Smartphone Users Check Facebook 14 Times a Day

Think you use your phone to look at Facebook a lot? Unless you're doing it at least 14 times a day, you're actually below average.

That's just one of the surprising revelations in a research report by IDC released Wednesday. The study tapped 7,446 iPhone and Android users in the U.S. between 18 and 44 — representative of the 50% of the population that uses smartphones — and asked them questions about their phone usage across one week in March.

Depending on your perspective, many of the results are either depressing or confirm what you knew all along. For example, it seems that 79% of smartphone users reach for their devices within 15 minutes of waking up. A clear majority — 62% — don't even wait 15 minutes, and grab their phones immediately. (Among 18-24 year olds, the numbers rise to 89% and 74%.)

Given that the survey was sponsored by Facebook, most of the questions focus on the social network. Which is, it seems, only the third most popular app on your smartphone, after email and the browser. Still, 70% of smartphone users are frequent Facebook visitors, with more than half of them checking it every day.
Peak Facebook time is during the evening, just before bed. But any time's good: on average, we visit the Facebook app or the site 13.8 times during the day, for two minutes and 22 seconds each time. Our average total daily mobile time on the site — and remember, this is just via our smartphones — is half an hour.

That's roughly a fifth of all the time we spend communicating; it's only slightly less time than we spend texting. On weekends, we check Facebook more than we text.

Any place seems to be good to check Facebook, too. Some 46% of us check it when we're shopping or running errands; 48% use it at the gym. Even preparing a meal gives 47% of us no respite from the social network. (Well, what else are you going to do while you're waiting for the microwave to ping?)
Perhaps the most unpardonable sin: 50% of smartphone users admit to checking Facebook while at a movie. We hope they mean only during the ads.

So what are we spending all that time doing? Well, for about half of that daily half-hour on the social network, we're simply browsing our News Feed. The rest of the time is divided fairly evenly between Facebook messaging and posting updates. Half of Facebook users play games via the service on their phone a few times a day.

Does the smartphone survey ring true to you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, franckreporter

Social Marketing Management Essentials - Social Web Analytics and Reporting

There are numerous tools available to monitor how people interact with a particular website. For example, identifying the pages that are most and least viewed, the search terms used to find the site, and physical locations of site visitors. The wealth of data that can be collected provides business with invaluable information to further direct future online strategies, product development, and future markets to target. Using analytical tools to collate data of this nature is pretty much old hat, but with advent of the social media boom, new strategies are having to be developed to identify and collect data based on a business' social media presence and activity.

Social media analytics enable businesses to see how they are being perceived, talked about, identify trends in that particular industry or field, identify which strategies and what content is resulting in actual lead conversions, and can go some way to calculating the ROI on their social marketing spend. Despite the fact that sales from social media commerce is in the billions of dollars, up to 70% of businesses still do not measure the effectiveness and results of their social media efforts.

Data can be collected which identifies which social media strategies are benefiting a company's business objectives and those which are hindering - an often over looked aspect of the social web.
Social web analytics provides business with invaluable consumer knowledge which can then help further targeted marketing campaigns, product propositions and development, and even suggest personalized options to consumers and prospects based on their buying habits and likes and preferences. In a nutshell, social web analytics and understanding the data enables the optimization of social media plans and an essential part of social marketing management.

How it is done?
Measuring social activity is a relatively new area in the world of web analytics. Google, for example, has only recently incorporated a social plug-in for their Google Analytics product. There are tonnes of online tools - some free, some paid for - that can be utilized to give marketers the data they need. There are even natural language processing tools which can help measure the number of positive comments compared to negative.There is a wealth of information to be gauged from effective monitoring of online activity, but there are still limitations and questions surrounding how to measure accurately the ROI from social media.

Data that can be determined from social web analytics
Here are some examples of the different types of data sets and information that can be obtained and reported on from analysis:

· Which of the visitors to your main site or landing page have been referred by social networks; this enables brands to determine where on the social web they should focus their efforts on.

· What content on these social networks is driving this traffic, and which content leads to engagement with your prospects; this enables strategic content planning, production and publishing.

· What are the differences and similarities between your social audience and your web audience; are they posting on and visiting the same sites, how does their geographical location compare?

· Which of your web and social visitors are return visitors; is there a correlation between their likelihood of returning and their social activity?

· What time does your site traffic peak, how does this compare to the peak of your social engagements? Provides insight as to when is the best time for delivering content.

· How does your blog content and upload activity to the blog relate to your prospects and customers social engagement?

· Which key search terms in your social content are driving visitors to your site?

· How many referrals from social to your site result in lead conversions? Is there a correlation between this and content type, a particular network, a time of day?

· What reach do you have on the social web? I.e. how many fans or followers, added to their friends and followers.

· What are the sales conversions rates and what is the average order value? How does this relate to the customers that have come via social links, compared to other means such as traditional search or as a unique visitor?

All of the information that can be gained can be then used to enhance and optimize your social marketing management. As you can see from the list above, what's important when considering the ROI is not just the figures and data gained from social analysis, but more importantly how this links in with and merges with the traditional web analytics data obtained from tools such as Google Analytics, HootSuite, and Omniture. What brands actually need to do is look at the correlations and relationships that exist between the two types of data in order to gain an overall picture of how they influence each other.

Return on Investment (ROI)
Understanding these two sets of data and how they relate to each other is the only way currently to gauge what sort of ROI a brand can expect from their social marketing management. However, due to the intangible nature of some aspects of social media, and because there are so many factors at play during the purchase decision, determining an exact ROI is near to impossible. Calculating the ROI in this instance is more complex that the usual cost versus increase in sales equation since there are too many variables and intangible elements, despite the range of cool technology and tools now available. In order to gain some idea of the ROI you need to first define web conversion goals. This will then serve as a benchmark from which you can measure and compare future activity, including the measurables listed above for example. By identifying relevant correlations in the different sets of data, you can draw up significant conclusions about the effectiveness and impact of your social media efforts.

Limitations
The intangible elements of the social world add significant limitations on how you can measure the impact of online social activity. For example, it is difficult to measure long term impact of social media. Interactions and sales may actually take months to come to fruition as there is a delay between initial posts and social engagement and a conversion to sales, making it difficult to pin point when the switch was made. It is also difficult to see the whole picture when considering a transaction as there may be multiple platform interactions over a long period of time. Companies can use customer surveys to help identify what led to a purchase decision, but this relies on further resources and customer willingness, so is also limited. And in the social marketing management arena, not even the most sophisticated tools can measure human sentiment, or the context in which a comment or post is published. Identifying how a particular branding incident affects sales over time and how it affects brand perception in the mind of the consumer is not something that can be measured. However, using a combination of web analytics, sales data and social web data, cause and effect can be estimated.

Despite the limitations on social web analytical data and the issues surrounding the calculation of ROI on social media, being informed and understanding the impact that social media is having on sales, consumer activity, brand awareness and the trends surrounding your product or service, should be an essential part of any brand's social marketing management strategy. Effective number crunching and statistical analysis allows for brands to learn from their customers, optimize their business strategy and ultimately maximize revenue.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7569667

Social Media - A Vital Component of Your Internet Marketing

Social Networking websites as we all know are viral, Facebook, twitter and many others play an important role in connecting us with people today. Our lives are so affected by these websites, and people who are connected through this almost spend about half hour a day on their desired networking website. These websites influence us in many ways such as lifestyle, we see many people from all over the world, and learn the way they live, they travel, they party and many other things, through their profiles, pictures. This influence is not only limited to lifestyle but other things such as music taste, preference of educational institutions, and many other things relating to our daily life.

Social Networking websites have turned out to be a great media to connect with people, may it be person to person or from a person to mass of people, and just like any other media such as T.V, Newspaper has turned out to be a great channel for commercial advertising so did these websites. Social Networking websites are a great way to advertise, turning out to be a great component in an internet marketing strategy, it is easy to access, and it's easy to spread content through it. Now, this has turned out to be such a useful media that companies rather than pitching for their products online give more importance to maintaining their pages and groups on Facebook. Groups owned by the companies are a way to connect them to their followers, just for an example, if Puma has a group of them on Facebook, people who like puma as their brand would join that group. This practice helps brands in the way that if there would be people who don't follow puma, but by seeing that brand appear in an attractive way on their friend's profile, would persuade them to try it out for once at least. This is how the brand following increases, but this is just a single way of advertising; there are many other ways of advertising suitable for companies of any size or budgets, and most of them don't even require costs, just a bit of time.

Majorly your popularity on a social media depends upon the quality and quantity of content you provide. On social media the advertising is not in the way it is done on other media, there is no sales pitch over here, don't sell, and just interact. If you want to achieve great popularity easily, you can take help of an SEO reseller. They can also provide you quality content for your social media; this is just like any other media, except the content has to be more personalized.

Social media endures a grave importance in any internet marketing strategy, its cost effective, provides you a great audience, and is the most used platform for any sort of interaction.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7542225

8 Tips to Get the Most Out of Running a Giveaway

When running a giveaway, either through your own website or through a 3rd party, you need to have a set of predetermined goals in mind so that you have a clear roadmap to success. Here are 8 tips to help you get the most out of running a giveaway.

1. Set Goals to Determine an ROI
First and foremost, what are you looking to get out of running a giveaway? Do you want more exposure for your brand, more sales, more likes on Facebook, or followers on Twitter? You must go into your promotion with predetermined goals, so that when it ends you are able to measure its success. I see way too many companies running giveaways with no predetermined goals in mind. When all is said and done, they end up feeling like they got nothing out of it, aside from it being some “fun” marketing ploy.
To set goals and track them, you can do something as simple as opening an excel spreadsheet before you run the giveaway, creating a list of the goals you want to set.



2) Sales? Probably not...
When running a giveaway, it is important to understand that you most likely won’t see sales pouring in. You may get a few sales, but don’t make sales your number one goal when running a giveaway. I’ve worked with many companies that measure the success of their giveaway based on the number of sales they received. If they did not get as many as they were hoping for, they are usually unhappy and feel as if their money was not well spent.

The problem with this train of thought is that no marketing tactic can ever really guarantee sales; giveaways are fantastic for lead generation, where you foster a relationship with your new customers, leveraging them for sales at a later time. Running a giveaway is just another marketing tactic and there will always be a cost associated with it.

If you have ever used Google Adwords or Facebook Ads you know that you have to spend a good chunk of change to get enough people to click through to your website. Even after they click, it is still JUST a click – nothing more. Your job isn’t done even after you have paid for a click; you still need to make sure those people are able to make it through your sales funnel to make a purchase. The same goes for a giveaway: you need to make sure that you have structured it correctly so that you are able to reach your goals, whether that is to capture leads, get more likes, followers, etc.

But of course, if you’re really itching to get more sales out of a giveaway, then...

3) Offer a Discount 
Providing entrants with a discount that they can redeem for products/services on your site is a great way to increase sales. Most companies either run a giveaway, or just offer a coupon, but from my experience, combining the two is more powerful.

Offering a coupon without a giveaway means that the coupon is out in the wild for anyone to see and use. People may see the coupon and say “Sweet! I’ve been wanting to buy something from them, now is the time!” Then, they get distracted. A few days go by and they completely forget about using your coupon to make a purchase. In fact, they don’t purchase at all. Unfortunately, you have no idea who this person is, or how to reach them.

However, when running a giveaway, you can offer a discount once the user has entered. This means that you have captured them as a lead, usually by collecting their email address, and you can effectively re-market to them to remind them about the coupon if they don’t end up making a purchase. A good rule of thumb is to provide a coupon for the duration of the giveaway and have it expire a week after the giveaway ends. This will encourage people that didn’t win to make an impulse purchase.

4) Interact on Facebook
Interacting with your current and new users on Facebook is especially important during a giveaway. Remember, these platforms are not meant to be used as a one-way form of communication; do less pushing, and more pulling. When you get those 500 new facebook fans, your first post shouldn’t be “HEY NEW FANS BUY OUR PRODUCTS NOW!”

Instead, engage and build a relationship with them. Much like going on a first date, you want to make a good impression in order to keep them as a fan and to eventually convert them into a customer.

For example, let’s say you run a company that sells mattresses -- start out with something like “Welcome to all of our new fans. Are there any problems that you have with your current mattress that keep you up at night? Let us know, and we’ll see if our certified mattress experts can help find a solution to your problem."
This opens the floodgates for your fans to start leaving comments talking about their sleeping problems as a result of their mattress. You then chime in and respond directly to each customer, helping to find a solution to their problem. Remember, building the relationship with them first is the key to turning them into customers who are likely to buy from you in the future.

5) Interact on Twitter
The same goes for Twitter – use it as a platform to interact with your new users, not as a platform to constantly push out tweets about your products.



Another great way to take advantage of Twitter is by using search.twitter.com. This allows you to search for any keyword or phrase that people are currently tweeting. So, if you run a mattress company, you can run a search for “I hate my bed’, and you will see results from people that have recently tweeted that phrase. You can then reach out to them, let them know about your mattress giveaway, and start building a relationship by asking why they hate their mattress and what you can do to help.

6) Promote to Your Own Audience
This one is simple and should be a no-brainer. Promote your giveaway to your email list and to your audience on social media. Put a graphic on the homepage of your website linking to the giveaway.
What is the point of running a giveaway if your current audience doesn’t know about it? Sure, you may just want to bring in new people for your giveaway, but you would be foolish to ignore the fact that your current audience could bring in more of their own friends and family which you would be missing out on.

7) Promote on Giveaway Directories
Adding your giveaway to a directory can bring in a lot of traffic, but keep in mind that it is mostly non-targeted traffic and sweepstakers just looking for freebies. However, if your goal is to get as much traffic and as many leads as possible, you’ll want to submit to these sites.
Here is a great list of giveaway directories to submit your giveaway to.

8) Utilize Facebook Comments 
Utilizing the Facebook commenting system in your giveaway is a great way to continue the conversation and bring in more people. Many 3rd party giveaway tools have Facebook comments built right in, but if you’re building a custom giveaway page, use the Facebook comments plugin.



If you structure your giveaway correctly, you should be able to ask users a question that they can reply to using Facebook comments. For example, if you’re giving away a mattress you can ask: “Which mattress would you choose from our selection if you win?”

This simple question will drum up hundreds of comments because it encourages people to browse your website to find the mattress they want.

Another great thing about Facebook comments is that when you reply to people your comment will show up with your company name. Don’t forget, when a user leaves a comment, Facebook usually displays that in the newsfeed for their friends to see, which brings in more people.

Recap

• Set goals to determine an ROI. Do not go in blind hoping for the best when running a giveaway.

• You most likely won't get many sales from a giveaway, if any at all. You should be capturing leads and interacting with your new fans to convert them into future customers.

• Discounts when combined with a giveaway can help to drive sales.

• Promote the giveaway to your current audience, and if you're looking to get as many leads as possible, submit to giveaway directories.
• Use Facebook, Facebook comments, and Twitter properly to increase engagement and interaction with your audience. Remember, less pushing more pulling.

Twitter Now Supports Line Breaks in Tweets

Twitter added support for line breaks Wednesday, a new feature that lets you spread your 140 character message over several different lines.


Supported on Twitter.com, as well as through Twitter’s official mobile app, the feature can be used to spread out a few different lines of text, or even to spread out a single word, one letter at a time.


Line breaks currently aren't supported on most third-party Twitter clients we've looked at, nor are they supported in embedded tweets.

While perfect for social media poets, the feature looks like something that could also get pretty obnoxious, especially if someone in your feed takes the one letter at a time approach that Twitter did in its announcement tweet.

What do you think of Twitter adding support for line breaks in tweets? How do you see the feature being used? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image via iStockphoto, matspersson0

Social Media Tools That Can Transform Your Business

Monitor and Manage your Brand
The web and its various social networks are packed full of information and so many different brands and businesses trying to be recognised. Consumers have easy access to all this information and they use it to make buying decisions. Social media tools designed for monitoring your brand can help to track wherever your brand is mentioned online. By tracking these mentions you can encourage positive feedback and quickly respond professionally to anything negative that might be out there. Here are two main tools you could consider:

Crowbooster - this is a tool for managing your social networks and has been specifically built for business use. It can auto-post content, manage new fans and provides statistics about your content and how it is being shared. It also shows you which of your fans are most interested in your posts and tells you when is the best time to send out content to engage with the largest number of your fans. It can also remind you to send out posts.

Google Alerts - this is an indispensable tool for checking your online business reputation and monitoring your presence across search engine results. It's a completely free tool and allows you to monitor your brand across the web. Every time a mention is made of your brand on a website you'll be sent an email. You can also monitor competitors this way.

Build and Maintain your Presence
Content is king in presenting your business professionally and developing its followers and interested parties. Your website and attached blog form the central base for all your content production and are the place you want to drive your followers too via social networks. You can use networks to reel in customers whilst your website is the prize they receive when they reach the destination. Blogging is a brilliant way of consistently providing up to date, relevant content about your business.

There are many products designed for making blogging easy and straightforward but by far the best is WordPress. It's an ideal tool for producing great blogs easily and it's a great way of small businesses creating their first website. WordPress blogs are well optimised for search engines and they're really easily to integrate with social networks and many of the sites you see online will be powered by WordPress.

Connect on Social Networks
The most powerful social media tools of all are the networks themselves. You can find your customers based on their interests, locations and also make interesting and profitable business connections.

LinkedIn - this network is perfect for business connections. It's the best social network online for getting new business leads and networking professionally. It has millions of users worldwide and your success is based upon a completed profile presenting a positive professional image for your brand. You can also create a company page at the site to further your influence and customer engagement.

Facebook - you can use the world's most popular network to create a brand page for your business and then you can keep all your Facebook fans up to date on any business advancements or developments. You can also use Facebook as a sounding board for new ideas and set up discussion groups all talking about and engaging with your company.

Twitter - this is the perfect network for sharing your content. You can track discussions about your brand or related products or services and each tweet is like a short sound bite representing your company. It's great for publishing links to your blog posts and other interesting content.

Google+ - Google+ Hangouts are becoming extremely popular for business use. It's a video chat service which allows up to 10 people to get involved and network, discuss business and share potentially beneficial info. Others can also tune in and watch the discussion so it's great for engaging with your wider audience.

Reach out to Customers
Of course the most basic and popular way of connecting with your customer base is email but you can make it even more effective by using social media tools designed for email campaigns such as:

MailChimp - nearly two million people user MailChimp for their email campaigns and have been getting increasingly effective results. It gives you an easy way of putting together effective and creative email marketing campaigns and you can design the newsletter yourself using templates before sending it out to your subscribers. MailChimp ensures your newsletter will never land in the recipient's Spam folder.

There are many different ways of ensuring you're doing the best for your business and when it comes to the web utilising a combination of these products will make a huge difference.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7537900

How to Get More Followers on Twitter

Twitter emphasises the number of followers you have. Emblazoned on your Twitter profile is the number of times you have Tweeted, the number of people you follow and the number of people following you. It is like some badge of honour, as though raw numbers mean something important.

Of course, the number of followers you have is largely unimportant. You could have a million followers, but if none of them interact with you, if none of them do anything as a result of your Tweets or if none of them buy anything if you are in business, what is the point? But you could have just 10 followers who all interacted and who all were loyal customers.

Even so, people are keen to get more followers - because the whole Twitter set up emphasises the issue. People feel somewhat undervalued if their friends have more followers than they can muster. Equally, business owners get into competitive situations, trying to get more followers than their rivals.

There is plenty of myth about how to get more followers, as well as some cranky, underhand techniques which boost your follower number, but little else. Now, for the first time, a long-term study has looked at the growth of Twitter followers over time in more than 500 users and half a million Tweets.

The research confirms that you gain followers when - surprise, surprise - you are social. That's right, hold conversations, chat to people and you instantly appear more interesting and therefore more likely to be followed.

The study also demonstrates three things you must AVOID if you wish to gain followers.

Avoid these to gain Twitter followers

• Hashtags
• Surprising as it may seem, hashtags are negative influencers of follower growth - especially if you use them for the sake of them, or if you use them excessively
• Negativity
• Twitter is often full of negative things, like complaints or criticism. But negativity makes you less attractive to others, so you won't grow your follower count
• Self focus
• Talk about yourself a lot and people don't want to follow you

Do these to get more Twitter followers

• Interact
• If you have lots of @replies in your Twitter stream, you gain more followers
• Be useful
• Provide useful information that includes a URL to original content. This is significant as it encourages "retweeting" which is also associated with increased follower counts.
• Show your location
• People like to follow people nearby. When you show your location, you gain more followers

Overall, the research demonstrates one over-arching principle:

Write positive, useful Tweets, that contain links to informative web pages and then reply to people who retweet you.

Simple.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7531330

Some Users Are Seeing “Give A Gift” Suggestion Alongside Friend’s Celebratory Status Updates

Inside Facebook has reported that some users are noticing a “Give a Gift” suggestion in their News Feeds alongside status updates that contain good news.

Facebook has been pushing gift giving for a while in the United States. Facebook gifts was made available to American users on 12/12/12, after the feature was tested extensively in the beta stage.

Since then, Facebook has partnered up with Starbucks to suggest gifts from the coffee chain on birthday announcement posts and even created a gift card, which can be topped up by a user’s friends on Facebook.
Now, Facebook is suggesting that users buy gifts for their friends to celebrate good news, as seen in status updates. Inside Facebook reported that the “Give a Gift” button was seen beside a status update announcing a friend’s new job and another which read “it’s a boy”.

This suggests that Facebook has developed an intelligent language processing system, which can monitor posts for keywords in specific orders and suggest gift-giving accordingly.

Karma, the gift-giving app that Facebook bought last year and then converted into Gifts, originally had software that could scan for celebratory updates, so it was inevitable that Facebook Gifts would eventually have a similar feature.

Gifts is clearly a feature that Facebook plans on devoting time on, as it has potential to bring in considerable revenue for the site and even move Facebook into competition with Amazon and eBay.

Facebook, of course, doesn’t have the same inventory as either of the big shopping sites, but it does have huge amounts of targeting information on its users, which is already made available to advertisers.

What do you think the future of Facebook Gifts is?

Internet Network Marketing Tips: 5 Tips For Online Network Marketing Success

These internet network marketing tips for success will help you move away from traditional "offline" network marketing strategies and start to leverage the power of the internet to boost your sales.

* Train Your Team - Instead of having to build a huge team, focus on training your existing team members. Arrange live events, create video tutorials, and organize Skype meetings to help improve the sales of your members. It is far more profitable to have 10 successful team members than 100 team members who do not take action. However, make sure that the internet network marketing company that you are involved with as a solid compensation plan that rewards you for the success of your team members.

* Social Media Marketing - As in all types of business, this industry about building relationships. So leverage the power of social media marketing for this purpose. Engage in relevant Facebook groups and offer you insights. Share useful content of yours and encourage discussion. Social media is not about "look at me, look at me" but is about talking to people and building relationships and that will then lead to growth of your business further down the line.

* Content For Leads - Article marketing for network marketing on the internet can generate a daily stream of free leads for your business. The key is to concentrate on writing daily articles that offer useful network marketing tips and tricks to your prospects. Then get the content out the on the internet on your blog, in the article directories, on document sharing sites, and other relevant websites in the industry.

* Leverage The Internet - In the modern internet era, network marketing and multi level internet marketing success is much more than cold calling, personal meetings, direct mail and newspaper advertising (you don't have to do any of that if you don't want to). A powerful network marketing tip is to instead of working once and getting paid once, get some content out there on the internet and generate traffic and capture leads on a daily basis. Each article could potentially generate leads for years to come and you only need to write it once.

* High Commissions - In order to earn a living from online marketing you will need to be properly rewarded for your efforts. If you only get 5% commissions then you are going to have to make a very high amount of sales to see much money from that. But if you are promoting products for 100% commissions there is much less pressure on the quantity based approach and you can simply focusing on making quality sign-ups.