How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] As technology adoption among small businesses increases, social media is an area that more business owners are becoming interested in. In fact, social media is predicted to see one of the biggest increases in online marketing spending this year, just behind website and e-mail marketing. Alexis Lamster, VP of customers at Postling and creator of the below infographic, told us that the company analyzed nearly 20,000 Postling users to extract information on how small business are using social media. Check out the data below and let us know in the comments how your small business is using social media comparatively. More Small Business Resources from Mashable: EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick.
Yesterday at its f8 developer conference, Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg gave what may be the first thorough walkthrough of the underpinnings of Facebook News Feed, the all-important page that users see when they first log on to the site. After giving an overview of the history of News Feed, which has evolved quite a bit since it launched in 2006, they offered some insight into the algorithms that allow News Feed to show you relevant content, collectively called EdgeRank. You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.
At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature. Facebook friends photo grid by Dan Taylor (CC BY on Flickr) Secrets to becoming a Facebook power user: Use the right touch, tools & tactics to build authority This is part 2 of our 4-part series on using Facebook strategically. • Part 1: Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work • Part 2: 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature (below) • Part 3: Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook • Part 4: 15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook Most people use Facebook for personal reasons: to maintain contacts, stay in touch with friends who live far away or to stay on top of one’s social life.
Only 15 percent of us use it to maintain professional or work contacts, according to a 2010 survey by ExactTarget. For professional networking, some people turn to social networks like LinkedIn or A Small World. As it routinely does, Facebook declined requests to comment for this article. Let’s play, shall we? Find the right vehicle for your professional voice Video.
The Facebook Like Button is not Viral : Momentus Media. Since Facebook released the Like Button in early 2010, the web has become plastered with buttons. The Like Button offers two promises: 1. Ability to message people who have Liked your page by posting to their newsfeeds. 2. Viral spread of your page by Likes posting into friends’ newsfeeds Since release, we have performed experiments to pull out numbers on how effectively the Like Button performs these two promises. Reengagement with the Like Button and Graph API We’ve found that a post to a Facebook Graph Object Wall has a click rate around 0.25-1%. Spreading content virally with the Like Button We set up an experiment here. From this test, we can determine that the Share Button is 23x more viral than the Like Button. The Share Button creates a large newsfeed post with an image and appears on the user’s wall and friends’ newsfeeds.
The Like Button creates a small non-graphical post that usually only appears on the user’s wall. Our Recommendation 1. 2. 3. Update: Why? Cateogories: Uncategorized. The Ecstasy and Agony of Facebook. Once upon a time in Killeen, Texas there was a young maiden named Erin Shephard who had a full-time photo-retouching job, and a hobby. Her hobby was that of an amateur photographer doing what she calls “pin-up” photography: vintage-style portraits that are recreations of classic 1940′s and 1950′s pin-up artwork. That’s what you call niched, right? And a hobby it remained until 18 months ago, when Erin decided to enter the magic kingdom of Facebook. She created a Facebook Page for Lone Star Pin-up , the name of her, up until then, hobby. Erin would frequently post her unique vintage-style portraits on the page. The Lone Star Pin-up page kept growing and growing and reached 5000 fans last September. What was once a hobby became a full-time business.
One day, just when everything seemed perfect, someone flagged 25 of Lone Star Pin-up’s photos. An Appeal to The Magic Genie Erin’s policy is that she never posts nudity on her website and Facebook page. Where Does it End? What Now? Facebook’s News Feed And “Attention Rationing” Last week, I attended the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin, Texas. Besides putting an unholy hurtin' on my wallet at Allens Boots, I walked away with a richer appreciation for Facebook, and what will surely be one of 2011's hot topics, News Feed Optimization (hey, let's give it an acronym for good measure: NFO.) Regular Facebook users are no doubt aware that Facebook's default news feed changed a while back, from a chronological, roughly real-time stream of your friends' activities, to something a little more "selective.
" Facebook's optimization algorithm, EdgeRank, essentially scores your interactions with your Facebook friends, and promotes items in your stream from people you favor with your attention, every time you read their profiles, click on their links, or comment on their updates. Close friends are assigned more weight than distant acquaintances, comments are weighted more heavily than the easily-given "likes," and newer tends to trump older. 1. Social Commerce And The New Rules For Local Businesses.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Craig Donato is the CEO of Oodle, a social maretplace that powers the Facebook Marketplace. Ecommerce today is imbued with the same DNA that runs through Google. It’s automated. It’s algorithmic. It’s certainly not human. And the marketing campaigns that are built with this DNA are similarly data-driven. They employ number-crunchers to capture their leads and build their databases, all the while looking for incremental ROI and arbitrage opportunities. But a new marketing game has come to town—social commerce. Succeeding with social commerce requires marketers to act human. Practice the art of conversation. It’s true that many other people in our industry besides me talk about “social commerce.”
Social commerce will have its biggest impact with a different set of businesses—businesses that are naturally “relationship businesses,” and these are easy to spot. If you’re looking for a new house cleaner, which would matter most to you: 5 Ways Facebook’s Discussions App Will Make You a Better Blogger.