How to Use Social Media To Generate More Leads

Using Social Media for Lead Generation

They say you can get famous on social media within a week, but getting famous is only half of the money game. How do you convert those “Likes” — “Followers” into happy and paying customers? What is your strategy about using social media for lead generation?

According to statistics compiled by Wishpond, they create social media marketing application if you didn’t know that, 77 percent of business to consumer (B2C) marketers have acquired customers though Facebook, while business to business (B2B) marketers have found more success on LinkedIn — finding it a surprisingly 277 percent more effective than Facebook or Twitter.

For more on how social media marketing helps generate business leads and ideas to stand out to potential customers, I have arranged this infographic for you. Take a look at this infographic below and we may discuss it later in the comments box.

You may also like reading: The Art of Getting Retweets: How You Can Get More Retweets on Twitter

What is your strategy about using social media for lead generation? How do you plan to promote you product through social media to achieve your sales goals? Please share with us…

By S A Rahman Bukhari.  Article source: http://www.itsuccesscenter.com.

Facebook considers using hashtags like Twitter does to follow the money

Data-mining is fast becoming the purpose of Facebook as Facebook is preparing to roll out hashtags on the giant social network, opening up another front in its intensifying battle with Twitter for people's attention, according to the March 15, 2013 news article, "Facebook hashtags? Annoying Twitter feature is data-mining." Facebook will have one more way to sell when it makes its announcement, according to today's news article, "Copying Twitter Hashtags Gives Facebook Yet Another Way to Sell."

Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter's lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events, reports the Wall Street Journal today in its news article, "Facebook Working on Incorporating the Hashtag." Catching up to Twitter and other rivals, the company will incorporate hashtags into its network, The Wall Street Journal reports. See, " Facebook to roll out hashtags, step up competition with Twitter."

Facebook is reportedly considering co-opting Twitter and following its previous aping of the Twitter model of following strangers and sharing content publicly. Each time you click on a hashtag, you'll see numerous other posts with the same tag. The goal is to show what's trending.

Then the most popular pages on social media can be tracked and used to generate more advertising money by studying demographics and popularity in trends. What goes viral can be a money-maker. To see what's trending in Facebook, follow the money as Facebook looks at what's happening with Twitter in the competition between the two social media giants.

Facebook is testing the idea of supporting the use of hashtags in posts to the social network, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Facebook has declined to comment on the reports. Hashtags first emerged on Twitter.

Many people not familiar with social media don't know how a hashtag is used presently or in the past, unless they're in the publishing or other media-related industry. Hashtags are preceded by a hash mark ("#"). They're used because they can be tracked and aggregated on Twitter as they would presumably be on Facebook, if Facebook decides to use them. Twitter shows which tags are trending.

Hashtags will be used Facebook if it decides to use them as 'vectors' that point direction to advertisers of what's trending online as most popular social media

When you have a device that points direction (a vector), then advertisers can pay to promote their own hashtags alongside Twitter's list of most common hashtags, if Facebook incorporates the use of hashtags.

Pages that show the most posts, and therefore the greatest 'trends' linked to a particular hashtag means that advertising can make more money on those pages. Just follow the money by following the trend popoularity. That becomes the direction or 'vector' advertisers follow.

On Facebook, advertisers could hypothetically "promote" user posts that contain particular hashtags just as they now promote "likes" of their business pages, notes the March 15, 2013 CNN news article by Ryan Tate, "Copying Twitter hashtags another way for Facebook to make money."

Promoted posts could receive longer and more prominent placement on Facebook's News Feed

If you look at the more numerous non-promoted items, they're simply sorted by relevance. It appears that mostly the highest trending pages would get attention through prominent placement because the pages are emphasized and promoted more when they're trending or more popular than the importance of the information to making the world healthier, more peaceful, or more sustainable in many instances.

The reason is as you follow the money, the popularity goes to the sites that go more viral in how many people pay attention to them. Yet, if people don't know they exist because they're not prominent or promoted, they won't get the chance to know how valuable the information could be to individuals who need the information to thrive.

It's as if more attention is paid to the lives of celebrities than to the latest discoveries in medicine, technology, or education. Celebrity, royalty, or very wealthy people's choices in diets, fashions, or health solutions usually trend higher in popularity than choices by scientists, teachers, or librarians. How hashtags generate money is through advertising on the most popular pages online.

People usually follow the rich and famous or the most heavily promoted and prominent rather than the quietest information resources or databases online, even though those pages may have the most current information waiting for the media to broadcast. Facebook and Twitter appear to attract similar social media audiences. Which one will attract the most readers in the near future?

The 'war' between Facebook and Twitter in the tech press

Competition between Twitter and Facebook is viewed by the media as a 'war' between Facebook and Twitter that's framed in the technical media. On one hand, Facebook is vying and competing vigorously for the attention of its users in order to generate more money from its advertisers.

If you follow the money, the outcome is predicted to be whatever will have the greatest ability to grow more advertising dollars. That's the only way to make money in social media--by keeping and adding paying advertisers on the Facebook pages, or for Twitter, on the Twitter sites. Hashtags will be one more way to track the trends.

By Anne Hart.  Article source: http://www.examiner.com/article/facebook-considers-using-hashtags-like-twitter-does-to-follow-the-money

Can Facebook Graph Search Help You Make Money? [Infographics]

Can Facebook Graph Search make you money?

Believe it or not, Facebook Graph Search has the infrastructure behind it to make it one of the best tools for small businesses that want to expand their social outreach and potentially make some money down the line.

Because Facebook Graph Search uses connections on the social network to provide relevant and personalized search results, there’s a huge opportunity for small businesses to grow naturally, via digitized word-of-mouth (which is trusted by 92 percent of consumers).

“Graph search could help over 13 million small businesses get discovered,” said Facebook’s Dan Levy.

As far as infographics go, this one below is probably one of the most complete and informative I’ve seen in a while, especially if you’re a business owner who is curious about how Facebook Graph Search will affect you. Heck, it’s even useful if you’re still not entirely clear what Facebook Graph Search is!

Check it out below, via Advantage Capital Funds and Neomam Studios:

By Dusten Carlson, Article source: http://socialnewsdaily.com/11046/can-facebook-graph-search-help-you-make-money-infographic

Facebook Rolls Out Social Search Feature

by Cadie Thompson

Source: Facebook.com

Facebook launches the new Graph Search icon.

Facebook unveiled a new social search feature Tuesday that will allow users to search their friends' content on the Facebook platform.

(Read More: Facebook Live Blog )

"Our mission is to make the world more open," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the event which was hosted at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

(Read More: One Thing We Know Facebook Is Working On (We Think) )

Facebook's stock took a hit on the news, while the search giant Google's stock got a bump. Yelp's stock also fell on the announcement.

"I think what you have here is a natural sell the news reaction, however, the stock has been one of the better performers of all the Internet names in the last couple of months," said Jordan Rohan, managing director and senior analyst for Stifel Nicolaus on CNBC Tuesday. "And I think as people realize that there are infrastructure achievements that may need to roll out first before the businesses can be built on the back of those, that's what matters."

He said that Facebook has a lot of upside in the long-term, in the near-term he said that mobile ads will help boost the stock.

The new feature is called Graph Search and is a social search tool, not a global web search engine like Google, that will allow users to search Facebook's social graph. However, users can only search content that has already been shared with them.

Play Video

Facebook's 'Graph Search' Moving the Stock

Facebook shares are selling off on its "graph search" announcement, with David Fitzpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect, and the CNBC's "Power Lunch" crew.

"You can only search content that has been shared with you," Zuckerberg said.

The new feature delivers information with exact answers, Zuckerberg said. For example, if a user searches for friends who live in San Francisco, it will deliver only friends that fit that search.

Hinting at a possible move into the global search business, Zuckerberg said that while the Graph search currently only focuses on people, places, photos and interests, there will be more additions in the future.

"Facebook aims to be central in many, many ways, not just for playing games and looking at photos, they want to be much more useful to their users, which is just about everybody on the web." Rohan said. "In the Internet, being central is the first point of importance, once you're central you can do what Google has done and be the Internet's great toll-taker."

(Read More: Wah? Facebook Wants You to Pay $100 to Message Zuckerberg )

Rohan said that Facebook is currently only central for social endeavors, so the new search feature will help make Facebook's platform much more central for other realms, like recruitment, dating and recommendations for shopping.

Taking a cue from Google, the social network also plans to implement auto-complete search results, where the search engine will try and guess what the user is searching before the entire search is finished being typed.

Graph Search is currently in beta, however, the new feature will eventually appear at the top of each page as a larger search bar.

Facebook users who want to sign up for the waiting list for the beta version of Graph Search can do so on Facebook's website.

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100381337

How Instagram Can Make Money — Without Alienating Users

Photo-sharing site Instagram recently upset many of its users by suggesting in an amended terms of service agreement that the site might start using their photos in ads. Instagram later retracted the change, but the controversy raises questions about Instagram’s business model and how its owner, Facebook, might eventually make a profit from the free service. Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim says the answer is to build a mutually rewarding relationship with its users.

Within two years of its launch, Instagram has grown to 100 million users who have posted some five billion photos. But loyalties run fickle in the world of online services. A day after its revised terms-of-service prompted outrage among users, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom clarified in a blog post that his company didn’t intend to sell users’ photos to advertisers. The service was working to update the terms to make them clearer, he added. But some damage had been done: Within a week of the first announcement, Instagram’s number of daily active users fell from 16.4 million to 12.4 million, social media traffic tracking firm AppData told the New York Post. Many unhappy Instagram users threatened to take their photos to rivals like Yahoo-owned Flickr, which recently revamped its mobile app, along with Instaport.me and InstaBackup, according to a New York Times report.

Facebook, which bought Instagram last April for $1 billion, “needed some of Instagram’s functionality, and Instagram is worth much more to Facebook than it is alone,” Wharton operations and information management professor Eric Clemons told KnowledgeToday soon after the purchase.

But the big question for Instagram is how to become profitable. Yildirim suggests several viable routes for Instagram to monetize its services, including low-risk options such as charging subscription fees, selling photo products and selling advertising. Higher-risk options include commercializing users’ photos and selling data to third parties. “Depending on which route they take, their major competitor will vary,” she adds.

“The first two options of monetization are relatively straightforward to implement and would result in low backlash from the consumers,” Yildirim notes. Most photo services allow for free subscriptions and limited storage, and begin charging for storage beyond a certain level. Flickr, which has such offerings, would become more of a competitor if Instagram pursues the subscription route. “The difficulty comes from convincing consumers to switch,” she says.

Instagram could also choose the option of selling advertising, including location-based or contextual ads relevant to the text or content of users’ photos, according to Yildirim. But unlike search engine-based advertising, advertising on Instagram would create some difficulties, she adds. “Technologies to process images [and offer ads based on the content in the photos] are not all that advanced at this point, but soon they will be.”

Another option for Instagram is to monetize its services in a way that would allow consumers to get “something in exchange” for their photos being appropriated for ads or other uses, says Yildirim. “There is an … opportunity for user-generated advertising for Instagram and YouTube. Creations — images and videos — of consumers can be picked up by firms for promotional purposes and distributed. It is cheaper to create promotional content this way, and ads can be more effective when the material comes from loyal consumers rather than an advertising agency.”

For such a strategy to have a chance of garnering the support of users, Yildirim notes, Instagram would need to give photographers some sort of recognition — monetary or otherwise — when their photos are picked up on the app and subsequently used in advertisements. “I think we will be moving in this direction,” she predicts, noting that on Twitter, “brands are collecting consumer photos and distributing them through tweets and re-tweets. There is no reason why this activity cannot be monetized.”

This entry was originally posted in Knowledge@Wharton Today, Managing Technology.

Facebook Marketing Secrets: Buddy Media Report Shows The Best Times To Post

Wednesday is the worst day of the week to advertise on Facebook, while Saturday and Sunday are the best, according to a new report analyzing user activity from brand pages of the world’s biggest companies.

On Wednesday, the rate at which users “like,” share or comment on Facebook brand posts is 7.4 percent below the average daily interaction rate, according to the report by Buddy Media, a social media consulting company. The weekends, however, show a spike in engagement. Brand posts published on Saturdays and Sundays receive 14.5 percent more interaction compared to weekday posts.

Yet many companies advertising on Facebook are doing it all wrong. Only 14 percent of posts published by brands appear on the weekend, while Wednesday is the most common day for brands to post Facebook content.

And that’s not the only mistake marketers make on Facebook. It turns out users are most likely to engage with brand posts in the evening and early morning. Yet few brands publish during those times. HuffPost found Coca-Cola, for instance, published all of its posts last week in the late afternoon. A lost opportunity given that brand posts published between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. receive 14 percent higher interaction than those published between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m, the report found.

The reason: "When not at work, people are more likely to spend time perusing Facebook and interacting with Page content,” the Buddy Media report says. (Obviously, social media marketers aren’t going to get up at ungodly hours to publish posts -- which is why Facebook scheduling exists.)

Not every industry is the same, though. For example, a clothing or fashion business is most likely to see users engage with its content on a Thursday. For a company in the retail or the technology space, Monday is the best bet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, leisure brands start to see interaction rates climb as the weekend nears on Thursday, peaking on Sunday.

Here are some other nuggets of social media wisdom from Buddy Media’s report:

• Limit brand posts to one to two times per day (brands that post one or two times per day see 19 percent higher interaction rates than those who post three or more times per day).


• Much like marketing on Twitter, brevity is key. Posts should be no longer than 80 characters (posts with more than 80 characters receive 23 percent less interaction).


• If you want comments, ask questions (posts with questions generate 92 percent higher comment rates than non-question posts).


• Use emoticons (posts that contain emoticons receive 52 percent higher interaction rates; the emoticons :D and :P have the highest interaction rates). But, as Buddy Media's report notes, "the use of emoticons proves most successful for health and beauty and food and beverage brands, while automotive, clothing, fashion and technology brands all have lower than average interaction rates when using emoticons."

By Nate C. Hindman, Article source: The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/facebook-marketing-secrets-best-time-to-post_n_1924134.html

Mapping World Social Media Trends

Facebook's growth is increasingly fuelled by users in emerging markets, including Latin America and the Middle East. But it still faces local competition in many countries.

It’s been a tough week for Facebook, with share prices falling sharply after its widely hyped IPO. But that doesn’t change the fact that the social networking giant now reaches roughly one in eight of the world’s population.

And it’s still growing fast internationally, especially in developing countries in Africa and Latin America.

According to a recent report by the International Telecommunications Union, social media use has now passed the billion-user mark. Of these, 900m have Facebook profiles. Its massive global following translates into big opportunities for social media marketers to connect with customers in emerging markets.

In the last year, Facebook has overtaken local competitors in many countries, including Brazil. It edged past Google’s Orkut earlier this year. It also overtook the home-grown Hyves in the Netherlands, which saw usage drop 38% in 2011. High-profile users and its “real name policy” helped drive up usage in Japan, where it’s outpaced Mixi, and now battles Twitter for the top spot.

More than half of Facebook’s revenue now comes from outside the United States. According to its own figures, it has achieved an impressive 85% market penetration in Chile, Venezuela and Turkey. This compares to just 60% in the USA and UK. And it’s growing fastest in Latin America and the Middle East, fuelled by growing, young, middle-class populations.

That’s not to say other networks aren’t giving Zuckerberg’s creation a run for his money. The world social media map is more diverse than it might appear at first glance. Twitter is the second most popular network in many countries, and is expected to grow four times as fast in the USA this year.

Both these two have still to overcome their ban in China under censorship laws. Instead, the socially-engaged Chinese online population turn to Qzone, Renren, and Sina Reibo, a micro-blogging site similar to Twitter. Youku is a local version of YouTube. Even if the ban is relaxed, it will still be difficult for newcomers to establish themselves in a crowded market.

In fact, Facebook’s performance in Eastern Asia has been disappointing so far. In South Korea, one of the most tech-savvy nations, users still overwhelmingly prefer Cyworld. This was one of the first networks to successfully make a profit by selling virtual goods. And in Japan, Mixi is managing to hold its own when the high number of mobile users are taken into account

Mobile use has clearly proved a headache for Facebook, since the company has still to make any “meaningful revenue” from its growing number of mobile users. This could prove more of a challenge as it begins to depend more on emerging markets for growth. In much of Africa, Asia and Latin America, a large proportion of web users are “mobile-only” and rarely, if ever, use computers.

One rapidly expanding market is India, as more of its vast population gets online. It’s predicted that there will soon be more Indian than American Facebook users. But most of them still rely on mobile connections to get connected, due to limited broadband coverage and the expense of laptop and desktop computers.

And even in Western countries, smaller “niche” networks are gathering market share. LinkedIn is building on its reputation as a site for business networking, while Xing plays a similar role in northern Europe. The two Russian giants, Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, are both looking at extending their reach into Eastern Europe and have recently launched in more languages.

For marketers, Facebook and Twitter might be the top two, but this isn’t the case everywhere. The growing importance of China and Russia means it’s certainly worth paying attention to other key players.

With the total number of social networkers expected to reach 1.43 billion this year, it will be interesting to see the winners and losers. The social media map is still far from a homogenous one.

Image credit: Vincenzo Cosenza

Article source: Christian Arno, http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10019-mapping-world-social-media-trends 

Microsoft + Facebook Taking the Search Engine to a Whole New Level

Search algorithms have used machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict which of the billions of pages on the Internet might be most relevant to your search.

Google has spent so much time, money and effort trying to make their search engine the most accurate when searching on it, but what do people really care about when they look for information?

What really makes a search result the most accurate or best of all online?



Microsoft Bing is revamping its search engine to include a sidebar to enable you to obtain recommendations from users of Facebook when making a search on Bing. It is not just Facebook but they are planning to include many other networks.

Bing will be able to deliver results based on what your trusted sources of information (your friends and acquaintances) think.

They have made this move following the fact that "90% of people consult with a friend or expert before making a decision"

The sidebar appears on the right-hand side of all searches, so when you do a search Bing will suggest "Friends Who Might Know" about the topic based on the information in their Facebook, Likes, profile information, photos, etc.

This move takes searching online to a whole new level, you don't just rely on the information found about it because it seems to be the most popular or the most visited, but you are able to see who in your network may have a recommendation, a suggestion or the expertise to guide you on your search, based on their own experience and knowledge.

This will push companies to increase the quality of their customer experience, customer retention, the influence they have on social networks to gain more recommendations and to put even more effort to grow their brand awareness.

This is only one more step forward to what the future seems to look like when bringing social networks to search engine rankings and optimization.


Article source: Mili Ponce at http://passiveincomemyassblog.blogspot.co.uk