Brand & Capture

When inbound marketers discuss A/B split testing, they’re usually talking email marketing. But there are more areas of inbound marketing that can benefit from a little testing. Facebook advertising is one such area.

Facebook is set to make many changes this year. With Graph Search rolling out and Emoticons and activity moods now inducted into status updates, Facebook has come through with yet another announcement: the Facebook Hashtag. This feature, similar to the way the hashtag operates on Twitter, will possibly be the hottest new targeting tool on the market. 

Back in January 2010, Nielsen released data showing U.S. Facebook users spent an average of 421 minutes per month on the social platform. That equals out to more than 14 minutes per day, an increase of roughly three minutes per day from just six months before.

Having an effective social media presence is key in building your customer base and brand. On the flip side, having an ineffective presence is a great way to lose existing clients and ensure you won’t be gaining more. If you think you’re ahead of the competition by just creating your Twitter and Facebook accounts—you’d be wrong.

As a social media manager, strategist and enthusiast, I’m always on the look out for new marketing tools for client and personal profiles. I want tools to help me stay organized, tools to help me grow audiences, tools to better measure analytics, tools to easily discover influencers and tools for discovering new tools. (Okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the picture.)

The morning winter storm Nemo hit NYC, a client requested our team send a tweet on its behalf. We all thought it was a pretty great idea, especially since the client is located in that neck of the woods. So the question quickly became, “What should we tweet?” One team member suggested we keep it light and fun with something along the lines of enjoying the snow or ideas for fighting cabin fever when you’re snowed in. That's where I hesitated, thinking keeping it light might backfire. “We can’t tweet that,” I said. “What if something terrible happens?”

After much anticipation and wacky speculations from social media enthusiasts everywhere, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook graph search, a better internal search function, yesterday at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+; in the realm of all things social, these networks are gods among men. So when it comes to social media marketing for business, it makes perfect sense that every business should have a presence on each of these platforms, right?

Even though my job is directly linked to and involved with social media, I still like to consider myself a decently private person. I don’t post, share or tweet anything that I wouldn’t be comfortable with someone discovering years from now. And I never really opted for the chance to have every friend or connection know every detail about my personal life. So, when the craze to check in everywhere you went first began, I didn’t jump on board. Sure, I used Foursquare for a bit, and even didn’t mind seeing every place each of my Facebook friends frequented. But I never was truly intrigued…until now.

In the time leading up to the big count down, it seems popular social media news sites and blogs are publishing a new “best of 2012 social media fails” each day. While I’m thoroughly enjoying the reminiscent “What were they thinking?!” feelings each post conjures, I’m disappointed with how few offer actual advice to prevent similar disasters in the New Year.