Social Media Tips in Small Business Today. Are you using social media in your business? Those two little words have taken on a greater significance then ever before in recent years. How are you using social media in your small business? You know you’re doing it. There’s a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account and a business blog. But, wait! There’s more. Getting Established What are you doing about Google+? How should I be using social media marketing? Facebook updates help users share better with others. Tools & Trends Daniel Gross’s Greplin is one smart search engine. Online marketing will account for 70% of small business marketing budgets by 2015. 18 reasons to use social media. Social Media Marketing Top myths about social media for business #2: “Don’t need it–we have SEO.” How to promote: an event thru Twitter. Social media for search. Another marketing channel? The ROI of Social Media: 10 Case Studies - TNW Social Media. The question of whether or not social media drives ROI still plagues many marketers and brands.
The issue is not always as straightforward as it seems, as there are multiple ways to measure the benefits of social media and it isn’t as simple as looking for a direct sales return at one end, with the social media imput at the other. Smart tracking and measuring is needed to fully capture the benefit of a social media campaign and while looking for direct ROI is one way to do it, there are other values to be measure from social media marketing. I’ve put together a list of case studies that prove the ROI of social media, both through direct monetary return, customer loyalty, repeat traffic and more. Viewing social media holistically to gain a better understanding of how it can work for you is more beneficial to any brand than looking for one single return.
Social media outperforms banner ads Social media saved Cisco $100,000 Old Spice put their money where their mouth is ROI from Facebook ads. 47 Percent of SMBs Still Not Using Social Media. Oy. Hiscox, a small business insurance company, recently published a survey of 304 small business leaders to find out more about their social media use. Somewhat shockingly (at least to me), only 12 percent of respondents described social media promotion as a “must” for their businesses, with 47 percent of SMBs admitting that they still don’t use social media at all for business purposes.
However, they are still hooked on word of mouth marketing, with 50 percent of SMBs saying they couldn’t live without it. Hmm, I guess social media, that place where people sign on to talk about your business, doesn’t count as “word of mouth marketing.” For those who do use social media, 19 percent say Facebook is their platform of choice, 15 percent prefer LinkedIn and just 4 percent are hooked on Twitter. Buy why aren’t more business owners hopping on the social media bandwagon?
That sound you just heard? And that really is the most important component – making time. But that does take a time investment. Research Report: Be Prepared by Climbing the Social Business Hierarchy of Needs « Altimeter Group : Research Based Advisory for Disruptive Technologies. By Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst, Customer Strategy What’s a crises? We did analysis on the list of social media crises aka “punkings” to find out what went wrong, why, and what should have been done.
First, a workable definition: A social media crisis is a crisis issue that arises in or is amplified by social media, and results in negative mainstream media coverage, a change in business process, or financial loss. To refine further, while crises may happen on a daily basis we wanted to focus on crises that had the actual outcomes: We categorized each crisis according to three severity levels: Level 1 is for crises that result in negative coverage in mainstream media; Level 2 is for crises that result in negative coverage in mainstream media, and a significant response or change by the company; and Level 3 is for crises that result in short-term financial impact.
Above: Social Media Crises (as defined above) are on the Rise. Speed Summary: Adobe Whitepaper on The Business Value of the Facebook Like. Adobe has just published a short whitepaper on the business value of Facebook Likes, including a practical hands-on guide for leveraging the ubiquitous button (download). It’ll be motherhood and apple pie for many, and is a soft-sell for the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, but it contains one of the best articulations of what social commerce ‘does’ we seen – social commerce transforms purchase funnels into viral loops. Sweet. The paper can be downloaded here, but heres the speed summary: The Like button drives word of mouth and referral traffic from Facebook, and when optimised can generate significant, measurable returns. Over 40% of Levi’s traffic from all sources came from Facebook after the company added the Like button to its website. A four step process will help businesses optimise business returns from the Like button;
Dreamforce 2011: Collaboration Hardwired into Context. Almost two and a half years ago in March of 2009, I suggested the following: “Don’t confuse Enterprise 2.0 with social computing concepts”. Ignoring the dated terminology for a second, my premise was that social in the enterprise doesn’t mean throwing all sorts of features at the end user in an attempt to get them to emulate some combination of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia for the enterprise. Rather, its the decisive use of social and collaborative concepts to get work done. If there is one single take away from Dreamforce, its that enterprises are systemically closer to this reality than ever before. Dreamforce conveyed that Salesforce.com has been immersed in twelve months of integration and investment rationalization. But in the spirit of contextual collaboration, the implications of some of the ISV announcements at Dreamforce are just huge and amount to this: Here’s a taste: From my vantage point, Salesforce.com will still need to keep an eye on the following: To summarize….
Tags: Research Summary: Introducing The 43 Use Cases For Social Business (Social Enterprise) Edelman Digital's Michael Brito talks about Social Business. SAP Social Intelligence.