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Research carried out by an automotive digital marketing firm has suggested that businesses aren’t harnessing the full potential offered by social media sites, according to an article published by Car Dealer Magazine.
Razsor’s survey found that while car dealers were active in their use of Facebook and Twitter for social media marketing campaigns, they were overlooking other sites, such as YouTube and LinkedIn.
Group director of digital marketing at Trader Media Group, Craig Stevens, commented on the findings of the survey.
He said: “There’s widespread agreement that in an increasingly competitive market, customer services is a key differentiator that can offer dealers the opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
“The last few years has seen significant growth in online activity, both for dealers and customers, but many dealers are still missing out on the opportunity to further engage with online customers. Social can be much more than just a Facebook page. With the right engagement dealers can receive in-depth reviews, feedback on their website and extend marketing campaigns beyond traditional channels,” he added.
Stevens concluded by adding: “The real value of social media doesn’t necessarily come from employing someone to “do social,” but from wider training, understanding and adoption of social media as a communications channel. With a few simple tools, a dealership can offer its customers a new level of customer service, engaging with them whenever they are online.”
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Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, has become the latest big name to experience what happens when a social media marketing campaign on Twitter goes awry, according to an article published by ZDNet.
Having launched the BeBold campaign at the beginning of year, RIM asked users to tweet their resolutions for the New Year – using the hashtag #BeBold.
The campaign got a good response until RIM unveiled four cartoon characters designed to reflect the main themes featured in the resolutions – Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.
Tweeters lined-up to express their criticism of the characters, with one Tweeter writing: “The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully.”
RIM has responded with a post published on the BlackBerry blog.
It read: “We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to be bold in 2012.
“More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organise the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign,” the statement added.
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Unsurprisingly, a recent study has found that Facebook remains the most popular platform amongst advertisers and businesses looking to conduct social media marketing campaigns, according to an article published by ZDNet.
Conducted by Strata during the fourth quarter of 2011, the study displayed that 89 per cent of agencies said that they planned to utilise Facebook for their clients in the near future. Around 39 per cent responded by stating that they planned to use Twitter with 36 per cent opting for YouTube.
The majority (81 per cent) of agencies expect their approach to marketing to remain the same – representing an increase of 14 per cent compared to the same study carried out during the third quarter of 2011.
Commenting on the results of the study, Strata CEO and president, John Shelton, said: “The key word for advertisers in 2012 is growth.
“The STRATA Survey shows that many advertisers are confident that their business and the economy will return to a strong period by midyear. That sentiment, coupled with strong numbers from the political race provides an overall positive barometer for advertising in 2012.”
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Now that we’re into the second month of the new year, new PPC marketing campaigns are beginning to take shape. Writing for Search Engine Watch, Kevin Gibbons has created a number of tips that could ensure that your PPC campaigns stand out amongst the crowd.
Here are just a few of the aforementioned tips provided by Gibbons, in a summarised form:
- Know your product – Although it may sound completely obvious, it is vital to know your product and know it well; having a good level of knowledge on what you’re going to be trying to sell will make it much easier to do so in “just a handful of words.”
Unique selling points still have an important role to play in your campaign; Gibbons recommends that focus is placed on the most compelling points.
- Learn to Tweet – Learning to Tweet may seem a little off-topic, but in PPC campaigns you’re going to be working with a limited amount of characters. Gibbons explains: “Learning to appreciate the restrictions imposed by short-form text will help you to understand what can – and what can’t – be said in a PPC ad.
- Be timely – Many adverts on TV relate to a time-sensitive discount – a new formulation, a buy-one-get-one-free offer or competition.
It is possible to impose an element of time sensitivity to your PPC campaign; as Gibbons states: “By imposing some kind of time limit on the ad, you put in your potential customer’s mind the feeling that they have to buy now.”
However you need to be more subtle than simply saying, for example, “you have won a smartphone – claim it in the next 60 seconds” – as most pop-up ads do.
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Some of the United Kingdom’s biggest brands are taking part in a beta trial group for Twitter’s new brand profile pages, according to an article published by New Media Age.
Unveiled in December, the pages offer businesses a greater amount of freedom to customise their page – allowing the chance to display a banner, customise greetings and a select a top tweet.
Chocolate manufacturer, Cadbury, Asda, Sky HD and EA Sports Fifa are currently the only UK brands to have access to an enhanced page on the micro-blogging site – popular with social media marketing professionals.
UK sales director at Twitter, Bruce Daisley, stated: “Brands want to be able to customise what they are doing on Twitter and personalise their profile. When we first announced the new profile pages in December we had huge interest from UK brands.
“One of the key features is the opportunity to show off a tweet,” Daisley added. “It means that when people come to the page, brands have the opportunity to make sure their brand message is on top.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski has launched a new social media marketing initiative in the run up to the start of the new season, according to an article published by Fox Sports.
Keselowski – who drives for the Penske Racing team – is offering 5,000 of his Twitter followers the opportunity to have their names inscribed on the tray of his Dodge truck in time for the season opener at the Daytona International Speedway.
In order to enter the contest, users must follow the accounts of Cequent’s Reese Towpower (@ReeseTowpower), Cooper Standard (@CooperStandard) and Keselowski’s personal account (@Keselowski).
Each of the lucky winners will also receive an autographed photo of Keselowski with his Dodge truck. Ten more names are also to be drawn from the list of 5,000; these winners will get their names inscribed in a larger size.
Commenting on the contest, Keselowski, said: “During the off-season, I have been putting a lot of thought into how to further engage with the fans. Social media, and Twitter in particular is an important tool for NASCAR, for the drivers, and for the sponsors. This contest is designed to bring all three of these elements together in a way that can uniquely reward the fans.
“It will be cool to, in a way, carry all of the prize winners with me in the race,” he added.
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Many businesses, when conducting social media marketing campaigns spread across various social channels, use a Twitter client – which allows them to post once for all channels, rather than individually for each.
Neal Schaffer, writing for Business 2 Community, has, with the help of Cibo, highlighted the top 20 Twitter clients being used in 2012.
Unsurprisingly HootSuite is the most popular; web-based, HootSuite makes it possible for users to publish multiple posts on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – there are also plans to support Google+ in the pipeline.
Importantly HootSuite also offers data that can be used by businesses to improve their brand awareness, demographic data and follower growth.
Twitter ranked second and is still considered to be a simple way to tweet your message if your business is operating just one account; however, if you operate more than one account, Schaffer recommends using something else.
Tweetdeck, which was purchased by Twitter, rounds out the top three and is still considered a good option, particularly with mobile devices – such as those operating Android, as well as iPhones and iPads.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
Currently only enjoyed by a select few – rumoured to be those spending $2 million – the sight of Twitter brand pages is set to become a much more common occurrence, according to an email intercepted by Ad Age and referenced in an article published by Search Engine Watch
Those businesses spending in excess of $25,000 on advertising on the micro-blogging site will gain access to the enhanced profiles from tomorrow (February 1) according to the email.
Advertisers can currently bid for Promoted Tweets, Accounts and Trends (which Twitter’s director of revenue, Adam Bain, revealed were going for around $120,000 per day last summer) which can then be used in social media marketing campaigns.
Bain previously said of brand pages: “A tweet’s only 140 characters. When consumers want to learn more, spend more time, or get deeper in terms of engagement, we think they’ll end up on a brand page.”
Global giants such as Pepsi, Nike, Disney and Coca-Cola are amongst the 21 companies that currently have a Twitter brand page.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
In 2012, the majority of big companies operate, or have at least dabbled with, social media marketing campaigns on a regular basis; despite this many still struggle to get a ROI (return on investment), according to Kritsta Neher, writing for ClickZ.
As a relatively new marketing platform, mistakes are, and will continue, to be made on social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and now, Google+.
Neher has created a list of common errors made by businesses when conducting social media marketing campaigns; here are just a few of them:
Too much focus on fans/friends/followers – By and large people determine the success of their social media marketing campaigns based on how many fans/friends/followers they’ve gained – this shouldn’t be the case.
A recent study, conducted by PageLever, revealed that just 3 to 7.5 per cent of fans of a business’ Facebook page see the posts produced. Instead of obsessing over fans/friends/followers, look to produce the highest quality content you can – this will get more people reading what you produce and improve your ROI.
Not knowing how to respond to questions posed by fans – People who take notice of your social media presence do so for a reason – they expect your business to communicate and provide regular updates. Be prepared to answer the questions and queries posed by those who take the time to follow or like you.
A non-response won’t do your reputation any good. To prepare Neher recommends: “Make a list of the top ten questions you’re asked on the phone. Also make a list of the top ten PR crises that you have had in the past five years. Be prepared to handle these on social networks.”
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