Social Media Marketing - Round Up, 10 May 2013

Is Facebook blue the new black for community managers? Social dashboards indicate Facebook marketing fashion changes by the season. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you might have to download a book or two, attend a webinar or five, and stay on a regular diet that includes a healthy dose of the online marketing conference circuit.

Positive ratings and those 5-star reviews from online consumers are powerful marketing content. Some 70% of Americans say they look at reviews before taking the next step to conversion, and 51% of consumers say they would never buy a large electronic item, such as a TV or computer, without reading at least one piece of user-generated content.

As Facebook Graph Search evolves and marketers begin to come to grips with the opportunities provided from the social graph, it becomes clear that a combination of both search and social media tactics are required if brands aim to improve visibility in the graph search engine results.

Social media continues to evolve and ways to improve engagement are also changing constantly. There are always ways to tweak, change and alter social media to improve engagement levels and make a little more of your efforts. Google+ Hangouts, Circles and Communities Use your Google+ business account to create Google+ Circles, which others will be delighted to join.

According to comScore, 40% of time on Facebook is spent on the News Feed. When a user logs in, there are normally many more posts than can fit in their "top news." EdgeRank is an algorithm developed by Facebook that governs what is displayed - and how high - on the News Feed.

My guess is you're busy. You're running around all day, you're battling your email and you're taking care of your customers. But in today's socially-connected world, it's not enough. You can't rest on a great product and go radio silent; you need to build a great brand.

We hear the phrase content marketing a lot these days, and it simply means you are creating some sort of content for your customers, whether it be blogs, ebooks, videos, or something else. It's one thing to create that content, but another to give it legs.

B2B companies can often struggle to make social work as people don't tend to use Facebook and Pinterest for professional reasons. There's always Linkedin of course, but that presents an entirely different challenge from the four main consumer networks.

Jasmine Henry Engaging your customers via social media is a day-in and day-out process that requires serious creativity and a continual effort to post relevant, eye-catching and informative material. You should simultaneously promote your brand and impress your customers.

Although the vast majority of brand engagement on Pinterest is user-generated, many branded accounts have achieved an impressive reach of their own. Social media-benchmarking company Unmetric took a look at 5,000 branded Pinterest boards in mid-March to assess which boards generated the most engagement in terms of followers, comments, likes and repins.

Are you looking for actionable tips to improve your social media marketing? Are you wondering what the common themes of social media experts are these days? This April, 1,100 passionate marketers from every corner of the world traveled to San Diego for Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW13), to find out.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, where brands drive engagement with their content through official accounts and pages, 70% of brand engagement on Pinterest is generated by the community itself, according to a new report by Digitas and Curalate.

Planning and executing a successful social media marketing strategy sometimes requires that brands look outside their own companies for assistance. Businesses may partner with consultants or agencies to tap into the expertise, skills and resources they can offer, to help with strategy and tactical execution of the plan.

I recently blogged about consumer brands that had come up with successful Twitter strategies, highlighting ASOS and Nike among others as companies that knew what they were doing with social. Many commenters mentioned that it would be useful to see a similar post focusing on B2B examples and I was obviously happy to oblige.

Social media metrics firm Unmetric evaluated over 5,000 branded Pinterest pages to determine which brands are leading on the social networking site built on images. The data gathered spanned from all time up until March 14, 2013 to identify the top five brands in five different categories: most followers, most comments, most likes, most pins [...]