7 Tips For Effective Social Photos For Your Business

Today, anyone can be a celebrity. Thanks to social media that has silenced the perpetual and often boring debate of picture versus the written word, to an agreement that one complements the other. Facebook’s Timeline may seem to have sparked the discussions again, with their demand for large photos to be posted on the profile. But even article writers will have to admit that the 399 wide pixels cover image has replaced a thousand words. But unlike other social media that are either too photo-oriented or too text-oriented, Facebook is well-balanced, retaining the apps functionalities, links and text that make for a complete ‘story,’ a word that is now commonly associated with the site.

It is inspiring to see what individuals and companies have done with this Timeline. But don’t feel overwhelmed by brands. As long as you have made yours look unique and conveyed what your company serves through the image, consider the job well done, no matter what size or how new your business.

To handle the medium, Facebook has sage advice: “Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property.” This and more do’s and don’ts on the Facebook website must be appreciated for providing quality and standards to marketing that had become increasingly lagging in the business world.

But there is a downside of putting pictorial content on social websites, which is that they are open to criticism. To avoid embarrassment of your picture categorized under ‘top 20 weird photos’, it is a good idea to take the opinions of trustworthy sources prior to posting the photo. While at it, here are useful tips to ensure your pictures are as good as your business, or even better:

• If you lack imagination, just put up your company’s logo and slogan. Play around with their placement, the fonts and colors.
• To be able to elicit positive emotions through images is very effective, taking into consideration to not cross the limits of professional boundaries. These may be in the form of an amusing picture to humor, or scenic visuals to enchant.
• Bring the photo to life by making a colorful collage.
• Utilize features from within the site. Facebook has also been generous in providing photo apps. One distinct app that includes the voice functionality is the Fotobabble.
• Use the flexibility provided by the medium. Change as often as you like, and edit as much as you wish.

Assess the photos before posting, immediately after posting, and continue to monitor its popularity through feedback.

This post originally appeared on  Avenuesocial.

The Real ROI of Social Media

There’s been plenty of hype over the past three years about how social media can revolutionize business in general and marketing in particular. Indeed, some brands seem to be making serious use of social media platforms, especially in the area of branding. The question skeptics continue to ask, however, is what is the real ROI of social media?

Part of the problem of answering this question comes in that it can be challenging to measure ROI. Some goals of social media are sufficiently vague as to be hard to express in actual numbers.

The problem of clarity

Perhaps the biggest barrier to understanding the real ROI of social media is understanding what you’re using social media for. If your social media strategies are designed to “increase collaboration and interaction with the target audience,” you’re going to wind up with a rather nebulous objective.

Here’s another problem about the clarity of objectives in regard to social media: if your social media strategy is designed to replicate something that can and should be done internally, you’re almost always better off doing so. An enterprise-wide internal networking strategy will have more measurable and immediate return than a social media approach.

Collaboration with peers vs. contact with customers

Focussing on those specific objectives is key to getting anything at all from your social media ROI. For example, improving communication with your potential customers provides a very different return than collaborating with others in your industry. The same holds true for employee collaboration.

The Real ROI formula for social media

Generally speaking, your ROI should be relatively simple in terms of how the formula works. You start by adding the cost of the strategy including work hours, contracted expertise, advertising support for the social media strategy, and even space dedicated to social media in your other online assets.

Those are the costs of your strategy. Now, you need to be able to identify in a very specific and dollar-value way what exactly it is that you’re getting from social media. That can take several forms, including:

• Market research. You can perform a number of market research tasks via social media. This includes things like focus groups, but you can also broaden it to things like surveys. While the more broad activities aren’t as statistically accurate as they would be in a general population survey, they do give you a good feel for how the folks in your target market think.
• Brand recognition. It’s always tough to calculate ROI when it comes to branding. Yet, branding is one of the most important marketing activities you can engage in. It’s a constant balancing act between promoting brand name recognition and actually being able to show that the brand name recognition brought in sales.
• Traffic to other Internet properties. One way to use social media is as a gateway to your website. Social media can be a strong source of traffic to your site (although it will not likely ever generate the kinds of traffic volume that good SEO will generate). In addition, social media sharing of your other web properties will ultimately help increase their Google Page Rank, and help them do better in the search engines as well.
• Actual sales. This is the area that many social media strategies forget. It’s absolutely possible to funnel your social media efforts into direct sales. If your business falls into that category, of course, it’s much easier to measure ROI. The key here is not to steal sales from your other properties, but rather tap into social media as a new sales channel altoghether. The last thing you want social media to do is take sales away from your sales force or from your primary web site.

Taking it seriously

Calculating the ROI of your social media endeavors is important. Simply throwing a bunch of social media activity out into the ether without knowing what it’s really doing can have a detrimental effect on your business.

Not taking your social media ROI seriously enough is worse than neglecting social media altogether. The global marketplace continues to shrink, and effective use of social media is key if you’re going to take advantage of every opportunity.

This post originally appeared on  Avenuesocial.

Facebook’s New Ways for News Updates

News is no longer the well-written article or a controversial headline by reporters. The way news is disseminated within a new social medium seems to have made users into journalists, where the user can exercise a wide variety of information of what they consider as newsworthy and through the source of their choice.

It is interesting to note the way users select and absorb information, i.e. through indirect contacts simply because of diversity in interests. This in turn leads to more learning, compared with the immediate circle which generally shares common interests. The updates one receives from their immediate circle can be a waste of time and page space. Therefore, social media has offered ways to tunnel the information directly from indirect sources onto the user page.

Subscribe

A few months earlier, Facebook introduced the ‘Subscribe’ button as a choice for users to ‘Allow Subscriber’, in addition to the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ option. It may be set as private or public, where users will receive updates transmitted to their page. The choice is not simply limited to user selection. The quantity and quality of information can also be controlled after selecting the subscribe button, by specifying whether the user requires ‘all’, ‘most’ or ‘only important t’ updates and also tick marking on ‘life events,’ ‘status updates,’ ‘photos and videos’ and ‘games.’

News Feed

Following this, while Twitter has previously provided the ‘Twitter Lists’ option for users to choose the kind of information, Facebook will allow the user to specify and organize the information by other users by adding them on their ‘interest list.’ The purpose is similar to the way a user organizes his or her friends’ lists. Major advantages to this tunneling of information are that users will not require researching news sites, because they will already have received updates within their own page and will even be able to keep information out from within their won contacts.

How companies can avail the opportunity through apps

The news feed has paved the way for social media to not just be people-focused’ but more information-focused. Recently, media companies such as Huffington Post, MSNBC.com and Pixable have incorporated media apps onto their Timeline page as a way of relaying specific news. Consequently, new users have added the Facebook apps which has thereby increased traffic to their sites. So what you have to say will catch the attention of readers rather than who you are. By creating interesting and relevant news, companies can post updates and link them to blogs and videos to inform people about their products.

This post originally appeared on  Avenuesocial.

Facebook Strengthens Bond With The Mobile Web, Increases Room for App Development

The main reason why Facebook is so obviously keen to focus on the mobile is its fast rate in increase of users, that is, four times more on the mobile in just half the time, when compared with PC users. Several reviewers have commented that mobile would have been Mark Zuckerberg’s first choice as platform instead of the desktop, had it been available eight years ago. Now that has happened, but Facebook has been challenged for its capacity to accommodate over 2,500 types of mobile devices.

That is why Facebook has countered to resolve some major issues that were recently discussed at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Spain, which will provide opportunities for app developers to create Facebook apps on the mobile platform.

• Mobile browser fragmentation: Each device requires specifications that may not be compatible with another device. To test compatibility of an app with a mobile web browser, a standard form of measurement is used. Ringmark is a ‘mobile browser test suite’ checks for compatibility issues in apps and helps identify and correct issues. The sizes of the rings determine the extent of the app’s compatibility.
• Mobile payment for apps and games: The main problem that users faced when using Facebook mobile is its tedious process of payment. By the end of it, the user is already frustrated to return to use the app. Facebook has integrated ‘Pay Dialog’ which is a requisite mode of payment on Facebook. They also intend reducing the number of steps involved in making an online purchase on the mobile through the ‘operator billing’ system, which will collaborate with over 30 mobile manufacturing companies to ease the payment process.
• App discovery: A Facebook Application that is difficult to identify, can be ‘discovered’ by linking the traffic to the apps through the Open Graph. Facebook recommends that app developers use the Open Graph on the mobile. In addition, other social channels will interconnect with Facebook. Other options for users to avail include ‘Bookmarks’, ‘Request Dialog,’ Feed Dialog’ and ‘Authenticated Referrals.’

Two key issues that Facebook is also focusing on are generating revenue through advertisement on the mobile, and how to divide profits between the mobile company and themselves. Second, with the mobile web in the lead for user base, followed by Smartphone, Facebook intends to include native Android apps in the near future to make social networking a more enriching experience on the mobile than it ever was.

This post originally appeared on  Avenuesocial.