It’s a brand new year, with a 12-month clean slate: the perfect opportunity to assess your social media presence and evaluate what needs a little sprucing up.
Need a place to start? We’ve got a few suggestions for ways to kick your Twitter efforts into high gear in 2013.
No matter your goal – gain followers, tweet more regularly, get more retweets, get your various Twitter accounts organized – we have a tip to help you out.
If your business relies heavily upon (or generates a lot of) visual content, it’s important that you’re mindful to post your images to the social networks where they have the greatest chance of being seen and, critically, shared.
For example, while 66 percent of adults use Facebook and 16 percent use Twitter, just 5 percent use Tumblr, but the latter is a veritable hotbed of image discovery and re-posts. Likewise, both Instagram (30 million photo-mad users) and Pinterest (with its predominately female demographic) offer unique attractions to marketers looking to maximise their social media ROI.
Everybody knows it: the holidays are stressful.
Maybe even the most stressful time of the year.
Wonderful, schwonderful. Nothing’s bright and merry about your teenage cousin getting bombed on wine spritzers and throwing up all over your grandmother’s antique tablecloth, while your sister’s kids play “who’s under the table?” for three hours and the dog keeps nosing your crotch.
Twitter, as you probably know, is free to use.
So is Facebook. In fact, every significant social media platform is and always has been free. There is no cost barrier to entry. Everyone can join, and everyone is welcome to use these tools to raise awareness of their brand, product and services, boost website traffic and drive sales.
But there are no guarantees. And nobody ever said it was going to be easy.
Posting text, photos, videos and comments, blogging, research, curation, engaging, listening and analytics… all of these things come with a huge cost, and it isn’t financial. It’s effort. It’s resources. And it’s time.
Your time.
While the true origins of social media can be traced back to the late 1970s and the first bulletin board system (BBS), the medium didn’t really begin to develop until the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which gave birth to the world wide web.
From here, we never looked back. AOL and blogging led to Friendster and MySpace, which gave us Facebook and then Twitter. But even as far as 2006 social media was predominately a text-based pursuit. So what’s changed?
Timing is, as they say, everything, and for brands, marketers and anyone else looking to use social media to raise awareness of products or services – and this includes self-promotion – ensuring that you share your content at the optimal part of the day is essential.
So, when is the best time to post? And is it the same for every social network?
Did you know that better customer engagement is the leading business objective for 78 percent of marketers, and that more than four in five (81 percent) of marketing departments have a 1-3 person team dedicated to social media?
But it’s not simply a case of showing up. To maximise social engagement and reap the rewards, marketers need to understand the science behind social interaction to determine best practices for posts made to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social channels – and, as importantly, when.
Did you know that almost three-quarters (72 percent) of businesses that use social media don’t know how to measure their return on investment (ROI)?
This disconnect has never been more important – or damaging. Some 167 million people are expected to shop online in 2012, and social commerce sales are pegged to reach $9.2 billion by the end of this year.
Brands that ignore social media or become inactive on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook risk losing existing and potential customers, reveals a new study from UK firm Kiss Public Relations.
More than half (51 percent) of respondents to the Kiss Social Media Interaction Survey agreed that if a brand is not present or not active with its social media it would reflect negatively on the company.
Ever since companies have been making products and providing services, customers new and old have been asking the people that they trust – peers, colleagues, friends and family members – for recommendations and suggestions about the best of everything.
This social proof has empowered consumers but also provides a tremendous opportunity for brands who utilize these tools to enrich their website and maximize the visitor’s experience… and conversion chances.
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