Social Business Strategy – The Law of the Squeezing Social Media Networks
What happened in 2014 in the field of digital marketing can best be compared with the Law of Bernoulli.
This law is very simple to understand: put your foot on a water hose and turn on the tap. What happens next, in my imagination, is a bubble of water that appears in the hose, just like in the Tom & Jerry cartoons from my childhood. On one side of the bubble, the pressure is higher. And on the other side, at the far end, only a little bit of water comes out. Take your foot of the water hose, and “voilà”, there is again plenty of water. Agreed, Bernoulli’s law is more complex than that, but this is supposed to be Bernoulli’s law “for dummies”.
In 2014, we’ve seen that Facebook started putting both feet firmly on our social media water hoses. Where we used to enjoy delicious free organic reach for our content, with “Facebook Zero” that organic reach came to a standstill. If we want to reach our Facebook friends as a brand, an hose them down with our updates, we’ll have to pay “please-get-your-foot-of-the-water-hose”-money to Facebook.
What is less known is that not only Facebook is doing this. Other titans like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn are taking steps in this direction.
Why do they do that? Obviously it comes down to money.
But it’s about more than just money … Read more 
Best-of-the-Best Practices on Slideshare – My private collection
The first time I ever published something on Slideshare, I was excited. It was a presentation called “Spreading the Content Marketing Virus”, which in essence told “my story”.
It tells the story of why I dramatically shifted the marketing strategy of the company I worked for at the time. From outbound to inbound marketing.
Hybrid marketing is probably more correct, as we kept on applying paid media where useful. But also from analog marketing (does that even exist ?) to digital marketing.
I was excited because it was ‘my’ story. And obviously that’s important to me. Ever since then I have continued to post presentations on Slideshare.
Today I want to
- share with you what I learned on Slideshare,
- and share some of my “private web resources collection” of best practices about Slideshare publishing.
Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable
When Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.
For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.
It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.
What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?
The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0
According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.
To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more
Which social media network brings most success in B2B ?
Source : Flicker @cuppini
2013 is almost there. What will 2013 bring? most probably another social media network.
Who knows, they come and go as Marcus Sheridan from @saleslion wrote about it on his blog. (by the way, I am a big fan of his work, check him out if you don’t know him).
Looking at the big ones, which ones will bring you the most success in B2B? I have seen many blog post about this subject: Facebook is better for this, LinkedIn is better for that. Twitter is only useful for this and that…
When developing a social media strategy, many companies start thinking which social media networks they should start developing. Developing means to create a presence, invest in time and maybe money to fuel that network with relevant content, and then organize actions to grow your follower base. Companies start hiring “conversation managers” that monitor the conversations, trigger the discussions, answer questions, be helpful where they can, and get the conversations going.
Should we do Facebook ? LinkedIn ? Whatever network ?
It’s definitely an important question. And on the other hand it’s not an important question. It’s even a simple question.
I’ll tell you : it doesn’t matter. It’s not up to you or me to choose which network you will develop. If your customers are there, you better be there. It’s as simple as that.
But how do you know if your customers are on that particular network? Mmmm, difficult question, that much I agree.
Then maybe we should jump on every network that sticks its head above the ground?
Should we be on LinkedIn?
In the case of LinkdedIn, there should be no doubt : if you are in B2B, you need to be on LinkedIn.
Almost all B2B professionals are on LinkedIn, using it for personal branding reasons, personal networking but also increasingly to find information.
Linkedin is changing from a pure B2B networking site, towards a site that is positioning itself as an information portal: updates from your contacts, the companies you are following, and more recently thought leaders like Richard Branson or Pete Cashmore.
The Orchestrated “Like” : The Social Power of Your Organisation
It struck me. One of our best sales guys didn’t understand social networking. Yes he was on LinkedIn. Yes he was part of groups. And most probably also on Facebook.
But he didn’t understand the power of social networking.
He just didn’t get it what happens when he would “like” an update of the company he was working for.
But there is much more to understand how this sales guy, and the rest of the reach of your organisation, can have a massive resonating impact.
In this blog post I’ll show what a simple, orchestrated “like”, can do for your company.
How social marketing works
image source : www.comscore.com/like2
Fan or Follower Reach : For brands to resonate on social networks, the first step is literally to be seen. While brands have the opportunity to communicate directly with their Fans through the News Feed, not every brand message delivered results in an exposure to a follower or a fan.
Facebook uses an algorithm to help optimize the messages users see in their News Feed, and while the exact algorithm is not public information, it is clear that relevance plays a role in message visibility.
LinkedIn is probably using a similar algorithm, you can see this yourself when checking the updates on your companies LinkedIn page. You’ll notice that the number of “impressions” vary.
So brands in which consumers engage more regularly, whether through a comment, share, like, or check-in, have a greater likelihood of being seen on the News Feed, otherwise known as Fan Reach (or “cut-through”).
“Social media networking” : Don’t we have better things to do?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheatfields/
Many executives do not understand the power of social media networks.
And as such, your boss might be asking to you: why are you spending your time on “social networking” ? You should be plotting marketing strategies, and generate leads, and other stuff that marketers usually do.
If they ask you that question, just pop this counter-question :
How important is LinkedIn to your sales people?
He or she will probably respond that it is an important way of finding new business contacts, and information about companies and their occupation. And that for them it is a way to get in touch with people they want to meet. Or that its serves as a tool to track down occupations of people or companies to see if there is a link with business opportunities. Or that they are joining special interest groups on LinkedIn because that’s where people interact about trending topics, or even business opportunities.
