Digital marketing is constantly evolving, and right now i-strategy in London have a bunch of digital professionals and marketers at a two day conference discussing and sharing strategies on the future of social media and marketing online.
I would have liked to have gone to this, however details hit my inbox a bit too late – but with the power of Twitter, I’ve managed to keep up to date with these discussions to keep abreast of what’s happening now and in the future online. Some really interesting statistics and information have come out of this, so I thought I’d share it here too – so you have it all in one place:
Search
Metrics currently show that 40% of all searches across the web are local in nature while 70% of all mobile searches result in action within the hour
604 million of the 1 billion FB users access using mobile. Facebook next generation internet, although not as resilient as they think they are. The goal is to get people to share on Facebook, content is king.
Hierarchy of Facebook prominence on the newsfeed works as follows: Share; Comment; Like
Facebook Marketing Tip:
Publish posts outside business hours, evenings and weekends and especially Fridays. FB happiness index spikes on Fridays. Great day to post. Only 16 % of your Facebook fans are seeing your updates in their news feed. If you want more it’s pay to play. Create superfans and empower them to be community managers.
Principles of Facebook success: Be authentic, be useful, be entertaining, be relevant, be timely, listen. People start P2P relationships through small lightweight initial connections, you build deeper relationships over time.
How to increase website engagement is key to getting content into the socialsphere.
Sharing, Lists & Content
Embed social share into ebooks and white papers to build email lists. Give away free stuff to build your lists. Use promoted posts to leverage great organic content. Repurpose and reschedule successful tweets, but not in Facebook. Social is a tactic to drive traffic to owned media. Be engaging, ask for input and have great content.
We really are living in a content world where Content is King and Engagement is Queen, but CONTEXT is their kingdom, she rules the house. And although content is King, shareable content is King for effective FB marketing.
Fear of the Negative
There does seem to be a huge fear of negative comments coming from many businesses, which results in not embracing the social digital world for fear of negative feedback.
If this does happen, use this as an opportunity and REPLY to negative comments. Engagement is the most critical part of having a social media strategy. So many big brands don’t reply which leads the consumer to get frustrated and leave negative comments, but don’t be afraid of this. It’s massively important to engage otherwise you become a house with lights on and no-one home.
Negative comments are a great opportunity to turn around customer opinion if you can fix the problem.
NB: It’s worth noting that 80% of consumers that receive a response from a brand go on to buy.
Facebook Apps to give you metrics
Booshaka – ranks the most passionate people and communities on Facebook.
Running a contest or sweepstakes on FB? You’ll need an app. Try @strutta, @shortstacklab @tabsite @wildfireapp.
If you want to analyse your Facebook metrics further? Checkout @pagelever @edgerankchecker @zuumsocial @crowdbooster
Change Management
For real change, your leadership must embrace the future. This is one of our biggest struggles. Leadership must embrace new technology. For example live twitter chat managed through coveritlive.com good for public sector. And live video chat is a great way to diffuse a crisis, not many businesses with the nerve to actually give this a try.
Next big thing
The next big thing for Facebook is Search. It won’t compete with Google but will be king for social searching online.
So the message here is loud and clear, in order to move your marketing onto the next level, then companies – however big or small – must embrace content marketing and build up relationships with their customers. Face to face conversations will never die and will always be the best way of communicating and building relationships, but we all have to accept that we now live in a digital world where it’s now become obvious that it’s just as important to be open and available to build relationships online.
These are my thoughts – I would love to hear from you, let me know what you think about content marketing?
