New Social Media Marketing Survey Continues to Show Positive Results for Businesses

New Social Media Marketing Survey has reveals multiple areas of benefit for businesses.

A recently released Social Media Marketing survey undertaken between September and November 2011, surveyed over 700 social media marketers to ask them amongst other things, what they saw as the main benefits to their business for using social media marketing as a promotional tool.

By far the biggest perceived benefit according to 88% of the 700 plus respondents was the ability to gain increased brand awareness within your target market.

As marketers we have always been acutely aware of the importance to raise awareness of our business and brands as a first step in the process that ultimately leads to product sales.

Almost as impressive is the second most reported benefit with 85% of the marketers surveyed reporting an increased ability develop a dialogue and engage the customer or prospect.

If we use the AIDA model as a guide with Awareness-Interest-Desire- and Action, we can see that the first two parts are well and truly positively impacted by social media according to the results of the survey.

It's reasonable to assume that with increased awareness and interest comes an increased level of desire and so it shouldn't surprise anyone that almost 3 in 5 (58%) of the respondents also felt that social media activities also led to increased sales and partnerships such as strategic alliances, with around 2 in 5 (41%) also feeling that social; media allowed them to save costs.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority (75%) plan to increase their social media marketing expenditure during 2012.

I suspect that in the next 3 to 5 years the only thing that will change is the degree to which businesses increase their expenditure each year, as social media continues to emerge and gain its place as a legitimate option to more traditional promotional tools.

What about your business. Are you planning to to increase social media spend in 2012 and if so where?

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Google Announces Google + Now Integrated into Google Search

Google has recently announced that Google Search now formally Integrates Google+ content into its standard results.

With this additional information, Google will have the potential to evolve into a search engine that not only lists information but has greater insight into understanding the relationship between the people with a new feature being the personal results.

The net effect of this will be that have more specific and tailored data based on the publically available data from the Google+ social networking platform.

As I said recently in an earlier blog post, numbers and growth rate aside, Google+ continues to come in a big way. Facebook beware.

Please feel free to share what do you think will be the next service Google+ may be or what you'd like to see them develop?

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Google+ Continues To Grow and Grow

Google+ just had just experienced its largest traffic month up 55% from November, 2011.

According to key research firm Experian Hitwise, Google+’s total monthly US visits have grown by 55% from November, 2011. Specifically some 49 million visits were registered during December, 2011 which was the best result thus far. In more recent time it has been suggested that the current numbers are even higher and in fact have broken through the 60 million mark.

This period of sustained growth underpins Google+ continued strong appeal and promotion, and despite Facebook still being the undisputed gold medallist of social networking sites, given Google’s' extraordinary daily traffic, the potential for Google + to one day challenge Facebook is not so difficult to imagine in the not too distant future, based on some key product features and differences.

What is also clear is that Google which has undeniably made mistakes in the past in this social media space, has learnt from these previous false starts and is wisely including sensible and practical functional service differentiations that will make Google + a must have for any business in 20102 and beyond as it maps out its marketing plans.

In the end however it is unlikely that it will either be a case of one or the other. I suspect most businesses are very comfortable with the notion of being on several of the key social media sites and platforms concurrently and accepting that they all play a part.

Twitter Set to Follow Facebook and LinkedIn with Company Pages

Hello everyone and welcome back for 2012. A year that will no doubt prove to be exciting, unpredictable and filled with more extraordinary advances in how we market ourselves to the world.

To begin with,as some readers I'm sure will already be aware, Twitter have now come up with there own version of Corporate Pages, along the lines of Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn company pages.

Up till now of course Twitter have adopted a similar strategy to what Google did with Google +
in that they only allowed a small number of privileged larger and well known firms such as Coca Cola,to start a page, again trying to create the same type of buzz around the place that Google where able to do with Google.

No doubt in time any and all businesses will be allowed to join and start their own page, so that they will be able to leverage it against the other marketing platforms they also have.

Naturally we will do a full review once we at Road Scholars have been included and can report as too the relevant utility and functionality of these pages.

So until next time, good kuck and good marketing.

Regards,
Daniele.