Saturday, January 31, 2015
Heat and Solar Energy
INFOGRAPHIC: Facebook vs. Twitter in Super Bowl XLIX
A recent survey by Fluent of 5,083 American consumers who have interacted with the company’s mobile ad network show that more people expect to follow along with the Super Bowl on Facebook (44.3 percent) than Twitter (18 percent).
Other findings:
5 Reasons Why Your CEO Should be Tweeting
Does your business tweet? Great! But what about your business leaders?
If you’ve ever spoken to your leadership about using Twitter – or if you are that leadership – you’ve probably encountered any number of protestations and roadblocks. Twitter is a time-sink. It’s frivolous. There are too many complaining customers and not enough advocates. It can’t be measured, so it doesn’t matter to the bottom line.
But the benefits of CEOs and other executives using Twitter can far outweigh the downsides, if done properly. Twitter can connect businesses to their customers on a more personal level than any other digital tool – and it is that personal connection that builds trust and loyalty.
1. Meet the press
Speaking one-on-one to the press can be a great way to network and make product or partnership announcements. And if your CEO is on Twitter, this process becomes a lot easier.
Many journalists use their own Twitter accounts to source stories and conduct research. They are always on the lookout for a good scoop. By connecting to the journalists covering your industry, your CEO will be able to form positive relationships with them. He or she can compliment them on a recent article, point them to industry news, and even offer to conduct an interview as an expert.
2. Plug in to what matters
With even 10 minutes every morning, your company’s leadership can quickly scan the latest news and thought pieces in your industry. They can search out who’s vocal about various topics, what news pieces seem to be garnering attention, and what their customers are interested in. Of course, great marketing teams in larger companies are likely already intensively using Twitter to conduct research, but by setting up their own accounts, CEOs can take a quick peek into the real-time conversations surrounding topics they’re interested in.
3. Perform crisis management
CEOs like AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes have led the way in terms of social media crisis management.
Your CEO can address issues during key crisis moments in an effort to inform and connect with the public. Of course, any crisis management needs to be done with tact and an understanding of the medium – you don’t want your CEO “angry tweeting” against a dissatisfied customer! But by tweeting transparently during a crisis, your leadership can show that they are unafraid to face challenges head on, and may even stop a crisis before it gets out of hand.
4. Become a thought leader
By tweeting his or her thoughts about your industry, company news and other related topics, your CEO can quickly shoot up the influence ranks to become a thought leader.
Many CEOs have distinguished themselves as not only business leaders, but influential members of a community willing to share knowledge and grow ideas. They are looked up to by their customers, partners, and even competitors. By using Twitter as the medium through which to share their thoughts, CEOs can show that they understand, and can respond to, industry news in real time.
5. Raise your brand’s profile
Last but not least, your CEO’s Twitter presence will do wonders for raising your brand’s profile, both on an offline. The more he or she interacts with other leaders and your business’ customers, the more visible your entire company will become. By tweeting regularly, a CEO can effectively “speed up” the process of building brand recognition and loyalty.
(Businessman on tablet image via Shutterstock)
10 ways Facebook has ruined your life
Facebook has ruined your life. You might think it's this awesome, free resource to keep you connected to your friends and family, but it's slowly breaking you
We have a very important list of 10 ways the social networking site has crept up on you, killed your confidence and joy, and stolen small pleasures.
Take a look through our reasons below. Did we skip a way in which Facebook has changed your life for the worse? Share it in the comments.
1. No one sends you birthday cards anymore.
Image: Facebook
How many actual, physical birthday cards did you get on your last special day? Even those aging relatives you used to rely on to hit you up with a Hallmark card every year — they're now on Facebook, too Read more...
More about Facebook, Social Media, Features, and HumorDiversity in tech takes center stage at 'Superwomen Summit'
For all its cutting edge innovation and talk of egalitarianism, Silicon Valley remains an industry rife with issues.
Just ask Cathryn Posey, a senior manager at software management maker Electric Cloud. On Thursday, Posey held the first annual Tech Superwomen Summit in San Francisco, California, a conference highlighting issues faced by women in STEM (science, mathematics, engineering and math)
She cites a Harvard Business Review study last May reporting that 56% of all women in STEM leave their jobs mid-career for something entirely different. One likely culprit: issues caused by a lack of gender diversity in their workplace. Read more...
More about Yahoo, Diversity, Marissa Mayer, Startups, and Social MediaSocial Media Jobs: Avion Tequila, Architizer
This week, Avion Tequila is hiring a social media manager, while Architizer needs a social media coordinator. Wellesley College is seeking a social media director, and Newsday Media is looking for a social media moderator. Get the scoop on these openings below, and find additional social media jobs on Mediabistro.
- Social Media Manager Avion Tequila (New York, NY)
- Social Media Coordinator Architizer (New York, NY)
- Social Media Director Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA)
- Social Media Moderator Newsday Media (Melville, NY)
- Social Media Strategist Market America (Miami Beach, FL)
Find more great social media jobs on our job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented SocialTimes pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.
Friday, January 30, 2015
6 Productivity Hacks For Content Marketers #socialtoolkit
How Well Do You Know Marketing Data? Take Our Quiz
Marketers have long known the importance of good data management and data cleansing. Yet we all know that, in practice, few have mastered the skills necessary to truly understand and successfully manipulate marketing data.
According to recent Econsultancy research, managing customer data - the crux of any customer engagement strategy - is particularly challenging. Some 35% of the senior level executives surveyed said they work within a “siloed organisation lacking coherent approach to marketing”. Only 8% said the technology their company uses to deliver an integrated customer experience is a “single integrated platform”.
We’ve created a fun quiz highlighting some of the more random buzzwords correlated with marketing data right now. Test your knowledge and find out how savvy you are when it comes to data lingo. Don’t worry if you don’t feel confident with your answers, there’s a marketing lesson in it for all of us. Once you’ve uncovered your score and taken some good advice as to how you can improve your marketing data knowledge, share your results and test your fellow marketers too!
For more strategies on how to leverage the data in your marketing arsenal, download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.
8 Vines that illustrate dream gadgets we'd love to have
Last week, we asked you to dream up your ideal gadget, whether it was as fantastical as an invisibility device, or as practical as an x-ray vision smartphone.
To bring you this challenge, Mashable partnered with Kingsman: The Secret Service, an upcoming action film by 20th Century Fox
Scrolling through the hashtag #DreamGadget, we were pleased to see submissions that encompassed both live-action and stop-motion techniques. Here are a few of our favorites:
1. X-Ray vision
2. Pixel hand
3. I could use a good charge
4. It's getting easy to catch the bad guy
More about Tech, Vine, Social Media, Apps Software, and GadgetsThe Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting
Must-Have Community Management Resources and Tools
A community manager is expected to be a jack-of-all-trades. You must be knowledgeable about the brand and its product or service, as well as all the people that make up the community. You need to know how…
The post Must-Have Community Management Resources and Tools appeared first on Sprout Social.
The Perfect Execution of Conversion Rate Optimization
How Gail Goodman Optimized Constant Contact’s Funnel To Build the $1 Billion Email Marketing Empire
Twitter is Still Bigger Than Instagram, Says Study
Last December Instagram reached 300 million monthly active users (MAUs) on the platform, making it bigger than Twitter, which had just 284 million MAUs.
A few days later, however, Instagram deleted millions of spam accounts from its system, which we theorised meant that it was now smaller than Twitter.
Turns out we were right.
GlobalWebIndex polled internet users aged 16 to 64 worldwide and found that Twitter beat Instagram for both active users and account ownership.
When rated by active use, Twitter finished third overall in the survey, behind Facebook and YouTube.
Instagram was fifth, behind Google+. Ouch.
(Source: GlobalWebIndex.)
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Highlights of Facebook’s 4Q 2014 Earnings Call
While a great deal of time was devoted to advertising during Facebook’s fourth-quarter and full-year-2014 earnings call Wednesday, several other topics were addressed, as well.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the following statistics related to usage of Facebook and its applications during his opening remarks:
One interesting sign of our continued growth in engagement is through our progress on visual and public content. More than 2 billion photos are now shared daily on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Video also grew significantly this year, with an average of more than 3 billion video views daily on Facebook. And there are now more than 2 billion interactions every week on Facebook between public figures and their fans.
Instagram is also growing and helping people share and consume the most engaging content in different communities across the world. Instagram reached 300 million monthly actives, with more than 70 percent outside of the U.S. Average time spent using the app continues to be very strong compared to other mobile services. Across Facebook and Instagram, we’ve done a very good job on engagement, especially when it comes to helping people find and consume content they like.
Next, let’s talk about our efforts over the next five years to build the next generation of Facebook services. We expect WhatsApp and Messenger to connect hundreds of millions of more people and become indispensable services for the world, as well as important contributors to our business. Messenger and WhatsApp recently achieved impressive new milestone. In November, Messenger reached 500 million monthly actives, and at the beginning of January, WhatsApp reached 700 million monthly actives, with more than 30 billion messages sent each day. These numbers speaks the quality of both products and the size of the opportunity ahead to help billions of people communicate and collaborate.
Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg chimed in on video:
In just one year, the number of video posts per person on Facebook increased 75 percent globally and 94 percent in the U.S. Today, over 50 percent of people in the U.S. who come to Facebook daily watch at least one video per day, and globally, over 65 percent of Facebook video views occur on mobile.
The most entertaining exchange of Wednesday’s call resulted in Zuckerberg saying he wants investors in Facebook to share the mission of the company. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Carlos Karjner asked:
Mark, I think in every earnings call, you talk to investors for a considerable amount of time about Facebook mission to connect the world, and specifically about Internet.org, which suggests that you think this is important for investors. Can you clarify why you think this matters to investors and why you think Facebook can make a significant difference of scale?
Zuckerberg replied:
Well, it matters to the kind of investors that we want to have, because we’re a really mission-focused company, and we wake up every day and make decisions because we want to help connect the world, and that’s what we’re doing here. So part of that the subtext of your question is that yes, if we were only focused on making money, we might put all of our energy on just increasing ads to people in the U.S. and the other most developed countries. But that’s not the only thing that we care about here.
So I do think that over the long term, focusing on helping to connect everyone will be a good business opportunity for us, as well. And we may not be able to tell you exactly in how many years that’s going to happen, but I think that as these countries get more connected, the economics growth, the ad markets growth and Facebook and the other services in our community or the No. 1 and Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5 services that people are using, then over time, we will be compensated for some of the value that we have provided. But this is why we are here: We are here because our mission is to connect the world, and I just think it’s really important than investors know that.
Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia brought up the potential monetization of WhatsApp with this question:
Just quickly on WhatsApp, I know the focus will be user growth for a while, but in the future, as you do turn on the monetization engine, just curious: What are some of the primary ways that you’re assuming growth will come — from advertising, or games perhaps? And also on WhatsApp user growth, would you be able to call out where that’s coming from? Are there any particular areas that are stronger, and I’m curious how that’s doing in the U.S.?
Zuckerberg responded:
So you’re right that the focus for WhatsApp is on helping to connect a lot more people, all right. So when (WhatsApp co-founder and CEO and Facebook board member Jan Koum) and his team joined us, one of the first things that we agreed on, and why I think it made sense for them to join, is that now, they can focus for a few years on getting to 1 billion and continuing to scale beyond that. SMS is an incredibly global and universal product, and I think WhatsApp just has a huge opportunity to serve billions of people. In terms of what the business looks like, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a distribution business, like Facebook and Instagram — how do you most effectively convert that into business opportunities for customers, whether that’s through payments or ads or other different kinds of structures.
We’ll figure out what the optimal thing will be, but the first order of things to do is to help our billions of people here, help to continue to increase engagement. I mean, people are spending a lot of time in WhatsApp, sending more than 30 billion messages per day, which is really crazy when you think about the volume there compared to the global SMS volume overall. And I think if we do that, there will be a number of opportunities.
People asked me this question a while ago, when we talked about games on Facebook, as well. And I always talked about our canvas business on desktop, even though its payment is actually the same thing as our business on mobile around app install and engagement. What developers test for is distribution, and whether they’re doing that through payments or ads or whatever it is, it kind of is all the same. The most important thing is to help people connect, help people and businesses connect and create business opportunities, and then you get a small amount of the value that you’re creating on top. So that will play out over the next set of years, and it’s one of the intellectual challenges that I am really looking forward to tackle.
UBS analyst Eric Sheridan asked on the subject of search:
It’s early days, but what is the company seeing in terms of the way people are interacting with the new search functionality inside Facebook broadly? And then maybe tying it back to advertising, what might that mean for closing the loop with some of your small and midsized business advertisers?
Zuckerberg replied:
So, our view on this is that there is a lot of unique content that people have shared on Facebook, a lot of personal content, recommendations from friends that you can get that you just wouldn’t be able to get through a traditional Web search service or other app. And we’re on this multiyear voyage to basically index all of the content and make it available to people and rank it well. We started off by launching Graph Search, which I think included more than 1 trillion different connections in the first system.
And the second round of the search progress that we just started rolling out at the end of last year was post search, which now has indexed more than I think 1 trillion posts, which, I mean, the sizes of these corpuses are bigger than anything in a traditional Web search corpus that you would find. So it’s an interesting and fun challenge to make this work. We’re seeing that that people immediately understand how they can use this and find content that they have seen in News Feed before or that they’ve posted with just a few keywords.
And we’re excited about that, but there is a lot more to do. So we’re not really thinking about advertising in it yet on the scale that our community operates — 1 billion searches per day is actually not that big compared to what we think the opportunity here should be. And we’re just continued to keep on working on it because there is just a lot of unique value that people should be able to get from their friends on Facebook search.
Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Sandler addressed video with the following question:
How important is it that Facebook posts the videos versus I guess sharing clips from third-party players in the feed, and what percent of those 3 billion streams daily is Facebook-embedded versus from other players? Ae you able to monetize videos from third-party players today? Is there is a way to work around that in the future?
Zuckerberg answered:
This thought that we shared 3 billion per day is all made on Facebook. So there are probably other shares from other video services, as well. The reason that I think made video is so valuable for people using our service is that when someone uploads a video to Facebook directly, we can optimize how it delivers right. So we can make it auto-play. We can find the right quality and bit rate to send down to the person based on their connection over time, and optimize all kinds of different things. So what I think people are finding from public figures to everyday videos that people are uploading is that the best experience that you can get is by uploading content native to Facebook, which is, I think, the big part of the growth that we seeing there.
Readers: What were your impressions of Facebook’s fourth-quarter and full-year-2014 earnings report?
Image of fourth-quarter red pencil courtesy of Shutterstock.
Using Your Social Audience as a Focus Group
Often, social media is the domain of our marketing or customer service departments (or both). But while social is an essential tool for these purposes, the data and insights gleaned from social networking can have a big…
The post Using Your Social Audience as a Focus Group appeared first on Sprout Social.
7 Conversion Marketing Terms as Explained by Urban Dictionary
Top Social Media Career Moves of 2014
4 Promotion Strategies Used by the Best Business Bloggers
Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Michael Gerard, CMO of Curata. He is responsible for Curata's marketing strategy and all related activities. Michael has more than 25 years of marketing and sales experience, having successfully launched and sustained three start-up ventures, as well as driving innovative customer creation strategies for large technology organizations (IDC, Kenan Systems, Prospero (mZinga) and Millipore).
Curata's Business Blogging Survey of 428 marketers revealed what it takes to develop and sustain a highly successful blog. Key findings of the study demonstrate that blogs have most certainly not disappeared. Instead, business blogs have morphed into a mature part of enterprises’ content marketing and publishing ecosystem. For example:
●80% of marketers use blogs as part of their content marketing strategies.
●70% of business bloggers have had their blogs for more than two years.
●44% of business bloggers have more than two blogs.
There is an exclusive group of business bloggers, which we’ll call “The 10K Club”, who receive more than 10,000 page views per month. This groups represents 21.8% of all business bloggers in the study. These bloggers certainly create great content, but they are also experts at thinking “out of the box” when it comes to developing innovative promotion strategies.
Here are 4 promotion secretes of the "10K Business Bloggers Club:"
1. Reuse- Repurposing content is a fantastic way to better promote your blog content, and create new resources at a lower cost versus creating new content. The Content Marketing PyramidTM provides a useful framework for creating and repurposing content.
The top of the pyramid contains heavy content, typically gated. (e.g., eBook) As you move down the pyramid, content is lighter and more easily absorbed and “digestible” for your audience. The base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is curated content, which is relatively low effort and lends itself to high frequencies.
Although this framework is commonly used to create smaller pieces of content from large surveys or thought leadership pieces; the best content marketers have learned that content can also flow upwards in the pyramid from items such as blog posts. Several of our 10K Club members have already discovered this; for example, one survey respondent said:
“We are preparing to package our best blogs into subject matter-specific eZines, which we will post on our website and promote”
2. Sales Enablement. Sales enablement, as defined by IDC, is:“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.“
Why should content marketers and bloggers care about sales enablement? Because it is a fantastic opportunity to increase content marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Bloggers, in general, are under-utilizing the potential impact of their own content on sales enablement; however, not 10K Club members. The 10K Club are taking full advantage of this opportunity; for example, 10K bloggers:
•Are equipping sales reps with content they can forward to their prospects. The best sales folks understand the importance of maintaining frequent communication with their prospects; and these sales reps would like nothing more than a link to a valuable blog post published by their own organization that they can send to a prospect. The best bloggers understand this, and frequently email content to their reps to share with prospects.
•Repurposing the best posts as sales enablement assets. Great content marketers and bloggers are always thinking up new and innovative ways to deliver valuable content to their audience. 10K Club bloggers often repackage their own blog posts into content/assets that can be used by their sales team. For example, the Curata blogging team developed an in-depth post on Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. This post was transformed into a tool for use by the Curata sales team. Posting these types of content assets into sales enablement tools such as SAVO also represent a best practice.
3. Influencer Marketing. Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individuals) rather than the target market as a whole. The following examples provide insight into how bloggers can use influencer marketing to promote their content and company:
- Buzzsumo: How to Assess Content Marketing Performance
- Not only did Buzzsumo use curation in this post, but they also cited a number of key content marketing influencers throughout the post. (i.e., Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter and Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing)
- Curata: Content Marketing Predictions: 6 Big Themes for 2015.
- By creating an infographic made of all expert predictions for 2015, we were able to target this specific group of influencers. This also helped promote the piece because these influencers, who have very large followings, are likely to share the post.
4. Advocate Enablement. Top bloggers know how to turn their most passionate customers into a community of advocates who will amplify their messaging. This is achieved through:
●Providing exceptionally valuable content.
●Ensuring that customers grasp an idea within 30 seconds.
●Using the customer's own information where possible to further engage them in the content, thereby providing more motivation for them to promote the blog.
●Providing customers the opportunity to easily share content with their own social community.
Some examples include:
- Enabling sharing directly from a blog site.
- Using advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or influitive to identify and mobilize your audience.
- For additional examples, check out Neal Schaffer’s post on “11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote your Content” for additional insight on advocate enablement.
To learn more about the strategies and tactics of the best business bloggers, check out the survey results in Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.
A Marketing Process That Built Two 7-Figure Companies in Three Years
Facebook boasts nearly 1.4 billion monthly users in newly released data
Love it or loathe it, Facebook is as integral to our day-to-day lives as checking email or texting that special someone. And in case there was any doubt, the social network unleashed new data on Wednesday to prove it.
Nearly 1.4 billion people around the world use Facebook every month. Some 890 million people visit it daily and now view more than 3 billion videos a day. Unsurprisingly, much of the growth is happening on the mobile side. Almost half of Facebook's 1.89 billion mobile users now check the social network exclusively on their phones and tablets. In other words? While most people continue to use their desktop computers to share, like and comment, mobile-only use is quickly catching up Read more...
More about Facebook, Earnings, Social Media, Apps Software, and Mobile