Arun Sundar C - Search Engine Optimizer

8 Social Media Trends Impacting Businesses

2010-12-01T14:37:00.000+05:30

Orginal Source from Link

As businesses continue to integrate social media and become more confident and comfortable with social media tools and platforms, we’re starting to see a change in social media usage. A new study reveals what’s changing with social media.
SmartBrief recently partnered with Summus Limited to survey more than 6,000 of its readers across a variety of industries.
They benchmarked and measured the state of social media usage among businesspeople. The data identified eight prevalent trends that give great insight into the social media behaviors, beliefs and challenges of the majority of businesses today.

#1: Companies Are Still New to Social Media

Most companies (66.5%) have adopted social media in the past 18 months. About half of the companies reported they’ve only been using social media for about a year and about 20% reported they’ve adopted social media practices in the past 13 to 18 months.

The graph above is a great reminder that most businesses are still very new to the social media arena.

#2: Businesses Focus in on the “Big 5″

Companies are focusing their energies on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs. Data suggests that companies focus their time and efforts on the “big 5″ because they’re able to find their customers there.
Unfortunately companies may be missing out on valuable niche groups by not extending their reach to the less-popular social sites. Flickr, for example, has a large audience even though it’s not as popular as Facebook or YouTube.

Based on the graph above, Facebook is the leader in social media platforms; however, Twitter is close behind in the minds of business professionals.

#3: The 2-Year Confidence Mark

It takes time for companies to incorporate social media effectively. The data identified a 2-year mark where businesses begin to gain confidence in their social media activity.
More than 25% of the companies using social media for 2 or more years say the tools and platforms have been fully integrated into their business model. In addition, more than 50% say they have a well-developed or fully developed social media strategy.

Note the 2-year mark in the graph above. This is where the majority of companies start feeling more confident in their social media strategies.

#4: Companies Are Broadcasting Versus Connecting

Brand-building is currently the primary purpose for business social media usage. However, the research showed that most companies are using social media to broadcast information versus using it for two-way communication.
This is unfortunate. Many companies are missing the opportunity to build stronger relationships by listening to their clients or customers, instead of doing all the talking.

As indicated in the chart above, the most popular social media goal among the respondents was to "increase awareness and interaction with our brand."

Unfortunately, most companies still continue to broadcast messages more than they use social media tools to engage and connect with their customers and prospects. Perhaps this will begin to shift as companies become more confident in their social media activity.

#5: Businesses Turn to Internal Sources for Social Media Support

Communications, advertising and marketing agencies are the leading adopters of social media. However, an interesting finding of the study showed that agencies are not the preferred source for social media support. Most of the companies surveyed have opted to create and execute their social media strategy using internal resources.
The marketing, communications and advertising agencies were the clear early adopters of social media, but businesses have been reluctant to turn to these agencies for social media support.

The resistance to look to an agency for support may be a partial reason for the 2-year "ramp-up period" highlighted in the chart above.

Perhaps the learning curve could be shortened if companies looked to the experts and early adopters for support as they build their overall strategy.

#6: Social Media Adoption Obstacles

Lack of management support and conﬁdentiality concerns top the list of obstacles to social media adoption. There was a clear lack of management support for those companies who have not yet adopted social media. 33% of the respondents pointed out they weren’t the decision-makers and 14.7% stated “management resistance” as an obstacle to social media adoption. To add to this, 33.1% pointed to “confidentially issues” as a reason for not adopting social media.
As we’ve seen in numerous studies this last year, companies are still struggling with employee social media usage and how to manage it internally.

In this chart, it's interesting how 33.3% of the respondents saw their lack of decision-making ability as an obstacle for social media integration in their business. Likely, the majority of the people responsible for social media management are not in a traditional management role.

#7: Lack of Social Media Measurement

Less than 15% of the businesses using social media are measuring return on investment. Over 33% are not measuring return on investment at all. It seems that many businesses struggle with identifying what to measure, how to measure and how to interpret the data when they are able to gather results.
Among those businesses that are measuring their social media activity, the focus is on usage and incoming traffic. Interestingly, most are not using traditional business metrics.

As this chart shows, only 14.7% of respondents answered "yes" to the question "Is your organization measuring your return on social media investment?" This shows that businesses know they should be using social media, but they don't necessarily understand why.

#8: Companies Lack Confidence in Their Social Media Strategy

While 60% of respondents say their companies are using social media, there’s low confidence in their social media strategies. One of the most interesting findings in this report was how the respondents rated their social media strategies. Only 14.2% described their strategies as “very effective,” while a low 7.3% described them as “very revenue generating” on average.

Based on this graph, it's clear that most of the companies surveyed didn't have confidence in their social media strategy.

Based on the fact that most companies are not tracking their success (as seen above) and most are trying to build their social media strategy internally, it makes sense that most are lacking confidence in their overall success in the first few years.
The full “State of Social Media for Business 2010” is available here from SmartBrief.
Now it’s your turn. Where does your company stand versus the social media benchmarks mentioned above? Are you confident in your social media strategy? Share your experience and comments in the box below.

Social Media as an Investigative Tool

2010-11-28T09:18:00.001+05:30

From Original Source: Link

Secura Insurance Companies is recruiting for a Social Media Claims Investigation Intern, whose basic responsibilities include:

Utilize various social sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace to gather information for potential claims cases.
Utilize other online avenues and Websites to obtain information on potential claimants.
Monitor any online activity pertaining to specific individuals.
Report suspicious online activity or information to claim representatives.

This helps illustrate two trends in social media: the use by third parties of social media to gather information about people, and the recruitment of the most junior possible personnel to perform social media responsibilities. (I won’t comment on the latter except to note that it seems asking a student to monitor people online ten hours a week for nothing — the Secura position is an internship — has the potential to lead to some interesting consequences.)
We’ve all read stories of people who learned that their employer, a credit reporting agency, a landlord or someone else had collected information about them using social media sources. Anyone who is surprised that this goes on has not been paying attention and only has himself or herself to blame if it happens to them. To repeat my favorite Marshall McLuhan quote on this topic: “Publication is self invasion of privacy.” In other words, if you don’t want the world to know about it, don’t post it on your Facebook page.
There have been many reports of law enforcement using social media as an investigative tool. In March of this year it was reported that the FBI was creating Facebook identities and then sending friend requests to people under investigation to gain access to their personal data and goings-on.
So far, rulings on whether these practices violate privacy have been mixed, but no doubt, these activities will continue. It is also inevitable that much of this will come to be accepted as legitimate use of social media. We live so much of our lives online that it would be difficult to expect the global village to be “off limits” for corporate and law enforcement use.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) are good sources of information on these topics and companies that wish to use social media in this way would be well advised to review the law and consumer reaction to these practices.

Google URL Shortener

2010-10-01T13:56:00.001+05:30

Like other Networks Google too makes its URL Shortening Service public. Previously it can be availed using Google toolbar's share button. Now we can use it without Google toolbar at Goo.gl.

Hoping for the exact statistics of the URL. Most of the URL shorteners will show the fake statistics to make their site more popular, even Stumble Upon's Su.Pr providing fake's. We already discussed about Traffic From Stumbleupon. And now we got another URL shortener service for microblogging. For better statistics sign in with Google and check.

Alexa Ranking

2010-08-02T10:53:00.004+05:30

As we know, page rank is Google's View of importance of that page and it won't help for business, what about Alexa rankings. It is a tool that is used rank web site's traffic. And how far we can trust the Alexa rank to judge a web page. Whether the rankings given by them are based on the real traffic.

And i would say that like Google PR, we can neglect alexa rankings too. Those rankings are based on the users who were using Alexa tool bar. For that we won't need too much of traffic. Just install Alexa tool bar and reload a page regularly with the reload every Firefox addon. We can increase Alexa ranking with just two steps like this. And there are some other ways too.

Being in this Internet marketing field of nearly a year there are many conflicts about these rankings. Once there, its Google Page Rank. Many of the SEO people still giving much more importance for that. It's not even going to help the business at any level. Then the Alexa Ranking, for a site which is receiving say 1000s of visitors a day we can't say how many of the users used the alexa toolbar.

Many of the end users will not have the knowledge about these Alexa toolbar or rankings. Then how can we judge the web page's traffic with the Alexa rankings. And here after i will not consider about this Alexa ranking too. The Alexa rank and the page rank are only useful for the people who are going to sell a domain with better rankings.Just concentrate in Search Engine Rankings and get targeted traffic for this business.

Tracking Your Blog Traffic

2010-07-24T09:52:00.005+05:30

Tracking the traffic for a site or blog is an important one. We can get the idea where we want to improve where we have the market through the traffic analysis only. Most of us using Google Analytics or Stat Counter or some other tools.

Now Blogger itself has a inbuilt stats feature. It was effective from July 1, here is the Source just now came to know this. This is a needful feature with a blog.

To track your blog's stats visit Blogger in Draft. You can see the stats tab with the other tabs. Here i attach the screen shot.

Almost it have all the features of the Google Analytics. Start tracking using Blogger in Draft.

Social Media For Business

2010-07-20T10:20:00.003+05:30

The evolution of Social Media and Social Networking Sites or the Web 2.0 sites makes the online marketing simpler. The targeted traffic has been easily driven to the sites with the help of these sites. Through these sites we can easily get connected to the customers. Even if every tweet does not return to a sale it helps to build the relationship with the people and lets to know about what they are expecting and so on.

It can create a brand awareness/market for your business which can generate lead for your business.Besides your competitors already using Social media you can follow them, what your competitors are saying about their product you can find ways to differentiate from them easily.

With the right content your posts in these sites have the potential to spread it out quickly. It can also hurt your brand, so be careful with the content.

Social Media builds credibility for your business.Try using it to create a postive perception about your brand. Track regularly to see what the competitors or others saying about you. Apart from all the other advantages social media is a affordable one, its cost effective. Giving our quality and focused posts about you will help to establish as an authority in your field.

Google Getting Better and Better

2010-07-15T11:42:00.005+05:30

Have you noticed this. When you are searching for a keyword Google shows the other relative keywords in its left corner below the search tools.

In this screenshot, when we search for Ecommerce Solutions we can get the other suggestions like website design, website development and more. And in the following Screenshot

when we search for SEO services we can get the other suggestions like PPC Management, Search Engine Optimization and more.

Usually it shows other keyword suggestions related to the keyword down the SERP.

Traffic from Stumbleupon

2010-07-06T15:17:00.003+05:30

Traffic - the word that every optimizers working for. Now there are so many easiest ways to gain traffic for a site through PPC Campaigns. However we want some more money on those campaigns than a SEO campaign. The usage of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook also driving some traffic for the site.

How about this site - Stumbleupon. Another Social Networking Site which can provide better traffic next to Search Engines. But, what makes me confusing is, the page views shown in Stumbleupon profile is much more differ than the traffic shown in Analytics. The Stumbleupon shows views in hundreds and thousands. Whereas the analytics shows only tens and units. It's acceptable if the difference is marginal since it may shows every single page load. But there won't be a huge difference like this.

The URL shortener of Stumbleupon - Su.pr, comes with the description Drive more traffic with short urls, whether Stumbleupon too showing fake views as the other URL shorteners doing. Its still confusing.

You can check this with My Stumbleupon Profile itself. Check that with the site ZS Cart, in my profile its showing 704 views(on 6th July '10) but in analytics it shows the overall traffic from Stumbleupon is just 54. Such a huge difference.

Social Media Hub - Hootsuite

2010-06-25T16:39:00.000+05:30

Have you used Hootsuite to maintain your social media profiles. If not, then use it from now atleast. It's a great social media hub i have used. You can maintain multiple social networking profiles through it. And you can set automatic feeds too using it. Now it has been in a new look. Have been added with some exciting features. It shows even the join date of a particular person, mentions, favorites, and tweets. You can get the analytics for your tweets. You can drag and drop files now. There is a customizes tab for twitter search.It's getting better and better. Start using it and enjoy its features.

How much important is Page Rank.

2010-06-24T17:27:00.000+05:30

It has been creating some excitation about the page rank and its updation. How important is that , whether it is necessary, and how it has been assigned.

The most important one for the business is the traffic for the site. Even if the traffic has been better for a site, the page rank has been low. And for some sites the traffic is at the worst and the page rank has been better.

The page rank is not going to help us with the rankings and traffic. And the visitors to the site too won't consider page rank since most of them don't know about it. Then why people still giving importance to page rank.

Whether it's a important one to achieve. Make a comment on it.

Facebook Gets it Own Url Shortener

2010-06-17T11:41:00.000+05:30

If you linked your Facebook Page with your twitter account you can find this difference. Here before it shorts the url with bit.ly url shortener now its using fb.me.

Look at the first two tweets in the Screenshot.

Google Adds an Extra Feature to its Homepage

2010-06-05T10:02:00.000+05:30

Google Adds an extra feature to its home page. Yes, we can change the background image. Look at the left corner in the bottom of the image. But it is a personalized background, can use while you logged into Gmail accout.

Social Bookmarking Sites List | Social Bookmarking Sites in India

2010-06-03T15:24:00.002+05:30

Here in this post i wish to share the social bookmarking sites lists i have.

Social Bookmarking Sites List

Bookmarking Dir

Directory Roll

Biz Gaint

Tech Maish

Tendou's List

Top Bookmarking List

Top 20 most Social Bookmarking Site.

Indian Bookmarking Sites List

List from Graphic SEO

Social Networking List from VM Options

Here is another list, seems to be new ones.

New List