Most B2B vendors have already optimized their websites for organic search engine rankings. While further optimization can yield some marginal improvements in rankings, B2B marketers have shifted their focus to offsite tactics such as back links on quality sites to deliver a significant impact on rankings and traffic. With the explosion of social media, Google and other search engines have included social media activity into search results and into the algorithm used to calculate website ranking based on social popularity. And now we have proof that social activity actually impacts organic rankings: TastyPlacement (a SEO and digital design agency in Austin, TX) has created a great infographic based on a study to explore the relationship between social media activity and organic search engine rankings. And is anybody really surprised that Google+ has the biggest impact on Google rankings? Check it out:

http://bit.ly/IMRRsz

Bitly, the URL shortener of choice for most people, has analyzed its click-tracking data to find the optimal days and times for posting links to social media. The results show interesting, distinct patterns among Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. On Twitter, the best window is 1 to 3 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. Facebook was hot at 1 to 4 p.m. And Tumblr is a night owl, with posts doing best after 7 p.m. See the charts below for the full breakdown from Bitly.

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According to comScore’s new Mobile Metrix 2.0 report released Monday, Facebook’s mobile usage is on the rise. In fact, the report revealed that Facebook users spent more time accessing the social network on smartphones than on computers in March. Facebook users spent an average of 441 minutes — or 7 hours, 21 minutes — accessing the social network via smartphones during the month. By comparison, users spent 391 minutes — or 6 hours, 31 minutes — checking out Facebook on PCs. The comScore report also revealed that smartphone users spent more time on Facebook than on any other social media network, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Foursquare. In fact, Facebook is the second largest mobile property behind Google. The social network garners more than 78 million unique monthly smartphone visitors, 81 percent of which access Facebook through its mobile app.

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Research Associate
Leading Edge Forum

Frank Cutitta, based in the US, is a Research Associate for the Leading Edge Forum, and is the author of our project entitled Growing Out of the Socially Awkward Phase: Leveraging the Co-Evolution of Marketing and IT. Frank is recognized by Folio Magazine as one of the media business’ Top 40 Innovators and Influencers.  He founded The Center for Global Branding (a global branding and intelligence consultancy in 2005) after serving as Chief Executive Officer of the International Advertising Association (IAA), and as a senior international executive at International Data Group.

For many years corporate marketing has relied upon Enterprise IT for a number of important business tasks such as customer database management, email marketing campaigns and web site hosting.  Yet despite their long history, our research has consistently shown that Enterprise IT’s relationship with Marketing has been considerably more strained than with other major parts of the firm.

For the full report click here 

Social may have established itself as a brand-building requirement, but — as some marketers have learned the hard way — it can’t replace other channels yet. “Brand-building strategy and social strategy are inextricably intertwined,” according to Forrester analyst Tracy Stokes. Yet, “social efforts do not represent a stand-alone solution and need the scale and consistency of paid and owned media.”

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As the worldwide social network audience soars well past 1 billion people, marketers are tackling the difficult task of coordinating their social media marketing efforts on a global scale.

A grassroots, organic approach may have worked in the early days, but many marketers now have dozens or even hundreds of social media profiles to manage worldwide. This requires a delicate combination of corporate oversight, to keep brand messaging consistent, and flexibility, to empower local managers who know their markets best.

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Analysts to Discuss the Future of Social CRM at Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit 2012, June 11-12, in London, UK

Although the adoption of social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments continues to grow rapidly, Gartner, Inc. said that, by the end of 2012, only 50 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will receive a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their social customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. “For the 50 percent of Fortune 1000 organizations not determining, or even measuring, ROI, ignorance will mean failed projects,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner.

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A surprising number of people are still confused about social media marketing. They know it’s on trend and that it’s probably good for business but logistically, it’s still a bit of a mystery for most.

EPiServer recently surveyed 250 UK marketing decision makers and their thoughts on social media marketing were all over the board. On the upside, 77% of them said they were running some kind of online community and 35% said they’ve been using social media for more than a year.

Of those with a social media marketing strategy, 30% said it’s increased their customer loyalty, 25% said it increased web traffic and 21% said they saw a direct increase in sales. Bravo. But only 1 in 10 said they had an effective means of measuring the benefits and that’s crazy.

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Launched a little more than two years ago, the social photo-sharing service has doubled its number of daily unique visitors to 4 million since January, according to new data from social media marketer Tamba. The site’s core users are women, age 25 to 54, but the site is attracting the interest of men, who now make up 28 percent of new members compared with 20 percent in January.

More money is also being associated with the site, according to Tamba. The percentage of social media-driven revenue that comes from Pinterest has grown from 1 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 17 percent in the second quarter of 2012. In that same time, Facebook has declined from 89 percent to 82 percent, and Twitter has plummeted to 1 percent from 10 percent.

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While the average Facebook user may still not have made the switch to the social network’s new Timeline format, as of March 30, 2012, all brand pages were required to do so, and some brands have been seeing increased engagement as a result.

Social media measurement company Simply Measured looked at 15 brand pages that were early adopters of the Timeline format and found that average engagement on brand posts (i.e., comments and “likes”) rose 46% in the three weeks after the switch compared to the three weeks before. Prior to the Timeline introduction, the 15 brand pages saw an average of 1,672 points of engagement per post, rising to 2,441 after switching to Timeline.

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