This is a question that many companies raise as they manage the day-to-day Facebook posts, tweets, blogs, etc.  It’s a full-time job for large companies, and for smaller companies it often falls to the marketing department to manage or “test” to see its effectiveness.

While measuring results of every single post isn’t always possible, many studies point to the fact that social media is in fact valuable for brands.

eMarketer recently published data from a study about the immediate and prolonged results of social media campaigns.  What they found is quite astounding.

• After exposure to a social media campaign, the likelihood someone would recommend a product increased to 61% (up from 39% pre-exposure to the campaign).
• One year after being exposed to the campaign, their likelihood of recommending a product remained elevated at 55%.
• An individual’s purchase intent after being exposed to a social media campaign increased to 69% (up from 38% pre-exposure to the campaign).
• A year later the purchase intent was still as high as 61%!

More about this study can be found here. This data clearly indicates the importance of social media marketing and the profound impact that it can have on word of mouth marketing (via recommendations) and purchase intent.

Your company should be participating in social media, if you’re not already.  And if you are already participating, you should be developing social media campaigns.  Too many companies simply post content on a daily basis, with little thought to their overall goal.  Social media campaigns should be created throughout the year to coincide with your other marketing efforts (online and offline).  You should focus on creating meaningful campaigns - ones that will be remembered and shared.  They could include giveaways, contests and/or user generated content.  Social media lends itself to engage with potential customers and companies should leverage this it to its fullest potential.

Until recently you had to be “friends” with someone to be able to receive their updates in your News Feed.  Facebook rolled out a new feature recently which has now changed that.  You are now able to “subscribe” to someone else’s updates regardless of whether or not you are connected (i.e. “friends”). The idea behind this is to give Facebook users a bit more control over the type of information that fills their News Feed. Anyone on Facebook knows how quickly new information populates in the News Feed, and sometimes it’s not information you care to see. In the image below you will note that a user has the ability to select the type of information they’d like to subscribe to.

So if you have a friend who constantly posts updates related to games, you can opt out of seeing those types of updates if you choose.

There are a few things to note.  First is that all of your friends will have a subscribe button on their profile.

This is because you’ve already subscribed to that person’s feed by becoming friends.

Additional people can subscribe to your updates after you allow subscribers. Once you do this, a Subscribe button will show up on your profile and your public updates will appear in their News Feeds once they click this button. If you are interested in getting subscribers, you will need to follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Go to your profile and click Subscriptions on the left side of the page, under your profile picture.
2. Click “Allow Subscribers” at the top of this tab.
3. After you click “Allow Subscribers,” your settings appear. From here, you can edit who can comment on your public posts and when you’re notified about new subscribers. You can also see who subscribes to you.

To encourage subscribing to others, there is new a section that now shows suggestions of who to subscribe to when logged in (very similar to Twitter’s Who to Follow suggestions).

This subscribe option now can make Facebook posts more useful if you want them to be public, and particularly if you start gaining and audience. On the other hand, it also may add more confusion to the already confusion privacy options in Facebook.

When you update your status on Facebook, what do you normally post?  A thought of the day? What you are up to?  Ask for a restaurant recommendation, or something else along those lines?

Many people (as you may realize if you are a Facebooker) use their status to ask questions to their fans to get thoughts, feedback, and opinions. As a result, Facebook has introduced a new feature called Questions.  Facebook Questions are intended to make asking and receiving responses to questions a much easier process.

When you log into your Facebook account, you will now see this addition next to where you update your status, post photos, share links, and so on.  Below is how it will appear when viewing a Facebook page you admin.

What’s unique about Facebook Questions is how much greater your reach can become.  For example, if you post a question to your Page or Profile using a regular status update, your question will be visible to your friends via their News Feed.  They can then reply to your question with a comment, or Like what you asked.  When asking a question using the new Question feature, your friends can respond, but also your friends’ friends will have the opportunity to participate and answer the question as well.  While other non-fans / non-friends can respond, your friends’ responses are going to be shown first, as those are likely to be more relevant or meaningful to you.

So how can this apply to businesses?  Not only are Questions available for Profiles, but they are also available for Company Pages.  Do you want to start a new product or service, or modify one you currently have? Reaching out to those who are already fans of your company to ask for their input could be tremendously valuable (and cost effective!).  When people start responding to your question, they can agree with an existing answer or add a different response.

The next time you are thinking about surveying your customers, try the new Questions feature in Facebook. You may find that the responses are all that you need to move forward with a decision.

Facebook has been a great marketing tool for quite some time through their Company Pages as well as through their advertising. Now, there is a new advertising opportunity called Sponsored Stories.  A Sponsored Story is essentially an action taken by a Facebook user that a company has promoted or sponsored.  These types of actions can include Page likes, interaction with apps, check-ins, posts to pages, etc. These stories will show up on the right hand side when logged into Facebook.  An example of a Sponsored Story is below.

One importing thing to note is that the Sponsored Stories will follow your privacy settings. This means that you will only see Sponsored Stories containing content that would normally show up in your News Feed; content posted by your friends.  In addition, a Sponsored Story that features your content will never be shown to someone who’s not a friend. The idea behind this is that when your connections are interacting with a page, checking in to a location or using an app, it’s likely that you may want to do the same or will discover new actions that your friends are taking. Another point that is important to note is that you can’t avoid being sponsored in a story. You also can’t opt out of seeing Sponsored Stories.

From the advertiser’s perspective, you are not able to control the messaging; it’s a matter of what people post in their News Feed, and whether or not you as an advertiser choose to promote that type of content. Sponsored Stories are, however, a great way to leverage and promote the viral marketing that Facebook already offers.  While Sponsored Stories will only be shown to you when one of your friends is featured in them, they help to better expose actions in News Feeds (Page likes, interactions with apps, etc). This provides more visibility for these types of actions, which would typically become buried in a News Feed over time.

Social media has proven to be an excellent marketing tool for companies, but the greater power social media becomes undoubtedly apparent at certain times.  One of those times is now, as many of us woke up Tuesday morning to the devastating news that an earthquake rattled the lives of those in Christchurch, NZ.  Although we’ve only been aware of this natural disaster for a short period of time, social media has enabled victims to share their situation with family, friends and loved ones.  The speed at which social media helps to organize aid for victims is extraordinary.  Members of organizations monitor social media channels just as individuals do. As a result, they can quickly be alerted to where their efforts are most needed.

Organizations have rapidly jumped to provide assistance and distribute information surrounding the earthquake. Google has showed support by powering a People Finder in addition to setting up a Crisis Response page, which feeds in news and information from various locations. With real-time sites available such as Twitter, a moment doesn’t go by where information cannot be shared around the world in an instant.  Individuals and organizations on Twitter are tweeting ways to donate, emergency phone numbers to call, tentative plans to open up airports, photos and videos of the damage, etc.

For those around the world trying to stay up on the latest news from Christchurch, it certainly isn’t difficult. If you are a social media fan, your channel of choice already has news which you can follow, whether it is YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google News, etc. 

Even though many of us use social media for marketing or promotional opportunities within our businesses on a daily basis, we shouldn’t forget how social media has altered communication, especially in times need.

Every time I write a post about a Google search update, it is always focused around things Google is doing to improve the way users can find relevant content quickly and easily.  This post is no different.  Just a few days ago, Google began rolling out an update that is taking social search  to a new level. There have been many updates over the last few years in an effort to unite social and search, and we can only assume many more updates will come with the growing popularity of social media. 

With this most recent update, if you are logged into your Google Account you may begin to see listings shared by your connections within the organic search results. (In the past, data from social connections was limited to the bottom of the search results.) These new social listings will be denoted with an additional line added to the listing, telling you which of your connections shared the link. As the image found in this Search Engine Land post shows, the listings from social connections are often given a higher importance.

This seems to make sense in that if one of your friends has shared a link related to your specific search term, you would likely be more interested in that link instead of one that does not have an “endorsement” by a friend or connection.  Keep in mind that any listings as a result of this social search update will be specific to you (as your connections are going to be different than the next person looking for something similar). Google has access to tons of information on the web and these social search results can be pulled from your connections on sites such as Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Picasa, Gmail, your Google Contacts, etc.

Other things to keep in mind are that you must have your social accounts connected to your Google Account.  If you don’t link your social accounts in any way to your Google account, or if you are not logged in to your Google Account, you will not see these social search listings.  Google will even assist you in connecting your social accounts if they find accounts that are specific to you (such as through the same usernames, etc). This way you can then easily link them to your Google Account.

There is a way to currently see who you are connected to through Google’s social circle page.  You can build these connections by associating your social accounts with your Google Account as mentioned above.  It will be interesting to see how this change to search results influenced by social media will evolve over time.

Social media channels have proven to be great marketing tools for companies, but measuring success can be difficult. You may be working significant hours each week to enhance your company’s social media efforts, but how can you be sure that you are tracking everything as optimally as possible?

First, it’s important to mention that social media success is not necessarily going to be visits to your website or immediate purchases of your products from social channels. Success can also be measured by engagement with fans or followers and the conversations held within the channels. 

That said, there are times when you’ll want to drive traffic to your own website or blog pages from channels such as Facebook and Twitter.  When doing this, you will want to make sure that you tag those links for Google Analytics (GA).  For basic instructions on how to tag links for GA, please see the blog post title, Yes, Google Analytics can track that, too!

If you are not familiar with tagging for analytics, you should read the above post first, because in short, you will not be able to successfully track social media visits if you are not going to code all of the links for Google Analytics first. At this time, Google Analytics depends upon those query parameters to know what referral information to write into the GA referring cookie (the __utmz cookie).

Below are a few examples… Here’s a hypothetical tweet on Twitter:

“Social media made simple from #morevisibility!!! http://bit.ly/1jiXS ”

Of course merely reading the tweet will not show you anything in GA (although it may provide value in terms of the information tweeted) but a visitor clicking on that bit.ly link will show you the following in GA (you can click on the link to get the full effect):

Source: direct
Medium: (none)
Campaign: (none)
Content: (none)

This is because, as you can see, there are no query parameters at the end of the URL once you get to our website’s homepage after you click the bit.ly link. The path that a visitor takes looks like:

Twitter >> Bit.ly >> MoreVisibility

Since bit.ly is merely a re-direct to MoreVisibility, Twitter isn’t credited with the referring information.

Another example with a different bit.ly link:

“Social media made simple from #morevisibility!!! http://bit.ly/f4Bfqg”

A visitor clicking on this second bit.ly link will show you the following in GA:

Source: twitter
Medium: social-media
Campaign: January 2011 Tweets
Content: Social Media Made Simple

This is possible due to the query parameters at the end of the URL after you’re redirected to our site. The path that a visitor takes is still:

Twitter >> Bit.ly >> MoreVisibility

But since we added the query paraments into the bit.ly shortening tool, it will show twitter as the source in Google Analytics, social-media as the medium, and so on, when clicking on that bit.ly link.

Last example: Same tweet, only this time we are not using a bit.ly URL:

“Social media made simple from #morevisibility!!!  www.morevisibility.com”

Now, if anyone clicks on this link you will see the following in GA:

Source: twitter.com
Medium: referral
Campaign: (none)
Content: (none)

twitter.com is now the source and the medium is a referral because that is a link on Twitter’s website that someone clicked on to get to the website. The path would obviously not contain bit.ly because we did not shorten the link this time:

Twitter >> MoreVisibility

As many of you knowTwitter only allows 140 characters per tweet.  Almost any page other than a homepage will use up quite a bit of valuable space, so that is why shortening links can be helpful.
Facebook does not have quite as strict restrictions on character counts, so you could use the actual URL (without Google Analytics tagging) and it will show up as a referral in GA.

Browser-based apps vs. desktop-based apps are also something to consider. If it’s a desktop-based app (one that you actually install on your PC where you don’t use a browser such as Chrome or Internet Explorer to control), then any clicks on links without GA query parameters will appear as direct traffic. If the links are tagged with the GA query parameters, then the traffic will appear with the source / medium combination that you have used in the query parameters.

Browser-based apps (ones that you log-in to a website and are using a browser to control) could appear as referrals from that website that you’re logged-in to, like Hootsuite.

So as you set out to track your social media efforts, it’s important to understand the intricacies of tracking and the ways in which this traffic may appear in your Google Analytics.

It used to be that starting a social media presence (creating a Facebook pages with customized tabs and a Twitter account for tweeting coupons and new products) was the big thing for online retailers. But as many have already immersed themselves within these channels, the next big trend that we see may be a broader use of social sign-in services. Social sign-ins enables customers to log-in to a website using their social media log-in credentials, such as Facebook, rather than registering with that site separately. 

There are benefits of social sign-ins for the retailer and the consumer. Social sign-ins provide retailers with access to information that they wouldn’t have access to if users were to simply create a new registration on their website. If someone logs-in to an ecommerce site using their Facebook log-in, that retailer would then have access to information about that individual – their likes, preferences, etc. - which they can then leverage for customized offerings. For the retailer, the goal is to have higher average order values, repeat customers, fewer returns, and an overall better user experience.  As you can imagine, it would be very difficult to capture all of the information people have shared on Facebook through a regular website registration process.

From the consumer perspective, it relieves the need to memorize one more log-in and password (as if we don’t have enough already).  But on the other hand, many are already weary about their privacy throughout the internet, and as a result, online retailers must tread lightly to make sure that the consumer does not feel that their privacy is being violated.

While social sign-ins is not brand new, only a handful of ecommerce websites have implemented this capability.  A report from eMarketer states the 18% of online retailers have implemented social sign-ins for their visitors by August 2010.  However, another 18% reported were in the process of implementing one, and 32% planned to implement one in the next 12-24 months.

As the social media landscape is ever-evolving, it will be interesting to see how quickly online retailers adopt social sign-ins.  Also, as more and more people are becoming aware of how their information is shared online (seen with many Facebook privacy concerns), it is still yet to be seen just how open the majority of consumers will be to using these social sign-ins.

Is it Google?  Actually, no.  Google didn’t make it to the top this year. Google was bumped to second place by the one and only Facebook.  Who would have thought when Facebook began nearly 7 years ago, that it would become as large and as influential as it is today? There is a movie about it, there are more than 500 million people now using the site, and its users are visiting Facebook for more than simply connecting with “friends”.  Facebook draws people from around the world – supporting causes, promoting brands and celebrities, and even shopping – while staying in touch with friends.

Recent numbers from Hitwise  below show that Facebook has now surpassed Google in being the most visited site in the U.S. during 2010. What is interesting is that not only was Facebook the most visited site, Facebook was the most searched term in 2010.  Should some of the credit maybe go to Google and other search engines?  Of the top 10 most searched terms, variations of Facebook occurred 4 times, as shown in the image below.

If the current trend continues as we move into 2011, it would also be extremely advantageous for companies and brands not in Facebook to consider a strategy for building a presence there.  Facebook has changed the way people find information and communicate with brands online. Also, as with most marketing efforts online, your Facebook efforts can be tracked through an analytics package as well as through Facebook’s Insights.  It will be interesting to see what Facebook will bring this year, further enhancing the opportunities for businesses.

This month LinkedIn is revamping the Groups section of their site.  You may already be a member of a group on LinkedIn, but if not, I would highly encourage it.  More than likely, there are groups about your industry or a specific topic that is of interest to you.  LinkedIn’s groups have always been a great way to portray your expertise in a particular area or stay up to date on news topics, but with this recent update I imagine that they will become even more helpful.

The focus of this revamp seems to be to place an emphasis on discussions within groups.  You will now be able to find news and discussions all in one place, making it easier to start discussions around recent news topics.  One of my favorite features is the carousel within the discussions section. This area is a great place to highlight topics, such as blog posts, as MoreVisibility’s group features. Members of the group can then scroll through the different featured topics.

Individuals within these groups can comment on an article, news, or discussion topic.  When they do, a thumbnail image of that member will appear. Simply scrolling over that user’s image will enable you to see their comment.

Other features include an area called Top Influencers This Week.  Following top influencers can help you to stay current with their topics and discussions. You can actually follow any members within a group. This follow feature in particular seems to be very “Twitter-like”.

There is also a Manager’s Choice section, where the Manager of the group can select a discussion topic of their choice to feature. You can also search discussions to find a specific topic that interests you. 

Become a member of a LinkedIn group today to learn about how you can get involved.