What Is Worth the Money When It Comes to Social Media?

For individuals, social media is great because it doesn’t cost anything. You can talk with your friends and spread your opinion without having to pay a dime. Unfortunately, businesses aren’t so lucky. Putting time and effort into a social media campaign can actually cost quite a bit of money when all is said and done.

Although signing up for the sites initially is free, there are many costs that catch businesses off guard. The worst part: Many businesses keep trying to work against the need to spend any money on social media. After all, social media is supposed to be free, right?

The truth is—just because something is free at first doesn’t mean it is going to stay free forever. In fact, it can sometimes be a good thing when your company becomes so successful that you have to start spending a little bit of money to keep it under control. This is an indication that your company is growing, and social media is no different. However, it can be tough to know what is worth the money, and in such a struggling economy every penny matters.

Below are some of the costs involved with social media that you may want to consider as well as some that are better left ignored:

Top 3 Social Media Costs: Are They All Worth the Money?

1. Scheduling tools such as Buffer charge for companies hoping to add multiple accounts.

No. This is probably not worth the money because there are scheduling tools, such as Timely.is, available that allow you to manage multiple accounts for free. If you are an individual, a scheduling tool like Buffer makes perfect sense because it doesn’t cost anything. However, a company’s finances are better spent on things aside from scheduling tweets and Facebook posts through a paid service. Although Buffer and Timely.is do differ in the way they schedule your messages, it is still probably best to wait until you are extremely financially secure to consider spending money on social media scheduling.

2. Hiring a social media consultant or agency to help you run your campaigns.

Yes. Unless you really know what you are doing and you have a large amount of time to work with social media, it is a good idea to hire someone with some experience. Knowing how to manage social media on a company level is different than knowing how it works on a personal level, and many business owners learn this the hard way. If you do not keep up with social media and do not have a presence on all of the major networks, this can actually hurt your company, making an expert really worth the money. Although I do not necessarily agree with hiring one person full-time to manage your social media efforts, it is a good idea to put someone such as an SEO director or content writer in charge of these efforts, or just hire someone part time.

3. Advertising on social media sites.

Yes. The major social media networks have users counting into the billions, so advertising on these sites is a great idea for any company. Social networks are also unique because you can make sure that your ad is being seen by someone within your target audience. Social networking already segments users into age groups, genders, and even religious backgrounds, so you will know exactly where to advertise. Visit Top Rank to learn more about how you can get involved with advertising on a social network.

The most important thing to remember is that social media is extremely important. If you are going to spend money on marketing campaigns, social media is something that should be put at the top of the priority list. Typically, your social media campaign will still be less expensive than your other marketing campaigns, so it’s not something to stress over.

Have you ever spent money on an aspect of social media? What was your experience?

Your Call To Action On Facebook

As more business owners recognise the value of facebook as an integral part of their marketing mix, I am pleased to observe that more fan pages are adopting a professional and attractive look.

However, when you get your custom designed facebook page you can still leave your competitors in the dust just by using a well underrated trick.

Have you ever been to a marketing seminar and heard time and time again how important a call to action is for any kind of advertising? Yet if you open the advertising pages of a newspaper you will notice that very few advertisers actually use it...in other words they are wasting precious marketing resources on ineffective, non measurable advertising.

The same applies to your facebook page. There are 2 main calls to action that you can use on your fan page to grow your fan base as well as your email list, plus get more clients through the door. Here they are:

1) A strong call to action for your page visitors to "like" your page. But you cannot expect them to like your page if you are not serving their self interest, the famous "what's in it for me".
"Like our page and get fresh updates on our exclusive facebook fans restaurant offers" or
"Like our page and automatically become part of our VIP customer club to receive regular added bonuses and free offers". This works for beauty therapy, retail, gyms , cafes or any high repeat purchase businesses where customer loyalty is key.

2) Instantly start growing your email list by using an auto-responder "opt in" form. Have something of value to give away in exchange for their email address: "Receive our free report on 7 ways to alleviate back pain in 5 minute per day" could work very well for a chiropractor or a physiotherapist.
If you keep in mind that across all industries, only 5% of browsers are ready to buy now, you have to do something to keep your chances alive in the future. The point of the opt-in form is to increase your chance of initiating a relationship with the non committed visitors.

To help you remember how to structure your welcome page, just go back to the well known "A.I.D.A" advertising formula. It works for fan pages:

A for Attention, by having a well designed custom page with a good headline

I for Interest, tell your visitors what they will find interesting on your page

D for Desire. Create desire for them to like you page or sign up on your "opt in" form

A for Action. Strong call to action " Like our page" with arrows to the "like" button, or "Register to receive our free report or Free Gift voucher"

Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market

The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.

But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.

The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.

Bollen and colleagues checked a huge Google database to see what other words are commonly used in conjunction with the original 72 adjectives, and added those words to their lexicon. Then the researchers took 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters between February and December 2008, selected the tweets that indicated a confession of emotion (tweets that included the words “I feel” or “I’m feeling,” for instance), and ran the test on the entire data set.

“We’re using Twitter like a psychiatric patient,” Bollen said. “This allows us to measure the mood of the public over these six different mood states.”

As a sanity check, the researchers looked at the public mood on some easily-predictable days, like Election Day 2008 and Thanksgiving. The results were as expected: Twitter was anxious the day before the election, and much calmer, happier and kinder on Election Day itself, though all returned to normal by Nov. 5. On Thanksgiving, Twitter’s “Happy” score spiked.

Then, just to see what would happen, Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.

“I sank into my chair. That’s a pretty big result,” Bollen said. “It was one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments.”

But this surprising correlation said nothing about whether Twitter could be used to tell the future. To test that idea, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict whether the stock market would go up or down, first using only the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the past three days, then including emotional data.

The algorithm did pretty well using stock market data alone, predicting the shape of the stock market with 73.3 percent accuracy. But it did even better when the emotional information was added, reaching up to 86.7 percent accuracy.

“Including this mood information leads to higher accuracy,” Bollen said. He stressed that their algorithm is highly simplified, and not the best stock market predictor anyone could come up with. But “we’re presuming on the basis of what we found, if you have some kind of super-duper algorithm and you add our time series, its accuracy will go up, as well.”

The fact that Twitter mood could predict the stock market’s movements even in the middle of 2008 is also significant, Bollen added.

“This was probably one of the most difficult periods to predict,” he said. “We had a presidential election, we had what looked to be financial Armageddon, we had the start of what has been the deepest and greatest recession since the 1930s… If our algorithm was able to predict Dow Jones Industrial Average in that period, we figured that may establish some kind of lower baseline. It could do a lot better in other periods of time.”

But why does it work? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” Bollen said. It’s reasonable to assume that people’s moods will have some effect on their investments, he says, but more research is needed to figure out exactly how.

“It’s a pretty interesting result,” commented computer scientist Sitaram Asur of HP Labs. But even though the correlation is there, Asur is reluctant to believe that the moods captured on Twitter can cause the stock market to change. Not everyone on Twitter plays the stock market, he notes, or even lives in the United States. And he would like to see the algorithm used on tweets from a wider span of time.

“If it is true, if we can actually find this correlation to be consistent, that will be a very important result,” he said. “But right now, I would be cautious about saying how important this is.”

Bollen agrees that the result has some shortcomings. “We need to expand this,” he said. The next step, he said, is to “put some of our money where our mouths are, and try to do this in real time.”

Facebook accounts versus Facebook fanpage: what do I choose?

This is a question I get asked a lot: For my business do

I get a facebook account and get lots of friends into it

or do I get a Facebook page and grow my Fans list?

Using the right strategy is not complex, but crucial.

Here are my answers:

Case Number One:

You are an accountant, a lawyer, a consultant, a coach

etc....or any other situation where you are known as a

business person and you are the main reason people

will do business with your company.

In that case you should have a personal account where

you build a Friends list and you become member of

facebook groups within your industry.

This in turn helps you build your following and you can

then direct them to your fan page.

So in many cases in small business you need both an

account under your own name and then a fan page under

your name or your company name.

Case Number Two

If you own or co-own a corporation and people do

business with your company mainly because your

company has a big name in the industry, then you can

go straight to having a page only, under your company

name.

The main restriction here is that a page cannot

be part of a Facebook group. That alone limits your viral

marketing options down the track.

Having a proper social media strategy can sound

complex but it is possible to keep it simple and easy,

with great return on investment.

This is a very brief answer to this question, there

are more elements to it but I just wanted to give you

some clarity here.