Archive for year 2012
Research shows that Pinterest is big, it’s bad, and it’s for real
Dec 6th
A new report from The Social Habit focuses on revelations about Pinterest and if you weren’t a “pinner” before, it might be time to get in the game!
The study concludes that while Pinterest has a smaller user base than services like Facebook or Twitter, the service engenders enormous loyalty and has become a daily habit for more than half its users.
As a reality check, Pinterest just ditched the limited “invitation” stage of its growth in early August of this year! So the expansion has been explosive and rapid.
The Social Habit research of American social media users shows some pretty staggering insights. A few highlights:
- Usage of Pinterest is already nearly as large as LinkedIn with 21% having a Pinterest account versus 26% on LinkedIn
- More than half of Pinterest users visit the site each day.
- We could be seeing just the tip of the iceberg for Pinterest’s growth. 38% of U.S. social media users plan to use Pinterest more often
- 70% of the site’s users are women and 64% of the site’s fans are under the age of 34. In fact, Pinterest is the third-most widely-used social network for women 18-44 (behind Facebook and Twitter).
- The most popular pins?
- Food
- Arts & Crafts
- Fashion
- Interior Design
- Family-Related Content
- Photography
- Here’s the big one: 27% of Pinterest users have purchased a product as a result of seeing it on someone else’s pinboard.
Pretty amazing stuff. How are you using Pinterest for your business? Or is it just for fun?
By the way, this is just one tiny glimpse into the amazing dataset compiled by Edison Research and the Social Habit report. This is a MUST HAVE and affordable resource for any agency, marketing department or social media professional.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to Edison Research.
A cautionary tale: Putting your business in the hands of Facebook
Dec 5th
As I enjoyed a mega-popular Kebab restaurant on my street, I wondered about the “secret” of their success.
Certainly one factor is the kebab itself — a delicious jungle of salad, meat, and fresh herb sauce that melted like Angel cream on your tongue. Mmmmmm.
The other aspect of their success, and frankly the more interesting part for us, is their Facebook presence.
The young owner has built an impressive online audience. The fan page attracted thousands of fans from around the country who post pictures and stories about their Kebab experience. Wowzee.
The owners fuel their presence through the share of fun restaurant pictures (guests posing, entertaining quotes, food pics), unique YouTube videos, and sophisticated social media give-and-take.
For a physical food biz to rock the Internet like that, I was truly impressed and as I heard his story, I almost let the Kebab slip through my fingers because of the sheer astonishment.
But when I asked them about their business website, they just shrugged their shoulders and laughed. “Why waste time and money on building a website when you can do everything for free on Facebook ?”
I frowned.
“Because you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket … and a basket that you don’t own.”
But the conversation was already over, because the business had placed its entire faith on Facebook’s free fan page which they’ve labored over for almost two years. Argh.
A few weeks later, Facebook introduced the “promote your posts” feature.
Bang.
Needless to say, interactivity and visibility of the restaurant’s fanpage dropped drastically. Now they are finally building their business website.
Lesson learned.
Now this is not a slap against Facebook, but it’s a mistake that happens all the time …
Every big online company wants to lock you into their platform…
…offering you free space and an incredible existing audience.
- Amazon wants authors to mainly use their author’s page and discourages outside linking challenging
- DeviantArt wants to display your entire portfolio on their site
- Facebook “encourages” you to focus on building your fan page followers and marketing
And while their offers are all legitimate, they hide one important fact :
They make you totally dependable on them – and you’ll always be at their mercy.
Seriously, I cringe every time someone focuses heavily on building their online presence on a platform they don’t own.
Instead of worrying about getting email subscribers and customers, they obsess about getting likes and followers on Facebook and Twitter.
It may be accessible, free and powerful in the beginning, but what do you do if their platform rules change, which they eventually will?
- What if the company changes from free sharing to paid promotion ? (*cough* Facebook *cough)
- What if a big player platform loses out and becomes irrelevant ? (Myspace is no space now)
- What if a successful online brand creates a hyped platform that attracts more digital dust that visitors? (sorry Google)
No matter how much you luv a brand (and I like Google a lot), always be suspicious of their offers to rely on them for your business infrastructure and marketing presence. It’s their game, and we all know you’ll never win by rules that have been set by someone else.
You can actually WASTE years of building your brand on someone else’s platform and then lose out when the tide changes. Nothing, nothing and I mean NO-THING is more important than channeling your audience attraction to your self-hosted platform. That’s why I focus the majority of my time getting people on MY site, instead of getting likes and followers somehwere else.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr … and sometimes even Google+ … all help me extend my reach, but each of them could vanish in an instant and I’d still have my audience and profits.
The web is in constant flux. The big platforms of today could become the no man’s lands of tomorrow.
Placing your bet on an outlet you don’t own is the riskiest and dumbest thing you can do. Treat them for what they really are – marketing tools that attract visitors to your own online real estate where you’ll turn them into subscribers or even paying clients.
Don’t be a leaf in the wind – a brand whose long-term success you want to control is dependable on a platform you own. Agree or disagree?
Mars Dorian describes himself as a creative marketeer with a moon-melting passion for human potential and technology. You can follow his adventures at www.marsdorian.com/
Original illustrations by the author.
5 Essential tools to attract a relevant audience to your blog
Dec 4th
By Ian Cleary, {grow} Contributing Columnist
It is not difficult to drive traffic to your site but what’s the point if visitors don’t stay around and read your blog post, sign up to your email list or buy your product or service?
We’re all familiar with the following saying:
“Traffic is Vanity, Conversion is Sanity!”
Well, maybe you’re not familiar with that saying because I just made it up. But it does make sense!
Let’s look at five great social media tools to ensure you attract a relevant audience to your blog posts.
1. Tweet at the Optimal Times using SocialBro
The people that follow you on Twitter are some of the most likely targets for your blog post but you need to have a strategy for reaching them. One part of this is timing the delivery of your posts to try and get the attention of the majority of your followers.
SocialBro is a social media management tool. One key feature is that it works out when your followers are online. This is not going to be 100% accurate but gives you a good idea of the best times to tweet.
At 8am only 31% of my followers are actively tweeting but over 77% are active at 3pm in the afternoon.
I’m based in Europe but focus on the US so it makes sense that more of my followers are online in my afternoon which is the morning in the US. It also makes sense to tweet at 8am and at 3pm because I want to attract the attention of my European followers also.
Action: Consider SocialBro or similar tools to work out the best time to tweet
2. Target People Who Know You Using Google Author
When you are searching through Google for content you often see the authors picture displayed in the search results:
The person in the picture is Amy Porterfield. As I know Amy and value her as an expert in her field I am more likely to click on this post in the search results.
Getting your picture displayed as part of the search results is called Google Author and can help to not only get people to read your post, but it also helps readers to connect and become more familiar with you so that they will recognize your posts immediately going forward.
Action: Set up Google Author. Follow this link to read step-by-step instructions on setting this up How to setup Google Author Rich Snippets
3. Promote Your Post Using WiseStamp
Most of the people you are emailing on a daily basis are potential subscribers to your blog. Encourage them to read your latest blog post by including a link to your latest post in every e-mail you send.
Action: Add your latest blog post to your signature using Wisestamp or similar tool.
4. Encourage Your Readers to Share
By attracting a relevant audience it is more likely that their network would also be a relevant audience. Encourage your readers to share out your content to their followers.
I use the WordPress plugin DiggDigg The reason I like it is that when readers are scrolling down through the blog post it automatically moves with the reader so there’s always the option to share at any point.
Action: Make sure that you actively promote the option for social sharing. It’s not enough just having it at the very top of a post. How else can you encourage people to share?
5. Find Relevant Keywords Using Google Keyword Tool
One of the most important elements of optimizing your blog post for Google is the Title Tag. This is not visible on the page but it’s something that Google reads when it is figuring out how to index your content.
If a librarian thinks a history book belongs in the Geography section then how will the historians have a chance of finding it!
So help Google index your content correctly by doing some keyword research using Google Keyword Tool and ensure you give Google sufficient clues regarding what your content is about.
The following shows a search for ‘social media strategy’. In the Global monthly searches column Google shows you the average searches per month over the last 12 months. It also shows a list of similar keywords with the number of monthly searches.
Google also looks for a description which is not used for indexing but is displayed in search results. It’s also very important to include the correct description to ensure you are only attracting people that are relevant.
Action: Perform keyword research for every post and ensure you have the option for configuring the page title as part of your content management system.
Summary
We get caught up too much with numbers. How many visitors you have, how many fans on Facebook, how many Twitter followers? But it’s not all about volume. How many relevant followers to you have? How many relevant readers are you interacting with?
What are your tips and tools for attracting a relevant audience? We would really love to hear your thoughts.
Ian Cleary is a Social Media Tools Specialist. He is the founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insights on social media tools. Follow Ian on twitter @ianmcleary
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
Your 2013 Social Media Strategy: Grow a Pair.
Dec 2nd
First I would like to explain this strange headline to my international readers. “Grow a pair” (not to be confused with “grow a pear”) is American slang for stepping up to be tough and bold. Now, on with the show.
There is an infection overwhelming social media strategy development and the virus is fear.
I just read a number of reports all showing how CMO’s are still confused about what to do about social media. Really? It’s been on the table for at least 3-4 years now. Isn’t it time to figure things out?
I’ve had the true honor of working with some of America’s most beloved brands over the past few years. And I can report that the overwhelming reaction to social media by many successful companies is: “Can we please just make this go away!”
Once they learn that they can’t make it go away, they do the next best thing: Shove it off to an advertising agency.
The fact of the matter is, “fear of change” is always the biggest obstacle to progress. Many of today’s CMO’s did not cut their teeth in the digital world, have not immersed themselves in the social web, and simply do not understand it.
It’s time these business leaders stop whining about social media, shatter the status quo, and grow a pair for the new year.
- Stop abdicating leadership to advertising agencies who just made Timmy from Accounting your community manager because he’s 23 and enjoys Facebook.
- If you still have a firewall to keep employees from the social web, grow a pair. Are you shaking your employees down for crossword puzzle books when they punch the time clock?
- Quit fighting over who owns social media strategy. It’s Marketing. Glad to be of help.
- Stop hiding behind your legal department as an excuse to not do anything. If you help them understand what’s at stake, they will help you. Lawyers care about your business too.
- Quit whining about how much time it takes to do social media. Take a little of that newspaper ad budget you’re wasting and re-direct some resources to the digital space.
- If you’re in pharma or another highly-regulated industry, stop waiting for guidance from the FDA or whatever agency and just figure it out. Whoever finally does that is going to have a remarkable competitive advantage.
- If you’re in the insurance, banking or wealth management industries, grow a pair and stop treating your employees like idiots who could not manage to send out a tweet without violating a freaking SEC regulation.
- Stop following a soul-less, cookie-cutter social media playbook devised by your agency. Learn enough about this new channel so you can ask the right questions and be a real leader in this space.
- If you are overwhelmed about social media and don’t know where to start, bring in help. If you want to find an advisor you can really trust, call me. I know a few I could recommend! Also, I recommend the Rutgers University CMD program (where I teach). In this remarkable executive program, you can get up to speed on the digital marketing landscape in one week.
- And most of all, please, please, please quit asking about the ROI of social media when this is simply code for: “If I keep asking for spreadsheets I can stall this thing until I hit retirement.”
So there. (Taking deep breath).
Please. Look around you. Which companies are creating new value today and achieving breath-taking business results? Which companies are declining quickly, and why? You’ll discover that if you don’t have a digital strategy, you are most likely on a path to irrelevance. Don’t go there.
In 2013 it’s time to do this thing. How are you going to integrate social media and digital marketing so that you’re not just checking a box. It’s time to master these platforms to make them work for you. Are you with me?
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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