Michael Stelzner, author of the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, commissioned a recent study that simply asked, “What question about marketing with social media do you most want answered?” From that study here are the top 10 questions your clients want answered regarding social media marketing. …read more
Facebook’s Big Changes: Action Items for Marketers
Social-Media Site Streamlines Apps Before Fanning Across the Web
Facebook’s latest round of updates announced this week will affect everyone: marketers, developers, publishers, consumers and anyone else remotely connected to their site and platform. And some of the changes will especially impact marketers.
In a rare move for any company, Facebook not only announced what changes will take place, but it publicly offered a timeline for when it will happen. Of course, the timeline may shift, and some specifics have yet to be ironed out — I’ve found in consulting both with Facebook executives and analysts covering the announcements that, many of the details aren’t yet known and a number of important questions cannot yet be fully answered. However, marketers should still appreciate the wealth of information Facebook has provided on these changes, including a gallery of screen shots. …Read more
Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. …read more
Charles Nelson, president of Sprinkles Cupcakes, doesn’t have a Facebook profile. Nelson, who works seven days a week, has no time for chatting online with Facebook friends.
But Nelson is logged on to Facebook all the time. That’s because more than 70,000 people have declared themselves fans of Sprinkles’ Facebook page, which is at facebook.com/sprinkles.
Each day on the site, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as “ganache” or “bunny,” and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores around the country and whisper that word get a free cupcake.
“On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,” Nelson said. “What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.”
Facebook is not just for friends anymore. The free social networking site — blocked in some workplaces as a potential time-waster — is increasingly becoming an inexpensive marketing tool for small businesses.
Sprinkles is among a growing number of small businesses taking advantage of a relatively new program on Facebook, one that allows them to claim their name, become visible even to folks who aren’t on the site, and stay in close contact with their customers. The business, in effect, can act like any other person on Facebook, posting status updates and seeing what its fans are doing. …read more here–>
http://bit.ly/huffington_post_facebook_accelerate
The BBC is attempting to embrace social media by appointing a social media editor in its newsroom and redesigning its website. As the September traffic figures for US political blogging site Huffington Post reveal, the strategy is clearly a wise one. In short: embracing social media boosts traffic.
The figures speak for themselves: after the Huffington Post launched a Social News site with Facebook Connect in the middle of August, comScore credited the site with 6,825,000 unique users in September. That is up impressive 50% year on year, and slightly overtaking the Washington Post website. According to the Nielsen’s September report, the Huffington Post is at 9.47 million unique users, compared with the BBC’s 7.2 million.
When Staci D Kramer from paidContent got a chance to interview the Huffington Post CEO, Eric Hippeau, he revealed some more details: Facebook referral traffic is up 48% since the launch and accounted for 3.5 million visits, so 15% of all the comments now come from Facebook. And according to the Huffington Post’s internal statistics, those numbers continue to build. … read more
