Posted by Justin Cambria on Fri, Aug 13, 2010
The intertubes were ablaze this week with the news that
Twitter launched its official share button. Content publishers web-wide can now use a button straight from the source to put next to their stuff so you the - faithful internet reader - can re-tweet it.
Tweetmeme has long offered this function, but Twitter is pushing the button out with some high profile media partners like Gawker and CNN.com. It seems to be a directly competitive move against Facebook's now ubiquitous 'Like' button. The elephants in the social media room are unsurprisingly going head to head for dominance in the 'use us to tell everyone you know you like something online' market.
We here at PNP extol the virtues of Twitter for Social Media Marketing. There are some measurable metrics with Twitter - your number of followers, number of updates, and link analytics through services like BitLy, to see whose clicking on your links that yo share on Twitter. And as I wrote on here Monday, there's increasing business interest in measuring the weight of influence on Twitter through increasing sophisticated means.
For marketers or business owners who are dollars & cents conscious, and whose time is their most precious commodity, the vague value proposition that being on Twitter is undoubtedly good can be frustrating. Sometimes I wish there was more I could say about why it has value or how much a Tweet is worth. We do have the advantage of HubSpot's social media tools to measure how many leads come in through Twitter, which is a quantifiable advantage that those unfortunates marketing sans HubSpot don't realize.
For now I spend time on Twitter and accept that it has value, and because I am a dork who enjoys it. Because it is so simple, the user community constantly innovates new uses for it. The community itself gave rise to the now ubiquitous #hashtag. Here's a couple of the ways you can take advantage of these community generated innovations to endear yourself to your followership:
- Utilize the #followfriday or #FF tag to increase your ‘twwethenticity’. On Fridays, use this tag to give credit to Tweeters you like and encourage others to follow them. There's even a FF site that measures influence around this tag. Of course!
- Use the #musicmonday or #MM tag on Mondays to share your current favorite tunes with your followers. As awesome as your product is, people might like you more if you share what's in your iTunes rather than just what you want to sell them
- Use that Tweetbutton you're going to be seeing so much of the share stories you like with your followers. And include a bit of wit about why you are sharing it! Sambang does an awesome job of this and her sassy bits of pre-link texts actually ignited our cyber-friendship.
What steps are you taking to up your Tweethenticity and Twitter street cred? Oh and, Follow us, yo!
Follow PullnotPush on Twitter!
Posted by Justin Cambria on Mon, Aug 09, 2010
At PullNotPush, we adhere to the HubSpot mantra, ‘if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.’ As part of our
Social Media Marketing, we track our online reach through RSS, email, and social media. We recently doubled our following on our
Pull Marketing Facebook Page in the course of a week, which was uber-cool, and which got me thinking about the quality vs. quantity concept in social media relationships, especially in the B2B sphere. There’s art & science to all of this, and measurements alone will never accurately assess the total picture of social media influence.
The Business of Measuring Influence
The science is of interest to lots of folks, as evidenced by my Twitter stream today, which featured a slew of tweets about online influence building. Noteworthy players are already invested: see HubSpot’s Twitter Grader, pop in your handle & get your rating (I'm rocking a 90 out of 100! w00t!). And there’s Klout, a San Francisco startup that raised $1.5 million in VC funding this spring, which is dedicated to mathematically measuring the actual quality of Twitter influence through algorithms that measure over 25 variables to rate a Tweeter (I scored a paltry 14. Sadface.)
Today, ConversationAge tweeted an interesting ZDNet blog post by Tom Foremski which cites research from HP’s social computing lab that puts some sophisticated math behind the notion that popularity doesn’t equal influence online. The more followers you have doesn’t necessarily make you the most influential.
Art & Science Merge: More Followers isn't More Influence
This research marries the art and science of the overall influence concept: authentic and compelling content publication, and organic attraction of your products of services through that, will trump spending time & resources fishing for likes and followers to get your count up for its own sake. No one can really measure the quality of your social media prose or the degree to which you are authentic on social media – you have to work that out by finding your voice and discovering your own way to forge meaningful relationships.
With HubSpot’s tools, we can and do measure Social Media's effectiveness in converting leads, which is neat and valuable science. But, we can’t measure the art of creating goodwill amongst your community that will get people to recommend you because they actually like you and what you have to say. And this is one of the coolest things about the social media: we’re witnessing a revolution. The technology backing the internet creates an infrastructure that places the power to influence in the hands of the public. It’s an information meritocracy, which underscores the value of inbound marketing over the old way of interruptively buying your way to people’s attention.
Case Study: The New Born Baby
We have one client, The New Born Baby - a lactation consultant - who does a phenomenal job with her Facebook page. Her followers are engaged, and she posts regular updates on topics of interest, and asks engaging questions which always spark discussion. Her authenticity, obvious expertise, and apparent interest in her field creates a genuine atmosphere on her page, which is immensely helpful to her in making potential customers that might ‘meet’ her first through this page to get comfortable with her.
As someone who came to social media with an attitude that she believes in what she does and she would share about that and try to spark discussion, Debbie has done a stellar job of building a good sized community that is even more valuable pound-for-pound than many other communities of similar size.
How do you measure or interpret the value of what you do on social media? Please comment!
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Posted by Samantha Coren on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
There's been a lot of talk in the internet marketing world regarding Ben & Jerry's ending their e-mail marketing efforts in the UK. Their decision to focus on promoting their brand through social media channels has polarized many.
Several gave virtual pats on the back to the two socially conscious ice cream peddlers for making this bold move. Others felt the decision to axe e-mail marketing was short sighted. As for me? For Ben & Jerry's giving up on e-mail makes sense given their extensive brand history and business model.
However going "social media only" with online marketing outside of your website may be a huge mistake for many reasons. Here's why:
The Fight for Attention
With Facebook and Twitter your business is fighting for the attention in giant streams of messages we all scan through in a day. Even within a company's individual profile page there are several different links and messages for someone to review and get distracted. There's no main focus - just hundreds of little "sound bites".
A well done e-mail marketing blast with a single call to action is much more effective at achieving a desired conversion goal than a tweet or a status update.
Customization, Personalization and Segmentation
While Facebook gives Pages administrators the option to target messages to certain connections there's no room narrowing down who your recipients are beyond age, sex, and location. With Twitter you can only mention someone's individual user name or send them a direct message. While it would be nice to send personalized messages to all your followers there's no quick and easy way to go about it in social media - especially if your social media connections are in the hundreds or thousands.
In a survey conducted by e-Dialogue, 64% of consumers want marketers to show that they know what types of products or services they like. Most e-mail marketing software platforms allow you the ability to personalize and target your e-mails based on user provided information such as name and purchasing history.
The more relevant the content is to the individual the more inclined they are to open and read your messages.
User Backlash Against Marketing in Social Media
Not everyone is happy about the commercial invasion of social media that's been occurring over the past few years. Facebook originally started out as a way for Ivy League college students to get to know one another - now it has grown into a major means of communication for anything and everything.
There's been resentment among Facebook's earlier user base about this transition. Older Facebook users in the 40 and over age bracket (among Facebook's fastest growing user segment) aren't as inclined to consistantly check Facebook multiple times a day either as they are with e-mail.
Many individuals have gone as far as deleting their profiles off social media presence altogether. Choosing to not do e-mail marketing will make your marketing efforts more or less invisible to this segment of internet users.
Before You Decide to Pull the Plug on E-mail Consider This...
Just because marketing your business solely through social media seems like the cool hip thing to do doesn't mean it's in your best interest. If you're not seeing results with your e-mail campaigns then you're probably not building them with an inbound marketing methodology in mind.
While social media can be a great promotional tool for your business you can't completely disregard the value of being able to tactfully target and pull your audience back to you the way you can through e-mail.
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Posted by Justin Cambria on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
Hey y’all. I'm Justin Cambria, new to the Pull Marketing Blog, and 
a Digital Marketing Strategist here at PNP. So I try to help our clients – and our company – with online marketing strategy. Utilizing the HubSpot CMS, I develop and execute digital marketing strategies using a comprehensive program of quality content creation, clever keyword placements, social media marketing, and blogging for business. Glad to be here with you all!
Facebook...
So… Facebook. It’s a 10,000 lb upstart gorilla in the internet world, which holds clear relevance to online marketing by virtue of its size alone. If you are a business that’s at all serious about your reach, you need to be on Facebook. There are vast resources available about how to do so and Facebook for Business Best Practices, so I won’t go into that today.
Why Facebook matters to Social Media Marketing
I’d like to focus on why Facebook has value, and to what extent that value can be measured for an individual business. As an example, we maintain a PullNotPush Facebook page. This holds value for us for several reasons: Google indexes Facebook pages, which helps search engine optimization, and since Facebook is a highly trafficked site, their links tend to perform well on Google searches. Also, we want to be able to be found and ‘liked’ by clients and partners within Facebook. And we want to share the content we publish in the Facebook channel. It’s an essential place to maintain an active presence, in large part because you are giving away a free marketing opportunity. All of this is undoubtedly good for us.
Can you measure its worth?
But one of the burning questions is how good is it, and how do you measure that value? If you are utilizing Facebook for its Public Relations potential, there’s little to debate. But speaking solely of sales revenue, it’s less clear. We are fortunate enough to work with HubSpot, we use some of their awesome tools to track how effective Facebook and other social media sites are in helping us to convert leads. Here's a snapshot of a client's Social Media traffic, which shows leads from Facebook specifically:
As practitioners of closed loop marketing, we believe strongly in the value of bringing visitors back to our website; if we can’t publish content that’s thought provoking enough for people to visit our site and give us permission to contact them, we’re in the wrong business.
But what'$ a Like REALLY worth?
Discussing some of this yesterday with Michelle from the digital strategy firm LoveTheCool, we spent some time pondering how to quantify the value of Facebook likes in terms of actual sales for B2C businesses, such as musicians who might want to sell MP3s directly to their followings on Facebook .
This is a harder question to answer. Some of the URL shortening services designed for Twitter such as bit.ly offer analytics tools: you can shorten the same URL (say, a link to an amazon MP3 sale page) many times repurposing each for a specific Facebook promotion. Then clicks on each link could be tracked a-la-carte. While that is a nice and useful feature, there is not, to my knowledge, a comprehensive way to demonstrate that having X number of fans, and posting Y times per day about album Z translates into N revenue. And there's clearly a demand for that
Convert Leads & Close the Loop!
As Facebook, which is likely working on a solution to this analytics issue, catches up, we see it as another argument extolling the benefits of closed loop marketing, which culminates by converting leads. Give your followers the option of consuming your content wherever they like – on your blog, at your Facebook page, or elsewhere – but get them to come back to your page and convert if you want to offer them something specific and continue a deeper dialogue. This is especially relevant to B2B business, or any business with a consultative approach to its services. Isolating that interaction out and making it one on one on your website will help you to qualify your leads and spend time only with prospects who are genuinely interested in interacting with you.
How do you use Facebook for business? Are you frustrated by proving its value? Drop a comment!