Brands place a high value on social media. A 2012 study revealed that 83 percent of marketers believe that social media is important for their business, and more than nine in ten (92 percent) spend six or more hours online each week maintaining their presence on these channels.

But what are the benefits of using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as part of your organisation’s digital strategy, and where do marketers plan to increase their time and budgetary spend in the future?

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In April of last year I performed a little experiment using my Twitter profile to get a rough idea of how many people actually read and, more specifically, reacted to my tweets. Going into the test I had a working theory that approximately one percent of my audience saw my tweets at any given time. That might sound low, but it was a number I’d been touting to clients for a while, largely to keep their expectations realistic. I needed to see if there was any meat around those bones.

Turns out I overestimated – the test results came back at less than half that, with a rating of 0.46 percent. And it wasn’t just me, or the things that I said – it turns out your Twitter engagement levels get exponentially worse as your followers grow. For example, at the time, links shared by the @Mashable Twitter profile, with its millions of followers, had a click-through rate (CTR) of just 0.11 percent.

So, I was forced to ask: is Twitter just a big waste of time?

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Social media comes with a pretty steep learning curve, which places an enormous amount of value in tried-and-tested guidelines, which can only come from persistence and experience.

Like many of the good things in life, there are no shortcuts, and while some folks get uncomfortable with the use of the word rules on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, there are some things that you really have to do to get ahead. For example, it’s important that you position yourself to be an expert so that your audience learn to trust your advice. Whatever you do, you must avoid spamming. At all times, your audience will expect you to keep it real. Your content should strive to engage and enrich. If you want to convert visitors into customers, always follow up with connections.

And, perhaps most importantly, have fun. It’ll make this inevitably long journey a lot more pleasurable.

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Much has been made of Pinterest’s rapid rise to social media darling and, more importantly, website referral traffic monster.

Indeed, Pinterest’s female-friendly demographic has quickly established the pinboarding platform as a better source of referral traffic than Twitter, Bing and Stumbleupon, and a Shopify study back in May suggested that Pinterest users were more likely to buy and spend twice as much as referrals from Facebook or Twitter.

Not so, says Amazon.

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We understand that Twitter has its limitations. The main problem with using it to market your business or yourself is the fact that much of your target audience isn’t on Twitter. Even worse? Many have a pretty healthy aversion to ever signing on (or so they say).

But you LOVE Twitter and use it all the time. So what you can do?

Well, if you used Tweets by Email, your audience could subscribe to your tweets via email and your efforts on Twitter would be able to do double-time.

It’s not as crazy as you think. Check THIS out.
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Have you heard about the controversial @Sweden Twitter handle today? Too many times by now, no doubt, as there are posts going up everywhere about @Sweden’s ‘failed social media experiment,’ which has gone horribly, HORRIBLY wrong! [Insert gasp here.]

But has it gone wrong? Are the @Sweden account holders and thinkers behind this idea wringing their hands nervously and figuring out who to offer up as a scapegoat to be fired? We think not. And we’ll tell you why.
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If you want to build your brand or generate revenue for your business, make sure you check out Mediabistro’s Social Media Marketing Boot Camp online conference and workshop, starting tomorrow, Thursday, June 7. You’ll learn how to launch a social media marketing campaign and measure its results. Read more

You may have noticed a certain hashtag this past New Year’s: #codeyear. The hashtag spread across the Twittersphere as users pledged to make 2012 the year they would learn HTML code.

The company behind the push was Codecademy. Within just a few days after the site’s launch in August 2011, over 200,000 users had already started an easy HTML lesson with the site. And thanks to the viral marketing push on Twitter, co-founder Zach Sims thinks there’s a good chance this could be the year everyone learns to program together.

“We were lucky enough that our users got the word out for us,” he said in a mediabistro interview. “They were the ones that put it on Facebook and Twitter; they were the ones who shared it with other people. We never did any advertising or anything; it was all user-driven.”

Read the full interview to get Sims’ four tips on how to make a successful app.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Did you know that recent data showed that 90 percent of marketers are now using social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook for their business, and 93 percent of those rated these tools as “important”?

Brands of all sizes are now leveraging online communities to generate business exposure, increase website traffic and even improve search rankings, but what about sales?

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Did you know that the average consumer mentions specific brands over 90 times per week during conversations with friends, family and co-workers?

Sounds fantastic for marketers. But here’s the problem: not all of these messages are positive, and anyone with even an ounce of experience in brand support knows that interactions with unhappy customers take up the vast majority of your time. Moreover, dissatisfied consumers are typically more vocal, taking to platforms like Twitter and Facebook to complain, which quickly attracts the attention of other customers (and trolls).

Companies that aren’t quick to respond to these messages can find themselves overwhelmed with negative mentions, rapidly losing control of the situation… and their reputation.

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