Social media outranks TV as UK's favourite pastime Social media has overtaken television as the favourite hobby of 16-24 year-olds, according to a new UK study by Click Consult. This age group talks to friends more through social media than on the phone; and on average spends almost three hours a day using social media, regardless of where they are. And 65% of 16-24-year-olds say they prefer social networking to television. “The social media revolution is not new, but for it to now take over from the nation’s favourite pastime for the younger audience, truly indicates how quickly leisure habits are evolving in our digital age,” says Managing Director of Click Consult, Matt Bullas. The social media surfing tide is also rising in older age groups, with TV and social media enjoying an equal split amongst 25-34 year olds, and some 32% of 55+ year olds saying they look at social media before their television. By Rebecca Burns Freelance journalist and copywriter living in Bristol, specialising in web content production and user experience.
Brand Advocates Are Here to Help Brand advocates are consumers who support specific brands and use in-person and online conversations to share their opinions, recommendations and thoughts about a company’s products and services. And brand advocacy is becoming a critical part of the social media marketing mix. As social media gives average consumers a longer reach, brand advocates of all types and levels have emerged, including social media influencers, industry experts, brand employees, and consumers who use recommendations, blog posts and “likes” to gain discounts, deals and, in some cases, payments. For some of these consumers, being an advocate is a new activity, and one that will grow as they participate in more social sites. “Industry experts and big-time social media influencers may seem attractive to marketers. In January 2012, Zuberance polled that group and found that, in the US, 38% made a recommendation about once a month, and 12% said they did so several times a week.
Social Media Tools List: +100 Social Media Tools By Erik Qualman | May 22, 2012 Tired of social media experts answering Hootsuite and Radian6 when asked about social media tools? Well dailytekk.com does an incredible job of keeping a social media tools list. So we’ve taken their incredible list and have mashed it with a few favorites of our own. Percolate – Turns brands into curators. Shoutlet - Enterprise social marketing platform.Awareness, Inc. - Publish, manage, measure, engage. Radian6 - Social media monitoring and engagement, social CRM.Sprout Social - Social media management, Twitter tools, social CRM.Spredfast - Social CRM and enterprise marketing.Nimble - Social CRM simplified. HootSuite - Dashboard for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Klout - Measures social media influence. Keep an eye out for IBM’s Smarter Commerce team, they are doing some incredible things.
How to Promote Your Blog With Social Media Are you looking to use social media to promote your blog? Sharing your blog posts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even Tumblr can help your content gain significant exposure. But each social media platform is distinct with different benefits and abilities. Here’s a process you can use to ensure your posts get maximum mileage. #1: Tumblr I’ve been blogging since 1999 and have had my own hosted WordPress blogs since 2003. Fortunately one day I realized that many of my best prospects were using Tumblr and decided to include it into my social media marketing. Tumblr makes it really easy to share your blog post. The HTML code is all ready to use, so I copy it just before publishing the blog post. Here’s how to share with the “text” option. Just after you’ve published a post and while you still have the HTML of your blog post open, grab the code and pop over to Tumblr. Tumblr offers lots of ways to easily share information. Sharing a post as text is as easy as 1-2-3.
6 Social Networks for Education You Might Not Know About There’s no denying the popularity of social media and its effectiveness for connecting with educators and sharing ideas. We’ve seen teachers pin lesson plans to Pinterest, and tweet educational pictures and videos from their smartphones straight to colleagues and followers. But while mainstream options such as Pinterest and Twitter and even Facebook are obvious choices, we’re betting you’ve yet to try one of the following six social networking applications intended specifically for education. Interested in helping your students author secure blogs that let them practice writing and share their thoughts? There’s a site for that! How about a network that makes it easy to find lesson-ready videos, links and applications? Edmodo User Base: Teachers and students. Interesting Fact: Edmodo has more than 11,500,000 members. Notable Features: “Insights”: A dashboard that allows teachers to see classroom trends, performance and activities. TeachADE User Base: Educators. Diipo Twiducate Lore Classroom 2.0
10 Tips & Tricks For Your Business's Facebook Fan Page Facebook is one the fastest growing social media network and its users are increasing by thousands every day. Due to its vast base of users, it takes no effort to acknowledge its influence and any company will jump on the bandwagon to utilize Facebook because it allows them to boost their brands or products also in the same time engage with possible clients. It is convenient for a company to create a Facebook page, publish their profile and products however, setting up a Facebook page that receive many "likes" and a huge fan base is never an easy task. What is the first thing a visitor will see when they land on your Facebook page? I am sure some of you have stumble upon Facebook page that makes you wonder “How is that even possible?!” 1 – "Call-To-Action" Graphic More of a piece of advice than a trick. Example: RedBull’s "Red Bull" tab has nothing but a call-to-action on it. 2 – Embedding YouTube Video The code: Code explanation: Learn more about fb:swf 3 – Hiding content from non-fans
Brands using Social Media without engagement – Isn't that just traditional advertising? The social media landscape evolves on almost a daily basis, but two things it seems are certain: Content is the King, and user engagement is its’ Queen. What happens though, when the Queen is ignored? Is it possible for brands using social media without engagement to still succeed? The short answer is yes, of course it can. It is relatively simple to measure success of a traditional advertising campaign – you simply compare the amount of time and money invested in the campaign, against the increased number of sales. Social Media vs. Let’s take a minute to think about the main considerations when planning a media strategy. Now let’s briefly go through the process of designing an all-singing, all-dancing social media campaign that encourages engagement and actually adds value to your brand: Build a community that users are happy and proud to be a part of. Initially, we scoffed at them and stated that it wasn’t exactly a ‘social’ media campaign.
50 Free Social Media Tools You Can't Live Without A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is). A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis. Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up! Listening / Research The foundations for any social media marketing activity start with listening and in-depth research, ranging from influencer identification to campaign planning. General listening tools Best in class: SocialMention.com – As far as ‘free’ options go, this is a solid as it gets.Alternatives: BoardReader.com (discussion board specific), Addictomatic.com (a general listening dashboard) and PeopleBrowsr.com (big data, big insights). Specific listening tools General research tools Engagement
12 Most Pressing Reasons to Get Your Company Using Social Media “How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” ~ Seth Godin • If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest country. • Facebook has 750 million users. They spend 700 billion minutes per month. • Twitter has over 140 million active users that are sending 190 million average tweets per day. • Google+ has more than 25 million users. These people are your potential customers and you can reach them on social media, because that’s where they are spending their time! 1. People are talking about your business on social media weather or not you are present on social media. 2. You can easily share any information with your followers. 3. Get started now. 4. Someone else could register with a social media site and use your company’s name. 5. 6. Social media is the new way to provide customer service. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
for Websites As mentioned, the code above uses the common defaults for the options available when initializing the SDK. You can customize some of these options, if useful. Changing SDK Language In the basic setup snippet, the en_US version of the SDK is initialized, which means that all the dialogs and UI will be in US English. You can change this language by changing the js.src value in the snippet. <script> (function(d){ var js, id = 'facebook-jssdk'; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement('script'); js.id = id; js.async = true; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/es_LA/all.js"; d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(js); }(document)); </script> Disabling Login Status Check By setting status to true in the FB.init() call, the SDK will attempt to get info about the current user. Setting status to false can improve page load times, but you'll need to manually check for login status using FB.getLoginStatus. Disabling XFBML Parsing Triggering Code when the SDK loads Debugging
Use Multimedia to Tell Stories By Sally Falkow PR Newswire recently took a look at how press releases sent on the wire perform in terms of number of views. The stats are quite revealing: Need I say more? Adding multimedia to your press releases, articles and blog posts will give you a remarkable bump in views. And since that’s the goal of content, it’s truly amazing to me that only 55% of the PR folk recently polled by PRESSfeed about their online newsroom content, say they are using multimedia with news content. A study of corporate websites and newsrooms shows that not many companies use multimedia with their press releases. Every media outlet has a website today. The top reasons given for not using multimedia are: Don’t have the skillsDon’t have the timeDon’t have the budget Perhaps you should look at it another way – can you afford NOT to add multimedia to your news content? It’s not enough to just have visual assets with your content. “At the core of their campaign was content. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Real-time Facebook 'likes' displayed on Brazilian fashion retailer's clothes racks Fashion retailer C&A may be a fading brand in much of Europe, but its Brazilian arm is doing what it can to stay on the pulse of social media. A new initiative called Fashion Like allows people to 'like' certain items of clothing on the company's Facebook page, and these clicks are collated and displayed on the relevant clothes rack in real-time. Customers are thereby able to view the item's online popularity in the real world to help them make their decision. It's open to debate how valuable this will be to shoppers — we've seen the trivial nature of much that's posted to Facebook, not to mention the dubious fashion sense of certain denizens, and it probably wouldn't be hard to game the data.
The Twitter Book It's bad enough having to relearn favorite programs every time an upgrade comes along, worse learning to use totally new programs when you break down and buy them. But, now we're expected to learn how to use social networks, telephone and cloud-ware applications that come knocking at our Email doors and entice us from magazines and blogs. Change may be good if you can hack the rate of change in computer-related products. It probably provides financial stimulation for devils who produce these newest banes of our computing existence and may even help the publishing industry, which cranks out books galore covering all things new that complicate our lives. Following are a few good ones that caught my eye over the summer: This book was written by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein. First, you gotta get that syntax right...Twitter is the program a tweet is the message itself, or can be a verb, describing what you do when you send a Twitter message. This book is well written and fun to read.
www.jeffbullas.com/2010/07/16/how-to-write-a-mind-blowing-headline-for-twitter/ The latest Twitter statistics show that Twitters growth last year was over 1,300% with the latest numbers revealed by Twitter at their Chirp conference for developers in April showing Total number of users at 105 million (12 months ago that number was 8 million) Twitter received 180 million unique visitors a month to its website. Twitter is a great way to promote and market your content and the challenge with Twitter for business marketers is that you only have 140 characters to get your message across and your link clicked on. The most important element to make that happen is a great headline to make people click on that link. So in essence Twitter has brought back the art of the headline which has never gone away but Twitter has highlighted its importance. So what are the important elements in creating and writing a “great headline” and why is it so important? Why is a headline important? 1. Example: “The Secret To Getting More Money For Your Property!” 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 506inShare