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How Marketers Are Utilizing Social Media in 2010

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When are your friends & family shopping for the holidays?

If you are a woman between the ages of 18 and 34, then the bulk of your holiday shopping starts at Thanksgiving. Though the time leading up to Thanksgiving will influence them in their buying decisions!

Plugging into Facebook’s Social Plugin

There was a full article in WSJ plugging the social plugin that Facebook has been pitching to businesses and website owners. The sales pitch:

For e-commerce sites, adding a “Like” button lets shoppers quickly share a product or deal with their Facebook connections, potentially encouraging them to buy the product themselves.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787904575403512335975240.html#ixzz13acRpgmE

But they don’t mention that Share buttons on most websites also enable customers to do this, and in my opinion, do it better. Share buttons allow users to populate an image before they share the link with friends. If you are in any industry where visualization matters (fashion, beauty), the like button is not serving you best. 

Facebook does have a solution for this, layering your Share plugin over the “like” social plugin, but other than slight tracking data, what are the benefits of doing that?

The flip side of the story is best told by “flip side stakeholder” Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis.

That is a change from when users share content through sharing buttons developed by other companies. Those companies, including ShareThis, which has buttons on 800,000 websites, can collect data to help sites understand their audience.

If online publishers lose data about user behavior, it could deprive them of revenue from selling advertising that is targeted to particular users, said Tim Schigel, chief executive of ShareThis. Advertisers are increasing their spending on such targeted ads faster than that for traditional ads that appear across an entire website at a given time, no matter who is visiting.

Knowing which customers share website information is valuable because it lets publishers see which users are influential, meaning they drive a lot of traffic back to their sites. “To the extent that any third party comes in and knows more and can extract more value than the publishers themselves, they can be worried,” Mr. Schigel said.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787904575403512335975240.html#ixzz13adi9SQq

I love Facebook, but I don’t think the Like Social Plugin offers enough value. 

Get Face Time with Your Facebook Friends/Fans

During the Facebook Success Summit, speaker Jay Baer discussed how to be seen in Facebook’s “Top News” newsfeed. He elaborated that newsfeed standing is determined by the Edge Rank, an algorithm that reflects three components:

• Affinity Score: The amount you have historically engaged with content by a person/page increases your affinity to the content creator.
• Timing: The more recent the post, the higher it ranks.
• Weight: As posts are commented on, liked and shared by other Facebook users and their networks, their overall weight increases.

SmartBlog covered the seminar and added that “only 35% of Facebook users log in during the workday.” This is often due to company internet restrictions. 

Using the Edge Rank, there are some clear goals for Facebook success (related to organic traffic). 

• Bring repeat viewers and participants to your fanpage. The more they interact with you, the more they will see your posts. That means, when people interact with you, make sure to interact with them. They’ll get a notification and love you a little extra. :)
• I wouldn’t encourage posting more frequently. Frequent posts may be cool on Twitter, but look like Spam on Facebook. Instead, I would encourage posting when other companies/orgs are not. Often businesses post during the day, that means you should throw in some evening posts. Taking into consideration that most users are not logging in during work, it is a win win situation.
• Make your content GOOD! Find the formula that gets the highest interactions from your fans. I’ve seen that simple updates and interesting topics that focus on the individual (not the brand), yield the best results. 

Who are your favorite brands on Facebook?

Do You Like Me?: Check the Box for Yes

A recent eMarketer post stated, “ExactTarget’s “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” report found Facebook users who “like” brands are even more likely to place importance on showing off their brand choices to friends than brand followers on Twitter or subscribers to opt-in marketing emails.”

For a fashion company that should emphasize protecting your brand on your Facebook page and/or social networking site. Customers identify with brands when they are aspirational or a reflection of how they see themselves.  To support this, the ideal Facebook page should let the customer immerse themselves in your brand, similar to the website experience. 

Nowadays, liking a company happens on the company website and not the fanpage, thanks to the Facebook likebox. This is an ideal situation, because the customer is totally immersed in the brand and probably at the height of identifying with it! The difficultly it taking the step to implement the like box on the website, where we would take up real-estate and make the facebook affiliation prominent. 
 

Light as a feather, stiff as a styleboard

Trust in the Social World

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about “social graphs”, which measures who influences you the most online. Facebook launched the “Like” button with the research that Facebook friends rank pretty high on the social graph. This interesting study from Invoke Solutions (via eMarketer) left us with the following key points:

• Individuals: Most trusted information was posted by people respondents knew. But blog posts were more likely to be trusted “completely” than posts on Facebook, and trust dropped off sharply when it came to Twitter, even among friends.
• Brands: Postings by brands or companies were trusted less, but levels were similar whether companies posted to Facebook or blogs.
• Secondary Sites: Online community sites did not hold the same trustworthiness as Facebook or blogs, whether postings were made by companies or fellow members
• Twitter: And across all categories of content creator, Twitter streams were trusted less than other media.

I am not shocked that Twitter ranks low on trust.  There are far fewer “fake accounts” or secondary accounts on Facebook than there is on Twitter. Fake personas and multiple personas run rampant on Twitter. The only legit accounts are large company accounts and verified accounts. This is prompting me to sign up for a verified account for some extra umph!

Also, it makes sense that a blog post, a piece of journalism would be easier to trust than a 140 character thought, especially since tweets are actually only 77 characters on average.

Asked to rate what was most important to making social sites trustworthy, users’ top concerns are below:

Women Account for Bulk of Online Buying

According to comScore’s “Women on the Web” white paper, women account for just less than half of US internet users but make up a disproportionately large share of online buyers, at nearly 58%.

Their share of transactions is even higher, with more than 61.2% of online purchases made by women. They also spent more than men, accounting for 58.2% of the total, suggesting men tend to make fewer purchases of bigger-ticket items, while women are more frequent buyers with a lower average order value.

(Via eMarketer)

If you’ve seen “What Women Want” starring Mel Gibson, then you were clued in at an early age about women’s buying power. Mel Gibson’s lead character tried desperately to get inside the mind of women to understand how to market to them. The research shows that women’s buying power also translates online.

Will the next round of executives be hanging out in Farmville? :)

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