Five Fridays: 10.24.14 Edition

Social business benchmark 2014

Hootsuite polled 750 individuals from enterprise-level organizations to get a read on the state of social business. The results? Not good. Let's look at one of the biggest problem areas: alignment or buy-in.

Source: Hootsuite (click to see full infographic)

62% respondents cited designing a social media strategy and 43% cited buy-in among executives as challenges. This should not be the case, but commonly is.

Why? Because people think social media strategies need to be different from business objectives. Wrong. What matters to any business? Reducing costs and increasing revenue.

That is the language the C-suite understands. Once you frame social as supporting those universal business goals, you can talk about how social tactics (such as customer service over Twitter, Facebook ads, engagement reducing churn, etc.) reinforce that strategy.

2014 local search ranking factors results

What are the most important factors when it comes to search ranking? Moz polled a panel and here are the results:

Source: Moz

The graphic above does a good job at communicating the most important signals. Here are some key takeaways from the survey:

• Behavioral signals such as CTR from search results and driving directions are increasing in importance
• Domain authority is on its way up, as are brand signals
• While social networks and related actions have been speculated to be helpful, review signals seem to carry almost double the influence

Creepy retargeting ads

"With great power comes great responsibility." Retargeting offers brands the potential to continually be in front of consumers across many digital platforms. Not only is there is the creepy factor of watching ads follow you across the Web, but consumers can experience flat-out fatigue and irritation, which damages brand equity.

Source: Marketoonist

While retargeting can be a relevant form of advertising, it needs to be paired with appropriate messaging and respect for the platform and its audience.

Sure, you can deploy ads and watch impressions and CTR rise, but the aim should be to drive quality engagement and awareness.

How to create +post ads

Initially, +post ads were only available to major brands. In April, Google made them available to anyone with a Google+ account with more than 1,000 followers.

Source: Plus Your Business

Why would you want to experiment with +post ads? Because they're different from how other social networks distribute ads. Instead of your ad living on the social network (in this case, Google+), it lives on Google's display network.

Plus, they're integrated with Google AdWords, which allows rich targeting and campaign reporting. A unique feature is that since these ad units are linked to posts from your Google+ page, those from outside Google+ can see how influential your brand is and how well your engage with your community (via comments).

Budget outlook for retargeting

88% of marketers currently use retargeting and 56% of those that don't currently use it plan on implementing it in the next year.

Source: eMarketer

While display is the currently the most popular method for retargeting (at 81%), marketers are planning on upping their retargeting budgets for social media by almost 40%.

Keep the cartoon and my comments about retargeting in mind. Yes, spending on retargeting will continue to increase and social media will get a bigger share of that budget.

However, just because you can follow any user from a website to a social network doesn't mean you should. You need to know who you're talking to and why so they actually have a reason to engage, i.e., you have to earn the consumer's attention.