While there are many social networks that would fit into this conversation (Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr), there is one in particular who’s growth and engagement is already attracting brands.

Instagram is now the world’s largest mobile social network. When you look at it’s astounding growth numbers it’s hard to deny that brands should think about a presence in the community.

Already, we’ve seen great examples of brands using Instagram including Starbucks, Red Bull, Threadless and Burberry. Take a look at Room 214’s POV document which outlines some great thoughts and tips on how Instagram can be used from a brand perspective.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not enough. Having social media accounts is certainly a great (and quite necessary) start, but if you don’t use them to interact with your current and potential customers, there’s really no point.

Luckily, I’ve picked 3 simple and free social media tools to get you pointed in the right direction:

• OnlyWire: Have a few social media accounts, lots to say and little time? Check out OnlyWire. This tool enables you to post content across multiple social networks at the same time, with the push of a button. The service includes all of the top social and professional networks, and the free version allows for 300 submissions per month. Say goodbye to multiple log-ins and hello to your customers.

• Roost: Use Facebook and Twitter, but not always sure what to post or when? Give your content a boost with Roost. Their free Campaign Creator connects to your profiles, lets you schedule single posts or entire campaigns, and analyzes their reach to suggest areas for improvement. This tool can also apply a fancy algorithm to your Facebook data, spitting out a score that determines whether or not your audience will drive business to your location. It’ll even tell you the geographic spread of your fans.

• Timely: Under the impression that the more times you hop on Twitter and drop your knowledge the better? Timely begs to differ…according to this tool, it’s not about the number of times you tweet, it’s about which times you tweet (however, please don’t forget that first and foremost it’s about the content). Timely will analyze your last 199 tweets, figure out the best time slots, and auto-schedule your posts based on the data. Now you can start dropping that knowledge when it’s most likely to be picked up.

With new social media monitoring tools (many of them free) popping up almost by the day, there should be no excuse for neglecting your networks. Start engaging with your current and potential customers and you might be surprised by the increase in online conversations surrounding your brand.

• YouTube videos are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results than a text page
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the U.S.
• As of February 2011, visitors were spending around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube per month

When you look at the facts, YouTube optimization makes a whole lot of sense. To get you started, here is a great video series that covers everything you need to know about YouTube SEO.

Content Optimization:

• Start Building Content: You should be creating a portfolio of content on YouTube. Plan to build in video with your normal campaigns. But video production is so costly, right? Wrong. All you need is iMovie and an iPhone to start creating content. If that’s too much to handle you can try one of the many screen share tools, an online slideshow creator, or a text-to-video service like xtranormal.

• Keep It Relevant: As you begin creating content, ask yourself this question: “Will this be useful in three months?” If the answer is no, it’s unlikely that your video has real replay value. Try to create content that will be relevant in the future… think long shelf life.

• Do Your Research: Before you begin making videos, do some keyword research using YouTube’s keyword tool. This will give you an idea of which videos will be successful. As an example, if you search “NBA” in Google, you’ll get results on players, news, and game scores, etc. If you search “NBA” in YouTube, many of the top videos will be about dunks, brawls, and highlights. This is a clue that a dunk compilation will likely do much better than a player profile video.

• Competitive Research: Do a normal YouTube search for some videos that are similar to the content you want to create. What is already working? What do people seem to like? What is most popular?

Metadata Optimization:

• Optimize Metadata for Video Search: Your metadata can help you appear in searches and gain traffic, but your content has to be good to experience true success (surprise). However, a well optimized video can help your visibility. Optimize your video title, tags, description, and category to appear in searches. Remember, YouTube search works differently than normal search engine results. If you need some clues, go back to your competitive and keyword research and see which video titles are performing the best. There is a great explanation of metadata here.

• Thumbnails: YouTube thumbnails are automatically chosen near the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. As you create content, plan to have something visually interesting happening at one of these points. Most people will only have a choice between these three thumbnails, so pick the most visually interesting one. In the case that you are a YouTube partner, you can upload whatever thumbnail image you would like.

Video Promotion:

• Leverage Existing Networks: The obvious thing to do is promote your videos on your website, email newsletter, and social networks. Take advantage of any platform where you have the ability to post a video.

• YouTube Promoted Videos: YouTube promoted video ads allow you to target your videos to specific keywords and pay for views. As a bonus, when you run promoted video ads, YouTube allows you to create a call-to-action link on your video, which can be used to drive traffic to another site. There is a great tutorial on how to do this here.

• Annotations: Use annotations on your other popular videos to drive traffic to newer videos. This can easily be done through the YouTube Annotations tool.

• Link building: In many cases, over 40% of views on your videos will come from sites outside of YouTube. Create a plan to reach out to bloggers and other sites, and build embeds of your YouTube videos.

YouTube Community:

• Channel Design: Spend some time on your YouTube channel. A blank YouTube channel is much like a blank Facebook page. Create a color scheme, upload a background, and organize your playlists, subscriptions and other modules.

• Moderation and Response: Keep a close watch on the comments that happen on your videos and your channel. Be sure to answer questions and respond to comments quickly. Treat these folks like you would treat visitors to your other social pages.

• Engage Fans: Videos with more ratings and comments will appear higher in YouTube search results. Within your content, you should encourage fans to rate, comment, and subscribe to your channel.

What we’d like to focus on is a point made by Tech Crunch. In their haste to split these two entities, the folks at Netflix neglected to acquire the social network properties before their big launch. TechCrunch highlights the user who owns the @Qwikster handle on Twitter, who is currently trying to sell this handle to Netflix.

After a look into the top social networking sites, it seems that they have not created an official page on Facebook or YouTube. There are however 7 unofficial fan-created Qwikster pages, all aggregating negative comments about this change.

So why is this oversight so bad? Why is it important to lock these online real estates down before you launch a new brand, company etc?

Control

Because Netflix did not secure these, they are not in control of what their critics and customers say about them. Had they obtained official accounts prior to the announcement, they could give customers and their company an official forum to comment and respond. The messages are out there, and it seems they are doing very little to respond or explain, which is not going to endear them to their customers.

Random Squatters

They now have to deal with people who are holding onto these properties, and will potentially have to pay them in order to acquire (some speculate in the six figure arena). People can get mighty greedy when they have the whip-hand over a corporation. This cost could have been avoided had they handled this in advance, or gotten a similar handle i.e. @QwiksterOfficial. In addition to the cost, they could have avoided a very public discussion about what kind of deal this yoo-hoo was after.

Confusion for Customers

Not having official outlets for your customers to comment, complain or ask legitimate questions can be very confusing. If they comment on an unofficial forum and never get a response, they may feel negatively about your brand.

Embarrassment

Netflix is a revolutionary company; nothing that they have done can change their impact on the digital-media landscape. However, it’s kind of embarrassing that an Internet-oriented company did not think of this in advance. It seems they don’t really even have a cohesive branded presence on YouTube as Netflix.

Four Easy Steps to Avoid This

1. Determine which social networking sites are the best fits for your company. It is usually smart to incorporate more incase you need them, or at least protect them.
2. Research what is already out there, if there is someone who already owns your brand name, what variation could you use across all of the social networks (i.e. if @MyersCorporation is taken, consider @MyersCorporationOfficial), consistency is key.
3. Grab them! (it will probably take less than an hour)
4. Figure out how you are going to consistently leverage these accounts, so that they become synonymous with your official brand.

What Attribute is Your Brand Looking for?

One of the first steps is to understand the method of influence people can have. After reviewing these, you can better identify which segment you’d like to pursue, culling down the numbers significantly. For instance, Ed Keller and Jon Berry, authors of the ‘The Influentials’ identify five key attributes:

Activists (Specialized): these are the active members of a topic/brand/community who entice people to take a certain action or get involved. If you need this person to incite action in others, activists will help drive response.

Connected (Broad Stroke): influencers who have sizable numbers of connections across the social networks. If you are looking for sheer volume of brand impressions this can be a powerful attribute.

Impact (Trust and Aspiration): these people influence others by being reputable by many and are trusted. If you are looking to build brand goodwill or trust with your customers, this validation from a trusted source can help.

Active Minds (Professional Dilettantes): these people are jack-of-all trades because they have influence across many different topics. These influencers can be helpful if you have many products and the audiences are segmented differently.

Trend Setters (Early Adoption): these people are ahead-of-the game and can influence others before an idea/product is popular. This can help build early excitement and credibility for your brand or product.

After reviewing these, which do you believe will have the greatest impact on your customers?  Looking at the attributes should help you start to understand who you need to pursue and the impact that they will have.

Where Does Your Target Audience Hangout?

Selecting one or multiple channels is another big factor in the social influence equation.  This is where your demographics and existing research comes in. Using this information will help you determine the best method to reach your customer.

For instance say you own a company that makes products geared toward boys aged 13-17.  Based on those demographics, what channel is best to reach them? Where do they hang out online? Where is it likely that an influencer could reach them? You can probably have a gut feeling about this, but make sure to double check the statistics of the channel to confirm your assumption.

Selecting the best channel to reach your target audience will help you identify the major players in that space.

Which Numbers Matter for Social Influence?

This depends on each social channel you have selected, so let’s give you a breakdown of the numbers to look for on the top three most popular social networking sites (in terms of size):

Facebook & Twitter: Fortunately, there is a handy-dandy tool called Klout that will calculate several variables of influence for you, on a rating of 1-100. Best practice dictates that a score above 50 is usually a good influencer. When you are searching for particular topics within Facebook and Twitter, note certain people and double-check their Klout.

YouTube: While many people don’t think about this as a Social Network, it actually is ranked #2 in terms of size and activity. Look for activity in a influencer’s channel:  comments on a video, responses to comments, subscribers vs. subscribe ratio.  This will show you how this person’s content is received, whether they are popular and if they engage with their community.

Other Social Networking Sites: Look for engagement factors, not just sheer size of community: discussions, comments, sharing. Look at how an influencer responds to commentary; are they helpful and problem-solution oriented? Do they suggest further action? What kind of information do they share? (Links, suggestions, products).

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This process can feel like an extremely overwhelming funnel: taking hundreds of millions of people and figuring out who is a best fit for you. Using these guidelines should help you understand how to take the top of this funnel and scale it down in order to find the best influential fits for your company.

With over 3,152,000 Likes on the Audi USA Facebook page, it’s not surprising that Audi’s fan engagement is above average. What is surprising, however, is that Audi has had an average of 7,487 Likes and 292 Comments on their posts so far in April.

According to Mashable, Saif Ajani, CEO and co-founder of Visibli, is not sure why Audi ranked so high in this study. “We’re trying to figure it out ourselves,” Ajani says. Even though Visibli’s CEO can’t pinpoint why Audi ranked so high in this study, I can offer a few points as to how this happened:

1. Unique Opportunities: Audi isn’t just pushing out facts about their latest models, posting videos from auto shows, and giving away free cars on their Facebook page; Audi is creating an engaging experience for their fans.
   On March 11th, Audi asked fans, “What’s the best thing that anyone has ever said about your Audi at the pump?” This question encouraged conversation amongst car enthusiasts and provided a unique opportunity for Audi owners to share their stories. From our experience, status updates that end with a question have a higher interaction rate than those that do not.

   

2. Photos: From managing my own clients’ communities, it is obvious that photos generate a higher Facebook interaction rate than other posts that include videos, links, etc. Photos not only generate higher interactions on the Wall, but they also have priority when Facebook’s Edgerank determines what to include in the Top News feed. More time in the news feed means more consumer engagement.
   I decided to test this theory on the Audi Facebook page (since they post multiple pictures and albums a week) and found that Audi’s photo uploads have generated an average of 11% more Likes and 75% more Comments than other posts so far in April.

   

3. Passion: Let’s be honest, it helps that Audi is a recognizable, sexy brand, but that’s not all they have going for them. Just looking at Audi’s Facebook page, it’s obvious that there is a real passion there, both from the brand and the consumers.It’s important for any brand to play on the consumer’s emotion to increase engagement on Facebook.
   In this instance, Audi USA provides a platform for Audi lovers to bond over their favorite car and emotionally connect with the brand.

Why do you think Visibli concluded that Audi is the most engaged page on Facebook? Leave a comment below.

Of course, the answer will differ across brands and platforms, but I’ve come across two articles that will help any social media manager answer this question.

The first is a recent blog post from the SmartBlog on Social Media. This article focuses on how to close the emotional gap that the Web creates between customers and your brand. According to Jesse Stanchak, the best way to bridge this divide is to adhere to the holy grail of social media marketing: familiarity, engagement, and trust.

The second article, from Mashable, focuses on five suggestions that community managers should take into consideration when creating a content strategy for any of their social marketing campaigns.

Based on my personal experience, and these two articles, I’ve gathered the top three most important guidelines for community managers:

1. Content is crucial: As Mashable writes, “Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy.” It is the intriguing content that will keep consumers consistently engaged with your brand online. Remember: It’s important to experiment with the types of content that you’re sharing with your consumers to find out what best engages your brand’s online communities. For example, post a social media update that relates to a current event, a funny video, or ask your fans their opinion on something.

2. Transparency: Both SmartBlog and Mashable stress the importance of being honest when engaging with consumers. By being truthful and open in your engagement, you will create a deeper interaction with your consumers, giving the online experience a humanized feel. This idea of a “human brand” is the essence of a successful social experience for consumers. For instance, don’t pretend to be someone that you’re not, and don’t be afraid to respond to complaints about your business.

3. Go the extra mile: Prove to your customers that your loyalty to them is just as important as their loyalty to your brand. It is our personal responsibility as community managers to satisfy the customer’s experience online. A great way to do this is to go above and beyond what any of our competitors are doing socially. How, you ask? As SmartBlog suggests (and I think this is a great idea!), this is as easy as tweeting someone a picture of their order coming together, or wishing them a “happy birthday” on their special day.

Even though these are the most important three guidelines that I follow when managing my clients’ social communities, there are certainly other guidelines out there. What do you consider to be the top three strategies that any social media manager should follow when engaging with consumers?

A search engine’s ultimate mission is to serve the most relevant information it can. But from a search perspective, the emergence of social media has essentially expanded what’s relevant.

While many refer to this subject matter as social media optimization (SMO), I prefer social search optimization due to the specificity. The end game is simple, and nothing new under the sun: maximizing the visibility of relevant content for those looking for it.

But First, a Real War Story

My good friend, Valerie, was recently looking for a job. In anticipation of the process, she updated her LinkedIn profile and did some house cleaning on her Facebook page.

Considering what any recruiter might do, she then did a Google search of her own name, and pow! The third search result was displaying a comment she made about a video within the Facebook page of the hit TV show, “Lost.”

Commenting about Sawyer (“the hot guy”) in the video, she wrote, “mmmmm, finger lickin’ good!” To her shock, those were the words displayed front and center in the search result, with a link to the video right under her good name.

This is specific to an individual, but we can probably all recall a popular pizza maker who experienced ugly search results tied to their name in a different way — yet still driven from social media.

Understanding Social Search: Two Sides

Social search varies in scope and definition, but most recognize it as the addition or inclusion of social content in the context of online search.

One side of social search is dedicated to understanding peoples’ search habits (online and offline) for the purpose of improving the user experience. Think about how juicy this subject matter might be to a company like Google, which is constantly testing and changing the waters (algorithm) to serve the most relevant search results.

With search now implementing social content within the results, social interaction design (SxD) enthusiasts continue analyzing what works and what doesn’t for people seeking information under various circumstances.

Brynn Evans, a respected thought leader in the field, has identified three categories of social search that fit this focus:

1. Collective Social Search: For example, Twitter Trends as a crowdsourcing approach to search via real-time “harvester” tools.
2. Friend-filtered Social Search: For example, Google Social Search, which yields results that may include tweets, blog posts, images, status updates and other results from your friends and contacts.
3. Collaborative: For example, Google’s acquisition of Aardvark, which enables two or more people working through an IM platform to get answers to questions).

Each of the three search types maintain a value unique from traditional, keyword-based search engines — ultimately relying on people (beyond Google PageRank) to deliver the most meaningful results.

The second side of social search, typically more applicable to marketing, is one of “social objects.” Social objects may consist of Facebook entries, YouTube videos, blog posts, comments, Flickr images, Yelp reviews, Scribd documents and much more.

Social objects are the elements that help drive conversations, and may consist of content directly indexed or associated through meta data (keywords that describe the content).

What Does it All Mean?

To reference Brian Solis’s viewpoint: The future of marketing starts with publishing, therefore every company is a media company. As you may have surmised, social objects are the new low hanging fruit of search optimization.

That means applying some of the same search engine optimization (SEO) strategies you’ve used on traditional web pages to applicable social objects. From smart keyword-targeted tags and titles (of your videos, pics, posts, etc.), to the effective use of keywords in comments and Facebook profile descriptions — your opportunity to optimize social assets for increased search visibility now abounds.

A Complicated Journey

When a brand creates a piece of information, that piece has a twisted, convoluted and often times unexpected set of adventures across the vast world of the interwebs. Once upon a time, this was the simple vision for the internet.

40 years later and things are not so simple. Interesting information about a brand can be shared on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, email, Buzz, text and a wide variety of other places. From those individual social spaces, others can share, reshare, and create additional information. Individuals with no inherent interest in your brand can stumble upon it by reading tangentially-related stories on blogs. And now we’ve got the Facebook Like button, which lets individuals trace their way through the web by means of their friends’ interests.

It gets very messy, very quickly. You have to know what to track and where to start looking in order to determine what kinds of people, places and spaces are hotbeds of activity surrounding your brand. Knowing this information, you can then create sticky and relevant content and properly support communities that have the highest propensity to make content viral.

How To Make Sense Of It All

You need to figure out what it is that you need to know in order to better understand groups and places of influence.

• What content gets shared most
• Where it goes viral
• What types of content are best fit to specific mediums
• Types of sharing (ie a few individuals share a lot vs. many individuals share a little)

Above is a snapshot of a dashboard from Meteor Solutions. We placed a bit of Meteor’s code on a client’s website. It allows us to anonymously track how individuals are choosing to share content from this website. We can see what days had the most visitors from shared links, where those people came from, and what kind of content they liked (shared) the most. It also allows us to find out where the content is being shared, potentially uncovering message boards, Facebook communities, etc. that are important influencers for our client.

Untapped Influencers

There are also plenty of sources that aren’t coming directly to your own website, but could be. Here’s a snapshot of a Syomos MAP search on “shade-grown coffee”, which gives me insight into influential message boards and forums surrounding this topic.

It’s Never Static

Whether you like it or not, this work is never done. Key communities will change. The types of content most often shared will change. To build a following, you can’t just monitor for the crisis situations; you need to monitor for the most beneficial situations too. We use a host of tools to go about tracking conversations, content sharing and overall feedback, but that toolset changes constantly. I’d love to hear anything you’ve seen useful. I’d also be happy to talk more about what we use. Drop me a line.

ROI is consistently the hot topic in social media. Everyone wants to know the magic formula, the mathematical equation that will produce (justify?) effective online efforts. Metrics in any program need to be focused on an end goal, and those end goals can normally be found in quarterly or yearly strategic business goals. This should come as no surprise; any marketing effort should be focused on driving a bottom line.

There are ways, however, to put some measurement into your online activity. Our Entertainment Group Practice Director, Wendy Hofstetter, came up with a way to get at this. This method takes the standard ROI analysis for a media buy (think banner ads), and applies it to social media efforts. You will be able to show how much your brand would need to spend in order to buy the equivalent amount of impressions you are generating in social media, and determine your ROI based on this amount.

Get Started

Let’s say you produce something you like to call Beer. Delicious! What a great product. We here at Room 214 support your decisions. You have multiple social media properties, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For each of these properties, you need to determine the number of impressions you are generating and a standard CPM you would pay online for advertising.

Facebook:

• Facebook gives you an overall impression-per-post and daily impressions.
• Your Beer page has 50,000 fans, with average daily impressions at 5,000.

Twitter:

• As Twitter does not provide insights, it’s best to determine your number based on number of fans. Here, we will estimate that 10% of fans see any given update.
• Your Beer Twitter page has 15,000 followers and makes 1 update a day.

YouTube:

• YouTube is simply addition of all video views.
• You have 24 videos about Beer uploaded this quarter, with a total of 200,000 views.

Doing the Math

Let’s determine a CPM for eyeballs (or as someone suggested to me today, a CPM for engagement). A simple online banner ad buy might come at a CPM $3.00. A behavioral-targeted campaign might come in at $15.00. Here, though, your eyeballs have already opted-in to hear from you. What is the cost of an impression like that? A conservative number could put you at $20.00. Assume you have a marketing manager spending 50% of his time managing your communities, at a yearly salary of $60,000.

Views: (5,000*365) + ((15,000*365)*.1) + 200,000 = 2,572,500 views

CPM: (2,572,500/1,000)*$20=$51,450

ROI: 51,450/30,000=1.715 (or 171.5%)

A Few Additional Thoughts

Based on the above calculations, you would need to spend over $51k to buy the same amount of impressions you’re generated by simply posting on your social media communities. And thus, you have a 171.5% ROI for your efforts. These numbers are representative of the fan-base for a medium-sized business. As managing communities takes time regardless of their size, the ROI is much higher with larger communities. I’d also like to note that there are plenty of factors NOT taken into account, like engagement, but I will dive into that in my next post.