Choosing Which Platform is Right for Your Brand

Jumping into social media can be a scary thought for any brand. There are so many options these days, from Facebook to Pinterest, where do you start? For example, you want to do some research like identifying where your customers are. This is not a new concept, just like in print advertising, you want to go where your target audience is. If you are selling custom NFL grill covers, it is probably not a good idea to advertise in People Magazine. Just like magazine readers, certain demographics gravitate to specific social media platforms. There are a lot of factors to consider before setting up your social media presence. Just because social media is mostly free, that doesn't mean you should take it lightly. After all, you would never start an expensive print ad campaign without doing extensive research first. Choosing that social media platform that is right for you is paramount, but how do you know which one is right? Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

• Who is my target demographic?
• What are my objectives? (Improve SEO, Increase site traffic, Increase brand exposre, etc)
• What platforms are my target demographic using?
• What skills do I have that I can leverage on social media? (Copywriting, Graphic design, Photography, etc)

Now that we have you thinking a little more in-depth about social media and how it can help your business, take a look at this infographic by Social Barrel. Take it step by step and figure out exactly what platforms you can leverage for the best results.  Don't waste your time and resources by investing in the wrong platforms, if you can successfully grow and cultivate your social presence, the results can be exponential.

-Mike

Better Facebook Posts in 10 Easy Steps

One of the most common mistakes businesses make on Facebook, is underestimating they strategy needed for a successful post. In order to achieve a truly engaging post, a business needs to do a certain amount of research and understand the best practices involved for each post. The infographic below, created by Shortstack, highlights 10 simple, but effective, ways you can improve your Facebook status updates.

-Mike & Samantha

Turning Complaints into Opportunity

Everyone knows how important word-of-mouth can be to a business. According to Neilsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family above all else. Combine that number with these following stats, and it becomes very apparent how important it is to correctly handle customer complaints.

• It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for 1 negative incident.
• The average "wronged customer" will tell 8-l6 people about it. Over 20% will tell more than 20.
• Happy customers who have their problems resolved will tell 4-6 people about their positive experience.
• Customer loyalty can be worth up to 10 times as much as a single purchase

Every brand in every industry is going to make mistakes, and these mistakes can often be magnified when they are out in the open for everyone to see on social media. There are a few brands out there who excel at turning these potential downfalls into customer service successes. Andy Sernovitz of SmartBlogs highlights 3 strategies used to win over upset customers:

• Make them laugh: There’s obviously a time and a place for jokes when it comes to fielding customer complaints, but a good sense of humor can be disarming and personal enough to defuse a negative comment while showing you’re human.
• Be vigilant: No matter what their concern, your customers will appreciate a fast response — even if you’re just acknowledging the issue and letting them know you’re on it. For example, when one cyclist was almost hit by a UPS truck, he tweeted about the incident — and when he got home, he was contacted within several minutes by their social media team. He later blogged about being blown away by the company’s careful attention on his blog.
• Make it personal: Dell allows their employees to answer customer service concerns with their real names and sometimes post unscripted videos of them working out problems. When your community managers can reply in their own voice, it reminds negative commenters there’s a real person behind your company’s social media page — it also let’s them know a real person cares.

At the end of the day, just showing the customer you care speaks volumes. Remember, the customer is always right.

-Mike

Pinterest Gets an Upgrade

As we have mentioned in a previous post, many major brands are still not leveraging Pinterest to its full marketing potential. This may have gotten a little easier with the recent update to Pinterest, which allows brands to display information in the pin, ranging from recipes to product prices, etc. This service is only available to a few brands that have partnered with Pinterest so far, including eBay, Target, ModCloth, Sony and Netflix. The idea behind this new enhancement is to get more information in front of users, without them having to click through links to the original poster. Traditionally, if a user came across a particularly delicious looking picture, they would have to dig their way through the post to try and find the link to the recipe. Now the brand posting this picture can simply post the recipe along with the picture itself, like below:

This is a win-win for both the brands associated, and Pinterest itself. With more comprehensive pins, brands will be able to gain an edge over traditional pins, gaining more followers. On the Pinterest side, having all this information available directly on the news feed, users will be less likely to navigate away from the feed to try and find the information they want. We think this new option creates a huge opportunity for brands who are willing to take advantage of it. It will be interesting to see what brands decide to partner with Pinterest and jump on this new way to reach their fans.

-Mike

Let the Integration Continue

It seems there has been an ever increasing trend lately to integrate as many services into other services as possible. The latest in this trend is Yahoo's move to incorporate Twitter into its news stream. This is not a very surprising move, considering how important Twitter has become to news sources. Consistently proving to be the go-to source for the latest breaking news, Twitter has become a considerable asset in this field. Here is a quote from Yahoo's CEO: "Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information. 140 characters can connect athletes with their fans, capture live chatter from the red carpet, and inspire global debate... so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo newsfeed."

As you can see below, tweets from sources like ABC News will start to appear in the news feed.

This new feature will continue to roll out to all U.S. users over the next couple of days. We think this trend towards integration is great and will only continue to make everyone's lives easier and more convenient.

-Mike

Google Hangouts App

Over the last few days, Google has been announcing a number of new services and enhancements to their offerings.  One of these enhancements we are excited about is the new Google Hangouts app. Google Hangouts themselves are not new, and chances are you have seen or used them before, but until this week, accessing this service on your mobile device was not very convenient. With this new stand alone app, it looks like the bar has been raised for chat services. As an Android user, I am particularly excited for this enhancement. Although I do love my Samsung Galaxy 3, the one thing it does not do well, is group chatting. Since the majority of mobile devices out there are still iPhones, whenever I get included on a group chat initiated from an iPhone, it is impossible to follow. All the messages get broken up into separate texts and it turns into a nightmare. I have since remedied this inconvenience by using a 3rd party app known as GroupMe. I admit GroupMe does to a good job when it comes to group texts, but it does not have the ability to sync with the rest of my Google services or offer video chatting, plus the people  you are chatting with need to have this app downloaded on their phone.

You may be asking, what about iChat and Skype? Sure, they have fairly good video chatting capability, but if you have tried all 3, it becomes obvious that Google comes out ahead in categories like ease of use, quality and functionality.

This new Google Hangouts app is going to be like text messaging on steroids. The nice thing about texting is the conversation stays in a continuous stream that never stops. No matter how infrequent you talk to someone, you can pick up the conversation from where you left it last.  Google Hangouts is going to be just like this, however, now you can throw in fun things like pictures, videos, multiple people, Gchat messages, screen sharing, etc.

If I haven't convinced you of how awesome this new app will be, check out this YouTube video from Google:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/XkpjZ7oA_Qg]

-Mike

Facebook Bings It

Building off the social sidebar that Bing introduced last year, as of last friday, you can comment on Facebook posts straight from Bing. Based on what you search, Bing will display relevant information from Facebook on your sidebar. From that sidebar, you can directly like or comment on a friend's post. In addition to viewing these posts, Bing will also allow you to add your own, straight from the search page. As you can see below, when searching a term like "Shake Shack NYC", Bing displays relevant posts from social media platforms.

For truly customized results, one must log in to Facebook through Bing, then all of your friend's opinions on your searched topic will show up. This seems like it could be quite convenient if you were doing something like researching a new restaurant. Not only will you get the standard information a search engine provides, you will also see what your friends think of the place. If you were looking for someone to go to this new restaurant with, it may also make it much easier to find that someone if you already know who likes that specific restaurant, plus you can ask them via Facebook right from the search screen.

Is this new social service going to help Bing reach the mammoth that is Google? Probably not, but we think this will certainly add value to Bing's service and will help drive more traffic their way.

-Mike