Marketers Shift Ad Budgets Into Social Media

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Social Media Advertising Grows At The Expense Of Other Channels (Nielsen via Internet Retailer)
Nearly two-thirds of marketers plan to increase their social media ad spending this year, including 31 percent who plan to increase their social media budget by more than 10 percent, according to a new report by Nielsen subsidiary Vizu. For most of those advertisers, that growth is coming at the expense of other marketing channels. For instance, 23 percent say that they are shifting marketing dollars away from online display ads to social. Another 39 percent say they are moving some of their offline marketing budget to social media advertising and 10 percent are taking money away from other online channels. Advertisers are increasing their social media ad spending because they view social media as one piece of broader marketing campaigns. For instance, 66 percent of advertisers say they run social media ads that relate to other online advertising “most or all of the time” and another 51 percent say their social media ads relate to offline advertising “most or all of the time.” Read >>

Facebook Beats Expectations, Stock Drops Anyway (Business Insider)
Facebook reported its fourth quarter 2012 numbers yesterday. It beat Wall Street analysts' revenue and profit expectations. Revenue growth continued to accelerate growing 40 percent year-over-year, up from 32.8 percent year-over-year growth last quarter. Operating margins improved, as well. Mobile daily active users exceeded desktop daily active users for the first time last quarter. Mark Zuckerberg even said, "Today there is no argument: Facebook is a mobile company." Ad revenue from mobile went from obscurity in 2011 to 23 percent of total ad revenue. Despite the good news, the stock dropped 10 percent as soon as the numbers came out. Read >>

Is Changing Company Culture The Biggest Hurdle For Social Business? (CMS Wire)
Almost 75 percent of respondents in the IBM Business of Social Business report said their companies were under-prepared for the needed cultural changes in adopting social business. Here are some uses of social business:

On the one hand, most companies see how invested their customers are in social, and on the other, they seem to be worried about transparency issues and other unforeseen consequences of adopting a broad social layer. Read >>

Seven Things Your Customers Need To Hear You Say On Twitter (debsylee)
One of the first ways to gauge how effective any business is on Twitter is to take a look at the feed. You would be amazed at the number of companies who never interact with anyone, who never thank their followers for a compliment or a retweet and who never give the slightest hint that they’re real people or that they’re approachable. Here are a few suggestions to change that:

1. Great to meet you
2. Good day
3. Thank you
4. Congratulations
5. You're welcome
6. Of course I can help you with that ...
7. We are rather excited, I think you will agree ...

By regularly responding, replying and interacting in a timely fashion you’re letting every potential customer know that dealing with your company is going to be a breeze. A cinch. A delight. Read >>

Trust-Related Elements For Your Social Marketing (Edelman via Heidi Cohen)
Social media and content marketing require customer trust to help build and extend your 360° brand. Without trust, customers won’t believe what your brand represents or what you say on your site, on third party sites or on social media. Even worse, they won’t buy from you. To this end, Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer reveals five trust element marketers must take into account when developing their social media and content marketing plans.

Trust elements: Engagement, integrity, products and services, purpose and operations. The challenge for businesses is that there’s a big difference between how important consumers feel these attributes are and how individual companies perform.

Spokesperson credibility: When it comes to credibility, customers still trust academics/experts, companies' technical experts and/or someone like them more than CEOs and government officials. Based on Edelman’s findings, more people distrust chief executives and government workers.

Influencer messaging: Before you decide to only use academics, experts and technical specialists to create and convey your business message across social media, owned and third-party media, take a deeper look at how consumers respond to different messengers and their communications.

Media trust matters: Where you place your message is as important as what you say and who says it. It provides context for your message and leverages the platform’s existing audience to distribute your message.

Build trust through repetition: Two-thirds of prospects and customers must hear a message three to five times before they believe it. Almost one out of five needs to listen to your message over six times before they start to believe it. Read >>

Personal Tweets Costing Businesses $650 Billion (ABC News)
When does twittering at work become frittering away your employer's time and money? When your tweets aren't work-related. Business research firm Basex puts the productivity cost of workplace interruptions, including employee abuse and misuse of social media, at $650 billion a year. According to Nielsen/Incite's Social Media Report for 2012, Americans spent 74 billion minutes, or 20 percent of their time, on social media sites. Instead of trying to suppress employees' addiction to social media, 1SaleADay, a deal-a-day company in Miami, chose to channel it. Eliyahu Federman, senior vice president, installed Yammer, and offered it as an alternative to Facebook. The benefits have been dramatic. In the customer service department alone, he says, productivity has risen a little more than 48 percent. Read >>

Ways Teachers Can Integrate Social Media Into Education (Online Colleges via Pass Now Now)
Some teachers embrace technology and social media. Others just look, many ignore. What does the average teacher do if they are somewhere in the middle? The following infographic shows which teachers are using social media and what for. Read >>