The 3 Best Platforms For Building Your Brand Through Paid Social

For those new to the world of social media management, paying to promote a post, tweet or business page is often viewed as some sort of unethical practice from the darkest of digital marketing catacombs. The reality of the situation, however, couldn’t be more different from what’s being perceived.

Even those who specialize in social media mastery have struggled to fully jump onboard with the idea of paid social as a promotional tactic. So undervalued and underinvested is the area that, reportedly, funds devoted to boosted social lag behind customer attention by about 50 percent. Astoundingly, that translates to nearly $5 billion.

Truthfully, if your brand is in need of a sizable advantage to compete with a host of digital rivals, paid social is just the marketing frontier that you’ve been hoping to discover. Most impressive is the fact that, by simply dedicating a few extra dollars towards social endeavors, measurable results—the kind that actually have a way of nabbing an audience’s attention—are guaranteed.

Produced by Fusion 360, the following infographic extract presents a concrete, real-life example as to what can come about through paid social:

As demonstrated by Space Walk, paid social does more than just make the occasional “marketing strategist” cringe. Positively, it delivers on numerous tangible fronts: 

• User engagement
• Audience identification
• Search engine rapport
• Brand exposure
• Target analysis, and most importantly
• A healthy ROI

Now, the real question—which of the Internet’s plethora of social channels is most important for your brand’s paid social? Well, in order to maintain a high level of widespread efficiency, it’s never a bad idea to focus on social media’s “Big Three.”

1. Facebook – Internet’s Finest Social Coverall

Ever since it’s emergence onto the social networking scene in 2004, Facebook has successfully managed to work its way into the lives of over 1.35 billion people. Yeah, so just in case you’re one of those people who’s into shocking statistics, that’s barely under China’s national population total.

Seeing as how Facebook is suitable for both B2B and B2C marketing needs, it’s no wonder that upwards of $11.4 billion of annual ad revenue is generated through the booming social outlet. With a minimum product- or service-pushing budget of just a dollar a day, businesses can both tackle and analyze ad objectives like audience growth, app installation and video views at an extremely affordable price. 

If the aforementioned sounds like something that your money-making entity could benefit from, consider promoting a Facebook ad to help build up a hefty bulk of likes. While purchased ads might provide the solution that you’re looking for, by using Sponsored Stories, it’s possible that a promoted webpage or blog post has more opportunity to drive traffic to your website and, in turn, develop more interest in your brand. 

As a final word of caution, when promoting content of any type—be it an advertisement or recently published article—make certain to use captivating adjectives, enticing verbs and numbers to attract clicks. Note: this is not an invitation to spread the digital plague that is “clickbait.”

Summary of brands that should consider paid social through Facebook:

• B2B and B2C marketers
• Need both mobile and desktop interfaces for advertising
• Target specific demographics, interests and behaviors
• Interested in audience growth, web traffic and special offer/event promotion
• Minimum cost per click: $0.01
• Minimum daily budget: $1.00

2. Twitter – Targeting At Its Finest

On Twitter, users are limited to only 140-character messages, but that has done little to keep people from being glued to their mobile devices throughout the course of any given day. Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Twitter—in recent years—has managed to rival Facebook as social’s biggest player. 

While the current crown still belongs to Facebook, Twitter has successfully amassed a remarkable 284 million active monthly users who generate upwards of 350,000 tweets per minute. Though doing little in the ways of B2B communication, there’s no better platform from which social specialists can join an industry-specific conversation with potential consumers than Twitter. Interactions are quick and timely, seeing as how the average user spends a total of only 17 minutes a day on Twitter. 

With that in mind, however, if your company’s market research has proven that mobile usership is a mainstay of client connectivity, Twitter’s pool of fans—86 percent of them, to be exact—prefer to use the social outlet on their respective smartphones than through a computer. 

For companies interested in focusing more on Twitter, as far as paid tweets are concerned, followers, keywords, clear-cut demographics and distinct interests can be targeted. All this for a minimum payment of one cent per click or—much like Facebook—a dollar a day.

Twitter, like most social outlets, offers a variety of ad options for businesses to promote their content. Of these options, the most popular is by far that of Promoted Tweets. Promoted Tweets allows brands and marketing experts to select their most popular tweets and direct them at precise audiences, interests or keywords. Additionally, tweets can be purchased through programs like JustRetweet or PayWithATweet.

Summary of brands that should consider paid social through Twitter:

• B2B marketers
• Prefer mobile interfaces for advertising
• Target followers, keywords, demographics, interests and behaviors
• Interested in audience growth, engagement and web traffic
• Minimum cost per click: $0.01
• Minimum daily budget: $1.00

3. LinkedIn – Built For B2B Marketing

Lastly, rounding out the list of the three biggest social powerhouses is LinkedIn. Well-known by most, LinkedIn is a business-oriented social site which is devoted entirely to professional networking. What was once considered an online billboard for résumés has quickly transformed into a place where industry influencers can come together to share useful knowledge, helpful tips and breaking news. 

Realistically, a company—regardless of size—without a LinkedIn business profile is a company that’s yet to have taken the digital side of it’s marketing strategy seriously.

In only 12 years’ time, LinkedIn has been able to attract an active monthly membership base of over 187 million people. Unlike its greatest rivals, LinkedIn is especially unique in that it’s exclusively geared towards B2B marketing. Whereas Facebook and Twitter have both learned to make cellular interaction a pillar of accessibility, LinkedIn has yet to have mastered the mobile realm with 74 percent of professionals preferring to access the site via a desktop computer at work or at home. 

For companies looking to improve social engagement, video views, driven web traffic and business leads, LinkedIn is difficult to compete with. Even more impressive, while Facebook and Twitter allow for finite targeting to take place, LinkedIn makes finding professional game changers even easier. Companies, schools, degrees, job titles/fields and skill sets can all be pinpointed with paid social efforts. 

Furthermore, with an average of 6,944 endorsements taking place with each passing minute, the odds of your paid post being glanced over by the perfect set of eyes are nothing short of favorable.

In order to gain ground on Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has put a great deal of emphasis on bolstering the connections that people can make through their own feeds. LinkedIn does offer traditional paid ad options that allow for advertisements to appear on the sidebar of a user’s page, but using Sponsored Updates is widely considered a more advantageous method for getting your brand’s content seen by the right people. 

Perhaps the biggest of LinkedIn’s paid post benefits comes from the massive amount of information that’s made readily available for brand advertisers to use: industry, job title, company size, current location, etc. The estimated cost per click on Sponsored Updates is roughly between one and two dollars. Though costing slightly more, if clicks turn into future subscribers and customers, the monetary sacrifice will be well worth it.

Summary of brands that should consider paid social through LinkedIn:

• B2B marketers
• Prefer desktop interfaces for advertising
• Target professional, academic and geographic factors
• Interested in engagement, video views, web traffic and potential leads
• Minimum cost per click: $2.00
• Minimum daily budget: $10.00

Needless to say, in the digital age of communication, having a robust social media game plan is of the utmost importance. With innumerable voices vying for the attention of possible consumers, paid social can no longer be considered a shady practice; rather, a means to get the proverbial social ball rolling.

http://socialmediarevolver.com/3-best-platforms-building-brands-through-paid-social/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+socialmediarevolver+%28Social+Media+Revolver%29

Get More Followers and Increase Engagement With These 7 Twitter Tips

Most social media experts will say that the core to Twitter greatness is:

1. Providing real value and engaging with others
2. Acting the way you would act in a real life situation
3. Never spamming
4. Building meaningful relationships

These foundational concepts are hugely helpful in making Twitter really work for you. And when you’re ready to build on these foundations and scale your Twitter engagement and reach, there are some useful next-level tactics that work great, too.  I’ve had a chance to test out some of the advanced tips and tricks to more followers and increased engagement on Twitter, and I’d love to share them with you and hear what you think!

1. The strategic way to follow people on Twitter

If you’re trying to promote a business or a startup using Twitter, you typically need three things to make it work:

1. A story (or a message)
2. Reach
3. Engagement

Let’s focus on reach.

If you go to followerwonk.com and search for “content marketing,” sort it by “social authority” and pick the first five individual (not company) Twitter accounts, you’ll notice an interesting pattern:

• John Luke – Following:  2175  / Followers: 15.2K
• Michel J.D. warner  – Following: 32.4K   / Followers: 38.8K
• Steven Farnsworth  – Following: 40.7K  / Followers: 116K
• Gerry Moran   – Following: 60.3K  / Followers: 75.1K
• Steve Cartwright   – Following: 62.6K  / Followers: 67.8K

Except for John Luke, do you recognize a pattern here? Most of these Twitter masters follow an amazing amount of people.

If you’ll look for the next 5 Top social authority twitter users ranking high for content marketing you’d get the same ratios (with a few exceptions of course).

This means that these people followed a large amount of other Twitter users to get to those big numbers of followers they have today.

Here’s where strategy comes in: It’d be great to get tons of followers but also make sure you have a qualified and engaged following.

This is where Twitter tools like Tweepi come in handy. Tweepi has two important features that will come in handy

1. “Follow Followers”—a feature that enables you to see who’s following a specific Twitter account
2. “Flush”—shows you who you’re following that isn’t following you back

One of the most strategic ways to get new followers who are relevant to your content and niche is to follow people who are already following a Twitter account that you share the same target audience with.

On Tweepi, you can find this information in the “Follow Followers” section. Enter the username of a Twitter user you admire and you can see all the users who are following that account. Choose a large handful to follow, and you are likely to see many of these users follow you back. I usually get a follow back rate of about 20-25%. 

Now for part two: Flushing.

Every so often, you can check into the Tweepi tool to see all the people you are following but are not following you back. If you want to keep your following/follower ratio balanced, you can use this information to clean up the list of people you follow (tools like Tweepi also can show you which accounts are no longer active, too).

Using this method of finding targeted, relevant people to follow on Twitter and regularly checking in with my follow/follower ratio, I was able to see some great results.

I went from 10-12 people following me per week to about a 100 per week.

Also, my engagement improved by over 32%.

More people are clicking on my content (raised my average by about 3x) and sharing it. 

2. The effective way to share a call-to-action

Occasionally, you may have the opportunity to engage with individuals and share with your community about some awesome things going on at your site—new products, new announcements, new ways to connect and share with one another. You don’t have to be shy with promoting (more on this below). It also feels great to do so in the right way.

Here are five tips that I’ve found to work really well when promoting your content on Twitter.

1. Remember to sound human and authentic –  People enjoy being spoken to in a sincere way. When composing your tweets, feel free to speak casually and comfortably with your audience.

2. Focus on the benefits - You don’t necessarily need to ask people to buy from you; instead, talk about what’s in it for him or her.

3. Be very specific – Don’t ask them to check your blog. Offer them to read more about the type of content your provide.

For example, if you were sharing with a new follower about the other places to find you online, you might say this: ‘Welcome aboard! Now that you’re following us on Twitter, you should also check out our blog!”

This will work better:  “Welcome aboard! If you’re interested in content marketing and growth hacking you should check out our blog”.

If your content is right for me, I will recognize it right away and will click on your link.

4. Make it the beginning of your funnel - Don’t just send someone to your site, but create a landing page welcoming them. That’s where you make the experience more personal.

5. If possible, use a branded link – By using a branded shortener you’ll make your new followers feel safer.

3. The new rule for following others back

I’ve often heard the Twitter advice to follow back all those who follow you. I’ve found a slight alternative that seems to work well for me:

Follow back the accounts that interest you.

If you’re not interested in a specific Twitter user’s content, you don’t need to feel the pressure to follow back. If they’re interested in your content, they will keep following you and become an engaged reader. When they start engaging with you – that’s when you follow back.

This is the right way to build the following/followers ratio—by posting great content that gets people to follow you and by not following people who aren’t engaging with you.

4. Influencer outreach can wait

One of the most important insights Kristoffer Tjalve shares on his post “The story behind #BeTech” is how to relate to influencers on Twitter.

Do not worry too much about the influencers. The influencers are already super busy doing their own stuff. Rather, you should focus all your energy in making the life better for those who are (connecting with you).

While most social media experts will tell you to try and engage with influencers so you’ll get more credibility and followers, it’s quite hard to do.

Influencers are extremely busy most of the time and are probably responding to tens if not hundreds of mentions on Twitter daily. They will usually have their own content to promote and their own very clear agenda to follow.

The content world is divided into roughly two major groups:

1. Content creators
2. Content curators

Content creators are the ones people seek their attention. Content curators and just-beginning content creators are usually the attention seekers.

If you’re just starting out and want to build your following, start by attracting the content curators, they are the ones who will actually share your content and be the foundation of your increasing reader-base.

After a while, when enough content curators notice you and start following and retweeting you, you will understand that for a small niche, you have become an influencer. Then, it will be the time to reach out to other influencers by email. Not as a newbie looking for attention, but as an equal.

5. Tweet the same content multiple times

Remember this tip? “If you share the same link more than once, your followers will take you for a spammer”.

Up until recently there was a strong belief that your audience doesn’t want you to share the same content more than once. That it is recycled content and you need to put more emphasis on creating higher value and share new stuff all the time.

In reality, most of your audience wouldn’t see your next blog post if you share it just once. Posting the same (valuable) content more than once won’t annoy your followers.

What it will do is get you more traffic, you’ll hit different timezones and reach new followers. 

Some of the main takeaways:

1. If you tweet something only once, a lot of people will miss it because their Twitter feeds are crowded with content. If you’ll tweet it multiple times there’s a bigger chance more people will catch it than people seeing it for the second time and thinking it’s spam.
2. If your audience lives in different timezones, one’s morning is another’s nighttime. Posting the same content at least once per time zone is recommended.
3. There are new followers on board – If you’re implementing the technique I showed you on the first section, then you’re getting about 100-120 new followers every week. This means that there are over 100 new followers who haven’t seen the content you shared last week. If you have interesting posts they might enjoy or find helpful, re-sharing them will increase the chances they’ll actually see it.

6. Forgo your timeline

If you’re using Twitter as a personal social media outlet, you’d want to keep your timeline clean and clutter free. If you want to get hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, you’ll need to start following a lot of people and your timeline will soon be unbearable for the naked eye. Try following the feed of over 23K users. You’ll go crazy.

Most social media gurus will tell you to take advantage of Twitter lists in your marketing efforts, but keep your Twitter feed clean so you can interact with your followers. That’s nice advice, but not scalable.

What you really need to do is to come to peace with the idea that the timeline is not for you anymore. From now on, lists are your new home.

 5 Lists I Think Every Marketer Should Create:

1. The timeline you wished you had - This is basically the following mix you used to enjoy before becoming a Twitter master.

2. Journalists and bloggers - Keep a tidy and up to date list of every journalist that covers your area of business. You’d want to engage with them so they’ll keep you in mind, see what they’re writing about so you can offer more information or guest posts. Remember, a good relationship with journalists means more PR (if you play your cards right).

3. Influencers - A great way to keep up to date with all current trends is by following other influencers. See what they are posting, share the best content they put out, plan your own content by seeing what works for them and see who they are engaging with, so you could get into the conversation as well.

4. Customer/ Clients – You want to build a strong relationship with your clients, so follow them on Twitter, help them when they are in need and spontaneously engage with them on daily events, just so they will see how much attention and effort you are willing to spend on them. They are worth it.

5. Competitors - Yes, you should have a list (probably private) dedicated only to your competitors. You want to know what they are up to and how you can learn from them.

7. It’s okay to sell your content & your product on social media

Content marketing is about providing value for your followers and engaging through interesting and engaging content. If your product / blog post / Ebook has real value (and I hope it has!) feel free to drop in a clear call to action along with the content you post regularly.

Take Retweeting for example: Do you know what are the best methods to getting more retweets? It’s asking people to retweet your content. You get a 12% more chance of getting retweets if you simply ask for it.

Same goes for downloading an Ebook, reading a new blog post of buying your product. If you provide the right context a direct call to action will significantly improve your chances of getting people to take the desirable action.

Which counterintuitive tips might you use?

With the evolution of social media and inbound marketing over the past 5 years a lot of what was considered as rude or ill-advice on Twitter has become obsolete.

You are no longer struggling on creating the best content out there, but to get noticed and acknowledged by as many relevant readers as possible. Like every meaningful growth, you will never achieve it by doing what everybody else is doing, only by finding the right combination that works for you.

What are your biggest Twitter tips that were counterintuitive to social media expert advice?http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240589

4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, "We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible," to the more pragmatic, "We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible."

You'll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you're doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you're ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let's start with the "Why," as in "Why you should care about SMO?" As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from Google. How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

Image credit: Gigya

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you're likely reaching a well-targeted audience.  Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn't just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

1. Widgets and Badges

Before the sudden ubiquity of Facebook's Social Graph, widgets were the go-to tool that allowed others to "grab" your content and share it on their blogs, Facebook profiles,MySpace accounts, and dozens of other smaller social sites or programs like iGoogle.

The NBA is a good example of an organization that has used widgets to great effect, allowing passionate fans to spread branded content across their social networks without ever landing on NBA.com to get it. At my company, we had one client who produces a lot of video tell us their video views doubled when they stopped forcing people to come to their site to see them.

Below is an example of what a simple widget might look like before and after a user activates it to share content.

"Badges," on the other hand, don't necessarily have the "Get & Share" functionality.  Rather, they consist of an embed code that allows the user to add an image to their blog that links visitors back to your content. This is obviously harder to implement than a simple share button, but there are several advantages. For example, each badge can have its own unique identifier connected to it, so a contest entrant can drive visitors back to their specific entry page, rather than to a general site. And each placement of the badge counts as a backlink to your site, as long as the person keeps the badge up.

2. Content Sharing

While most experienced social media marketers now understand the value of social sharing, there are some key points to be made here.

First, offer options. According to social sharing plugin AddThis, Facebook is far and away the number one place where people share content through their widget, taking 38.52% of the pie. But that means that over 61% of shares are being made elsewhere. Having said that, I'm not a huge fan of those "Share This" and "Add This" buttons, unless they are supplemented in a way that features only a few major services.

In fact, AddThis' own data shows that its toolbox (which displays only a few major networks, instead of an expandable box of hundreds) performs 40% better than its regular widget. AddThis has even added functionality to that toolbox that shows different buttons for each user based on what sites they personally share to the most — even more targeting.

Gigya, meanwhile, has a handy tool that allows people to share to multiple networks at once without even leaving your site. This is an excellent way to socially optimize your content.

3. Social Sign In

The goal of most websites is to attract visitors. Beyond that, you want the visitor to register. Why? Connected visitors tend to engage more than non-connected visitors — they've already engaged once by registering, after all. So if you can get the visitor to connect, you'll likely see more time on site, more pageviews, lower bounce rate and, if you're operating an e-commerce site, increased sales.

The traditional long and cluttered registration form is a bit of a pain in the neck for users, and you may be asking the visitor to marry you when they're not yet sure they even want to date you. Social sign-in can help solve this.

For sites that already have a large database of registered users, however, social sign in can make things confusing, as you end up with duplicate records. To eliminate duplication, advanced sites are "sniffing" when a registrant may already have a conventional account, and asking those users to sync the accounts. This is something you should be thinking about now, before you end up with tens of thousands of split records.

Similar to sharing, remember that Facebook is important, but you shouldn't put all your proverbial eggs in one basket. Gigya reports that 46% of users sign in with Facebook, beating out Google as the preferred social profile for making connections to other sites.Echo, a multi-platform sign-in module you can use, reports that Yahoo is number one (34%) for sign in, ahead of Facebook (25%) on the top 10 sites they serve. Whatever data you believe, it's clear that providing choices will increase your chances of success.

4. Social Commenting

Leaving a comment on a site is nice. Sharing that comment with your social network is a traffic driver. Today, through programs like Echo, Gigya and Disqus, you can easily encourage people to share their comments more broadly.

Facebook upped the ante dramatically when they added the "wordless" social comment, the Facebook "Like" button. And people who click the Like button typically have 2.4 times more friends than people who don't, and they click on 5.3 times more links within Facebook than others.

Levi's implemented Facebook Likes across its site to great success. Jeans, of all things, went through the roof in terms of social commenting, and Levi's quickly found that Facebook became its number one site for referring traffic. (Note: The "Recommend" button is simply the Like button with a different word, allowing people to share content without "liking" news articles about crime, for example.)

Since Likes show up as one line of text, and Shares show up as a link with a comment, progressive sites are encouraging Shares immediately after someone presses the Like button.

Unless you're a news site or a blog, part of the art of this is figuring out where to implement social commenting and where to implement Facebook social plugins such as the Like button on your site. When you get it right, it can drive traffic, but it can also provide social proof that your content (be it a blog post or a pair of jeans) is "Like worthy."

Overall Strategy

Given the importance of the referral traffic and the fact that many search engines, including Google, Bing and Scour are currently incorporating social actions into their search results, having a strategy for socializing your website and your content is increasingly important.

What do you think? Have I overlooked any aspects of social media optimization that you think are important? Be sure to leave your strategies in the comments. http://mashable.com/2010/10/22/social-media-optimization/