Tag Archives: social media advertising

The Future of Social Media

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There is no doubt that social media utilization has become the most popular and highly adopted form of emerging media within today’s marketing strategies. Every company that has a presence online has been frantically trying to increase their company’s exposure by following outrageous numbers of users of Twitter, bombarding fan pages on Facebook, and are seeking the newest markets within other social media networks.

According to eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, the future of social media and its benefits are not only ever-changing but will play an entirely different role for companies who utilize them.

“Advertising—which some might say has already failed as a business model for social media companies—will not be the primary revenue driver,” said Ms. Williamson.

The better business model, other than utilizing social media, will lie in the mastery of analytics tools to track their conversion rates of visitors coming to websites. The use for social media in the future will not be for advertising specifically but rather for a plethora of other reasons including:

• Should be integrated within all marketing efforts

• Should be available for consumers to find out more information about your company, products, or services

And more importantly should be used for:

• Brand Monitoring
Social media will soon be the best way for companies to track and begin to understand the “why” of consumer chatter about them and their products/service as well as the “who”, “what”, and “when” of their customer base.

This statement was offered by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist, Ustrategy.com, in response to brand monitoring:
“Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people’s attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.”

In essence, social media and its use for companies will be ever-changing. However, the future use of social media will lie in helping companies get information about their consumers and hearing what they have to say about specific products or services to help them improve customer relationships.

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

The Importance of Your Brand Reputation within Social Media

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Many companies fear that online consumers will post negative or hurtful comments about them and their products or services. This is worrisome especially on social media where opinions about certain things are shared all over the globe and in real-time.

In their “Social Media and Online PR Report,” Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia explored ways marketers can combat “brand bashing” online.

They reported, when asked how companies most often combat these negative comments, that:
• Nearly one-half suggested having directly engaged with the consumer
• The second-most-common strategy was longer-term in focus: trying to improve products and services.

Many respondents had even tried to get offensive content written about their company removed entirely but that tactic can have many negative effects on a company’s image.

Econsultancy also noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results, and that more could go this route.

When companies were asked about their activities on Twitter specifically, Brand monitoring was the third highest activity behind publicizing new content and marketing using this form of communication channel.

Other findings from Twitter usage found:
• About one-quarter of companies were using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.
• Nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.”
• More than one-fifth of client-side companies told Econsultancy that fear of reputation issues was a factor preventing more effective social media engagement.
• Almost 30% of agencies said the same of their clients.

In response to the results of these findings, Econsultancy offered this statement to address brand monitoring and how to effectively combat it: “To address this, there needs to be more education around how to deal with negative PR and social media crisis management, as well as best practice on how to engage in the first place,” according to the report. “There is clearly an opportunity here for agencies to better educate their clients.”

Happy Branding!

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Online Social Media Platforms continue to skyrocket!

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Here are a few stats on the Social Media arena out there. If you company is not engaging actively within the social media realm you are missing out on a “boom” within Internet Marketing. Social media audience totals 122 million people. That is 64% of the total Internet audience! The time spent on social networking and blogging sites is growing at over 3x overall Internet growth. Blogs readership estimate 96.6 million users at least once per month. By 2013, that number is expected to reach 128.2 million – which accounts for 58 percent of all U.S. Internet users.

The top social networks have stats that astonished me….here they are:

Facebook
• Average user time spent on Facebook grew 566% (2008)
• Over 1/3 of all content sharing on the web is done through Facebook and Twitter

Twitter
• 62% of Twitter users are ages 25 to 54
• 90% are moderate to heavy Internet users

YouTube
• 89.7 unique visitors in April 2009
• 6 billion videos viewed each month