Social Fresh Tampa

I had a chance to attend a local Social Fresh event in Tampa. Social Fresh, founded by Jason Keath, is a one day conference targeted for marketers and small businesses.

The Tampa event had some well known industry speakers like Spike Jones from Brains on Fire and Rick Burnes from Hubspot to name a few. Maggie Fox from Social Media Group kicked things off with an excellent keynote presentation about “The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media”.

What I liked the most was exposure to some great thinkers in my own backyard like Jason Breed (INgage Networks), Mark Meyer (Digital Response), Griffin Farley (22squared), Tessa Horehled (Think Interactive), and John Ludwig (Push). The quality and the range of the work was refreshing.

Since I have been creating strategies and executional plans for clients around social media for the past year I felt like I knew a lot but I did walk away with some the following insights I wanted to share.

1. Create An Ecosystem – I sometimes call it “Your Brand’s Social Architecture” but it is basically the same. Listen and identify conversational hubs. Think about a seamless flow from brand experiences from one platform to another. This is the foundation.

2. A Strategic Plan and A Great Idea – Understand the target audiences’ passion points and develop a launching pad for a direct relationship with your customers by providing interaction and expression. Last, there needs to be a unifying theme to create relevance and value.

3. Measurement – Determine what is a significant value exchange. Is it influence, engagement, loyalty, share of voice, or specific actions or conversions?

4. Test & Refine – Use A/B testing to determine what platforms work for your brand.

The day was full of good tips and practices so I recommend attending if you find the conference in a city near you. It is affordable and the caliber of speakers are always impressive.

Also check out these links:
SPY – a browser based social media listening tool

#socialmedia – a weekly twitter based discussion around “The Business of Social Media”

Professional Social Networks

Below is a overview of key membership and usage statistics for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter from a great article on Social Media Today. The numbers support how these networks have grown and how influential they are in today’s business.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

Facebook: Facebook has over 300 million members with 150 million that log in at least once per day. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are 35 years and older and according to Facebook more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared across the network, each week.

Twitter: Twitter has more than 32 million members with the segment of 45-54 year olds being the top demographic and 25-34 year olds following closely behind at second. It has been found in other studies that baby boomers and senior citizens are more likely to join Twitter than their grandchildren.

These findings are from The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study. If you want to learn more I recommend reading the whole article:

The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Social Interaction Metrics

I recently found this good article on “Measuring Engagement”.

The article discusses engagement goals (what you want people to do) and what key performance indicators (KPIs) are good to measure.

Every client/company may have unique goals but I thought the final list was a good example.

1. Register for Alerts by RSS feed – to get new content
2. Views (videos, rich images, design concepts)
3. Use the design widget
4. Put the widget on their blog or Facebook, etc
5. Feedback (via the site)
6. Email subscriptions
7. Favorites (add an item to favourites)
8. Feedback (via the site)
9. Forward to a friend
10. Invite / Refer (a friend)
11. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, relevant design forums, blogs etc)
12. Time spent on key pages
13. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)

By tracking and measuring your user’s actions you then can start to focus on the user’s needs, likes and dislikes. In the end you give your audience the right tools and content they are looking for.

Miami Beach: Social Media Marketing Seminar

I attended a great Social Media Marketing Seminar yesterday sponsored by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce.

Social media marketing can be hit or miss these days but I was surprised at the enthusiasm and the quality of attendees and speakers.

Below are links to the speakers and some other good stuff.

Special thanks to the speakers I saw:
Jessica Kizorek – Founder of The Viral Pulse
Jason Beukema- President of Whet Travel
Mande White- FreeSocialMediaHelp.com
Courtney Recht- Manager, Public Relations Norwegian Cruise Line

A few worthy links too!
Search Twitter Feeds- find who is tweeting in your zip code!
Tweetbeep – track conversations
Twitter Karma – manage friends

Custom Tabs on Facebook Fan Pages

Recently for work I built a custom tab page for a client. When you add the tab you can set it as your default page and use it as a landing page for first time visitors. This is a great way to introduce people to your products or company.

It was fairly easy to do with very little coding knowledge. I wanted to share a few links that I found very helpful.

How to add a custom tab to your Facebook fan page – This is a well documented “how-to” resource.

An overview on Facebook Pages – also download Fan Page product overview pdf.

The App Static FBML – you need to add this app to the tab to use FBML.

Wiki documentation on FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language).