Category: Social Media

Social media can be dangerous for marketers, but not in the way that you might think.

While social media can be a big liability for large brands with a habit of saying the wrong thing, it can also be the largest threat to an average marketer’s most valuable resource: time.

Like college students procrastinating a final paper, we find little tasks to fill our time and make us feel like we are accomplishing something, at the expense of our important projects and responsibilities.

We spend a few minutes responding to customers here, and a few minutes sharing our content there. Social media provides [...]

In Social Media

The one-to-many broadcast style that has made social media such an appealing channel for so many marketers is changing. Tweets are now buried under the thousands of new accounts added daily, and according to Facebook analytics firm PageLever, most Facebook page posts fade off into the ether in just three to five hours after getting published. Brands need to adapt their focus in order to be successful. But how?

The future of social media may lie in identifying and utilizing industry influencers. Instead of hoping to broadcast your message to the masses, you should be trying to create a [...]

In Social Media

It’s no surprise that social media takes up a larger part of a marketer’s day than it did even a year ago. The addition of social networks your company needs to have a presence on and keep updated is growing out of control, leaving many marketers drowning in the increased time and investment required.

However, the massive amount of time marketers are dedicating to social media these days is no indication that they are doing it right. In fact, I would bet that in most cases the more time a marketer spends on social media, the less likely they are to [...]

In Infographic, Social Media

In a scene reminiscent of the publicity madhouse that is an Apple product announcement, hundreds of anxious reporters gathered on January 15 to hear Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg deliver a highly anticipated, yet mysterious product announcement.

Despite speculation of a potential Facebook phone or a revamped ad platform, Zuckerberg debuted something unexpected: graph search. Although it lacked the glamour of a lot of the potential theories for what could be announced, graph search began to take shape as an intriguing concept the more that Zuckerberg elaborated.

Graph search is a huge step forward for social search, allowing users to search the billions [...]

In Social Media

It wasn’t until a few years ago that it became necessary to start optimizing your Twitter page for search. In the past, Twitter pages were marked with “nofollow” tags in Google’s search algorithm, meaning that Google would not give tweeted links any credit that would count toward search rankings. Despite this, Google and Bing revealed in an interview in 2010 that they were still receiving streams of data from Twitter that they were using to weigh author authority and quality.

So what does this mean, exactly?

It means that links shared through your social sites can influence your search rankings, to an [...]

In SEO / SEM, Social Media

Can you measure your ROI on Facebook? This question has been hotly debated among marketers ever since the platform was adopted by businesses as a marketing tool. For many marketers, Facebook was something that they decided to pursue solely because “everyone else was doing it.” While this teenage mentality may have gotten them to use the platform, it certainly didn’t teach them what to do once they were there.

This has left many marketers fumbling in the dark when it comes to Facebook. While we can see (often arbitrary) numbers like followers, likes, and fans, we don’t have any great statistics [...]

In Social Media

If you started neglecting your LinkedIn profile the minute you were hired, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity. As the most business-focused of the social media giants, LinkedIn’s 28-million monthly visitors view it as a credible source of product recommendations and industry news and trends. And if you’re still not seeing the potential marketing value here, our survey results on the topic (though now a bit dated) revealed LinkedIn as the social media channel most effective in generating leads.

Here are seven tips to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your LinkedIn, by optimizing your company page, effectively [...]

In Ideas, Social Media

Our world is getting more complex each day.

There’s no doubt about it. With more social sites to sign into, more tools we should be using, and more channels to worry about, our lives are more complicated than ever.

However, where people are involved, it’s shocking how almost all actions still come down to basic human motivations. Even though we have more channels to express ourselves, and more tools to do it with, we remain surprisingly predictable. Social media is a perfect example of this.

With billions of pieces of data shared on social media every day, it can seem impossible to uncover [...]