Social Media Roundup - May 2013

Small Businesses Need Social Media Help
Research by email marketing giant Constant Contact reveals that 60% of small businesses need help with social media marketing. Small businesses often find the time commitment needed to make good use of social networking greater than they anticipate, and many have trouble allocating resources and time to it. Also, social media continues to evolve quickly, and businesses often find their choices and opportunities confusing and hard to understand. Finally, it's rare that social media marketing drives sales directly: ROI may be hard for a small business to identify. Understandably, it's hard for them to have the patience to reap the benefits of sustained, strategically sound campaigns. Learn more here.

How To Segment Your Email List
Even in this era of social media marketing, smart businesses continue to use email marketing as a key tool. Since email marketing works really well in conjunction with social, it's important to keep your skills up to date. One of the fundamentals of successful email marketing is segmenting your list so specific messages go only to the most relevant recipients (and others on your list aren't annoyed by them). Each email marketing platform has its own system for segmenting lists, but list segments that must be considered will certainly include geography, purchase history, and demographics. Other useful segments might include users who have abandoned shopping carts, and users who open every communication from your company and interact with your content regularly. The first group might get a special offer to entice them to return and complete a transaction. The latter deserves special consideration and thanks as loyal customers and supporters of the brand.

LinkedIn Adds Visual Content to User Profiles
LinkedIn is far and away the most successful social networking site for business people and professionals. But up to now, LinkedIn profiles have been pretty much limited to text and static lists of achievements, jobs, and professional qualifications. Now users will be able to add images, videos, and presentations to their profiles. As the new capabilities roll out, LinkedIn users will gain new tools to add rich media. This article contains two presentations that highlight new capabilities of LinkedIn's profiles. Get ready to add some pizzazz to your LinkedIn presence!

Twitter Advertising Now Available to All U.S. Users
In March 2012, Twitter added self-service advertising comparable to Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising. With a year's experience and feedback from users, Twitter has added a series of enhancements to the product, especially in the areas of targeting and reporting. All the new capabilities are built right into the user interface for creating ads, so no third-party tools are needed to take advantage of them. Anyone with a Twitter account can now have access to the advertising platform with a simple signup.

The "Perfect" Facebook Post: 7 Tips
Nobody's perfect, especially in social media; so here are seven tips to help you craft better Facebook Page posts. They include advice on the optimal size for image uploads; how to use Facebook's Sponsored Stories to promote your posts; the need for calls to action; and a reminder that many or most Facebook users are now viewing your content on mobile devices, which means you need to keep it simple and short.

10 Useful Stats on Men's Purchasing Behavior
Marketing to men? Spend some "guy time" understanding the subtleties of male shoppers' behaviors. Contrary to the stereotype that "men hate shopping," 43% of affluent men (more than $100,000 of household income) think of shopping as a relaxing, enjoyable activity. Probably not as surprising: 41% of those affluent men do their shopping on Amazon.com. Also, male smartphone owners are more likely than females to make purchases because of mobile advertising. This infographic brings together many more statistics about male purchasing behavior.

$375 Million, or 31% of Facebook's Ad Revenue Came from Mobile
According to the company's latest earnings report, almost one third of Facebook's advertising revenue now comes from mobile platforms (smartphones and tablets), a 22.5% increase over the previous quarter. Facebook reports that it's seeing about three quarters of a billion (of 1.2 billion--yes, that's billion) users per month on mobile platforms. The social networking giant has steadily improved and refined its mobile applications on popular platforms like iOS and Android, focusing time and resources on getting the mobile experience right for its users. Rumors abound that Facebook is developing its own mobile platform to compete directly with Apple and Google in the mobile space.

Make Your Photographs More Memorable: 3 Tips
Visual content attracts attention to social networking pages and profiles. Great visuals keep people coming back to them - and to the brands they represent online. Easy as it now is to create and publish visual content, many of us need to learn more about how we can make our photographs more compelling and memorable than the run-of-the-mill snapshots we often see online. Here are three simple tips to get you started: 1) show people (people like to look at pictures of people); 2) use human-scale space (keep the frame structured around the people in it); and 3) avoid landscapes (sorry, your beautiful photographs of the great outdoors bore people... unless there are people in them and they're not overshadowed by all that scenery).

New Facebook Ad Tools Target Lifestyles and Purchase History
Here are some examples of the kinds of specific information about potential customers on Facebook available to advertisers through the new Partner Categories: pickup truck owners (17,904,500 users), household size of six (8,842,800 users), and dog owners (12,643,500 users). In conjunction with the already formidable ability of Facebook Advertising to target ads based on demographics, geography, and interests, the new Partner Categories will give Facebook advertisers an impressive array of powerful new options to home in on their best prospects.

Daniel Lieberman is the founder of Daniel Lieberman Digital ("I speak Geek - You don't need to"). Based in Shelburne Falls, Mass., he helps companies, organizations, and individuals learn to use the Internet to communicate, market, and brand themselves using the most up-to-date tools and techniques. Contact him at 413-489-1818 or daniel@daniellieberman.org.