The Science of Facebook Engagement (infographic)

I’m often asked how companies can increase the engagement levels of their posts on Facebook. Sadly, there’s no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution, but there are plenty of studies that show the value of experimentation.

And while it doesn’t offer any universally applicable answers, the infographic below may give you some fresh ideas for what to test next.

In brief: photos work well (as do videos), less is more, spell out your ‘call-to-action’, try simple participation ideas like caption competitions and know when your fans are online.

Enjoy!

Spanning the Digital Divide

This is an interesting time to be in business. On the one hand there’s a constant stream of new shiny objects, gadgets and apps to play with, presenting exciting new ways to reach your customers. But on the other hand there are still plenty of traditional routes to market that  generate vast reach, even if they may be losing some of their earlier potency.

And that means, in this unprecedented time of change, that being able to span both the old and the new and make intelligent decisions about what to adopt and what to abandon has become a crucial skill for marketers.

For most businesses, knowing how to nurture traditional routes to market while reducing your long term dependency on them is essential. And intelligently testing new channels in parallel to allow these to gently come to the fore will also help your business to evolve and become future-ready.

I was reminded of our digital divide by the above infographic based on data from the National Readership Survey. Even today, with tablets seemingly everywhere in our big cities, fewer than 1 in 6 (15%) adults own either a tablet device or an e-reader. And a tiny 1.4%, like me, own both.

Although tablet devices or smartphones or HTML5 enabled browsers or Twitter or whatever… are undergoing remarkable growth, most still remain in minority ownership.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the offspring of the digital form factors will ultimately become universal but there’s no getting away from the fact that they’re still far from omnipresent. And until they are, marketers would be well advised to continue nurturing traditional communication channels.

The CMO’s Guide to Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a fancy-shmancy term that describes the way that consumers can now find companies before they buy through personal engagement with content on the social web. It’s fundamentally different to traditional marketing (AKA “Shouting!”) in that it requires continuous efforts from content creation teams and relies more on your ability to attract and maintain attention than your ability to buy media placements that can virtually guarantee your visibility.

Cloud-based SaaS company Marketo recently published an infographic that summarises some of the benefits of adopting an inbound marketing approach. As is often the case, they’ve had to grossly oversimplify the concept in order to fit it neatly into one diagram, but the underlying sentiment is valid. I also think their approach to editorialising content is much too basic (who honestly believes three blog posts a week is right for everyone?), but it’s a good place to start your journey if inbound marketing is still virgin territory for you.

Here’s the infographic in full:

How to infographicise your Twitter profile

Is this useful or not? Probably not, but it’s harmless, good fun.

A tool from Visual.ly allows you to “Twitterize Yourself!”, essentially creating a near-instant infographic of your Twitter persona.

Quite what you’ll do with the resulting diagram I’m not sure. Maybe impress your mum or print it out to stick above your desk to convince any naysayers of your awesome social media powers.

Or you could do like me and ponder what you’ve done to only achieve “17.82% interestingness” before concluding that even answering that question is unlikely to improve my score!

What do you make of this tool? Any practical uses you can uncover?

(And here, for my mum, is my full profile)

No, this “INSANE Graphic” will not make you a better social media marketer

When Business Insider Advertising posted a story about an “INSANE Graphic” about social media marketing last week I simply shrugged and moved on. Since then, the post has attracted huge amounts of attention online, amassing over 500,000 views and around 9k shares on each of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And with LinkedIn reporting that the story is now trending within Accenture, Microsoft and IBM, perhaps it warrants a second look.

The graphic, by Luma Partners, is a visual representation of the logos of some of the top products and services associated with social media today. It’s one of a series of similar diagrams that attempt to explain the complex ecosystems of various online marketing sectors. Here’s the “Social LUMAscape” that’s attracting so much attention:

Take a moment to drink in the enormity of what you’ve just seen.

It’s a complicated diagram alright. But is it helpful? No, of course not. It’s utterly absurd. Charts like this are much loved by “social media gurus” because they help make something no-one controls or fully understands look structured and professional. But never in the history of the internet has anything useful been done as a result of a chart like this. No-one needs to know all these services and any attempts to compartmentalise each service misses the defining point of the social web: that no service operates in isolation, but is interconnected, conceptually if not physically, to every other service available online.

I can understand the appeal of complicated charts like this and I confess to having used similar diagrams in the early days of the social web to help explain the vastness of the online ecosystem. But the days of this sort of visualisation serving any useful purpose are long behind us. We need more enlightened and informed guidance if we’re to make sense of our rapidly changing digital world.

Alright, if you really must, other LUMAscape diagrams can be found here.

The CMO’s Guide to The Social Landscape

With thanks to Dr Kelly Page for sharing this, here’s a handy ‘ready reckoner’ from CMO.com that summarises some of the benefits of 15 of the big social networks, categorised against their value for Customer Communication, Brand Exposure Traffic (generation potential) To Your Site, and SEO.

Of course, like any summary of this kind, it’s wildly over-generalised and quite dangerous in the wrong hands. But if you have first-hand experience of each of the platforms and enough knowledge to draw your own informed conclusions, it could help you synthesise your planning and focus on the better platforms for your unique business goals.

Click the image below to view the full table.