We specialise in technologies that deliver effective and smarter ways of doing business. We focus on using social platforms and tools to improve marketing and internal communications.
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Socialnomics by Erik Qualman has had a refresh and some new material added in which is well worth watching. The original version has had over 2.8M views, the 2nd video over 1.6M and doubtless that this one will achieve a significant number
Idea: many people have in there own business/market or vertical amazing figures that are often not pulled together or are not even known. If you want to to create something interesting for your industry why not explore this type of infomercial video for your industry. I appreciate in many cases it might not work but in some I imagine if done well it would spark a lot of interest.
Some more resources for social media facts and figures:
The BtoB Guide to Social Media guide have put together a massive list of facts and they are continually updating this as well. They have categorized the list so fairly easy to explore figures for any blog or article you are writing.
Data can be pretty tough to get your head around especially if you like to see information more visually. However, infographics can take data and present it in visually stunning ways. It has become a captivating way of explaining often complex data in a brilliant and creative way. The daily infographic has some good and easy to view categories for you to search. Importantly infographics can be a key hook and provide traffic and buzz.
Supplement you blog or an article with a good infographic it will help illustrate your article and break up the text.
Facebook
So much news and focus in social media is around Facebook. The growth of Facebook has been phenomenal and it continues to dominate the social networks not only for the size of the user base but because they are still evolving and changing. Brands and businesses are switching budgets to focus more on developing their brand communities on Facebook and it is no wonder when you look at how many followers some brands have.
Some of the best figures come from the research and reports that are generated by the specialist consultancies. Many are more of a generalist research consultancy such as Forresterand Gartnerwho produce industry and market reports that many organisations buy. However, often the data or at least some of the graphs filter through and can be picked up for free. Hubspot produces some excellent reports and most are free to download in return for signing up to their subscription.
On the flip side consultancies likeEconsultancy through their blog release some great insights and reports. Other noteworthy consultancies are Borrell Associates and
Add to this blog
If you have any other resources or websites that you think are good and are worth adding to this list let us know and we will update it with your information and of course credit you with any links you provide.
I hope you all enjoyed my blog last week; I have to tell you I was incredibly nervous about putting it out there. Thank you to all those who fed back to me, your comments are invaluable.
From the feedback I have had, it seems that what my audience would appreciate most is simple and easy to use information that can have real impact on their business.
I think this is otherwise known as quick wins!
I remembered an article that I had recently read in a local magazine and it made me think about the number of different ways in which business’s use money off coupons, discount vouchers and deals to entice and reward their customers.
Facebook has recently introduced a similar scheme ‘Facebook Deals’ this is free to businesses in Europe and is really easy to set up. Unlike the other more familiar coupon sites like Groupon, they do not solely rely on groups and the deals can be individually tailored to suit your specific business and the customers you are trying to attract. Have a look at this clip on you tube to see how it works click on Facebook Deals.
So why use Facebook deals?
Facebook has over 650 million members and the average facebook user has over 130 friends, this makes it a great platform to run a reward based system. There is real flexibility with the deal offerings and there are no minimum offers and no minimum purchases required. Currently this is all free of charge and this makes it especially attractive to small business's who would be hard pushed to hand over between 20% and 50% of their commission should they use an organisation such as Groupon to facilitate their deal offerings. 'Google Offers' will also be promoteing a reward based system but without the membership base that facebook has aquired, and the minimum requirement of a 50% reduction I dont see that this is yet the market place for the small business. If you want to read more about the strategy behind this new facebook scheme have a look at this article in the guardian http://bit.ly/hDOrm7 . I have highlighted below some of the more tangible benefits to running Facebook Deals.
Hassle free word of mouth marketing
Builds loyalty and drives repeat business
Enables you to reach new customers
Gets people to reccomend your business to their friends
What are Facebook deals?
There are four different types of deal:
Individual Deals
Individual Deals will create lots of attention in a short space of time. A one off offer like 20% off your purchases for a limited time can be offered to both new and existing customers.
Friend Deals
Friend Deals is a great way to get people to either buy from your business or visit your venue as a group. Friend Deals allow you to offer discounts to groups of up to 8 people when they check in together. Since every deal claimed will be posted to the users’ profile, this is an excellent way to spread the word.
Loyalty Deals
This kind of deal is to reward your most loyal customers and may encourage your occasional customers to visit you or buy from you more often. This type of deal can be very flexible, it can simply be a reward that customers can claim after a certain number of check ins or purchases.
Charity Deals
This is a great deal if you or your business cares about poverty, the homeless, disease or abandonded puppies for example. If this is the case you could consider setting up a Facebook Charity Deal for your business. As an example of how this could work, you could promise to donate a certain sum to your chosen charity, every time a new customer checks-in at your venue.
Facebook Deals could really work for your business, if you take the right approach.
Register your 'Place' on facebook, use the clip above for guidance.
Until you have a 'place' your customers will not be able to 'check in' with you or search for rewards that may be available.
Who are your customers, what kind of rewards would they use and recommend.
Run a series of different deals and change them regularly to keep your content fresh and your customers interested.
Use other media to create awareness - window posters, newsletters, email... to raise awareness
Vary your deals to suit individuals, groups and loyal customers.
Make it fun!
I would love to know if you have found this helpful and if it has given you some fresh ideas, if you do set up a facebook place or deal please let me know about it. What do you think about Facebook Deals, a replacement for Groupon or not?
You can use this space for your brand to allow you users to quickly recognise you. This is the image that shows up when people search. It can be up to 180px by 540px, but if you do this then make sure your main logo fits right for search.
Once you’ve done that, you can turn your attention to the new photo strip. At the moment you can't control where each of the images (they need to be 97px * 68px) that are in that strip will go – they are randomly sorted by Facebook. They can’t be ordered like they can on personal profiles.
Top tip here is to use images with a similar design so they create a more uniform look. Alternatively you could use QR Codes or Tag to go here as well; offer your customers specials or exclusives - it is one of the biggest reasons people visit brand pages.
B - The Tabs
Each tab can now be linked to an icon which makes it visually easy to differentiate tabs. Our tip here is to keep it tidy - delete old tabs, keep a menu that is relevant and label them clearly. If a tab is not being used change the content, question if it is needed and if not remove it. We often see tabs like discussion with no posts, events with no events...keep it simple and up-to-date.
C - The Heart of the Page
This is the biggest part of the page and where you are looking to interact and engage your fans. Some key points:
Point out the like - don't forget to remind people to like you
Share - the share button invites people to share your page with their friends
A word of caution here, don't get absorbed in the tools - understand your customers, research their interests, passions and behaviours and you will then produce content that is relevant and engaging for them. Once you've decided on this the content production and delivery follows naturally.
Most brands now are using video on their pages to entertain / engage / interact with their clients. If you look at this link you will see that video is becoming interactive. The point is you can integrate virtually anything into Facebook now, graphics, copy and even e-commerce.
Use a video to:
make a personal commentary about your business or products
provide some interesting ideas that you are working on and ask people for their comments/feedback
provide testimonials of happy customers and why they use you
video interviews of why your people like working with your business
you can also use motion graphics or animation here to explain your products or services in an entertaining way
You can even get people to try your new products!
D - Make it Easy to Find your Brand on Other Social Sites
Coca Cola also highlight their other networks - something few brands remember to do. You don't have them exactly in this position but remember to make it easy to find and recognise the icons for the other social networks like Twitter. Often this is on the information page which people don't often look at.
E - Make The Page Worth Exploring
People are increasingly spending more time on social networking (nielsen) and Facebook is the dominate player. Providing a a set of rich experiences on your Facebook page means that people spend more time with your brand than your competitors, are more likely to stay on your page and more likely to share your content. Use the page to enable people to explore opportunities.
Don't forget to also offer specials/exclusives to fans. The top two reasons to follow a brand are for promotional benefits (84%) and because the fans already enjoy the product (89%). 83% of fans would like more exclusives from the Facebook page, whether via special offers or Facebook-only content.
F - Highlight and Link to other Products Brands or Partners
If you have other brands/products or services then you can like them as a page; these then show up in the space highlighted as F in the Coca Cola example above. If people like your brand then the chances are they might explore and like your associated pages.
A FEW MORE TIPS
Information page
Take a look at the Pepsi and Nokia information pages. Pepsi has been a bit lazy just duplicating links whereas Nokia have made a clear statement for their followers. Use this space wisely and fill it in to tell people about why they should follow you and how you want to build your relationship with them.
Frequency of Posting
Posting too frequently is the 2nd most cited reason for unfriending a fan page. Most experts recommend 2-3 times a day as a maximum. Here are some reasons as listed on Mashable and some further reading. To see some other great examples of how brands are using Facebook here is a list from Econsultancy.
Rules and Policies
Some brands ignore this and don't put up a clear statement of their policy for their walls. However, best practice is to post up a clear statement that allows people to understand what is acceptable and what is not.
Brand Engagement on Facebook
Here is Jeff Ragovin who gives a great talk on Facebook brand engagement - enjoy :-)
If you have any questions or are looking for advice you can post on our Facebook wall and we promise to get back to you with an answer - you never know by sharing it we may help other people with the same question.
Have you noticed that not all Facebook pages are equal; not just in the presentation of the brand, but the interactive media, the conversations on the page, the comments and likes. In getting a Facebook page to look good there are some basic points you need to consider.
We are going to take you through some key areas of a Facebook page and what to do to make it stand out from the crowd and how to make sure it works for your customers.
Why Facebook is important
Here are the number of fans/likes for celebrities and brands, so you can see the who's who on Facebook popularity - Top pages on Facebook and here are some further figures. Brands are due to increase their Facebook investments to $4Bn this year. According to a new white paper (pdf) from Webtrends:
Websites that do not engage in e-commerce are losing traffic to their Facebook pages at a startling rate
Websites with e-commerce activity seem to sustain traffic in spite of Facebook's influence, but are experiencing drops in unique visits compared to last year - signs of losing traffic in the future to Facebook
This proves a gradual shift in traffic from a brand's website to its Facebook page and hence the need for marketers to closely measure their Facebook activity
Facebook stores are very efficient at traffic acquisition acquiring visitors at no cost through wall posts and establishing a store monthly user base equal to 1-10% of the retailer's fan base
Facebook stores on average generate a 17% social engagement rate (merchandise "likes" and "shares" per visitor)
Facebook commerce conversion rates ranging from 2% to 4% are on par with Commerce websites.
Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2% to 4% and are on par with e-Commerce Web sites. (avg. 3.4%, according to Forrester/Shop.org).
If you haven't got a Facebook page now is the time to get one. A good start point is to plan how you want to engage with your target audience and here are a few tips on how you can do this.
Is video now less about advertising and more about sharing stories and experiences? Are brands now exploiting emotions or changing to more relevant experiences? Here are some examples from Coca Cola and Nike.
Entertainment and experiences will become a necessary part of marketing a brand, available where, when and how we want it e.g. mobile. But we are not yet there and still there are hurdles and barriers yet to cross.
John Winsor’s recently wrote a blog post in which he said:
"Sometimes you have to destroy something you love"
John's point is that the model and the business of marketing needs to change, must change. If the people within the industry embraced change the shift to being social and collaborative, it would be a catalyst for greater things. His agency, Victors and Spoils, is one of many (e.g. Blur) that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"
Brands now need to be in the experience industry, creating experience media that is innovative, inimitable and is sharable.
The future of video
As we have moved to a high speed world our love of video as a media both as creators and as consumers is astounding:
As of Feb. 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide that searched about 92 billion pages per month. It means that we spend around 2.9 billion hours (over 325,000 years) on YouTube in a month.
This is part of the reason for the predicted growth in online video advertising.
Engagement is equally a part of being of being relevant (a key point made by Brian Solis) as it is to do with quality content. The creative concept therefore has an equal part to play in making it relevant to the audience, interesting and hopefully shared.
One of the most effective media is video; why because we can convey so much using it...but it is the many new and interesting forms of video that now make this media simply amazing. This year we will start to see many of these new forms of video become more mainstream: animation, augmented video's and motion graphics.
As Facebook continues to change and evolve video will play an increasingly important role in how brands use Facebook; we will see more Facebook pages with video embedded on the landing pages. It is already easy to integrate it video into pages; imagine the powerful combination of video and Facebook stores (f-commerce).
But what makes a video engaging, here are some examples that we think work in these formats:
What do you think?
1. Animation
Animators vary both in style and methods but one thing they have in common is the ability to engage and entertain often putting over complex ideas in a simple way.
Here are two amazing examples:
a. Commoncraft label themselves quite rightly as being in the explanation business
Another great company is RSA - here is an example of their work
The costs have lowered for animation, driven in part by lower costs of software but also due to machines more able to cope with production.
2. Augmented Reality overlaid
As in our last blog the use of augmented reality in video will take off. The idea of augmented reality videos in Facebook takes it to a whole new level.
The best example is Youtique:
3. Motion graphics
Similar to animation but with real world video and graphics blended there are limitles possibilities in how this can be used. A partner of ours Fraser Davidson in his show reel demonstrates the superb possibilities in his showreel.
So How are you going to use video to engage your customers - for businesses now it is imagination that is the limiting factor not technology. How do you imagine your future business?
