wherever they are.”

Changing consumer habits
Marketers are intrigued by cross-device campaigns because of the opportunity to reach the same audience across different devices throughout their day, which has the potential to provide greater brand continuity and campaign stickiness.

Changing consumers habits are a key reason for the interest in cross-device campaigns.

“Most people have multiple devices on which they are now concurrently active,” said Craig Elimeliah, vice president and director of creative technology at RAPP, New York. “Watching TV on a smartphone or a tablet has become commonplace, as is navigating from phone to tablet to computer to TV.

“We now have a much more complex browsing environment in which users are starting engagement on one device and continuing on another,” he said.

Delivery enhancements
The advancements made in delivering and measuring campaigns across devices are also helping to spur interest.

For example, Google Enhanced Campaigns debuted recently, making it easy for marketers to execute paid search programs across smartphones, tablets and desktops with a single campaign.

Additionally, Publicis Groupe and AOL Inc. recently teamed up to create Publicis AOL Live, an end-to-end solution for delivering live advertising across mobile, tablet, desktop and smart TV.

“Fundamentally, cross-device campaigns require three things to execute: premium scale across all platforms, accurate first and third party data linking devices together and an optimization engine to increase results,” said Chad Gallagher, director of mobile at AOL Networks, New York.

“Up until now, companies weren’t able to check off all those boxes thereby making execution difficult,” he said.

Another reason for the growth in cross-device campaigns is the success marketers are seeing with these efforts.

“Clients, regardless of the vertical, are seeing dramatically better results when running a cross-device campaign than if they run a campaign in silo’s on desktop and mobile,” Mr.Gallagher said. “ The days of desktop only campaigns are over.

Agency interest in cross-device campaigns is also strong as the availability improves for data sets that accommodate cross-device targeting.

Understanding user behavior
However, there are still challenges for executing campaigns across multiple devices, including unified reporting, establishing appropriate success metrics based on each device’s unique capabilities and building programs that work for advertisers while adding value to the consumer experience.

“The methodologies used to determine and evaluate cross-channel audiences are widely different,” said Tom Talbert, group director of media services at Lowe Campbell Ewald, Detroit. “So when a media partner references their ability to target across various screens, understand how they’re arriving at the audience data they are presenting to you.

One of the challenges with cross-device campaigns is understanding how to make sense of users’ behaviors across the devices.

Marketers then need to be able to report and act on those behaviors.

“Cross device campaigns now offer marketers a more robust opportunity to tell more contextual stories,” RAPP’s Mr. Elimeliah said. “Each device tells us what kind of mode our users are in, and the trick is to seamlessly tell that story in a creative way that makes sense at each touch point in the consumer journey.

“The challenges are becoming intimate with each device, the pervasive channels on each device, the contexts those devices are being used in and cohesive storytelling that threads the entire ecosystem,” he said.

“That is no easy task. It takes an expertise in device; technology; user experience; popular and emerging channels and apps; a number of storytelling methods that are native to all of those channels; and a genius to architect this so that it doesn’t feel creepy or fall apart at various touch points.”

Mobile tracking
Another challenge for cross-device campaigns is the lack of a persistent cookie for tracking users in mobile, making it difficult to optimize efforts.

Marketers are trying to address this issue in a number of different ways.

For example, advertising technology firms RUN has developed a proprietary product that enables cookie-less ad targeting and conversion tracking across all devices.

“Mobile’s role in cross-device advertising is growing exponentially, specifically as a highly-influential step within the purchase funnel,” said Seth Hittman, CEO of RUN, New York. “This is where the ‘holy grail’ opportunity for true multi-channel attribution comes into play.

“Without the ability to accurately track consumer behavior on mobile devices, there is no way to truly accomplish a multi-channel, cross-device strategy that premium brands can rally behind,” he said.

Agencies report that cross-device campaigns are getting easier to execute because marketers understand the importance of reaching consumers where they are spending their time. Also, designers and developers are experienced with responsive design and adapting content and messages across platforms.

The challenge going forward is going to stay on top of just how quickly mobile is growing.

“According to Google, 90 percent of all media interactions occur with a digital screen, and we are now seeing what has been previously called the ‘second screen’ rising up to become the ‘first screen’ for consumers in more and more campaigns,” said Matthew Witt, executive vice president and director of digital integration at Tris3ct, Chicago.

Mobile advertising advances on many fronts, challenging marketers to keep up

Mobile advertising advances on many fronts, challenging marketers to keep up

 

By Lauren Johnson

August 20, 2013

Native advertising gives mobile big bump

While the consensus is that the mobile advertising user experience has made significant strides forward, this growing sophistication also makes it harder for marketers to decide how to move beyond the standard banner ad.

Native advertising, cross-device advertising, social media, enhanced targeting and real-time bidding can all help marketers significantly enhance their mobile strategies. However, mobile advertising has also become more fragmented this year with multiple companies all vying for brands with different propositions.

“There are many companies out there trying to provide alternative options to standard ad formats,” said Alexis Berger, vice president of Midwest sales at Kargo, New York.

“The question becomes ‘A: Do they have the scale to make an impact, and B: Do they have the right properties to run them on,'” she said.

Native opportunities
Mobile advertising has become increasingly more sophisticated this year, as evidenced by the growth in brands adopting a number of different strategies, including native ad formats to create scalable campaigns.

Marketers have placed a significantly bigger focus this year on mobile native advertisements as an alternative to static banner ads. Although fragmentation and scale remain issues, the value proposition of integrated ads that do not feel intrusive is catching on with both advertisers and consumers.

“Consumers have a deeply personal relationship with their mobile devices and so there’s a higher expectation for how brands reach them through this medium,” said Deborah Powsner, vice president of marketing and consumer insights at SessionM, Boston. “Mobile ads need to feel like a seamless, relevant piece of the experience.”

“While native ads were once reserved for test campaigns or large promotions, we’re starting to see this format become an evergreen piece of brands’ media buys,” she said. “I expect we’ll see a lot more of this in 2014.”

As mobile continues to move closer to becoming more contextual and relevant, native ad placements let marketers adapt their creative to fit bigger ad formats.

In fact, SessionM chalks up 20 – 30 percent click-through rates on brand campaigns due to a differentiated experience from the 200 X 350 banner ad.

A native mobile ad from Old Navy

Cross-platform advertising is growing in importance for marketers, evidenced by a new study from ValueClick Media and Greystripe which found that one-third of digital ad budgets will be allocated to cross-device campaigns this year (see story).

The problem with cross-screen campaigns though is that the experience is often the same with ad copy tweaked to fit the size of the screen.

Cross-screen opportunities grow

Improved targeting
One of the other main ways that mobile advertising has changed this year is around targeting, including location and social media.

Twitter and Facebook are two of the heaviest hitters in social media this year in terms of boosting their mobile strategies.

In fact, Facebook’s most recent numbers show that 40 percent of revenue comes from mobile, which is significantly higher than the 23 percent that the medium represented in the fourth-quarter of 2012.

“The increase in social media means that there is much more data that Facebook has on its users and their interest,” said Eric Mugnier, senior vice president of North America at M&C Saatchi Mobile, London.

“This is becoming increasingly sophisticated,” he said. “Coupled with conversion tracking, we can now effectively increase customer ROI.”

Although mobile continues to grow in importance for Facebook, many experts argue that the user experience is not the best. For mobile to hit a tipping point for Facebook, the user experience will need to improve so that consumers are still able to browse through the site without feeling bombarded by sponsored news.

Twitter has also expanded its advertising options for marketers around second-screen efforts, with brands such as Sprint testing new ways to drive tune-ins and engagement during live TV (see story).

Real-time bidding has also helped achieve better mobile targeting this year at a granular level, according to Mr. Mugnier.

The data that marketers are able to collect via new types of mobile advertising has also been significant in swaying marketers to invest more this year.

Mobile devices collect ten times the number of user signals that desktops collect, opening up new opportunities for brands to do more with mobile than repurpose ads, according to Anne Frisbie, vice president and general manager of global supply at InMobi, Singapore.

For example, more precise types of location are being used by brands this year to tap into mobile’s goal of taking an advertising message down to a hyperlocal level.

“As marketers have begun to open themselves up for new digital marketing approaches on mobile from what they have done on desktop, innovation is starting to show up in the area of data and targeting,” Ms. Frisbie said.

“I love to see testing around in-app purchase data, mobile lifetime value calculations that drive audience segments, geo lookalike models or in store visit attribution studies,” she said.

3 Strategies for Finding Customers With Social Media

3 Strategies for Finding Customers With Social Media

Do you need a strategy to reach your ideal prospects with social media?

Are you overwhelmed by all the social media options?

If so, you’re not alone. Social media overwhelm is one of the biggest challenges businesses face.

In this article, I’m going to show you three social media strategies so you can focus your efforts on the channels that best align with your business objective and target audience.

 

The Simple Solution

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution for it: only focus on where your customers are.

Where are your customers on social media? Image source: iStockPhoto.

Once you find out where your customers are on social media, it becomes easier to come up with a strategy that will help you find your future customers.

Here are three strategies you should consider:

Strategy #1: Ask Your Customers

Asking is the low-hanging fruit that’s easy for small business owners to overlook. It’s such a simple thing to do and allows you to further cement the personal connection you have with your customers.

If you have a brick-and-mortar business, when your customers visit your location, ask whether they use social media. If you have another type of business, figure out the best time and place to ask your customers whether they use social media.

If they do use social media, ask them what channels they spend their time on. Is it Facebook? Pinterest? Maybe it’s LinkedIn.

Maybe they don’t even use social media. By asking, you’d know.

If your customers are using social media, take it a step further and ask them how they like to be engaged on those channels. This will give you invaluable insight into how you can best add value in a way they’ll find useful.

You can also take the same approach if your business is online.

Most online businesses have an email list. Send your customer contacts an email and ask the same questions. It doesn’t have to be the subject of an entire email, necessarily; just a simple “P.S.” at the end of your weekly newsletter or part of a quarterly survey you send out should work wonders.

Ask you using a P.S. in your email.

Implementing this strategy can separate you and your business from your competitors, because so few businesses make the effort to ask. Asking removes any assumptions you may have about where your customers are hanging out online and shows them how much you care.

This is an easy way to get the important information you need to set up a successful social media strategy for your business.

Strategy #2: Use Google Alerts

I’m sure you’ve heard of Google Alerts, but are you using them?

If not, you’re missing a simple and free way to monitor what’s going on in your industry and find where your customers are online.

Google Alerts are updates you can set up in Google that allow you to keep track of a specific topic anytime it’s mentioned on the web.

For example, you can monitor if you or your business is mentioned across the web or keep track of industry news. When there’s a mention of your topic, you receive an email with a link to that search result.

How does this help you find your customers on social media?

Say you’re a small toy company that specializes in locally made wooden toys. You have an online presence but want to expand it and you think that social media might be an effective strategy. You’re unsure, though, which channels your target audience is using.

You could use Google Alerts to find this out.

You decide to enter “birthday gift ideas for kids” as a search query in Google Alerts. And the results show Pinterest boards and articles on “mommy blogs” that are relevant to your business.

When checking out the Pinterest board, you also find several other boards that are similar to your niche. Bingo! Pinterest may be one social channel you want to focus on.

Here’s how to set up your Google Alerts:

• Go to Google Alerts.
• Enter the term or phrase you want to monitor in the Search Query field.
• Choose the type of results you’d like to get in the Result Type field. (I recommend starting out with “Everything.” You can always change it once you see the type of results you’re getting.)
• Then choose how often you want to receive the results, how many results you want (I recommend “Only the best results”) and the email where you want to receive them.
  

  Here’s how to set up Google Alerts.

Google Alerts require a little market research, but can get you the valuable information you need to find the social media strategy that works best for your business.

Strategy #3: Use the Search Function Within Social Channels

Sometimes you may want to take a deeper dive into researching your customers on a specific social media platform. Or you may love using a certain social platform and want to know whether your customers are there too. You can use the platform’s search functionality to quickly find out if your customers use the same one.

Each social channel has a search function that gives you the opportunity to instantly determine whether your customers are using it. And this can be as simple as entering the names of some of your customers in the search box on the social platform.

You can also search on things like your niche topic, relevant industry leaders, brands within your niche and any competitors you might have.

Using the search function is another simple and effective strategy that’s often overlooked, yet it will give you great insight into whether your customers are actively using that platform.

If you have a large customer base, consider pulling together a short list selection of the typical customers you want to reach on social media, and then search for them on a social media platform. This would give you information to work with.

Use the Google+ Communities Search:

Google+ Community search.

Or use the LinkedIn Search:

LinkedIn search.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is especially effective because not only can you search by all the attributes mentioned above, you can also search within a specific geographic region.

Twitter Advanced Search includes geographic locations.

Remember to stay up to date with changes on your favorite social platform. For example, there have been developments recently with Facebook Graph Search.

Conducting a little research on your customers using the search functions on the social platforms can help you determine where you should invest your social media marketing.

Finding Your Customers Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Use these simple, effective (and free!) ideas to find which social channels your customers are using.

As a business, if you’re not engaging with your customers on their terms, you’re missing a huge opportunity to add value and ultimately grow your business.

Focus your efforts on the few channels that align with your customers and business objectives and let your competitors be overwhelmed by thinking they need to be on every social media platform.

How to Use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

How to Use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

 

Are you wondering how to use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates?

Does your business have a LinkedIn company page?

Do you want to grow your following outside of your company page?

In this article I’ll show you 6 steps for creating and measuring the impact of your first LinkedIn Sponsored Update.

Why Sponsored Updates?

If you’re one of the 3 million companies that have a LinkedIn company page, you’ll know that you can post updates directly from your company rather than as an individual. And you can like and comment as your company as well.

And now, just like Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories on other social sites, LinkedIn has launched its own Sponsored Updates function, which runs on the same principle.

If you’re a B2B marketer, Sponsored Updates allow you to promote your message to others outside your company page following. At the same time, you can target who sees that message, so your marketing efforts can be focused on the right people.

Here’s how to use Sponsored Updates:

#1: Create Your Post

Post your update to your company page as normal. You’ll need to wait a few minutes and then refresh your page until you see the Sponsor Update button.

Select an update to sponsor by clicking the Sponsor Update button.

 

You can sponsor any of the updates on your company page, even one that’s a few months old like this one. When you click on it, you’ll be taken through to choose your target criteria for your Sponsored Update.

#2: Name Your Campaign

When you set up your first campaign, you’ll need to give it a name. I suggest you pick something generic like trial 1.

As you set up other Sponsored Updates, you have the opportunity to use the same campaign criteria each time, making it easy to duplicate an equation when you find one that works for you.

#3: Target Your Campaign

You can target your update for:

• Location – by country and some areas
• Company – by name or category (industry or size), or exclude
• Job title – by title or category, or exclude
• School – by school name, or exclude
• Skills – by skill name, or exclude
• Group – all or a particular group, or exclude
• Gender
• Age – several age brackets to choose from

#4: Choose Your Payment Option

Now you choose your budget and whether you wish to use cost per click (CPC) or cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). You don’t need to wait for LinkedIn to authorize your Sponsored Update; it’s live within a few minutes.

Choose how you’ll pay for your Sponsored Update.

#5: Check Your Preview

Once your ad is set, you can preview it by clicking Preview in your Campaign Manager.

Access a preview of your Sponsored Update in the Campaign Manager.

You can see what your visitors will see.

An example of a Sponsored Update.

#6: Measure the Results

So now that you’ve created your post and set up a campaign for it, what do all the figures mean?

Interactions refers to any action that the viewer took, such as clicking Like, Share or Comment.

The engagement rate is worked out by adding clicks and actions, divided by impressions.

You’ll also be able to see how your post is doing organically, outside of the Sponsored Update feature, and with those who follow your company page and see the post in their news feed.

Track the impact of each Sponsored Update.

The green + signs will be seen on your Sponsored Update statistics, but not on your organic statistics. They simply refer to the extra visibility you have given the update by sponsoring it. Lastly, you’ll see any new followers you may have acquired via the update promotion.

You can view your metrics at any time by going to your post and clicking on the highlighted campaign name or you can go directly to LinkedIn Campaign Manager to find out how your updates are performing.

When you click on the highlighted campaign name, you’ll see all of your campaigns. If you click on View Details, you’ll see the current criteria attached to your campaign and you can easily make any adjustments.

Use the Campaign Manager to access all of your metrics.

By clicking on View Details, you’ll be taken through to more information about your campaign criteria and given the opportunity to tweak your audience, campaign settings (not shown on this image) and general information.

Example of a campaign overview.

Once you’ve created your campaign criteria, they will all show in your Campaign Manager, where you can see how each campaign is performing.

Click the question mark icons to find out more detail about each tab heading.

An overview of a campaign’s performance.

You can turn off your campaign at any time in two ways—through your Campaign Manager page by turning the status to off or directly from your post by clicking on Manage. Simply uncheck the box and your promotion will be stopped.

Easily turn your campaign on or off.

There are two types of clicks to be aware of—social and billable. Social clicks are simply post likes, shares and comments. Billable clicks are amassed by someone clicking the post title, the post link or your logo within your Sponsored Update.

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates have pretty much the same metrics you would expect from any ad campaign manager. Take a few minutes and have a look around on the Campaign Manager page.

Consider using Sponsored Updates for:

• Ticket sales for upcoming events
• Marketing giveaways such as white papers and eBooks
• New product launch information
• A blog post that is already working hard and generating good results for you

Best Practices

The great thing about LinkedIn Sponsored Updates is that they run on a very professional B2B networking platform, so your target audience is very much available to you.

With that in mind, you don’t want to throw money away through either poor targeting or poor ad creation.

Here are a few things to consider when you decide to sponsor an update:

• Create a killer headline—something that creates intrigue to encourage others to click on it.
• Use only one link per post. You don’t want to confuse the reader on where to go by providing too many choices.
• Keep it human as well as professional. Remember people are surfing their news feed to catch up on what’s happening in their network, not to be sold to.
• Add a striking cover if you’re promoting a report or other PDF. If you simply upload a text PDF, it won’t stand out very well.
• Use great images to get your post noticed.
• Select your targeting options carefully.

Conclusion

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates are very easy to create and manage, and can be used as a lead generation tool for your business. The metrics will allow you to optimize the targeting of your content delivery so that you’re sure to reach the right audience.

Six Ways to Grow a LinkedIn Group: Tips From the Pros

Six Ways to Grow a LinkedIn Group: Tips From the Pros

Are you part of a LinkedIn group that has stalled?

Do you want to create a LinkedIn group?

LinkedIn groups can be a great way to network with your customers, peers and other professionals in your industry.

But it can be challenging to grow your group and get the people you want to join and participate in the discussions.

We asked the pros to share their best tips to grow your LinkedIn groups.

Follow these tips and you’ll find it easier to create the type of community you’re looking for.

#1: Use Email to Send Invitations That Convert

Viveka Von Rosen

You’ll need to send out invitations to get your contacts to join your LinkedIn group and LinkedIn has a form for you to do this.

The default LinkedIn message that’s sent when you fill out the form below is: “Subject: Name invites you to join Group” and “Welcome Message: I would like to invite you to join my group on LinkedIn.” Unfortunately this has about 1% chance of getting someone to your group.

Standard LinkedIn group invitations can be boring. (Note the link field at the bottom gives you the link to your group. Copy this and create a custom URL for your group to use in your email invitations.)

 

Let’s face it. There’s enough noise out there. If you want to get someone to join your group, you need to give them a good reason. Instead of using the standard LinkedIn invitation, use email to craft the kind of message that will get your contacts to join your LinkedIn group.

In my opinion, the person who does this best is Jill Konrath. She has created a beautifully branded email that she sends out to her email list. It not only shares the link, but some of the reasons you might want to join her group, Fresh Sales Strategies.

Jill Konrath’s well-branded email gives you reasons to join her group.

Let’s take a look at how this works.

Use email to invite your prospective members. This allows you to expand beyond your LinkedIn network. For those of you who only want to invite your LinkedIn connections, you’ll want to create an external contact list:

• Create a specific group on whatever CRM or email service you use (Outlook, Gmail, etc.).
• Export your LinkedIn contacts.
• Send email to this Group only.

But why would you limit it to just your LinkedIn members? Invite your whole mailing list if relevant!

Brand your email with your website and LinkedIn group branding. Be sure to use a clear call to action, such as “Join Now.”

Lead with the WIIFM (What’s in it for me?). Be very clear on what your group has to offer. What are the benefits to the user? Tell your contacts what they’ll get by joining your LinkedIn group and make sure this aligns with your business’s marketing message.

LinkedIn group URLs are not easy to remember. Create a customized group URL (http://Bit.ly/join-the-group) that’s easy to use and remember and use this in your email invitations.

Send a simple, elegant invitation via email to relevant lists and you’re sure to see your LinkedIn group grow in size.

Viveka Von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and is known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert.”

#2: Set Up an Auto-Send Email to New Members

Mike Delgado

One of the keys to help you grow a successful LinkedIn group is to get new members engaged with you and your community quickly.

You can jump-start the engagement process by auto-sending an email asking new members to make a quick introduction to everyone. Make it really simple to do this and provide a link that goes right to your LinkedIn group URL.

Setting up an auto-send email for new members is very easy. Once logged into your group, click on the “Manage” link at the top, then click on the “Templates” link on the left sidebar. Make sure the Auto-send box is checked and click on Edit Template to compose your message.

It’s easy to set up an auto-send email for new members.

Remember to keep your message quick and easy to read, with a URL to drive them to your group.

Here’s a simple template you could use to encourage new members to start engaging.

Use a simple template to get new members to engage.

Another tip to boost engagement with members is to make sure you connect with them after they’ve joined your LinkedIn group. This will ensure you can engage with them in the LinkedIn stream too.

Mike Delgado, author of circled.us and the social media community manager at Experian.

#3: Set Up a Regular Email Plan

Kristi Hines

If you want a successful group on LinkedIn that benefits your business, then be sure to take advantage of the ability to email members.

Remember that you can email your members once a week using the Send Announcement option. Give these emails thought and turn your LinkedIn group members into leads for your business. For example, you might want to offer free content downloads and webinars related to the theme of your group on a regular basis.

Customize your email message before you send it to new members. Image source: iStockphoto

If your group is open to the public, include a line in your welcome email and regular announcements and ask members to spread the word about the group to help it to grow. You can even include a tweet for people to share by using ClickToTweet to create a custom tweet that members can share with their followers that includes a link to your group.

Kristi Hines, freelance writer, ghostwriter and author of Kikolani.

#4: Focus on Creating Discussions

Linda Coles

It’s not as easy to build a LinkedIn group as it is to build a Facebook Page. LinkedIn is used as a business tool and so is probably mainly used during work hours. Facebook is a form of entertainment and is used at all hours. The messages you receive from both of these platforms are very different.

Without the availability of cute inspirational picture quotes, your LinkedIn group content needs to be both useful and worthy of a discussion. So how do you know what will work and what won’t? The answer is trial and error—but very often it’s just the simple things that get the most traction.

Try to talk about something that will resonate with your audience or pull on an emotional string in some way. Members may have had an experience of a similar nature to share. People love to tell their own stories and others like to listen.

Share discussion topics that resonate with your audience and spark conversation. Image source: iStockphoto

Remember also that not everyone in the group will click Like or leave a comment. There are also the voyeurs who are watching, listening and learning from those who are taking part. Just like your blog visitors, very few actually commit to take action, but they are there just the same, so keep posting!

Focus on creating discussions and members will want to come back and participate.

Linda Coles, founder of Blue Banana.

#5: Go Niche!

Stephanie Sammons

When you build a LinkedIn group, it can create a number of benefits for your company. For example, a LinkedIn group can position your company as an industry leader and also serve as a pipeline of potential leads for your business.

My best tip for building a successful LinkedIn group is to go niche. When you focus on a specific target audience for your LinkedIn group, magical things can happen.

As the old saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together.” Chances are, the members of your target market are already connected to people who are just like them on LinkedIn and other social networks.

Focus on a specific target audience and encourage connections among them. Image source: iStockphoto

As they join your group, their connections have the potential to see this activity, which is essentially a peer endorsement of your group. Additionally, you can enlist industry influencers to become advocates for your group.

These group advocates can help recruit members using their online influence, and they can also serve as discussion leaders to engage your members.

A more obvious benefit of focusing on a niche target market is that they’re likely to have similar needs and goals. You can create engaging discussions within your group that will increase participation when you focus on the needs, questions, concerns and issues that your members are collectively facing.

It’s much easier to come up with discussion ideas and content to share inside of your group when you understand the needs, issues and concerns of your specific target market!

When you focus on a specific niche for building your LinkedIn group, you can run targeted ads to promote your group within LinkedIn. For example, if you were targeting “financial advisors” for your LinkedIn group, you can run promotional ads within LinkedIn that target the job title “financial advisor” to get your group promotion ads in front of the right LinkedIn members.

Building a high-quality LinkedIn group is a long-term process and requires hands-on management, but you will get there much more quickly if you go niche with your LinkedIn group building efforts!

Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor.

#6: Select the Right Name for Your LinkedIn Group

Melonie Dodaro

It’s important to choose the right name for your LinkedIn group. The name you choose can have an impact on how easy it is for others to find your group.

Before you decide on the name for your LinkedIn group, identify your goal for setting up a group. For example, are you looking to create a networking group for people within your industry or do you want to create a group for your ideal clients? Determining your goal is essential in ensuring that you select the right name for your group.

You’ll want to make sure the name you select targets the specific people you’re looking to attract. If you want to attract people from a specific geographic area, include the name of the city or area in your group name. For example, if your target market is businesspeople in San Diego, you may want to name your group San Diego Business Networking Group. It’s also important to have a custom logo made for your group to ensure it looks professional.

It’s important to have a custom logo for your group.

Select a name with the keywords that people would use when searching for groups on LinkedIn. This will ensure your group shows up in the search results. By doing this, you’ll see a lot more organic growth for your group.

Melonie Dodaro is recognized as Canada’s #1 LinkedIn expert and is the founder of Top Dog Social Media, a company that helps businesses leverage the power of social media.

Social Media Marketing Networking Club

Social Media Examiner hosts the Social Media Marketing Networking Club on LinkedIn.

This is a LinkedIn group for marketers and business owners to network, learn and make connections. You’ll find discussions around the best ways to use social media tools to help your business.