Earlier this year eMarketer wrote an article based on MarketingSherpa’s surprising findings concerning social media effectiveness and measurability.

MarketingSherpa’s study asked US Social Media Marketing Professionals to identify the most appropriate marketing uses for social media. Here are the results (in order of effectiveness):

1. Influence brand reputation
2. Increase brand awareness
3. Improve search engine rankings
4. Increase website traffic
5. Generate leads
6. Improve internal communications
7. Increase online sales

If you have a small company, chances are you’ve heard the following phrase in a marketing meeting while discussing whether or not to engage in social media: “It will increase our online sales!” As you can see, however, this oft cited justification for involvement in social media is actually the least effective marketing use for social media. When you’re thinking about social media involvement you have to be thinking long term. The biggest marketing impact you will have will be changes in brand reputation and brand awareness. Next in line will be SEO benefits, and an increase in traffic and leads. It’s likely that all of these things will ultimately lead to an increase in sales, but not overnight.

Social Media Tactics That Get the Most Bang For the Buck

Since your company’s social media efforts are going to be a long-term commitment you should determine what’s most important to your company and which activities align with those factors. Ask yourself “Is it more important to be able to measure the results of my social media efforts now or is it more important to focus on social media efforts that will be the ‘most effective’ in the long-run?” (more…)

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There is a whole sea of blog posts out there telling you how to tweet and what to tweet and when to tweet, but the common theme among them is that they rarely provide actionable specifics. In this post, we will try to give you an idea of what you should tweet about in a way that encourages your business to develop a plan of action.

What are Users Tweeting Now?

To get started, let’s look at what individuals and companies are already tweeting about. A recent eMarketer article revealed that all tweets on Twitter as of August 2009 could be broken down into the following categories:

• Pointless Babble (also known as the “Sitting in my chair now!” tweets*) 40.55%
• At Replies (@TwitterUser) 37.55%
• Retweets (RT @TwitterUser) 8.70%
• Self-Promotion 5.85%
• Spam 3.75%
• News 3.60%

Unfortunately the three types of tweets that give Twitter a bad name (the pointless babble, self-promotion, and spam) account for more than half of all tweets, leaving the beneficial and insightful aspects of Twitter (the replies, retweets, and news) in the minority.

What Should You Tweet?

As a business, you will need to make sure that you use your Twitter account correctly. But how? What should you tweet about? There is no one “right way” to approach tweeting on behalf of your company, but here is a good model to follow: (more…)

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Right now you’re probably shaking with anticipation like a kid on Christmas morning waiting to open his/her presents, but we need to give a little background for new readers.

I See Your “Cyber Monday” and I Raise You One “Green Monday” Most people know that Black Friday is the name given to the day after Thanksgiving, which traditionally marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season for retailers; and that it’s online equivalent (commonly referred to as Cyber Monday) is the following Monday. What most people do not know though is that while Black Friday is traditionally the busiest (and therefore most profitable) shopping day in the retail world, Cyber Monday is not the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season.

The biggest online shopping day of the year had not been given the honor of a snappy moniker until more recently: “Green Monday.” I know what you’re thinking: “Okay great, just tell us when Green Monday will be THIS year!” (more…)

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With our modern reliance on the hard numbers of quantitative customer feedback it’s easy to lose track of the importance of qualitative feedback from customers.

Quantitative customer feedback usually comes in the form of a survey with multiple choice questions and rating scales to determine a company’s success on a number of clearly defined objectives. The data that is collected is then analyzed using averages and formulas and is boiled down into tidy stats that look great on a PowerPoint slide.

Qualitative customer feedback, on the other hand, can take many more forms. It can be as simple as adding your company’s email address to an order slip and stating “Tell us how we’re doing.” It can be emailing customers some open ended questions and asking for feedback. Lately, analyzing customer sentiment on social media sites has become a popular form of qualitative customer feedback.

A Volusion customer shared a story in our forums of how she used qualitative customer feedback to benefit her business. Her words are replicated below: (more…)

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The holiday shopping season is just around the corner, and you know what that means… a surge in online sales.

Every year Volusion makes a prediction as to when the biggest day of online sales will come. As you may remember from last year, we noted that a snappy business-friendly moniker had not yet been given to this “biggest day of online sales.” Well, this year Bing stepped up to dub it “Green Monday.” Why? Because they are predicting the pinnacle of this year’s online sales will come on Monday, December 7th.

We like that moniker enough to add it to our short list of holiday shopping terms (i.e. “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday,” etc.) so we will be using it this holiday season.

The heads here at Volusion have been pretty close in past years with our holiday predictions. In fact, last year we were only one day off when we predicted that Monday, December 8th would be the pinnacle of the holiday shopping season.

So, in our expert opinion, when will “Green Monday” fall this year? You’ll have to stay tuned later this week to find out!

-Kate Pierce eCommerce Specialist

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