This is a guest post from Ryan Critchett from RMC Tech.

Editor’s note: I usually don’t do this but in this case I thought it was important to point out that, the intention behind this type of content is to showcase real entrepreneurs and their stories of successful use of social media marketing, rather than presenting the usual suspects nobody can relate to, like Redbull or Starbucks. These are real examples you can put into action. The story is told by Ryan and, if you have something similar going on, share it with me. Here goes…

It’s no secret, video blogging is a great tool that anyone can benefit from by adding it to their arsenal of business marketing weapons.

Some take advantage of it, some don’t know its power exists and some, don’t understand the force impact you can make by showing people the “face and feeling” of the company.

I’m in the former category. I started video blogging on a blog some of you may remember called Imarketinghacked. Long gone and taken down, Imark (as it was called in the street) was a blog mainly about the awesomeness of new marketing and social media. That’s where it all started for me.

Video Blogging Has This Much Power?

I was blown away. Months after launching the blog, I had actually (contrary to collective expectation) built a pretty solid readership.

Was my content awesome? Well, I think so! But it wasn’t the quality or practicality that brought in such quality readers, it was the fact that they saw my face, felt my feelings and were bonded to me emotionally that got that blog traffic.

That was well before I decided to start a full blown business. I was just dabbling around, learning the landscape, testing things out. But, as it turns out, it was not only the perfect primer, but the most powerful social marketing training I ever could have gotten.

Taking It Into Business, iPhone Style

My company, RMC Tech, is a technical service company that goes where the market needs us. Right now, we’re needed in, and are attacking the iPhone screen repair market.

We replace screens on broken iPhones nationwide, and locally here in Pennsylvania. But, with just the technical skill to replace a screen, could I really make any money?

Could my business get traction, press, awareness and leads just because I’m a hardware geek? I think not! And I certainly didn’t for the first month I offered the service.

I knew, I had to do something big, something contagious, something that spread. The video blogging begun.

I started thinking about how I could use the power of storytelling to reach the local market in the Lehigh Valley, expanding out to the rest of the US. The answer? The iGraveyard.

iPhones break, and when they do, we normally keep the parts. With the parts, comes a story. The story of how the phone met its demise.

Here’s a clip of one of our latest:

My friends started telling me they were drawn in by the iGraveyard videos, that each new one that came out, they were excited to watch and it’s at that point that I knew I was onto something.

Tweeting the videos out to people in my local market, it started to spread the awareness for me. Even if the video gets retweeted 5 times, 5 more people see it, the idea that I repair iPhones gets pressed into their brains, and I’ve effectively just indirectly marketed to them.

But wait, there’s more. It isn’t just the Ryan Critchett theory, I’m getting leads from this. People are not just calling for the service, they now ask me if I’m going to showcase their iPhone on the iGraveyard videos.

I’m now getting a steady flow of leads saying things like “I stumbled across one of your iGraveyard videos on Youtube, and I have a broken iPhone..” not just locally but also from states like like Massuchusetts, New York, and Texas. The main sources for this lead generation, as I ask each one of my customers, are YouTube, Google and Twitter.

I’ve also been able to get some interesting press coverage, land meetings with executives from worldwide brands about technical services within the enterprise, and attract a nationwide franchise technical service company. We’re now in negotiations to do some major partnership stuff.

The videos helped my company get the exposure we were not able to get by building backlinks to our website or attending local networking events. The formula is simple, I use video as a digital emotion vehicle to reach people in a more personal format, through storytelling and showing my face to spread something entertaining and get a message across, which is much more effective than interrupting people.

We’re moving into a new age. In fact, it’s arrived. We’re here. Internet technology and the social web makes it possible to reach customers, and generate leads, in a whole new way. Video blogging transfers emotion. It gives you the ability to show the company’s personality. The human being behind it.

How are you approaching your target?

Let’s take the bull by the horns. Find creative ways to built trust through video with your target market. Reach your potential customers before your competitors do.

Take advantage of the fact that this makes huge budgets in advertising obsolete, because you’re getting to the consumer first by being with them in the trenches and entertaining them.

Crank out some awesome videos, not just about the service you provide but about something entertaining around that service, without trying to sell all the time. People want to do business with people, they want an emotional connection and there is an enormous opportunity to build real trust points through video marketing.

Your R.O.I. is more likely to show up.

Photo Credit: Rego – d4u.hu

This is a guestpost by Jim Belosic, CEO and co-founder of ShortStack.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on news regarding Facebook then you haven’t missed the multitude of articles discussing whether the change to Timeline has been a good or bad thing for business pages and fan engagement.

Numerous studies have been released saying that pages are seeing an increase in fan engagement since the switch and right behind those are studies revealing the exact opposite. So which is true? The answer is neither.

The truth is, it’s always been a Timeline era. The switch to Timeline has not changed any of the rules on Facebook. Was it easier to market prior to Timeline? Yes. But just because it was easier doesn’t mean it was being done properly. Businesses with a strong social media strategy that has proven to work will continue to see success with Timeline. The businesses that are blaming Timeline for negative changes in engagement are going to be disappointed to learn the problem is probably with their social media strategy, not with Facebook.

Marketing in the Timeline era is about getting back to basics. With all the hype surrounding Timeline, here’s some tips that businesses may have forgotten to truly be successful on Facebook.

Focus on Your Existing Fan Base

Don’t exclude your existing fans. Businesses were obsessed with default landing tabs and many were convinced the world was going to end when Facebook took them away. In fact, Francisco just wrote an article on how custom tabs aren’t dead but more alive than ever. He accurately addresses how custom tabs weren’t as successful as everyone had previously thought; and how custom tabs are now more successful than they’re being credited for.

Facebook has never been about getting in the face of a million strangers, it’s about getting your message out to your fans — your fans who already love you and want to share how cool you are with their friends. Facebook is organic and referral-based by nature — something businesses need to keep in mind when building a successful Facebook presence.

If you’re unsure how to engage your fans, run some test content. Try posting an update with a video or a photo, show trends, pick an interesting fact about your history and post something new each week, offer an awesome deal or a prize for entering a contest. Use Facebook analytics to see what your fans are responding best to and use your existing fans to bring you new fans. Facebook analytics are free to all business page owners. In addition, if you use a third party application to create custom tabs on Facebook, most platforms include their own analytics that track engagement.

Measuring fans does not measure success

We touched on this lightly before, but it’s worth mentioning again. We hear clients say everyday, “I want to create a tab that gets me more fans.” Any social media guru, marketer, or expert will tell you, it’s not about getting more fans, and it never has been.

If you have 5,000 fans and you hold a contest and your fan base increases to 10,000 fans, that’s great for your likes, but did your actions increase? In the long run, gaining 5,000 new fans won’t mean anything for your business if none of those fans are engaging with your brand.

Use Timeline for its advantages

Yep, you heard right, Timeline has advantages. We’re not just talking about the ability to pin and highlight posts, we’re talking about the transparency that the Timeline layout offers. For the first time since traditional websites, Facebook now allows a business to tell their story, from day one.  There is room for a huge amount of content on the page. Without default landing tabs, everyone who visits your page learns about your history and sees how you engage with your fans.

It’s now more important than ever to make sure your Facebook content is clean and up to date. You need to be answering questions, thanking your happy customers, and dealing with your unsatisfied customers. Someone interested in your business can see all of this upon visiting your page, so their first impression of your business is in your hands. This means that Timeline can be either beneficial or detrimental to a business’s Facebook page.

Facebook takes time

“Social networking is a full time job” has become a cliche in our line of work, but the adage is true. A successful Facebook presence takes lots of effort and tremendous amount of time and thought. It also takes more than just Facebook to make your page successful. Once you’ve built an amazing page you have to give fans a reason to talk about your brand, so advertise it by posting on your wall, promoting it through email newsletters, even purchasing Facebook ads.

A successful Facebook page does not happen overnight. Timeline has pulled the veil back on what consumers are really interested in. It’s proven that likes aren’t everything, and for some businesses, has revealed the truth about their social media strategy. The key is not to be scared of Facebook, or throw blame at Timeline. Just get back to the basics. It’s the simplest steps that are the most successful, and often times, the most overlooked.

Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North.

Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.

Comments and ideas welcome! We are all learning together here.

Ranked Results versus Display in SERPs

The first thing we’ve been trying to do is distinguish between rankings and display visibility on Google SERPs.

• Ranking optimization is the traditional way of thinking about SEO. We apply a set of activities to specific URLs and domains in ways that leverage Google’s search algorithm and improve the ranking position of particular pages of web content.
• Display optimization applies to making content visible in new/other sections of Google SERPs – personalized search, time subsections, and search subsections such as “Blogs” and “Discussions.”

Google is now giving much greater emphasis to personalized results, at the expense of traditional results. Social content, such as Google+ postings and blog posts, appear prominently in SERPs. As time goes on, it’s likely that Google will give equal weight to content in SERPs that is both subjective (i.e., content that is favored by people in your social networks) and objective (i.e., content that is indexed and ranked according to Google’s traditional algorithm).

So, as personalized results gain emphasis, display optimization becomes more important. Here is an image that shows the complexity of Google SERPs, and how traditional search results are being deemphasized:

In light of all this, here are three strategic points worth thinking about from a social and SEO perspective.

1. Social shares – Tweets, Likes, Google +1’s, etc. – carry weight in Google’s ranking algorithm, but as yet it’s hard to establish more than a ballpark impact.
2. In contrast, social media content and shares have a clear and significant impact on display visibility. Original Google+ and/or blog content is indexed and displayed in regular, personalized, time-sensitive and social subsections of a SERP. Content endorsed with shares by your social connections is visible. (Original Twitter content has been devalued lately, but I think in the long term it is likely to gain prominence.)
3. User behavior and preferences are critical element in devising SEO strategy. The importance of display visibility depends largely on whether a user is logged into Google, and the extent to which a user has an active social media network. If your target market is not logged in and/or has few active relationships, traditional search results are all that will matter to them.

10 Social SEO Action Steps

In terms of focusing on social media activities that have SEO impact, here are things most worth doing.

1. Add Google+ buttons to your blog and most sharable web pages. Make social sharing as easy as possible across all popular/relevant social platforms.
2. Create a Google+ company page and share your content on it.
3. Write keyword optimized, original content on Google+.
4. Shares and original content on Google+ matter more if your company page is circled by many users. It therefore may be helpful to make a strong effort to build your Google+ community.
5. Encourage people to +1 your content.
6. For Facebook and Twitter, having an active social media presence is useful IF social sharing is generating links to your content. Links, not shares, are the more important social media metric from an SEO perspective.
7. Content that is unlikely to be shared on social media, such as a company’s About page, should be optimized in the traditional way. Pushing social shares is not worth the effort.
8. Content that is likely to be shared, such as a blog post, should, conversely, be promoted heavily through social media activities.
9. If your target market isn’t active or interested in social media, focus less on content sharing through social media and more on traditional link acquisition activities. If your target market is active in social, balance the two.
10. Measuring traditional rankings is pretty straightforward: what we need are ways to measure display visibility. Any tips for how to do this?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North, a Chicago-based SEO company that works with B2B firms in a variety of specialized niches, from merchant credit card processing for gas stations to orthodontic web design.

Photo credit: Go Local Search

Guest post by Sookie Shuen from Zoober Inbound.

Something big has happened to social media.

In case you hadn’t noticed, social media is big – and getting bigger all the time. What was once the domain of just a small number of people is now everyday currency in and outside of business. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc are now familiar channels for many of us. Now 23% of all the time we are online takes place on social networks and blogs. Internet users are now spending more time on Facebook than on any other web brand combined (Source: Nielsen).

Business is quickly catching on to the potential, with recent research showing that a third of companies in the UK now put up to 20% of their marketing budget into business social networking (Source: Regus).

Why many businesses still aren’t getting it

Social media’s growing profile can make it look like a relatively simple way to generate leads. Social media was the leading emerging channel for lead generation in 2010 (Source: Hubspot Marketing) and many companies already see it as the next step in attracting more customers. But the reality is a great deal less simple. Here are just a few reasons why:

• More noise: As the business take up of social media increases, so does the marketing ‘noise’ – making it even more of a challenge to stand out.

• Missing links: Many businesses have the drive, but lack the strategy. They see where they want to get to in terms of income or leads, but they’re missing the crucial links to make social media work truly effectively for them.

• Minus the strategy: The returns of social media can be tempting. After all, the proportion of UK companies successfully winning new customers through social networking activity rose from 33% in 2010 – to 41% in 2011 (Source: Regus). But many businesses are still engaging in social media activity without a long-term strategy, often creating initial interest, but failing to convert it into sales.

What does it take to turn social media into business leads?

Most companies have a drive to make the most of social media.  The 2011 IBM Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study showed that 82% of CMOs plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years – yet just 26% per cent are tracking blogs today. This suggests how detached the drive is from the approach. So what do companies need to do to turn social media activity into real business leads?

1. Go the distance (and take a road map)

Using social media as an answer to winning more business is one thing. Actively generating leads from your specific social networking activity is another. Avoid the temptation to act for the short-term. Take some time to develop a clear strategy for your social media activity that relates to your overall business goals, your sales strategy and your company’s value proposition. Ensure that you carefully adapt this long-term plan so that it fits with each individual channel, whether it is Twitter or LinkedIn. Think long-term about what it is you want to achieve and who it is you want to reach, rather than moving in too quickly.

2. Do your homework first

Get your homework done first, before you rush straight in to social media activity. Success with social media is all about doing your research. You can use inbound marketing technology to undertake keyword research that gives you an up-to-the-minute viewpoint on what your target market is looking for – and where. Don’t do anything without applying this detailed insight to help shape your lead-creating success.

3. Create content around your dream connections

Who are your dream social media connections? Driving leads successfully with social media depends on great content which is directly relevant to your target audience – whether it is 140 characters or 1400 words. Create and distribute content with a clear and consistent focus on attracting the interest of your ideal potential leads. But make sure you back up all your content up using resources such as inbound marketing technology to research what interests your audience. Then you can create content that answers the most important questions your contacts have.

4. Make the connection

Generating leads for the long-term starts with a joined up approach. This means carefully aligning your social media activity with your other marketing activities – and your wider business strategy. Carefully plan a structure to your whole marketing process to take your new connections from initial interest to consideration, by attracting them to useful and relevant content on your website. This will allow you to engage with them on a deeper level and encourage them to provide vital data that you can utilise in your sales approach.

5. Start and end with your sales team

Make your sales team a staple part of your social media lead generating strategy. Your overall plan is all about turning your social media connections into leads and then into customers – and your sales team is an essential part of this. Use inbound marketing technology to give your sales team more up to date insight about who to contact. Once your social media contacts have been drawn to your website to download your content, your sales team can take over and make the most of the hot leads. They’ll have more information and a better focus, allowing them to maximise your social media presence.

Where is social media taking you right now?

Social media is no longer an optional extra for business. By 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users (Source: Gartner, Inc). There is no doubt that social media offers a huge array of opportunities for companies to connect with and convert new prospects. But there are still too many companies missing out because they fail to approach social media strategically. Avoid the temptation to take action without a plan and get the right research, resources and sales response in place and you could look forward to generating leads from social media.

Here’s a free PDF version of this downloadable eGuide on How to Generate Leads from Social Media. Click here to download it now.

Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, a leading UK inbound marketing consultancy. She provides free advice and updates based on her experience of helping businesses evolve through her Zoober Inbound Marketing Blog.

Photo credit: EJP Photo

One of the first thing I quickly realized when I started my first business was this: I do NOT want to chase business.

I’m not that old by the way, that was 12 years ago. The landscape was completely different even though it wasn’t that long ago. I think I shared this with you before, I got started by doing some small print ads on local magazines and ended up producing my own TV spots and running them on national networks. I had to learn everything from writing to casting, producing and even doing my own media buys and running all kinds of reports.

I did all that just to avoid chasing business. The end result was about 600 incoming daily calls.

I did learn how to generate a lead through Inbound Marketing. But there was something I figured out besides making the phone ring 600 times in a day. The quality of the lead generated through inbound is much much higher than outbound, where you are pretty much trying to convince a person about something they did not ask for.

The concept of Inbound Marketing remains the same, only today, we have the social web providing a leveled field and a potential for exposure that was never put on the table before for small businesses. See, just now I was shamelessly bragging about how I was able to generate that volume of calls, what I didn’t mention is the investment that took. Let’s just say that when I think about it today I feel sick.

Let’s not make a mistake here, while it offers incredible opportunities, marketing in the social web is not free. Having a presence online is one thing but turning actual leads and sales is something else. I have no statistics about this but my feeling is that more and more small businesses have been actually getting to that point in the last 2 or 3 years.

This infographic shows a few interesting facts about how small business is adopting inbound marketing strategies more aggressively than brands. I specially like the breakdown of where marketing budgets are being allocated, small businesses are clearly investing more on social media, SEO, blogs and email than on paid search, direct mail and telemarketing. Also, notice how the closing rate (leads to sales) is clearly higher on inbound initiatives like SEO and direct traffic.

Over to you

What is your online inbound strategy? What kind of results are you getting from this strategy compared to outbound initiatives? How are you measuring the results of your blogging, SEO or social media efforts?

I’d love to hear from you. Enjoy the infographic!

This infographic is courtesy of gplus.

Some of you have experienced customer service from brands via social media. Of course with different outcomes. And some of you have never taken advantage of this medium to get product issues solved.

Sure, I’ve had my share too. When I was stuck in a Delta flight waiting to departure for 45 minutes and tweeted my frustration (just being an inpatient jerk, really), they got back to me almost immediately. Some time ago when my site was hacked, I contacted Network Solutions customer service department over the phone and they said it would take about 48 hours to get my site back up, I turned to Shashi Bellamkonda on Twitter and had my site back up in less than 2 hours.

Of course you can also run into issues with companies like Time Warner Cable that will completely ignore you no matter how nasty your tweets are.

Social media has proven to be a great vehicle to ensure customer satisfaction over the last few years. Companies that identify this are able to turn issues, something that’s considered negative, into positive outcomes right in front of the public eye.

But what is the current state of customer service in social media? The Social Media Customer Service Report by TNS answers this question in this nice infographic by Our Social Times.

What’s clear in this infographic, is how even tough we’re slowly starting to turn more to social media vehicles to address our issues with companies, the traditional platforms are still very important and, despite the clear advantages for these companies to establish this type of connection with consumers, 60% don’t even care about responding to these direct messages.

When people in this survey were asked what companies should do to improve their customer service experience, 53% responded that companies should address possible issues by posting video demonstrations and tutorials online and only 11% said companies should offer an immediate response on services like Twitter. It’s kind of surprising to me that 68% said they wanted companies to have a prominent contact number on their website, specially when we all know what a hassle a call to a customer service department can be.

A few weeks ago I talked about Social Commerce and the fact that, even tough we are used to making purchases online, these purchases are not happening on social platforms like Facebook as fast as we thought. We also know how, even tough brands are able to acquire spectacular numbers of fans, true engagement is very low.

Today we’re looking at something similar in customer service. Is the user only looking at social media as a social networking vehicle? Or is it that brands are not being successful in adopting these technologies to establish new communication channels?

One more thing I’d like to see, and I’m frankly surprised is not reflected in the infographic, is how platforms like GetSatisfaction are performing in the customer service segment.

How about Small Business? How about you?

I’d love to hear from you on a couple of subjects here:

• From the consumer perspective, have you considered approaching a brand with the purpose of solving an issue via social media? What was your experience? Do you prefer to get on a phone call?
• And as an entrepreneur, do you use social media channels to solve your customers issues? What is your experience?

Thank you. And, here is your infographic.

Infographic courtesy of Our Social Times

According to the Content Marketing Institute, Content is one of the fastest growing segments in Marketing and an increasing number of marketers are relying more and more on their strategies to achieve success online.

Is this a surprise to you? Because if it is, you have probably been living under a rock for the last couple of years.

With the amount of content that goes left and right in front of you, on your screen, there are content creators, curators, users that share and consume on a minute to minute basis. Now, that doesn’t mean all that content is successful in reaching its goals or has even been put out there with a business goal.

In my case here at SocialMouths for example, I basically rely a good 90% on pure content marketing. Basically, I connect with people that arrive to my blog because they followed a tweet or a share with an interesting headline, liked what they found, some of them became regulars and some of them I even end up having a relationship that in time turned into a client agreement.

You can understand that I am interested in everything regarding Content. Today, the cool team at BlueGlass Interactive sent me their new Infographic called “The Content Marketing Explosion”. It includes lots of data and I recommend you bookmark it and take some time to chew on it. I will leave you alone now so you can enjoy it, before that I’ll just point to these two facts I want you to remember:

• 90% of marketers are doing some form of Content Marketing, even if they don’t know it (Have you been doing some content marketing without realizing it?)
• 60% of B2B marketers plan on increasing their efforts this year
• 26% of budgets are allocated to content (obviously is much higher in small business)

Have fun going through it and express your thoughts about how your doing or planning your content marketing.

Infographic courtesy of BlueGlass Interactive.

This is a guest post by Garrett Ira, a digital marketing strategist who blogs at garrettira.com.

Over the last few years, just about everyone has given their two cents on how to “do social media” the right way. You know what I’m talking about: connect with your audience, add value, it’s about relationships, and all the other advice we hear over and over.

Something has happened that few are ready to admit: companies have gotten much better at social in 2011. Yes, there are still plenty of companies doing it terribly, but if you compare the present day to two years ago, there’s a huge difference.

Now that (some of us) have our heads on straight, the question transitions from “how do we do this the right way?” to “how do we do this differently than everyone else?”.

Here’s the problem: if you’re constantly asking the same questions, distributing content at the same times, refusing to take risks and fitting in with the crowd, you’re going to lose. Here are six simple ways to get the ball rolling in a fresh new direction.

1. Post in the evenings and on weekends

How many businesses post content around 11:00PM? Probably about zero, and that presents an opportunity for you. The vast majority of businesses post content during the work day, between 9:00AM and 5:00PM. Do you think your audience uses social media at 5:00AM, 7:30PM, or 10:54PM? Yes, they do – but no one posts at that time.

The benefit here is obvious: start posting when others don’t and your content is more likely to be seen – you have less competition. But there’s another opportunity here: posting at times that you haven’t ever before opens you up to new people. Maybe there’s a hidden portion of your audience that doesn’t use social media due to restrictions at work. Post at unusual times to reach them.

2. Mix up your post tactics

Even if diverse content is included, the average Facebook page is full of posts that look, feel, and smell the same. Each post has 4 lines of copy asking you to visit the link below. Each post has two paragraphs expressing their opinions on a certain subject. Each post uses lots of exclamation points begging you to donate!!

If you keep each post looking and feeling the same, you’re eventually going to put people to sleep. Now is the time to do something different, to say something differently, to get their attention.

Post pictures that REALLY stand out in the news feed. Use bright colors, close-ups of human faces, and images that stir up emotion. Start using ultra-short copy instead of the usual 4 lines. Ask people to fill in the blank or describe a photo in just 1 word. The idea here is to always bring something a little different that they can see quickly and interact without much thought. Remember, you aren’t just competing against other businesses – you’re competing against people and their favorite pets, games, teachers, friends, parents, and everything else in their lives.

3. Stop self-editing

People always say “be yourself” and “be transparent” in social media, but very few people walk the walk when it comes down to it. Are you a little snarky in person? Maybe a bit sarcastic? Don’t be afraid to let it show a little.

While crossing the line is definitely possible, many people and brands have experienced great success by being themselves – even if they might get an earful in the comments.

Gary Vaynerchuk and Donald Trump (love him or hate him) are great examples:

4. Go Where Your Competitors AREN’T

This is a bit of a follow-up to #1. Instead of going head-to-head, why not tap into a new area where your competitors aren’t?

The automatic assumption for most businesses is that they need to get involved in the big 4: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, & blogs. While this is probably true, there are often hidden opportunities and niche communities online that can be absolute gold mines, even compared to the big 4.

Do you own a jewelry store with a strong community of wealthy women? Have you thought about tapping into Pinterest, MySpace or forums? It’s a little outside the box and failure is certainly possible, but be willing to fail in the name of innovation. If none of your competitors are there, your customers are, and the platform fits your brand, why not give it a shot with a small investment?

Just kidding about MySpace by the way.

5. Narrow Your Content Focus

Social media can support a number of different business functions. Too often, we try to focus on all of them and end up with mediocre results in every area.

Snickers is a great example of doing it differently. You might expect their Facebook page to be full of contests, promotions, branded partnerships, and other initiatives to achieve every objective they possibly can.

Instead, their page is filled with clever one-liners and snarky statements that fit their brand and support other initiatives in a subtle way. In simple terms, their page is interesting and gets their community of nearly 3,000,000 fans talking.

6. Craft content specifically to be shared

Getting people to talk about you to their friends is what social media is all about. Content should be designed specifically for people to share, re-post, and re-tweet. Make your tweets fewer than 120 characters so they can easily be re-tweeted. Create a get-well graphic and ask your fans to share it with a friend who is ill. Include call-to-actions in your very best content to increase shares.

On Facebook, there’s even more reason to provide shareable content: Facebook’s Edgerank (the algorithm that determines what people see in the news feed) prioritizes shares higher than anything else, including comments, likes, or clicks. If a post is shared by lots of people, it has the potential to extend your reach exponentially.

Here’s the bottom line: don’t embrace the status quo. Take risks. Take note of what your competitors are doing – and run the opposite way.

What do YOU do in social media that most others don’t?

Photo Credit: Scott Ableman

Garrett Ira is all about the most effective strategies and tactics in the social media world. He is a Community Manager at Bonfire Social Media and frequently discusses all things social on his blog.

We can discuss how successful companies are using social media but it will be better to hear it from them, specially when it comes to small business.

I’m always concerned about small business because there is a huge difference in what it takes to be successful. When brands run online campaigns they’re usually backed up by a juicy number of ad impressions or other kind of support. Just a few days ago a friend asked me how we were able to get 100k Likes on a Facebook page so fast, I responded “they have a huge TV campaign”. His face filled with disappointment…

Point is, small business goes out there to fight with a stick. Guerrilla style. Most small businesses have pretty depressing stories when it comes to finding any success online. They don’t have the budget, the resources or the knowledge.

There are 2 infographics in this post.

The first one has some basic information on how small business sees social media. It doesn’t surprise me that 83% responded that they use social media because it’s free or inexpensive, which it’s absolutely not true. What surprises me in a good way is that their usage is increasing over the last 6 months and that they are starting to take their brands seriously by monitoring, looking at sentiment and facing all kinds of mentions.

Infographic by Constant Contact

The second one I think is looking at a more realistic state. Here are some interesting points:

• 88% believe social media will impact their business
• but 67% will not increase their budgets
• I expected this to be high but this number is impressive: 96% do not use any social media management
• and of course having a structure in terms of organization is kind of obvious that is pretty much non existent

Let’s look at it…

Infographic courtesy of: Social Strategy 1

How about you?

What is the state of YOUR business when it comes to social media? Can you share what’s your experience?

Should you start spending time on StumbleUpon now that reports claim it represents more than 50% of the social media traffic and has passed Facebook to the #1 spot?

Not really. Let’s take a second to understand if StumbleUpon can really send you more traffic, what kind of traffic and I’ll also give you 3 quick tips to help you increase traffic to your site.

What, you thought StumbleUpon was dead?

StumbleUpon is very much alive. In March 2011 Mashable reported 15 million users and new signups of around 500k per month. Those are huge numbers, how many services do you know that get half a million signups per month?

Also in March this year, while All Things Digital announced that SU was raising $17M they said that the discovery service was making 800 million content recommendations per month.

This week, both Mashable and Read Write Web announced that the service now represents 50%+ of the social media traffic.

The following chart shows how StumbleUpon have already passed Facebook as a social media traffic generator in the US.

But not globally although it shows a clear decreased for Facebook and a healthy increased for SU, as it’s shown in the next one.

But Not All Traffic Is Created Equally

What does this mean for your blog or site? We know quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality, specially on the web. Let me share with you what I see on my Google Analytics for SocialMouths.

• StumbleUpon has always been at least in the top 10 traffic sources for this blog but, in July 2011 it was actually the #3 position and has the #1 spot in referral sites. Facebook was the #5 traffic source and #2 referral site
• It represented 4.85% of the total visits last month against a 2.92% from Facebook
• 94.12% of the traffic are new visits while new visits from Facebook are only 36.27%
• And it has an extremely low average time per site of .29 seconds compared to a 1:09 from Facebook

But Wait!

What Should You Do?

Actually Use The Tool

Over To You

What is your experience with StumbleUpon? If you’re a blogger, do you see action coming from the service? Or share your own ideas on how you handle it.

If you want to connect, here is my StumbleUpon profile.

Happy Stumbling!