Social media is now an essential component of doing business. It’s important for marketers to keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape so they can align their strategies and achieve the results they’re looking for. Here’s a list (in alphabetical order) of some great social media blogs to read in 2012. They all have unique voices that cover a wide range of social-media-related topics, news, and trends. From tips to tactics to measurement, there’s something for everybody.

1. The Brand Builder (Olivier Blanchard): For businesses looking to dive deep into social media discussion, check out Olivier’s rich insights. He blogs about building strong brands through passion, innovation, creativity, and common sense.
 
2. Brass Tack Thinking (Amber Naslund): Amber was the VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, a social media monitoring and engagement platform. She blogs about social media strategies for business, and offers insights into what works and what doesn’t.
 
3. Conversation Agent (Valeria Maltoni): Valeria is a fresh voice in strategy with 20 years of real-world business experience, 10 of which have been spent online. Her articles are about connecting ideas and people, and how talk can change our lives.
 
4. Convince and Convert (Jay Baer): Jay writes about social media strategy and works with companies to build integrated, measurable social and content programs.
 
5. CopyBlogger (Brian Clark): Ranked as a top marketing blog, Brian and his team help businesses persuade in a 2.0 world. Their posts provide advice and solutions that empower people to successfully grow their businesses through social media and online marketing.
 
6. DaveFleet.com: Dave provides unique perspectives from the realm of communications and public relations. He writes about communications, PR, marketing, and social media, and the areas where those topics intersect. He’s well known for his comprehensive ebook on developing corporate social media policies.
 
7. Diva Marketing Blog (Toby Bloomberg): Toby’s blog provides a wide array of social media advice. She shares the cool things she stumbles across that can make life easier and more fun for marketers.

8. The Future Buzz (Adam Singer): In this blog about web marketing and PR strategies, Adam writes about spreading buzz in the social web and building long-term visibility for brands in today’s fragmented media society. Bloggers, marketers, freelance writers, entrepreneurs, artists, small business owners, and public relations professionals will all benefit from the content here. 

9. Ignite Social Media blog: “The original social media agency”, Ignite Social Media’s blog offers advice about social media strategy and implementation, SEO, blog content creation, channel/sentiment monitoring, social identity management, and other useful topics for brands.
 
10. Jason Keath: Jason’s focus is on researching how marketers succeed. As the founder and CEO of Social Fresh, a social media education company, he curates some of the smartest voices in online marketing, online and offline.
 
11. JeffBullas.com: Jeff writes about social media and marketing topics. His expertise helps business and personal brands with digital social media marketing, including how to use blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and SEO to improve reach and engagement.
 
12. Kikolani (Kristi Hines): Looking for great “getting started” social media guidance? Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers, helping them succeed in search marketing and social media.
 
13. Lipsticking (Yvonne DiVita): Yvonne heads up a very talented group of women bloggers. They bring a powerful female voice to the marketing world, assisting many brands, agencies, and non-profits in their marketing-to-women strategies.
 
14. MackCollier.com: Mack is a social media strategist, trainer, and speaker who specializes in helping companies better connect with their customers via social media. He blogs about social media marketing and customer-engagement topics.
 
15. Methodical Madness: Written by members of The Duffy Agency, this blog looks at the perpetually changing world of social media and marketing as they relate to building brands internationally.
 
16. Outspoken Media: Outspoken Media is a boutique SEO consulting company that specializes in fitting clients with customized integrated marketing strategies to amplify their voice on the Web. The firm’s blog offers great advice about marketing via Web 2.0.

17. The Relationship Economy (Jay Deragon): Jay offer a look at social media through the perspective of social technology disrupting business. He is a great resource for effective approaches to social media strategies.

18. Social Caffeine (Lori Taylor): Lori is a social media consultant who designs direct response marketing campaigns with a social media focus that improve her clients’ ROI. Her easy-to-read articles offer many ideas for marketers who are looking to drive branding and sales.

19. The Social Media Marketing Blog (Scott Monty): Scott is the head of social media for Ford Motor Company. This is his personal blog, where he shares his perspectives on social media — the convergence of marketing, advertising, and PR on the Web — for marketers, agencies, enterprises, and individuals.

20. SocialMouths (Francisco Rosales): Francisco works with entrepreneurs and small companies to reach their full potential online. He designs blogs (including this one), manages social media strategies, and coaches/consults with many SMBs. His writing offers a wealth of information about how to use social media for marketing and engagement. 

Are you reading any of these blogs? Do you have suggestions of your own about good social media blogs? Leave a comment and let me know!

Social media marketers always wonder when the best time is to post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and the myriad of other social platforms for optimum customer engagement. Is it in the morning, since many people check their Facebook page before they go to work? Is midday better because users look at their Twitter stream while they’re eating lunch? Is evening best? Which days of the week generate the most engagement? And what about B2B versus B2C — are the dynamics different?

Eric Boggs, CEO of Argyle Social and Jay Baer, CEO of Convince and Convert, recently teamed up for a terrific webinar that addresses these questions as they pertain to Facebook and Twitter. It offers valuable insights for marketers who are trying to fine-tune their social outreach efforts. The webinar covers:

2011 was a giant year for social media. Pandora, Groupon, and LinkedIn went public, Google+ launched, Twitter reached 100 million active users and was valued at $8 billion, and Facebook rolled out some big changes, including its major Timeline redesign.

This infographic from Flowtown takes a look at the major social media events in 2011.

Facebook rolled out Timeline this week, and brands are eager to take advantage of the new feature. The social network isn’t letting brands create their own Timeline pages yet and hasn’t given guidance about when that feature will be available. “We are currently focused on Timeline for individuals and will consider how to make consistent experiences for Pages, but we have nothing to announce at this time,” a Facebook rep is quoted as saying.

If you aren’t familiar with Timeline, it’s the revamped version of the Facebook Profile. It’s a way to show off who you are, what you do, and where you’ve been. It’s a complete design overhaul that constructs a visual history of everything you’ve ever done. Facebook automatically adds photos, status updates, and life events from your Facebook history to your timeline, but you can also add photos and content fill out the “Way Back” section.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the company’s f8 developer conference in late September:

Timeline presents some great opportunities for brand marketers:

Increased engagement: Facebook’s 800 million users are spending more and more time using the social media platform, whether it’s updating their status, sharing photos, or “liking” content. Timeline encourages people to post more about what they’re doing, which will happen automatically if they set up sharing apps. This means that users will be spending even more time on the site — exactly what advertisers are looking for.

More advertising opportunities and improved ad targeting: Since people will probably focus most on their timelines and using the new sharing apps, marketers will get much-improved data about how people interact with products and services — this translates to more opportunities to serve users relevant ads and create a richer brand experience.

Chris Crum at WebProNews says that Timeline is a potential game-changer for social media marketing: “Brand timelines, for those companies who choose to utilize them to their full potential could provide limitless information and knowledge about brands in a way that we just haven’t really seen in the past. … If you think about it, brand timelines could really change the landscape of what social media marketing looks like.”

With close to one billion members, Facebook is a very attractive marketing platform. The Facebook Advertising team has done a great job of working with company engineers to build a self-service, easy-to-use product that makes Google AdWords look quaint by comparison. Advertisers can target users by age, location, or area of interest, enabling very focused marketing efforts.

Flowtown created this infographic to show data the company collected about who is marketing on Facebook. An impressive 69% of the businesses they spoke with are using Facebook to reach out to current and prospective customers. Some other interesting statistics:

• The cost-per-click (CPC) of Healthcare advertising is the most expensive at at $1.27, while E-commerce costs the least at $0.31.
• It costs more than $320,000 to get 300,000 likes on your Facebook page.

Does social media have a place at the office? Some organizations definitely don’t think so. A recent report from Clearswift, an IT security firm, found that 19% of companies are blocking employee access to social media sites at work, up 10% from last year.

But wait… Is Cyberloafing’ Good for Productivity?  discusses web surfing at work and its effect on output. The conclusion? It “serves an important restorative function and can actually refresh workers and improve performance”. The article summarizes a recent study by Don. J.Q. Chen and Vivien K.G. Kim which found that the amount of Internet browsing a person does during the day, including visiting social media sites, is significantly and positively related to such upbeat mental states as excited,  interested, alert, and active, and inversely related to such negative mental states as distressed, fearful, hostile, and jittery.

What’s a company to do, then, about employees who visit Facebook, Twitter, and other sites with their company-issued laptop? Social media’s exponential growth has created unique challenges for employers and employees. Some key points to keep in mind:

Social media use at work is no longer limited to young professionals and members of Gen Y. According to the Pew Internet Project, social media users come from all age groups — the average age of adult social network users has risen from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010, and over half of all adult users are now over the age of 35.

How much is too much when it comes to surfing social media at work? Moderation is key. A recent survey by GSN Digital touched on the matter and found that 80% of respondents who said they visit online gaming sites throughout the day “feel more focused on work as a result of periodic mental breaks associated with game play” – and 59% of them said they visit such sites for less than 30 minutes per day.

Businesses haven’t had to tackle this issue until the last few years, so there aren’t any historical precedents for guiding employees about social media etiquette. Many companies either don’t have a policy about how workers should handle their online interactions while they’re at the office or, if they do have one, it’s so dense and convoluted that it’s impossible to plow through. Companies like Coca-Cola, Kodak, IBM, and Intel that offer a relaxed, common-sense approach appear to be more successful in crafting policies that result in better etiquette and fewer mishaps. When the emphasis is on what’s allowed rather than what’s forbidden, social media mischief decreases dramatically. The best strategy is for corporate culture to embrace social media and encourage responsible employee use.

The infographic below, Social Media in the Workplace, illustrates some ideas to help employees be more responsible. It also give examples of companies with good social media policies, and how to deal with some blunders.

A new study by marketing firm Constant Contact and research company Chadwick Martin Bailey sheds light on how consumers interact with brands on Facebook. According to 10 Quick Facts You Should Know About Consumer Behavior on Facebook (below), it turns out that people engage with their favorite brands on Facebook far more than on any other social network.

CMB asked 1,491 respondents to share their social media habits. The data shows that more than half of Americans over the age of 18 spend an hour or more each week on Facebook, and over a quarter of them are connecting with their favorite brands.

A number of details were revealed about why and how people interact with brands on the world’s largest social network, including:

• For the most part, respondents said they “Like” a brand on Facebook because they are a customer (58%) or because they want to receive discounts and promotions (57%).

• Being a fan is mostly a passive activity — the vast majority of consumers, 77%, said they primarily engage with brands on Facebook through reading updates and posts from the brands.

• Only 17% of those polled said they interact with brands by sharing experiences and news stories with others about the brand, and only 13% said they post updates about brands that they “Like”.

The study also revealed some promising data for businesses:

• 78% of consumers who “Like” brands on Facebook said they “Like” fewer than 10 brands.

• 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook.

• 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product after “Liking” the brand on Facebook.

The data also shows that 76% of consumers said they have never “unliked” a brand on Facebook. This is contrary to a February study by email marketing firm ExactTarget, The Social Break-Up, which concluded that 81% of consumers have either “unliked” or removed a company’s posts from their Facebook news feed.

The data in the the Constant Contact/CMB study reinforces once again that brands looking to make the biggest impact on Facebook must keep marketing messages to a minimum, be careful not to overwhelm fans with too many updates and, most importantly, share compelling content.

Here are the study results:

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project on social media reveals that nearly two-thirds of adults on the Internet say they use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, up slightly from a year ago. Drilling down further, the research also shows that social media use among Baby Boomers is growing at a faster clip — among users aged 50-64, 33% say they visit a social network daily, a 20% increase from last year.

Among online adults:

• 83% of 18-29 year-olds
• 70% of 30-49 year-olds
• 51% of 50-64 year-olds, and
• 33% of those ages 65 and older

use social-networking sites.

Users generally enjoy their experiences, describing them as mostly “good”:

Also according to Pew:

“Among internet users, social networking sites are most popular with women and young adults under age 30. Young adult women ages 18-29 are the power users of social networking; fully 89% of those who are online use the sites overall and 69% do so on an average day. As of May 2011, there are no significant differences in use of social networking sites based on race and ethnicity, household income, education level, or whether the internet user lives in an urban, suburban, or rural environment.”

Search Engine Journal created the infographic below, which gives an excellent breakdown of social media usage growth and patterns. It aggregates data from the Pew report along with some other recent statistics, showing how much social media has forever changed how we interact and connect online.

Meaningful exchanges constantly take place all over the social Web on a variety of platforms, connecting people and enabling them to share, critique, and interact with content and with each other. The type of information we share reveals a lot about who we are, who we know, and what we know — people tend to talk about the things they care about/are most knowledgeable about with others who are interested in similar subjects. The impact of those relationships affects our Web authority.

Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a certain way. In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency. In order to raise awareness, foster brand advocacy, win attention, and generate real-world action, businesses want to know the answers to questions like:

• Who are the influencers in my brand category and how do I find them?
• What are they saying about my brand?
• How many of my Twitter followers are clicking my links and retweeting my content?
• Does my Facebook page create the kind of engagement I’d hoped?
• What is my brand’s “true reach”?

Measuring online influence is difficult at best. How can it be calculated? How do companies validate that that their messaging is is working? For the most part, marketers have been limited to piecemeal metrics like followers, likes, and page views. Now a variety of influence-scoring platforms are emerging to help personal and corporate brands determine just how influential they are and locate influencers in their industry. Here are a few tools to get you started with benchmarking:

Klout

Klout measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage, you influence others, and your Klout Score measures that influence on a scale of 1 to 100. Using data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, Klout measures how many people you influence (true reach), how much you influence them (amplification), and how influential they are (network score), and assigns a score from 1 to 100.

PostRank

PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real time across the Web. It gathers data about where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from 20 of the top social networks. It tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — its social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet is a metrics aggregator for all your social media and Web properties. It pulls and generates metrics from Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly, YouTube, Google Analytics, MySpace, FriendFeed, and RSS feeds and displays them in a slick interface all in one place. It also notifies you whenever something noteworthy happens.

PeerIndex

The PeerIndex algorithm measures the speed with which we find and share content on any specific topic, as well as the volume of our sharing. Authority on a subject is affirmed when the content you share is approved, i.e. retweeted or commented on, by someone else that is an authority on the subject. It gauges activity on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to come up with a score.

Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue calls itself the Social Stock Market. It’s inherently a social networking game that allows you to connect with individuals based on “value relationships” — the much closer relationships than just having someone follow you on Twitter or Like you on Facebook. The platform can be used to find highly engaged individuals around the world across a wide variety of interests. It enables brands to get in front of new, engaged audiences and connect with relevant customers in a fun environment across 150+ countries.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows businesses to efficiently and effectively manage and grow their social presence across multiple channels and turn social connections into loyal customers. The application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla, and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics, and more in a package that’s intuitive and easy to use.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster helps you achieve an effective presence on Twitter and Facebook. It shows you analytics that aren’t based on abstract scores, but numbers that are connected to your business and your social media strategies: impressions, total reach, engagement, and more. It then give you the tools and recommendations you need to take action and improve each one of these metrics.

Twylah

Twylah adds context to your tweets and creates a whole new experience around them. It doesn’t just tell you what you and others are influential about, it shows you why you’re influential by placing a user’s “trending topics” (what you tweet about most often) into clickable, topical buckets. It showcases your tweets in a more complete narrative story, and is a much better storefront for your Twitter brand than the less attractive Twitter stream.

My Web Career

My Web Career enables you to uncover and evaluate your digital footprint. It’s a great networking tool and is useful when exploring the way your social profiles connect across the Web to create an overall picture of yourself or your business. It uses link analysis, visualization, and semantics technologies to enable you to quickly evaluate and explore data that may relate to you, and it makes this data accessible, manageable, and actionable.

Appinions

Appinions is an opinions-powered platform that makes it easy to identify, analyze, monitor and engage with influencers. It features an extensive database that includes millions of opinions extracted from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, newspaper and magazine articles, and radio and television transcripts. It not only focuses on the influencers creating content, but on the influencers attracting the most attention. Appinions also meets the needs of online publishers, leveraging the power of opinions and influencers so they can provide readers with more relevant and interesting content.

Have you tried any of these tools? I’d love to hear about your experiences and whether or not you’ve found any of them helpful. I’m sure there are tools that I’m not aware of, so please share them in the comments below.

Social media is about more than marketing and branding — it’s quickly becoming an essential part of customer outreach for brands. In addition to using social platforms to monitor conversations about their industry, competitors, and products, companies are increasingly reaching out to to their customers via the social Web to communicate messages about what they have to offer. In fact, social media is transforming the way organizations communicate — the many social tools that are available today are very cost-effective compared to traditional approaches such as email and online advertising. Blog posts and tweets enable businesses to create communities, offer immediate feedback or assistance, and promote their products and services.

A surprising number of companies of all sizes have yet to use social media as a communication tool. Socialcast has compiled an interesting infographic that visualizes data from many sources, including eMarketer, the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Nielsen, about how Fortune 500 companies use social media. The majority of companies studied found social platforms such as blogging, social networking, and online video to be successful. (In March of last year, I shared some data about about how Fortune 100 companies were using social media at the time.)

Here’s a look at why organizations adopt social media, what types of tools have been successful and how important they are for outreach, and some examples of how companies have tapped Facebook, Twitter, and blogging for customer communication: