social media Archives

Social Media Case Study: Ford

February 21, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media can generate quite a bit of success for your brand, and for Ford, their strategy and the lessons they pulled should be adopted by any brand looking to succeed on social media.

At a recent conference, Scott Monty, the Global Head of Social Media for the Ford Motor Company gave a presentation detailing the success of Ford’s social media campaigns in recent years entitled, “Social Wheels in Motion: Ford’s Lesson in Social Media.”

Of course, with so much success in social media over the last few years, Ford was bound to pull away a few key lessons that any brand should adopt with regards to their social media program. Below are the five top lessons you can pull away from Monty’s presentation and apply to your social media program today.

Stand By Your Product and Let Your Audience Share

In 2009, for the launch of the Ford Fiesta, Ford allowed a number of social media influencers to drive the Fiesta and share their experiences online. The videos and blogs were posted in real time, with no editing or filtering by Ford. The confidence Ford had in its product resulted in a great deal of success on social media. The campaign resulted in nearly a hundred and fifty thousand requests for more information about the new car. What’s more, more than 80% of those asking to find out more were new Ford customers!

Lesson: If you have a good product, let your influencers tell your social community about it.

Commit to Your Social Media Presence

Running a successful campaign is great, but your social media presence cannot be relegated only to when an official campaign is underway. In order to find success on social media, you need to be committed to your program. Ford created a hub wherein Ford users could engage with the brand in real time. This phenomenon is referred to as social care, and it is a social form of customer service that nearly a third of social media users prefer to conventional customer service options (i.e. phone).

Lesson: Make a point to stay active on social media, because Ford has shown that consistency pays off.

Integrate Every Form of Media

Disjointed campaigns will result in confusion for your audience. Different channels and department working on different campaigns and promotions will mean a diluted audience responding to a multitude of campaigns as opposed to a convergence on one major one.

For Ford, they approached their 2010 Explorer campaign this way, integrating every form of media in order to drive the most traffic at the launch. The result? The day of the launch they received 100 million social impressions and 400 million browser impressions.

Lesson: Integrate all of your media under one roof to drive every potential lead to the same place.

Build a Personality for Your Brand on Social Media

As much as people might like a brand, they want to engage with something more. Your audience wants to engage with a personality. For Ford, this realization came when they were looking to rebrand the Focus. So, how did they create a personality? They created a sock puppet mascot named Doug. The goal was to engage with a younger audience and find a new customer-base for the rebranded Focus. The results were impressive, and Ford saw a spike in interest in the Focus with a 61% consideration rate. Not bad considering most people tried to avoid the Focus even as a rental prior to this rebranding.

Lesson: Build a personality for your brand and engage on a human level with your audience.

Find Your Audience Where They Are Talking

One crucial element that marketers often forget is that they need to be going out and finding their audience where they are as opposed to waiting for their audience to find them. Ford realized this and took action. When building a program last year, Ford created a video and distributed it among every one of their followers most popular networks. The results were quite successful, with the video receiving over 1.5 million hits.

Lesson: Find your audience and engage with them where they are, and not the other way around.

How can you apply some of these lessons to your social media strategies? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Marketing Statistics: Where Is Your Audience?

February 20, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media marketing success means knowing where you audience is, and a recent study shows those statistics.

The Pew Research Center published a study recently entitled “The Demographics of Social Media Users – 2012”. The study looked at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr in order to determine where audiences were. As marketers, we need to know where we can find our audiences in order to find success when it comes to social media marketing.

Some of the figures in this study are surprising, considering all we hear about social networking statistics. Below are a few of the key takeaways from the study, and some tips as to how these statistics can be incorporated into your social media marketing strategies.

Facebook Is Still in Charge

Of the population surveyed, 67% say they are on some sort of social media. As expected, Facebook reigned supreme with that entire population stating that they were registered with the largest social network. Coming in second was Twitter, with 16% of the surveyed population claiming to use the micro blogging social network. And in a very close third was Pinterest, with 15% of the population. The growth of Pinterest has been no secret, and these numbers prove it.

With regards to social media marketing, the demographics were rather impressive as well. Have a look at the table below to see a breakdown of the most popular networks and which demographics use them the most.

An In-Depth Look at the Users

When it comes to social media marketing, we need to make sure we are targeting the right audience. In order to do that, we need to know where our target audience is talking. Moreover, we need to know if our target audience would even respond to our efforts when it comes to social media marketing. Below is a breakdown of the surveyed population based on demographics and the proportion using social networking sites in some way.

Perhaps the two most interesting figures arise when looking at minority statistics. When it comes to Race and Ethnicity, the Black, Non-Hispanic and Hispanic population have a higher proportion of social media users than the White, Non-Hispanic population. Furthermore, a surprising 32% of the 65+ population claims to be using social media in some way. Have a look at the table below.

Highlights by Network

The study breaks down similar demographics to those above for each one of the five networks observed. When it came to Twitter, there was a slight edge of male users (17%) over female users (15%) and the most popular Race/Ethnic demographic using the network was Black, Non-Hispanics.

On Pinterest, female users (25%) far outweighed male users (5%), which is to be expected considering the overwhelming data that has been produced showing that Pinterest is a network dominated heavily by the female population. But perhaps what is most interesting to note is that the two income brackets that were the most popular when it came to Pinterest were $50,000-74,999 (23%) and $75,000+ (18%).

On Instagram, women once again out edged men 16% to 10%, respectively. What was interesting about the statistics from Instagram was the fact that there was a fairly consistent makeup of users from nearly all demographics. The same can be said about Tumblr, the least popular of the networks reported.

Finally, Facebook showed yet another favor for the female population (72%) over the male population (62%). Though when it came to the rest of the data, there was little prejudice for one demographic over another in most categories. Based on the study, it would seem that regardless of your socioeconomic status, Facebook is where you want to be. Thus, we can conclude that when it comes to social media marketing to any demographic, Facebook is always a viable place to start.

Click here to read the full report. What have you found to be most surprising? Will any of these statistics influence your social media marketing strategies? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Facebook Marketing: Increase Your Shares [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 19, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Facebook marketing is all about exposing your brand on social media, so how can you increase your number of shares?

We all know that great content is what drives a successful Facebook marketing campaign. People want to engage with brands that are active on social media and posting content that intrigues and excites their fans. But, while we might know that the backbone of great Facebook marketing is great content, it might not be so easy to get your share count up. Luckily, there are a few tips and tricks in this infographic that will help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing efforts to increase your shares and showcase your brand on Facebook.

There is a lot to remember when putting together your Facebook marketing campaign, but if you adhere to the suggestions in the infographic below, you can expect to see those numbers jump pretty quickly.

How are you increasing your shares when it comes to Facebook marketing? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

YouTube Marketing Optimization

February 18, 2013/by Corey Padveen

YouTube marketing is one of the best resources we have as marketers, but how can we measure if our efforts are paying off?

YouTube is a search engine, and like any search engine, a marketer’s goal is to rank highly for specified keywords and drive traffic and business from our YouTube marketing efforts. But, like any social media program, we need to be able to measure our campaigns and the success of our YouTube marketing efforts. Behind the channel there is an entire set of statistics and measurable data that we can use to see exactly where our YouTube marketing efforts are paying off, and where we need to improve them.

Below is a set of tips that you can use when it comes to YouTube marketing to measure exactly how effective your strategies are. You might be surprised to find just how much information you can pull directly from the backend of your YouTube channel.

Look Into Your Analytics

First of all, where can we find all of this stored information about our videos? In the top search bar of a YouTube account, there is a small dropdown menu where you can select your analytics.

It is in this analytics section where you can begin evaluating the success of your YouTube marketing. The YouTube analytics dashboard allows users to both measure basic information, such as viewer demographics and traffic sources, as well as engagement statistics, which allow you to measure how your videos are performing with your audience. These data are very helpful when it comes to modifying your YouTube marketing campaigns, as they indicate where your work needs improvement and where you are finding the most success with your video marketing. Paying attention to these figures will help you optimize your YouTube marketing to ensure that you are not losing anything (from time to audience engagement) with each of your videos.

Your Most Important Data

There is plenty of information to look through in the backend of your YouTube channel. It can become almost overwhelming. What is important? What should you focus on? These are not the easiest questions to answer when you have so much to sift through.

Perhaps the two most important areas of focus in your Reports section are your Traffic Sources and your Audience Retention. (In the menu on the right.) Let’s have a look at those a little more closely.

Your Traffic Sources are going to be one of the most important elements to look at when evaluating your YouTube marketing efforts. These tell you exactly where your viewers are coming from. This will help you structure future campaigns outside of YouTube to drive the most traffic from your most popular sources. Are your email campaigns driving the most viewers to your videos? Maybe it is your social media efforts on other networks, like Facebook or Twitter, that are bringing in the most views. This is where you can find out.

Knowing where your traffic is coming from will allow you to cut out the time you spend marketing on networks that are not driving any traffic to your YouTube channel and focus entirely on areas where you are seeing success. This increases the efficiency of your YouTube marketing and helps maximize your return on investment (time, in this case).

Audience Retention is another crucial focal point of these statistics. Say, for example, you put together a video campaign with a call to action at the end of a video. Then you put together another one with a call to action at the beginning. Which one is driving conversions? You can see this with your Audience Retention tool. Note in the image below that there is a drop off at a certain point in your videos. People have an inherently short attention span when it comes to YouTube, and the longer your video, the less likely it is that people will stay to the very end. We have found that the optimal length of a YouTube video is somewhere in the ballpark of two minutes. After that, audiences tend to move on to something else. So, when it comes to YouTube, a video search engine with billions of options to choose from, the shorter the better. And all of this is available in the Audience Retention report of your YouTube analytics dashboard.

How Are You Engaging?

Engagement is a cornerstone of any successful social media marketing campaign. And contrary to what a conventional understanding of the term ‘engagement’ might suggest, engagement on social media is more about your brand and your audience. It is not solely about how you are engaging with your audience, but also about how your audience is engaging with you. The engagement reports in YouTube focus on your audience’s engagement with your brand on YouTube.

This section is wonderful for tailoring your YouTube marketing to the preferences of your audience. You can find out what videos people like best, where they are commenting most and when your engagement is taking place. Again, this is an area that will help you maximize the efficiency of a campaign and your return on investment.

These are just a few of the great analytics tools available in the backend of YouTube. Of course, like anything, the best way to learn is by doing. So have a look at the analytics dashboard of your YouTube channel and find out where your efforts are paying off. Then tell us how you use the YouTube analytics dashboard in the comments below or on Twitter!

Google+ Marketing Explained [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 15, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Google+ marketing can be an excellent tool, but you need to understand the social network in order to execute an effective strategy.

There is a ton to know about Google+ in order to effectively execute a Google+ marketing strategy. That explains the length and detail of this excellent infographic. Considering Google+ has the backing of search giant Google, it is no wonder there is so much intricacy involved in understanding the social network.

In the last couple of years, Google+ has exploded with regards to membership. Now whether or not these numbers are inflated due to the fact that Google+ automatically signs Gmail users up is not the point. The fact of the matter is, there are hundreds of millions of members on the network, and whether or not you plan on engaging with them, having a Google+ marketing strategy in place will help you with your search rankings.

Have a look below and learn exactly why Google+ marketing is important to both your social marketing strategies as well as your SEO efforts.

How are you using Google+ marketing in your social media strategies? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media, Will You Be My Valentine? [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 14, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media is going to be a big part of Valentine’s Day. How is the holiday manifesting itself on social networks?

Valentine’s Day features two things: love and bitterness. And we can be sure to see plenty of that on social media networks today. In fact, we have already been seeing quite a bit of it. Radian6 and NM Incite have both conducted studies that show a few interesting trends on social media leading up to Valentine’s Day. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the bitterness of men outweighs that of women 23% to 11%. As one might expect, however, women have a greater share of voice on social media when it comes to Valentine’s Day, outweighing men 66% to 34%. Below are a couple of figures from the NM Incite report.

The infographic below details exactly what Radian6 found about the holiday and its relevance in the world of social media. Quite a bit of chatter for marketers to join in on.

How do you plan on engaging with your audience on Valentine’s Day? Do you have any social media specials or promotions you have put together for the day? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Best Mobile Tools for Social Media Marketing

February 12, 2013/by Corey Padveen

When you’re on the go, what are the best mobile tools you can use to manage your social media marketing?

Social media marketing is no 9-5 gig; far from it. When we’re on the go, we need to have access to our dashboards and accounts, because social media is all about real-time engagement. If we miss an opportunity to engage, we might be missing an opportunity to acquire and possibly convert a new customer.

With that in mind, what are some of the best tools we can use when it comes to mobile social media marketing? The app store is filled with some great (and almost all free) business apps that can help us efficiently run our social media programs when we’re out of the office. Have a look below for a list of some of the social media marketing apps we think are the best.

Facebook Pages

The Facebook Pages app is an excellent tool for monitoring your company or fan pages on the go. The app allows for nearly all the same insights and features as your admin when using your Facebook pages on a desktop. You can view insights, receive notifications, and even monitor the success of campaigns as they are executed. This is a particularly great tool for marketers managing client pages. This allows you to be away from the computer and still engaging with your clients’ customers and fans in real time.

HootSuite Mobile

HootSuite is a favorite among marketers when it comes to social media marketing management. It is an easy-to-use, efficient dashboard that incorporates the majority of the most popular social networks. Considering the vast number of users, it is no wonder that they have developed an excellent mobile app. The HootSuite mobile app allows users to manage a number of profiles from their phone. Granted, there are not as many options available on the mobile version as there are on the desktop dashboard (it is effectively just Facebook and Twitter at the moment) but it does give you some of the same capabilities as the desktop version.

iDashboard

Google Analytics is a vital tool. And while we may not necessarily need to constantly access it in real time on-the-go, it is still nice to have the option. And the option of using iDashboard is a nice one. The Google Analytics app (paid version) has a ton of great features. Not only can you access all of your Analytics accounts, you can also look into specific data regarding traffic, referral data, social monitoring, and much more! So when you need a quick bit of information when you’re on the road, the iDashboard has it for you.

Foursquare for Business

The Foursquare for Business app allows owners of a business (or businesses) and marketers to claim locations, and create and monitor campaigns as the move. As they expand their business frontier, Foursquare is looking to make it as easy as possible for marketers to access the social network for business purposes wherever they are. It is for that reason that they developed the app. So whether you’re monitoring your own location or a client’s, you can do it from anywhere with the Foursquare for Business app.

These are just a few of the great apps available for running your social media marketing on the fly. There is no shortage of other apps, including stand alone apps for Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. What are some of your favorite social media marketing apps? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Mobile Marketing Tips: Capture Your Mobile Audience

February 12, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Mobile marketing is quickly becoming one of the biggest trends when it comes to engaging with your audience.

Numbers don’t lie. In the past year, we have seen the use of mobile devices when accessing the web and social media rise sharply. According to a recent report, consumers increased their use of social apps on mobile devices by 76% in 2012 compared to 2011. For some users, most of the time they spend on social networking sites now takes place on a mobile device. And the number of users of the mobile web nearly doubled in 2012 compared to the previous year. Taking these figures into account, it would be foolish for any marketer to ignore the power of mobile marketing.

With that in mind, we thought we would share a few helpful tips when it comes to optimizing your mobile marketing strategy. Have a look below to find out what you can be doing (and in some cases, for much less than what you might expect).

1. Mobile Site

Whether you are an e-commerce store or a restaurant, having a mobile website is going to be a crucial part of your mobile marketing. Simply having access to your website on the go can help users engage with your brand wherever they are and whenever they need to. Furthermore, this is not as complicated as it might seem. Today, there exists a number of services that help transform your site into a mobile-friendly one without much configuration. Nearly anyone can do it! Tools like Mobify or MobilePress (for WordPress sites) can help you transform your website. Furthermore, there exist numerous options in some of the more popular CMS platforms that automatically render your site for mobile devices. So when building your site, keep your mobile marketing strategy in mind, and be sure you are constructing a mobile-friendly one.

2. QR Codes

QR (Quick Response) Codes are a great way to engage with potential customers visually, and drive them to your mobile site or mobile landing page with an offer. Essentially, a QR Code is a pseudo call to action that leads people to find out more by scanning it. What a QR Code does is it sends data to your device and loads that information immediately on screen. This is growing in popularity in the real estate world, and is catching on elsewhere as well. The benefits of a QR Code lie in its mystery. People want to know more about enticing offers, and a QR Code allows them to do that right away. Furthermore, they are not all that expensive to incorporate into your mobile marketing strategy! There are even free services like Quikqr that you can use.

3. Geo-Targeted Mobile Marketing

This is where mobile marketing really pays off. Geo-targeting and location-based marketing are the real bread and butter of a mobile marketing strategy. These strategies give you the ability to directly target potential clients in your area and offer specials or promotions to users who visit your store, restaurant or location. Optimizing your social networks like Foursquare and creating deals therein are where you stand to reap the highest benefits.

A tool used by a popular shoe store in Europe to attract nearby patrons begins a countdown when a potential customer enters a competitor’s store. The countdown starts at 100 and works down to 0. Users who see this countdown must make it out of the competitor’s store and into the other shoe store as quickly as possible. As soon as they enter, the timer stops and the number on which it lands is the discount the customer can receive. This strategy is literally dragging clients out of a competitor’s store and having them run to yours!

4. Mobile Applications

This is where you can get very fancy – but for a price. Customized mobile apps might be the most expensive form of mobile marketing, but they certainly have the highest payoff. As we noted above, mobile app use has skyrocketed in the last year, and those numbers show no sign of slowing. Users like the idea of a customized mobile application that they can use to interact with your brand. Whether it is an app for an airline to book your seats, or an app like the TV series (The Walking Dead has created where users can “zombify” themselves) people like to have fun with their mobile devices. So, if you have the budget, consider spicing up your mobile marketing strategy with an app tailored to your brand.

What are your mobile marketing strategies? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media at the Super Bowl [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 11, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media was the big winner at the Super Bowl, and these numbers show exactly why.

We all know that social media made a splash this year at the Super Bowl. As we noted in a recent post, roughly half of all Super Bowl ads this year featured some form of social media integration, mostly in the form of a hashtag. That was up from just a few last year, and only one two years ago. Clearly, the trend of social media for business is picking up steam in the marketing and advertising world.

Well, a week after the big game, Marketing Profs has put together some great infographics detailing exactly how social media was used during the Super Bowl, the impact social had on the game, and the impact the game had on the world of social media.

Have a look at these infographics below and tell us what you think; where does social media in the world of business head from here? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Facebook Marketing: The Impact of Graph Search [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 8, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Facebook marketing is seeing some major changes with the introduction of the Graph Search feature.

Not long ago, Facebook announced that it would soon be introducing the Graph Search functionality to the social network. This meant quite a few changes to the world of Facebook marketing, and we noted a few of those changes in a recent blog post about Facebook’s Graph Search. But while we all might understand that the advent of Graph Search will mean a changed landscape with regards to Facebook marketing, we might not necessarily understand why.

This wonderful infographic that we pulled from our Pinterest page does a great job of breaking down and really detailing exactly how Facebook marketing (and digital marketing, in general) stands to change as a result of Graph Search. So, while we all know that there will be a change, now we can understand exactly how and why. With that, we will be able to better execute Facebook marketing strategies, taking into account Graph Search and all that it brings to the table with regards to our marketing efforts.

Have you had a chance to use Graph Search yet? How do you feel this feature will impact your Facebook marketing strategies? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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