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Facebook feeds chatter to news outlets

September 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Facebook has begun feeding select news outlets real-time social network chatter about hot topics to weave into story coverage, wading deeper into Twitter territory.

A pair of software tools, Public Feed and Keyword Insights, lets Facebook’s media partners tap into comments posted on the service.

‘Selected news organisations can begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic,’ Facebook’s online operations vice president, Justin Osofsky, said in a blog post.

‘From favourite television shows to sporting events to the latest news; the conversations are happening on Facebook.’

Facebook listed its media partners as Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, BSkyB, Slate and Mass Relevance.

For a while now, news outlets have turned to globally popular one-to-many messaging service Twitter for real-time insights, opinions, and perspectives for stories.

Osofsky said that Facebook is ‘committed to building features that improve the experience of discovering and participating in conversations about things happening in the world right now, including entertainment, sports, politics and news.’

Only public posts by Facebook members will be streamed to news outlets, according to the California-based social network.

The software tools also allow news outlets to report demographic breakdowns of those discussing topics online, as well as how often specific words have been mentioned.

Osofsky gave the example of NBC’s Today Show being able to ‘include how many people on Facebook talked about a popular subject, where it’s getting the most buzz, whether it’s most popular among males or females, and with which age groups.’

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, internet, marketing, news, Social Media

Top 5 Marketing Strategies for Small Business

August 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

As a busy business owner, you’re unlikely to have endless time and resources to spend on marketing, so what you execute needs to really count. Focus on these five strategies for maximum bang for buck.

A survey conducted by US email marketing company Constant Contact has revealed the most effective marketing techniques for small businesses. Even though the study is perhaps biased to email marketing, the overall results are consistent with what I believe works well for soloists.

Here are the top five marketing strategies for small businesses according to the survey, and the percentage of respondents who found these strategies effective:

1. Email marketing – 83 per cent

2. Website marketing, including both content marketing and SEO – 71 per cent

3. Face-to-face interaction – 68 per cent

4. Social media – 49 per cent

5. Events – 41 per cent

These results show some interesting trends, which may change the way you think about and conduct your marketing activities.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Research Tagged With: business, marketing, news, strategy

Social networking spend slows in marketing budgets: Survey

March 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

A new survey shows marketing budgets will grow by 1% in 2013, following growth of 3.4% last year, while the growth of social networking and Web 2.0 is less pronounced than in 2011.

The 2013 Senior Marketer Monitor, conducted by the Australian Marketing Institute and Colmar Brunton, is based on a survey of 259 senior marketing professionals in Australia.

The aim of the study is to understand senior marketer sentiment, priorities, perspectives and challenges in the current marketing environment.

Marketing budgets will grow by only 1% in 2013, the report reveals, following growth of 3.4% last year.

A third (34%) of the marketers surveyed expect their marketing budget to increase in 2013, with these organisations anticipating an average increase of 16%, while 38% expect their budget to stay the same.

Meanwhile, 28% of marketers expect a decrease in 2013, and for these they anticipate an average decrease of 16%.

Nearly half of organisations with zero to 100 employees expect to increase marketing budgets this year, according to the report, with these smaller organisations more positive than mid-sized and larger organisations.

“Most organisation types and most industry sectors are reducing marketing budgets in 2013, with only smaller organisations, professional services and not-for-profit[s] growing budgets,” it said.

Organisations with zero to 100 employees will grow their budgets by 6% in 2013, while those with 101 to 1,000 employees will reduce their budgets by 1.7%.

There is also a great deal of variation at an industry level when it comes to the outlook for marketing budgets, the report said.

The media and communications (13%) and manufacturing (19%) industries have the lowest proportion of organisations increasing budgets in 2013, while professional services has one of the highest (45%).

The top marketing priorities include measures to increase sales, maximising efficiency of marketing expenditure, and focusing on more profitable market segments.

“Overall, there was slightly more emphasis on increasing sales and less focus on efficiency and brand-building compared with previous years,” the report said.

According to the report, there have also been shifts in the communication channels used by marketers.

“The use of social networking and Web 2.0 as a communication channel continues to grow, but the growth in this channel is less pronounced than in 2011,” it said.

“The popularity of viral marketing has decreased somewhat with less intending to use this channel more, compared with previous years.”

In 2011, 77% of the marketers surveyed used social networking and Web 2.0 applications. Last year, that figure fell to 66%.

Similarly, 32% of marketers used viral marketing in 2011, compared to 23% in 2012.

It’s worth noting marketers’ use of all communication channels has decreased, suggesting they have become less important to businesses in the current economic climate.

The use of online advertising fell from 64% in 2011 to 56% in 2012, while only 34% of marketers engaged in public relations last year, compared to 47% in 2011.

The use of direct marketing fell from 48% in 2011 to 38% in 2012, while mobile and SMS fell to 30% last year, down from 46% in 2011.

This article first appeared on StartupSmart.

Story by Michelle Hammond Story source: www.smartcompany.com.au

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media Tagged With: marketing, news, Research, Social Media, survey

Fake product reviews and sites next in line for ACCC crackdown

December 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One area of Internet marketing we constantly get asked about by our clients is negative reviews of their products on review forum sites. As these sites tend to have a high organic search result in Google they often rank higher or just below the company themselves, and if the review is negative and there are a few of them from disgruntled customers, it can affect not only the On Line reputation of the company but also sales.

We are often asked to remove these from the search results, and of course that is easier said than done. The best form of defence is not to have the bad reviews there in the first place, but lets ask a question, how many of them are actually genuine reviews?

Are you asked for a proof of purchase before your review is accepted? do you check the email addresses or user names of the people writing the review?

I know of one client where the negative reviews, which resulted in a poor star rank, was actually caused by a competitor leaving bad reviews under assumed names, this is really a form of commercial sabotage.

So where is the policing of these reviews? in the more traditional media, an editor will first audit the review and then decide on wether to publish. That process is given lip service with the forum sites, and as long as you don’t defame the company your review seems to be freely published.

I’ve never been contacted by any review site either before or after a review has been published, to ascertain the genuineness of my review, even to find out if I’d ever actually used the service or product, the assumption is I have.

As a frequent traveller, I will often look at customer reviews of hotels or resorts to make decisions on wether I’ll use them for accommodation or travel, and often have changed my selection based on other peoples reviews. But how do you really know they’ve actually been there?

Of recent times, I’ve become very suspicious of reviews and now research more thoroughly before making my choice.

It’s about time that the ACCC is now looking into this, it has the ability to impact on small business in a big way, it’s hard enough for small business to compete for clients in the current economy, and the last thing they need is this impacting on their business.

If you are interested in the actual story, I’ve included it below for you to read:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Research, Technology Tagged With: business news, fake product reviews, forum sites, marketing

Copy and Paste Drives Sharing

November 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Copied content indicates what really engages—and what drives users off-site

Social sharing buttons may be sexier, but according to research from user engagement platform Tynt, copy and paste is the sharing method of choice 82% of the time.

The service, which offers a way for content publishers to track sharing behavior through embedded code that indicates referrals and includes site URLs when content is pasted elsewhere, reported that in October 2012, 2% of all page views across its network involved a copy and paste.

Just over half of the content copied was then shared. This could be in an email, an instant message or another social channel. In addition, about one-quarter of copy-and-pastes resulted in a search—that is, a word or phrase from the content being viewed was copied into a search bar to look for more information on the topic.

For users, copying and pasting to share content holds obvious appeal: It’s almost frictionless, and it allows the sharer to choose exactly what to pass on to a friend or social network.

“You probably have a lot of friends sharing the same article,” Tynt general manager Greg Levitt said. “But when you can specifically call out a personalized, relevant aspect, it makes the story your own.”

On the search side of the equation, copy-and-paste analytics give publishers information about what content is actually driving users away from their sites.

Tynt also reported that while the vast majority of copied-and-pasted content is text, 12% of copied content was images.

Publishers know based on other types of sharing which pages are driving social engagement—but not necessarily why. When they can dig into the specific phrases and passages of text that readers want to pass on, it gives them a deeper window into what content users are really engaging with.

Story Source: www.emarketer.com

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media Tagged With: copy, internet, marketing, paste, sharing, Social Media

Consumers, Marketers Disagree on Effective Ads

November 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Internet users think TV ads are more effective than online placements

Even while marketers have taken strongly to digital advertising, they haven’t abandoned traditional media by any means—TV still takes the largest share of ad dollars in the US, and its percentage of the total isn’t slipping. But with the measurability inherent in online ads, confidence in their efficacy is generally high.

In an October Adobe survey of marketers and consumers, US marketers even rated online ads better than TV ads—though just barely, with 51% saying that they were more effective. But consumers appeared stuck in the past, with about two-thirds claiming TV commercials were more effective.

Consumers also appear to like seeing ads in traditional media better than on newer digital devices. Asked about their preferred venue for ads, 45% said they liked seeing them in their favourite print magazine and 23% on their favourite TV show, compared to just 11% who chose favourite websites, 3% who chose social media and 2% who liked to see ads in digital magazines.

Marketers and the consumers they are trying to reach disagreed on the effectiveness of a wide variety of ad types, according to the survey. Though both groups thought the best ads were those created by professional marketers, nearly half of marketers said this, compared with just 36% of internet users. There was large disagreement about the effectiveness of paid search ads (touted by marketers, played down by web users) and outdoor advertising (the reverse). Internet users were also much more likely to say there were no good or effective ads—positions which marketers were extremely unlikely to hold, for obvious reasons.

So what did consumers like? Nearly three-quarters thought ads should “tell a unique story, not just try to sell,” while about two-thirds said videos and user product reviews were good and that in-store experiences were more important than online ones.

The message for marketers may appear mixed, but it’s not exactly news that consumers don’t love to see advertising—or that they consider information from people they trust better than a hard sell.

Filed Under: Research, Social Media Tagged With: advertising, internet, marketing, Media, news, Research

Copied content indicates what really engages—and what drives users off-site

Internet users think TV ads are more effective than online placements

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