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Social Media Knight

Fighting our way into the social media realm

Marketing

7 Tips for Marketing a ‘Boring’ Brand on Social Media

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We expect big name brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola to come up with fun and engaging social media marketing campaigns.

It’s the businesses that sell less-than-glamorous products like toilets, or hard-to-grasp concepts like antivirus software that aren’t so easy to market on social media. Does that mean you should leave social out of your marketing strategy? Absolutely not.

Chances are, there’s something exciting about your business. A backstory? The contributions you make to the local community? Your company culture?

Whatever it is, finding passion in what you do is the first step to marketing your business on social media. After all, if you can’t show interest in your own company—how will others?

By: Kaylynn Chong

See full story at blog.hootsuite.com

How advanced marketing automation tactics can increase sales

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When we drive visitors from social media and other sources to our website, they are all at various stages of the buyer journey.

Imagine two Person A:  They are not following you but they see an update reshared by a fan on Facebook.  This links to a blog post on your website.  At this stage, they have never heard of you before and it’s their first time visiting your website

They are loyal followers and may have even bought a product off you before.  They see a link to a blog post and visit your website.

We’d call ‘Person A’ a cold audience and ‘Person B’ a warm audience.

Both are very different, so the information we share and how we communicate with them should be different.

To deal with the complex world we are in today, we need to rely on automation to help us.

By: Ian Cleary

See full story at www.razorsocial.com

5 Practical (and Unpretentious) Ways AI Will Change Marketing by 2020

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Here are five use cases that are gaining traction across industries. These are based on Skype interviews with leading AI companies, content marketing experts, and analyst reports.

1. Robot reports

Hootsuite creates a lot of content. And we spend a lot of time measuring how much traffic it drives, how many social shares we get, and how much revenue it creates.

2. Automating enterprise content

I wanted to find out more about Quill, so I reached out to Narrative Science, the company that makes the solution. Narrative Science helps enterprises  use natural language generation to analyze and tell stories from their data.

3. Finding patterns in your data

For example, AI platforms can look at millions of transactions and predict a customer who is about to churn.

4. Reducing duplicate work across the enterprise

As AI is rewiring the way enterprises create and analyze content, I wanted to know about the impact of all of this on SEO. This led me to MarketMuse. Their company uses AI and machine learning to help enterprises refine their content planning process.

5. Personalization for everyone

Consumer brands such as Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix have given shining examples of how powerful and profitable personalized web experiences can be. AI is helping to make personalization a reality for brands of all sizes.

By James Mulvey

See full story at blog.hootsuite.com

 

5 Intriguing Twitter Marketing Case Studies

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Twitter is a fantastic tool for reaching and engaging with a seemingly unlimited audience. Over the last few years there have been some fantastic examples of brands doing this to great effect, so we’ve scoured the web and collected 5 of our favourites.

     1.  LG Ticket Hunter

Last year electronics company, LG, wanted to boost smartphone sales amongst 16-24 year-olds. To help achieve this they went about creating a Twitter treasure hunt.

The idea was simple, LG would set out a stall in a UK city and the first person to get to their stall won two tickets to a high profile concert. To help users find the stall, LG placed a map online that gradually zoomed in on the precise location whenever the hashtag #lgtickethunter was used on Twitter.

LG Ticket Hunter Image

By fusing a fun and active challenge with desirable prizes, LG ensured that their competition would reach a large number of their target market. The campaign received 5,000 tweets on the first day and went on to reach 50,000 by the end. This, combined with impressive engagement rates of 38% from their sponsored links, helped them to quadruple their smartphone sales among 16-24 year olds during the weeks following the campaign.

     2.  Taco Bell

Not all brands rely on offering high profile prizes to help drive Twitter engagement. Taco Bell has adopted a very different approach by focusing much of their effort on engaging with some of their most influential followers. By diving into conversations with users who have over 10,000 followers, they’re able to maximise their brand awareness through mentions, retweets and recommendations.

Central to this is their light-hearted tone of voice that helps to ‘humanize’ what is a very large organization. Combining their jovial style with trending hashtags has also done wonders for their engagement levels and has helped them reach over 600,000 Twitter followers – roughly 3x as many as one of their biggests fast-food rivals,BurgerKing.

Taco

 

     3.  Fiat – Too Fast to Follow

Fiat took a very unusual approach to their social media marketing in Germany. Rather than engage with their followers, they actually blocked them. Their claim was that the car is “too fast to follow”.

The campaign generated a great deal of publicity and Twitter users were lining up to be blocked by the Abarth 500, though it’s not possible to give actual numbers for obvious reasons.

Fiat 500 Abarth

See Full Story on oursocialtimes.com

5 Social Selling Tactics to Attract, Engage & Convert More Customers

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Social Selling

Outside of marketing and customer service, one of the fastest growing areas in the social media world is social selling. With billions of people connected to social networks for personal and business reasons, time and attention of prospects is both valuable and highly competitive.

Connections between people supported by social technologies have become more valuable than ever as trusted sources of information. Interactions with brands don’t have to happen on the corporate website anymore. From customer service to sales – social networks are powering important buyer and brand discussions from awareness to purchase to advocacy.

Companies of all sizes are empowering their sales teams to leverage the technology of the social web with the human connections between sales people and their customers to scale reach, engagement and new business. Demand for social selling experts is rising too, as companies look for outside perspective on how to create the culture shift, processes and skills training necessary to make social selling real and valuable.

See Full Story on www.toprankblog.com

11 signs your small business social media strategy isn’t working

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Today, small business owners are busier than ever trying to run their companies while handling marketing and sales, too. An important part of marketing today is social media. For many small business owners, the world of social media is still foreign territory, and finding the perfect strategy that actually works can often be difficult.

So how do you know if what you’re doing is really hitting the mark? Here are 11 signs that your small business strategy isn’t working. If you’re doing any of the things on this list, chances are your strategy is falling flat and you’re missing prime opportunities to use social media to engage, inform and promote.

1. You delete negative posts.

Negative posts about your brand can be shocking, scary and hurtful. One of the key mistakes small business owners make is taking negative comments personally. Most often when you see a negative post about your brand, the person posting isn’t talking about you. They’re talking about your product or service. Instead of hitting the delete button when you see something negative, think of it as an opportunity to engage. But make sure that you directly address the negativity head-on. Don’t try to sugarcoat your response.

For example, if you own a delivery service and a customer makes a negative comment about your company because their package was late, don’t panic. Instead, let the person know that you will direct message (DM) them with a response and take care of the issue. Once the issue is resolved, go back to the original post and let your followers know you’ve handled it.

See Full Story on www.miamiherald.com

 

Twitter Talks to Ad Agencies About How to Market Twitter

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Twitter has been reaching out to ad agencies in recent weeks with an interesting brief: It’s looking for ideas on creative ways to market the service and build the Twitter brand.

It wouldn’t be surprising for Twitter to seek agency help. Facebook made its famous (or infamous) “Chair” video spot two years ago and just recently released three new video ads created by Wieden + Kennedy.

Now Twitter has been inviting agencies to pitch concepts. It’s not clear whether the work will include TV, but it is understood that the media spend will be low. No surprise there: As the Oscars Twitterpalooza showed once again, Twitter gets plenty of free exposure on TV, but it could distribute video across its own considerable network, not to mention Vine.

Twitter is thought to be looking for something less than an agency-of-record relationship but more than project work. Executives familiar with the matter believe the company would like an agency it can turn to on a project basis.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not have a CMO, though it does have a small consumer marketing team. With all the free mentions on TV — prime-time and in the news — one could argue it hasn’t needed it. But now Twitter’s growth is slowing down. The fourth quarter of 2013 was Twitter’s slowest quarter of growth yet.

See Full Story on adage.com

This Brand Hired a 16-Year-Old to Build Its Following On Snapchat

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Teen retailer Wet Seal became the latest brand to try marketing on Snapchat when it handed over control of its new account on the ephemeral messaging service to a 16-year-old beauty vlogger for two days.

Following in the footsteps of Snapchat early adopters like 16 Handles, Taco Bell, Acura and the New Orleans Saints, Wet Seal created an account on the service last month. In order to get it off the ground with some actual followers, Wet Seal enlisted the services of Meghan Hughes, who goes by MissMeghanMakeup in the digital realm. She has 200,000 YouTube subscribers, 49,000 Twitter followers and 101,000 Instagram followers.

“We wanted to be thoughtful about how we could exponentially increase our reach, so we partnered with an influencer in the teen space,” said Leslie Hall, president at Wet Seal’s digital agency ICED Media.

Ms. Hughes, 16, manned the Wet Seal account during the weekend before Christmas and created a Snapchat “story” documenting those two days of her life. Unlike “snaps,” which are sent from one user to another, stories can be stitched together from multiple snaps and broadcasted to a larger audience. They appear in the friends list section of the app beside the handles of the people who posted them. The snaps within them stay visible for 24 hours and can be replayed as often as someone likes in that window.

She added upwards of 15 snaps to the story — each of which expired after 24 hours — in the course of the weekend, including scenes of making Christmas cookies, playing with her dog, a light show and outfits of the day that incorporated Wet Seal pieces.

See Full Story on adage.com

5 Social Media Advertising Trends to Watch for in 2014

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Social media advertising is what traditional search engine marketing was 5 years ago: constantly in development with major changes coming every other week. That’s not to say that SEM has stagnated and development has stopped – it hasn’t (enhanced campaigns anyone?).

The point is that 2013 has seen more changes and big leaps forward in social media advertising then any year before. The development boom hasn’t slowed down at all this year and is propelling the entire social media space forward into 2014.

Here are five trends in social media advertising to watch out for next year.

More Twitter Ads

Twitter had a big year in 2013. The social media network saw changes across the user interface on desktops and mobile devices. The ad platform grew leaps and bounds. And perhaps most importantly, Twitter filed for and successfully completed their IPO.

Previously I wrote about what that meant for Twitter Ads . In short, using Facebook’s IPO and subsequent development boom as an example, it is safe to assume we should expect big things from Twitter. Throughout 2013 and leading up to the IPO Twitter successfully overhauled the advertising interface and targeting functionality, launched TV ad targeting and created the impressive Lead Generation Cards.

See Full Story on  searchenginewatch.com

7 Reasons Your LinkedIn Profile is a Hot Mess

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Image via BigStockPhoto.com

In the age of personal brand marketing, it’s just not okay to let your LinkedIn profile sit collecting Internet dust until you’re ready to look for your next job. If your profile isn’t current, or if it communicates indifference, not only are you likely missing career-transforming opportunities, but you could also be giving people the wrong impression. Most important for marketers, a stale profile means you’re losing out on the chance to build thought leadership clout and keep your company’s brand top of mind.

By Jason Miller****See Full Story on  www.convinceandconvert.com