Social Media Has Become Indispensable for CEOs

The current stampede to embrace social media as a valuable business tool has kicked up a big cloud of dust and created new layers of confusion for chief executives and other leaders. social media marketing tips Most CEOs sense that social media marks an important breakthrough for business communications, but they aren’t sure how to fully utilize the technology to gain a competitive advantage. This is because leaders often have trouble distinguishing between “actionable social” information and what I like to call plain old “social noise.” There is a substantial difference between the two.Think of actionable social as useful information that can be acted upon to improve business results. Social noise, on the other hand, involves a vast overload of data that drowns out the underlying message or meaning.Nearly three-fourths of senior executives in the U.S. believe that C-Suite leaders who use social media to communicate their core mission and brand values are more trustworthy than those who don’t adopt social media. This surprising finding comes from the 2014 Global Social CEO Survey by Brandfog, a social media consulting firm for CEOs. The Brandfog survey also shows that 82 percent of senior leaders think executive use of social media raises brand awareness and helps establish industry leadership.Social media offers a useful way to capture community knowledge and enhance group creativity. Yet many of the enterprise social media tools out there today allow everybody involved to interact with everybody else. This creates a dynamic in which the die-hard followers carry on and on to hear the sound of their own voices, causing many others to zone out and disengage from the process altogether. social media marketing tools This is the unfortunate situation at too many businesses today.To succeed as a next-generation social CEO, business leaders need to engage more with their internal teams, partners and customers. But this requires leaders to contain, control and curate such social media conversations, rather than hosting unwanted social free-for-alls. This is the challenge most CEOs face regarding social, whether they realize it or not.

Create Photo Galleries with an Instagram Hashtag

With a larger character limit than twitter and an equal propensity for hashtags, Intstagram offers many of the same tracking opportunities. And as a visually-driven medium, compiling photos into a gallery is a no-brainer. marketing social media Last year, JetBlue partnered with Instagram analytics service Totems to run the JetBlueSoFly campaign. Using Totems analytics, the team identified the best photos to be shown on a special section of the JetBlue website. The campaign was a resounding success for JetBlue, and also made for a nice case study for Totems.After surveying more than 120 social-media marketers, my client Offerpop found that Facebook still reigns supreme among ad dollar allocations, with 92 percent of marketers planning to spend the majority of their holiday social media marketing budget on Facebook, despite the platform’s plummeting organic reach. (Offerpop clients and participants in its educational seminars were surveyed.) Sixty-seven percent of marketers polled said that they will increase their spending on social media this holiday season with the direct goal of increasing sales.Oceanside, Calif.-based headphone company JLab Audio is also preparing to sell products online with the help of Facebook ads in a crowded marketplace (with competitors like Beats and Skullcandy). While the company leverages brand partnerships on social networks such as Instagram and Twitter, Facebook will be getting the lion's share of JLab Audio's holiday social-media budget, said marketing manager Jordanne Muldner. JLab plans to double this year's Facebook ad budget (over with 2013's level) and increase its social-media advertising budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. benefits of social media marketing The Gallup numbers show that 35 percent of Americans say that social media has some influence on their purchasing decisions. While 35 percent is obviously a minority, think about how many Americans say that advertising in general affects their purchasing decisions. If that number is also in the 35 percent range, social media and traditional advertising will be shown to affect the purchasing decisions of the same percentage of people.

Reward your followers

There is no lack for tools analyzing twitter content, but there are far less that provide data about followers. SocialRank fills this gap by providing intelligence about an account’s most valuable, most engaged, and overall best followers. using social media for marketing SocialRank data gives brands the opportunity to interact with followers that mean the most, and to create content surrounding the interaction. Muhammad Ali used SocialRank to give free t-shirts to fans. His tweet announcing the promotion was retweeted 100+ times and also resulted in press coverage from Business Insider.hardly an indictment of social media's clout.While not an apples-to-apples comparison, many marketers have reported less-than-satisfactory results from radio advertising, for example. Does that mean radio ads are totally ineffective? No. Perception can differ from reality.It's safe to assume that the majority of the people polled had no specific intent to allow social media to influence their purchasing decisions. Most people generally do not particularly desire to be the target of marketing. There are exceptions to all rules, however, and there are certain individuals who do actively seek out brand pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. By neglecting social media, brands are not providing content to audiences actively seeking it. Considering the extent to which brands go to gain clients' and consumers' attention, it is very unfortunate when legitimately interested parties are unable to find brand information they are actually looking for. social media marketing strategies A more basic issue with Gallup's poll is the issue of the validity of the question posed. The Gallup poll demonstrated that most Americans say that social media don't influence their purchasing decisions, but it doesn't mean that they are completely immune to it. Exposure to a brand may affect purchasing decisions subliminally, so the influence of social media may be more significant than we realize.