It’s Saturday. Your company’s pre-scheduled Facebook post is collecting dozens of angry comments. What do you do?
Your company has numerous social media accounts with community managers across the country. How do you keep things under control?
Your brand accidentally tweeted something that came off politically insensitive. How do you react on Twitter?
These are just a few of the issues that today’s community manager face. While these challenges are daunting, they can be overcome with a smart social media workflow. But, where do you begin? (more…) →
Customers are everywhere at any moment, and marketers are challenged to reach them at the right time on the right platform. For many marketers, this means tapping social channels to help drive traffic into stores and offering content to them once they arrive. Giving customers great experiences not just online but in-store is a critical piece of this cross-platform puzzle.
Today Shoutlet announced it has integrated with foursquare, giving Shoutlet customers the added benefit of managing all of their foursquare venues in the same social media marketing and management dashboard they use to power their outreach and content publishing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Marketers today have more on their plates than ever before. In fact, their top concern is keeping up with the proliferation of channels over the next three to five years, according to IBM’s The State of Marketing 2012, a survey of more than 350 marketers.
Despite the challenges they face, some marketers are finding ways to consistently perform above average. What are they doing that others haven’t been able to yet? And how might these traits pertain to social media, specifically?
For marketers who love data, the growing conversation about Big Data and integrating it more into every day operations is no doubt exciting. Data collected through social media factors into this discussion in a number of ways, from uncovering areas for improvement in brick and mortar stores to pulling insights from sentiment about everything from products to ad campaigns.
But only about one-third of U.S. marketers are capturing social data. For companies that have adopted Social CRM tools that maintain a database of profile information for customers, this is valuable data about the social customers who are interacting with your social accounts.
One of the benefits of large amounts of data is that it can be sliced and diced – and how it’s sliced leads to different insights.
This post originally appeared on Mashable on April 1, 2011.
In addition to its incredible success as the de facto portal for video uploads and viewing, YouTube is itself a community. For brands, it provides an additional viable opportunities to spark discussion with followers. It’s a place to build relationships and create a space for users to converse with each other about branded content.
Just as Facebook has become an incredibly popular place for brands to maintain a dialogue with their customers, YouTube offers a similar opportunity, although the conversation is driven primarily by video content. Treating YouTube not only as a platform for video distribution, but as a forum for engagement deepens the customer experience.
So how do companies make the most of the conversations happening on YouTube?
1. Start With Great Content
Whether you’re a popular consumer brand or an emerging B2B company, engaging content that prompts discussion and social pass-along requires outside-the-box thinking to make an impression (pun intended). Like any other content provided to social audiences, videos on YouTube must be engaging and compelling enough to spark those discussions and encourage sharing.
A classic example of this is “Will it Blend?” Blendtec’s famous video campaign that purées popular gadgets is an ingenious way to captivate viewers while demonstrating the power of the product. The ROI equaled its creativity, with sales jumping 700% since the campaign started four years ago. Great content brings users to your channel and your videos; engaging them once they arrive is another challenge.
It’s Saturday. Your company’s pre-scheduled Facebook post is collecting dozens of angry comments. What do you do?