Research

digital engagement / Shutterstock

Whether a customer stands on the stage of awareness, consideration, purchase, or post purchase, touch points open and close. And it is in those moments that engagement, regardless of source or shape, affects the next steps and impressions of customers.[read more]

Predictive analytics whiz: Dr. Eric Siegel

In this Social Media Today exclusive interview, Henry Spethmann speaks with Dr. Eric Siegel, founder of Predictive Analytics World, about what predictive analytics is and how it can be applied to a number of different disciplines, including business and sales.[read more]

#SMWA

The more you learn about social media, the more you realize you don't know. Presenting at the Social Media and Web Analytics (#SMWA) Summit in San Francisco, AOL shares five key questions they asked in calculating their customer's social lifetime value.[read more]

infographic

A recent Sachs Media study claims that women are more willing to sacrifice sex for a week than their smartphones, coffee or alcohol. This infographic lays out the poll results in an accessible way -- and the bottom graph could serve as a reason for people to switch political allegiances.[read more]

social media usage

The research was checking peoples’ browsing habits. By distilling the overall Internet browsing time from 2012 into one single hour, the study found out that respondents spend 27% of every hour on social networks.[read more]

Earlier this week, HubSpot published its annual report on the state of inbound marketing. If you start reading it today, you may be done in time for next year's. Read this article for the skinny version.[read more]

SEO tools

As a company in need of SEO services, it can be tough to know in which direction to go. Therefore, it’s important that you ask yourself not just who the “best” SEO firm might be, but which type of SEO is going to be best for you.[read more]

Twitter to Market

When the AP Twitter account was hacked and a fake tweet was sent out saying that President Obama was injured in a White House bombing, you may have wondered how one tweet could cause the entire stock market to react so hastily. This infographic from MarketWatch explains.[read more]

Facebook Big Data research

Stephen Wolfram is the math genius behind the big data project Personal Analytics For Facebook, which can provide all sorts of insights about your Facebook account. This week Wolfram issued his research based on anonymous data from millions of Facebook accounts. The results? Amazing![read more]

surveys for engagement

The well-written survey could be viewed as a window into the minds of your present customers, or a crystal ball that shows you future customers. If it's incentivized, you could also see a survey as bait, an effective lure to attract new customers. Your survey is defined by the goals you set for it.[read more]

Facebook strategy

You may have tens of thousands of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page and therefore think you’ve achieved success because of those numbers. Well, think again! Unless you actually work for Facebook, then you need to stop having your social media marketing plan entirely focused here.[read more]

Nestivity today announced the 25 most engaged brands on Twitter among the 100 most followed. The analysis indicates that neither having more Twitter followers nor posting more content necessarily translates into more engagement.[read more]

Adobe

Adobe Summit 2013 started this morning with some major announcements. Adobe has just released a new Predictive Publishing for Facebook, which aims to forecast social content performance to maximise engagement and ROI. It opens the gate to a new era for Social Media and new challenges for organizations.[read more]

Prepare yourself. From September 15th to 17th, 2013, Social Media Today and Blogworld will be hosting The Social Shake Up, an amazing gathering of social and digital practitioners in Atlanta. This is the “real deal” – we’ll be joined by leading thinkers (and, importantly, doers) from big brands like AFLAC, Citigroup, Dell, GetSatisfaction and PwC.[read more]

social data / shutterstock

With social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook on a meteoric rise, companies are beginning to incorporate data collected from these social sites and their users into many aspects of their business from marketing to internal Human Resources issues – and with good reason.[read more]

In the Financial Services vertical, you can still find some who think that social media is not that important--that wealthy investors and licensed financial professionals are too busy and too serious to pay attention to (much less create) tweets and posts.[read more]

LinkedIn strategy / shutterstock

Running a B2B business can be challenging, especially when you are trying to contact the right person in a company regarding potential partnerships or a joint venture. LinkedIn is a great way to avoid having to ask to speak to the relevant person and being caught up by a gatekeeper.[read more]

Two esteemed professors at an Ivy League school say that while those in the marketing world continue to struggle with how to handle all the data they are accumulating, they may in fact be wasting their time and more than likely need to go on what they refer to as a "data diet."[read more]

With the massive volume of consumer commentary through billions of daily posts across social networks and open-source channels, accurate, actionable consumer personas can now be constructed based on the actual self-identified comments of the consumers themselves. These personas can be incredibly detailed based on interests, life stage, lifestyles, activities, experiences and attitudes.[read more]

Representing a new generation of YouTube pop artists who bypass the stifling corporate music industry with their own do-it-yourself YouTube success, K-pop recording artist Psy has become yet another driving force that is forcing the industry to change its hand. Today’s pop artists have found highly profitable ways to monetize their sounds on YouTube, rather than struggling to profit from their record labels and relying on, in large part, merchandising at concerts.[read more]