Modifications to ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons, embedded posts make Facebook more public

 Facebook announced changes to its “like” and “share” buttons and improved its embeddable posts today, underlining the company’s purpose to grow as a platform for public sharing.

The new “like” and “share” buttons can be embedded on websites, cheering readers to recommend or show content to others. According to Facebook, these buttons increased the amount of liking and sharing activity by 5 percent. The company revamped the buttons back in November, but waited until today to roll them out to the common public. 

As for embedded posts, you can now adjust the width of what you’re embedding, which gives people more manage over how embedded posts appear on websites. And for people accessing Facebook on mobile, embedded posts will mechanically scale to the screen size. 

So if you want to embed, say, a music video posted by awesome Minnesota-based rapper Lizzo you can now control how wide it is. Strangely, you can’t control the height. Width wise, you have to stay between 330 and 750 pixels, presumably to prevent distortion.
Neither of these changes are major, but they emphasize how significant public sharing is to Facebook’s plan for the future.

 Even small adjustments can yield major traffic increases for shared content on Facebook, and since the company is doing everything it can to shift users into making their posts public and cheering them to share newsworthy content, optimizing this type of feature is important. Earlier today we reported about how Facebook is trying to help companies discover what users are saying, and that requires user info to be public.

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Social Media Marketing mythology

 There is no lack of advice about the role social media marketing should play in a company’s overall marketing plan. Sadly, that advice is often all over the map.

While a number of years have passed since companies first began venturing out into the unexplored country of social media, mixed messages continue to flourish, leaving business owners wondering where to focus marketing resources.

One end of the spectrum proclaims there is no arrival on investment for a business tapping into social media. The other great school of thought dictates your business has no future if it doesn’t have an engaging profile on every obtainable social media network.

The result is that both over-inflating and underestimating social media’s prospective impact on your business means you are not as likely to make a sound investment of resources to gain a reasonable return on your investment.

Your customer demographic isn’t using social media.

This myth should be simple to bust, yet it persists. According to digital marketing resource Digital Marketing Ramblings, best arithmetical estimates as of November 2013 find Facebook with 1.19 billion active users, YouTube boasting its own 1 billion users, Twitter with 215 million active users, and Google+ garnering 300 million active users. In addition, Instagram has concerned about 150 million users while Pinterest claims 70 million.

Digital media research company eMarketer estimates that in total, social media reaches almost one in four people around the globe. perhaps you could have made the argument back in 1993 that your customers weren’t on social media, but this is one easy myth to bust 20 years later.

Approach: Social media marketing should be one out of several components of your company’s general marketing plan. That means even if you are still concerned that your customers aren’t on social media, you can continue to reach them by phone, direct mail, print advertising or other means. 

Fretting that your targeted demographics are not tweeting, posting, or uploading is time and energy wasted. Remember, too, that your existing customer base should not be your only worry. If you are convinced your current clients are eternally offline, consider the chance to target a brand new demographic.

 A staff member needs to be devoted to social media to get results.

Instead, use aggregators like Hootsuite to make posting simpler on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Then, with the time you save, use Twitter as part of a more concerted marketing effort by hosting a tweet chat. A tweet chat is a kind of live Twitter event, moderated to focus on a number of aspects of one general topic. A hashtag is used to filter all the chatter. Hosting a tweet chat provides your company with the opportunity to build its brand in ways that can’t be accomplished through posts alone.

Social media can take the place of your website.

Because use of social media is a newer marketing tool than beginning a website, there is some confusion over whether social media marketing can take the place of a company website. The answer is, no. The longer answer is, social media may be reasonably new, but email still remains a very powerful tool in your arsenal.

There is no way to measure a social media campaign’s return on investment (ROI).

This is perhaps the myth that seems to outlive and outlast all others. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of social media experts and consultants who may be extremely knowledgeable about social media networks, but they know very little about marketing or measuring return on investment for businesses.

Strategy: In reality, there are a number of ways to track social media’s impact on your business. The metrics for your social media program are not much different from the metrics of other marketing efforts. There are quantitative metrics, which are the many data-driven capacity, such as page views, unique visits, demographics and the like. Then there are qualitative metrics. Unlike quantitative metrics, qualitative metrics have an moving element. If you are serious about the impact, there are several companies competent in providing an in-depth analysis of these metrics.

While your ROI metric is very helpful, it still provides only a snapshot of social media’s true influence on your company’s bottom line. Even more important is your customer lifetime value or CLV. This is the amount of revenue a customer from your social media marketing program will bring to your business over the whole course of their time with your company’s brand. Typically, companies budget about 10 percent of CLV as the amount they are willing to invest to acquire their next customer. In this way, you can compare the CLV of your social media marketing efforts to other marketing efforts in validating your social media investment.

Engage, Drive, and Convert

 

When it comes to social media, the phrase “engage your customer” always seems to be at the head. However, just engaging prospective customers is only part of the story. It does not mean you have successfully driven them back to your site and converted them to paying customers. Treat your social media marketing efforts as you would other marketing programs. Plan carefully, budget adequately, and analyze your results.

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FREE Tools for Measuring Social Media achievement

One of the most demanding tasks in selling digital marketing to the C-Suite is defining the return on investment (ROI). It can be mainly challenging when justifying the budget for social media marketing (SMM).

Marketing ROI has usually been measured like this:
Return on Investment (%) = (Net profit / Marketing Costs) × 100.

Sometimes, cost per customer gaining is the measure. As recently as 2010, the dawn of social media marketing, those in the C-Suite attempted to apply the tried and true transactional ROI model to SMM. The CMO review, as reported by Forbes, lists the most common metrics used to measure social media investment.
 

 1. HootSuite
 

HootSuite is a good all around tool to use for management and metrics tracking. You can plan posts from multiple social media channels as well as create over 30 individual reports. The free metrics are somewhat limited, but for basic it's all you will need.
 

2. SocialMention

SocialMention is an collective tool similar to Google Alerts, but for social media, only. This will give you insight into not only what is being said, but who is saying it and what the universal sentiment is.
You can set an RSS feed, email alerts, or even add a real-time widget to your website. You can also download a CSV/Excel file for further assessment.
 

3. Klout
 

Monitoring influence isn't an accurate science, but having a tool that helps you begin to gage someone's online existence can be useful. Klout is a free tool that will allow you to measure influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and several other channels.
 

4. Facebook Insights

The Facebook insights control panel gives you all of the analytics data for your Facebook page. The insights allow you to understand your audience, what they are reacting to, and adjust your content to meet their needs.
 

5. Twitter Analytics
 

Twitter now has its own analytics control panel. With Twitter Analytics you can track timeline activity, including tweets that were favorited, retweeted, and replied to. The tool also tracks number of mentions, new followers and newly followed. For more information, see "Twitter Analytics: A Beginner's Guide".
 

6. Google Analytics
 

With Google Analytics Campaign Tracking, you can set up links for campaigns with UTM parameters to track the movement. Go here to create the link using Google link shortener for campaigns.
This is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to track success of a specific link within a movement. It's also one of the most overlooked methods of tracking.
 

7. Custom Social Media Reports
 

Google Analytics does a nice job tracking the number of visitors to visit a website from different social channels. These custom reports give you extra insights as to how traffic is being driven to your website.
 

If you aren't blogging or creating new and helpful content to draw people to your website, don't expect these numbers to be high. It requires a content strategy to really work people toward your website. These easy to install one-click reports are invaluable.
 

8. Bitly
 

This link shortener allows you track all you share. This is a great way to see what your audience is interacting with and decide if the content you share is precious.
Bitly also integrates into many third-party software packages, making it a great umbrella tool, as you can track within numerous platforms. For example, you may use Social Sprout, a paid management platform and Buffer both with Bitly then review data in individual platforms or as a whole through Bitly.
 

9. Buffer
 

Buffer is a vast tool for scheduling content. You simply fill up your Buffer account each day and it will automatically post the content to the channels you select.
For metrics, you're able to look at a dashboard inside Buffer to see what posts are receiving the most interaction, or attach it to Bitly to include in your general tracking. You can also join UTM parameters to track traffic in Google Analytics.
 

10. TweetReach
 

TweetReach is a huge tool for tracking a campaign or conversation on Twitter. Simply enter your search term or hashtag and allow TweetReach to search for the tweets to tell you reach, exposure, activity, top contributors, and more. You can look at the past 50 mentions for free.
 

11. Keyhole
 

Keyhole is similar to TweetReach apart from that it also tracks Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter. This is a vast way to track a hashtag or keyword for a campaign or event.
The free social tracker gives you a example of what the tracker can do. If you signup you can get a three-day free trial, which may be adequate for an event or snapshot view of a campaign. To get a long-term view you can sign up for a monthly paid plan.
 

Summary

Measuring social media ROI isn't always easy. Building a brand and improving your customer service may not show up openly in your analytics, but these "soft" metrics can have a major impact on the bottom line.

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Social Media Analytics Companies that you want to validate

GraphDive Facebook

We don’t need to repeat you on the importance of social media analytics for marketers and businesses. But with so many social media formats, it’s suitable extremely hard to chose the right analytics company that will effectively aim your audience. And, to make matters worse, there are a constant number of startups trying to take a piece of the pie. Here are are five social media analytics companies that should be on your radar. 

1. SumAll

You may have previously heard of SumAll, since the company is the leading provider of connected data analytics, but they lately announced the integration of Google+ pages into its data visualization tool. This move should help improve all from SEO ranking, sales, site visits, and revenue.  The addition of the Google+ pages of competitors can be layered into charts help with competitor benchmarking.

2. Trendrr

Trendrr has been approximately for about five years and has worked with ABC, MTV, Telemundo, and Univision. lately, it was acquired by Twitter. Twitter is planning on using Trendrr because of its real-time data capabilities. Trendrr is best used by media and ad companies to better understand how people use social media while watching TV.

3. ThoughtBuzz

ThoughtBuzz is a leading social media analytics company in India and South East Asia that was recently acquired by digital services network To The New. To The New will utilize ThoughtBuzz to integrate social media analytics into its digital services portfolio so that it can keep track of public content on social media networks.

4. Social Crawlytics

Social Crawlytics has been generating a lot of buzz because it’s a robust separate social media analytics tool. If you have a Twitter account, this free asset will easily help you monitor, schedule, and analyze social sharing metrics in one shrewd dashboard. Also, you can check out where your competitor’s content is being shared and promoted.

5. GraphDive

GraphDive may be a startup, but so far it is very promising. The company uses Facebook attach data, such as age, income, education, and relationship status, to offer businesses a better understanding of who their online visitors are. These vital insights can be used to give your consumers personalized recommendations, as well as, find new users that look like your best current clients.

How Many Social Buttons Do You actually Need?

Sticking social buttons – Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking icons – at the peak of articles can help spread your content organically, and also help with universal SEO. Too many of them and your website can create to look messier than a Yahoo toolbar from the early 2000′s.

Too many choices can also dilute the force of the most significant platforms. Here, we take a look at the most well-liked social buttons, explaining our decision process when selecting the significant buttons to use on our casino portal website, roulette.co.uk.

Facebook

With over 1.1 billion users and including, Facebook is by far the most widely used social networking device. It is also the platform that sees the highest levels of appointment by active users. While some users might have fears about sharing gambling-related content via this platform (due to the likelihood that family members and employers might see it), the sheer weight of numbers makes the choice to include a Facebook ‘like’ button a no-brainer.

Twitter

Twitter is the second most well-liked social platform, with over 500 million users, 200 million of which can be considered ‘active’. It’s a much more open method of communication than Facebook, as users can ‘follow’ whoever they want, rather than the close-knit, exclusive personal networks optimistic by Facebook. This makes it a very effective platform for sharing and spreading content, so we felt that including a Twitter button was a must.

Google+

Google claims that their social platform now has 343 million ‘active’ users, making it the fastest-growing social network on the web. Just how active these users in reality are is questionable, as the levels of engagement among these users is a lot lower than with Facebook and Twitter. There are lots of people with Google+ accounts, as extensions of their other Google accounts (Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive etc), but not many of these visit the Google+ homepage on a usual basis to check their news feed.

On the other hand, the Google ‘+1’ button seems to be very helpful from an SEO view, as recent changes to Google’s search ranking algorithm prioritise social shares – particularly on their own service. Because the online casino business is still very search-oriented, we felt that the SEO advantages of a Google+ button made it worth including. However, if we were in another line of business that was mainly driven by social marketing, we might have thought twice about using it.

LinkedIn

This is a button that we had to give a little more thought to. Because LinkedIn is mainly a business-oriented social platform, we were unsure about how suitable it would be, or how much visibility would actually be gained by people sharing content on it. It’s not, generally speaking, a platform that people use as a source of activity or links to interesting articles, certainly not in the way that Facebook and Twitter are. Most users joined the network for the purposes of job hunting, recruiting, and keeping in touch with business networks.

The most attractive statistic, from the perspective of a casino website, was that 12% of LinkedIn users seek gaming information online, as opposed to the average of 7% for other social networks. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those people are using LinkedIn to find this information, as the vast bulk of traffic for gambling-related websites still comes through search engines and banner ads. So while we decided against it on space grounds, we might well decide to include a LinkedIn button in future.

StumbleUpon / Digg / Delicious

A few years ago, it seemed as if social bookmarking services might actually take off as a way for people to share and meet new content on the internet. However, the whole concept never really took off on a large scale, as people seem more interested in what their Facebook and Twitter connections are recommending.

The use of these widgets has declined sharply over the last year, which has coincided with the rise of Google+ and Pinterest, telling that bloggers and webmasters are getting rid of social bookmarking buttons to make room for these.

However, with most users being indisposed to share gambling-related content via social platforms, the relative anonymity of these services can still be a highly effective driver for additional traffic to websites such as ours. For that reason, we’ve sustained to use the StumbleUpon social widget, although we might review the situation in the near future if usage continues to refuse.

Reddit

Reddit is successfully an online magazine consisting of web-sourced content voted for by its readers. It has a comparatively small (compared to Facebook) but very excited following, with its 69.9 million users reading 4.8 billion pages every month. However, from looking at the type of articles that are highly visible on Reddit, we felt that their relatively user base was unlikely to hold casino-related content, and that the inclusion of a Reddit button would only clutter the space above or below our articles.

Pinterest

According to Alexa rankings, Pinterest is the 42nd busiest site in the world, and like other fast-growing social media outlets, it is being gradually more used for business and marketing purposes. However, it seems to have a very specific audience, with 82% of users being female, and their primary benefit being hobbies and crafts, interior design, and fashion, which fits in well with the format of the site. For these reasons, we felt that users were unlikely to respond to or share our content via this service, so on balance we decided that a ‘Pin It’ button was not mainly appropriate to our content marketing needs.

Social Media in eCommerce Strategies

Approach 1 – create Strong & Professional Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn Profiles

First and foremost significant point for eCommerce websites is to have a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profile as these are the three biggest social networking websites that are one of the best and perfect for making customer relations. Through these pages, you can also grow your business and sell your products too.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are used by millions of people worldwide, so it is very important for e-stores to have their presence on these social networking sites from where they can increase more number of visitors and customers on their websites.

Approach 2 – Have Sharing Buttons on Perfect Places

Second most important point is to have social sharing buttons on ideal places. As we all know that all the eCommerce websites are providing sharing buttons on their website, and it is not a novel point to know. But the new point to know is to have those buttons on great and unique places so that your customers find it easy to share with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

Approach 3 – Go for Pinterest

Third important point is, go for Pinterest, which is one of the rapid rising social media websites. This website allows you to share your favorite pictures from diagonally the web with different people. By creating a Pinterest profile for your eCommerce website, you can connect with well-suited and new consumers who have much interest of enjoying pictures of special products.

You can easily share pictures of your best products on Pinterest and relate with new customers who may have interest of purchasing your products. But you need to make sure to be unique as other pictures so that it becomes easily possible for you to grab the notice of visitors.

Approach 4 – Add Product Videos
Fourth most important point to consider is addition product videos as videos are considered one of the best sales tackle that surely help you to sell your products. We all know that all the people love to see videos particularly of those products that they are buying, so it will be beneficial for you and your website to put product videos. On the web, you can find many popular eCommerce websites that provide product videos on their website, and these companies have seen big impact in sales after adding product videos.

Approach 5 – network with your customers

Fifth major point is, interact with your customers. Creating a Facebook and Twitter fan page is not sufficient for you as you need to interact with your customers and have to solve their queries regarding your products. By answering their all queries, you can build strong and long-lasting link with your customers, and it will hoard them to come back on your website and purchase your products.

Approach 6 – Offer Some reduction & Product Deals through Social Media Websites

Sixth major point to keep in mind is, offer your customers some amount of discount and product deals through social media websites. By present discount and offers, you can easily attract them on your website, but you need to make sure that you offer unique offers and deals that they won’t get somewhere else.

How to Effectively Make Your Site Social Media-Friendly

Having a website has become something of a requirement for businesses these days, due to the global example shift where more and more people are integrating online tricks with their lives. Besides this basic reason of going where the market goes, there are also great benefits to having an official site for your business.
Starting a website is much cheaper than building and maintaining a brick-and-mortar store. There is no need to look for a good site, pay the lease, take into account overhead expenses, etc.
You can reach a much wider audience not partial by time or any borders, making market expansion much easier and opening up more room for increase. You also get to showcase your products, as well as important information about your business to customers, establishing your integrity while making it suitable for your target audience.

Social Media as a medium

Of course, there are still some truths in promoting an “offline” business that apply to the online world. Merely having a website does not guarantee profitability. You need to be able to show your know-how and individuality in the industry, and you need to establish a good connection with your customers. The best way of pursuing these goals is through leveraging the power of social media.

Creating accounts for your business for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is good, but these are just channels to your main website. Social media is simply a way for people to attach to your website to consume your content and eventually make purchases. You just have to make sure that your website has good social media integration.

Here are five ways to perfectly incorporate both assets:

Killer Content

“Content is queen” is a phrase that will never get old because content is exactly what people are looking for online, particularly in social media. People are constantly sharing with their huge networks of family and friends all sorts of content that they deem attractive, whether it’s a news article, an opinion piece, a funny picture, or an inspiring video. Their connections, in turn, share it with their own networks, and so on. The number of people you can reach with killer content is astounding.

Therefore, you need to make content that will make the rounds within these social media channels through shares, retweets, pins, etc., and you need to be able to do it in a regular fashion. There is no sure way to achieve this, but the best way is to simply create great content.

Social Content

Social media platforms are built with connecting people in mind, but you can go after their template with your website by allowing for some level of interaction with your website’s visitors. This can be done through a blog with a comments section, a forum where they can discuss your products/services, or a customer review feature where you let people send in their critiques of your business’ offerings. You can even let visitors leave comments on your content using their Facebook accounts for fuller integration.

By giving your customers a way to state their opinions, you also give them a sense of belonging with your company. They will feel that you care about what your customers think, establishing a stronger relationship in the process.

Striking Titles and Images

some truly great content doesn’t reach its full potential, because of poor titles that don’t at once grab people’s consideration when browsing through their feeds. Other great content that tackles technical and/or multiple subjects are not being read, because of the lack of convincing pictures that break up the uniformity of text.

• For titles, you want something that addresses a concern while being directly to the point. It has to fix your target audience’s gaze when they’re quickly scanning on their Smartphones or computers.

• For images, you want something that explains your points in a clearer fashion while maintaining the tone of your content, and more importantly, your brand is known for. You can actually just focus on creating content that is purely image-based (e.g. infographics) to simplify complex concepts and highlight important facts.

Social Buttons

Due to the fast-paced nature of today’s Information Age, people now expect a good level of convenience when surfing the Web. They want to be able to share things they like through their various social media accounts without having to deal with the relative hassle of opening up new windows or tabs and copying and pasting URLs. Social buttons are the answer to that problem, making it much easier for people to show their interest in a piece of content to the rest of the world.

These social buttons can also work in your favor, because they usually show the number of people who have expressed positive sentiments about particular content. Once these numbers climb, it can be even easier for people to take notice, because they will think the content is value checking out, attributing it to the number of people who already did.

RSS Feeds

Rich Site Summary or RSS is nothing new, but it is a tool that has found even more use now that there is so much more content being produced and shared all through the Internet. Use it to syndicate relevant content you have on your main website to microsites targeting more concentrated niches. This way, you don’t have to be publishing the same content on multiple sites.

Conclusion

While an official website serves as a base for creating an online presence, social media allows for even wider coverage for your business, and gets you even closer to your aim audience. By integrating it with your website, you realize the full potential of doing business online.

Only 37% of Marketers believe Their Facebook Advertising is successful [Study]

Social Media Examiner has released the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry statement. Of all the questions they posed to marketers this year, the thing that stands out the most is not how many businesses are using social media, but how many aren't actually tracking how effective their social media marketing actually is.

Of those who participated in the survey, 97 percent said they were using social media for their businesses and 86 percent considered it to be an significant part of their marketing efforts.

Moving onto Facebook specially, it isn't surprising that 92 percent were using Facebook as part of their social media efforts and that 49 percent considered Facebook to be their most essential social media platform.

But what is surprising is the actuality that only 37 percent of marketers think their Facebook advertising is successful. That is a pretty astonishing number. Is this a metric that shows Facebook marketing isn't efficient, or is it really to do with the fact marketers aren't properly tracking those Facebook efforts into ROI?

The report also reveals that larger businesses were much more likely to agree that Facebook was effective, but this might also be from a number of factors, such as higher brand awareness overall and targeted traffic from their company brand site to their Facebook page. For smaller businesses and lesser-known brands, Facebook marketing might definitely seem to have a lesser impact without a well-known and familiar brand behind it.

Another interesting factor is the relationship among the amount of experience using social media and the amount of time spent marketers spend on their social media efforts. Fifty percent of those with less than 12 months experience with social media are spending 5 or fewer hours on social media, while for those who have been doing social media for at least two years, 70 percent of those are spending 6 or more hours on their social media efforts each week.