Comments by Amit Nanda Subscribe

On The 5 Types of Facebook Fans (and How to Keep Them)

This is a useful framework. Would'nt it be great if they would self-identify themselves into a bucket :) It is a challenge to identify fans that may convert to customers - and this is an extremely important type. One thing to consider for the "The Potential Client/Customer" type is to try and get these fans into your sales pipeline. You could use FB Page apps to pull them into your email database (https://apps.facebook.com/ctctjmml/) or mobile database (http://mofans.co/) or Salesforce db (http://blog.involver.com/2011/08/23/salesforce-integration-to-release-in-conjunction-with-dreamforce-2011/). 

On Do Social Media ‘Conversations’ Sell Anything?

Nice post Mark.

I love this: “Content is NOT king. It is the conversation around that content that is king.”

We're working on increasing engagement using SMS (that provides great reach) - so, engagement + reach.

SMS also enables timeliness (most text messages are opened and read within 5 minutes).

But this still does not ensure a direct correlation between social activity and sales.

We are looking to layer location on top - so engagement + reach + timeliness + location --> will this improve the correlation between social activity and sales? I guess, we'll find out. Fun times ahead.

On R.I.P. Twitter as a Marketing Platform

Some excellent points. I agree that as a brands followers increase their following count, there is a higher likelihood they will miss a tweet. This is a high tweet turn-over problem that can cause your message to get lost in the noise. Brent has suggested using SMS notification as a solution and he is right-on. If a brand can get Twitter users to turn on sms notification for their account (its kinda like your email sign-up test - a few extra minutes of work), then the tweet lies in the SMS Inbox and tweet discovery is much less of an issue. They are not likely to get tweet SMS notifications from all their followers and so this should help the signal-to-noise issue. Twitter has put in place a very valuable SMS infrastructure (look at all the countries/carriers they support now and they are adding to this). Plus this SMS set-up is available to marketers for free (no need to acquire short codes/keywords, sign-up aggregators/ apps providers, pay for SMS costs). As a data point: it costs $ 500-1000 per month to rent a short code plus you have to hire SMS service providers and will pay $ 0.03+ per SMS. ALL this has been zeroed out by Twitter which we feel can be disruptive for the SMS marketing industry. Ofcourse Twitter would not give you direct access to your followers mobile # (for your database) but why should you care if your followers get your message (tweet) in their SMS Inbox. More marketers need to look at Twitters SMS set-up. As a disclaimer, I do have a vested interest in this. We have launched an app called Twextter with this hypothesis in mind - you can check out this use case: http://www.slideshare.net/cellzapp/twextter-use-twitter-to-run-sms-contests-campaigns