Tools & Apps

Pinterest now has over 48.7 million users and stands as the fastest growing social network. Pinterest holds so much potential for brands to showcase their products to a large community of eager buyers looking to find that perfect product.[read more]

image credit: worradmu/freedigitalphotos.net

In many ways, things are harder than they’ve ever been before for the 4.5 million SMB CEOs in the United States. Between tightened restrictions on bank loans, and rapidly-changing marketing best practices, the 50% of companies that survive past their 5-year anniversary are typically run by individuals that are both savvy and tenacious.[read more]

Five years ago, Dell had little presence on social media. That changed when the computer company realized 4,000 conversations about the brand were happening online every single day and the company was not present. Since then, Dell has invested millions of dollars’ worth of time and resources to join those conversations.[read more]

The Social Command Centre—a kind of NASA Ground Control for social media hub teams in organisations—is an increasingly common sight these days inside large organizations. In reality though, having a whole bank of screens—I’ve seen as many as twenty—creates a wall of data that is sometimes very hard to analyse and understand without an army of community managers and data analysts.[read more]

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Social networking isn’t just a trend that is going to go away – it is here to stay. Learn how to keep yourself protected from outside threats while still using the social networking sites you know and love. It is always important to monitor your credit so that you know if you have been targeted by identity thieves.[read more]

SoLoMo

In the past, a company’s social, local, and mobile marketing efforts were silo-ed. You had social media marketing campaigns, geo-centric marketing initiatives and mobile marketing, the latter being largely comprised of SMS text messaging. However, the widespread consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets has changed all of this forever.[read more]

targeted ads (image credit)

As of late, there seems to be a lot of noise on my Twitter feed around increase in ad spend across various emerging markets globally. In Middle East and North Africa (MENA), digital advertising budgets are projected to double from 4% to 8% in 2013. The question: is that money well spent?[read more]

Most of the free Google Reader alternatives in the market are focused on providing users with social filters to discover great content. Netvibes has been there and done that. They’re more interested in helping users finding meaning through context.Netvibes will give you their news reader for free. But if you want their analytics, you’ll...[read more]

Do you remember “show and tell” from your elementary school days? This is the exact approach social media business users should be taking. Too often businesses merely tell followers why their product or service is worthy of a purchase. The best social media practitioners show and tell.[read more]

Since last week's defeat of the Toomey-Manchin gun control bill, social media sentiment tracking shows the public is taking aim at foes of the bill in support of background checks.[read more]

hashtag / shutterstock

Twitter processes 350 billion+ tweets daily. Talk about a noisy marketplace! For marketers who want results from their tweets, it comes down to carefully choosing the most potent hashtags. Want to try creating your own hashtag? Getting it going isn’t difficult, but does take some finesse.[read more]

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The events of last week concerning the Boston Marathon bombing as well as the recent hacking of the AP Twitter feed had community and social media managers everywhere on high radar when it came to looking after the company and personal Twitter accounts alike. Tweets were pouring in, but many contained misleading information and links making it difficult to figure out what to retweet.[read more]

Social media software questions (Photo: Flickr's Diamond Farrah)

Choosing social media management software for your agency or company is a difficult task. Ask lots of questions, and don't feel bad about it. Here are nine things to think about before you get on the phone with salespeople and schedule demos.[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]

Google power

The biggest mistake made by small businesses when it comes to Google Adwords is just setting up a campaign and then leaving it alone. You need to be constantly tweaking your campaigns to get the most from them and that’s where linking to Google Analytics can help.[read more]

Vine strategy

Vine debuted in January, providing a new micro-video service for its partner and big brother, Twitter. So far, Vine’s rapid rise hasn’t caught the full attention of the sporting world. Lack of strategic thinking could be keeping teams, leagues and athletes from jumping on board.[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]

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After I published an article on Social Media Today, it began to pop up on other website unattributed to me. Indeed, it was republished 100 times. I'm mad! This is why.[read more]

LinkedIn & Hootsuite

The social media management tool Hootsuite has integrated with LinkedIn Company Pages, allowing Company Page Administrators to post Company Updates with Hootsuite. This means businesses can easily engage with their audience on yet another social network via Hootsuite.[read more]