Follow Your Customer

NO, Not Literally! That would be STALKING!

Expand your social presence. You might have a Facebook Page or a Twitter Page or both. However, it is not necessary all of your customers are on one of the other profile. Create your profiles on various Social Media Networks, keep them clean and up to date with contact details, links to your website, and other important things such as content, and/or logos etc.

Engagement is Key

Just like in our earlier post “10 Reasons why People Don’t “Like” Your Facebook Posts”, we want to make sure you understand the power of engagement. Listen to your customers! People feel more secure and safe disclosing a lot more personal information and their needs on Social Media sites. Review that information, to help formulate your marketing strategy. Also, reply and engage with the customers that have left feedbacks/questions/comments on your Social Media profiles.

Follow Your Customer & Continue Engagement

Once you have chosen the right networks, have your profiles set up, continue to use them. Social Media is not a one time thing. It is not something you can schedule in your diary as a weekly or monthly task. It is ongoing, whether it be daily, twice a week or more, depending on your market penetration and user engagement with your profile. However, keep in mind, just because you don’t have any or too many followers and just because they aren’t interacting with you does not mean you stop or give up!

Yes, video production can be expensive, but there are a lot of options available now where its easy to get an informative, engaging, yet entertaining video ad made for a few hundred quids. We’ve researched some cheaper and FREE options that you could use to create your own videos.

GoAnimate.com

A great resource to try your hand at video production for FREE. If you fancy to upgrade they have some great prices. Their business pricing starts from US$25 per month to US$50 per month.

Prezi

This is another great resource, more geared towards the business type presentation videos. Prices range from FREE to $13.25 per month.

Sliderocket

Also geared more towards presentations, but we like some of the pre-canned templates you could use for infographics, presentations, surveys, webinars, and more.

Not Judging, it is good you and your business is moving ahead with technology and adapting it rather than being stuck in the past!

You now have a Facebook page, you maybe even have a budget for it, and if you are big enough you maybe even have a Social Media Manager/Expert helping you with your “Social Media Marketing” efforts. Yet, you find people don’t interact with your page, they don’t call for quotes, they don’t even visit your website let alone sharing your posts. Why is that? Here are a few reasons why that might be the case:

1. Posting questions that are too broad or too personal.
2. Posting for the sake of posting i.e. uninspiring tone.
3. Posting for the sake of posting i.e. text only posts.
4. Too much focus on selling – remember, Social Media is about creating your brand, and interacting with your demographic market and not a channel to directly Sell (although it can also be used for selling only).
5. Too self absorbed i.e. talking only about your business.
6. Out of sync messages i.e. message isn’t in sync with your demographics or business.
7. Social Media is not a one way street, so if you are posting but not responding to the few feedbacks/comments you have received its BAD!
8. Identity Crisis.
9. You aren’t really offering anything.
10. You give up too easily.

Here are 12 ways to Engage on Twitter:

1. Add Personality, by adding a real picture of yourself. People connect with people rather than random profile images.
2. Position yourself as an expert. Pick topics that are closest to your profession, mind, heart (depending on your twitter usage) and discuss those time and again.
3. Tweet Often, but DO NOT SPAM! You might have 10 things to tweet about but that does not mean you post 10 tweets in 10 mins NOBODY LIKE A TWITTERBUG!
4. Ask questions, answer questions, don’t just tweet for tweetsake!
5. It is a Social Network, so help people network with each other. When they notice you connecting people they will appreciate you more and it builds your credibility.
6. Don’t be a narcissist. Promote others, Re-tweet others tweets and @mention them.
7. Make your own content, even when you are re-tweeting edit the copy with your own thoughts and words (but make sure you @mention).
8. Kind of obvious, stay within the character limit! Try sticking to 140 characters. This helps leave space for other people who want to re-tweet you and leaves room for their own handle.
9. Ask and you shall get! When you ask people for a re-tweet, chances are you will get them most of the times. BUT always remember to thank them, and re-tweet their tweets.
10. Always acknowledge people who shared information with you – again @mentions
11. Re-tweet the same tweet IF it is important. You will notice, twitter feeds move fast. You only have a few seconds for your tweet to get noticed. If the tweet is crucial post it again BUT do not SPAM!
12. Connect Connect Connect! Don’t just try to increase your own followers. Connect with other people, this increases their follower-ship and gives them a chance to @mention you and re-tweet your tweets.

TWEET TWEET!

Clickz reported that eBay-owned GSI Commerce and its 180 major clients that include household names like Bath & Body Works, Calvin Klein, and American Eagle Outfitters will soon be able to gain access to social buttons. eBay has around 100,000 clients who use the online auction site’s e-Commerce platform.

Business retail will soon be deeply immersed into Facebook’s ‘socialised’ universe. Despite the ongoing criticism regarding Facebook’s share scare, the optimism for further expansion remains upbeat. eBay customers can soon share their online shopping experiences with their friends once they click the ‘Want’ and ‘Own’ buttons. Well, Facebook seemed to have learned quite a few lessons from its failed Beacon project. This time, the social networking giant is giving its users the option to share what they like, want, or own to other Facebook users. Well, there’s no escaping Facebook unless you quite using Facebook or any of its related applications. Many internet users can be impulsive and most likely to immediately push those social buttons once they appear.

How the New Social Buttons Affect Marketing Strategy

According to social media marketing experts, once customers enter a retailer’s website via their Facebook account, the new buttons’ click data can be accessible to both the social networking site and the vendor. The data will then be utilised for positioning offers on a merchant’s site. This methodology of distributing such data is pretty similar to what retailers have already experienced with Facebook’s other social buttons. ‘Want’ and ‘Own’ are not the only ones that will soon appear on people’s Facebook pages. New social buttons such as ‘Reading’, ‘Watching’, and ‘Listening’ will soon be displayed. Once this happens, marketers can explore the full-blown potential of using Facebook for marketing purposes. There will be an unprecedented massive data sharing between Facebook and its media and retail partners on a social media scale. This innovation by Facebook allows merchants to effectively target marketing offers to their intended audience.

According to Clickz, Wanttt.com, a company who also developed similar ‘Want’ button for its 230 clients have seen a rather rosy prospect for Facebook’s retail partners to seize valuable marketing opportunities brought about by this change. Sharper Image, one of Wannttt.com’s clients, reported a five times higher conversion rate for ‘Wanters’ than the non-Wanters. This opens an enormous volume of opportunities for marketers. Social media marketing aims to build a campaign strategy based on a customer’s intent. There’s no better way of gauging the intent of a use than the ‘Want’ button. This method would probably have more accuracy in pinpointing what consumers ‘really’ want.

This innovation really reinvents the idea of social networking. Socialisation of eCommerce is truly quite a different approach to marketing. Would Facebook remain true to being a genuine social networking site or will it speed up its transformation of becoming a commercial hub?

There’s no black and white answer to that question. Much of what Facebook is doing is in grey. As Facebook evolves, two things can happen. Facebook could either socialise eCommerce or commercialise social networking.

The new Facebook-Yahoo alliance is just part of the bigger social media revolution that will redefine human interaction in cyberspace. The partnership led to a content sharing platform which gives the people the ability to see what articles their friends are reading via the ‘Facebar’ on Yahoo News page. Content sharing even goes further by allowing Facebook users to update their friends about their favorite TV shows, music, movies, and other forms of information.

So what does this integration mean for Yahoo?

Despite being the search engine pioneer, Yahoo lost much of the competition to another search engine giant, Google. The company tries to resuscitate itself and rebrand in anyway possible. One of the creative ways to do that is to ride on the popularity of other cyber entities, hence, the Facebook-Yahoo partnership. If this formula of integration proves successful, Yahoo can acquire a chunk of Facebook’s success. Much of the content being shared among Facebook users is news so it’s pretty logical for Yahoo seize a good part of it.

The cash-strapped company has quite a rough sailing for quite some time now. Its executives are under intense pressure of delivering decent market gains in the face of fierce market competition. Social media marketing experts point out the content sharing platform it shares with Facebook should give Yahoo a good marketing advantage. When contents are being shared across a wide reach of audience, the company should be able monetize on high page views that will result to better advertising prospects.

What about privacy concerns?

This approach to socialisation of media and content sharing might drag Yahoo into Facebook’s own troubles regarding privacy concerns among its users. Will there be a sad repeat similar to the failed Beacon project? That possibility is not in sight yet. But it can never be that far unless Facebook finds a clever way to circumvent privacy-related issues that will surely resurface from time to time.

There seems to a warm enthusiasm about the whole team-up between Facebook and Yahoo. Let’s wait and see if this collaboration will successfully work out.

Now, with over 750 million users, Facebook seems to capitalise on its sheer size to extend the limits of social media. Netizens are pretty much used to hearing new set of changes that Facebook intends to roll out on short notice. So what’s the buzz about this so-called Facebook’s “Read, Watch, Listen” theme that people are anticipating about? TechCrunch, an online technology blog, seems to suggest that this will probably dominate the entire flow of Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference that is due to take place this week. This might prompt critics to raise same issues albeit with greater drive and intensity.

As the news goes, we’ll be seeing a few other wall buttons that are seen as offshoots of the “Like” concept. TechCrunch goes on to suggest that a “Want” button might soon appear. It’s pretty clear where Facebook is heading: towards greater aggregation of information then to a wider network of data sharing.

This no longer comes as a big surprise to everyone. Even before, Facebook has been making hints about its future plans of putting the entire social networking world under its own umbrella. As expected, Mark Zuckerberg and company will bring the social media to an unprecedented level of ‘socialisation’. All Things Digital reported an unnamed source saying, “Facebook has talked about socializing the Internet, but this is actually the biggest step to doing it.”

What do these changes mean to an average Facebook user?

Well, learning from the Beacon fiasco four years ago, there’s a tremendous potential that can be derived from this enormous data-sharing scheme. The launching of the new buttons will complement Facebook’s plan to integrate a media sharing platform into the user’s profile page. Similar to the now defunct Beacon project, users would get some updated scoops about what other people are into. The concept behind Beacon isn’t dead yet. It looks like Facebook is creatively rebranding the idea to make it more acceptable to Facebook-basing critics.

Will this further cement Facebook’s hold over the cyber space or will this trigger the start of its demise as a popular social media site?

Let’s try to explore both sides of the argument:

It will beef up Facebook’s position as the number one social networking site

Facebook has been the defining trend in the world of social networking. In order to be several steps ahead of its rivals, it has to be at the forefront of innovation to keep the users from getting bored. Being successful means getting there first. Apple did the same thing when it launched iPad. It was a strategic move by the company because it didn’t have any competition then. The initial reaction was a bit cold but the product caught on unleashing tablet wars today. Take for example Facebook’s news feed which allows people to get personal updates with each other; this functionality wasn’t present in other social networking sites until much later. Another important key point to Facebook’s success was the integration of third party developers to enhance the Facebook experience. Social communication has gone beyond chatting and posting comments, people are now able to share photos and videos and play social games.

It will mark the start of Facebook’s demise

On the gloomy side, this may spell the end of Facebook albeit gradually. This may happen if it ceases to function like a real social network and starts acting like an advertising platform. The site capitalizes on people’s experience in using the technology for socialising with everybody. When people’s profile page starts appearing like an entertainment webpage full of ad banners, it may alienate a huge segment of its loyal users who feel uncomfortable with the new changes. It may even divert Facebook’s attention from improving its usability and desirability to profitmaking. Social media marketing experts deemed that it was a huge mistake for MySpace to convert its entire social networking platform into an advertising hub. Another thorny issue that will resurface from time to time is privacy. By becoming a huge depository of shared information, there’s no way escaping Facebook unless you stay away from using it.

Which side do you think makes sense? For now, it’s hard to make solid predictions about something that hasn’t been applied yet. We haven’t seen how people’s reaction would be. The users’ verdict could either be acceptance or rejection. Flimsy imagination could sometimes lead to an overstatement or an understatement.

The convergence of search and social media have opened a whole new dynamic world of searches where the traditional online web search and advertising are combined to form an eco-system of real-time search and real-time bidding.

With the launch of Google real-time search, Twitter-inspired “real-time” search results now have their own Google webpage.

Although critics have slammed the idea as being nothing more than an enhanced reputation monitoring tool, and also for being very similar to Bing. However, the fact of the matter is that real-time search is still very much under development.

Social Media has enabled a dynamic partnership between traditional search, SEO and PPC. With real-time search platforms and homepages needing further work, it nevertheless converges search and social media models. Since, real-time search is having an impact on SEO, as fresh real-time content trumps relevance, especially those that are news-related searches, real-time search, thus, requires SEO to include fresh content as well as relevance.

Engagement efforts can be enhanced by the optimization of social media content, as direct and indirect links are increased by the distribution of content through social media platforms.

Real-time bidding (RTB) allows bidding on impressions based on key factors such as demographics and behavioral profiles. As it is targeted, it allows advertiser to target the right customers with the right message at the right cost and time.

But display can learn a lot from search. And it’s easy to see search influences on display. What is evident though is that there is enormous opportunity for centralized digital platform developments.

Conclusion

Real-time search and real-time bidding (RTB) through Demand Side Platforms are creating new digital marketing eco-systems.

Real-time bidding and demand side platforms (DSPs) allows seamless integration of search and display, and as evident from the Facebook integration into DSPs, social merges with search and display quite comfortably and efficiently. This allows the purchase of paid and performance display media via one platform, bidding per impression, and in real time.

Whether it’s many significant shifts in the market, or just considered as a convergence of social, search, and display, it is time for marketers to start looking into the possibilities of heading toward this convergence and accepting it, because as far as reputation and buzz go, they just can’t afford to wait.

Google Buzz, a social network integrated into Gmail, was quickly shut down after users complained about invasion of privacy. Although the Internet giant has acquired social services such as Jaiku and Dodgeball, it has not invested in them yet. Some people such as Jared Spool, founder of a consulting firm in Massachusetts, think Google’s lack of a social networking service is due to their emphasis on technology and engineering instead of user experience. When interviewed by Erica Naone, Spool noted that Google’s other failed social services like Lively and Wave were originally side projects and therefore were not expansive enough to become full-fledged social services. According to him, Google’s existing social services are scattered and will require effort to be combined. Users will also expect any social networking platform from Google to have full integration with existing products like Gmail and Docs.

When questioned by Naone on why Google was so desperate to get in on the social networking scene, Nick O’Neill, a social networking expert, said Google was missing out on the commercially valuable information Facebook was collecting from its users which it would not be able to mine from existing offerings like Gmail because of privacy issues. Spool commented that although many of Google’s communication tools like Picasa and YouTube are already popular, it will need to populate its social graph, that is, the connections between users on a social networking platform to gain significant traction against Facebook.

Spool said users will need a great reason to switch from Facebook to a new social service and Google will have to offer innovative services, such as the now-cancelled Wave, to draw people to its own platform. Ben Gross, an online identity expert, told Naone that Facebook and other popular social media platforms have their own problems which Google could turn into an opportunity. For example, most networks assume that connections between people are flat and put all of a user’s connections into a single group of ‘friends’. Users then have to manage privacy settings for different acquaintances and most people don’t want to put in the effort to do so. This would be a great chance for Google to shine in an area where others have failed.

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One of the primary reasons for this extreme gap in knowledge and awareness, with regard to effective utilization of social media networks for marketing purposes, remains the absence of a platform wherein Social Media News, views and information from social media experts, whether in the form of tips or opinions, can suitably be aggregated and compiled together.

Instead, the usual observation is that of a haphazard array of disjointed information, which may or may not suitably pertain to Social Media Marketing or its innumerable nuances – in the very first place. And in those cases where it does, the reliability of the obtained information remains a subject of abject concern.

It is under all the aforementioned circumstances that the visionaries at ABSEM went ahead and actually established such an online base station where the most relevant and useful insights from the world of Social Media Marketing could be obtained suitably. Today marks the day of the launch of this platform.

Speaking on the occasion, Naval Kumar, Founder and CEO of the ABSEM network which comprises of ABSEM Limited as well as sister concerns such as ABSEM-SMM.com, said, “With ABSEM-SMM.com, we have essentially established a platform which would be an aggregation of the most useful and relevant Social Media Marketing industry developments, from around the world. With the industry itself being immensely dynamic and constant upheavals being its most noticeable facet, a platform which shared these developments for the greater good of the entire Social Media Marketing community across the globe, has finally been put in place.”

Today, when increasing numbers of people all over the world are spending an enormous amount of their time on various social networks, it becomes imperative that marketers make their presence felt, where their target audience lies. At the same time, the whole approach towards marketing on these networks has to be intelligent and intuitive, otherwise efforts are unlikely to bear fruition.

That is where ABSEM-SMM.com comes into the picture, by providing Social Media News and Social Media Management Tips that ensure that all the relevant information is aggregated and shared through one platform.

Owned & Operated by ABSEM Limited, ABSEM-SMM.com aggregates Social Media News & other Social Media Management information written by Social Media Experts.