Social Media Marketing News & Articles

Have you heard of social marketing and engagement platform Vitrue? Well it was just acquired by enterprise content management giant Oracle, with plans to add its capabilities to the Oracle Cloud.

The word on social influence is starting to sound a lot different than it did a couple of years ago. Not only are people quickly abandoning the concept (most in favor of social advocacy) -- they're hating on it, too. A recently popular example comes from Tom Scott, creator of a tool called Klouchebag. The self-billed "standard of asshatery" basically flips a 180 on Klout's algorithm for a cutting -- albeit entertaining -- insta-douche-o-meter.

For marketers, the new message is clear: digital popularity doesn't matter one (c)lick when it comes to building brand loyalty.

Or does it?

Like many voices at a party, the many kinds of social media conversations all compete for attention. To help deal with what it describes as the “anarchy” of social media marketing in many agencies, social enterprise software provider Buddy Media is announcing major enhancements to its social marketing suite.

Facebook is continuing to tune its advertising options in advance of its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). The company has repeatedly made major changes to its ad services over the last year. In the last two months, Facebook has expanded the beta test of self-service Offers platform to a small number of international brands and most recently, local businesses. Now Facebook is expanding Offers to web-based companies.

Last month we reported that Google Analytics was launching a set of social reports aimed at helping users measure their social reach more accurately. Last week it officially rolled out its social reporting tools and announced a few additions that didn’t make our first go-round.  

 On Friday, April 27 more than 500 community managers, social media strategists and marketers convened in Knoxville for Social Slam 2012. The brainchild of Mark Schaefer, educator, blogger and author of Return on Influence, this was Social Slam’s second year. It proved to be a one-day conference that delivered engaging, interactive and myth-busting information about social media, customer engagement and social intelligence that left everyone inspired.

Optimizing for mobile engagement is not always easy, thanks especially to the changing interfaces, screens and sizes of mobile devices. Still, the objectives remain the same: Provide relevant information or tasks in an accessible and user-friendly format. Many companies have been slow to adapt, struggling to decide between native and mobile apps or develop workflows that allow information to flow through content management systems. Challenges aside, there are many advantages to going mobile and many ways to leverage mobile to improve user access, engagement and ultimately revenue. In fact, the folks at Mobify have come up with 14 Essential Tactics for Mobile: Email, Search and Social Media Marketing.

Recently we reported that many marketers are under pressure to deliver convincing results to prove that their social media efforts are worth the investment. While it depends on what your goals are, Google Analytics is making it a little bit easier to figure out which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.

This year’s social media marketing industry report identifies the top ten questions that marketers would like to have answered. Among them, marketers want to know what to measure, what tools to use, how to engage their audience and how they can maximize their time on social media. Oh, and they want to know the winning lottery numbers, too.

If social media -- rightly, on occasion -- gets it in the neck for being somewhat of an echo chamber, lost in a battle for hearts and minds or stuck in the contrived toil of crowning content creation versus content curation King, it is perhaps inevitable that the Higgs Boson of social media is the annual pilgrimage of flannel and black-rimmed specs to Austin, Texas for SXSWi.

Facebook is making quite a few changes to its advertising assets. We reported recently about changes to Facebook ads, now the company has rolled out both Facebook Timelines for brand pages and real-time analytics via Page Insights.

For many organizations, social business is the name that shall not be spoken. It exists but no one really knows anything about how it’s done or by whom -- they just know that it’s there in some capacity and can we talk about something else, now? Despite best practices, white papers and case studies illustrating the merits of being more strategic and transparent about social media marketing, it’s hard to ignore that, in many companies, social is a dirty, often whispered word -- and I really think the boss can hear us talking about it, so pretend to laugh like I said something funny so he doesn’t get suspicious. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Us CMSWire kids have been making a pretty strong case for social this month, but just in case you need a little more convincing, consider this: over 80% of Americans use at least one social network, and more than half of those users follow a particular brand. Not only should a piece of that pie be yours, it has to be if you want to compete in today's market. 

Paul Adams, a Global Brand Manager at Facebook, had some bad news for services like Klout and PeerIndex at this year's Social Media Week event cluster: Social influence doesn't matter. Let's entertain that idea for a minute. Drop the scores, the badges and the bragging rights, and consider a different approach. 

Let's say your brand has ten thousand followers on Twitter and an even greater number of fans on Facebook. Congratulations! Now what?