Are we heading towards the ultimate convergence of search engines and social media? Can the so-called socialization of search results help your business? Is your business’ social media presence as important as your Page Rank? How do you leverage this lethal combo of search engines and social media for your business? Let’s find out.

Search is changing

There’s little doubt that search is changing, it’s becoming more social and more personal. It’s no longer the uncharismatic experience of typing in some text, looking at the results and being done with it. It’s now about how to transform the search results to be contextually related to a user’s social media presence. Whether its tweets those show up in Google Search results or the Liked Search results on Bing, search is getting personalized.

Tweets

Given Twitter’s mammoth and ever increasing user base, it’s unsurprising that all leading search engines including Google and Bing index tweets. For a business, this represents a fantastic opportunity to tweet their way to top search results on leading search engines. For consumers, it’s beneficial as they can directly impact their web search results.

What do you think of the revamped Twitter Business Center? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.

Facebook

Microsoft says that nearly 4% of its search queries are related to finding people. Therefore, it decided that integrating Facebook Profiles in search results is the best way to let users find the right person without a lot of effort. While Bing does the job of redirecting users to your business profile, it’s only half the battle won. Having an active and well maintained Facebook profile is important in order to make that redirection count.

Social Connectivity

From a business perspective, you must make a conscious effort to enhance your social connectivity by linking your site to engage with leading social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, following a standard authentication scheme such as oAuth would allow customers to login using their Google, Facebook or Twitter credentials to your site. This would allow users to conduct Google searches, access their Facebook account and be logged in to your business website without having to explicitly logout.

It’s often said that human beings are social animals. All our needs have a social aspect attached to them and internet search is no exception to that rule.

What do you think about the socialization of search engine results? Do you think it offers a valuable business opportunity? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.

Formulists

There’s no doubt, this is the best tool to manage your twitter lists. Formulists helps you automate the process of organizing your followers and conversations using lists. It also allows you to see who has recently un-followed you. Your existing list can be customized and combined in simple terms.

Listorious

Listorious is similar to Tlists below. However, Listorious is more comprehensive, with a more specific and targeted search functionalities. Listorious does not just allow you to search for relevant lists, it also allows you to search for top Twitter users in your targeted industry or niche.

Tlists

Tlists can easily be called the search engine for Twitter lists. It lets you find top lists on any topic of interest and following the top users in each targeted lists is easy.

List 1up

List 1up is a very simple application for viewing most recent activities of listed users on a Twitter List.

Does Follow

Does follow is useful when you want to know if a particular user is part of a particular list or not, and it’s very simple to use as well.

If you know of more Twitter Lists management tool not listed here, please add it to your comment below.

To best use Facebook in your business, you have to decide on 3 things:

1. Set your goal

Ask yourself, “Why is my business on Facebook?” Asking yourself why you are on Facebook would give you an idea on what to expect on from your activities on it. Your expectation could be to build a prospect list, send traffic to your blog, sell more products and services, increase registrations for events, increase contacts and media attention, get instant access to Joint Venture partners, establish yourself as an authority, or to improve your level of customer service an interaction, but you should define your expectation from the begining.

2. Determine your strategy

Now that you have defined your expectation or your “why”, the next step is to determine the “how”. How are you going to attain your goals and meet expectations? In other words, what’s your strategy?

Each strategy comes with its own set of rules. On what terms and conditions are you using Facebook?

Ensure you have a clear documented strategy from the start. Document your brand management, content strategy, editorial calendar and how to manage your customer expectations.

Decide on Key Roles and which Operational model you will use. Appoint a Social Strategist. Some one who is responsible for the overall definition and execution of your social strategy. Choose the best Community Manager who takes care of your customer facing interactions, reporting and content updates.

I’d like to emphasize the importance of a good Community Manager. It takes the right person with the right attitude to be successful on Facebook. The most important trait to make the human connection is Empathy. So, if you appoint a community manager, look for someone who primarily wants to work with Empathy.

Look for an individual or agency with industry expertise for a creative execution of your brand page.

3. Reserve sufficient budget

Success takes time. If you have no budget or time to build a Successful Facebook presence or campaign, my advice would be, don’t do it!

The size of your budget would of course depends on your strategy. To best determine your budget, think about things like the size of your target group, their demographics and characteristics like age, gender, education, region, the type of engagement, the type of advertising, the size of your campaign team, the time the campaign is running, etc.

Finally, Facebook is a great platform for interaction with your customers. Your customers can share their experiences and opinions about you on the news feed of your brand page. If you are able to listen proactively, you will increase your Customer Loyalty and your business will stand out.

Kurrently is a great resource to listen to people talking about your business on Facebook and Twitter.

If you follow the right Strategy, have clear Goals and spend sufficient Budget for the day to day operations, the conditions for your success with a Facebook presence are set, but it begins with your decision to stand out.

To find out what people are saying, whether it’s good or bad, you can set up a few things to monitor what is going on online, try the following –

Google Alerts – You enter your own search terms and then Google will send you an email with information on where your search terms have appeared in news, other websites and people blogs.

Social Mention – You can use Social Mention to monitor over 100 different social media platforms, these include; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Digg etc. Plus you can have updates directly sent to your email once a day.

Twitter Search – For instant access to what people are talking about then I suggest you download and use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite for your twitter accounts. You can use either of these programs to set up a search for certain keywords or phrases, you’ll then be able to see what people are saying and it is constantly updated.

Constant Industry/ World Updates –

If something major is going on in your industry then you need to know about and then react accordingly. You can use your blog to tell your customers what they need to know.You should be aware of the local/ national/ worldwide news and current events as these things can change your strategy or even affect your business. For example if a news story comes out explaining that the last toy is spontaneously combusting, then you can reassure customers that your product is safe or, if its true, apologise and recall the product and ask your customers to send it to a certain address.

Answer questions and answer customer feedback –

Having a Facebook Page can encourage people to ask questions, you can then respond and maybe start a conversation with someone. The same applies to someone giving feedback on your product, you can say thank you if it’s positive, or help rectify anything that has gone wrong for them. It is very important you handle yourself fittingly and professionally here as others can read what you are saying and can also comment. It also shows that you’re are active within the community and easily available to contact people’s queries or questions.

Updates in an Emergency –

With Twitter being so instant you can almost guarantee that if something has gone wrong for you, it will have gone wrong for lots of other people and they will all be talking about. For example, this Monday morning, after the clocks had gone back, my iPhone alarm didn’t go off until an hour later. I was then late for work, and I certainly wasn’t the only one judging by the amount of twitter updates proclaiming the same thing! Apple is now desperately trying to rectify this before the Americans clocks go back next weekend.

Worldwide Reach –

When has there been an easier way to reach people all over the world within seconds? With a Marketing Service for Instagram you’ll get you and your product out there to the masses. You are no longer restricted to advertising locally or even nationally, social media allows you to publicize your products and news to the world, and the best thing is that the world can talk back to you. You can still advertise locally, but you can now tie it in with your online presence. If you made a short advert for local TV, you can now upload it to YouTube for the rest of the world to see too.

The best thing about Social Media; Its free-ish.

You can sign up to any number of these sites completely for free and get going on you own social media adventure. You obviously need to invest a lot of time and effort to learn the ropes and find out what you can do with it, but there are many tutorials and others who can help you with that. Once you find your target and start to carve out a niche for yourself, your return on investment will be fantastic!

B2B social media can be surprisingly successful with a specific focus on lead generation. If social media is to be taken seriously for B2B by marketing decision makers, it needs to maintain a focus on business objectives and driving sales vs. “fluff”.

B2B companies are actually in a much better position to use social media as a marketing channel than B2C companies. They often have a much clearer expectation for what a customer does and what they want.

B2B companies also have deep internal expertise. It’s not uncommon for top B2B companies to employ thought leaders in their specific industry. However, there’s a solid argument that for many B2B companies, online marketing and social media might not be a fit.

Instances where social media doesn’t make sense:

• If you have a tiny customer base (perhaps you have only 5 customers).
• If the people you are trying to talk to can’t access the internet. Many people in regulated industries can’t access the outside internet from work. (i.e., some military/electric industry).
• If you or your business don’t have an advocate that can help you.
• Velocity and volume – tough for social media in the beginning. You can potentially create quick velocity but quick volume would be difficult.
• If you have a lack of resources you shouldn’t engage in social media. This seems like a big pain point for organizations. If you lack the time or resources it makes it difficult to be successful.

It’s important to classify what exactly a lead is. According to Kip, a lead is when somebody expresses clear interest in working with your business. If someone downloaded a whitepaper and gave full contact information, Kip classifies that as a lead.

Before anything else, it’s important to have the basics in place. If the website isn’t usable and there are no landing pages to collect lead information, social media is going to have much less of an impact because the traffic won’t engage and convert with your content.

Content to build leads for B2B Online Marketing

Content is the building block for all online marketing as a B2B company. Companies need to know how to talk to prospects in a way that is not promotional, solves their problems and provides value to them.

More content, in general, equals more entry points which should lead to increased leads. Content creation correlates to organic lead growth. One way to attain conversions is to ensure there are calls to action alongside content.

Leads stem from multiple social channels depending on industry and strategy. Discovering where your audience is matters. Remember that engagement is not a goal, it’s something you do which helps facilitate a goal and should be measured as a KPI, not an outcome.

Blogging has been critical as it is a platform to create and publish content throughout many different networks and attract new visitors.

Headlines win – never before in history have we had so much information. People are subscribing to blogs via email, Twitter LinkedIn, RSS, etc and headlines are the main call to action for content. They’re the make-or-break detail if people read content or not. HubSpot has found many of their most successful article headlines have numbers in them because people know they’ll be scanable.

Always optimize content with keywords so that you’re gaining additional organic visitors from search engines.

Social media and lead generation

CTAs (Calls to Action) – With a business blog, there are many different ways to get people to become a “lead” from a visitor. For example: including buttons in the sidebar to talk to a representative, or text links within content to whitepaper landing pages or to download content. HubSpot has found it successful to add calls to action at the end of content.

We have found that a majority of posts generating leads haven’t been published recently. Older content is generating leads.

It’s important to remember that your customers are more important than you are. For example, HubSpot has a customer in Virginia that installs pools and spas. All he does is share what someone might want to know when installing a pool. He doesn’t directly sell his products, but that’s okay. Even if people aren’t ready to buy, publishing value added content adds them into that consideration section.

Getting all team members involved in the business blog is vital. People want content from people, not necessarily just companies. Getting different people from different departments – i.e., research or product, allows marketers to expand the relevant information covered on a given blog to appeal to a larger subset of customers.

Business blogging drives leads and serves as a hub for search and social media visitors. It doesn’t feel like they are visiting a website that hasn’t been updated in years. A blog provides much better context for a business.

According to HubSpot’s research of its own customers, B2B is lagging behind B2C in terms of direct customer acquisition in social channels. B2B is only winning in one tool: LinkedIn, which makes sense. B2B organizations are acquiring customers through social channels, just not at the same rates as B2C.

Key tips and takeaways for B2B Social Media Marketing:

• Email is the ultimate testing ground for social media because for most of those getting started in social media, email is the largest sample. Email is not being replaced by social. You can use it as a testing ground to amplify the success of other marketing campaigns.
• The CRM tool is essential to tracking. Look at how a lead comes in, how it was converted and how it goes through the sales process. By having your sales system and CRM tied in with analytics, it gives a clearer picture from visit to lead, which is essential to tracking.
• Lead source – It’s important to understand what leads you get from different online channels to identify what sources are effective or not.
• Measurement – With analytics in place to measure and provide insight around lead sources, you can figure out where to allocate budget, especially if you can measure from visit to customer.
• Social + CRM is how you should think about ROI. If you can have your web analytics and your CRM talking, you can have an understanding of how people are coming to your site and how different channels are performing to you, measuring it down to the customer level.
• Acquisition cost reduction: Social media can equal more engaged and lower cost customers.

Add the glory of social media measurement to the mix, and you have a recipe for going beyond mindless repetitive tactical execution, and establishing a social media data-driven revenue-making machine. Although opportunities are ripe and plentiful if you know where to look, determining and prioritizing actionable insights from an enormous data store of information is a constant challenge.

Brand Management

One of the first things you do as a social media marketing manager is set up alerts related to mentions of your brand, products, partners, or affiliations. Social media is less about who yells loudest, and more about engaging in conversation.

If you’re just starting out, one of your first duties is to assume the identity of “online spokesperson” for your brand. The easiest place to start engaging with your community is on your home turf: speaking about your company.

• Take action: Search engines and free tools such as Google Alerts can help you find brand mentions quite easily, but may not afford you the ability to filter results based on influence, authority, sentiment, or reach. This is where paid social media monitoring tools such as Sysomos or Radian6 come in handy. When dealing with larger brands and thousands of mentions, it helps to begin your outreach with negative sentiment from the highest authorities in social media, and then slowly whittle down the list.
• Example: if I worked for Southwest Airlines, and I wanted to monitor negative (or positive) comments on new routes opened up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I knew I was going after the lucrative young professional crowd competing with youth-oriented carriers like Virgin, my weekly alert filters might look something like this:

Lead Generation

Social media monitoring tools are a lot like pay-per-click advertising platforms. Sometimes it’s as easy as selecting the keywords you know will generate leads and tracing mentions of those words back to interested members of the social media community. When purchase intent isn’t obvious, you’ll want to hone in on conversion funnel keywords that communities may use en route to a purchasing decision.

• Take action: Monitor core business-related keyword mentions across social media platforms and engage communities with conversation and information, but hold the outright sales pitch, unless asked/appropriate. Introduce yourself or your brand to those individuals high up in the decision-making process, and attempt to pitch those who are ready to buy. Remember, more individuals will mention non-specific terms; ensure your efforts are aligned to your brand’s specific goals (sales support vs. lead generation).
• Insider tip: filter on “anyone know” or “ne1 know” plus your keywords and you should find a slew of people that could use your help.

• Example: If I worked for Verizon or AT&T, and wanted to engage people interested in finding the right cell phone, I might approach users who ask questions or mention the word “cell phone” and help with their purchasing decision. Because “cell phone” is very high in the conversion funnel, I wouldn’t bother pitching a specific phone to anyone using that term, but I would be honest and helpful so that when they were ready, trust in my brand would have been already established. However, people mentioning descriptive and specific keywords such as “smart phone” and “android phone” are probably much further down the decision-making process, and more easily pitched, if approached courteously and professionally.

Business Development

Depending on your level of comfort in social media measurement, you may find yourself applying what you learn online to develop your business, especially if you already offer products or services related to advertising or marketing, public relations, investor relations, or creative agency. Almost every tool, free or paid, will offer some data portability via API that you can weave into sophisticated applications and reporting capabilities to enrich your brand’s value proposition.

• Take action: Apply context to web analytics reporting by including social media measurement metrics such as mentions, reach, percentage sentiment, and share of voice. Go one step beyond data puking and attempt to correlate positive brand mentions, community engagement, and total reach with revenue numbers. Compare your analytics to your competition’s brand and show how much smarter/cooler/successful you are.
• Example: If I worked for an agency and already offered clients a number of kickass web analytics reports relating to their digital assets, I could potentially win additional business or upsell more robust reporting and consulting services related to social media engagement with the help of social media monitoring tools. At the very minimum, tools such as Sysomos Heartbeat can be white-labeled and resold.

Customer Service

If your brand is in a B2C vertical, reserving a Twitter handle is probably all that’s required to start generating a few negative customer service comments pointed directly at you. Very few brands do a stellar job of traditional customer service, but many brands have started jumping on the social media bandwagon to reduce costs.

Brands that take customer service to the next level, such as General Motors (@GM_joe) and Adobe Omniture (@omniturecare and once @benjamingaines), do their best to not only engage individuals that call out their brands directly, but participate in events and shared interests to further the knowledge base and communication of their community and industry.

• Take action: Use social media monitoring tools to determine your key social media demographics. Are most of your brand enthusiasts located in distinct regions in the U.S. and Canada? Do your followers attend tradeshows, tweetups, virtual summits, or Twitter chats? Find out, meet people, be social, and engage your customer service team with their community. Connect with influencers in those communities, and build advocates that may relieve your team of some of the burden of reaching the entire community on it’s own.

These are just a handful of potential applications that can help you make the most of social media monitoring tools. As always, we’re interested to hear how you use social media measurement and monitoring tools to complement your analytics reporting and provide actionable insights, so feel free to leave me a comment below.

Although Facebook already dictates that user IDs are not to be shared with data brokers, the Wall Street Journal article this weekend contended that this was occurring, regardless of policy. And while many have since questioned the WSJ piece, suggesting it may be overblowing the threat to privacy, Facebook – under pressure from the media and from potential Congressional inquiry – announced today that it is taking steps to address any inadvertent sharing of information.

While the user ID could be obtained by parsing the URL, Facebook is proposing changes to encrypt that information. The proposal reads:

Instead of reading the current fb_sig_* parameters, your application will read only a single parameter, named request. This parameter is generated as follows:

• Encode the data in JSON format.
• Encrypt the JSON using AES-256-CBC algorithm.
• Encode that encrypted binary data with base64url to make the package JSON-safe.
• Then, take the encoded encrypted blob and add it to the envelope with key payload. The envelope is just another JSON array that describes the encryption, containing keys algorithm, iv, andissued_at.
• Encode the envelope in JSON then base64url.
• Take the entire blob, sign it with HMAC-SHA256.

Prepend the signature, then a period “.”, then the blob, and you’re done.
As Facebook note in today’s announcement, “While this proposal will address the inadvertent sharing of this information on Facebook, the underlying issue of data sharing via HTTP headers is a Web-wide problem.”

Does Facebook’s move to encrypt user IDs a question of “best practices”? Or is it simply a move to appease its critics?

This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore.

What is your organisations social media strategy and what social media plans have you implemented? How are you measuring your social media campaigns?

This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

Not so, counters Derek Edmond in a recent post at the Komarketing Blog. To search marketers like Edmond, “social-media strategies are much more than a method for securing direct links through submissions, posts, and updates.”

Edmond offers five reasons to incorporate social-media tactics into your SEO strategy:

1. Brand-Based Search Results. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Pages and company blogs often appear prominently in brand-based search results. Completing social-media profiles at these sites helps ensure the company message you create gets found.
2. Link-Friendly Content Strategies. Even if newly created content gathers few SEO-friendly links, acquiring and evaluating the number of bookmarks and votes helps illustrate how successful your organization is at connecting with potential customers and audiences.
3. Connection with Content Publishers. A social-media presence can open doors of communication and new link opportunities previously unavailable to you.
4. Connection with Connectors. Social-media sites offer greater access to people and organizations that can help your business grow through new business opportunities, partnerships, and strategic advice.
5. Social Media’s Influence on the Search Space. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all integrating social elements with their respective technologies. Therefore, social media’s direct influence on rankings is certain to increase.

Search engines are already smarter than we think, Edmund adds, and they are likely able to determine link intent and so establish some SEO value—even for “nofollow” links.

ACTION: Make your SEO more social. Adding social media to your SEO strategy is a sure bet these days, Edmond concludes, as the influence of social-media keyword rankings is definitely on the rise.