As social media content continues to find its way into search engine result pages (SERPs), interesting new data reveals just how much traffic is referred to our s facebook pages from search.  The folks at the very useful Facebook analytics engine PageLever published their analysis of over 1000 fan pages with 10,000 fans or more and found that 33.98% of the referring traffic to these pages came from one of the three major search engines.There are two things about this that I find very interesting:

Firstl, this stat means that about 9.5% of all traffic to  facebook pages comes from search on average.  That is definitely higher than what I would have anticipated.  Also it should be noted that Google is by far the largest contributor to this percentage. Almost 82% of the traffic from search to facebook pages is coming from Google.

The second thing about this that interests me is the degree to which this may impact our content strategies on Facebook.  Good SEO strategies usually begins with good content strategies.  Social media is important outlet for a content strategy.  Therefore, we can now realize how important it is to apply solid content marketing principles, with SEO underpinnings, to our Facebook fan page output whenever it is possible to do so.

I’m not recommending keyword stuffing your posts but just being mindful of the fact that the search engines, Google in particular, are crawling what you create, and they seem to be making more off an effort to make it visible through SERPs.  Well-thought out, useful, entertaining or engaging content is best path towards greater search visibility in all channels.  That’s good news for the marketer and even greater news for the consumer.

Since the widespread adoption of the tablet as the content consumption platform of choice, the industry has been eagerly anticipating the rise of the Internet TV as the next disruptive platform to change the way we thing about digital content consumption.  Is it happening?  Sort of, but not as quickly or with as much innovation as we had hoped.  With the drop in price of the Logitech Google TV set-top box and the announcement by Viewsonic that it is deep-sixing its plans to build a Boxee powered TV, there is growing evidence that the marketing for this technology is softening.  Or is it just that the right forces have not yet come together to make this technology take off?  I once saw an attempt at creating a solid-body electric guitar that was build in the early 1930s.  That was the wrong time for that technology to take off.  Musical styles (content) had not evolved, manufacturing processes (technology) had not become cost efficient enough, and the demand was not there because people did not know what to do with it (user experience).  Internet TV is that same moment where the content, technology and user experience pieces have not yet come together in a moment that will drive consumer adoption.

Sure you can buy Internet TVs but as Van Baker, Vice President of research for Gartner recently observed, “In most cases consumers are buying a television with Internet connectivity as insurance. In other words, they are buying them just in case they need it in the future.”  There are also plenty of price-accessible ways to get a non-ethernet TV connected, not the least of which is my personal favorite the Sony PS3.  The problem is once you are connected, what can you do?  Or more appropriately what can your connected TV now do better than the myriad of other devices that surround us every day.  The answer is that beyond on-demand streaming the user experience is not yet fully developed.

Do consumers want to use browsers on a TV screen?  Despite the fact that the TV screen is large it does not offer a very conducive browsing experience.  But some things do work?  Have you seen the YouTube and Netflix apps designed specifically for the TV?  They have large buttons that are easy to navigate to and click.  They have a display that is almost devoid of text (hard to read on a TV) and heavy on seductive visuals (fun to look at on a big screen).  But until there are more apps and user experiences that are built specifically for the TV, the usefulness of it as digital device is somewhat limited.

However, the promise is still there.  As companies like Adobe help hash out digital rights access with its Adobe Pass offering and as more of these devices continue to end up in consumers’ homes, if for no other reason than the current crop of product is coming equipped with the technology whether consumers demand it or not, the groundwork is being laid for enterprising content providers to realize that there is a new opportunity to wrap bigger and bolder user experiences around their content and make it accessible in ways that best suit the TV as an interface.  I’m still bullish on the technology and anxious to see how this next wave of digital user experiences will evolve.  In fact, I think this is the time for publishers and media companies to take the lead and prove what this technology can be good for.

As I have had the opportunity to experiment with an increasing number of Facebook ad campaigns, I feel like I’m starting to get a feel for how to use the platform to best effect.  I’m sure that we could get some great input from all of you as well but the approach I’d like to talk about has to do with taking a layered approach that includes fan page enhancements, regular facebook ads and sponsored story ads used in combinations.  I think this layered approach is the best way to address the issues of new fan acquisition, engagement and leveraging a fan base in one concerted effort.1.  Develop a content marketing strategy: This can be as simple or as complex as the project demands but take some time to figure out what you can say and do with your audience(s) that is likely to have value to them while also serving the needs of allowing you to communicate what you need to communicate.

2.  Use fan page enhancements and apps to offer higher levels of engagement to the audience(s): There are wide range of great apps and a variety of price points that can create whole new user experiences for your facebook fan page.  Some of the functionality you can add include contests, coupons, like gates, custom landing pages, sign up forms, galleries, downloads and a whole variety of other experiences.  Don’t just rely on the wall and the like button.  Give people more ways to interact with you.

3.  Use Facebook ads as a fan acquisition tool: Facebook ads suffer from high impressions at low CTRs.  However, they are also not terribly costly so that even at low CTRs you can generate enough impressions to create some activity.  I think this makes them useful for acquiring new fans and building out a base of awareness but read on….

4.  Use Sponsored Stories to leverage fans: Don’t let your facebook advertising stop at fan acquisition.  Sponsored stories based on the actions that the fans take on your newly enhanced fan page is the secret sauce that makes all the rest of this work worthwhile.  In the most basic sense, they offer you the ability to leverage your fans to reach their friends in generally more impactful ways than simple post liking achieves. Here’s a link to a PDF from facebook on the subject.

So how have you been combining these tactics together?  Anyone have any additional thoughts or examples of recent projects that showcase how this all works?

Spinning off this recent article that lists the Top Eight Social Media Campaign Management Tools I thought I’d add two more that I like and make it an even 10 tools that can really help social media marketers better engage their audiences and track results. There is a always a great deal of movement in the industry as new services launch and existing ones change hands or get acquired. My hope is that this list will still be accurate at least 17 seconds after I publish it.

1. WildFire
Wildfire allows you to create quizzes, contests, coupons, virtual gifts etc and distribute them to social networking sites. It also allows user to send multiple updates to different and multiple social networking sites.

2. Awareness Social marketing software
Awareness Social marketing software is a enterprise class tool which has wider perspective of social media marketing. It integrates all the social networking sites control like updating on multiple account and engaging with people. Further, it also has comprehensive ROI measuring features embedded in the system. It is mainly targeted to bigger enterprise (meaning that is on the more expensive side).

3. Buddy Media
Buddy Media also allows multiple account management from twitter and facebook . In addition, they have included lots of case studies from large brands. They allow users to manage and monitor campaign as well.

4. CoTweet
CoTweet gives more like a dashboard experience where you can view all the updates and schedule tweets. User can even track keywords and monitor the brands. It recently was acquired by ExactTarget so it will be interesting to see how that integration plays out.

5. Hootsuite
Along with CoTweet, Hootsuite is one of the more popular tools for managing accounts from one dashboard. Users can integrate multiple account from different sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin ), view their streams, track their statistics and schedule to multiple accounts. Recently, they have even included the people management part where different person can be given different roles.

6. ObjectiveMarketer
ObjectiveMarketers has the inclusion of almost all the important sites from Twitter to YouTube. It also allows easy status updates to multiple account, branding the landing page, tracking click statistics and managing users role. It has also recently added some brand monitoring part to it. The most interesting feature of it is the ability to brand landing pages using customizable frames. Their tracking goes farther than most at helping to generate ROI statistics.

7. Socialtalk
Similar to all the above services, Socialtalk integrates Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType. Allows multiple channel updates and work-flow management, scheduling and other features. SocialTalk is geared towards businesses where there is a matrixed approval process that posting activity has to pass through before it can go live.

8. Buzzom Premium
Buzzom Premium is also one of the most useful tool in social media management. It has comprehensive twitter activity monitoring dashboard, integration of sites like (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Fan Page and MySpace). User can easily schedule messages to these sites and even plan the whole campaign in an excel sheet and just upload. Recently, it has added a brand tracking facility which allows user to track keywords and engage with people. I like their Twitter follower management features that seem better thought out than most others.

9. Involver
Involver offers dozens of off-the-shelf but customizable Facebook apps that can really increase the types of interactions that you can offer through your Facebook fan pages. The have a basic free level and then two additional levels of paid access. I particularly like their photo gallery tool and the app for creating and sharing coupons.

10. ScoutLabs
Scoutlabs is my preferred tool for social media monitoring. The key to Scoutlabs is that it is not trying to do too much but what it does do it actually does very well and it is easy to use. It makes it easy to create searches that weed out all the irrrelevant results. It also has work-flow management tools so that a team of people can collaborate on engaging the online conversation around a brand.

Hope these help you out. Let me know of others that you think belong on this list. 10 does not have to be the magic number.

Foursquare, a location-based micro-blogging service that launched in 2009 seems to be on the verge of relevance. In preparation for their marketing push at SXSW they announced that they have added 500,000 new members bringing their total to somewhere in the 1 million area. Additionally, they are launching a free analytics service for business owners so that could create interesting marketing opportunities for businesses that are based on foot traffic. I’m rooting for them because this could become a very interesting marketing medium. This recent article in the NYTimes explains the new analytics service in some detail with examples of how some of the beta-testing businesses have been using it.Foursquare users use mobile apps to tell the foursquare community where they are and what they are doing.  However, from the business perspective, users are checking in when they come to your location which gives you some information that you can leverage.  For instance, some businesses have found that is interesting to be able to message formally frequent visitors to get them back.  Others have been able to learn more about what messages have been driving their customers to them.  In a nutshell, any business can see the registered customers and prospects around them and look for ways to reel them in or make their experience more enjoyable.

Here’s a screenshot of the kind of stats that they are planning to share with businesses:

Foursquare recently beta-tested this tool with 30 businesses and is planning to expand the beta round to 500 in the coming weeks.  If the user-base grows, this could become useful resource for marketers.  As it is right now, it’s just on the verge of  earning our attention.  Stay tuned and share any information you learn about this service or any of its near-competitors.

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services.  Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature.  Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it.  However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

We are only a baby step away from a day when a retail store can monitor the locations of it fans and followers and send them a little announcement of a special they are running today on that brand of running shorts you like to buy from them. Or perhaps your favorite restaurant by the sea can know that you are driving nearby and message you that the sunset looks great tonight and you have to come see it from their deck. Used well, this capability could be appreciated by consumers and could create additional reasons for users to want to fan and follow their favorite businesses.

However, it is not difficult to imagine this capability being over-exploited in intrusive ways such that users will flock to their account settings to turn it off. Not mention the fact that letting the world know where you are at any given point in time has its own drawbacks to our precious anonymity and privacy. I’m intrigued by these new capabilities and will be anxious to see how they impact our digital lives in 2010.

I’d be eager to know your thoughts on geolocation features in social media.

• I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts.  Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

Nail a need. Make your offers highly targeted.
If you are involved in social media marketing you can use the information that you gain from constantly monitoring and engaging in the online conversation around your brand to generate offers and promotions that are specific to the needs being expressed by your audience. For instance, let’s say you are monitoring the social conversation around your restaurant and you find that the health-conscious portion of your audience often comments favorably about the dietetic options on your brunch menu. You could develop an offer that is specifically designed for them by offering a discount to a local spa or free admission to a local fitness event as part of a package. In fact, if you are monitoring the sites that your health-conscious audience frequents, you can use those sites to help get the word out. The advantages here are many:

• Higher redemption rates of more specific offers with lower overall promotion costs
• Generate fan loyalty in your audiences by speaking directly to their needs
• Generate promotions and discounts that add value to your brand rather than cheapen it.

Test and monitor. Use the channel to refine your offer strategy
The immediate data that you gather from distributing offers online affords a great opportunity to test and tweak different aspects of it. What if you change the value, make it time sensitive, make it referral-based, or make it a contest? You may notice that some promotions generate interest but lower redemption rates whereas others get less click activity but generate better sales.

Keep the balance. Make the largest volume of social media marketing about engagement with your audience’s interests.
This is the tricky part. Your audience wants to be rewarded for their loyalty but they don’t want to be barraged and bored by your endless series of offers. Whats the right balance for you. Is it a deal of the day or of the week? If you have 6 specific audiences that you can monitor online do you make sure you offer at least one promotion to each audience each month? The right fit will become apparent of you continue to track things like your rate of new followers, click-through rates on all your posts, how often your posts get passed along or commented on, and the engagement of your audience off-site. Your primary emphasis should continue to be on creating the force of attraction that draws them into your social media marketing with a generous sprinkling of offers and promotion to keep them active.

Be specific, keep testing and trying, and don;t overdo the promotions and you will find that social media channels can help you get those sales messages out in new, cost-efficient, and effective ways.

For a short while this past week, there was an accidentally revealed document floating around the web that shows some potential upcoming developments in Facebook marketing…and they are definitely ideas that will make business page owners very happy.  The document itself is no longer anywhere where I can link to it but there is this useful article about it on the Inside Facebook site.  Here’s the high points:

1. For page owners, Facebook will track impressions and interactions relative to each post. Right there in Facebook you will be able to see how users are interacting with the content you post which will greatly enhance your understanding of what to post that best suits your audiences preferences.

2. Facebook seems to be planning to offer ad targeting based on a function they call “Real Time”. It’s not completely explained yet but the supposition is that you will be able to target based on the content of the audiences posting activity. So if I post an update about a concert I went to I may be served ads that relate to the artist, venue, genre or anyone else that finds that subject to be defining of their audience. This could be very interesting.

Both of these changes indicate that Facebook is taking a harder look at the needs of marketers on their service. If they continue to make wise choices like the ones listed above I think they will allow marketers to better use the platform while not intruding on the basic experience of their users. In fact, in both of these cases the net result could be a higher quality experience for the Facebook users. Hope to see more about these in the near future.

“What are other people doing and what’s really working?” We got a sneak peak at some of the valuable information in The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa. The accompanying chart shows us which social media marketing tactics are most often used and considered most effective by our marketing peers.

There are several tactics not listed here that I wish were.  For instance, apps, games, contests, and communities come  quickly to mind.  However it is interesting to see that blogger relations is considered so highly by those surveyed.  Many companies lack the resources to put consistent effort behind this but information like this might change their reasoning.  I also think that many of these tactics tend to be excuted in tandem and are probably most effective when that is the case.  Also, the greatest amount of effort tends to reside in simply creating valuable content and communications that can flow out into the social media arena.  Once you have done that, it is much easier to leverage it across multiple tactics.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ.  But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start.  Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.First of all POST stands for people, objective, strategies and tactics.  The order is important because it forms the basis of the planning process.

People: Spend time identifying,  finding and listening to your audience.  Where do they go online?  What do they do?  What are they saying?  What kind of online content do they like (articles, reviews, images, video games etc).  Do they like to create things or just watch?  If the web can be thought of as a playground, what toys does your audience like?  How might you best join with them in the play?

Objectives:  What is that you hope to accomplish by joining in the play?  What would you like your audience to do?  Though objectives are often linked to revenue generating activities you would be best served by having some objectives that are not.  The objectives will lead directly to the communications strategy and it needs to be focussed on the audience..not the sale.

Strategies:  This is where you develop a content and communications strategy.  How will you play with the audience.  What will you share.  What will they share with you?  Where will the content come from?  This step gets overlooked a lot.  Much of the time businesses just share their promotional information.  Blah.  No engagement there.  Spend the time planning the content generation and communication strategy and you will find much more success.  Make sure to bear in mind the sustainability of the effort based on whatever internal (staff) and external (agency)  resources you have to use.

Tactics:  All of the thinking in the previous steps should lead to this but it is amazing how frequently this becomes step one for many businesses.  Would this plan be best executed on an existing platform (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, dare I say MySpace etc.)?  Would it be best executed on your own site via a blog, game, widget or some other form of interactivity that you build. Don’t overlook this option. There is no law that says all businesses must be on Facebook or Twitter though it may appear so by the level of discussion about it. Also, this is is the step to develop your plans for tracking and optimization.  You may need to develop some specialized approaches in your web analytics  or you may need to use outside services as well.  What software and services can help you and your team administer this?  Finally, what sorts of training or coaching might you or your teams need to be able to carry this through?

I can’t believe I wrote a post about POST.  It works though.  Build a social media marketing plan and your prospects for success will be much higher than those who jump in by saying “Hey let’s post some special offers on Facebook and see what happens!”