By Nick Johnson - June 18th, 2013
The Wednesday Update including: social media tools in the workplace, the importance of location in ad placement, calls to action that work and how to gain brand trust.
Social media used to validate brands
Every business knows that social media is a great touchpoint with their customers. A new report from Forrester reveals that only 15% of consumers trust the posts that brands place on their social media networks. Conversely, 70% of family and friends are trusted, which isn’t surprising, as the ‘recommendation economy’ has been gaining pace for some time.
Brands need to do more – and some are leveraging their social media networks and gaining more customer trust. A good example is C.Wonder whose CEO, Michael Chao, boldly state about their customers that they “connect with us in deep and personal ways.”
Trust can be gained if a business is willing to spend the time and resources to understand what is important to their customers, and how to deliver this content to them. C.Wonder for instance is experimenting with the video app Vine, and Trendabl to tap into the propensity to connect their brand over mobile networks.
“Social media is not only a way for us to amplify brand awareness, but also create delightful customer experiences, improve product design and marketing, and build excitement for new store launches,” Chao said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The opportunities are limitless because social media is deeply embedded into our company culture.”
To gain more trust brands need to move beyond connecting with their customers via promotional mechanics and build deeper connections that create brand advocacy and positive sentiment. If this can be done, trust soon follows.
Choose your call to action words carefully
A new infographic from Dan Zarrella looks closely at which words are used on the main social media networks as calls to action. Using a dataset of over 50,000 blog posts he discovered that post containing the words ‘comments’ ‘link’ and ‘share’ got the most comments and were shared widely between readers’ networks.
Twitter was also interesting in that using the phrase ‘please retweet’ and please rt’ were highly effective to get a post reweeted widely. And with Facebook ‘comment’ and ‘share’ are powerful keywords that generate a call to action.
It seems that choosing the right words to generate the desired action is critical when it comes to social media. Businesses may have become experts in SEO techniques, now its time to ensure the right calls to action are used on every piece of material placed on their social media networks.
Facebook ad marketing set for meteoric growth
If your business is looking closely at how it can further leverage its advertising activity across social media networks, a new report from Salesforce is vital reading. The report concludes:
“Current and future social advertising trends continue to show an incredible amount of growth in the industry. Research in a recent BIA/Kelsey report suggests that the social ad market may reach $11 billion by 2017, up from $4.7 billion in 2012.
“The same report indicates that the social ad market is young and growing, representing only 1-10% of many advertisers’ budgets. Additionally, there’s a huge opportunity in mobile advertising. For instance eMarketer shows that while mobile represents 12% of people’s time spent consuming media, only 3% of United States advertising is spent on mobile. This represents a $20 billion opportunity in the United States.”
And tools like Graph Search are now critical to ensure that each ad is working as hard as it can. Also, placement is important with sponsored page like stories costing more to place, but these receive 13.7 times more likes from viewers. And sponsored place check-in stores are ideal and cost an average $0.04 per click with a massive click-through rate of 3.2%.
Social tools improves teamwork
Nearly half of employees report that social tools at work help increase their productivity, but more than 30% of companies underestimate the value of these tools and often restrict their use, according to new research released by Microsoft.
“Employees are already bringing their own devices into their workplaces, but now they are increasingly bringing their own services as well,” said Charlene Li, founder and analyst at Altimeter Group, a firm that studies social media and other technology trends. “Employees expect to work differently, with tools that feel more modern and connected, but are also reflective of how they interact in their personal lives. Enterprise social represents a new way to work, and organizations embracing these tools are improving collaboration, speeding customer responses and creating competitive advantages.”
The research also found distinct differences between countries, sectors and genders as they relate to the levels of productivity, collaboration and communication tools used in today’s workplace.
“Enterprise social tools like Yammer have helped Red Robin transform a widespread employee base of nearly 30,000 across 44 states into a more tightly knit workforce focused entirely on team member and guest satisfaction,” said Chris Laping, senior vice president of Business Transformation and chief information officer, Red Robin. “Even more importantly, it helps us ensure we reach our workforce — 87 percent are millennials — in the right ways for learning and engagement because how they want to be engaged is through social and mobile.”
Until next time….
The Useful Social Media team.