Mediaboss Marketing

If you think teens and young adults are doing the same things on social media that Baby Boomers are doing, or that Gen Xer's experiences in social are the same as Millennial's you're mistaken. That's the key takeaway from new Sprout Social data.

"Social media holds great promise for reaching your audience since multiple generations are now reliably all in the same place," said Scott Brandt, CMO of Sprout Social. "The effort doesn't end there for brands, however. The data shows that while these people of all different ages may be reachable via the same platform, they can use it in drastically different ways. Strategies should be adjusted to support individual customer needs, and brands that don't talk to their customers-directly or via social media-won't see the best possible results."

Researchers looked at how the difference demographics are engaging through social, and found that Millennials are more likely to turn to social specifically to engage with a brand. Other demographics are more likely to make a call or an email, for example. But, both Millennials and Gen Xers are about 2x more likely than Boomers to follow brands via social media. Other interesting findings from the report include:

43% of those polled are using Facebook, making it the most popular social network 1 in 10 social messages get a response from a brand Gen Xers are 2x more likely to unfollow a brand because of the brand saying something offensive.

Tags: Social marketing, social marketing trends, social media trends, Sprout Social

See the original post here:
Report IDs differences in how people use social - BizReport

At The Drum's Predictions Breakfast, I was interested to hear how 2017 is going to be the year social takes its rightful place at high table of digital marketing.

Im normally suspicious about 'years of anything' being proclaimed, but after I saw some fantastic presentations on the use of social data and about how a complex ecosystem of tools has evolved around the discipline I had become a convert.

The biggest area of growth seems to be around influencer marketing with the smart money moving from celebs to micro influencers as the centre of this world. And of course tech and agencies are growing up around this sector as well. We really are seeing a lot of growth in the requirement for staffing in this market already in 2017.

As we are all well aware, organic reach and effectiveness continue to diminish and most brands are increasingly have to pay to deliver the strongest results. Even organic posts which do perform well need fantastic content and more often than not, that will need funding as well.

So it's becoming clear that brands need to put the social channel at the heart of their marketing. Its also become clear that they need to do it well and to do it well is going to cost. No longer can social be seen as something you can do on the cheap. There's nothing more off-putting to a prospective customer than untended or abandoned Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Sadly, when we look at the data we gathered for the seventh edition of our Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report, we see that this is not a view that is prevalent across the board. Social media salaries remain below the average marketing salaries at all levels. This suggests that businesses are still to be convinced that effective social media marketing influences the bottom line enough to increase remuneration.

We found that the average mid-level salary came in at 35,583. Compare that with a general marketing role at 40,296, email marketing at 38,688 or SEO at 39,422 and you can see that social staff are getting a raw deal.

We see the same patterns at junior level where the average social salary is 25,379. A general marketing role is 27,376, email is 27,419 and SEO is 27,038.

So we can see a disconnect here. We know brands want to invest more in social. We know that social marketing is growing as a medium as brands move away from traditional display. Surely it should follow that if social is an integral part of your marketing strategy then you should pay to get that expertise?

Melina Jacovou is chief executive and co-founder of Propel. The Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report combines internal salary data with over 1300 respondents to a survey carried out over three months in 2016.

See original here:
It's time to take social media seriously and that means paying higher salaries - The Drum

Business-to-business (B2B) companies need to research and understand buyer behavior on social media before executing a social content marketing plan, which can be done through social insights.

Knowing that buyers are using social networks is only the beginning, said Jillian Ryan, an analyst at eMarketer and author of the latest report, B2B Social Media 2017: Tying Efforts Back to Larger Business Goals. (The full report is available only to eMarketer PRO subscribers).

B2Bs still need to do research to understand audience behaviors on social platforms to deliver targeted content to the right person, on the right network, at the right time in the buyer journey, she added. These sort of audience insights can be extracted through social data mining and listening.

Companies that skip this step tend to be unsuccessful in their social marketing.

Chief evangelist and startup advisor Jill Rowley explained that mining social networks for signals is the backbone of understanding buyers. Do the research to be relevant to your buyer and the entire buying committee. B2Bs should use social networks to find buyers, she said. Insights allow you to listen to your buyers so you can relate, connect and engage them.

For marketers, this is a big shift in behavior, since social media is often thought of as a downstream method to share content with customers. However, using it with an upstream approach for persona analysis is valuable, explained Tim Barker, CEO at DataSift, a tech company that recently announced that it would be partnering with LinkedIn to bring engagement and audience insights to LinkedIns advertisers. If marketers have a pulse on their audience, they are better informed before they start to spend their effort building communities and sharing content, he said.

This means understanding buyer usage habits, channel preferences and content consumption patterns, according to Amber Long, vice president of engagement, PR, content and social media at B2B agency gyro. When a B2B maps out its whole social ecosystem and framework according to the needs, desires and preferences of their buyers, it means the strategy is all aligned to the buyer journey, she said. This is the epitome of audience-centric.

However, Long also noted that many B2B brands that she works with are still a little skeptical about leveraging social insights and intel. An August 2016 survey of US B2B marketers by Demand Metric and Socedo showed that the majority of respondents arent taking advantage of social media monitoring tools: only 39% used them.

Business-to-government defense technology contractor Raytheon, however, is sold on the power of social intelligence. We set up dashboards so that we can understand where the target audience is and listen to what theyre saying or what theyre talking about within these channels, said Pam Wickham, Raytheons vice president of corporate affairs and communications.

eMarketer analyst Jillian Ryan discusses B2Bs use (and misuse) of social in the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, eMarketers podcast.

View original post here:
eMarketer Releases New Report on B2B Use of Social Platforms - eMarketer

Last year, my partner and I raised $3 million to scaleJumpCrew, our social marketing and sales outsourcing business. Our first task: sharingour ideal hiring profile with the new recruitment team.

Related:Why, and How, to Hire for Potential Over Experience

JumpCrew wasn't our first venture. Over the past seven years, we have hired hundreds of salespeople for JumpCrew, LocalVox and other clients. And during this period, the composition of our teams and our ideal profile of a top performer have bothmaterially changed.

What started as a surprising observation about top performers turned into a fascinating discovery, one which performance data ultimately supported and one whichre-shaped our hiring strategy.Last October, that discovery helped us set our 12-month hiring goals and defineour ideal team and individual profiles.

Subsequently, the majority of our first 100 hires had . . . little or no experience in either marketing or sales. --How's that, again?

Like most companies, we had started with the assumption that our top performers would be experienced salespeople who transitioned to digital marketing with sales savvy. Butwe were wrong.

In our fast-growth SaaS environment, we learned that recent grads often outperformed sales pros with 10 to 15 years experience.In hindsight, we were experiencing a transformative moment in the SaaS economys influence on productivity. The impact of new sales and marketing technologies had fundamentally altered what creates "success."

In fact, time and again, our top performers were:

In short, we found that more experienced employees brought more biasregarding how they thought they could be most effective. Less experienced employees, in contrast,brought less bias and enrolled in our processes more fully.Above all, our most successful salespeople were those who were team players and collaborated effectively.

We were also able to identify, as our outperformers, reps who took the Challenger approach. The Challenger approach describes employees with the insight and confidence to challenge assumptions they know are not true. This seems obvious, but in reality a lot of salespeople don't work that way.

The correlation between those taking the Challenger approach and those who are outperformers was not surprising.A 2007 Harvard Business Review studyshowed that fully 54 percentof the top performers looked at werechallengers (as opposed to "relationship builders," "hard workers," "lone wolves" and "reactive problem-solvers.")

The surprise for us was that even among those we considered challengers, the majority of top-tier performers had little or no experience.Instead, they shared these traits:

Read the original:
Building to Scale, 'No Experience Required' - Entrepreneur

Above the Law

Four Ideas to Implement Today on Social Media Inside Higher Ed (blog) ... adapt it to your school, for your purposes. Social media can be strategic, fast, and effective on the fly. Paul Redfern leads the communications and marketing team at Gettysburg College and is a frequent presenter on marketing and brand topics at ... 50 Amazing Social Media Marketing Ideas, Strategies & TipsBusiness 2 Community Social Media Strategy: How Much to Spend and WhereHospitality Net Why Social Media is Critical to Ongoing Professional SuccessAbove the Law Forbes -MarketingProfs.com (subscription) -Real Business all 58 news articles »

See the article here:
Four Ideas to Implement Today on Social Media - Inside Higher Ed (blog)