By the end of the first week of 2012, the Google+ hype machine is in full swing; with 9+ posts of the good the bad and the ugly. The facts are telling, Google+ showed solid growth in Q4, initial branded page adoptions are happening, integration of +1 within in ads, linking YouTube to Google+  as well as  Google+ showing high in search results there is no question the social smack down is in full motion. 

The below image shows the leading brands and their smart mover advantage; Note these numbers are nothing to their Facebook counter part but they have linked with some of the top influencers via Google+.

For brands and marketing professionals who are taking a serious look at their entire media ecosystem, achieving greater results and measurable returns is appealing, while  more pressure to simplify the process of integrating their paid, earned and owned media around social.

If you’re thinking “Oh No” not another social site” you’re not alone.  In our recent blog post  5 ways to drive Engagement, Likes are so Last Year  we address the opportunity to drive more engagement with the content that matters and how Hypercuration™ keeps you relevant. A media war is brewing, and many brands will  capitalize in the wake of the carnage. The time is now, to begin to include Google + into your overall Social strategy with your Facebook and Twitter activities.

Below is Hitwise Google+ active user growth.

The gambling has begun, and if the consumer shift continues to Google+ and they successfully execute their new feature releases into their other platforms it will be full steam ahead for Google.  The Integration of Paid, Earned, Owned and Social media is now more evident than ever. It is truly becoming a Social Ménage à Trois in Paid, Earned and Owned Media. The brands that want to be the voice of their industry will have to be even more agile as consumes demand more.   The challenge is how to embrace these social changes.

The Google+ button is being put on every content item and in ads.

On the Google Display Network (GDN), the +1 button will be added to images, animated GIF’s, Flash, Display Ad Builder ads and select mobile inventory. You can also choose to include the +1 button on your DoubleClick Rich Media ads, which can run on or off the GDN.

Data, Data, and more Data
Data is the big play for Google. They are in the position to be the most integrated application set, with an enormous war chest of very popular applications. Yes, Facebook is big but most brands have less than a 1% engagement rate. Increasing reach , and achieving greater lift are imperative for Brands in 2012. By developing a Google+ integration strategy and working on SEO objectives will help brands meet their goal of increased reach and greater lift.

The above image show where the money is in media, however, the amount of intelligence from social is a big factor to drive decisions in other media spending.

By developing a strategy for all of your social data will be the biggest key for a Brand to achieve success in 2012. Google closing in on becoming the most integrated social network in the world, and this is Google’s best weapon in the war against Facebook.

5 Ways Google+ is relevant to brands in 2012

1. Like it or not Google+ is affecting search so embrace it: add +1 to your web site, blog and content. Google is indexing everything that is +1 publicly. You really have nothing to lose and all to gain because if you look at your organic traffic from Google will continue to play a major factor.
2. Google lets you import your contacts (email) and link them with your Google+ page as well as you can segment those contents into Google+ circles making it easy to target posts and other relevant information to a sent to key individuals or groups. You can’t do this in Facebook for brand pages.
3. Display ads with +1 “SocialAds” are just smart, while Facebook has worked hard to force ad networks not to use Facebook in ads Google is and presents an opportunity for media planning to content selection.
4. Hangouts on Google+ are very powerful and a large portion of influencers are on Google+, impressive growth; high engagement and a strong customer service angle - watch for forward thinking companies. 
5. Social ROI is getting closers with a cohesive overall Social strategy on Google + since they include so many other Google platform add-ons.

Facebook anti position on integrated social share in ads is a major mistake in our eyes. While a brands' core strategy of creating content and messaging fans in their own news feeds and optimization will not change. Facebook has removed the restriction preventing non-fans from interacting with Pages, and there is no question paid media will be in greater need for driving higher engagement.  will still be required to continue growing engagement over just followers.

Takeaway
Gone are the days of making easy followers on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ engagement requires continuous optimization and traditional media planning is just not working in the age of Agile Marketing.
  
Digital integration and the speed of delivery will change a marketers approach to every level in the organization must think of the social implications. Old school marketing and silo strategies are not conducive to the real time consumer media consumption behavior. The insights obtained from social media is making real-time marketing an imperative.
  
As Google plans for Internet dominance building a strong inbound marketing and Google+ content cross-pollination strategy is a must have. The analysis of these social touch points   and the collection of data is just as important. Leveraging content interaction will always be the best way to measure consumer behavior and intent and  re-purpose this data will improve product development, increase sales efficiency, and create a more agile and responsive marketing strategy.

Be sure to check out InfiniGraph’s Google+ Page.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page and Google+ Page welcomes you.  Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

STUMBLE | DIGG

 

Brands are stuck in many ways with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ due to the nature of the news feed. Social Feeds have begun to look like the stock ticker display that scrolls in Times Square… You look away for a millisecond and you miss so many relevant items that you start to lose count.

If your customers and followers are not on at that moment, you just missed a massive number of people that you could have potentially engaged with. A more sophisticated approach is required to maximize your content marketing ROI. You must go beyond timing content and general post optimization. While necessary, these are small factors needed to reach social mass.

“The Numbers do not lie”, we always say. What is your social engagement in comparison to your followers? In our previous post “Be Relevant or Die” we highlighted the fact that brands must enhance their engagement strategy to increase content marketing traction. With the recent chaotic changes over at Facebook, and the filtering of posts made by 3rd party API’s, Facebook is now back peddling off filtering. In return most of you have seen your feeds interaction start to rise, or the number of posts showing up in real-time increasing. Regardless, most brand news feeds are still at sub 1% engagement levels, pointing out the cold reality that even the best content is not seen by the masses or target audience. The challenges are real and the competition to capture the consumer’s ability to share content is never more palpable than now. Unleashing the potential of your content is not easy, however, going beyond the news feed is our primary focus in 5 ways to drive engagement. 

Recently, eMarketing reported CMO’s are focusing on the nexus of social data, engagement, and user intelligence to drive greater relevance. Noted in the post is the emphasis placed on social media strategy, customer analytics, and data management.

These largely reflect the marketing aspects CMO’s felt they had the most room to improve; Over half the respondents indicated social media as a key engagement channel for customers and which almost 3/4 felt unprepared to leverage the large amounts of data that continue to flood the online marketing space.

Problem: Massive data, low response rate when content trends, and lack of action to encapsulate greater engagement.
 
The need to be more relevant and induce people to not only interact but also share has raised the bar again to getting your post action in the coveted news feed (friend’s / followers conversation stream). The on-going debate about which social network will create greater value can make one’s head spin. Twitter is about clicks and more authority, where as Facebook is more about engagement. Now Google+ is touting they have more engagement. PHEW!!!  For a brand marketer they are being measured on how many units are sold or traffic being generated that results in direct client conversion. The “how” is somewhat irrelevant. The elusive Social ROI behind social is not simple since there are so many factors happening in a single promotion. But one fact remains, the metrics (numbers) on your own brand feed. You’re not alone. The tsunami of content is one cause of post engagement atrophy.  Quality of followers and quality content is an amazing combination and must be fostered. In another recent post “Relevancy meets passion…” we postulate that the best indicator is crowd approved action based on their intent, but how do you reach scale with your content once you know it’s good?   

1. Trending Content
Content that starts to trend on your brand is gold. The immediate reaction and how to cross-pollinate this information via other channels will be covered below. Some posts are better than others and the ones that are most relevant are ripe for content recycling on active days and times.  This powerful approach not only scales with engagement but it will increase your organic reach if done correctly. On average this approach provides more than 30% amplified engagement rate and some we see as high as 100+%. Most brands will “post and forget” while others have a hard time putting previous content back out thinking they are spamming.  Content half-life is short for Facebook and Twitter. The majority of your followers never saw the post to start with.  Worried about losing followers?  Focus on engagement measurement, and tap into the recent addition to Facebook statistics, which can validate even more reasons why engagement is critical to your strategy.

2. Facebook Sponsored Stories
Sponsored stories are one way to enhance post engagement on trending content items. It’s been proven that showing friends who liked the post, or what they engaged with, prompts the friends of friends to engage as well. The price is going up on sponsored stories. The average costs are in the range of $0.32 to $0.85 a click (CPC). Using Precise Interests (keywords) is a proven way to drive greater targeting and is a must if you desire a greater level of engagement. Avoid zombie clicks. For a brand, who cares how many clicks you get? It’s how many converted that’s the real measurement. For more on this topic see Maximizing Facebook Ad Buy.

3. Promoted Tweets and Target Timelines
Using trending content items in a Promoted tweet to followers costs $0.50 CPE (cost per engagement) such as click, re-tweet, favorite and reply. You can go broader with Target Timelines; “Users with similar interests will see your Tweets in their timelines.”  However, you can’t control who sees your tweet nor the quality or the click statistics. We have found that targeting using keywords yields higher conversion, as in registrations, over just obtaining clicks. Relevance plays a key role in twitter as well as timing. Promoted tweets are powerful but you’re limited to your own Twitter community. A lower cost approach is targeting on keywords to increase your relevance. Using keywords based on the consumers who interact with other relevant content displays intent for a target industry or brand. This approach allows you to have lower bid amounts and more targeted control of your audience. Several people have talked about success with twitter promoted products and we agree with this strategy. We’ll discuss it in more detail in our next update.

4. Social Ads – Agile Marketing
This is a very exciting approach to display media where real-time content meets rich media.  Agile marketing with Hypercuration™ is real and allows marketers to be more responsive.  Using display media to target consumers and redirecting them back to say Facebook is a proven way to gain traction while further increasing organic reach. Creating greater relevancy in those ads based on media consumption is the crux of agile marketing. Being responsive, and leveraging trends in display ads, further amplifies relevance while enabling real-time content changes that prompts greater ad engagement. This is a radical change from the static rich media you’ve seen. If you know what media is being consumed you are able to target specific publications based on their social behaviors which will increase your relevance even further. Depending on the cost per thousand (CPC) network charges we have obtained $0.12 - $0.35 per engagement for highly targeted audiences.    Flite/InfiniGraph Webinar on intelligence SocialAds with Hypercuration™

5. Blog Groups / Ad Networks
The Paid media meets Earned media approach is a great way to increase engagement. Many brands have embraced it (SocialMoms, MomCentral, BlogFrog, and GlamMedia) and many more established blog networks are using it for producing original content as part of a central call to action.

At the same time, these premium networks run display media that is often linked to the content marketing campaigns across the network’s relevant audience. These sites have trending content that can be leveraged as a collective source to enhance and expand their brand posts with the above methodology.

Conclusion
Scaling social engagement is highly achievable with good content. Taking advantage of trends as they happen, being responsive while utilizing agile marketing, and optimizing on consumer behavior’s all work in complete harmony to achieve measurable Social ROI. Driving greater engagement is now possible with intelligent Social Ads that leverage behavior based, precise interests and keywords. Both Facebook and Twitter are amazing engagement platforms, coupled with Hypercuration™, to give any marketer the competitive advantage of knowing what to target on and when the content is right.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.  Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

STUMBLE | DIGG

Facebook’s recent change to the News Feed has put greater pressure on Brands to feed more relevant content than ever before. Due to Facebook's distribution algorithm, Edge Rank, which is based on engagement; the majority of pages reach less than 1% of their fan base.  Big Problem!  In our recent post Social Ménage à Trois in Paid, Earned and Owned Media we addressed the fact that social is making a major impact in the way media is being integrated. Now page owners have access to a very powerful insight that makes it easier to optimize on engagement, which means they'll have to publish even more relevant content, but this is still not enough. Beyond the editorial calendar, content curation is a critical part of any content marketing strategy.

NBC Universal uses paid media to drive traffic back to their content and Facebook page. These trending content units are seeing between 0.5 CTR to 1+% CTR.

Content that’s very relevant and trends for a brand’s target audience is a green light to cross feed and the brands that GET IT will dominate. The brands that can’t get their trending content act together will suffer as their post impressions decrease and engagement falters because the overall Edge Rank is low compared to the brands that master engagement.

Lexus post on Steve Jobs off Mashable and Horizon Organic post on Power Breakfast off      Parent.com.

Major brands such as Lexus, Mercedes Benz, Red Bull and Burberry are now leading based on how they organize where and how they distribute content over social-media channels.  As brands harness intelligent content marketing, the ability to keep their audience engaged and the melding of branded media within display, brands are steadily becoming publishers, like it or not. Content intelligence / curation is a key factor in understanding what content is resonating in, and around, your community and no longer can brands just post and pray for engagement.    

   Comscore’s recent study shows how serious brands are using paid media to drive engagement on Facebook.  Marketers Spending Big on 'Social Ads' That Drive Traffic to Facebook

A shift in content marketing is now making its way to display advertising from a direct-response form of advertising to branding media. The major challenge is how brands can expand beyond their social channels currently showing more linear growth.  A recent quote by Bob Lord CEO of Razorfish is telling; "Go get me a million fans on my Facebook page' to "Oh my God, I have a fanbase, and how do I keep them interested and engaged with content?' An editorial calendar is a blueprint that's an expression of the brand's social voice,"

Focusing On Engagement
Facebook has made it easy to pull as a single number "People talking about this page"  for any fan page on Facebook.  Both the amount of engagement and number of fans is now available even from your competitors. 

The “talking about” number comes from of all types of engagement such as interacting with posts, consumption (plays, views, comments, hovering over objects and expanding details ) and custom app actions. Facebook is clearly focusing more on fan engagement and going past fan acquisition. Marketing teams optimizing their social campaigns must focus on content relevance; this has huge implications because it now puts the focus on engagement. This is great news for consumers because it pushes brands to focus on content quality that the audience, based on behavior, is saying is relevant.
   
Scaling Engagement
The need to expand content interaction beyond just Facebook and Twitter is more important than ever. Content discovery in a cacophony of continuous bombardment will be more of a challenge, and brands must increase their content engagement if they are going to drive more Organic and Viral interaction.

To fulfill this challenge InfiniGraph became a premier partner on the FliteHub launch . 

Flite provides the cloud advertising platform where InfiniGraph is the intelligence around relevant content curation and management. The combination brings brand advertisers closer to real-time marketing and scale to reach target audiences for more social action points.

Brands are still focused on Clicks and Conversion even though that conflicts with true engagement and makes it hard to justify spend. As ROI expands beyond the Cost Per Fan (CPF) to Cost Per Engagement (CPE) marketers will demand more accountability on what all these engagements are doing to drive sales.  Facebook has made it easier to create connections between people and content by lowering the barrier from affinity to action. Brands with budgets will need to be decisive on what spend will drive the most engagement and content discovery with proper curation. It is becoming a major factor in content marketing planning. How are you driving more engagement and what other channels are working?

Join InfiniGraph at Social Media Marketing & Monitoring New York 2011 Oct 12th presenting NBC Universal case study,    PivotCon Oct 17-18th,   Socialize West Oct 21-22nd Guest Speaker on Real Time Marketing  and OMMASocial Oct 27th panel.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.  Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

STUMBLE | DIGG

 

Maximize results or you’re going to lose your job.  Facebook’s meteoric revenue growth is serious business, with $1.6 Billion in revenue for the first half of this year and it’s being widely reported will reach $4 Billion annually soon. It’s well known that social ads are yielding results due to the fact consumer action on ads creates spread, like conversations extend reach. Content creation and curation also has a major impact as to how well brands own their industry voice.

Without good content the engagement that drives reach will not happen as shown in our previous post Relevancy Meets Passion: 5 Ways To Increase Post Relevance.  Social has become the best way to integrate “paid,” “earned”, and owned” media (PEOM) like never before. Examples from a social perspective:

●    Paid: Buying Facebook ads, Twitter promoted ads, and display ads / TV spots
●    Earned: Blog or news about your product, conversation on your social sites
●    Owned: Facebook, Twitter and a brands websites, all used to drive interaction

The fact that consumers are connected and the social graph is melding paid, earned, and owned media presents challenges in synthesizing and optimizing these three channels. CMO’s that are committed to integration will achieve greater marketing efficiency, higher ROI, and measurable success.  Here’s why:

Social Always On
Nothing is for free and it costs to do social well. Many have talked about the costs but where is the ROI?  Since social has truly leveled the playing field it takes work and here is where the “Earned” comes in. We rarely see a TV spot or other advertisement that does not promote a Facebook or Twitter presence and for good reason. Now the conversation can be continued and shared via social channels expanding the overall reach. A direct example of melding these three channels is seen on the NBC News (TheGrio) website homepage and the Flite.com ad unit embedded within in shown below.  

Leveraging filtered, social content as it trends and streaming it within an advertising unit created +2.5 percentage points CTR higher over previous ads to the main site that’s a 50X uplift.

Dan Woolsey - Director of Business Operations, NBC News (TheGrio)  "Every brand is familiar with the need for social media.  The common challenge is that this general need for social media costs time and money and there are frustratingly few paths to a calculable ROI.  Quite simply, InfiniGraph paves that path.

By identifying trending content from you own social media efforts and allowing you to place that content into ad units, your CTR shoots up.  The bottom line is ads that display trending social media do better and become more valuable.  Our initial test campaign started with a baseline CTR of .05% - not bad for industry rate. We incorporated our own trending content in the ads and the CTR jumped to 2.5%."    

Social discovery linked with paid media delivered these results.  Creating mass exposure via paid channels has shown to be a very promising approach in integrating content relevance.  In the last three years a good set of brands have hired social media managers or social agencies and that has likely been the bulk the “social” budget, but now it’s taking more to realize an ROI and InfiniGraph measurement is way more than just “Like” counts.  A Facebook Page is not free but it is “owned” media.  Creating and managing content on that page costs real dollars, making it more “paid”, especially if you’re also buying Facebook ads.  A great example in action is what Discovery Channel  is doing to find super fans.

Social Earned Media
One proven way to increase effectiveness and lower your costs is earned media coupled with social optimization. With the social share button being one click away from spreading good content, the connection between “earned” and “paid” is undeniable.  INTENT is everything, if someone shares, tweets, comments, etc., it all hits the graph and spreads to friends.  That’s gold!   Where brands fall short is the follow through engagement, re-posting the best-trending content means not just your super fans become your evangelists. 

The majority of content is not being leveraged to its maximum due to poor tracking and the inability to be responsive.  Creating more engagement on what’s most relevant not only expands the brand’s reach but also maximizes those paid assets.  Below is a direct example of post optimization based on crowd-sourcing trending content.

Earned media’s biggest payoff is from shared connections compelled to create reviews, a blog post, a comment or a tweet, people sharing their thoughts on your brand with their social network.  The nice thing about earned media, too, is that it provides more insights and is much more measurable than it was before social media went mainstream.  (BEHAVIORAL)

Understanding Intent and Behavior around all that content gives brands a competitive advantage. All content being shared, whether it’s posts, text, messages, a video or a website —will all be reduced to a link hitting one of the major social networks. Word-of-mouth marketing now spreads at the click of a button and that’s why earned media has become so important to a marketing campaign.

The Ménage à trois – All about the data
Analyze the data to see where traffic is coming from – Finding out the what, where, and how of a specific call to action is not only critical it’s required.  Many brands are still stuck on getting the LIKE count up but don’t translate it into measurable sales or don’t measure if those LIKE’s generate more traffic / conversation.  Likes don’t provide much insight into interaction around the brand where content clearly does.  Knowing what is relevant to your audience is critical in driving more engagement.  A brand needs to optimize all forms of media, thereby enabling the brand to create the deepest and most meaningful relationships with consumers while also understanding their media consumption.   Noted Dave Fleet created a few slick visual for interworking of POEM The 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem .

Social is a horizontal layer touching every part of your business, from customer service to customer acquisition, to customer retention.  There are different performance metrics for each point along the marketing funnel.  You can determine your effectiveness at achieving a goal, whether it’s brand buzz, brand awareness, brand preference, or intent to buy.

•    Were we able to increase our contacts and leads to sell more items?
•    Did we increase referrals or direct sales to a target location?
•    Are people saying better things about the brand or our buzz increasing?

North America is approaching social saturation (ubiquity) and the globe is well on its way to being socialized, generating earned media has become a higher priority due to the hyper social sharing behavior.   Now more pressure is on paid and owned media teams to streamline their coordination or lose the opportunity of momentum.    As the barriers are being torn down and silos altered, a new form of media collaboration must be created.     Give us your thoughts; are you seeing the digital media landscape changing due to social?

Want to see more? Come see InfinGraph demonstrating live trending content with paid media.    Ad Innovation Series: Brand Management in the Digital Age Thursday, September 22, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM (PT) http://innovationseries.eventbrite.com/   at Flite SF HQ and don’t be left out when in New York, Wednesday 12th October come see us co present our NBC News case study http://www.oursocialtimes.com/socialmediamarketingnewyork/.  Then we're back in SF October 20-21 for Socialize West - speaking on Optimizing Social Media making real-time decisions with real-time data. http://www.mediabistro.com/socialize/

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.  Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

STUMBLE | DIGG

Social attraction is about keeping them interested to a point where the relationship becomes physical, meaning more than just “I like you.”  Regardless of the social channel, content clearly drives the progression of engagement with consumers.  Twitter, Facebook and now Google+ are all about relevancy, social sharing and leveraging content as social currency.  While most smart brands do search engine optimization (SEO) to use website content to improve their search rankings, the vast majority don’t optimize their social content to drive stronger customer interaction.  In this post, we’ll dive into what brands must do to optimize their social ROI, maximize their Facebook EdgeRank and avoid boring their followers.

Several recent studies have pointed to the strong impact of social content marketing, specifically, content curation and news feed optimization.  A brand’s dream comes true when consumers amplify brand content through active social engagement.  Sharing of content lowers the overall cost of reach and, of course, builds awareness.  A recent Comscore study revealed that 27% of Facebook browsing is done on news feeds compared to only 4% on home pages.  This indicates that consumers are seeking dynamic content engagement versus static, one-way information.  The study also illuminated the fact that brands optimizing their news feed posts, versus developing apps for their Facebook pages, are also likely to reach the most people.
 
Facebook marketing is similar in many respects to SEO.  Just as you optimize your website for better search performance, Facebook content is optimizable for superior fan engagement.  And, our research shows that increased audience engagement brings markedly higher click-thru rates, traffic and quality fan growth.  Consequently, there has been a great deal of chatter about Facebook EdgeRank, the algorithm that governs how posts are prioritized in users’ news feeds.  The main factors that control post visibility are described in this graphic from a presentation given by Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg at the 2010 f8 developer conference describing Facebook’s EdgeRank.:

If confused you're not alone, let's see if we can simplify this a bit more.

1. Affinity: This refers to the level of activity between the brand’s fan page and the consumer, primarily around content.  Is your audience actively commenting on, sharing and “liking” your content?  If so, your content’s EdgeRank should be rising.
2. Weight: Much like InfiniGraph’s trend score on content interaction rates, Facebook places different values on each type of interaction.  For example, check-ins and comments have greater value than likes.
3. Time Decay: The older the interaction, the less relevant the relationship is.  If your consumers have not recently interacted with your brand content or fanned the brand page or your content is not fresh, your EdgeRank will suffer. 

Calculating EdgeRank is similar to measuring brand relevance and if a page’s content has a low rank, the fans will most likely never see its content.  Like we said, actions rule the day and Places check-ins, shares, comments and likes being the lowest all determine the interaction impact.  A recent post cites the finding that only 3%-10% of your Facebook fans are even seeing the posts you make.  Here we list ways to use content optimization to lift your brand’s posts above the news feed noise.
 
(1)   Time your posts: Just because you have lots of fans, doesn’t mean you have good engagement.  You will generate much greater interaction if your content is relevant and you post at the right times.  For example, research shows that weekend postings can do just as well as or better than weekday postings.  We have verified these findings with our own testing as has HubSpot's Dan Zarrella.  Your consumers are not 9-5; nor should your content be.  Here’s one client example that showed triple digit percentage increases in traffic with more active posting on weekends and certain weekday time periods.  

(2)   Post frequently: Under-posting can lead to time decay which is an EdgeRank killer.  If a fan hasn’t clicked on one of your posts for over a year, they may never see your posts in their newsfeed again.  Optimization, like keeping fit, is a constant process.  Unsubscribes will rise with increasing post frequency; however, it’s important to ask whether those fans were actually spreading your brand’s word in the first place.  Increased engagement is the goal here and your reach does as well through consistent posting of relevant content that your active followers want to consume and share.

(3)   Repost the good stuff: Trending content is ideal for reposting because your audience is giving you the “thumbs up.”  InfiniGraph scores and ranks trending content to help brands identify which of their posts have resonated most strongly across Facebook and Twitter simultaneously  We have consistently seen that reposting trending content on the weekend dramatically improves impressions, CTR and overall interaction.  Also, refreshing your trending posts, perhaps with a question for your followers, and republishing them generates even greater engagement.  If you don’t repost trending content, you risk missing active followers at peeks times.  The graphic below shows another example of the increased visits and pageviews generated by reposting.  The positive impact of reposting compounds because more engagement from new fans has a direct impact on EdgeRank.   In our next case study, we will present more data on how a major publisher improves margins with optimization.

(4)   Broaden the conversation: Don’t “always be selling.”  Think of your brand as a media company or publisher (see our last post).  Just as NBC tries to attract more viewers by offering superior programming, a brand using social media has to provide appealing content that motivates your fans to engage.  This might be a company video, but could also include a relevant blog post by third party, the results of an industry study or a survey on a topic of interest to your brand community.  Social media marketing leader REI actually tries to maintain a 75/25 ratio – 75% of their published content is general interest in nature and only 25% directly promotes the brand and products. 

(5)   Cross pollinate: If your brand has more than one Facebook and Twitter presence, leverage that to post content from one channel to the others.  Also, other outbound channels, such as your website or email newsletter, can use content that drives users back to the Facebook page for further engagement.

The reality is not enough brands are posting what’s relevant to their audiences to increase overall engagement on their brands.  Existing and new pages must have a strong content strategy as well as a thoughtful, consistent optimization plan.  The key point is that intelligent curation is absolutely critical in determining relevance to your audience members and in keeping them engaged.   What are you posting outside of product updates to engage your fans and what content marketing strategies or examples can you share?

OK some plugs here ..... Please vote for the SXSW 2012 panel we’re on, " "The Future of Content Monetization and Publishing"  and come see us at Socialize West, Oct 21st in San Francsico.  Our talk is on "Optimizing Social Media :  Making Real-time Decisions with Real-time data".

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.  Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies.

STUMBLE | DIGG

The beauty and cosmetic industry is dominating Social Media for good reason.   Women are the most socially active consumer group when it comes to Facebook /Twitter, and they create a wealth of engaging content.   There is a high stakes game going on where whoever captures the mind share of this group, and evokes their passion, captures their pocket book.
   
In our previous post "Winning Curation Strategies and Brands Becoming Publishers"    we noted that good content curation enables thought leadership, higher engagement and increase in Facebook Edgerank.  Edgerank is how Facebook manages which posts get placed at the top of an individual user’s news feed.   Brands that have figured out how to curate outperform and often are more profitable than those who do not curate their own content.    

According to L2

L2 Think Tank is a research group who created the Top 100 Prestigious Brands , and we connected with the founder Scott Galloway, at OMMASocial NY where we saw the considerable level of work the team took in order to come up with the Top 100 list.  The analysis focused on the engagement leaders within the luxury category in 100 top brands on Facebook.

InfiniGraph took this research further and applied social-behavioral analytics in order to better analyze the list.   (NOTE:  each brand name listed is clickable. Click the links below in order to run the InfiniGraph Social Intelligence on each brand.)

Scott Galloway says:   "While many prestige brands wait for hard [return on investment] to justify a shift in human, creative, and financial capital from traditional to emerging platforms, others have taken a leap of faith and are in an arms race to acquire Facebook likes."

With cost-per-click "ads on Facebook up 40 percent" in the first quarter of 2011 versus the same time last year, "the industry may look back and regret not having aggressively built communities for a fraction of the cost".  However, winning on Facebook is more than just like count. Although many prestige brands maintain monocular focus on the size of their Facebook community, "they have failed to embrace the authentic two-way communication and marketing activation required to monetize the platform."

Applying social-behavioral "intelligence"

Through InfiniGraph’s Social Intelligence which uses social-behavioral analysis on content interaction we found that Urban Decay Cosmetics  was the second most connected brand to people active on the L2’s top Beauty / Skincare overtaking Clinique and Bobbi Brown .   Below is the Top 5 Brand Affinities based on what consumes behavior is around other contented activity as they relate to the Top 5 L2 cosmetic brands.  

Sephora is the most influential retail outlet and dominates socially, whereas top publications were Allure Magazine, Marie Claire, Who What Wear and Fashionista.

Looking at the Urban Decay Top Affinities chart above its clear where the best source of cross posting content resides.  Sephora still leads the way as a major connector along with Marie Claire.

But, we wanted to take this cross relevance further.  Below you can see the cross counts (who shows up more with greater content activity) of the L2 top brands with the most trending cross connections.  Sephora is over 50% greater than any brand or retailer!   Swiffer and Food Network made it in the top 16 providing a unique insight on what other properties are getting engagement and should be used in targeting.
    
All brand displayed were derived from the Top 5 Brand Affinities and shows you which consumers are the most socially active in reference to the L2 Top brands, and, where content should be sourced from via partnering and targeting.

Social Analytics is changing the way we communicate and interface with brands that sell the “feeling good” “health” “wellness” “beauty”, harnessing the power of passion.   The brands that successfully leverage conversation will dominate, as more buyers become more socially connected.   

Key takeaways:

• Brands that allow posting on their wall obtain higher engagement
• Engagement around products got the highest interaction rates
• Posts around contests and promotions registered the lowest interaction rates.
• There is poor integration  across digital platforms when using the Like and Share within content and promotion
• Competence on Facebook is inextricably linked to shareholder growth

It’s clear a lot can be learned from the beauty industry.    Not all brands are created equal and in this tech savvy world, those that are more likeable, sharable and engaging can and will cut through the clutter.    The competition is steep and they are all vying for your attention and everyone wants to be the “thought leader” but only a few can be.    Learning how to harness your content makes for a much more effective social experience.

Questions to ask:

• When Content trends on your brand, what do you do?
• Are you getting the most out of your content marketing?
• Are you expanding your outreach on what your consumers engage with, or letting it die?
• Are you asking your audience questions around your trending content? 

What areas of content are getting you the most social traction?  Share with us sites you have seen that are doing well with curated content creating engagement.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.  Yes LIKE IT - if you're into great curation strategies...... we bring it.

STUMBLE | DIGG

With the massive growth of social networks, brands are evolving into publishers due to the rise of the Internet as a consumer buying power house. Recently, only the biggest brands could play this game with corporate publications or magazines. Now company’s of all sizes can establish platforms for broadcast and conversation through Facebook and Twitter.  As, in our previous post 5 ways curation and content automation increases engagement here we will go into depth on the next phase of how brands are becoming publishers.

As brands scramble for attention, products like Strorify, Netvibes and Paper.li are all steadily gaining traction in enabling self publishing content curation. Social platform LinkedIn recently jumped on the bandwagon, blurring the lines between social media and the trending content from its users sharing, all in an attempt to keep you glued to their site.

Not everyone has large budgets to invest in online PR, or a social media agency to manage content that is distributed through social media channels. Many brands realize the value of social marketing, and are creating, finding and sharing compelling content.  This can prove to consumers that a company knows the market, and is a thought leader in its industry and wants to keep its customers engaged.      

According to a recent study, nearly half of US marketing professionals surveyed are now curating content as part of their strategy, and another 42% are familiar with the practice but not participating. Even among that group, 85% had done at least some content curation.   If you ever pass around some interested content via email or shared a post, then you're doing content curation.   The main objectives of content curation survey were establishing thought leadership,  and improving brand buzz.   

Brands with large numbers of followers have an absolute need to keep fans engaged. Yet most feeds are DEAD!  Brands have a unique opportunity to own their content voice and be a thought leader in content that’s buzzing around them i.e. trending.  If your content choice doesn’t touch a passion point with readers, you will lose social velocity and risk losing followers to a rival. The same goes for a brand’s social media presence.

Content marketing can do much to improve results in SEO and customer acquisition. Inbound marketing solutions firm HubSpot has reported on the effectiveness of customer acquisition via blogging  as well as how content created for social media efforts can boost search rankings.  However, content curation can be made simple;  its usually not a low-touch activity.   The greatest challenges are creating content that is original and compelling, and finding the time to do so.  Nearly half of marketers reported that finding and indentifying relevant content was difficult.  

Everyone knows the pain traditional publishers have seen over the past decade with the relentless internet growth, audience declining and just shutting down.  Now you have converted a follower on Facebook/Twitter GREAT…  So What!     Customers have almost infinite choices.  Keeping those follows, brands must keep creating value and feeding the information need, i.e. center of discovery.  Your status updates, filling your customers news feeds.  You better recognize that your role is one of publisher.

If brands don’t embed themselves in this process, they will be drowned out by the ones who master the industry voice. For brands to successfully make this transition, let’s learn from successful process:

• Deliver compelling content and engage with customers while fostering trust
• Create communities that promote two-way communication between your brand and consumers, as well as between consumers
• Derive an understanding of customer needs and behaviors
• Understand what is trending and why - feed other content creates thought leadership
• Leverage trending content within your feed simplifies the curation process

The primary challenge is creating ongoing compelling content, while discovering and managing the deluge of information.  The long-term trend for brands to become media is now very much a reality. Publishers and agencies must find their mojo in this fast growing space.  Brands that listen and participate are able to make offering adjustments and therefore position with the communities’ involvement, while simultaneously attracting new followers due to the nature of how the feeds work.  That is customer relationship management in action.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

STUMBLE | DIGG

Come see InfiniGraph present Social Intelligence 2.0 at this years leading social media events.    June is a very busy month for InfiniGraph with the launch of 2.2 scheduled to drop next week!   Come and experience the benefits Real Time Social Intelligence has to offer and see how brands/publishers are harnessing their trending content, intelligent curation and social brand affinities to create real ROI.     RealTime NY #RLTM  June 6th - NY InfiniGraph's 2.2 Release event, live demo of intelligent curation in action and announcement of PeopleBrowsr partnership expanding the Twitter Firehose with InfiniGraph's Social Intelligence. OMMASocial June 9th - NY Optimizing Social Media: Making Real-time Decisions on Real-Time Data Social media, with its nebulous, random activity, also gives marketers a lot of real-time intelligence about where their market – or potential market – is, and what they are talking about. This has led to the new specialty of social media optimization, which leverages all this data so that marketers can make the most of social media. This session will look at methods for optimizing – from posting when a target market is most responsive to technologies that target potential fans or followers AF EXPO June 28th - 29th - SF PR 2.0: Facebook for Public Relations While there may be no secret weapon you can unleash on Facebook to make your PR initiatives successful overnight, there are a plethora of new tools, apps, features and targeting tricks that can work magic for your PR campaigns. This session will provide PR practitioners and marketers with a portfolio of tactics, tips and techniques for bolstering media relations work as well as consumer outreach along with insider advice on how to track these efforts. Whether you are looking to grow your follower base, brush up on social listening skills or simply glean PR 2.0 best practices, our Facebook experts have you covered. The panel will also provide step-by-step guidance to help you make the most of Facebook Places, Groups, Messages, Deals, and Stories. Get ready to take lots of notes! If you missed it here is our guest post .......... 5 Ways Curation and Content Automation Increases Engagement - SocialTimes.com @chasemcmichael @InfiniGraph Our Facebook page welcomes you. STUMBLE | DIGG

We recently attended the book release party "Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators" by author Steve Rosenbaum in Palo Alto.   It was mentioned at the party, and by some reports, that every two days we now create more content than was created from the beginning of time until 1993.  We’re not entirely sure of the validity of that claim but, even if its an exaggeration by an order of magnitude, we're still talking about an insane amount of content being created every single day.

The major challenges are how to sort and filter through all this content to make sense of it. We're also challenged with how to make the content actionable to drive consumers to your call to action while creating authentic engagement.  Enter crowdsourcing, the beauty of using your audience to determine what’s relevant is like a giant super human computer; working on your behalf, selecting and ranking what’s of value, and kicking out what’s not. This radical approach eliminates the complexities of keyword monitoring and a large sentiment analysis problem. What’s left is pure gold. A great article by John Cole “10 Reasons Why Automated Social Media Listening Tools Fail” highlights many of these issues.

Your customers know what they like and if they interact with content that’s a big statement of intent and that should be noted. Think about it. You’re leveraging millions of interactions at scale… now you've got something. Consumers connect to many brands, not just yours, and this context of other brand interaction is critical to you owing your content voice. Finding those that are interacting and moving this voice for your industry is the 1% mentioned often in social marketing. Tapping into the collective defined by trending content and doing it in context provides the competitive advantage to power curation.  

Many Social Media Management (SMM) tools post on Facebook as well as other feeds. However, feed automation is problematic without a way to intelligently measure effectiveness of what content is getting the most social interaction and how it relates to other brands in the industry.  With Facebook controlling posts that are viewable from publishing apps, the main issue is your posts don’t reach the audience and your impressions are low if you post frequently.  You can post more frequently on Twitter versus Facebook, so be selective and use Twitter as a barometer for what’s relevant.  Relevance is the critical foundation that enables real insight from social media data.

Publishing trending content will definitely increase your CTR. First, you need to understand what is trending and why. Content that’s trending on your brand is just as important as content that’s trending around your brand. Of the SMMs out there, listening doesn’t provide crowdsourced social relevance and this content can be easily piped intelligently, and directly into all the SMM platforms.

Dan Zarrrella's recent webinar on The Science of Timing nailed several key factors imprtant to curation. A major take away was ability to post more than once on the same topic. With Social Intelligence this process is made simple. See our recent ClickZ on “Tuning Your Content: Social Media for Content Publishers” by Dave Evans

Ok! On to Top 5 ways to increase engagement around trending content.

1. Facebook is not the same as Twitter. Post more on Twitter and analyze what content gets the most interaction. Focus those posts on Facebook.
2.  Content that trends on a brand has a low perishable nature and can be posted again on nights and weekends to further the engagement.
3. Timing is key but, if you're posting often, you can’t jam them out in a few hours. Spread them out to avoid feed stacking and it's best to focus on the ones that do get traction.
4. Be the center of the discovery and own your content voice. Sharing content that's relevant to your customers creates engagement and makes your brand more human vs. just posting your product blurbs and discounts over and over.
5. Trending content is “Crowd Approved” and integrating within a Facebook Ad Buy using that same content is like pouring social gas on a fire.   Very little can amplify the word of mouth effect, creating great social discovery and reach.

Twitter trending topics are not very useful directly, whereas what’s trending around your brand is. You won’t get what you’re looking for with social listening if you’re not listening to what your customers are saying. Knowing what content your consumers are interacting with and segmenting on what’s most relevant in your industry, is the most powerful method and use of Social Intelligence. Use affinity trending content to determine what sources are getting the most action.

Are you using Facebook and Twitter now to drive traffic and what content is getting you the most traction?  What is driving your customer to engage?  In our next post we will explore content streaming in ads and how to improve engagement by adding dynamic text within an ad unit.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

STUMBLE | DIGG

eMarketer estimates Facebook sold $1.86 billion in ads in 2010, about 60% or $1.12 billion of which was self-serve, meaning advertisers that buy directly using Facebook's targeting tools.  And more than 33% of online-display ads in U.S. in February appeared on Facebook according to Comscore.  Companies like Marin and Kenshoo both have developed advanced bulk ad delivery via Facebook ad buy API along with several other startups enabling 1000’s of ads to be managed over many parameters, however, the need for higher relevant targeting still exists.    As seen by WebTrends research on Facebook ad conversions with lackluster results in our view have more to do with the method of targeting over the platform ability to service targeted ads.

Facebook ad buy interface supporting “Precise Interests”

When talking with advertisers using Facebook ad buy the overwhelming requests are;

• reduce Cost Per Like
• increase CTR
• what to target on
• what copy / images will yield the highest engagement   

Traditional marketing spend is shifting to Social.  Evidence that Social is driving more engagement has created a need to provide greater direction on what keywords a.k.a. “interests”  are most relevant to the audience as well as what content is trending to enhance the ad copy.    Using crowdsourced brand affinities creates the ideal Interest segmentation “interest graph” based on social interaction around content.    The combination gives marketers a direct line on what’s most important to their target audience simplifying the “joining the conversation” process.

Those who are active and have “in common connections” increase reach due to similar consumer composition and passion.     Advanced content marketing based on the trending content affinities  is a big deal over targeting broad categories that don’t link with what the collective consumers are doing on other social graphs.    See results here on why affinities work.

Below are two brands showing side by side trending brand affinities that are used to optimize SEO as well as what specific topics to choose to complete the “Precise Interest” section in the Facebook ad buy interface.

Top 5 Ways to make your next Facebook ad buy rock:

1. Determine who is interacting with your brand the most and target that demographic
2. Segment your buys with copy that’s trending to attract more attention over just product pump (promote the buzz)
3. Include pictures that resonate with the trending content  based on the crowd
4. Target on trending brand affinities … your audience is telling you what others have interest on
5. Buy over many trending affinities with small amounts then go big with the ones that preform best  (affinities change in rank based on social content interaction so run more than one campaign over time and Twitter affinities can yield higher than Facebook)

The mountains of data Facebook has access to now will surely impact Facebook search results and ad buy functionality.   With the recent announcement of using real time conversation mining to target ads this too could significantly improve the targeting relevance.  We must fish where the fish are and trending brand affinities provides the best indication to date on what to buy against. Trending link sharing in the context of social density of “who is sharing” provides a much better discovery experience for the brand who wants to understand their social ecosystem.

Determining what’s resonating “trending” among the community creates the brand affinity matrix making Facebook and Twitter ideal for advertisers seeking to understand the buzz of their consumers.   Social density based on topic is radically different approach over old ways of search that massive indexing the web based to fixed links here its based on social interaction and context.

InfiniGraph’s innovation in real-time trending content based on brand affinity association provides advertisers with a highly competitive advantage taking the guess work out of targeting at the same time understanding what most relevant for copy improvement.   Now we have the ability to determine relevance of content beyond the number of links it has taking into account the social resonance of a particular topic that a key audience is resonating around.    .

Your turn!  How are you leveraging what your audience is telling you?

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.