For any business using social media channels, it is important to know what makes your target market tick and to think about how you are going to engage with them.

I have recently completed the Search and Social Media Marketing course at Salford University which has given me more of an insight into digital marketing and some psychology behind the thought process of users on social media.

According to Jonah Berger, there are six STEPPS to creating successful content that is more likely to trigger people to share or engage with your content on social media.

Read more…..

Tapping the Social Media apps on my phone has become more of a habit than a conscious decision. Whether it’s to check out the persistent notifications for a picture I clicked ‘like’ on days ago; or to answer a private group message about a friend’s birthday meal. I no longer need to simply wonder how an old friend is doing, as their profile picture and status updates will tell the story of their relationships, hobbies and interests. Status updates can be akin to a diary extract; often telling us a lot more than we care to know.

Everything is Good by David Shrigley

Pew Internet’s research has shown that, “As of January 2014, 74% of online adults use social networking sites.” Whilst we live our private lives in the public eye, it’s important to consider that a respective new employer is able to scope us out before that life changing job interview. They will have already have made an opinion based on our online public persona. Perhaps due to this ‘social’ nature of Social Media, some companies aren’t taking it seriously enough and are reluctant to use it.

If you choose to use it to your advantage, you could be just one social media campaign away from beating your competitor to the number one spot in Google rankings. You will be better connected to your customer base, promoting your business to a wider audience all whilst being inspired and quite possibly entertained.

Choose Life, choose a Social Media platform

Consider the strengths within your company and use them to your advantage, but firstly…

• Who are your target audience?
• What’s your unique selling point?
• What objective are you trying to achieve?

Once you have established all of the above, you will be able to determine the correct Social Media platforms to use. Here are some of the usual suspects:

• Facebook

Facebook is still, far and away, the most popular social media platform. According to Statista.com, ‘As of the third quarter of 2014, Facebook had 1.35 billion monthly active users’.  It speaks volumes really. You can set up your company and wait for the ‘likes’ to come in, or if you have the capital, use pay per click adverts that work on pay per interaction rather than pay per impression. This is a real advantage over some of the more traditional online advertising techniques, where Return on Investment (ROI) can be low.

• Twitter

Despite being, arguably, the second-most recognized platform out there, Twitter is fourth in usage. The ultimate, real-time conversational micro-blogging platform; perfect if you like to keep your posts short, sweet and less than 140 characters.

• Instagram

If you are an ‘image heavy’ company this is an excellent medium to use. It’s fun, requires little management, just maintain a good level of high quality images.

• Tumblr

Hosting some 188 million blogs, Barack Obama took to the ‘micro-blogging’ platform to discuss issues such as national security, instantly dispelling previous perceptions that the site was little more than a hub for playground discussions between teenageers. Tumblr gives you ‘gofollow’ results, which is SEO GOLD! You can also use Google Analytics to track key metrics.

You can use ALL of the above, or just one, depending on how much time you available to dedicate. If you can spare at least half an hour a day to Social Media, make sure you use the platform that will create the most engagement. You can use a Social Media dashboard, such as Hootsuite to put out the same content  all the platforms at once, you can even schedule a suitable time in the day; reaching your audience in the USA when they are drinking their morning coffee. This will save you from setting your alarm for the middle of the night to send a Tweet.

To rank at the top of Google, you need to have a fresh unique website which is updated on a regular basis. A neglected page will make you drop off the first page on Google faster than you can say, ‘sneezing panda’. Set time aside each week to update the website. Try adding blog posts from guest bloggers, who have their own suitably engaged followers who can link back to your site.

Here’s a stinky statistic for you; according to Mashable, “There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone, but only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush”. This shows how imperative it is to have a mobile friendly website, we are all using our mobiles to view Social Media.

Be a Smarty Pants

One of the many fun things about Social Media is you can be a bit of a smart ass. There are so many things you can do, beyond basic tweeting and using the correct hashtags. Google trends is an excellent way of engaging with your desired audience, this will help to stay on top of trends relating to your business. It will inspire you to write a tweet at the perfect time. The best timed tweet I ever did was for my DJ collective project, Dance Lady Dance, (shameless promo) during the World Cup which got us 52 new followers. Thank you Miley!

Albeit, more football fans than music fans followed us…. which swiftly leads me to my next point:

Find the right audience 

Buying Twitter followers, or going on a follow-frenzy, is not going to be beneficial to your company. Locate your audience, who do they follow? This may be your competitor; if so ‘follow’ their followers, they may soon follow you back. Use an appropriate hashtag # that relates to your business and follow the latest followers who are tweeting about related topics. You’ll soon have a relevant audience who are ready to interact with you.

The best Social Media Marketers are creative thinkers who take risks. SEO and Social Media Marketing is ever changing, so there really is no guidebook on how to do this; its trial and error. Youtube hosts countless videos on unsuccessful marketing campaigns. Only the very best campaigns will go viral via Social Media (or ones with cats playing instruments).

You are ready!

Remember that your profile picture and cover photo is the first thing your audience will see, you have about five seconds to win them over, so make it count. Use something that represents your company and what you have to offer; always have a link to your website in your profile.

Follow the steps, keep your content updated and you’ll soon find that people will follow you whenever you go.

Connect with me @louloupembers

Cones as you may have realised aren’t interesting, they’re not funny, sexy, or appealing in any way, how then do you market one to the general public?

As a manufacturer of traffic management products we’re not exactly on trend, or in high demand. Basically cones are boring, and as a business to business company we didn’t think social media would benefit us in any way. After starting the Search and Social Media Marketing course though I thought why not try setting up a twitter and see where it gets us.

Before I set up the account I looked into other social media campaigns for boring products. The most successful one I could think of was Will It Blend?If you haven’t seen the videos, they’re advertising blenders but instead of just blending food or showing you a picture of a blender, they blend tablets, phones, toys, marbles, and a big mac, almost anything you can think of to show the power of the blender.  The campaign really took off and the guy behind it all became somewhat of a minor celebrity in America. There’s also the Got Milk? campaign, Milk has got to be the most boring product imaginable but the campaign was so successful that it has been running for over 20 years, there’s been celebrity endorsements and even merchandise, who knew an advert for milk could be so successful!

Another really good social media campaign is that of Vitamin Water, they asked people to tweet them with what’s currently boring them, then Vitamin Water would come back with a response to make it brilliant. They even went to a town In Oregon called Boring and put on loads of events and gigs, the whole thing went viral and there followers on twitter went up 100%.

There was more of online presence in our field that originally thought, so we set up our twitter account, @MelbaSwintex, designed the page around our theme from the website, followed the relevant people and waited for a miracle, but as we quickly realised, planning needed to go into running a social media platform.

We currently have three people with access to our twitter, a designer, a sales rep and me, so a wide variety of people, luckily we all have our own personal twitter accounts, so we knew the basics, we just didn’t know what to tweet about! Firstly we laid down the rules of what can and can’t be tweeted, we decided to discuss tweets before we posted them so we didn’t get any repeat tweets and so that non of the tweets were offensive, spelt wrong, or incorrect.  For us humour seemed to be the best way to go with, nobody wants to follow someone on twitter who blurts out facts about the first road cone or how to properly lay your road cone on the road. After only a couple of tweets we had a council ring us up and want to start a 2 year contract with us, just because I’d followed them on twitter, which is very encouraging.

Currently we’re tweeting about new products that we have coming soon, innovative design ideas that we are pursuing, particular tools that people can use on our website, and re-tweeting local news. We’ve currently got 31 followers, which doesn’t seem like many but to be fair it is a twitter account about cones.  According to our Google analytic’s profile, the twitter account is already generating more views to our website. Hopefully this will generate more interest in us as a company!

Thanks for reading and if you need any cones Melba Swintex is the place you need to call!

Melba Swintex

SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials

Wednesday 24th July – Book Now

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO) are no longer an optional choice for many organisations competing for the increasingly internet savvy consumers. Do you have a digital strategy and a social media policy? Do you know that if you don’t manage your social media presence chances are your customers will manage it for you and not always in a most favourable way.

As part of the University of Salford’s commitment to delivering the best digital training available, Salford Professional Development have developed a one day ‘SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials‘ course. This course is aimed at busy executives who want to have theoretic understanding as well as some basic hands on practical exercises which will highlight the essentials in SEO and Social Media Marketing. This knowledge will enable you to develop a better understanding of your customers behaviour online and help you to develop long term plan and implement basic techniques for management of day to day social media engagement. Working from your business objectives you will be able to draft some key performance indicators for your online presence, identify key social networks for your organisational use as well as conduct some basic Social Media Optimisation. The main focus on this course is to offer you a broad overview of search and social media marketing and help you to start working on your long term digital marketing strategy as well as plan for use of techniques.

Tutor:

Aleksej Heinze – http://businessculture.org

The course will be taught by Dr Aleksej Heinze, Aleksej is a co-director for the Centre for Digital Business which is part of The University of Salford’s Business School. He currently works on an international projects Passport to Trade 2.0 which helps businesses to understand International Business Culture and develop new business opportunities in Europe using social media networks.

Guest Speaker:

The course will also feature Martin Cozens who is the Managing Director for Banc Media. Based in Old Trafford, Manchester, Banc Media are a Search Engine Marketing company providing Pay Per Click & Search Engine Optimisation. They specialise in a measured & transparent approach, focussing on ROI for our clients through researched search engine marketing.

Martin Cozens: “We develop close relationships with our clients, proving to become an integral part of their business, smashing targets set by them and showing real return on investment in the products we supply and the search results they gain. Developing these relationships is what makes our business stronger and helps our team grow further to providing the very best service.”

Their clients include:

• Lufthansa’s business rewards air miles scheme SACP
• Cruise1st – a leading cruise holiday provider operating in the UK, Ireland & Australia
• FADS.co.uk – the nationally known online furniture retailer that was on the high street in over 800 stores
• Breens Solicitors – a renowned law firm operating out of Merseyside for both private and business clients.

Venue

SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials is based and delivered at the state of the art teaching and training facilities in the heart of the UK’s Media hub at MediaCityUK, University of Salford. This cutting edge facility is on close proximity of the BBC, ITV and many other top digital and media agencies.

Price

This course costs £299 + VAT.

Want to know more?

If you wish to enquire about this course, simply get in touch with Robert Goodison at Salford Professional Development on 0161 295 5407 or email R.Goodison@salford.ac.uk.

Are you new to digital marketing and interested in launching a viral campaign? Then you could learn something from our experience in running a viral campaign as part of our Search and Social Media Marketing module. This module is shared by MSc Marketing and Salford MBA postgraduate students at Salford Business School.

Launching a viral campaign is a great cost-effective way to connect with a wide and otherwise unreachable audience. The only real barrier to entry in this context is being able to construct an engaging idea.

How to create a viral video?

Our challenge was to create a viral video, but how can we do it? Our client for our campaign was the University of Salford Business School, and we chose to target our campaign at EU/home students looking to study for undergraduate business management degrees. We were given the overall aim of building awareness of the clients brand and generating leads to the course application webpage. To achieve this, we had to combine certain ‘brand consistencies’ given by the client, as well as the ‘creative’ elements that we thought would have characteristics of being viral.

Viral Video Content Research and Development

We began our work by looking at competitors online strategies, researching online trends, reading journals and blogs on viral marketing strategies and analysing past viral marketing successes. After gathering enough research we were set with the most difficult task of a viral campaign, creating original and engaging content that our target audience would be willing to share with their friends.

Our attempt at going viral was a video to be posted on YouTube and shared through international social media networks Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit. The storyline is about a frustrated student looking for the right place to study business, who finally finds the website with the help of his Lego figures. While it may sound very unusual and irrelevant to use Lego in a university business school campaign, our rationale was that the stop-motion animation that we created would grab the attention of our target audience because of its relative originality. This was also backed up by the fact that online videos which include Lego stop-motion animations are particularly popular on YouTube with our target audience which made it more likely to go viral.

Halfway through the development of the video, feedback received from our client pointed out the absence of a clear call to action in our campaign, which we addressed by adding an extra scene where the Lego characters construct our new core message ‘Build your future’. We also added a pun into the title of the video to give a better description of the content.

Viral Campaign Launch

The revised version of our video got positive feedback from the client so therefore we decided to launch our campaign. The video was posted through the clients and our personal Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as through Instagram and Reddit personal accounts. In 6 days the video gained 700 views, 30 ‘Likes’, as well as positive comments, however, that is far from our aim of going viral.

What we have learned about how to create a viral video?

To conclude, we have learned that the process of making a video go viral is a challenging task, part of which is beyond our control. Due to the nature of the client demands and because of the nature of the content itself (i.e. business education) it is challenging to combine the aspects of a ‘viral’ video with a client that demands a certain level of neutrality and messages open to a universal audience. It is evidently difficult to attempt to produce a video of viral nature which also has the broad objective of promoting the business school, which seems to contradict the inherent nature of viral videos themselves.

If you have any questions or experiences you would like to share, feel free to comment!

So, you’ve decided to embrace the world of social media…

Perhaps you’re an organisation who has heard all the buzz about Facebook and its ilk, and feel that you’re missing a trick not being on there too. Maybe you’re a freelancer who feels that getting social would lead to a fatter contacts book and more juicy commissions. Or perhaps (like my Dad), you’re a fifty-something with too much time on their hands who likes the idea of Twitter because it allows them to keep tabs on their children (sorry Dad). But now, after registering on all of these sites – choosing a pithy user name and a swanky avatar – you’re not sure what to do next.

But wait! Don’t fiddle around with it for five minutes and then brush it off as being a bad lot. Social Media can make a difference to your business. It’s all about finding a niche, taking the time to make connections, and pushing out good content to the right people.

I’ve been using the internet regularly since 1996, when it was all fields and the occasional IRC chat room. And, throughout the years, it feels as though I’ve jumped on every social media bandwagon going – IRC, Livejournal, Friendster, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter – you name it, and I’ve probably had a profile on there.

I don’t claim to be an ‘expert’ about this subject, but I am one of those ‘Digital Marketing’ types (by day I’m the Web Manager for The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and by night I post recipes and restaurant reviews on my food blog, Little Red Courgette), and I feel proud to say that I’ve managed to make a career out of messing around on the web. I’ve also recently been studying on Salford University’s Search and Social Media Marketing course which has enabled me to think about social media in ways which I hadn’t envisaged before. Whilst this isn’t going to be the definitive tome on the subject, think of it as a handy Beginner’s Guide.

But why should my organisation use social media?

As Bill Gates famously stated in 1996, when it comes to the internet, Content is King. But it’s not enough to create amazing words and pictures and let them sit there on your website waiting for people to stumble across them. If you want to make an impact on the SERPS, you have to be a bit noisy. As this handy infographic says, social is SEO and content is social. Google’s Panda algorithm actively encourages people to produce and share high quality content, and posting links on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus allows people to share your content to their own personal networks. Having a single tweet retweeted by someone with thousands of followers can lead to your content going viral, meaning lots new followers and customers for your website and a higher page ranking on the search engines.

Become an expert

If you want to make an impact on social media, find your niche. There’s no shame in being a one topic wonder, so long as people connect with the content you’re sharing. If you provide users with the most useful, attractive and engaging content that you can, then this will motivate them to share it with their friends, link to it and keep coming back for more.

• Don’t be afraid to tailor you content specifically towards your target market. If you try and be relevant to everyone, you won’t relevant to anyone.
• Don’t sound too sales-y. There’s nothing worse than someone who is using a blogpost to simply flog their services. The more relevant information you can provide, the more people will be wanting to return to your website.
• Remember – the more high quality content you share, the more valuable it becomes and the more people will share it. So make it sensational!

Start making friends

Social media should be exactly that – social. Don’t just use your profiles as a glorified RSS feed. Start conversations and make connections. Reply to tweets and Facebook messages. Comment on people’s blogs and befriend people in your industry who you think may be interested in listening what you have to say.  A bit of cheekiness can go a long way – and can reap huge rewards.

Don’t restrict yourself

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – it’s easy to find a platform  that suits you and use nothing else. But in doing so, you’re doing yourself – and your brand – a bit of a disservice. Different social media platforms attract different audiences, of different age ranges and different nationalities. When devising a social media campaign, it’s important that you look at each platform, think about how you can transmit your key messages through each of those in a unique way and adapt your voice accordingly. For example:

• I use Twitter to share links and chat with friends and freelance clients
• I use Facebook to catch up with old acquaintances and the family members I have scattered across the globe
• I use WordPress for my blog
• I use LinkedIn to speak to colleagues and business connections
• I use Google Plus to promote my blog posts to a wider audience

If you’ve not yet encountered Google Plus, it’s a social network which aims to be Facebook, but better (and with less risk of your boss seeing pictures of you drunk and falling over). To find out more, watch the handy explanatory video below.

Learn from the masters

When it comes to devising and implementing a social media strategy, it’s always good to look at what your peers are doing. If they’ve got a good online reputation, it’s usually because they’re doing something right.

A few brands who do social really well are fashion retailers ASOS, Topshop and Evans (which have all utilised blogs, Twitter and Facebook to connect with their key demographic). Evans have also reached out to the blogosphere, holding press days for fashion bloggers to see their new collections, and encouraging influential bloggers to contribute guest posts to their corporate blog.

The Golden Rule – Don’t be an idiot!

OK, so this just sounds like common sense. But it’s a sentiment which can easily be forgotten in the heat of the moment. The internet has a long memory, and it’s often quick to judge. One misjudged tweet or Facebook status update can have a debilitating effect on your brand. A good example of this is when, in 2009, Habitat used ‘Hashtag Spam’ to get into the top trending results on Twitter. Hashtags are the keywords used on Twitter which allows users to follow a conversation, and, using hashtags like #Iran and #Mousavi, the retailer added notes about its products into the stream of tweets about the Iranian uprising in 2009. Whilst Habitat blamed this on the actions of a rogue intern, the effect was debilitating and, arguably, the brand’s online reputation hasn’t really recovered since.

And, above all else, have fun!

It’s easy to take social media too seriously, but in doing so, you’d be missing out on seeing it for what it can be (namely, bloody good fun). If you’re prepared to put the effort in, you’ll soon reap the rewards, as well as make friends, influence people, and (eventually) become a social media superstar.

Agree? Disagree? Or perhaps you just want to say hello? If so, feel free to follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/misscay, or feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

At this precise moment in time, I am a member of 44 LinkedIn Groups with one additional group membership request pending.  As someone with an avid interest in social media and who is taking time to learn new skills, it has been an extremely simple process to sign up to numerous groups and platforms. Every new lead or connection often leads to the exploration of new groups and other interesting sources of information. This is great in the context of information discovery; but it can quickly lead to information overload and a constant battle to stay on top of incoming messages.

LinkedIn Discussion Groups Experiment

On November 1st, I decided to try a small experiment.  I signed into my LinkedIn account and changed all of my groups’ settings to switch them to ‘email each new discussion’ and remove any weekly and daily digests.  The intention was to use the filters within my email client to divert the junk mail directly to my delete folder and try to achieve a more manageable email flow. However, what I actually did was set up a single filter to divert all of my LinkedIn Group notifications into a dedicated folder.

Over the course of the experiment, I discovered a number of  things:

1. It is very difficult to set emails to automatically delete unless there is a specific subject or person that merits being avoided;
2. I receive an average of between 15 to 20 notifications per hour, varying according to time of day and day of week;
3. The vast majority of notifications contain links to articles, blog posts and marketing material with no commentary or additional value to warrant the use of the LinkedIn platform;
4. There is a considerable amount of duplication across different LinkedIn groups, not to mention external sources such as other social networks, news aggregation services and monitoring tools;
5. Closed groups are typically more valuable to me than open groups, in terms of relevant content, fewer problems with spam and more interaction.

So, what I end up with is a list of emails that looks a lot like this:

Sample list of emails from LinkedIn Discussion Groups

Filtering Discussion Group Notifications

At which point, it becomes necessary to employ a technique called ‘thin slicing’, which I first learned about when reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  First of all I use the select all check box, then I skim the subject titles for key words, patterns and phrases that look like they hold some potential.  You quickly become blind to the words ‘New discussion’, which leaves only a short title to skim through. If one of the subject lines grabs my attention I glance over to the right to check which group the item was posted to and then to the left to see if I recognize the author. If the email subject looks interesting, I deselect the check box for that email and repeat until I reach the bottom of the list, at which point I delete all selected emails.

This technique allows me to filter out up to 98% of the LinkedIn Group notifications that make it to my inbox, which means that it is critical for messages to have well-written, concise and highly targeted subject lines.

One example of an email that attracted my attention was the third email in the list above, using the subject line: “Anyone know of any articles or resources that can justify the creation o…”. The primary hook being my interest in information research and the indication that this is a discussion question as opposed to a link share.  In my view, discussions on LinkedIn are worth following where there is the possibility that expert knowledge might be shared or where valuable connections can be discovered.

Clicking on the link revealed that the full subject line was even more interesting: “Anyone know of any articles or resources that can justify the creation of a branded Google Plus page? How is it different than a Facebook page? Will Google Plus be around next year?”

New Discussion Notification Email from Social Media Today Group

This is the second decision point in the filtering process: deciding whether or not to right click on the link to open it in a new tab before hitting the delete button. I will typically run through all of the emails that escaped the initial delete, before moving over to LinkedIn to check each discussion item that I have opened in a new tab. [N.B. It is useful to be logged in to LinkedIn before starting this process.] In the case of the example used above, there is no article link in the discussion posting and it generated ten comments in two days, containing some very useful links, tips and feedback.

Improving the Signal to Noise Ratio

LinkedIn have just launched group statistics, which are accessible by clicking on the graph icon on the My Groups page.  This can simplify the process of targeting group interactions; so it is possible to unsubscribe from email and digest notifications from groups, in circumstances where it may be relevant to be a member but not to have an active participation.  If we look at the activity statistics for two groups with strikingly different member and activity statistics, opting out of discussion notices from a larger group becomes a viable option, especially when the majority of postings may be duplication either within multiple LinkedIn groups or on other social networks.

Example demographics of a small LinkedIn Group

Example demographics of a large LinkedIn Group

Example activity levels of a small LinkedIn Group

Example activity levels of a large LinkedIn Group

The important thing to remember is that even though it is very easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that flows through social media networks, there is an ‘off’ switch.  As you get to know the groups you have signed up to, it is possible to reduce the pile of messages and notifications clogging up your inbox by:

• Switching off notifications from groups that are primarily used for link sharing and direct marketing broadcasts.
• Switching digest notifications to individual notifications, because digests typically include ‘still active’ discussion notices, which are often more distracting than useful.
• Using a social bookmarking service to direct followers to your preferred networks and groups.

In the process of writing this post I have received membership approval for my 45th LinkedIn Group, I think it’s time to update my XeeMe groups’ page.

Update – 5th January 2012

When setting up filters for LinkedIn emails, it is very useful to set up separate filters for ‘New job’, New discussion‘ and ‘New comment‘ to direct them to individual folders. I updated my own filtering system after I reached the maximum of 50 LinkedIn group memberships and these work for me for three key reasons:

• I can automatically delete job postings when I am not working on a specific recruitment related project;
• I can ignore new discussion items until I have a block of time to sift through them for interesting threads. In fact, by delaying responding to a discussion item it creates a buffer effect to renew interest in a discussion item and serves to encourage more responses overall;
• I can easily pick up on and respond faster to comments on discussions that I have already commented on or started following.

Next on my agenda is to write a blog post on how to write good subject lines for new discussion items over at http://smespresso.co.uk

Finding More Help with Social Media

I’d love to hear from you, if you would like to:

• Leave a comment on this post
• Find me on through my social bookmarks on XeeMe
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Follow the #ssmm tag or my #ssmm list on Twitter for useful tips and connections
• AnjleeB

The Socialnomics video by @equalman is probably the most shared video on the economics of social media on YouTube.  This is the long version (4 minutes 19 seconds) of the 2011 edition set to music by Fat Boy Slim.

Social Context and Network Presence

Some social media and marketing experts believe that you should be everywhere.  However, it is far more important to be in the right place at the right time. Context is everything when it comes to deciding which social networks are relevant for you and your business.  Take the example of a downtown restaurant, where daily specials can be posted on Twitter and loyalty discounts can be offered to regular customers who check-in on Foursquare.  Different networks will have different advantages depending on the type of business and amount of resources available.  The trick is to weigh up all the pros and cons of each opportunity so as to not risk being overwhelmed by taking on too much too soon.

Earlier this month, the Oxford Internet Institute released the latest report on the State of the Internet in Britain, containing information on the emergence of next generation users in terms of adoption, characteristics and attitudes, use, government and politics, social networks and friendships, impact of internet use, regulation and control and digital divides. This valuable demographics and trend data feeds into the World Internet Project, which “is a major, international, collaborative project looking at the social, political and economic impact of the Internet and other new technologies”.

Most users will only actively participate on one or two networks on a daily basis, so it is important to focus on relevance and providing valuable engaging content. Unfortunately there are a myriad of networks to choose from and the top choices will vary depending on industry, geographic region and active user base.

Choosing a Social Network

If you are based in the English speaking world, the main social networks that have established social media marketing frameworks, applications, metrics and guidance on usability are a good place to start: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, and YouTube.  It is not critical to establish a presence on all of these networks and there are plenty of review sites and social media comparison charts that can help with the targeting process, such as those provided by the Social Media Guide.

The Social Media ROI video is part of the Socialnomics series by @equalman; can you tell that I am a fan?  The data is from 2009 and the music is Bob Sinclair, 4 minutes 15 seconds worth of real world examples of social media strategies that have had a clear business impact.

The key questions to ask when deciding to participate in a social media network are:

• Why should I be on this network?
• Are my customers there?
• Do my customers want me there?
• How will I engage my customers?
• How much time and effort will it cost?
• Will there be a worthwhile return on my investment?

By considering each of these questions in the context of the individual social networks that you might join, you will be able to decide which networks will be the best ones for you to start with.

A comprehensive UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report is compiled annually by Econsultancy, and although the full report currently costs £250, there are some useful metrics in the free sample download.

Company Names, Brands and Trademarks as Social Identities

This video is a great visual interpretation of the journey of branding from its use as property demarcation to social identification and what it means in today’s economy.  It was produced in 2011 by the MSc Brand Leadership team at Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia.

The question of whether you need to register your profile on all of the social networks that you are likely to want to use is a good one. It is important to consider whether your company name, brand name or trademark is worth protecting from being registered by someone else, who might use the account for their own purposes.  Even if you do not wish to actively participate in a particular social network, it may be worth registering your username to act as a placeholder or a redirect to the websites and networks where you are actively participating.

A useful service to check is KnowEm, which allows you to do a quick username search on more than 550 social networks.  In my personal experience, the results are not always 100% accurate; but it is a great place to start researching for safeguarding a specific company name, brand name or a trademark.

Finding More Help with Social Media Marketing Basics

Well, a great place to learn more about Search & Social Media Marketing is the SEO Training provided by Salford University…but that might be stating the obvious!

Whichever profiles you choose to establish on social media networks, it is really important to remember which social networks you have joined and use a bookmarking service.  My personal favourite is XeeMe, which is based in the US but currently on target to set up a physical presence in Europe in the coming months.

I’d love to hear from you, if you would like to:

• Leave a comment on this post
• Find me through my social bookmarks on XeeMe
• Follow the #ssmm tag or my #ssmm list on Twitter for useful tips and connections
• AnjleeB