Ignoring social media is as harmful to business as ignoring phone calls or emails

By 2014 organizations that refuse to communicate with customers by social media will face the same level of wrath as those that ignore emails and phone calls today.

As familiarity with social media grows, customers expectations about how organizations will use these channels are evolving. The new minimum level of response expected will be for organizations to use social media to promote products and respond to inquiries.

The dissatisfaction stemming from failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15 per cent increase in churn rate for existing customers.

It’s crucial that organizations implement approaches to handling social media now. The effort involved in addressing social media commentary is not good cause to ignore relevant comments or solvable issues.

Social media leaders must develop a process for deciding whether to respond to public or client-prompted social engagements. A person or team needs to have the power to decide whether a comment is relevant and whether the issue presented is solvable, or whether there are positive dimensions to what is being said that should be recorded.

It’s also important to accept that it’s impracticable and counterproductive to respond to everything. For example, if a comment is clearly inflammatory and unsolvable, it is usually best not to respond at all. However, if a person is an existing customer logging a harsh but legitimate complaint, the issue must be addressed publicly, promptly and within the same media it was made.

Generally the best practice is to acknowledge the issue on social media, but to move attempts to resolve the issue offline.

Some organizations have implemented the first stages of a social media engagement process, but they make the mistake of treating engagements as ad hoc. While over half of organizations monitor social media, only 23 per cent collect and analyze data. This means that most organizations do not keep records of interactions occurring on social media and do not keep social profiles for people they have engaged with.

Some examples of the world’s most popular social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

It’s important not only to keep records of individual conversations, but constantly to analyze the interactions to see what insights can be gleaned from them.

Developing a means for acting on social data will provide a competitive advantage by providing exceptional customer experience through increasingly significant social channels. Firms such as Internet & Social Media Advertising specialize in setting this up for you.

Organizations are urged to do three things. Firstly, participate — it’s important that organizations don’t let a fear of someone saying something bad about them stop them from participating in social media. Secondly, don’t assume all comments require the same level of attention — develop an appropriate response for the different types of interaction your business faces. Thirdly, plan for an increase in social commentary and adapt communications practices to cope — this will require changes to job descriptions, performance metrics and business processes.

Contact us now to discuss the implementation of your social media campaign now.

2012 London Olympic Games: Social-Media lessons for small business

Twitter wars have broken out between athletes and unfortunate tweets were sent out — all reflecting poorly on their brands.

If you’re like many, you’ve been engrossed in the 2012 Olympic Games happening in London. While the games provide an entertaining opportunity to cheer for your favorite athletes, they also offer lessons for small-business owners about the right and wrong way to use social media.

Since the games began, social media has taken center stage and sometimes, not for the right reasons. Athletes have been kicked off teams for posting offensive tweets. Twitter wars have broken out between athletes and attendees have started online riots over unused VIP seats that weren’t filled.

So what can you learn from these Olympic social-media debacles?

1. Think before you tweet.

The incident: A triple jumper from Greece and a soccer player from Switzerland were booted from their respective teams for sending offensive tweets.

The lesson: “The lesson here is to think before you tweet,” said Dick Raman, CEO of BrandReact, a Miami-based firm that counsels corporations about their use of social media. “Because social media is instant, people sometimes don’t realize that things written in the heat of the moment have a lasting effect even in the Twitterverse.”

Raman recommends carefully planning your social-media updates and to run them by several people in your company prior to posting.

“Remember that your tweets are a reflection of your brand,” Raman said. “And whether it’s you or your employees who are maintaining your corporate social-media accounts, it’s important that everyone think twice and then think again prior to posting.”

2. When customers vent, listen fast and address the problem even faster.

The incident: People who weren’t able to get tickets to the Olympics were upset when a large number of seats at major events went unused. They took to Twitter to voice their frustration, forcing Olympic organizers to address the issue publicly.

The lesson: “Whether you are a large or small business, if you are in the social-media space, you will have to address issues from customers,” said Jeff Zelaya, an executive at Vocus Media and public speaker who trains companies on the proper use of social media. “Businesses need to remember that social media is all about transparency, so you can’t really hide anything. If you find yourself facing an angry mob of tweeps who are upset over something your brand did, the first thing you need to do is publicly address it and let them know that you are addressing the problem.”

Olympic organizers publicly addressed the empty-seat issue by distributing tickets to students and the military.

“Olympic organizers did a great job in solving this problem,” Zelaya said. “They responded directly on Twitter to the people who were upset and distributed tickets to people who could not get them previously.”

3. Don’t trash your colleagues or competitors.

The incident: U.S.. women’s soccer goalie Hope Solo launched a Twitter war trashing Olympic commentator and former U.S. soccer player Brandi Chastain, criticizing her for several comments she made during a match.

The lesson: “Brandi Chastain is a former Olympian and colleague of Hope Solo,” Raman said. “Taking to Twitter to trash her wasn’t appropriate. The same thing applies for small businesses. Instead of trashing your colleagues and competitors, use that opportunity to talk about the strengths of your company and what makes you different.”

4. You control your use of social media to promote your brand.

The incident: Australian swimmer Emily Seebohm failed to win a gold medal and blamed the loss on social media, citing that she didn’t perform as well as she should have because she believed the hype on social media that had her pegged to win gold.

The lesson: “Brands have to remember that they control their presence on social media,” Zelaya said. “When something goes wrong, don’t blame it on social media. Instead, use it to talk about the problem in a transparent way and let others know how you intend to address it.”

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7 Tips To Beat The Google Panda

Google Panda is the latest update rolled out by Google in the manner by which it ranks websites in the search results. If you have been working with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) field, then you have an idea how this new Google search algorithm has impacted a lot of websites in its search result. The purpose of this new Google search algorithm is to bring back the sites with quality contents up the search rankings and bring the sites with low quality contents to the bottom of the rankings.

Gone are the traditional practices of ranking websites where you simply write an article, put some backlinks in it and pay some service providers to spin it and submit it to thousands of spammy websites and, voila, your website is ranked high in the search engines overnight. If you ever attempt to do this technique now, your website is guaranteed to plummet at the bottom of the search engine rankings or worst it could be banned by Google as a spam site.

BenefitS of Google Panda

One of the benefits of the Google Panda update is that it levelled the playing fields in search rankings. It used to be that wealthy businesses can spend millions of dollars to buy practically thousands of websites with bots contents accessing their main website thereby fooling the search engines into ranking them high in the search results to the detriment of smaller competing businesses that cannot spend as much on similar tactics.

So, Google Panda seemed like a poker-faced gatekeeper of search rankings. How, then, can you make your website rank high on the search engine results page (SERP)?

7 Tips To Beat The Google Panda

1. Write good quality content. Putting good quality contents on your site is mandatory. Google Panda is very particular on the contents of your site. Good quality means that the subject matter must be something of value to the readers. Put contents that are informative and quality editorial subject matters.

2. Contents must be unique. Unique contents mean that it is not a duplicate of another topic somewhere on another website. Plagiarism is, therefore, to be avoided at all cost.

3. Update your site regularly. Putting good quality and unique contents on your site at regular intervals is an indication to Google web crawlers that your site is active and lively.

4. Avoid low quality backlinks. Low quality backlinks are those links to your site coming from websites intended to spam. Be very careful when submitting articles to websites that spam other sites. Your site will definitely be downgraded by Google, or worst, your site will be blocked.

5. Avoid high add ratio. Do not plaster too many ads all over your site. It may be favourable to adsense but it is not wise to optimizing it for search purposes.

6. On page SEO should match off page SEO. Your site meta tags including the keywords of your site contents should match the contents of your site. As much as possible, links pointing to your site must come from contents of other website that at least share similar subject matter.

7. Do not forget the social media platform. It would seem that Google is using signals coming from social media such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and bookmarking sites in gauging the rankings of websites. It would then help a lot to create link to your site from these social sites. Be mindful, however, that this social media sites have lately been used to launch spam which is a big violation to Google Panda algorithm.

As it has always been proven true, prevention is better than cure. Do not try to circumvent the rules of Google Panda. You may get away with it maybe for a short period of time, but once it catches you, then you can kiss your ranking goodbye. Play the game fairly and you will thrive.

So if you like the post give us some social love: Please hit the “Google +” button, Facebook “like” and “share” and leave some “comments” and see you on the next post very soon.

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Facebook Pages: Fancy New Features

Facebook Pages: Schedule Posts, Admin Roles, Manager App And Other Fancy New Features

 In the last few weeks, Facebook has been slowly rolling out a series of new features specifically targeted to help small business manage their Pages better.Since this wasn’t a big announcement but a gradual roll out, you might have missed some of them. So we’re here to go over each one of these features and make sure you’re not just adapting but, making the most out of them.Let just say this before we get started, while these new features might seem small to you, some of them are really changing the way you manage your Facebook Page.

Page Posts Metrics

This is huge. Facebook has added instant Reach metrics to the bottom of each posts on your Page. While this data is available on your Facebook Insights, there is nothing like getting a quick glance at your performance during your day’s activity.

Let’s face it, most people don’t spend 15 minutes a day looking at Insights data to see how they’re doing. If you want to get a quick visual of the metric, just hover over the links. Here is the screenshot:

On the left, you can see exactly how many people saw this specific post.

• Organic is the number of people who saw YOUR post, either on the News Feed, the Ticker or on the actual Page
• Viral is the number of people that saw the post from a friend. This is important because they are users you do not have access to. In this example, 140 people that are not SocialMouths Fans saw the post

On the right image, you have the percentage of how many of your likes were reached by this post. A simple formula:

Number of people that saw your post (Organic) / Total number of Likes = Your Reach

I’m not sure if this is official, but these metrics are not showing on posts published from a third-party app.

Promoted Posts

Another easy way to promote and advertise.

If it makes sense to you to put down $15 to reach a certain amount of people, then test it. If it doesn’t, don’t.

Let’s do some quick math. If you reach 3,300 people and 1 person turns into a buyer (which is a conversion rate of 0.03%) and your product or whatever you sell has a profit of $20, then this is a great way to advertise.

Page Manager App

Everybody is saying this is the Community Manager dream come true but, I think this is even more important for the entrepreneur that’s always moving.

This App, which is only available for iPhone at the moment, let’s you access, manage and post to your Page without having to deal with your personal account. If you are Admin to more than one Page, you can also access them here (I made them blurry on the image but you get the point).

Besides that, and more importantly, you can view Insights at Page level and even at Post level.

This means you can post something and then look at its performance right from your iPhone. Life is good.

The 2 images on the left are showing Insights at post level and the one on the right at Page level.

Schedule Posts

This is also kind of a game changer. Until now, the only way to schedule a post on Pages was through a third-party app but now Facebook has added this feature into its system.

You can post content for up to 6 months in advance.

Click on the little clock icon on the left to set the time for your post. The only thing is, I can’t believe how many clicks it takes to schedule a post. Hey Facebook, what ever happend to simple calendars? This is supposed to be available for all now.

Admin Permission Levels

I’ll give you an example of why this is important. In some of the Pages where I act as administrator, I only care about looking at analytics but since I’m an admin, I get bombarded with every single activity that happens in the front-end.

With this in place, I only have access to Insights. Thank you.

Or it can be the other way around, you might have a member of your team that moderates activity but you don’t want him to have access to manage Admin Roles. Now you can make sure he’s not gonna get drunk, hate on you, and lock the rest of the team out… It happens!

Facebook has launched 5 different levels for administrators. Here is the official breakdown and rights each one of these roles includes:

Contact us now to discuss your online advertising needs.

50 Amazing Facts About Google

Google has become an integral part of our lives and  the word has even become a verb as we are often heard to say let’s “Google” that. I have even heard the web giant referred to in hushed tones during heated discussions and when a controversial fact or figure is being debated across a dinner table or at the local bar as to whether it is true or false and a person will pull out their iPhone and say “Let’s Google It”.

Google was founded in 1997 by two Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin whose initial company mission statement was

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

Which they seem to have made a good dent in achieving since they started the company.

Technology is enhancing us as human beings and the integrating of artificial intelligence is slowly being weaved and embedded into our activities and habits almost without us noticing. This reliance that is permeating our day to day existence even extends to a reported 60% plus of all buying decisions now starting with a Google search as we start our research online rather than walk the shop aisles and asking sales attendants questions.

It’s been barely 13 years since conception but the search company whose slogan is “Don’t be evil”  (reputed to have been coined by the Google engineer Paul Buchheit in 2006 ) has now struck out into other technology areas beyond their core search business such as

• The successful Android mobile operating system which is reporting 400,000 activations per day (April 2011)
• Picasa photo organisation
• Google ‘Earth’ the 3D view of the earth technology that was initially the start up Keyhole
• Google Energy that is developing and investing in renewable energy projects such as wind farms in North Dakota
• Google Driverless Car that uses Google Street View with artificial intelligence technology

The law of abundance is evident here if you want a glimpse of the facts and the staggering global statistics for Google in its search engine and associated online properties such as YouTube, Android and other associated subsidiaries and technologies

50 Amazing Google Facts and Figures

1. The original nickname was BackRub due to the backlink technology used to determine site importance but eventually changed the name to Google originating from the misspelling of the word “Googol (the mathematician’s term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros) to signify the large quantities of information for people that it would provide.
2. Google began as a research project in 1996
3. Google.com domain went online in 1997
4. The first funding of $100,000 for Google was provided by Andy Bechtolsheim the co-founder of Sun Microsystems
5. The CEO for ‘Excite’ George Bell rejected to buy Google when it was offered to him for $1 million when Brin and Page were finding the search engine taking  up to much time from their research in 1999
6. The first round of venture capital of $25 million was provided in 1999 by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital 5 years before it floated
7. Google incorporated in 1998
8. 30 million pages indexed in 1998
9. 1 billion pages indexed in 2000
10. Eric Schmidt named CEO in in 2001
11. Acquired Blogger in 2003
12. Adsense launched in 2003
13. Gmail launched in 2004
14. Google IPO in 2004
15. 8 billion pages indexed in in 2004
16. Acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion
17. 1 Trillion pages indexed in in 2008
18. Android announced in 2007
19. Chrome launched in 2008
20. 1.8 million shares given to Stanford University for its PageRank Patent sold by Stanford in 2005 for $336 million
21. It currently runs over 1 million computer servers in data centers around the world
22. Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day
23. 7.2 billion daily page views
24. 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites
25. Google’s global search market share is 85%
26. Daily visitors to Google is 620 million
27. Google.com’s worldwide ranking is number 1
28. Revenue in 2000 was $19 million
29. Profit in 2000 was a loss of $14 million
30. In 2009 Google’s revenue was nearly $23 billion
31. In 2009 Google’s profit was $6.5 billion
32. 97% is the percentage of revenue from advertising
33. Stock price at its IPO in 2004 was $85
34. Stock price in 2010 was $535
35. Over 19,000 employees
36. 37% are research staff
37. 37% are sales staff
38. A ‘Noogler’ is a new person at Google
39. 45% of Google’s products are currently in Beta
40. YouTube market share is 39.4%
41. 270,000 words a minute are written on Blogger
42. 146 million Gmail users
43. Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites
44. 400,000 new Android devices are activated every day
45. 100 million activated Android devices
46. 200,000 Apps available for the Android
47. 4.5 billion Apps have been installed from the Android Market
48. Google’s Android mobile operating system is the world’s leading smart phone platform surpassing Nokia and Apple with a 33% share
49. 33 million Android operating systems were shipped in the the fourth quarter of 2010
50. The Google Driverless car named the ‘Stanley’ won the DARPA Grand challenge and the $2 million in prize money from the US Department of Defense in 2005

50 Facebook Facts And Figures

The rise and rise of Facebook is producing a scramble by marketers and companies to leverage its huge global database and traffic.

Google is looking over its shoulder as Facebook grows at over 10 million users a month and sits currently at number two on web traffic rankings according to Alexa.com.

Last year Facebook surpassed Google for the top ranking for total time spent online.

Google is even being forced to continually adjust its search engine algorithms to cater for the a social web that provides more prominence for social channels in its search results. Facebook has also become the 3rd largest video website with 46.6 million viewers sitting behind number one ranked video content property provider Google with its YouTube site and Yahoo at second ranking.

50 Facebook Facts and Figures

1. 1 in every 13 people on Earth is on Facebook
2. 35+ demographic represents more than 30% of the entire user base
3. 71.2 % of all USA internet users are on Facebook
4. In 20 minutes 1,000,000 links are shared on Facebook
5. In 20 minutes 1,484,000 event invites are posted
6. In 20 minutes 1,323,000 photos are tagged
7. In 20 minutes 1,851,000 status updates are entered
8. In 20 minutes 1.972 million friend requests are accepted
9. In 20 minutes 2,716,000 photos are uploaded
10. In 20 minutes 2,716,000 messages are sent
11. In 20 minutes 10.2 million comments are posted
12. In 20 minutes 1,587,000 wall posts are written
13. 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year’s weekend
14. 48% of young Americans said they found out about news through Facebook
15. 48% of 18 to 34 year olds check Facebook right when they wake up
16. 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
17. Average user has 130 friends
18. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
19. There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
20. Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
21. Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
22. More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
23. More than 70 translations available on the site
24. About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
25. Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
26. Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
27. People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
28. Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
29. Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
30. More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites
31. There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices
32. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
33. There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
34. Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage
35. One early Facebook function was a file sharing service
36. The first “Work Networks” as well as the original educational networks  included Apple and Microsoft
37. The meaning of the term poke has never been defined
38. There is an ‘App’ to see what’s on the Facebook cafe menu
39. Mark Zuckerburg (CEO of Facebook) calls himself a “Harvard Graduate” when in fact he didn’t graduate (apparently his reply is that “there isn’t a setting for dropout”)
40. Australian’s spend more time per month on Facebook than any other country at over 7 hours on average
41. A Facebook employee hoodie sold for $4,000 on eBay
42. Facebook was initially bank-rolled by Peter Thiel the co-founder of PayPal for $500,000
43. It is the second biggest website by traffic behind Google (at the moment)
44. Facebook is now valued at approximately $80 billion
45. Facebook makes money through advertising  and virtual products
46. Facebook was almost shut down by a lawsuit by ConnectU who claimed that Zuckerburg stole the idea and Technology for Facebook (the issue was settled out of court)
47. The USA has the largest Facebook user base with 155 million people which represents 23.6% of Facebook’s total users
48. There is over 16,000,000 Facebook fan pages
49. Texas Hold’em Poker is the most popular Facebook page with over 41 million fans
50. More than 650 million active users

Contact Internet & Social Media Advertising now to discuss your Internet Advertising needs.

20 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Likes

Growing your Facebook “likes” are social media’s version of building the traditional email subscribers list.

Facebook specialist Allfacebook.com states that for them Facebook fans are twice as effective as an email list. Their reasoning?…that email is now full of “spam” and 50% of all Facebook users log in every day.

Steve Gaither from the agency JB Chicago reports that the conversion rates for Facebook and Twitter are consistent across a number of their social media marketing campaigns.

Conversion Rates for Facebook and Twitter

These are what JB Chicago have found to be the conversion rates on their campaigns.

• Paid Twitter: one to three percent
• Organic Twitter: eight to nine percent
• Facebook organic: 20 to 30 percent
• Facebook ads: 18 to 20 percent

According to Venturebeat in an interview with Carolyn Penner ( a Twitter spokesperson)  “We’re seeing incredible engagement numbers — between 3 percent and 5 percent on average for Promoted Tweets… We’ve seen some as high as 52 percent,”

(Twitter defines engagement as a clickthrough, but it also counts retweets, replies and favorites in its engagement numbers — meaning that part of the ROI includes one-on-one conversations with fans of the brand)

So despite some differences in conversion rates reported, it goes without saying that capturing those important Facebook likes is vital to your social media marketing campaigns.

So how can you grow your Facebook likes and increase engagement?

20 Ways to Increase  Your Facebook Likes and Engagement

1. Advertise on Facebook to get more “likes”. This is the quickest way to grow your fan base. The Supre fashion brand did this to obtain 40,000 fans quickly.
2. Rotate your ads “DAILY”  people get tired of hearing the same thing in conversation so change your ad! Conversion (CTR) rates can drop by 50% after the first 24 hours. Do not “set and forget”
3. Add Facebook Social Plugin Box to your Blog and Website (60% of my “likes” are achieved this way)
4. Free exclusive video that can only be viewed if you like the page.
5. Run a competition. Everyone likes a competition
6. Make it obvious on a custom landing page by providing a big bold “Like our Page”
7. Initially ask friends and family to like your page. A bit overdone but essential at the beginning
8. Offer a free ebook to obtain a “like” (just like you should be doing for email subscriber acquisition)
9. Post content from your blog to Facebook whenever you write a new post. Facebook users love receiving new content on Facebook without having to go looking for your blog. Treat Facebook as an extension of your blog.
10. Provide enticing high resolution photos. Compelling photos that are appropriate for your target audience will keep them coming back and make them share and so drive more likes from their friends
11. Ask questions regularly using Facebook’s native question app.
12. Include a link to your Facebook page in your email signature
13. Provide a compelling welcome video on your Facebook landing page
14. Simple but often missed: Add a “follow us” on Facebook button near the top of your website and blog pages
15. Create an incentivised “Like” page that gives people a reason to like your page.
16. Include the Facebook like button on your email HTML template so that people can like your facebook page from the regular email newsletter
17. Add a large custom banner to your blog and website asking to “Like
18. Add a link to your Facebook page as one of your three LinkedIn website links that are part of your LinkedIn settings in your profile
19. Add a newsworthy update that is relevant for your industry or market niche to your Facebook page every day
20. Offer “Special” including discounts to Facebook fans. The majority of Facebook users “like” a page to obtain a discount

Even though growing your Facebook Likes is important don’t forget to continue to grow both your email subscriber list and Twitter followers. Different users have different social network channels of choice and you need to be everywhere. “Synergize” multiple channels don’t “Monopolize”.

Contact Internet & Social media Advertising now to discuss all your online advertising needs.