Social Media Roundup - October 2013

World's #1 Digital Ad Spend Per Person? It's Norway!
With about 5 million people, Norway is a small, oil-rich country with beautiful scenery and lots of fish. It is also the world's leader in digital ad spending per person, at $209 per Internet user expected in 2013, compared with $201 per user in the U.S. With 91% of the Norwegian population using the Internet regularly in 2011, it's probably the best place for marketers to be. In fact, all four Scandinavian countries made the top 10 in Internet spend per person: Norway (1), Sweden (4), Denmark (6), and Finland (8). For total digital advertising spending per person, Australia was ranked number one, with the U.K. second, Norway third, and the U.S. fourth.

45 Social Media Facts and Stats You Can Use
This infographic roundup of facts and statistics about social media can provide actionable insights for you. Published on ViralBlog, the article also discusses what some of the numbers mean for CMOs. Here are a few examples:

• 28% of Twitter retweets are due to inclusion of the words "Please RT!"
• 4.2 billion people use mobile devices to access social media sites
• Social generates double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, daily mail, or pay-per-click.

Why not see how many of these 45 items you can translate into action?

Pinterest Targets Readers with "Article Pins"
Pinterest is branching out, adding "article pins" to its Rich Pin family (which also includes recipe, movie, and product pins). With article pins, readers can view a headline, author, story description, and a link to the original article. According to the company, 5 million articles are "pinned" every day. The three-year-old company now boasts 70 million users and receives a staggering 2.5 billion page views per month.

Get Visual! Learn from How Starbucks Uses Instagram
Here are three key ways Starbucks uses Instagram. Your business can use these strategies, too.

• Show beautiful product shots. Post interesting, relevant, and above all, beautiful pictures of your products or other images relevant to your brand.
• Emphasize emotional connections. Show how your customers connect emotionally with your product or service. A product is never just a product.
• Go behind the scenes. Show customers how you make and deliver the things they love about your business.

Bit.ly's "Media Map" Shows Most Popular Shared News by State
Bit.ly, the URL shortening service, has introduced a new feature that ranks the most popular news sources in each state and displays that information in real time. Media Map allows users to filter results by type of media (newspapers, TV/radio, online-only) for 40 sources (up from 15 when the service was introduced last year). This information can be helpful to businesses crafting a content strategy that depends on curating and sharing information useful and relevant to their networks.

2013's Worst Social Media Fails
Ouch! Entertaining lessons at the expense of Kenneth Cole, Taco Bell, British Airways, and Amy's Baking Company. These companies were singled out as a few of the "worst social media disasters" in an article on ViralBlog. Let's hope we can all learn a lot about what not to do online!

Facebook, Twitter Seek First Place as "Second Screen"
Facebook and Twitter garnered huge traffic boosts around the showing of the final episode of "Breaking Bad" on Sunday, September 29, 2013. Over a 10-hour period surrounding the broadcasts on the East and West coasts, Twitter reported that 600,000 people posted more than 1.2 million tweets; Facebook reported 3 million posted about the final episode. With so many advertising dollars at stake, the social networks are vying to be the leading digital, real-time, advertiser-friendly place for conversations about television.

Stop Worrying About Negative Brand Feedback...
Companies considering social media marketing often fret about the possibility they'll receive negative feedback on social networks. While it's important to think about what it means - and how to deal with it when it happens - it's also essential not to let this keep you from getting started and from continuing to use social media. Three principles to keep in mind:

1. There will always be someone who's unhappy.
2. If you're not sticking your neck out, your competition is.
3. Businesses need to innovate. They don't win by playing it safe.

...But Stay on the Right Side of the Law
This roundup of potential legal issues connected with social media use by businesses includes advice on copyright, responsibility for employee activity, the ins and outs of online contests and sweepstakes, what photo content is okay to use without getting releases, and, yes, the legal issues around negative reviews (you don't want to get accused of false advertising).

25 Social Media Tools for Your Brand
Developers continue to crank out interesting new tools for social media marketers. Five categories of these tools are covered in this helpful infographic:

• Social listening. Find out what people are talking about.
• Social marketing. Create, manage, and report your campaigns.
• Social conversation. Keep track of online conversations. Have questions already been answered? Are you repeating yourself?
• Social analytics. Understand the data coming in from your social networks. Tracking results allows you to constantly improve your effectiveness.
• Social influencer. Studies show over and over that some individuals have a lot of influence in their networks. These tools help you find and engage with them.

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 [email protected].