Social media has, since its introduction, created a conundrum for marketers: how do we measure success? It’s all well and good to gain followers and likes, but what does that really mean in terms of bottom-line impact? Pinterest, the latest addition to the social set, introduces a whole new set of opportunities, as well as a whole new set of questions. Don't Think Of It As A Social Platform The best way to look at Pinterest is not as a social platform. Don’t think about developing a “Pinterest Strategy.”  Consider Pinterest a media channel for content marketing. The social aspect [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Pinterest | Pinterest: Analytics | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing Column

If you're responsible for social media for a large organization, odds are good that you either use automated tools or are giving serious thought to using them. At enterprise scale, it's virtually impossible to manage an effective social program without some kind of software assistance. The good news is that over the past year, social media management tools for the enterprise have become robust and reliable. Marketing Land’s sister site, Digital Marketing Depot, regularly takes deep dives into areas we can’t always cover in depth while we’re keeping up with the rapid change of news in [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Features & Analysis | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing

I have a couple of cool tools in my kitchen: The Aero Press and the Vitamix. I love them both. The Aero Press is a convenient way to make a great cup of morning coffee. It helps me accomplish a habitual practice I engage in each day. But, the Vitamix (a high speed blender) has shifted my understanding and approach to food. I’ve learned to use different types of raw foods to fuel whatever activity I’m about to engage in (tip: try kale for mental clarity). This shift has improved my performance and productivity both mentally and physically (some in my family even point to a sunnier dis [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics | Marketing Day | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Marketing Tools: Social Media

If only Epicurious had been using Social Flow or Buffer, it might've avoided the headaches associated with social media's latest tragedy-related faux pas. But it appears the food-lover's website wasn't using either of those social management services, and sent out a couple tweets on Tuesday that looked like an attempt at self-promotion in the aftermath of a terrible event. Twitter user Thomas Powell seems to have been the first to notice (that's his image above), and coverage on other websites has quickly picked up steam, as is always the case when brands take this route with their s [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Strategy | Features & Analysis | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Twitter

Video technology company Unruly released a Social Video Quarterly Report for Q1 2013 today, the first in a new series of quarterly reports measuring social video advertising trends. According to their findings, the Entertainment sector won 28.7 percent of total shares for social videos, followed by the FMCG/CPG, Tech and Automotive sectors. The two entertainment video campaigns that drove the most shares were a set of two trailers for the movie Fast & Furious 6, which generated a combined 4,090,803 shares and Fox's ad for the 'Homer Shake' episode of the The Simpsons which garnered 568, [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Video | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Video

With its launch today at the 2013 ad:tech Summit, Blab claims to be the first commercial platform to predict social media conversations up to 72 hours before they happen. Applying algorithms that analyze text, images, and videos from more than 50,000 real-time data sources, Blab organizes billions of conversations to predict future conversations within 24, 48 and 72-hour windows. Designed using a SaaS platform, marketers access Blab's Conversation Canvas dashboard to find opportunities and threats in real-time, making it possible to devise strategies and develop content based on future conv [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Strategy | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Hashtags

The marketing technology company HipLogiq launched their newest social media software SocialCentiv at last month's SXSW Conference. Within 30 days after its launch, the company says more than 1,000 companies had become customers. Designed for small to medium sized businesses, SocialCentiv claims to help companies identify potential customers on social media sites like Twitter, allowing them to reply to social media conversations with location-based offers. When someone uses an offer, SocialCentiv emails a referral incentive reward to the new customer. The software also includes reporting op [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Twitter: Advertising | Twitter: Marketing

Little Twitter is growing up, today announcing it will offer an advertising API for its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products, a development allowing marketers to buy and optimize Twitter ads alongside their other media buying. The company has been testing the system for the last month or so, with beta partners Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, TBG Digital and SHIFT. "With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale," wrote April Underwood, Twitter's prod [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Top News | Twitter: Advertising | Twitter: User Interface

After giving users a sneak peek last month, the new owners of Delicious.com have launched the new version of the venerable bookmarking site. On first glance, it looks like they have a winner on their hands. Going to the home page today should show a small pop-up window introducing the new site to both users and non-account holders. If you have an account already, logging in will bring up another overlay with a couple quick tips about using the new site. Content discovery looks like a cross between the old Digg and a page of Google search results. The far right column shows a preview o [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Delicious | Marketing Tools | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Top News

It's funny how subjective using social media tools can be from person to person. Every day, I use at least a half dozen tools to post and track social activity online, primarily SocialFlow, Chartbeat, Google Analytics, Tweetdeck, Facebook Insights, Exact Target. On occasion, that toolset grows: Google Webmaster Tools, Simply Measured, PageLever, Followerwonk, Raven Tools, Curalate, Twitter Analytics, bitly, Muckrack, Tweetreach, Google Insights, Statigram, IFTTT... and there are more if I count the tools I use on a personal basis. I haven't used Union metrics for Tumblr yet (frankly I am si [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features & Analysis | Marketing Tools | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Uncategorized

Marketers that want a better sense of where a Facebook Page is most popular can do that now via a new tool from the social analytics firm, SocialBakers. The company announced its Local Page Ranks tool today, which shows where Page fans are located geographically. This data has been available to Page owners in Facebook Insights, but only for their own Page(s). SocialBakers' Facebook Page Statistics page now has a "Country" dropdown where the local ranks of Pages that SocialBakers monitors can be accessed. The data shows, for example, that Walmart is currently the most popular Facebook p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

The dog never ate my homework. Or at least, I never tried to use that as an excuse, which is odd, considering my family actually owned a dog kennel. To this day, the memory of homework sends chills down my spine -- I just wasn't one of those people who dashed off their evening assignments with ease. If only they had called it research. Research evokes pictures of Mission Impossible dossiers of secret agents, or scientists discovering a breakthrough cure for a killer pandemic. Research is a key task in social media marketing. We have to listen to and analyze our communities, perhaps [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

Buffer, the increasingly popular social media management tool, has announced a new update for both its web interface and iPhone app. Together, the two products are getting a pretty substantial list of new features along with a new look. The new Buffer web app sports a new design that appears to make it easier to choose social accounts when publishing, and also shows the media (photos, videos, etc.) right inline with scheduled updates in the Buffer queue. Analytics are grouped together under a new menu option, and now indicates which posts performed best with "top tweet" and other icons. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing

Dlvr.it, an automation tool used by many bloggers and publishers, is switching to a freemium business model with the launch of two premium account plans and changes to its existing free service. The new plans were introduced in an email sent to users last night. Dlvr.it allows publishers to automatically distribute content from an RSS feed out to social networks including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You might think of it as a more limited/focused version of IFTTT. New are the "Pro" and "Ultimate" plans -- $10 and $20 per month, respectively -- both of which offer services not ava [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media

Would you pay $20 for a Twitter client? Especially when Twitter has its own free client, and several other Twitter clients are also free? That's the question that Tapbots is asking Twitter users. The company, makers of the excellent and popular (and free) Tweetbot client for iOS, has just released its desktop Mac version of Tweetbot ... and it comes with a $19.99 price tag in the Mac App Store. Why? In its announcement today, Tapbots says $20 is "not that expensive" for a piece of software that might get used every day. But the price isn't just a reflection of development time and cos [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features & Analysis | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Business Issues

Update: Due to new information, the original headline of this story has been changed. Please see the postscript at the end of the original article. If This Then That (IFTTT) is notifying users today that it will stop supporting Twitter-based "triggers" as of next Thursday, September 27th. But the service will still allow users to create actions that use Twitter as the "action" -- the end result of a trigger. In a letter to users, IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets says Twitter's new developer guidelines mean that IFTTT users can no longer use the service to send tweets to Dropbox, Evernote, email [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Twitter | Twitter: Business Issues

Yesterday Facebook profile analytics took a step up with the release of WolframAlpha personal analytics. Logged in members (tied to the WollframAlpha Facebook app) simply have to enter "facebook report" into the search bar to get a variety of statistics about your profile. True to the mission of WolframAlpha, the new service is data-driven an ties into various knowledge domains.  Not only can you see some basics like the demographics of friends, weekly app activity, photo dates/times and geographic data, but also activity data. Personal analytics tracks all types of posts and displays data [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Facebook | Facebook: Insights | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Top News

If you're planning a campaign to stimulate word of mouth discussion of a product or a brand, one question likely keeps arising -- how influential is a particular person online? Is it worth reaching out to them? If you've been pondering how to measure or benchmark social media influence, several companies, including Klout, PeerIndex and Kred, are clamoring to assist you in identifying and connecting with influencers with high social capital ranking scores. Even if connecting with influencers isn't an immediate need, the boss might be asking for explanations of your brand's Klout score, [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Channel: Industry | Klout | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing Column | Statistics: Social Media | Twitter: Marketing | Word Of Mouth Marketing

User influence monitoring service Kred, has created Kred Story, a rich visual experience for viewing one's social stream. Kred has traditionally competed with Klout on influence measurement, the new Kred Story takes a different approach as it aims to find and display influential activity in a visually appealing layout. The layout places more of an emphasis on images pulled from links and social accounts for an appealing newspaper-esque layout. Included with the updates are top influencers, locations, related words and top bloggers around an account or hastag. Listed Tweets show Retw [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Klout | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing

"He's makin a list, He's checkin it twice" -Santa Claus is Coming to Town, ‪Haven Gillespie People love lists. In the opera Don Giovanni, the licentious main character’s servant Leporello maintained a list of his boss’s conquests. As children, we might have been encouraged to make lists of what we wanted for our birthday, while our parents made lists of groceries to be picked up on the way home. And now that we need a book for vacation, we might even consult the best-sellers list. If you know your HTML, you’ll know that a numbered list is an ordered list, while a list sim [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing