Facebook App Chat Heads: This Week in Social Media

By Cindy King
Published April 20, 2013

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

Facebook Updates iPhone App With Chat Heads and Stickers: “Now you can keep chatting even when you’re doing other stuff on Facebook, like checking your news feed. Tap Chat Heads to reply, drag them around or flick them down to close.” And you can also add stickers to your messages.

The Facebook iPhone app's new Chat Heads make it easy to follow chat conversations on the go.

LinkedIn Unveils a New Mobile Experience: The new LinkedIn phone app provides a completely revamped experience “with the general professional and everyday use case in mind.”

Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

Twitter Releases a Music App: The Twitter #music app is “a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter. It uses Twitter activity, including tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists.”

"You can navigate to #NowPlaying to view and listen to those songs."

Twitter Trends Now in 160 New Locations: Twitter introduces Trends “in more than 160 new locations. Included in that list are a number of countries that will be getting Trends for the first time: Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Ukraine, plus more than 130 new cities in countries that already have Trends.”

Twitter Trends are now available in many more countries.

Google+ Comments Come to Blogger: “You can bring Google+ Comments to your Blogger blog. Once you’ve enabled the feature through your Blogger Dashboard, you’ll enjoy a number of important benefits.” Will Google+ Comments expand to other platforms in the future?

To get started with Google+ Comments, just visit the Google+ tab of your Blogger Dashboard, and check Use Google+ Comments.

Here’s some interesting social media news to follow:

Facebook Launches Open Graph Mobile: Open Graph Mobile “takes Facebook’s social graphing product to the mobile platform for the first time.”

Here’s a couple of useful tools for social media marketers:

The Rollup: a free tool to help you manage your inbox by combining and managing selected subscriptions into one convenient daily digest email.

The Rollup helps you to manage your email subscriptions.

Wajam: a free tool to find out what your friends share by adding a social share section to your Google search page.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.

About the Author, Cindy King

Cindy King is the director of editorial for Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business from scratch by using social business networking. Other posts by Cindy King »

http://www.jretechnology.com

5 Mobile Video Apps to Boost Online Engagement

By Meaghan Edelstein
Published April 17, 2013

Do you want to use videos to market your business?

Are you wondering if there are simple mobile apps to make this possible?

In this article I’ll review five mobile video apps and share how they can boost your online engagement.

Vine, Twitter’s mobile video app, has business and marketing professionals considering the numerous ways video apps can be used to increase engagement.

Ekaterina Walter, social innovator at Intel and author of Think Like Zuck, recently predicted that “2013 will be the year of visual marketing”. Walter based this prediction, in part, on the fact that “…visuals and video done right are highly effective in cutting through the noise.”

This prediction has already proven true with a burst of new video apps and upgrades hitting the market. And some of these offer unique opportunities for savvy marketers.

Here’s five apps you should consider.

With only 140 characters to work with, it can be a challenge to create rich content on Twitter. To date, catchy headlines, creative hashtags, promoted tweets and images have been the best methods for grabbing attention on Twitter. But with the introduction of Vine, there’s a new way to generate and share highly engaging content.

Vine is a simple and fun way to create short, beautiful, looping videos for your friends and family to see.

Vine’s six-second looping videos are easily consumed and highly shareable. And as a result, these videos naturally boost engagement. Marketers can use them in a variety of ways. You can create mini-advertisements, behind-the-scenes tours, announcements, contests and much more.

Your followers can view and share your videos directly from within Twitter. And you can encourage followers to shoot and share their own six-second videos to further increase likelihood of engagement.

Now’s the time to jump into Vine because it’s easier to capture audiences’ attention. Early adopters almost always enjoy a higher level of exposure. With Vine, you now have an opportunity to stand out among the millions of tweets posted daily.

Happy valentines #valenvine vine.co/v/brMraJq2aW3

— London Lazerson (@londonlaz) February 14, 2013

According to Facebook, the use of images and video results in the largest visual impact on their platform.

Instagram increased the ease and popularity of photo posts.

However, the use of video has lagged. This can be attributed in part to the hesitation many feel when it comes to filming, editing and sharing video.

Facebook’s recent integration with iOS 6 makes the creation and sharing of video less daunting. If you are an iPhone user, you can record and post without ever leaving your Facebook app. This makes sharing video on Facebook instantly very easy, even for novices.

Video posts on Facebook encourage engagements in the form of views, shares, likes and comments.

The key with video on Facebook is creativity and consistency rather than fancy editing. With the iOS 6 upgrade, you can give fans exclusive inside access. Record major events and breaking news, then post immediately to your timeline.

To encourage community participation, create fun video challenges, ask for honest reviews and acknowledge those who take the time to post their videos to your Page.

One of the most enticing aspects of social media for business is its ability to expose a large number of people to your brand messages in a short period of time. However, as more and more businesses use social platforms, your messages are easily diluted.

Video offers a way to stand out from the masses, draw attention and leave a longer-lasting impression.

With the mobile app Socialcam, you can create videos with no length restrictions, use an assortment of filters and post to numerous social sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Socialcam allows mobile users to quickly and easily upload videos to social networks and share with others via SMS or email.

Lars Schmidt, senior director of talent acquisition and innovation at NPR, shared NPR’s strategy for exposing potential new hires to what it’s really like to be an employee at their organization.

“We used Socialcam to capture and share a more realistic perspective of what it’s like to be an NPR employee.” He went on to explain how, exactly, they did this: “We would record NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts using Socialcam, then push the videos out to our various social sites.” This visual element helped NPR “show the true experience, the energy and buzz of what it’s like to work at NPR.”

The Robert Cray Band jamming at NPR's Tiny Desk Concert.

The decision to create and grow a presence on social platforms should not be taken lightly. Platforms emerge constantly and it would be virtually impossible to build and cultivate communities on all of them.

However, there are key platforms every business should seriously consider: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and at least one video-based social network. Because video platform members feel comfortable engaging with and creating video, you’ll see an uptick in interest and views of your video content.

Viddy is a video app for both iPhone and Android that creates “a simple way for anyone to capture, beautify and share amazing videos with the world”.

A simple way to share well-produced, bite-sized videos with the world.

Viddy is also its own social network with major brands like Southwest Airlines and General Electric actively engaging through posting compelling video and running contests.

With a presence on Viddy, you can post your own 15-second videos, follow other members and be followed. There’s also plenty of opportunity for daily engagement in the form of comments and likes.

One of the most appealing reasons to utilize Viddy is that it’s integrated with Open Graph, allowing all actions on Viddy to be automatically published on people’s Facebook timeline.

This creates a unique environment and allows you to grow a community where it’s easy to encourage user-generated content.

People like, follow and subscribe to businesses because of a desire to connect on a deeper level.

Once someone has initiated an interest in connecting with your business, it then becomes your responsibility to build the relationship. This can be done through various activities and correspondences, video being one of the more successful avenues.

Videolicious is an extensive app with a variety of business-focused plans. You can edit videos and photos and turn them into film, use built-in video ideas and share across multiple platforms all at once.

Make and edit professional-quality video, automatically. Just choose your shots and Videolicious does the rest.

The app even provides extensive how-to’s for creating video thank-you notes, product reviews and news reports. And, if you want to boost views and engagement even more, there’s an option to promote your video content.

With a plethora of ways to engage via a video, Videolicious has the capability to drastically increase people’s affinity for your business.

As you can see, these tools offer a variety of ways to increase engagement on your social platforms. And as more marketers adopt these video apps, you’re sure to find other ways to improve your social media marketing with videos.

What do you think of the mobile app phenomena? Are there mobile apps you’re using that have helped move the engagement needle? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

About the Author, Meaghan Edelstein

Meaghan Edelstein is the Senior Social Strategist for Tilson PR and RingCentral. She is an event producer, journalist, attorney and owner of MobileDealin’. Follow her on Twitter @megse34. Other posts by Meaghan Edelstein »

http://www.jretechnology.com

How to Boost Engagement on Your LinkedIn Company Page

By Mike Delgado
Published April 18, 2013

Are you leveraging your LinkedIn Company Page as best you can?

In a recent LinkedIn study, 50% of current company followers stated they are more likely to purchase products and services from a business they engage with on LinkedIn.

This means that an active LinkedIn presence could help your business. And you’ll likely want to improve engagement on LinkedIn.

Here are five simple ways to boost engagement with your LinkedIn followers.

Aside from studying what your competitors are doing on LinkedIn, you should spend time in the groups where your target market is engaging. You’ll want to find out what interests them there.

Which “manager’s choice” article is getting the most attention this week? What discussions are getting the most likes and comments? Take time to analyze and read what’s engaging your target market. All of these discussions will help you discover topics and ideas to post in your company stream.

Furthermore, you can search for specific topics in groups to quickly see what type of questions and issues are drawing the most engagement. Simply go into a group where your target market is active and click on the Search tab. You’ll then see the box on the left-hand side where you can search for posts by topic.

Use the Group Search feature to find the most engaging content on a given topic.

Create a log of what types of topics, questions and challenges are being discussed by your target market.

You can also dig deeper to find the most engaging discussions month-over-month by analyzing the group’s activity data. Simply click on the More tab in a group you’re part of and select Group Statistics in the drop-down menu.

The Group Statistics link will provide you insights into demographics, group growth rate and activity by month.

Next, click on the Activity link in the chart navigation to see trends in engagement, as well as what months received the most comments. This insightful look can help you figure out trends and what topics might be more interesting at certain times of the year.

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Once you know the periods with high engagement, go “back in time” by scrolling to the bottom of the group discussion stream and click on the Go to Archive link. This can help you find older posts with high engagement.

If you scroll to the bottom of group discussions, you’ll find a Go to Archive link that will help you see older discussions faster.

Tip: Groups are also a great place to “test” status updates to see what type of engagement they receive before adding to your company stream. Not sure whether a certain post would be valuable to your followers? Add the update into a group first to see what type of interaction you receive.

Recent data from LinkedIn reveals that posting status updates in the morning is the best time for businesses to engage followers. That said, it’s also important to schedule posts throughout the day to increase post visibility and engagement with those logging in later in the day.

This is why you should use a tool like HootSuite to automate LinkedIn posts when you’re not able to manually update. Automating your status updates in LinkedIn allows you to schedule posts on weekends or late at night when you’re not working on your LinkedIn company account.

HootSuite is a free tool that allows you to schedule posts for your social media channels.

Using HootSuite to schedule posts doesn’t mean you should schedule a bunch of posts and never log in to check metrics. You should still check your engagement metrics for each post to see what content is resonating with your followers and dig into your Page and follower insights to see what’s working and what’s not.

Tip: Create a spreadsheet to log days, times, post impression count and engagement stats. This will help you figure out what days/times are giving you the most reach. This will also help you figure out what topics are getting more or less engagement.

Now that you can add images and files to your LinkedIn company status updates, there is no excuse not to test out pictures and files along with your text updates. As you know, images make your status updates “pop out” in the stream, and this can help you get more eyeballs and engagement on your status updates.

Add images to your posts help you get more attention and more engagement with your posts.

Interesting links with status updates can help you pull in hundreds (if not thousands) of clicks to a URL you are promoting. So take advantage of driving relevant traffic to a blog post you’ve written for your target market.

Number of likes and comments can signal high engagement, but the click-through data can provide even more insight into what’s engaging your audience. (Note: Engagement stats listed in example above are not real data.)

Aside from testing images, files and links to interesting articles, you should also explore using contests to gain more followers (and potential clients).

London-based Reconverse started up a LinkedIn page to reach out to the human resources community. Even though they had less than 200 followers, their first status update below helped them gain 1,431 likes, 124 comments and 87 followers because of the shares and virality of the post.

Test out a fun contest to see how many likes, comments and shares you could receive even if you don’t have many followers.

This simple status update also helped them attract 15 delegates and 4 new supplier clients for their events. And their second “contest” status update (offering an iTunes gift card) received 318 likes, 11 comments and 12 requests for more information about Reconverse events. Check out the full Reconverse case study to learn more.

Tip: Use LinkedIn’s Targeting feature to craft specific status updates for select audiences that are following you. For example, use a targeted update to reach out to non-employees only with offers and contests.

One simple way to increase engagement on your LinkedIn company profile (and attract new followers) is simply by promoting a link to your LinkedIn Company Page on your website and email signature line. This will inform fans and potential clients about your LinkedIn profile, which can help you establish credibility and more followers.

In fact, Wild Apricot added their LinkedIn product reviews on their homepage, which increased conversion rates by 15%. You see, adding product reviews from real customers (via LinkedIn) adds more credibility for products. This helped them increase leads—not to mention new followers for their Page.

Wild Apricot displays reviews of their products on their homepage, which boosts conversion rates on their site and increases LinkedIn followers.

By promoting LinkedIn recommendations on your website, you’ll gain more followers and engagement on your LinkedIn Company Page. If you’re going to do this, make sure to get approval from the person who will be featured on your home page.

Tip: Test long vs. short product recommendations on landing pages (or pages that you want to boost conversion rates on). You may also want to test type of recommendation based on the visitor coming to your page (e.g., first-time visitor vs. frequent visitor).

LinkedIn Recommendation Ads allow you to promote your products and services to your target market. These ad campaigns can help you increase engagement with your Company Page by bringing in more traffic and product recommendations. And each time someone recommends your product, it is automatically shared with that person’s followers (which can bring you even more traffic and recommendations).

Recommendation Ads allow you to showcase a product or service with a specific target market. AT&T now has 104 people recommending their AT&T Networking Exchange product.

Hewlett-Packard used Recommendation Ads to gain 20,000 new followers, 2,000 product recommendations and 500,000 viral updates in just a few weeks.

Increase Your Company’s Engagement on LinkedIn

If you follow these steps consistently over time, you’re sure to increase engagement with your audience on LinkedIn. And they will be more likely to purchase products and services from your company.

So how are you engaging followers on LinkedIn? Do you find these tips useful? Please share your questions and comments below.

About the Author, Mike Delgado

Michael Delgado is a digital marketer who loves writing about Google+, online brand management and social media. He's the author of circled.us and the Social Media Community Manager at Experian. Other posts by Mike Delgado »

http://www.jretechnology.com

How to Target Facebook Ads Based on Purchase History, Lifestyles and More

By Jon Loomer
Published April 29, 2013

Would you like to get more out of your Facebook advertising?

Did you know you can now target Facebook ads based on people’s purchase history, job roles and other external insights from major data providers?

Facebook continues to roll out advertising tools that allow marketers to target their ideal customer in ways not seen before.

Within the past year, Facebook has launched Custom Audiences, Conversion Tracking, Sponsored Results, Lookalike Audiences and a whole lot more.

Partner Categories is the latest tool added to your Facebook toolbox. Here’s what you need to know and how to use Facebook’s Partner Categories to reach the audience you want with your Facebook advertising.

Facebook partnered with Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon to make Partner Categories a reality. These partners provide data on Facebook users’ online and offline activities away from Facebook to create more refined targeting opportunities.

Up until recently, you could target ads to Facebook users based only on the information they provide in their profiles (age, gender, school, location, employer) and both precise and broad interests.

One of the previously added features—Custom Audiences—changed that, adding the ability to combine your offline customer list (email addresses, phone numbers and Facebook UID numbers) with your Facebook advertising efforts.

And now Partner Categories enters the fray to provide access to even more data for Facebook marketers.

Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon provide more than 500 categories that you can target associated with things like purchase history, job role and lifestyle.

There are more than 500 Partner Categories to choose from.

Instead of giving you a list of all 500-plus categories, here are 10 examples that provide a glimpse into the power of Partner Categories:

Household size of 6 (8,842,800 users)Upscale department store credit card user (34,618,400 users)Home office supply purchases (2,638,300 users)Aftermarket vehicle purchase over 48 months ago (11,952,800 users)Baby food & products buyers (10,497,100 users)Casino vacations (4,242,000 users)Dog owner (12,643,500 users)Fitness buyers—runners (5,950,600 users)Teacher/educator (223,000 users)Donate to veteran causes (7,016,400)

As you can see, these partners are providing Facebook with a ton of data. Individual categories can include up to several million users.

And Facebook will continue adding to this list.

I know what you’re thinking: AHHHH! Advertisers know how much money I make? What I’ve bought? PRIVACY ALERT!

Rest assured, advertisers know nothing about you as a user. As Facebook marketers, you simply tell Facebook to target users in a specific group, and they do it. It’s the same as when we target women who are age 35-44, live in San Francisco and work at Facebook.

There are no lists of users. There’s just a category name and the number of people who are in it. Facebook does the rest.

When ads are displayed that utilize Partner Categories, users will be able to get more information about what company shared their information and how. Read this post from Facebook about advertising and third-party partners for more info.

It’s all about relevancy and efficiency.

Stop wasting your money advertising to people who don’t care about your product, service or niche. Focus on those most likely to relate to what you have to say.

This also opens up opportunities for selling on Facebook. Imagine you are in the travel industry and offer packages for seniors. You could target users in Datalogix categories like this:

Take cruises (13,020,0400 users)Affluent baby boomers (17,098,700 users)Leisure travelers (22,800,900 users)

You could then target those who qualify in all three groups, and your list is cut down to about 4 million users.

Or maybe you sell new Ford trucks valued over $30,000. You could target users in Datalogix categories as follows:

Pickup truck owner (17,904,500 users)Make is Ford truck (10,647,400 users)Vehicle age is 6-10 years old (31,187,100 users)Price is $30K-40K (2,249,400 users)

If you cross these categories, you end up with about 37 million users.

But your dealership is in Milwaukee, WI. If you target only men within 25 miles of Milwaukee who fit within these categories, the new audience is 71,500.

That’s right. Just over 70,000 Ford truck owners in the Milwaukee area (that’s a lot of Ford trucks in the Milwaukee area!) who may be on the lookout for a new Ford truck. You can target them.

Powerful, right?

First of all, this is only available to advertisers within the U.S. for now. If you’re outside the U.S., stay tuned.

Second, Facebook says they are rolling this out to both Power Editor and the self-serve ad tool. I only have this within Power Editor. If you want access to all of the good stuff, you should be using Power Editor anyway.

While creating an ad, go to the Audience tab. Under Precise Interests is a Categories box. This holds both Facebook Broad Categories and Partner Categories.

Partner Categories are found in Power Editor under Precise Interests.

As mentioned earlier, you can grab categories from Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon. Just know that you can only pull categories from one of those partners for an individual ad.

Expand Acxiom, Datalogix or Epsilon to view the categories contained within them. Then select any of the categories that you want (again, only select categories within a single partner group).

Here’s what it would look like based on the travel company example from earlier.

Click on the categories you want to target. Make sure to pull from only one partner per ad.

Hover over a selected category and a tooltip description will come up. Here’s the description for “Affluent Baby Boomers”.

Hover over a category once you’ve selected it to get a full description.

You can choose to target people who like ANY or ALL of these categories by clicking on the drop-down to the left…

Target either ANY or ALL of your selected Partner Categories.

If you don’t feel like digging through all 500-plus categories (it’s admittedly a bit clunky to expand and collapse repeatedly to find what you want), you can also start typing a keyword in the category search.

I started typing “Marketing” and the category “Sales/Marketing” came up.

Instead of collapsing and expanding, type a keyword in the search to find your ideal Partner Category.

Partner Category targeting can then be used in addition to your other targeting like age, gender, location and interests.

Partner Category Reminders

To recap, here are the main things to remember if you’re going to start using Partner Categories today:

Target users based on buying activity away from Facebook.Use Power Editor.Only available in the U.S.Target multiple categories, but only one partner at a time.Use Partner Categories in addition to other targeting.Nothing changes regarding privacy.

Now, it’s your turn to give it a try!

Is Partner Category Targeting Effective?

This form of targeting on Facebook is too new to say just how effective it is yet, and it will largely depend on the quality of the data. But there’s certainly potential here.

What do you think? Have you used Partner Categories? What results are you seeing? Let us know in the comments section below!

About the Author, Jon Loomer

Jon Loomer’s blog was named to Social Media Examiner’s Top 10 Social Media Blogs of 2013. Follow him for advanced topics focused on Facebook advertising and metrics. Other posts by Jon Loomer »

http://www.jretechnology.com