Most companies now have a Social Media strategy in place, whether it be in use for PR purposes (as a lot of big companies are doing with Twitter) or for Lead generation (this is the side that most marketing companies are talking about). Regardless of your approach, it's going to be important to understand how things are working for you.

There are some important statistics that you're going to have to monitor, like audience size and interactions, but if you're active across multiple platforms this can get a bit confusing. The fact that there are hundreds of different terms being thrown around, all of which basically mean the same thing, doesn't exactly help. On top of this, there's some more important and all together more interesting things you're going to want to monitor, and they may not be the first thing that gets drawn to your attention.

What I'm going to do is break down for you all the different things that might get mentioned in a report to help you get a clear picture of how your campaign is going.

Audience

After much speculation and what seemed like an eternity, finally - the Facebook Timeline for brand pages is now live!

Facebook Timeline for pages is a great opportunity for brands that want to tell a more engaging and authentic story of their company.

Timeline makes it easier for people to find information by pushing the Info section, photos, apps and map to the top of the page in a clear navigation bar.

It gives companies of all sizes the opportunity to get creative and use their cover photos, app designs and interactive features to grow their overall presence and influence in the world of social media.

With all this in mind, I will now show you how to get your company's page up-to-scratch and ahead of your competitors!

Firstly however, it is important to note that there are some major changes to company pages such as; how the applications are displayed, the introduction of cover photos (the default landing pages have now gone entirely) and the options for fan interaction have now been improved.

You can enable your new brand page now but on the 30th March 2012 your Page will automatically convert to the new format (much in the same way the new Timeline for profiles was introduced earlier this year) – so it's best to get prepared beforehand.

Follow my guide on how to enable it NOW:

By now we've all heard of Pinterest. You'd be hard pressed to have escaped it in fact. For some of us it's just another one of those Social Media sites floating around in the background and for others it's a big deal. No doubt some of you will have been running around over the last month or so trying to find out all about it, and even more importantly, how to generate leads from it.

There's a lot of blogs out there from people who've been on this from the word go, trying to pinpoint the best strategies for building a brand identity on the site. Pun not intended of course. Now some of these blogs are pretty useful, and at this point there's more than enough information out there to make sure that your brand is forced down peoples throats deep enough that they'll never forget the experience. Some of the strategies are pretty clever too, though they don't vary too differently from that of other platforms.

Twitter moves closer to PPC as it launches self-service advertising

With the rise of social media and it's use in business, different platforms have been quick to bring advertising services to the table. And why not? Google PPC and Facebook PPC are valuable weapons in any company's digital marketing arsenal. However, Twitter have been somewhat slower on the uptake. Whilst its true that there millions of punters on Twitter, all conversing on topics potentially relevant to your business, most people seem to agree that introducing an advertising platform that doesn't compromise the service will prove difficult.

Digital to Direct Marketing – How to make telemarketing the most powerful asset to your marketing strategy

You may not have heard about 'D2D' Marketing. The whole process is a fairly new concept...but one which we feel gives us at Red Wasp the pioneering edge.

Most people are aware of how telemarketing works. You get a list of data to call (usually cold with no prior contact) and work through it systematically, ensuring that call backs are hit on time and opportunities are converted into qualified leads.

Some of you may already have the benefit of having warm leads to follow up on, be it registered interest from a prospect at a trade show or previous customers, which is great, but targeting the cold data is where the hardest challenge lies. So how can we improve that?

The answer is simple. Website traffic. If someone has come to your website, the chances are they are looking for your services or interested in your product. With 'D2D' Marketing there are three steps you need to take to turn these potential interests into the qualified leads we all fight for, and here they are:

As many of you have already seen, Facebook recently launched the 'Timeline' feature which allowed a Facebook users 'life story' to be shown in the form of a scrap-book style profile page. All of your activity on Facebook within a particular year (and since you created your account) such as photos taken, events attended etc are captured by Facebook and then displayed to your friends in a 'Timeline' format.

Twitters much anticipated revamp comes in to effect in the UK this Spring and about time too!

Having relevant and interesting content is vital, however this alone does not guarantee that your fans will continue to visit your page or interact with your page. You need to give your fans a reason to engage with you.

Incredibly, 98% of all website and social media page visitors will never contact you - we at Red Wasp Marketing help identify who they are, make contact with them and follow up any potential interest while most importantly - delivering all leads directly to your business.

Ten easy steps to set up a Google+ page for your business

1. Create and log-in to your personal Google+ account
To do this you need an email account (preferably gmail), once you're finished, you'll find an link to 'Create a Google+ page' at the bottom of the right hand side of the main homepage, click this!

2. Choose a category that applies to your business
You have to choose from;

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organisation
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• or Other

3. Add basic company details and select the audience
This is your opportunity to enter your company name, link your new Google+ page with your website, and select which category your business falls under.

4. Add your company logo and tagline
Google+ logos are square so if like us your logo is naturally rectangular you may have a little creative work on your hands, Google also provide an online 'Creative Kit' you can use to change your logo if needed. The tagline is important as it not only tells your customers what you do, but also provides Google with an idea of what your company does.

5. 'Get Started'
Much of the tools you need to push your new page out to the masses can be found on the main Google+ homepage via a link named 'Get Started' on the bottom of the right hand side, click this!

6. Add the Google+ badge to your website
In the 'Get Started' section, you'll find a widget you can add to your website which will take any clickers directly to your new company Google+ page. This can be added to email signatures, your homepage, your blog, anywhere you like. Also, once Google can see the badge on your website, and see your website’s URL on your new Google+ page, it will link the two, and allow people to find your Google+ page directly from the main search bar just by adding a plus sign before typing your company name.








7. Add the +1 button
Also in the 'Get Started' section you'll find a link to help you add a +1 button to your website and any content you're publishing online. This allows your contacts to publicly recommend you, and your content to their contacts online. These recommendations will then appear in Google's natural listings, and will soon become much more powerful than Google AdWords, with people relying much more on personal recommendations.

8. Invite all your contacts
You can invite your existing clients and prospect either by sharing your new pages URL or by pointing them to your new G+ badge you've hopefully added to your website, email footers and blog. As with Facebook and LinkedIn, you can't currently upload a list of contacts and send invites as your company page, but you can do this via your personal page if you so wish. Once a contact has connected with your new company page, you can then add them to a 'circle'. We'd recommend using different 'circles' for prospects & existing clients, that way you can personalise what messages you send out to each. You can also take this idea further and separate up your clients depending on what products or services they currently you currently provide them with to personalise your messages further.

9. Hash Tag Research
Just like on Twitter, you can add hash tags to your posts on Google+ to allow people you're not currently connected with to find relevant content. From the main Google+ homepage you can search for relevant Hash Tags people are already using, for example at Red Wasp we were pleased to find an existing group of people sharing content under #marketing #advertising & #PPC. Whatever hash tags relate to your industry, write them down and make sure you include them on all relevant posts.

10. Publish Content
When publishing content on Google+ the trick is to make it as personalised as possible. Don't just send out the same message to everyone in the same fashion you would on other social media profiles, create a specific 'circle' of contacts, and write a piece of content aimed at them. You're click through rates will be much higher, and people will +1 your content a lot more.

Five reasons you should use Google+ for your business

1. Improve your Google search rankings

With the introduction of company pages on Google+, it becomes possible to link your company website and G+ page through a combination of badges, icons and +1 buttons. As this grows it will inevitably be integrated into their search algorithms, and in the mean time it is going to have an enormous impact on the amount of clicks a search result receives. This will completely change the landscape of SEO and for anyone who is serious about their inbound marketing, a well developed G+ profile is going to be invaluable.

2. Precise targeting

The thing that makes G+ different is the way in which you can, be targeted in how you share content. For an individual user, this means sharing more personal information with close friends and hiding it from others. For a company, this means being able to communicate specific messages with different groups of people; be it current clients or prospects, or perhaps different groups of staff. You can communicate to all of them through one platform, and can pretty much guarantee they'll get a notification as everyone uses Google.

3. Integration with other Google products

Applications like analytics and Adwords are integral to the digital strategy of most companies, and this only scratches the surface of what Google offers. The integration of these products with G+ and its company pages is already well under way, and the information that will be made available as a result of this, will make these apps infinitely more powerful and precise.




4. All the best features of other Social Media platforms

All social media platforms all have their own strengths, which is exactly why they are so popular. Facebook provides an unlimited supply of apps to aid our social interaction, LinkedIn give us interaction with our specific professional circles, Twitter enables us to communicate 1 way with strangers and engage in trends, social bookmarking sites like Reddit & StumbleUpon provide you with content based on your interests, and Skype allows us to speak to people via video link from the other side of the world. Google's social media platform does every single one of these things! It really is set to make all other forms of social media obsolete.

5. It's Google!

What more can I say. All of these incredible functionalities and exciting levels of integration are brought to us by Google, the single most powerful web based company in existence. They are constantly developing, constantly improving, and they have almost total control of which aspects of the internet we can access. Can you imagine anyone being able to do a better job?

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What is content marketing and why should I bother?

If you're looking at Red Wasp's website, it's a possibility that you may be considering direct or digital marketing services and as such you may stumble across our blog. It struck me that some people coming here may not necessarily be familiar with content marketing and what it can offer. To be fair, content marketing can go by many names; corporate media, corporate publishing, branded content... the list can go on.

LinkedIn has recently launched “Status Updates” for its company pages.

This nifty little update was first announced by the LinkedIn team on their blog in early October, but has recently received an official release, with e-mails sent to business people all over the planet. Needless to say it's been getting a lot of attention as a result.

The benefits of this particular update barely need spelling out. It is now possible to transmit messages to a company's entire fan base on linked in; Updating them on anything from special offers to new products and services without ever being invasive and ensuring that the message can be seen and shared by anyone who takes an interest. A nice addition to your Social Media Marketing armoury, I'm sure you'll agree.

Exciting as this may seem, it is not particularly useful if you are looking to use LinkedIn to reach new prospects. In fact, short of having a very active profile (which is still by far the best approach), the ways of expanding your audience are generally limited to LinkedIn's PPC service and the natural brand power of your company. In-fact, I might go so far as to say it's a slightly less effective tool than twitter, though of course it's not something to neglect if your serious about your digital approach. Plus, you could argue that the audience will be more relevant, especially for a B2B company.

So, although it is now possible for companies to “tweet” through LinkedIn (for want of a better word), there is still a problem of how to expand their audience, a problem against which I am constantly battling.

Now, although this new update doesn't make my day job any easier (in fact it gives me one extra thing to think about since I can't yet sync it with my company's Twitter account) this doesn't stop me from getting excited about it.

The reason for my excitement can perhaps be eluded to in just one word:

“Apps”

Anyone who uses Facebook regularly will be aware that fan pages were implemented as a way for non-individuals to have a voice on the platform. This has included the use of status updates and a wide array of apps. From embedded media players, links to other sites to competitions and online stores.

Linked in already uses apps on individual profiles, but up until now it has treated it's company pages as a fairly passive point of reference for people. It seems to me that enabling status updates for these pages is the first step towards mimicking Facebook in that area.



I think we can expect the degree of customisation allowed to company pages to change massively over the next few months. From what is currently limited to an inbuilt banner system in the product and services tab of a page, to a wide variety of different apps that allow an exciting range of functionality.

If this is an accurate prediction, the possibilities become almost endless.

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Three top tips to help you write AWESOME content!

You may have heard the famous term “content is king” banded around. It is talked about a lot, and it's not hard to understand why when you consider that pretty much anything you do online is based around it. So, as my first blog post about content writing I thought I’d offer some tips that can help you create awesome blogs, articles, tweets and more to help you really engage customers and prospects.

With nearly 1 billion users, Facebook is an ever-present in most of our lives and it is now being utilised by businesses just as much as the everyday user.

Businesses have learnt to harness the incredible possibilities of connecting with their customers through Social Media, and the power of advertising to new prospects by means of heavily targeted advertising campaigns and promotions.

Twitter has definitely come a long way since its inception, and users from across the globe continue to sign up and get their teeth sunk in.  From what your dog is currently chewing on and how much you hate that certain celebrity (I’m looking at you Justin Bieber) to the hot topics of the world today (Steve Jobs, Occupy Wall Street, you get the picture). But what I love about Twitter is the amazing affects it can have on a business and how it brings so much more to the table.

Here are a few examples of how some companies have added Twitter to their social media marketing strategy to improve their customer engagement:

1. A Leading UK bakery chain use Twitter to promote free vouchers in conjunction with newspapers, respond to customer queries and complaints in real time and promote competitions for all ages with chances to win prizes

Five years ago, Twitter came to life when @jack sent the first Tweet to his seven followers. Now, 100 million active users around the globe turn to Twitter to share their thoughts and find out what’s happening in the world right now.

Read the full article here http://blog.twitter.com/2011/09/one-hundred-million-voices.html

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Don't worry you are not alone. With so many tools to choose from, marketeers have never had so much choice. Thankfully you don't have to choose, in fact, if you combine online and offline techniques in the right way you could see your ROI explode.

Digital to Direct (D2D) Marketing in 3 simple steps: