Brands to Spend Big on Social Media This Holiday Season

Social media is no longer an experiment. With more than 1.5 billion active users on Facebook and Twitter alone, social marketing media social media has matured into a critical channel for retailers looking to get a big chunk of the estimated $650 billion that will be spent on holiday shopping this season.According to recently released research from digital marketing platform Offerpop, 67 percent of marketers plan to increase their social media budgets this holiday season. Brands also appear to be sticking to proven social media platforms, with 92 percent of marketers saying they will spend the majority of their budget on Facebook.However maturing social networks like Instagram are gaining interest from retailers: 73 percent of marketers say Instagram is the breakout social network of 2014. Read this infographic to learn what a survey of 120 marketers found about holiday shopping trends for this this upcoming season.
Social media is no longer just an optional add-on for businesses: It’s a requirement for staying competitive. social media for marketing Today’s customers are hyperconnected to their devices and networks, using them to not only socialize but also receive the recommendations and information they need to make purchases.Well, yes and no. I’m definitely not suggesting that you neglect those social-media giants. But as with any investment, it makes sense to diversify. You don’t want to put all your marketing eggs in one highly fragmented basket.If you have a very specific target market (musicians, physicians or even zombie film directors, let’s say), your company might have a significantly larger impact on a niche social network. Although the overall pool of users is smaller, it might contain a higher ratio of people who might be interested in your product or service. You can then more effectively tailor your content to unique needs, interests and experiences.

Facebook fan page likes

If you haven't already, create a fan page on Facebook and ask people to "like" you there. social media marketing course It only takes a consumer two seconds to click on the "like" icon, so take advantage of this easy marketing tool on social media. And don't be scared of the "ask." On blog sites, business cards and across other social-media channels (i.e. LinkedIn), ask people to like your Facebook page. According to Facebook, more than 1.2 billion people use its platform and in excess of 30 million businesses have active pages. Twitter is also growing quickly as a promotional platform with more than 4.5 million small businesses signed up, according to a Wall Street Journal article last fall. It has 271 million monthly active users and 500 Tweets sent each day. So with Facebook and Twitter commanding so much traffic, does it make sense to focus your time and energies on those sites? Plus, Facebook and Twitter are already saturated with posts and ads from businesses similar to yours, if not ignoring them altogether.
On a smaller, lesser-known platform, your social-media activity might resonate with a more receptive and perhaps less cynical, social media marketing plans group of users. Want to reach more than a million moms? CafeMom is the place. All it takes is a few engaged users, and you could see your product or service featured on highly trafficked “mommy blogs” around the world.Designed for book lovers, this niche social-media site caters to more than 25 million bibliophiles. Users can chat in forums on Goodreads about books, authors, characters, plots, and anything reading related. The site also offers quizzes and book clubs. This site has received a lot of recent press, as many Facebook users have migrated to the smaller, simpler Ello in protest of Facebook’s enforcement of its real name requirement. Ello differs from Facebook in that it allows for anonymous posting and offers an ad-free environment.Similar to Pinterest, Kaboodle presents images featured by users.

Tweet Practically Blew Up Twitter

There’s Jack Black’s Tenacious D and then there’s Elon Musk’s mysterious “D.” The two are worlds apart. real estate social media marketing Or are they? No one knows for sure, except Tesla Motors’ eccentric billionaire founder, who, by the way, hopes to colonize Mars to save humanity from extinction. No, really.Musk, somewhat of a riddle in his own right, sparked a wild speculation frenzy when he tweeted these nine enigmatic, unpunctuated words last night: “About time to unveil the D and something else.” The vaguebook-style teaser tweet, which included a dark, Batman-evocative image of the front end of a vehicle emblazoned with the date Oct. 9, 2014, stoked rumors that the luxe electric car company could be on the verge of unveiling a new product.As all manner of inquisitive, hilarious and downright crude reply tweets piled up by the thousands (they’re still stacking up like crazy), international headlines about the ambivalent tweet spiraled out onto the interwebs.
Maybe Musk intended the lone D as in the first letter of “dual motor” system, The Wall Street Journal hypothesized, social media marketing blogs the feature the SpaceX founder and original PayPal mafia member promised the imminent Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle would boast. Or, perhaps the single letter is a clue about an upcoming Tesla all-wheel-drive offering. Who knows.As it turns out, the mystery “D” wasn’t supposed to stand alone in the first place. Just two hours after rocking the Internet with his original ambiguous tweet, Musk fired off another tweet, this time reacting to the nonstop Twitter typhoon his illusive earlier tweet set off. Barely clearing up the matter, it read, “I love the Internet. Comments had me literally ROFL. No, it wasn’t intentional.Whichever other letter Musk accidentally omitted (or not) doesn’t really matter, does it? One letter alone packed enough provocative punch to give Tesla (TSLA) shares a sweet nudge upward. Right now they’re trading up by about 6 percent.