Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Posted on June 3, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
My favorite social media monitoring and management solution by far and away is Hootsuite. It offers crazy good functionality, a ton of additional features, and support for what I consider the three most relevant and important social networks; Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. After hosting more than a few talks, trainings, and panels, I’ve found that I’m definitely not alone in my preference, either.
However, I’ve always felt the search operators available inside monitoring streams were a hugely underutilized feature. If you think you’re familiar with these, I’d ask you to suspend your disbelief for a moment and believe that there’s some functionality you’re missing. Let me start by telling you a little more about what stream search operators are.
Stream search operators
These are, essentially, rules that you can apply to your streams in order to filter them. In order to create a search stream, click the Add Stream button in the top left section of the Hootsuite dashboard. Then, select the Search tab from the dropdown.
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View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on May 20, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
Social media management has come a long way in the past few years. Whereas once it was relegated to the emphemeral domain of ‘social media’ guru-hood, we now have concrete strategies and metrics we can draw on in order to develop and measure real business success from social media marketing. Here are five metrics that I use for reporting that every social media manager should be familiar with.
1. Assisted Conversions
What it is:
Assisted Conversions show the overall impact of marketing channels by comparing conversions that came directly from a channel to conversions that came indirectly from that channel.
Why it’s important: (more…)
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on May 14, 2013 by Stephen Kapusta
It’s safe to say that Facebook.com and YouTube.com are the #2 and #3 most visited websites on the world wide web (behind only Google.com). No big secret there. It’s also pretty safe to assume that you or someone you know has shared a YouTube video on their Facebook Wall. Also not a life-changing revelation. What might surprise to you is that you can actually target viewers of these Facebook-hosted YouTube videos using a Google AdWords advertising product. That’s right; read it twice.
“How is this possible?” you might ask. ”Aren’t Facebook and Google mortal enemies?” you might ask. Well ya, but with Google AdWords for video and some keen investigation you are able to leverage these two super-massive audiences in conjunction with one another. You get the best of both worlds by effectively serving your advertising message alongside compelling YouTube content within the world’s most popular forum, Facebook. (more…)
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Paid Search, Social Media
Posted on April 25, 2013 by Dorcas Alexander
Your social media traffic data is split across several reports in Google Analytics. Are you taking steps to get it together?
Social media traffic sources appear in Social :: Network Referrals, as well as in Sources :: All Traffic and Sources :: Referrals. They also appear in Sources :: Campaigns if you use campaign-tagged links, not to mention the ones masquerading as direct traffic.
There’s little you can do about the direct traffic, but to get a handle on the rest of it, it’s helpful to understand where the reports overlap and where they don’t. Some of the sources for these visits are accounted for across reports. Others appear only in Sources reports and not in Social reports.
For example, the Sources :: All Traffic report shows visits from t.co and twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com (values of the Source dimension), while the Social :: Network Referrals report pulls them together as visits from Twitter (a single value of the Social Network dimension).
It’s not clear from these two reports whether the two campaign-tagged sources “twitter” and “Twitter” on the left are also pulled together into the social network “Twitter” on the right. Actually it’s not even clear that the other three sources are part of the social network, either, but we’d like to think that, wouldn’t we? (more…)
View Comments (11 Responses) | Categories: Analytics, Google Analytics, Social Media
Posted on March 28, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
So, in the dead of night, Google rolled out another change to their Google+ network. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s what it looks like:
The largest changes are the new, responsive cover photo and the now-circular profile picture. Besides being uniquely troublesome for companies with square logos, it offers some new optimization opportunities which we’re going to detail below. Beyond those, they’ve rearranged the About section and made some tweaks to the presentation on the Photos and Videos tabs. (more…)
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on March 14, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
As part of our social media auditing and competitive analysis services, we see the same basic mistakes over and over again. This post is our effort to try and curtail some of those common gaffes and make the social web a better place. Here are our top ten common social media marketing mistakes.
1. Forgetting to add a symbol before ‘@’ in a public tweet
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Posted on February 28, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
Vine, a new app from Twitter, is a social media platform that combines all of the best elements of gifs and videos. You might remember my prediction that a mobile network based around gifs would be the next big social network – with Vine, which allows users to create short, looping videos, I’d consider my prediction a half-success.
Vine presents another great content opportunity for brands, and, best of all, it does it at no extra cost tax to their current resources. It’s tight integration with Twitter means you’ve already got a built in community, and gives it the rapidly-disappearing prestige of being one of Twitter’s multimedia cards – you might remember Instagram losing this particular honor. That means they can be featured in Twitter’s embedded tweets. Additionally, it’s low budget by nature – viewers aren’t expecting the high-quality polish of YouTube content, and you’ve only got to worry about a six-second timeframe. Ready to get started?
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View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on February 14, 2013 by Dan Wilkerson
Video content is one of the most resource-intensive kinds of content you can create. Done well, it requires expensive equipment and time investment both before, during, and after shooting. The result is often very appealing and, as we can see with sites like YouTube, intrinsically social. Yet, more often than not, it can be the video hosting service that earns a link, and not your site.
Short of hosting the video on your own site, here are a few simple steps you can take to earn a few extra links.
Step 1: Embed the video on your site in unlisted mode
A simple way to do this is by creating a blog post about the video. Add some content before and after it (more on that in a bit), and embed it centrally in the page. Set the video to ‘Unlisted’ for a week or so – this way, Google will index the video as part of your site before it indexes it in YouTube, increasing the likelihood that it will use your page with the video as a video result in search. Make sure to optimize whatever written content you add as well as the page itself.
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View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
Posted on November 27, 2012 by Dan Wilkerson
When it comes to going social, some of the best and brightest pioneers are restaurants. The sharing-driven nature of social media mixes well with the visual world of the restaurant industry. We’ve all seen people snapping photos of their dish to share on Facebook (and maybe indulged once or twice ourselves). In fact, there’s a dizzying array of ways that consumers can interact with and endorse restaurants on social media, including check-ins, photos, recommendations, tips, lists, and much more. So really, the question at this point is why wouldn’t a restaurant be using social media to help them achieve their business goals? And yet, there are some pretty great businesses that would do well to use social media that are not seizing the opportunity. Today, we’re going to go over those opportunities using two businesses that haven’t really made the jump as our examples.
The restaurants we’ll be examining today are Wings Over and Kings Family Restaurants. Wings Over is a group of franchises born out of Massachusetts, specializing in delivering hot and tasty wings made fresh (I used to be a delivery driver for them – try the boneless Honey BBQ, you WILL thank me). Kings Family Restaurant is a chain of American-style dine-in restaurants with a history starting in the Pittsburgh area. Both of these chains have dipped their toes, in one way or another, into the social sphere, but neither is really jumping in the way that they should be. Let’s take a look at what they’re missing.
1. Reviews
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View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on November 12, 2012 by Dan Wilkerson
In June of this year, we published an infographic listing all of the sizing information for images on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. It was a wildly successful piece of content, totally blowing our expectations out of the water. Unfortunately, while its popularity has flourished, nearly every social network instituted changes to their image sizes, rendering most of the information on the infographic out of date.
We knew we needed to update the information on the cheat sheet, but we weren’t comfortable with simply adjusting one or two figures on the blog post and leaving it as-is. We’d also received a lot of feedback, both on the design and information it contained. We decided to redesign the entire sheet and incorporate a few more social networks.
We also decided to permanently redirect the old sheet here, so that shared tweets, pins, likes, and so on, would lead to the correct sizing dimensions. Additionally, as sizing changes are implemented across social networks, we’ll actively update this sheet – meaning that if you use the embed code at the bottom to share this sheet on your own site, the image will automatically update with changes as they are rolled out. No more out-of-date information.
So, without further ado, here it is – the ultimate, complete, final social media sizing cheat sheet. As before, you can find a simple text list of the pixel dimensions at the bottom. Save this sucker on your hard drive and never Google ‘Facebook cover photo size’ again.
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View Comments (258 Responses) | Categories: Social Media
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