This was a newsletter I distributed on New Year's Day that is a comphrehensive list of tools, resources and services for social marketing. I will be speaking at the NAMM Show in the Idea Center on Thursday at 2:30pm on how to optimize your website for maximum effect. Please stop by and say hello.  Also I will be at the NAMM Show all four days in case you want to chat.  Drop me a line or give me a call at 760 566-6998 to set up an appointment.

Don't Read This

How better to end the year (in my opinion) than with a few of my favorite social marketing "things". If you are not directly involved in digital marketing hit "delete" now as you will not find this article interesting. Please go have a glass of eggnog instead!

 

Facebook Insights

 

With the onslaught of confusing Facebook changes also came the enhanced version of Facebook analytics which is still called "Insights". The new version provides much deeper analytics data to allow marketers to determine what is working and what is not working to engage their communities. I love the way you can drill down per post and measure interaction and virality! You can learn about Insights here and even take a test. Although it does take a little experience to get the most out of the data we know have more data to dial in our strategies.

 

Facebook Advertising

 

I LOVE Facebook ads. For the musician market they are spot on. Because the cost goes down based on click throughs you are rewarded with a cheaper ad spend if the ad performs well. And now with the introduction of  Sponsored Story ads and the newly announced  Sponsored Story for the real time ticker, us marketing folk have more crayons to work with. By running a variety of ads you can determine which ones perform the best. Also now there are many  third party companies who have developed improved ad service features using the Facebook Ads API. These services allow automatic A/B testing and auto generation of similar ads plus some other powerful features. They are not cheap though as the least expensive start about $500 per month.

 

Contest and Page Creation Tools

 

The Facebook development environment got a makeover this year and spawned many new services for creating Facebook pages and contest services. I still love Wildfire Promotions mainly because it works every time and the support team there is fantastic. One nifty feature is that you can use the contest service for mobile contests too with a nifty workaround I came up with! You'll see a variety of the contests at the NAMM Show where my clients will be handing out flyers with QR codes on them to enter.

 

Shortstack and WooBox are other contest services I like as well. Shortstack has a great compliment of support documentation that really helps and that's a good thing as their services are very powerful, even allowing you to customize your CSS code. WooBox just released a mobile friendly contest hosting service so that you can use WooBox to allow contest entries from mobile devices. Nice!

 

DamnTheRadio has some excellent page creation services too. In fact, I have found the newsfeed comments section of their landing page to be so viral I recommending starting a contest by sending them to a DamnThe Radio page then encourage commenting. Lookout! Lots of added traffic and contestants this way. A new service called BackatYou claims greatly increased participation through their viral tools but I haven't tried that service yet.

 

Social Media Monitoring Analytics

 

Of course Radian6 is the granddaddy in this category and is very through and provides excellent features. It's also expensive at $600 a month per one brand. If you can afford it there are other solutions. Another player in social monitoring I really like is  Viral Heat. They are still building up the platform but they have a nifty feature allowing the software to learn what you consider to be a lead. That is a nifty feature.

 

If you are into analyzing how well you are doing against the competition check out All Face book Stats. I like this simple service because I can monitor engagement on Facebook pages that I don't have admin rights to. They have a nifty bit of code too that lets you benchmark a page's engagement with their community and compare it to your page. So you can use the new Facebook metric "People Talking About This" and data from All Facebook Stats to get a look at your competition's ability to engage their fans.

 

Facebook Applications

 

One of my favorite apps easily is "Fan of the Week". The app randomly picks a person that was posting, commenting, liking, tagging etc. on your page and awards them with the Fan of The Week award and encourages others to engage to win the award. You don't have to do anything other than install the app. Use it now before it gets extremely popular. You can of course do this without an app which incentivizes your fans to participate.

 

Napkin Labs has a clever app that encourages fans to provide feedback on a specific topic. Maybe you want to know what banner ad to use, the color of a product or some other question. The app motivates the fans and even allows other fans to choose the winner. Fangager has a similar app and provides a wide variety of apps based on your needs - they have a lot of apps! Reward your most engaged fans with Booshaka services.

 

Involver has some decent apps. Their RSS feed has a nice looking interface to feed your blog to Facebook. The YouTube app allows user comments under the video which increases sharing and engagement. Got a Flickr account? Use the Involver app to put a Flickr tab in your Facebook page.

 

Need to put your support policies, ecommerce guidelines or product catalog on Facebook. Use this technique with an iFrames application. How about dedicated customer support on Facebook?

 

Video is the thing these days. Have a live streaming event with one of your artists and require the Faceook Like button to watch it on Facebook!

 

One of the hottest app types now are coupon apps that provide coupons based on sharing. I am absolutely amazed that more dealers do not use these types of apps as they are perfect for the musician market. Incentivine and Lastwordtech are just a few companies offering these apps.

 

Need a store on Facebook? Some of my clients are using Payvment and really like the easy set up.  Tab Juice is another ecommerce (or "f-commerce" - yes it is actually a term now), solution. AN excellent solution (but not cheap) is Shopigniter that puts shopping right in the newsfeed!

 

You want to look for apps that put functionality in the newsfeed. Why? Did you know that the majority of your fans never come to your Facebook page unless motivated by some call to action? Yup. They interact with you on their personal page through the newsfeed. So look for those newsfeed apps AND motivate your fans to come to the page and interact with you.

 

TimeLine and the Real Time Ticker

 

The new TimeLine features look great and I think will increase community and interaction. Want a walk-through of the new Facebook features?  Here you go. I do think the new app platform that companies like the Washington Post are using definitely needs some tweaking. These so called "frictionless" apps opt people in to the features automatically. Most people don't know this nor do they know how to filter this information or turn it off. If I see one more post about one of my friends reading a Washington Post article I am going to scream! While these social graph apps are increasing community I think they will have a detrimental effect over time unless Facebook and the developers make them less intrusive.

 

What is up with the Facebook real time ticker anyway? Let's see, let me guess. I bet the conversation went like this at Facebook HQ:

 

"We need to optimize the newsfeed for revenue."

 

"Yes, but aren't we a social network? Won't that dilute the power of Facebook for the community?"

 

"Well...put another feed in there that is real time."

 

"Won't that confuse people?"

 

"Sure. But we're Facebook. People will figure it out."

 

"Hey we can put ads in that stream too. I like it."

 

As Kurt Vonnegut says, "So it goes."

 

Social Media Examiner Small Business Contest

 

This summer Social Media Examiner asked people to nominate their favorite small business on Facebook. Thousands of businesses were submitted. If you would like to check out some great Facebook pages with a brief analysis of why they work,  click here.

 

I participated in the  Social Media Examiner Facebook Summit that consisted of 16 webinars in October. While I didn't learn anything groundbreaking (that's good right?) the sessions were excellent for getting people started. One thing that was apparent from these sessions: it's impossible to keep up with everything that goes on in social media marketing. That's the bottom line on that one! So I would highly recommend their summit series when it comes around again.

 

All in One Widget

 

Zooshia has a slick widget that lets you put customizable feeds of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on your blog or website. It's nice to you use one widget instead of three.

 

Facebook References

 

How many of you have created a Facebook sweepstakes without ever reading the Facebook Promotion Guidelines? Hmmm. You know who you are. Click on the link and at least read the guidelines once!  This article helps explain things. The  Facebook Marketing Dictionary explains (or tries to) the Facebook marketing terminology.

 

Twitter Tidbits

 

Payvment the company mentioned early that provides e-commerce for Facebook pages now has a  Twitter solution. Tweetscan sends relevant tweets to you in an email or RSS feed so you can monitor or look for potential leads and followers. Need to dump those followers who are spammers or worse?  Here are some tools that let you purge non-relevant followers. Want to send eBay store listings to a Twitter account? Check it out. If you haven't created a branded Twitter background you should. Here's a  help desk solution for Twitter.

 

Looking for Answers

 

Got a social marketing question? Well, you could send me an email but if you don't want to do that you can use Quora, a technology forum where Facebook employees are known to hang out. The LinkedIn group called "Facebook Success Summit" which is also used for the Social Media Examiner Summit mentioned early has lots of folks available to answer your questions too.

 

Tip of the Iceberg

 

These tips are just the tip of the iceberg for social marketing solutions. The tools are just that - tools. The technologies change and morph over time and the changes are coming really fast these days, i.e. Google Plus business pages. So worry less about the tools and focus on the goals and objectives. That way you will feel more grounded as digital marketing continues to change. It's okay if you haven't heard about the latest Facebook app. It's NOT OKAY if you don't have a plan of attack for your social marketing programs!

 

So, it's time to make that New Year's Resolution and really work your marketing strategies. This includes optimization, analysis, experimentation and analysis. It's a loop. Just keep doing it and Happy New Year to you all.