Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - April 29th, 2014

Email sharing, social SEO, Facebook reach and the value of social media marketing

Top Facebook pages still reach audience

If your corporation has been looking closely at the activity across its Facebook pages, new research from Wisemetrics reveals that even though there has been a drop of with organic search, the top 1% of Facebook pages still reach over 80% of their fans base. What has become clear is that good content is the key component to maintaining an active Facebook presence. It can be difficult to avoid being caught in the minutia of Facebook stats. Brands need to regularly take a step back and ask if their current content is engaging with their fans.

Email still preferred platform for article sharing

Social media may be supplanting all other forms of information sharing, but a new study from Rumble illustrates how powerful email still is. According to their study of 100,000 users across multiple publishers, 76% of all shared articles were via email, with Facebook and Twitter achieving 12% each. The study concluded: “As sharing is a leading indicator of user engagement, it reinforces the argument that low-traffic content sections can still offer great value to publishers serving double duty in driving higher engagement and enhancing brand value by sharing to a non-regular user base.”

Brands are fast becoming aware that social media isn’t a one size fits all environment. Each piece of content or traffic needs to be assessed and the appropriate sharing mechanisms put in place. What is clear is that email is still a platform that should be at the heart of content distribution.

Social SEO

SEO has been the mainstay of link building since the inception of the Internet. Social media for many people has overtaken SEO, but this misunderstands how the two channels can support each other. Social media marketers today need a detailed understanding of how SEO performs and how to properly manage its capabilities. On top of this social media offers a new engagement layer that can be powerful with the right content.

A new infographic from Brafton offers masses of insight into how SEO, content and social need to be managed together. Build up your site with the content that your audiences want, then broadcast it to social fans and followers. Make it easy for them to pass on to friends by incorporating the sharing buttons on your content pages. Data from Nielsen’s content sharing study shows that people are ready to share when the content is worthy: 27 million pieces of online content are shared daily, and more than one in five social media messages include links to content. Plus, shared content frequently mentions brands by name.

Social satisfaction

A new piece of research from Forrester is insightful, as it looks closely at not only which types of marketing platforms are being used, but how satisfied marketers are with the results. Not surprisingly Facebook and Twitter lead the pack as easy social media platforms to use, with the study concluding that seven social media platforms are used on average by marketers.

However, looking at the study is interesting when satisfaction and value are placed into the equation. It seems marketers are using some social media channels, but find the social leaders overvalued. What’s more, even though marketers know social media is important for their brand, 55% allocate less than 10% of their marketing budgets to this channel!

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.