Posts tagged brands
Why your digital strategy is all about the ‘fans’
Feb 9th
Brands are increasingly migrating to Facebook, setting up Fan pages and getting rid of their own branded websites. But can social media replace a corporate presence on the web?
As you are probably well aware of by now, Facebook as yet again rolled out a new home page design. The site is still looking to make money you see, and to do that it needs to make the look and feel more attractive and navigation easier for users, including brands who have their own ‘Fan’ pages and profiles.
Everyone from Toyota to McDonalds, to Coca-Cola to UTalkMarketing has a Facebook ‘Fan’ page. And with the popularity and users’ willingness to become Fans, will Facebook Fan pages make branded websites redundant?
Coke is just one global brand that is shifting its digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010, according to newmediaage. Kelloggs has also made a similar move and will host digital activity on social media platforms including Facebook.
The benefits of Facebook are simple: it’s where your customers are spending the majority of their online time (some 350 million global customers, that is).
Facebook Fan pages also allow you and your customers to communicate in real time. Fans can also communicate with each other allowing you to listen in to the conversation and monitor what is being said about you.
Also, you’re only a mouse click away and don’t need to build a time consuming and expensive SEO and site awareness campaign to attract visitors
Moreover, creating a Fan Page is free, quick and easy. People actively engage on Facebook commenting, uploading photos and sharing interesting links, helping them to feel like part of the campaign. Awareness also spreads virally when people joining Fan Pages appears in the news feed.
So how do you build a successful Fan page on Facebook?
1. Network with other platforms
2. Creating a resource
3. Creating contests that include participation
4. Empowering pre-existing pages
5. Targeting the proper demographic
Creating a Facebook fan page is simple, but it will also take time to build up a community of followers. Build good content, make it easy to share, and let people know about it, and over-time maybe you too could phase out your corporate site.
The right tools to help you monetise your tweets
Jan 5th
It’s finally 2010 – the year that will be Twitter’s “revenue year” as promised by co-founder Biz Stone.
And it’s encouraging to note that according to a new OneNewsPage.com poll published on UTalkMarketing half of respondents are also making money from their Twitter activities.
We heavily covered ‘All things Twitter’ last year including how marketers and brands can monetize their tweets and how to incorporate tweets into their everyday marketing activities as a way of keeping in touch with consumers.
Twitter has more than 40 million monthly users, with London being the international hub of activity. Last year, Microsoft began to integrate Twitter messages into Bing, its new search engine, and Google announced a deal to do the same meaning that this year, tweets will be more visible and possibly more lucrative than ever before.
So here’s a list of tools to help you get the most from your 140-character status this year:
1. TwitterCounter
TwitterCounter analyses your account or that of any person using Twitter and provides information on the number of followers over time plotted on a graph.
It uses this information to extrapolate your likely follower growth in the future. You can also find statistics such as your current ranking on Twitter according to follower numbers, and you can then compare this to the most popular users on the service.
2. Twitalyzer
Find out how much influence you have on Twitter. Twitalyzer analyses your activity in five areas: influence, signal, generosity, velocity and clout.
Signal indicates the proportion of tweets that contain information, generosity measures how willing the user is to re-tweet, velocity watches how regularly tweets are made and clout refers to how often the user is referenced by others. Influence is a combination of all of these scores.
3. TwitVid
Share video clips via Twitter. You can upload videos and add a tweet to go with it. TwitVid links to Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.
4. The Twitter Tag Project
Follow Friday is a weekly event on Twitter where users recommend new people to follow. You do this by sending a tweet including the username or names of the people who you want to recommend marked with the hash tag ‘#followfriday’.
The Twitter Tag Project provides a tool to help you work out who to recommend. Enter your username, and it’ll suggest a bunch of people based on your last 200 tweets, ready formatted into #followfriday tweets.
5. TweetGrid
TweetGrid offers a similar service to Monitter, but integrates elements of a full Twitter client. You can log in and use it to send tweets and make re-tweets as well as monitoring searches in real time.
You can also opt for different page layouts, including three columns, or grids of three-by-three searches, giving you nine searches on one page.
6. Twitterholic
Find out how addicted you are to Twitter by entering your username at this site. You’ll get an overall ranking and a ranking by your location. You can also see what tags have been applied to your account. Twitterholic also shows the top 100 Twitter users for context
7. Friend or Follow
Worried about who’s following you back, or who’s dropped you shortly after following you? Friend or Follow helps you find these answers. Go to the site and enter your username.
Friend or Follow then analyses your account and presents you with three lists: people you’re following but aren’t following you back; people who follow you who you aren’t following back and people you’re following who are also following you.
8. TwitterFeed
Automatically notify your Twitter followers whenever you post to your blog. It does this, simply enough, by linking your blog’s RSS feed to your Twitter account.
You can sign in using an open ID and then link your Twitter account. TwitterFeed also enables you to check for updates at hourly or daily intervals and include your blog post title in the automatic tweet.
9. Dabr
Dabr is a lightweight web-based front-end for Twitter that’s optimised for mobile use. It offers many of the functions that other Twitter clients provide, and increasing numbers of desktop PC users have switched to Dabr because of its speed and ease of use.
Icons next to each tweet enable you to reply, re-tweet, mark as a favourite or direct-message the user. Pictures appear as thumbnails in the timeline
10. Mr Tweet
Mr Tweet helps you to find new followers based on people you already follow by looking at their followers and people that they recommend. If you recommend people to Mr Tweet, your followers will see your recommendations and Mr Tweet will use them to help improve his recommendations, which you’ll see when you visit.
11. Twittervision
Watch a selection of tweets as they are posted in realtime set against their locations on a world map. Twittervision is fascinating to watch, although of course you only see a small fraction of the tweets currently being made around the planet. It does gives you a feel for where the global Twitter hotspots are, though
12. Monitter
Monitter supplies real-time search updates from Twitter presented in multiple columns. Search by username, hash tag or keyword. You can enter a different search in each column, and they constantly update.
There’s no need to log in or even have a Twitter account. This makes Monitter a useful place to go if you’ve been working with a client application and have used up the limited number of API calls per hour Twitter permits you to make.
How to create and tailor your next ad simply by listening in…
Nov 23rd
A number of big brand advertisers and marketers and experiment with developing ad campaigns based on what consumers are talking about on the web.
Monitoring what internet users say in their instant messages, social networks and blogs isn’t anything new, of course. There has been many a study telling us what the most popular brands discussed on the internet is (Apple’s iPhone, Vegemite, Starbucks and Microsoft just to name a few).
But now, marketers are using new technologies to scan the web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren’t—saying about their brands, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Marketers can then incorporate those findings into their more-conventional research to create specific text and photos for their ads given what consumers seem to want – or, what they say they want, at least.
Furthermore, once the campaigns are up and running, advertisers are using the same web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them.
Marketers have long drawn on information from the web to help them design their web sites and online marketing campaigns.
Now, more of them have begun to use it to guide their marketing across a range of media, including print and TV, and in choosing the overall strategy for those campaigns.
Digital marketing and advances in the technologies available to marketers and advertisers don’t just mean more channels to advertise – they mean more channel to listen, too.
Jason Falls, a social media consultant and blogger on socialmediaexplorer.com, said that it is “imperative” that companies and brands can gauge public opinion about them by listening in to online conversations.
He added that companies could also then interject in these discussions and that while marketers may not have control over the conversations, they should at least have a participatory role in them.
Services such as Google Alerts and searches on Twitter, Google Blogs and Bing can allow companies to keep track of conversations about their company.
According to recent research from Harris Interactive and Tealeaf, more adults are turning to social media to talk about problems they have had with brands and companies.
Here are some sites to help you:
and the old favourite, Google Alerts
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