Social Media Has Become Indispensable for CEOs

The current stampede to embrace social media as a valuable business tool has kicked up a big cloud of dust and created new layers of confusion for chief executives and other leaders. top social media marketing companies Most CEOs sense that social media marks an important breakthrough for business communications, but they aren’t sure how to fully utilize the technology to gain a competitive advantage. This is because leaders often have trouble distinguishing between “actionable social” information and what I like to call plain old “social noise.” There is a substantial difference between the two. Think of actionable social as useful information that can be acted upon to improve business results. Social noise, on the other hand, involves a vast overload of data that drowns out the underlying message or meaning. Nearly three-fourths of senior executives in the U.S. believe that C-Suite leaders who use social media to communicate their core mission and brand values are more trustworthy than those who don’t adopt social media.
This surprising finding comes from the 2014 Global Social CEO Survey by Brandfog, a social media consulting firm for CEOs. social media marketing classes The Brandfog survey also shows that 82 percent of senior leaders think executive use of social media raises brand awareness and helps establish industry leadership.With a predicted growth of 8 percent as compared with last year, according to Prosper Spending Score, the 2014 U.S. holiday shopping season has begun. Many companies bank on the success of sales from November and December to wrap up their fiscal years on a profitable note, with Prosper estimating this year will be a $650 billion holiday retail season. Although Facebook and Twitter recently announced built-in commerce options, they’re being tested only by a handful of companies.

Take Advantage of Automated Visual Content

Want to create an infographic based around social media data but short on time? Visually’s create tools offer a variety of ways to plug in social media accounts and get a slick-looking infographic in seconds.social media marketing news Twitterize Yourself creates an infographic based on the content of your tweets, and Twitter Showdown pits two accounts against each other across a variety of metrics. After surveying more than 120 social-media marketers, my client Offerpop found that Facebook still reigns supreme among ad dollar allocations, with 92 percent of marketers planning to spend the majority of their holiday social media marketing budget on Facebook, despite the platform’s plummeting organic reach. (Offerpop clients and participants in its educational seminars were surveyed.) Sixty-seven percent of marketers polled said that they will increase their spending on social media this holiday season with the direct goal of increasing sales.
Oceanside, Calif.-based headphone company JLab Audio is also preparing to sell products online with the help of Facebook ads in a crowded marketplace (with competitors like Beats and Skullcandy). social media marketing network While the company leverages brand partnerships on social networks such as Instagram and Twitter, Facebook will be getting the lion's share of JLab Audio's holiday social-media budget, said marketing manager Jordanne Muldner. JLab plans to double this year's Facebook ad budget (over with 2013's level) and increase its social-media advertising budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Below view Offerpop's infographic about social-media marketing trends for this holiday season.

Create Photo Galleries with an Instagram Hashtag

With a larger character limit than twitter and an equal propensity for hashtags, Intstagram offers many of the same tracking opportunities. marketing through social media And as a visually-driven medium, compiling photos into a gallery is a no-brainer. Last year, JetBlue partnered with Instagram analytics service Totems to run the JetBlueSoFly campaign. Using Totems analytics, the team identified the best photos to be shown on a special section of the JetBlue website. The campaign was a resounding success for JetBlue, and also made for a nice case study for Totems.Twitter polls are not only a great way to engage with your followers and get immediate feedback, but they also represent an opportunity to create great content. When SAP conducted a twitter poll about self-driving cars using their social media analytics solution, they were able to cover the results in a Forbes article (which also serves as an example of native advertising for those keeping track).
Twitter poll results can also easily lend themselves to simple charts and graphs, which can be crafted into microcontent for use all over the web. social media marketing certification The Gallup numbers show that 35 percent of Americans say that social media has some influence on their purchasing decisions. While 35 percent is obviously a minority, think about how many Americans say that advertising in general affects their purchasing decisions. If that number is also in the 35 percent range, social media and traditional advertising will be shown to affect the purchasing decisions of the same percentage of people, hardly an indictment of social media's clout.While not an apples-to-apples comparison, many marketers have reported less-than-satisfactory results from radio advertising, for example. Does that mean radio ads are totally ineffective? No. Perception can differ from reality.