One of the disadvantages about social media is the hard time that one has to put on it, the daily post to keep people engage to your brand is hard work. I know about these tedious activities since I have my own page called “Una Pata Amiga” a nongovernmental association to help animals without a home, so it hard to keep the talk going. However thanks to the move of technology there almost an app for everything and I have found 5 that will help anyone with the use of different Social Medias.

So the first one is Facebook! Yes is it’s the most well known app and a must have, most of the Smartphone’s owners already have it on it, so these helps you to be in touch with your facebook friends and participate in the conversation everywhere you go as well as a monitor tool.

Then we have Postling, as we know Blogs have a huge impact from what is being said about your company as well as a conviction tool for consumers looking to find information about you company, products or services.  Therefore this app lets you create content so you can add it directly to your blog. This app allows you to monitor Yelp, City search and sites like trip advisor. So one can also choose the best reviews and post them to you social media like twitter and facebook. Finally another advantage of this app is that you don’t need to go out to manage your social media one can directly use it from there as a one stop access.

Number 3 is Plum an app where you can manage different Tweeter account at the same time and you can also use plum to post from Facebook, however I wouldn’t use recommend it since its time consuming to use different apps for different social Medias. Number 4 is Flipboard is the ultimate app for finding content, this is great since it takes out the tedious work to search for it, and it has a great variety of content from the latest trends, so like fro my page “Una Pata Amiga” I would look for cute animal pictures, information about animal society’s and videos of rescue dogs for example. On the other hand it also lets you interact directly through your social networks so you can interact via the app, giving us a tool to  manage, find and share content and interact on our networks without leaving Flipboard.

Finally  we have Google currents so if you ever struggling on finding good content to post you should check it out. So you add the information much like a RSS feed, letting you know what are the trends from the internet and providing a better communication with your audience, posting questions of interest, and start discussions.

One of the advantages of using social media as a tool is the availability of gaining new consumers and providing a betters service, also one can generate more engagement. But why would big companies like Disney don’t allow consumers to participate in their page? Jim Singer did a study reporting that companies as Disney, McDonalds and Sony only allow post mostly created by them.

So the system has change now we open the door to these companies and they have to gives us a reason to keep them in our homes, for first time marketers have to engage us instead of talking at us. But the main reasons why these companies are so afraid of engaging are the following: first one can lose control of what it is being said about you; more than one third of the comments collected would harm the company reputation. About 27% of the posts were spams and 8% were real complaints. People with gripes about a company can post in their official portal, the problem is that not only they are listening but their whole fans are.

However another main reason of this close engagement is that most marketers don’t know how to create something to talk about, make the conversation flow, 20 of 50 companies have 4:1 company to consumer ration of posts. 71% of the companies were promotional and only 5% were to create conversation.

However not everything is lost one can create conversation by using nostalgia, product discussion and common causes. As Fox News is doing it,, which had 17.6 million interaction with brand posts last year. How it does is through breaking news, videos and exclusive interviews posting them on twitter, facebook and YouTube, keeping their fans wanting for more.

For me my best company on engagement would be Bud light they are lovers of contest, and they are really good on getting the word out. They had 23 million responses from consumers to brand initiated posts, but mainly on Instagram I find it cool the pictures posted by the other consumers.

Everyone say cheese! Well it’s time for picture time and now thanks to instagram it’s easier than ever to start sharing your pictures with your friends, getting rid of that tedious comment of “pass me the picture” , as we have seen Instagram works solely for mobile apps having a huge growth with over 100 million users since 2006. So now it comes to me to present to you one of their new changes and opportunities for marketers, as well as examples of good practices.

Instagram announced the rolling of profile pages on the web, where your pictures will be display in a way of a collage above you profile and bios similar to Facebook’s, also one would be able to comment, like and edit on the web. However, one cannot upload photos from the web; this feature will be kept for now just for mobile. As a conclusion these would make it so much easier for managers to manage their profile from the web since it can get a bit tricky to do it by phone, also its going to attract new consumers because of the ease of accessibility and the amounts of engagement found; finally it would create a show case for your brand, moving forward you consumers into the sales funnel

Companies rocking these app are:

Burberry- With the opportunity to see behind the scenes of these popular top brands, they use instagram to share the shots of their products but also show fashion shows! Photographer Mike Kus  kept a real time photo feed during the duration of the show

Then we have good morning sunshine! Coffee who doesn’t love coffee, Starbucks uses his #starbucks hastag for fans to share their drink on facebook. Therefore, selling experience and fun moment rather than just a coffee, so what these pictures are trying to promote are the in-store experience and how the consumers connect to it.

Yesss please!! Well as we know Tiffany did so well with its campaign of “True love in Pictures” consisting on consumers using Tiffany’s hashtag #trulovepictures and uploading pictures about love, that they created another campaign called #timelesstrulove

So as a conclusion one can say that keep your consumers involved, and they will do the work for you, if you provide attractive content they will do the sharing, another point is share content for consumers to use it that it’s align to your brand, finally be sure to keep the  experience on you photos

The dream of all marketers is to know how to drive engagement, what do you need to keep your fans and consumers interested on your brand? Well there’s still no specific answer for this but there is a recipe that one can follow and it’s through emotional engagement, Martin Jones says that one of the most viral messages spreads are when one is felling happy, sad, angry, disgusted or surprised; its becomes almost impulsive to share content.

According to Social media today Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman found that “there is a strong relationship between emotion and virality regardless of whether is positive or negative” including some takeaways like:

• Positive content is more viral than negative one
• Inspiring and surprising content gets a higher probability of shares
• Sad content can generate shares, however is less likely to happen
• Finally the strongest forecast of virality was how much anger did the message evoke

So how can we create a more effective engagement through these emotions? Well here are some recommendations

1. Surprise- Anything unexpected
   1. One method is through showing people a new method to do something, like the lacost commercial, which teaches you a new way to fold clothes.
   2. Fear- is a great motivator but one must use it with careful and its recommend it to use a solution at the end to end it.
   3. Joy- as mention before these will have a greater impact than the negative one, on e can use inspirational messages like BMW commercial, therefore if it generates more laughs chances are it gets more shares.
   4. Anger- here it doesn’t mean hostile anger but that emotion that gets to you when you are do not agree with what is being stated, as an example the Loewe commercial, that was highly criticized by the young Spaniards since it depict them as lame, therefore they created a lot of viral content ruining the brand image.
   5. Sadness- has a low probability of going viral, except catastrophe events, natural disasters like hurricane sandy
   6. Disgust- tend to be really delicate subject so it’s proper to avoid it

So people tend to share more content when they are emotionally engaged; therefore, one can use these tips to perform more effectively. For me one of my latest shares was about the app of Yog, which caused me surprise, since one can actually race with someone else in the network and compete with them, so I found this really motivating.

The polar bear is one of my favorite animals in the world, and actually my biggest passion are animals, so being a lover of them I just found out through social media today that Discovery Channel is planning on doing a special broadcast season of this cute furry animal. Discovery Channel is known for his Shark Week having 25 years old; therefore thought arise if the polar bear are going to have the same success. Which in my personal opinion I think they would, global warming is becoming a well know issue that has to be address as quick as possible or else these breed of animals will disappear having less than 25,000 left. So the main tool to raise awareness and viewers would be trough social media, right now they show their live stream on explore.org. Mashable states, “Explore.org aims to use new media to rapidly build awareness for the devastating effects climate change is having on the lives of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, using a live stream.” Channels like YouTube will be posting the live stream for a period of time on their home page every day, CNN, Animal Planet, and National Geographic will also be sharing the live stream on their pages.

As an example of the use of social media to promote causes like these, I hope it gets the expected result and people start to get more conscious about these diminishing animals that are suffering extinction because of the climate change. The power of social media is great, one can really use it as a way to send a massive message to the world and create more worth of mouth, and finally I use these blog to inform you that one can help through nongovernmental organization like WWF 

Since January Pinterest had 11.7 Million visitors and it is still growing, however companies don’t seem to be noticing this, despite that, Pinterest has join to amazon zappos since august, where it links articles that you have pin from pinterest to your buying recommendations and not just from your personal pins but also from other Pinterest users. I think this is a new way of doing online shopping in a clearer and more interesting way, and it feels more rewarding knowing that you can buy all of the fabulous articles on Pinterest.   As Will Young putted “When we talk to people and ask what they think is the best social-shopping experience, they say Pinterest, and it’s not even a retailer.” It’s true there you can find so many options and the good thing is that they have the outfits so you don’t have to worry in if ill match with this or that. However the revenue from Pinterest compare to Facebook and Tweeter have been the lowest even thought the amount of share articles in Pinterest is bigger than the other two mediums, the problem is that if a user with even 100,000 followers pins a shirt on “things that I love” it might not get the same endorsement that Tweeter has, being the one with the highest revenues with an average of $33.6 per order. Also Ebay is performing a new browse of their products , as eBay Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges said “is to combine the ease of online purchasing with the fun of window shopping, said “  this will be a great modification for online shopping and it will even make it more entertaining.

Article from: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/amazon-s-zappos-combines-pinterest-and-e-commerce-in-new-site.html

Now a day’s our generation seems to spend more time in online entertainment like YouTube, where one can find videos of all kinds from how to make a key set to the latest concert of Snow Patrol, and these videos give huge opportunities for people to be heard and get out there. Most of the young eagerly video makers use these means to get experience, get notice and show their skills.

As a fan of videos made by talented regular people there’s a new opportunity for these cinema makers, I now that sometimes doing what you love can be expensive but if you are good at it now you can get revenue from what you love doing, videos!!! I think it’s quite amusing now these artists can get more value from their work. So how does it work, well as a viewer one rates their videos by giving money from $0.99 – $500 to the video, This tool makes it easier for the artist to make more videos that their viewers will love, where there’s win-win situation; and this is all through VIMEO. Introducing Vimeo Tip Jar and more Creator Services  I think this is a good way of making business without having the need to get an agent for getting some business done. This new tool might be a great for developing entrepreneurs.

Recently I found an article “Are You Refined Enough to Be a Fan of Grey Poupon’s Facebook Page?” where it tells their new strategy on Facebook. First one has to like their facebook page for later an algorithm will define if you are refined enough to like this page, what this algorithm will be testing will be you likes in music, movies, books and grammar to put some examples. So if the algorithm finds you with a bath taste it these type of qualities, you will be asked to refine your profile to be part of this page. I think it’s a bold strategy because it’s already enough having people judging you moreover a brand, nevertheless people seem to like it, it’s completely different but will see how much this technique works for them

Also American apparel took an advantage of the social media, using tweeter as a way to promote discounts on the Hurricane Sandy situation coming to the next states: Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. They called it The “ Hurricane Sandy Sale” , they sent an email on Monday night offering 20% discount for the next 36 hrs, targeting shoppers online who are staying indoors to seek refuge from the storm but the main re response from these advertising campaign was incredible negative, most of the comment are showing the insensitivity of the brand to the situation.

Social media is increasing and it’s clearly going to keep moving forward. This is why it’s so important for marketers to participate in this move of technology, where they have to be in constant renewal of their information since their consumers are having a daily change of ideas, likes and interests. So social media has this huge potential of making brand awareness and has also the power of WOM, since most of us as consumers believe more in recommendations from friends than from an add.

According to the article “Marketers Still Can’t Tie Social to Bottom Line”, marketers are increasing their participation on the social media, becoming almost necessity for success, the problem is how to measure success, right now the most easy to get measure is: engagement, such as comments, times spend in the page, and the number of followers; but what about revenues, well only 12% where able to measure it and one in five companies where still stuck on the basics.  But even though this metrics are very subjective, social media still has power of brand awareness. This year most of the companies are using Twitter as first place, then Facebook, Youtube and finally LinkedIn.

by socialbalbla

One reinforcement of this metrics is the article “Social Media Proves Value, Gets Budgets”, where at least 52% of B2C companies will increase their social media budget, especially on Facebook since last year B2C companies spend 65% of their budget on it, proving that 67% of marketers had generated leads from Facebook and 39% saw sales. So if you as a marketer are not still in this constant renewal of media then get up to speed.

HELLOW WORLD

As we know the use of a mobile phone with data has become a huge necessity now days, the use of internet on the go has eased our lives, like finding a good place to have lunch, or where to go on a Friday night. Thanks to this a new market known as the always addressable customer according to Melissa Perish, has been increasing since 2010, therefore in 2016 more than half of the US population will have a Smartphone with online access at all times.

Some of the advantages is the possibility of searching from wherever we are our interests, like in the food industry platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, make it easy to share new recipes or discovering new products. The article “Consumers Seek Food Inspiration, Sharing Online” show us that actually despite that Pinterest is cataloged as a female website, men showed to be more prompt to buy with 37%, compared with women with 17%. As a cook lover I completely fall in these percentage, also by finding commercial products in the recipes like Philadelphia Cream Cheese one tends to buy them at least once.

Finally when it comes to buy or search for certain goods like music, books or grocery products people are using more the retail websites than online ads, reviews or retail emails. On the Article “ Retailer Websites Are Leading Source of Purchase Information” we can see how people tend to go more for the retailer web site than the salesman at the store, I think I personally do this as well since you gain time by just searching online for the adequate product, and comparing it to other brands, to get to the final decision.