Below is live coverage of the Google + Facebook = Success: Getting More Lift With Social Media panel from the SES San Francisco 2011 conference. This coverage is provided by Shanon Woodruff at RankSmart.
Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.
Speakers:
Russ Mann, Founder & CEO, Covario
Alex Funk, Senior Manager, Paid Media, Covario
Social Networks Has Grown & Matured
Most social networks have leveled off in population and growth
65 million people "Like" things on FB everyday.
Twitter: 200 million tweets each day on Twitter - Enough content to fill a 10 million page book.
-Customer Engagement - 85.4%
-Direct Customer Comm - 65%
-Speed f Feedback - 59.9%
-Learning Customer Preferences - 59.1%
-Low Cost - 59.1%
-Brand Building - 48.2%
-Market Research - 42.3%
-Credibility of the "crowd" - 40.1%
-Research - 37.2%
-Great Lead Generation - 21.2%
-Customer Services - 17.5%
Social is both a panel and a channel
Social is the vocal minority, and search is the silent majority
Search is behavioral - search is emotional
Google is including your social network in it's results, and so is Bing.
Search is about targeting terms, social is about hyper-targeting from the additional information generated from UGC. This allows you to better understand the user.
Building a search and social campaign must be holistic.
-Increase reach
-Be Top Mind
-Grow audience
-Communicate with your customers
-Learn from your market and gain feedback drive engagement
-Drive engagement and Online/Offline conversions
-Awareness: A person views a paid ad, sponsored account or fan page
-Consideration: A person takes action to learn about product within any one area
-Conversion: Completion of a final action
SEM Keywords > Interestes plus Categories > User Data > Keywords Better Message > Refine Search
When you put all this together you get a better picture of who your audience is.
What Was: People, Process, and Technology
Now: Strategy, Structure, and System
How's it Working?
Promoted Trends on Twitter now cost only $120k per day (Up from $25k per day 1 year Piror)
-Be Honest - Don't ride unrelated trends
-Ask relevant questions
-Offer Perk/rewards
-Recycling is bad - keep content fresh
-Timely communication
-Monitor your spikes, like and dislikes
-Don't use as a pure "sales channel" unless that's understood (@DellOutlet)
Q: What was the critical success factor in your FB example
A: Lots of testing, stories, ad units - set up a wide net to begin with - at start is was over a dollar a fan, but with the data collected, it decreased the cost to less that 50 cents a fan - The same things that help you rank higher will help you with social, good quality content, testing, and data will help you to grow your social media campaign.
Q: Did Google end their contract with Twitter, and are tweets showing up slower in results?
A: Yes. It is not moving to Google Plus to feed the instant results on your Google searches. Also, its is not Google vs Bing or Google vs FB, for marketers it is both.