5 Social Media Trends for 2014: New Research

#1: Social Listening Becoming Important

More brands are beginning to really listen to their customers.

According to the report, 60% of marketers were using social listening strategies in 2013 and 24% plan to do so in 2014. The sad news is that only 31% of marketers think their social listening is fully effective.

Consider the context of social conversations and respond strategically. Image source: iStockPhoto.com.

Key Takeaways

Social listening offers opportunities to interact directly with consumers. But it’s not just about setting up a HootSuite account and watching tweets that mention your brand’s name.

• Don’t just listen; understand first—are you hearing one loud voice or a growing trend? Is positive sentiment due to great advertising or an awesome product? Understand the full picture before you respond.
• Consider the context of online updates and conversations—are consumers reaching out to you directly or venting to their friends? It’s their context (not yours) that matters. Your response should fulfill their expectations.
• Engage with the intention of delivering mutual value—consumers have shown they’re willing to give up some level of privacy in exchange for better service and incredible value.
• Demonstrate how listening builds relationships, rather than simply “intruding” on consumers’ conversations. People are still sensitive about privacy and listening for listening’s sake is simply creepy.

#2: 57% of Marketers Use Social Advertising

The lure of social advertising is fascinating. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are daily destinations for millions of U.S. consumers who spend an average of 37 minutes per day on those channels.

No wonder 57% of marketers used social ads in 2013 and another 23% are expected to start using ads in 2014. But again, only 23% of digital marketers find their social advertising efforts effective.

Marketers’ budgets indicate the appeal of social advertising.

Key Takeaways

The problem for marketers is that social ad options are very confusing. What’s the difference between a Facebook promoted post and a Facebook sponsored story? When should you promote a check-in story? And do social ads even work?

These are some of the questions that make social advertising very tricky. But don’t be caught flat-footed when what used to work starts failing. Educate yourself and learn the most effective ways to leverage social ads in the current market. Here’s a simple plan to get started with social ads:

• Establish measurable marketing goals.
• Set your budget (start small).
• Know your audience’s needs.
• Pick the channel.
• Research different ad types (how they work, how to leverage them and how your audience will perceive them).
• Check out the competition.
• Optimize your landing pages.
• Experiment and create ad copy (two or three versions).
• Test and measure.

#3: Email and Social Integrate

You would think the widespread use of social media has made email obsolete. But email is alive and well, according to 68% of marketers who say email is core to their business. In fact, social media has made email even more powerful than ever. Take a look:

Email is core to business performance, but social is the other side of the coin.

Key Takeaways

It’s important to understand the relationship between email and social. With email marketing, you have the ability to stay top-of-mind with existing customers, which helps bring them back to your door. Then by encouraging your email subscribers to connect with you on Facebook or Twitter, their friends will see your brand on their news feed, thus generating more social visibility for you.

On the other hand, you don’t want to leave your social connections at the mercy of Facebook’s arbitrary algorithms. You want them to receive your content straight to their email inbox, where you have more control and can extend those relationships.

• Use email subject line testing to optimize Facebook ad headlines and vice versa.
• Incorporate your most popular email content into status updates (and vice versa).
• Test image effectiveness via email and incorporate into status updates (and vice versa).
• Just like sponsored stories, incorporate your fans’ enthusiasm for your brand into your email content.
• And finally, tease upcoming emails via a Facebook status update.

#4: Assemble Your Social Media Dream Team

The survey found that social media teams are becoming more common, with 57% of respondents having a dedicated team to strategize, execute and steward social media initiatives. Typically a social media team has three people or fewer.

Having a dedicated team is key to social media marketing success.

Key Takeaways 

Most brands understand that having a dedicated team is key to social marketing success. It’s also clear that one-person social media “teams” are most common (probably due to small budgets or lack of buy-in from upper management).

Of course, having a social media team of more than one person would be great. But don’t be discouraged if you don’t have the budget to make it happen. There are always things you can do to create social media success. However, you also have toadjust your expectations to match the level of investment in your budget and team. Here are some basic tips if you’re a one-person show:

• Start with a strategy. Know what you want to accomplish from social media and choose your social networks wisely.
• Create a workflow process. Schedule some time each day for routine social media activities (e.g., listening and monitoring, posting updates, networking and so on). The more you repeat these tasks, the better you’ll get at it.
• Develop quality content. You’ll need to create original content on a regular basis (e.g., blog posts, images, videos, graphics, etc.). Even with a small budget, you can get other people to create high-quality content for you by using a service like Fiverr. You can also get free images from Flickr or Wikimedia Commons.
• Get the word out. Let your co-workers and customers know that you have a Facebook page or a Twitter profile. Encourage them to engage with the company on these channels. It’s also a good idea to join an online community where you can tactfully get the word out to others (without spamming them). The more value you add to their conversations, the more receptive they will be to discovering and engaging with your online brand.

#5: Social Media ROI Remains Elusive

While marketers are dedicating more time and resources to social, they’re not 100% sure how effective it is in terms of ROI. Thirty-four percent believe they’re currently seeing ROI, while 52% believe their social media efforts will eventually produce ROI. This is not good.

Measuring social media can be tricky, but not doing it at all is damaging to business.

Key Takeaways

Many business owners make the mistake of not measuring social media ROI. Know this—As long as you’re not measuring, you will never understand how social media marketing can benefit your business.

Measuring helps you to be intentional about your marketing activities instead of spending time and resources on useless tactics that don’t work.

Start by defining clear, measurable social media goals such as brand awareness(e.g., Facebook likes), lead generation (e.g., email opt-ins or content downloads) orcustomer retention (compare cost of retaining a social media customer vs. a non–social media customer). Then develop a content strategy to achieve those goals(remember that content drives social). Focus on one or two social channels where your target audience hangs out and gradually scale as your audience and your resources grow! Soon you’ll be counted among the 34% who are seeing ROI on their social media efforts.

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How to Get Employees to Embrace Social Media

#1: Define the End Goal

First, identify how and why social media will be used to meet specific business and brand goals.

For example, a business goal is to increase revenue by 10%, whereas a brand goal is to create deeper relationships with your existing clients.

Clearly define realistic, concrete and measurable goals to give your team objectives to pursue.

Define your goals to create the internal structure you need for your social media presence. Image source: iStockPhoto.

#2: Create a Social Media Task Force

Depending on your company’s size, one person or a group of people will lead your social media efforts. Assign the following roles to group members:

• Lead strategist: Responsible for long-term strategic vision and ensuring day-to-day initiatives are mapped back to specific goals.
• Content manager: Leads all content strategy and development across social. This role often extends into website and other digital properties.
• Community manager: Publishes content across all social media channels; spurs conversations with existing and prospective customers, influencers and media.
• Analyst: Measures the success of social media by benchmarking key performance indicators (KPI) against business and brand goals.
• Social media coordinator: Facilitates communication by planning monthly meetings and staff emails. This individual may also be a resource from the core team (versus creating a new role).

Kathleen Ngo, social media specialist at Sony Electronics, says:

“At Sony, we recognize the impact social can have in terms of driving brand awareness and even conversion. Having a team devoted to social allows us to be nimble and responsive. We’re able to implement real-time marketing efforts to supplement our larger brand campaigns, as well as to understand the voice of the customer and pass valuable feedback along to our product teams. We can go beyond content creation and focus on other verticals, including events/sponsorships and influencer relations.”

All of these individuals work closely together to collaborate on content approaches that appeal to your target audience(s) and decide how to execute campaignsand find the most valuable and relevant tools your brand will use.

Your social media task force will work together for successful social media campaigns. Image source: iStockPhoto.

#3: Develop a Holistic Social Media Strategy

Once the team is assembled, strategists lead and work with all team members to lay the groundwork for your social presence through a holistic social media strategy. The team answers questions such as:

• What do you want to achieve by being present across social media? What’s the goal?
• What are your target audience segments? Are there multiple segments—for example, media versus consumer? Based on this, across which social networks should the brand be present? What should each channel do? What should it not do?
• How does brand voice translate across social channels? What types of words and tone best describe your brand? What types of words do not?
• Using social media monitoring, competitive insights and focus groups, what is/are your target audience(s) interested in learning? Based on these insights, what’s your brand’s content strategy?
• How often should content be proactively published across each channel?
• Which tools can be used to streamline publishing, monitoring and measurement?
• How do social media efforts tie into your larger digital ecosystem? How can your team support and/or leverage other groups working in digital, such as your brand website, one-off campaigns, SEO, SEM and display advertising initiatives? How often should you meet and communicate?

The team will develop company-wide social media guidelines, which are applicable to both the social media task force and employees. These rules are shared and approved by senior leadership, and made public to the company through a staff email and on the company intranet to minimize risk of how your brand is represented across social media channels.

This strategy is referred to during each team meeting to ensure all individuals are collectively working toward the same goals.

#4: Consistency Is Key

To ensure content is consistently developed, published, tracked and analyzed, hold weekly one-hour social planning meetings where each resource spends 10 minutes to update team members on what he or she has recently learned.

Regular social planning meetings facilitate the success of your social media marketing. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Devote the meeting’s last 20 minutes to brainstorming. One-half of the month’s meetings focus on strategy to ensure all parties are on the same path toward the brand’s long-term social media footprint. The other two meetings focus on content ideation to identify new ways to deliver content through creative assets, contests, etc.

#5: Use Tools to Your Advantage

Whether you do or don’t have a budget, various tools are available to effectively support content publishing, tracking and optimization:

Free tools:

• Publishing: HootSuite simplifies content publishing and helps you track links.Use this tool to schedule content in advance, but keep in mind the importance of proactively checking social profiles daily to respond to messages. Be cautious of pre-scheduled content during current events such as natural disasters, and be sensitive to the local, regional and/or national community during difficult times.
• Measurement: Use Wildfire App’s monitoring tool to benchmark against competitors and gauge social community growth over time.
  

  Use Wildfire to monitor the growth of your social community.

Paid tools:

• Workflow and publishing: For more complex organizations with longer-cycle approval processes, Kapost helps create workflow streams and assigns specific roles such as “final approver” to various individuals.
• Social media listening: NetBase provides tracking of specific keywords including branded, competitive and topical terms (to gauge general chatter around set topics) across digital. NetBase supports content strategy development to ensure materials created for social channels align with what the target audience is interested in learning.
• Measurement and competitive benchmarking: Plug in your social channels against competitors through SocialBakers to get a sense of how you stack up in the industry. You can discover which specific campaigns, individuals and content perform best.

#6: The Team Should Be “Social”

Create awareness of your brand’s social presence to support the growth of your community and engagement rate online, and create appreciation among peers for how you manage your company’s digital brand presence.

Tips for getting your company involved in your social media presence:

Whether you’re a small or large organization, the social media task force is critical toensure content is published from a consistent voice on a regular basis. However, opening up the conversation to other employees creates a new platform and way of collecting points of view and content sources to support the content manager.

Set up an email alias specific to social media content submissions, curated by the content manager, to provide new content opportunities and fresh thinking on a regular basis.

Remind team members of their ability to contribute through company meetings and staff emails to energize and enable creativity.

• Initially, send out a staff email that features the social media team and captures what the group will be doing across digital to illuminate brand channels.
• Emphasize that company involvement is an important part of your brand presence. While you’ll be sending out notes periodically to facilitate brainstorming, you are interested in learning about who would like to participate in the brand’s social presence, which requires minimal involvement.
• Create a Google document to send out in this email and encourage employees to log their name in this document, with their favorite part of social media (some might be more interested in brainstorming; others have a soft spot for analytics).
• Work with these individuals and the social media task force to support day-to-day and campaign-related activities. Make participation easy for them. Ask simple questions and provide easy ways to respond.

Send out monthly staff emails with top-performing content or announcements you would like employees to propagate. If you request sharing of specific content across employee social media channels, draft 1-2 sample posts for easy copy and paste.

Add brand social media channels to your company signature with hyperlinked URLs, encouraging other employees to do so. If you are a part of a larger organization, altering the official signature may require coordination with HR.

Add links to social media accounts to your company email signature.

Regardless of where social media sits within your company, craft simple-to-digest emails to send off to executives and senior leadership. This keeps them in the know about what is happening across social.

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26 Social Media Marketing Tips from the Pros

CATEGORY: Calls to Action

#1: Get More Leads With Calls to Action

Throughout the conference, the topic of calls to action (CTAs) came up in numerous sessions. What is a CTA?

A social media call to action is an integral and often overlooked element of an effective social media strategy. Social media gets prospects, customers and the public primed to want to find out more about your offering or to engage with you further, but you must lead them to the next step in your sales or other conversion process.

Regardless of the platform—blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—posts will receive better success rates if they contain calls to action, compared to ones without them. So, all the more reason to use them!

From the post, "Theft: 9 Ways to Protect Yourself From Losing Your Data" by Michael Stelzner.

#2: Optimize Your Facebook Posts With Calls to Action

“On Facebook, posts that include the call to action “share” receive more shares, comments and likes.”

Sometimes just the act of inviting someone to share your post will be the encouragement a fan needs to take your suggestion. Once they share the post, it will travel on further to their colleagues, friends and family, thus expanding your reach. Truly one of greatest benefits of social media!

This post was shared by 42 people, in addition to 59 likes.

#3: Grab Readers’ Attention With CTAs

Examples of calls to action include: click here, sign up today, get your ticket, join us at, RSVP here, buy now, enroll here, check this out, click, and comment.

When a reader is on your page and you have the privilege of having their attention for even the shortest span of time, make your CTAs an integral part of your marketing plan. Something you had front of mind—not an afterthought. Then you’ll have some influence on where readers navigate next and what steps you want to encourage them to take.

Calls to action grab attention.

#4: Get the Most Bang for Your CTA Buck

Make your CTAs crystal-clear and stick to one CTA per post. Avoid excessive calls to action.

When you present clear and direct CTAs, you reduce the risk of overwhelming readers with too many choices. They came to your post to learn something and the last thing you want to do is to make them feel they have to give you everything if they decide to become a follower of your content.

Decide what action you want users to take.

#5: Experiment With Different CTA Touch Points

On Twitter, if you want to target people who aren’t following you, try using a call to action to engage.

Twitter is a fast-moving stream of content. Updates can quickly flow by readers. While they’re deciding on whether to read your full update, a call to action can help seize the moment. If they like what they see, they’ll be more inclined to follow you, retweet your message and visit your website.

Reach out and touch someone!

#6: Take the Guesswork Out of CTAs

Effective calls to action can result in completed lead generation forms, phone calls and email signups.

When you put a call to action out there, you’ll know which ones have been effective. For example, if no one is signing up for your free website consultation, ask yourself if the call to action is buried too far down on the page, could the wording be more enticing, are readers worried that once they do that they’ll be hounded by salespeople?

What can your call to action do better to be more effective? Knowing the answer willenhance your marketing efforts.

Gather information with forms.

CATEGORY: Content Strategy

#7: Give Content the Priority It Deserves

It may not be much of a surprise that the topic of content received “royal” treatment at SMMW13. Whether the focus of a workshop was on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc., many focused on the importance of fresh, frequent, quality content.

“Content is King but engagement is Queen, and she rules the house.”

—Mari Smith, 10 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Reach

Content is kind of a catch-22. The best content in the world won’t receive traffic unless people engage with it—sharing, commenting, liking, etc. Give your content the royal treatment—dot the i’s, cross the t’s, and most importantly, make it engagement-friendly. Then you’ll be able to see great results!

15,000+ tweets and pics sure sounds like good engagement!

#8: Be Generous With Your Content

Useful content that people continue to remember long after the post was read becomes “sticky.” The content keeps you in the person’s mind. They may be willing to check out your products and services. By giving generously and gaining a reader’s trust, you earn a reputation of being a reliable resource. With all the competition out there, useful content will help differentiate you in the marketplace.

Content is fire, social media is gasoline. Content should be so useful that it’s seen as a “YOUtility”; in other words, content marketing that is so useful, people will want to keep you close and even be willing to pay for it.

Switch from a "me" to a "you" mentality.

#9: Keep the Content Flowing

We’ve all been there. Landed on a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Or on a Twitter account that has an egghead avatar and was abandoned in 2010 after the user wrote: “Hello world.” What’s wrong with these pictures? Lack of content.

[Only] 36% of people surveyed believe their content marketing is effective. Biggest challenges they’ve faced are producing enough content and the kind that engages.

Content requires a strategy, a production schedule with designated authors and engaging topics that encourage readers to return. Find ways to cover your content bases with an effective content plan.

Verbal and visual content that delivers on a frequent and regular basis will increase your chances to catch up to your competitors and join the ranks of those with effective content marketing strategies.

How will you create more content?

#10: Offer Subscriptions to Your Content

Content can easily be missed on Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds. One way to helpensure that your content is seen is through subscriptions.

Focus on subscriptions to your content; for example, “Join over 40,000 of your peers. Get daily articles and news delivered to your email inbox and get CMI’s exclusive ebook…free.”

—Joe Pulizzi, 10 Content Marketing Secrets That Will Propel You Beyond the Competition

Delivering daily articles and news to a subscriber’s email inbox is highly effective for busy businesspeople. Even if their inbox is overflowing, when they chip away at reading their emails, they’ll find your content pointing and linking to your articles.

Users may miss your tweets but will be more likely to receive your email.

#11: Give Credence to Analytics and Post Data

Social media data is the keeper of all kinds of useful information such as location of readers, topics and keywords that attract and time and day an update is more likely to be seen by your audience.

Amazing content yields great leads. Don’t get attached just to shares—find out which posts are getting leads.

Set aside time each week to review your analytics and what you can learn from them. Content may not magically convert a lead to a customer, but you’ll be more likely to increase your funnel of leads when you provide great content.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut around the sales cycle. Print placement ads, radio and TV commercials never promised that either. With social media marketing, you still have to work a lead!

Could it be any clearer?

#12: Give Your Posts More Pizazz

Some posts read like they’re just giving the facts, something that you’d find in an old-time Yellow Pages ad.  Nowadays, we have to go the extra couple of miles.

Posts that are shareable give advice, warn, amuse, inspire and amaze… don’t be boring.

“Don’t be boring” might be one of the harshest tough-love pieces of advice that you’ll receive. But it’s true. How many times are you more willing to read an article with catchy titles and cool images or watch a video with great camerawork and music or listen to a podcast that presents a dynamic interview or industry report? If you build amazing content, they will come!

What? We need to be interesting, too?!

#13: Meet Social Media Followers Where They Are

How many times have you felt that a company isn’t letting you in? That they’re not telling you more about the business culture or values that are important to them? One of the true assets of social marketing is the ease with which we can converse with our followers.

One kind of content that has been effective for TaylorMade is real-time, ‘inside-the-ropes’ information to consumers.

Real time is the real thing. Inside-the-ropes information makes followers feel a part of an online community—and connected.

Consumers like to be in-the-know.

#14: Tune Into What’s Being Talked About

Time passes quickly and topics do, too. It’s become increasingly important for social media marketers to know what readers are most interested in today, this week, this month—and as projected into next year.

Content is the greatest sales and trust-building tool in the world.  Find the most common phrases and their keyword rank in monthly searches.

With free and paid keyword tools at our disposal (e.g., Google Keyword Tool, Long Tail Pro), you have a tremendous opportunity to tap into the content that is resonating the most with your audience. This will cut down on useless projects and make each and every post an important spoke in your marketing hub.

Using higher-ranked keywords will make a difference.

#15: Look for the Best Ways to Promote Your Content

Content promotion is an important part of content marketing strategy. With the ease of ebook creation, many businesses have found that putting together new or repurposed content into an ebook format may be one of the most advantageous ways to get their content out there.

Ebooks are best used to promote content. Businesses should focus on the value that users will receive from your content.

Ebooks offer the ability to create cost-effective, well-designed pieces that don’t require the expense of printing.

HubSpot displays their ebooks on a Pinterest board.

#16: Know Thy Customer

By keeping your customer in mind during your content strategizing, you’ll be more likely to engage the people you’re looking to attract.

Use the social data you have about your customer to improve content strategy.

Buyer personas and knowing how topics rank among their interests will be helpful ways to improve content strategy.

Knowing who you're talking to is a big part of the content equation.

#17: Write Great Blog Posts

In an earlier 26 Tips piece, we discussed Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts. Writing great content involves many aspects beyond the ideas you set down on the page. It includes factors such as layout and design, formatting, whether the content is original or curated and more. Producing quality content requires proactivity.

Take an active approach to content development. Create content all the time.

—Amy Porterfield, Facebook Strategies to Launch a New Product or Program

Even when you’re not in the middle of a new post, jot down ideas as they come to you and see whether you can work them into a post.

Keep the content rolling.

#18: Think Beyond the Written Word

Content assets include images, videos, printed word and audio. When you have an idea for what you want to communicate, you may find that one format will serve your audience better than another. At SMMW13, there was a lot of buzz about podcasts and the impact that mobile phones and working on-the-go have on our ability to reach people, even when they don’t have time to sit down and read an article.

Podcasts cannot live without content.

—Cliff Ravenscraft, 15 Tips for Creating a Podcast People Can’t Live Without

What information could be communicated to your audience via a podcast?

Offer a variety of topics.

#19: Deliver Targeted Content

If the demographics of your target customer are diverse, then targeted topics or specific platforms may suit one audience better than another.

Slice and dice content to make it highly targeted… be consistent, authentic and relevant.

Maybe you have one blog that speaks to a younger audience and another that addresses issues of more concern to middle-aged people. Messaging isn’t one-stop shopping.

Whole Foods takes "slicing and dicing" very seriously (and literally).

#20: Motivate Customers

Don’t just communicate. Motivate. Find the niche area that makes readers stop, listen and watch.

Who are your customers, what do they want to hear about, what do they talk about to friends and family, what are their obstacles, what are their worries, how can you inspire them, how can you coach, mentor and motivate?

Make your content motivating and inspiring.

#21: Use Keywords Strategically

Keywords should stay front and center. Don’t think of them on a piece-by-piece basis. Instead, what are the topics that will cover the range of topics of most interest to your audience?

Develop 5 key topic areas and at least 20 unique pieces of content for each of 100+ keywords per year.

Being prepared with topics and keywords will make it easier to create unique content.

Knowing keywords and topics you will be writing about will help keep you focused. Readers will learn what they can expect.

#22: Alter Your Ways of Looking at Content Development and Delivery

Your content strategy will make a lot more sense to your authors and your audience if you think about people and where they are in the sales cycle. The information will be helpful in making a decision about whether to write a blog post, conduct a webinar or engage in a LinkedIn group forum.

Map content to customers’ journeys through the sales cycle—awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy.

Targeting content to the sales cycle can be highly effective.

To learn more about content marketing, 10 Content Marketing Tips can be found in an article by Cindy King.

CATEGORY: Email and Social Integration

#23: Integrate Email and Social Media Marketing

Consider this: “Email has had a long history, beginning in 1971 when U.S. programmer Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network email, and he was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an ‘@’ symbol… Email has become a major part of our lives, consuming 28% of our workday.”

With the maturity of media, preceding ones will become displaced. Email, which has been a key player for 20 years, hurt postal delivery. Today, many are using Facebook messages instead of email.

Facebook messages improve the odds of having direct contact.

#24: Interact With Your Audience Via Opt-In Emails

With the subscriber opts into your emails, your business can get in front of your audience’s eyes on a daily and weekly basis.

The inbox is the best social network in the world.

Social Media Examiner not only sends email updates, but also tells you the number of subscribers.

#25: Vary Your Email and Social Integration Strategies

Below are a number of great suggestions from presenters at SMMW13:

• Advertise on Facebook to your email list.—Brian Carter, Turning Social Advertising Into Leads and Sales
• Subscribers who follow brands on Twitter are three times more likely to open an email than a subscriber who’s not on Twitter.—Kyle Lacy, 5 Social and Digital Trends Impacting Consumer Behaviors
• During the promote phase of a Facebook campaign, build your launch email list with a signature promotional giveaway. When launching, your email list can be your most powerful profit-generating resource. Use an autoresponder as part of your email campaign.—Amy Porterfield, Facebook Strategies to Launch a New Product (autoresponder)
• The third time you email someone, just pick up the damn phone.—Jay Baer, How to Create Customers for Life by Informing More and Promoting Less
  

  Set up any number of email messages to be sent either immediately after a new user subscribes to your mailing list, or after any period of time has passed.

#26: Set Personal and Business Goals for Social Media

• Personal: Self-expression, exercise writing, be a useful resource, connect with bloggers, contribute to the community
• Business: Brand awareness, elevate publicity, support customers, recruit,attract new business referrals, create an editorial calendar

—Lee Odden, How to Integrate Blogging With Content Marketing that Inspire

• Google Analytics to create and track goals via a goal funnel, a series of pages leading up to the goal destination—for example, a contact page.

—Rich Brooks, Beyond Likes: How to Turn Fans Into Customers

Be sure to create and track your business goals.

Concluding Thoughts

Perhaps the most telling number about the significance of social media marketing was reported in the April 8, 2013 PeekAnalytics report for the hashtag #SMMW13 that states:

The content [at SMMW13] was shared by consumers who have a combined total of 4.8 million social connections across their social graphs.

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