Commanding your business' social media

As social media has grown in importance, some businesses have committed substantial resources to create their own listening centre to give them a wide and detailed view of the social media landscape.

A new infographic from BeingYourBrand will make interesting reading if your corporation is planning its own social media centre at the moment.

Picking several businesses that have well-established social media centres the infographic makes it clear that one size doesn’t fit all. It’s vital that your business clearly assess what insight your command centre will be required to give about the social media landscape your company is part of. Only then will you be able to build the tools that are needed to track the vast quantities of data available, and of course make commercial sense out of these touchpoints.

A social media obsession

If your business has an inkling that its customers are social media obsessives, your hunch is correct. New research from Experian has revealed that UK consumers spend nearly a quarter of each hour on their social networks. In the US this figure is slightly higher at 16 minutes, but UK social media users are more likely to buy goods and services during these sessions.

James Murray, Digital Marketing Manager at Experian Marketing Services commented: “The online landscape is constantly changing and we’ve seen some pretty dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour across different geographic regions and in the various vertical markets. Consumers are changing the way they interact online and the rise of 3G and now 4G mobile internet access means more visits are being made on the move, particularly in social and email.

“As brands become increasingly global entities it’s more important than ever to understand the differences between regional online behaviours so that marketing campaigns can be tailored for better and more effective brand engagement.”

Is Pinterest the new Facebook for marketers?

A new infographic from BloomReach puts a shot across the bows of Facebook by claiming that for marketers looking for good ROI, Pinterest is clearly the platform to be exploiting now. This certainly seems to be the case with corporations stating that they intend to increase their marketing spending over the next five years from their current 8% to a whopping 21%.

What is interesting is that the research that BloomReach have carried out shows that more Pinterest users are ready to buy when perusing the site. Also, when a brand moves from simply building its number of followers – which Facebook is clearly the leader at here – moving to more targeted marketing on networks like Pinterest pays dividends as 22% more traffic on Pinterest converts than on Facebook.