Potential reach and age demographics for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the others
From What you need to know about choosing the most effective social media platforms, an infograph made by infographics.sg:
A marketer’s guide to paying attention to the social web
From How to Effectively Listen on the Social Web [Infographic] @ socialnomics.com:
Targeted social listening helps marketers identify new prospects through monitoring the actions and conversations of potential customers. This monitoring also brings an augmented level of understanding of existing customers based on their behaviors and motivations.
2 step guide:
- Identify relevant data and behaviors: develop a path to purchase by identifying actions that lead to sales.
- Invest in infrastructure: integrate your systems to maximize efficiency.
Lewis' infographic illustrates these 2 steps with the example of marathon runners looking to purchase new shoes.
Which infrastracture investments?
- Monitoring platforms: identify keywords and influential people to find conversations about your topics.
- Marketing automation: capture social profile for lead nurturing; send prompts to opt in for your newsletter, send coupons for purchase
- SMMS (Social Media Management System): schedule and syndicate posts
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management): record sale, continue to track social, sales and customer service activity.
Facebook: FMCG largest audiences, automotive biggest engagement
Today Socialbakers.com released their Global Report focused on all industries active on Facebook. The report focuses on the top performing brands by several audience and engagement rate metrics.
Some of the highlights from this report:
The Auto industry - especially BMW, Ferrari and Mercedes Benz - is the most engaging industry on Facebook (0.207%) with the biggest quarterly fan growth (up to 62%!). “What Makes Car Brands So Cool In Social Media sums up the brands’ efforts to create appealing visuals, engage local communities and launch effective posting strategies with a huge impact on the overall Facebook success.
Alcohol brands (like Heineken and Jack Daniel's) have also been investing a great amount of energy into social marketing and innovative ways of communicating their products online in the last quarter. Heineken is the industry leader with more than 6M Fans and a growth of 23% each quarter. Bacardi rum has been growing even faster and celebrating 150 years of “Mixing up the party” this year.
More where this came from: Global Report [.png]
Social media KPIs: NPS, ARPU, CPA and the others
Do not arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without first setting measurable kpis (Key Performance Indicators). Define how you will measure success by selecting one primary and one secondary kpi. According to Jim Sterne in ‘Social Media Metrics’: ‘Social media kpis are, by necessity, a little fuzzier’. But even if you first have to work with a ‘best of breed’ home recipe of mainly free, publicly available and often imperfect sources, it is definitely worth the effort in the long run. Sterne continues: ‘You can’t control the conversation but you can guide the conversation. You can influence the conversation. You can have an impact on the conversation. That’s the whole reason for tracking and measuring it.’
For your reference: Deloitte takes it up a notch by connecting social media efforts to known business KPIs like NPS, PR Value, ARPU, Media Reach/Impact, Media Spend, CPA and Churn. Click to enlarge.
15 free social listening tools
Social Listening Tools by Rosie Siman outlines some free tools you can use to better understand your brand, your audience, how your audience perceives your brand in the social space. These are also great tools for researching bigger conversations, themes or trends in the social space.
This is my favourite one:
Bit.ly (now Bitly.com, since .ly is a Libyan domain extension)
Bitly is a URL shortener, but can be used (sneakily) to find out how influential a brand or person actually is. By adding a +to the end of a bit.ly link, you'll be taken to a stats page where you can see how many people have clicked on that specific link, where they were when they clicked on the link (physical locaIon and site location) and when these clicks happened (dates) amongst other things. If you have a client with a Facebook page, you could have them share a link, shortened by bit.ly about themselves and one about something else to see what their fans are most interested in. Or if youre looking at a brand or a competitor's Twitter feed, you can see how many people click on the links that they re sharing (if they share links using Bit.ly.)
Listening and monitoring: what is the business benefit?
In the age of Facebook and cloud computing, listening to customers is more important than ever. It sounds simple enough, but there are tweets, online comments, and various other channels of digital communication to pay attention to.
According to a 2011 Dell-commissioned Forrester Consulting survey of 200 US-based companies, 63% of surveyed companies believe that listening and digital engagement has helped them see positive results in brand awareness.
But what areas of their business will benefit most from listening and digital engagement?
More in this Infographic: How Brands Listen in the Digital Age @ getsatisfaction.com
Facebook for business: traffic to site most prominent KPI
Custom fan page designers Pagemodo conducted a survey among small business owners who were using Facebook as a marketing and revenue generation channel. The results show that, while only half of respondents use Facebook, a significant number of users report increased revenue as a result.
Highlights from the survey:
- 47% of SME owners said their Facebook pages are pushing a significant amount of traffic to their websites.
- 48% reported that a portion of the traffic converts into customers.
Businesses that use Facebook for business engage in the following activities:
Social is gaining share in referrals
From Study Gives Insight Into Content Discovery Trends Across the Web’s Leading Publishers @ blog.outbrain.com:
Currently, search methods [...] send the largest slice of referral traffic to content. Links from publisher sites make up 31% of referral traffic to content pages [...], portal homepages (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com) account for 17% of traffic, and finally, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Fark.com, reddit, Digg) send 11% of traffic to content pages.
What kind of content do people share online?
This infograph says it all:
Download a high-res PDF of the report: Content Discovery and Engagement Report, Q1 2011 (.pdf)
The Content Grid: a framework for the process of Content Marketing
From the (excellent) Social Media ProBook:
The "buying" process begins long before a sales person contacts a prospect. The fuel that drives a prospect from latent interest to active demand is created, curated or procured by a brand, distributed over social channels and measured against business objectives.
Their list of KPIs is particularly interesting:
Awareness:
- traffic / page views / time onsite
- content downloads
- inbound links / page rank
- fans / followers
- mentions / comments / shares
Consideration:
- open / click-through rates
- inquiries / database growth
- form submission rate
- funnel conversion (stage change)
Close:
- qualified / accepted leads
- meeting with sales
- opportunities
- active pipeline / pipeline value
- closed deals