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Category Archives: social media trends

Some Companies With Smart Social Media Presence

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TwitterfeedSometimes it’s hard to understand just what to do with your social media accounts. You might have Facebook and Twitter, but they are either A) just sitting there or B) lacking focus. But there are some major companies that do social media right.

  • GrubHub: GrubHub has a great Twitter and Facebook presence, and both are different enough that they get people subscribing to both. Their Twitter account allows for more direct communication with customers and their Facebook has a lot of giveaways. But they also have a really funny, sarcastic tone of voice that fits right in with their 20s-30s audience.
  • DSW.com: DSW is also a winner when it comes to giveaways. They do weekly giveaways on their Facebook, offering free shoes for a lucky few from those who like and participate on their page.  They also constantly share new shoes coming in to their stores, a good way to get people to return to the actual site or brick and mortar stores.
  • Starbucks: With over 25 million Facebook fans and  1.5 million Twitter followers, Starbucks has used social media to better its company. How? It’s let customer submit ideas for the company, as well as connecting together a community of volunteers with non-profit organizations. They do a lot outside of just promoting their coffee, which is what makes them so successful.

So with these few companies in mind, maybe you can think about what focus and way you can brand your social media accounts and reach out to your specific audience. Get some inspiration and roll with it!

Corporate Social Networkers Piggy Backing On Trends

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Piggy back on others.

Riding a trend is one of the best things most companies can do on the Web to gain more followers and engage with more consumers. This is why the release of a giant movie like Iron Man 3 for example might result in a wide array of tweets and other social networking activity not at all associated with the film itself. These posts are hoping to seize on the

already excited audience and transfer some of that enthusiasm onto their product. This is a great method for online marketing.

Similarly, many companies will latch onto popular songs (“Thrift Shop”, “Call Me Maybe”, etc.), television events (Oscars, Super Bowl) or news stories to move their merchandise through their social networking strategies.

Of course, as always with the Internet, it is important to walk a tightrope of self awareness without tempting trolls to besmirch your good name for your opportunism.Finding that balance between using fun popular topics for your own branding purposes is done best by trial and error with a constant focus on reaction. If the crowd on Twitter seems displeased by a particular post it is best to delete it quickly and address the problem directly. Eventually this will all become like second nature and you could establish some meaningful customer outreach in the process.

Top Twitter Trends of 2012

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2012 twitter trendsTwitter is one of the most used social media outlets in the world and everyone from the average Joe and Jane to famous celebrities and businesses use it. In 140 characters an individual or business can share thoughts, opinions, even advertisements. Part of using Twitter means learning how to use hashtags (#) to create a common subject of discussion within the so-called Twitterverse. This created trends that many people latched onto and thus became popular. Here are a few trends that became popular in 2012.

  • The Olympics: a game the entire world gets involved in, it does not come as a surprise London’s 2012 Summer Olympics trended the highest last year.
  • 2012 Presidential Election: from each candidate’s tour across the country all the way up to election night, millions of people tweeted about this very contested election, reaching hundreds of thousands of Tweets in a single minute.
  • The Super Bowl: we Americans love our football and the Super Bowl is the culmination of our love of the sport. Super Bowl XLVI saw the New York Giants duke it out against the New England Patriots, with many fans speaking for one team and against another on Twitter.
  • Hurricane Sandy: Super Storm Sandy hit the East Coast – especially the Tri-State Area – very hard and was a topic of much conversation before, during, and after the event. Topics ranged from emergency broadcasts, making preparations, well wishes, and simple forms of communication with the rest of the world.

NYC Social Media Week 2013

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smw 2103

It’s official! The 2013 Social Media Week in New York City is underway until February 22, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to learn about the techniques, trends, and platforms that are piquing the interest of the entrepreneurial and tech worlds. Attendees are sure to be all-a-Twitter (Ha! Get it?) about the collaborative work spaces, interactive installations, and the variety of master classes. Leading speakers during the week include, Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian, New York Times Media Reporter Brian Stelter, Code for America Founder and Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka, and many other CEOs, founders, authors, reporters, and innovators working within the realms of social media, business development, and communication. If you’re following SMW13, here’s a guide to keep up-to-date with the official mobile app, streamed events, and real-time social updates.

To promote social media awareness during another awesome week in NYC, each day the Ajax Union blog will feature the ins-and-outs of one of our favorite online platforms. The posts will be written by the social media savvy members of the Ajax Union staff with a knack for business promotion and a passion for innovation.

GIF Takes Word of the Year

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One of the most popular online novelties for blogs, GIFs seem to be ruling the internet masses in more ways than just viral spreading this year. Earlier this week, Oxford University Press released GIF, an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, as the word of the year. Surprisingly, GIF is an acronym that was first used in 1987 by CompuServe. GIF also serves as a noun and a verb. GIF Bin represents one of the many popular GIF blogs that spread the love of GIFs and helped rocket the term to being dubbed the word of the year. Some of the contenders for word of the year include the acronym YOLO, superstorm, and super PAC.

Post-Election Facebook Fans Changing

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Now that the storm of political campaigning has ended, both of the presidential candidates face social media scrutiny. However, Romney’s immediate scrutiny seems to be losing Facebook fans at an alarming rate of 847 friends each hour, totaling over 55,000 users that have unliked his his page. On the plus side for him, he has gained over 17,000 Twitter followers since election night. For Obama’s social media presence, he has gained over 804,000 page likes since the close of the election, in addition to the record setting most retweeted tweet on election night.

A Pinterest Full of Secrets?

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Have you ever wanted to pin yourself onto a board on Pinterest without sharing it with everyone else? The social media company has just announced that pinners are now able to deem one of their boards “secret” sharing it only with themselves and people they invite. The bummer is that you can’t apply this to your preexisting boards, but it’ll work going forward—which is great, because who doesn’t have a few guilty pleasure?

2012 Presidential Election Set Twitter Record

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The election this past Tuesday night garnished a record 20+ million tweets in one single night, effectively making it the most tweeted government ever in the social networking site’s history. This just goes to show that social networking truly is becoming a valid news source, and a reputable way to communicate about important historical events. Tell us, are any of your tweets part of the 20 million that attributed to Tuesday night’s record?

MySpace Gets a Makeover

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Remember MySpace? One of the first super popular social networking websites fell to the wayside after Facebook, and then Twitter, hit the scene. However, MySpace always maintained a special spot in the hearts of magicians as a music-sharing tool for unsigned bands and solo acts. And now, almost a decade after its hay day, MySpace, backed by pop-star-turned-actor Justin Timberlake, is getting a makeover. Redesigned with a look that reminds us of Pinterest, the website looks fresh. But can Justin Timberlake bring sexy back to the digital community that bit the dust?

Women and Social Media

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One can’t say, as a whole, whether or not women like to shop or even if they handle the majority of household shopping. However, women do control 85 percent of purchasing in the United States.  In line with this statistic, brands have taken notice and often approach marketing with a focus on the females in the audience.

When it comes to online marketing, and social media marketing in particular, the same is true because not only do women control the market, but they are far more active on social media than men. Recent data suggests that women are 55% more likely to buy from companies that they interact with on social media than those without an active online presence. Furthermore, over one third of women believe that the number one reason to login to social media accounts is to remain privy to coupons and deals offered online.

An important fact to keep in mind when crafting women-focuses campaigns, is that increased social media engagement results in increased real-world engagement for many of these women. In other words, Facebook activity from a brand may inspire women to visit that store, not necessarily buy online. So offer incentives to buy online if that’s your goal.

Klout Score Changes

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The San Francisco-based social media analytics company Klout recently quadrupled its measurement variables, which means your Klout score may have changed quite a bit. What Klout does is collect data from your social networking profiles like Facebook and Instagram. Then, that data is analyzed and each user is given a Klout score which represents the reach and strength of their online influence. The number of followers or fans a person has, the content they contribute, and how their followers and fans interact with the content all contribute to Klout score, which is ranked 1 to 100.

Recently, however, Klout has made certain factors more important in determining score. Who is following you and how you interact with them matters more now than it did in the past.

Blogger Emily Price put it well when she said: “For instance, a like on your latest cat photo from Barack Obama will mean a lot more than a like from your coworker.”

Speaking of the President, with the new analytics system, Barak Obama’s Klout score increased from 94 to 99, while Justin Biebers falls nine points to 91.

Find out more at Mashable.

 

Seven Social Media Tactics

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According to eMarketer, Facebook, Twitter and other social media are expected to surpass search engine optimization in 2013 as the driving force behind business growth online. Thus it is critical that Internet marketers take note of how search engine algorithms are incorporating social media, and how this changes the way we approach search engine friendliness and online brand engagement. Check out this article from clickz.com to read about seven social media tactics you need for 2013.

Photo Update from FB

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On Monday, a short article posted to the Facebook Newsroom revealed an update to the way Facebook users experience photo sharing to make it more enjoyable.

See bigger photos

Now when you click Photos at the top of your timeline, you’ll see larger pictures that fill up the page. You can use the menu to find shots you’re tagged in, pictures you’ve shared and albums you’ve created.

Here’s what it will look like when the changes hit your profile.

Connecting Your Social Media And Social Networking Platforms

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With so many new platforms to use to promote yourself, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, WordPress, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr, just to name a few, it seems like an absolute nightmare keeping things updated. It becomes overwhelming to have to post the same thing several times and in different formats.

However, you can make your life a whole lot easier if you just connect your accounts. Many of these sites are friendly and will have buttons to connect your posts on other sites to help spread them around. This means that when you upload a new pin on Pinterest, you’ll have it pop up on your Facebook and Twitter, which will then post it to any sites you connected those accounts with. You save yourself annoyance and stress.

It also drives more conversation. Your business can benefit from more activity. Engaging viewers from multiple platforms will empower your brand and give it quicker recognition. So long as you choose which posts to link via multiple sites, you won’t appear to be spammy to followers.

You can easily set your preferences, whether you want the social media or networking sites to do this automatically or whether you prefer manual control of the posts. Many prefer manual just because it allows you to build a more dynamic and steady campaign.

Use these sites to your advantage. If these social media sites offer you the chance to connect and it means being more productive, do it.

What’s Most Engaging?

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What social networking site do you visit most frequently? Which network makes you feel the most engaged? Say what you will, but comScore doesn’t cite Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any of the other major players as the most “engaging” that the web has to offer. Rather, the analytics company names Tagged as the most social of networks.

Log in via Facebook to see for yourself! Tagged.com.

As for comScore’s credentials, straight from the horse’s mouth: “comScore is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics.”

PInteresting

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Take a look at this infographic originally published by mashable to find out juicy tidbits about Pinterest’s fast climb. Did you know that Pinterst users can shared their pins on Facebook and Twitter? Or that Pinterest has its own phone app? Or that Pinterst is GREAT for business marketing? No? Then read on!