The Social Media World Forum is underway today and will go on through tomorrow in New York. This conference has entered its third year and continues to provide top-level strategic advice and social media marketing insight. Covering important topics on how to engage customers, manage brand perceptions, empower employees and more. If you didn’t  make it to the event,  follow the hashtag #SMWF to view tweets with the latest on brand engagement, monitoring, ROI, advertising and community management and much more.

Twitter Highlights–Morning of Day 1 #SMWF

A curated collection of social media marketing sage advice from #SMWF keynote speakers:

@EA Chris Thorne:  Global Head & Senior Director of Social Marketing and Media at Electronic Arts.

@TedRubin Ted Rubin: a leading social marketing strategist and in 2009 started using the term #RonR: Return on Relationship™

@LinkedIn James Burnette:  Head of Sales, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn

@mariaamezaga Maria E. Amezaga: Global Social Media Manager- Center of Excellence, Communication Strategy, Shell

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Pinterest takes the commercial plunge.

Up until a week ago, a business couldn’t legitimately have an account on Pinterest (though plenty did/do). In fact, having a business Pinterest account was a technical violation of the service’s rules, which forbade commercial usage. In a welcomed step forward, Pinterest formally announced this week a set of business tools and terms which differentiate business accounts from personal accounts. (more…)

Another Facebook platform change? Actually there are a lot of recent changes Facebook has implemented. If you’re a Community Manager, Page owner, Brand or Business on Facebook, then you no doubt have noticed some of these changes. Below is the first article in a series that reviews recent Facebook changes along with information on how to use the new features. (more…)

Does your Facebook Page have Rules or is it a free-for-all?

A Facebook Page is an excellent venue for a variety of current and potential customer engagement and activity, and most people who ‘Like’ a Page use it accordingly.  However, every Facebook Page is a potential target for the irrational or angry person who ‘Likes’ the Facebook Page for the purpose of leaving a barrage of negative or abusive comments. (more…)

Using Twitter for marketing your business or brand is an excellent idea for most. Whether your business is on Twitter for brand awareness, customer service or an increase in sales (perhaps all three), Twitter can provide abundant exposure and branding opportunities that are hard to beat.

As a Social Media Strategist, I’ve noticed that the majority of businesses, brands and entrepreneurs that have Twitter accounts that are fledgling or plodding slowly along is because the business or brand isn’t quite sure how best to utilize this powerful micro-blogging platform.

With the goals of achieving the best click through-rates, exposure and retweets, I’ve pulled together a “Top 10″ list of  Twitter tips that should be committed to memory and employed on a daily basis.

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#hashtag
As anyone who uses Twitter knows, the ‘#’ symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Interestingly enough, it was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Hashtags are simply a way to “tag” your tweet with subject matter to make it easy to be found. Anyone can create a hashtag simply by placing the ‘#’ sign in front of a word. (more…)

Social Media is a tactic for SEO. They are complementary like peanut butter and jelly. At the very least, social media provides a great opportunity for additional inbound links and traffic. Social media, in all of its forms, creates an increase in brand exposure and exponential link-backs to your content (website, blog, etc.) resulting in higher search engine rankings, and additional rankings for your site since Google and Bing display Facebook and Twitter results. (more…)

LinkedIn Company Page

Tens of millions of professionals are following more than a million companies on LinkedIn. Having a fully optimized and professional LinkedIn company page will showcase your business in the most professional light to job seekers, employees, potential customers, purchasing managers, current clients, and interested observers. A LinkedIn Company Page is your brands interface to the professional social world and presents an opportunity to engage, grow and reveal the human side of your company…all while providing a peek at the individuals behind your brand and products. (more…)

Social Media Goal: Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness is always at or near the top of our client’s list when we discuss social media marketing goals. Even for large brands, Brand Awareness continues to appear as one of the top 3 goals…typically in the form of “enhanced” Brand Awareness or “top of mind” Awareness. And the question usually comes down to… what should we measure (and how) to determine awareness and our success in achieving such? (more…)

The New Rules of Social Engagement

With social media now mainstream, we’re experiencing a surge of consumer influence from “social shopping”, consumer reviews and online word-of mouth-marketing.   53% of those on Twitter have recommended companies and/or products in their tweets and almost as many voice an intent to buy those products or services. (more…)