What if you could understand why your audience shares some information and not other? That would make your content stand out from the competition.

The Science of Sharing

30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month, including blog posts, links, news stories and photo albums.

HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella has found that three things must happen to get your content shared.

First, people must be exposed to your content (be a fan on Facebook or follow you on Twitter). Second, they must be aware of your content (meaning they actually see it). Finally, they must be motivated by something in your content to share it.

Many articles have been written on how to increase your audience size and make people aware of your content, including these by Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman. This article will focus on the motivations for sharing.

The New York Times recently partnered with Latitude Research to unpack the psychology of sharing. Based on their study of 2500 participants (and some other recent research), here are 9 reasons why your customers aren’t sharing your content.

#1: Your customers don’t trust you

Stated plainly, people won’t share your content if they don’t find you or your content to be trustworthy.

The 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer found that globally only 56% of people trust businesses to do what is right. However, in the US, the UK and Japan, that number fell significantly between 2010 and 2011.

Notice the evolution in trust.

#2: Your customers don’t care about your brand

That hurts to hear, but customers have short memories. They wonder “what have you done for me lately?”

Your customers are looking for valuable information, great deals and a chance to meet other people who share their interests. As soon as you stop offering these things, your fans will go looking elsewhere.

They may not feel a commitment to your brand, but you can keep them interested in your content. The next couple of points offer some remedies you can implement immediately.

#3: Your posts are boring

“Don’t be boring,” says Grandma Mary, the alter-ego of Social Media Examiner’s Facebook community manager, Andrea Vahl. People are far more likely to share something they find intriguing or funny.

Look at the case of Volkswagen’s videos. Their Cannes-winning episode, The Force, a spoof on Star Wars, earned over 40 million views. None of their other videos, more traditional marketing content, came close to 1 million views. Of course, most of us would love a million views. But look at the relative difference in sharing power.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

#4: People care about causes more than brands

The New York Times found that people are more likely to share about something they are passionate about.

Let’s face it. People rarely wake up wondering what they can do for XYZ brand today. But they do dream of ways to help their favorite cause. Whether it’s ending poverty, supporting Greenpeace or advancing a local charity, many people give sacrificially to help things they care about.

Notice how CREE has taken a boring subject like lighting and made it a mission and revolution to change lighting in public places across America.

While not a cause in the humanitarian sense, this does get people excited about being part of something bigger than your brand or product.

#5: People share to build relationships with others

Research shows that people value relationships with other people, not necessarily with brands. They are definitely looking for community. Your brand might be able to create a platform for that community.

Here are two interesting factoids from The New York Times study:

• 78% of respondents use links to stay connected to people they might not otherwise stay in touch with.
• 73% of respondents said sharing content helps them find people with common interests.

Red Bull does a nice job of sharing content their fans might be willing to share with their friends.

Notice how Red Bull asks a question and then encourage sharing.

#6: Customers are looking for validation

Some things haven’t changed since junior high. We are all trying to build credibility in the eyes of our friends. We want to be seen as experts in some area(s).

The way we do that online is through the content we share.

68% of The New York Times study participants said they share content as an advertisement for themselves. They want to give others a better sense of who they are.

#7: People share to manage information

You’ve heard it said, “I’m just thinking out loud.” Today many people think out loud through social media.

In fact, 73% of the study participants said they process information more deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully when they share it.

Additionally, 85% of respondents said that reading other people’s responses helps them understand and process information and events.

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella found the following words generate the most comments in his research.

Notice how popular words like "giveaway" and "jobs" are.

#8: You’ve misunderstood your audience

If you’ve been around marketing for very long, you understand the concept of a marketing persona. This idea has been around for at least 20 years and advocates understanding your customer profile by creating detailed pictures of your ideal customer(s).

The New York Times study found there are six sharing personas for online fans and I’ve listed a seventh based on my experience and our audience. Understanding who your customers are can help you identify common motivators:

1. Altruists—Altruists share content out of a desire to be helpful and aspire to be seen as a reliable source of information. Preferred tools: Facebook and email.
2. Careerists—Careerists are well-educated and seek to gain a reputation for bringing value to their networks. They prefer content that is more serious and professional in tone. Preferred tools: LinkedIn and email.
3. Hipsters—Hipsters are younger sharers who have always lived in the “information age.” They use Twitter and Facebook to share cutting-edge and creative content. They share content to build their online identity. Preferred tools: Facebook and Twitter.
4. Boomerangs—Boomerangs seek validation and thrive on the reaction of others to their content, even when it’s negative responses. Preferred tools: Facebook, email, Twitter and blogs, wherever people will engage them.
5. Connectors—Connectors see content sharing as a means of staying connected to others and making plans. They are more relaxed in their sharing patterns. Preferred tools: Facebook and email.
6. Selectives—Selectives are more thoughtful in what they share and with whom they share it. They personalize their sharing and expect responses to their content. Preferred tool: email.

Although this is not based on The NY Times research, I’d like to add a seventh persona to the list:

1. Trendsetters—Trendsetters are thought leaders, marketers and business leaders who purposefully seek to stay abreast of breaking news and trends in their industry, sharing it quickly and aggressively. These people are typically seen as experts (or aspire to be seen as such). Preferred tools: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

A couple of observations: 1) notice how many of these personas prefer email; 2) notice that the platform significantly predicts the motivation pattern.

#9: People are more personal with email

The study authors discovered that people have not abandoned email. In fact, participants share most frequently through email and consider it more private. Therefore they have higher expectations for responses through email.

Some final pointers

If you want a deeper understanding of the psychology of sharing, see this article by Dr. Rachna Jain.

One of the most overlooked rules in content creation is the rule of simplicity. Shorter posts (80 characters on Facebook) get shared 27% more frequently. Keep your writing style at a fifth grade or lower level of understanding.

Create a sense of urgency in your writing. Give people a reason to respond now. If they don’t act immediately, they probably never will.

Finally, remember that getting your content shared is just the first step. See this as part of longer-term strategy of building a loyal following.

Share your comments!

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your comments on how you get your audience to share your content. If you have any stories, please leave them in the comments box below.

Here’s the good news: A new (and free) tool may be just the solution you’re looking for.

Looking for Something New?

Collaboration, innovation and communication—all three have become corporate buzzwords. But they are also critical components to any company’s success. These are three areas where organizations are constantly looking for new ideas and social media tools are increasingly playing a larger role in that process.

Businesses have a need to communicate. They’re always looking for new and different ways to foster collaboration among employees and ways to innovate—faster and more efficiently. “How can we come up with new ideas while using the least amount of resources?”

The list of tools that can fulfill these needs is long, but Posterous Groups, a recently launched social media tool (that’s free), should be considered as a way to meet these business needs.

For the uninitiated, Posterous Groups is one part Facebook group and one part email listserv. In essence, a Posterous Group page is really a living, breathing, collaborative document. And again, like Posterous itself, it can all be done via email.

Posterous Groups represents an easy, simple opportunity for brands to collaborate with, learn from and communicate with customers, brand ambassadors, volunteers and external partners.

The key Posterous Group benefits and features include:

• Uber-easy to set up. Simply email the name of the group and group member emails and your group is ready to go (no blog/platform account necessary).
• Privacy is assumed. Posterous Groups defaults to a private group setting, which means content shared within the group is protected from prying eyes outside the organization (if you wish).
• Post a variety of media formats. PDFs. Microsoft documents. Photos. Video. You name it and you can post it to Posterous Groups.
• View content on the go—easily. Posterous Groups is also optimized for viewing from mobile devices, including iPads. A nice inclusion as more folks are accessing online content via smartphones and tablets.
• Receive daily email summaries instead of instant notifications. For more active groups, this is a nice feature. Keeps you more connected and plugged in to what’s happening within the group.

Daily email summaries make it easy to stay current on Posterous Groups.

• Fantastic photo-sharing capabilities. Just my opinion, mind you, but Posterous recently added a new slideshow feature that makes this functionality even better within Groups.

Slideshows are a great photo-sharing feature to add to your Posterous Groups.

The biggest advantage of Groups is the ease of use and the fact that everything is wired right to your inbox. After all, who doesn’t have an email address in 2011? Even that guy in accounting who thinks blogging is “never going to catch on” can still participate using Posterous Groups.

And remember, photos, video and other files you post to the Group are hard-coded into your emails—no big attachments. And finally, while conversations occur on email, they’re forever archived on your Group site so members can go back and track discussions that occurred weeks ago in just a few seconds.

So, what does all this mean for brands? There are a number of organizations already using Posterous as a blogging platform. One of my favorite local brands, Punch Pizza, uses Posterous to share photos and coupons, which are routinely redeemed en masse at Punch restaurants.

Punch Pizza routinely offers online-only coupons through its Posterous blog.

Chevrolet is one of the few brands using Posterous Groups.

Nationally, Chevrolet has been using Posterous for more than a year now to promote talk about the Chevy Volt.

And Twitter app TweetDeck is also using Posterous as its primary blogging platform.

But, by and large, not too many brands are using Posterous Groups—at least not groups that we can see.

That doesn’t mean opportunities don’t exist, because they certainly do. Given that Posterous is an email-based platform and it’s extremely easy to use, I’ve long felt more risk-averse companies have a big opportunity with Posterous as a means to start blogging—and I think with Groups, there are a number of clear opportunities, too, both internally and externally, for organizations.

Internal Applications for Posterous Groups

#1: Company intranet

Probably more appropriate for small businesses and non-profits—organizations that can’t afford an off-the-shelf solution. But think about it. Doesn’t Groups offer much of the same functionality as an intranet? Document, photo and video sharing, all accessible via email or the Internet. And remember, it can be private.

Sure, it’s not behind a firewall on your company’s servers, but you have to weigh the advantages and benefits versus the potential risk. This certainly presents a different way to think about an intranet, but I tend to think it’s a collaborative (and very easy) way to get your internal teams involved.

#2: Special interest groups

Look inside any company and you’ll find a number of special interest groups. Some are more formal than others; running clubs and bowling teams, for example. What if you had a way to give them a private space online where they could stay connected between meetings or events? They could use this area to post photos, videos and just share information about the next event or meeting.

#3: Team communication

Just as Posterous Groups is a great tool for special interest groups within your organization, it’s also a perfect tool for business communication between teams. Think about it from a marketing/PR standpoint.

Your team could use a Posterous Group as a project-planning tool, a way to brainstorm ideas across geographically disparate offices (complete with photos and video), a vehicle to aggregate and share media coverage with the team and a tool to share organizational updates and news. Again, all in one spot—as opposed to the different areas this information probably exists now.

#4: Short-term collaboration

For those who have managed a new agency relationship, consider all the information you need to share with that partner to get them up to speed. Wouldn’t it be great if you could house all those documents, images, usernames/passwords and graphics in one easy-to-find and common area? Hello, Posterous Groups.

External Uses of Posterous Groups

#5: Promotional/corporate event pages

Think about the promotional and community events your company participates in regularly. Wouldn’t it be great to have one spot where you could house RSVPs, key event information, promotional coupons, offers, photos, videos and interviews with customers and participants after the event? How are you doing that now? Would Posterous Groups present an interesting alternative?

#6: Private brand ambassador groups

What about creating a private group for your most cherished brand ambassadors? A space where you could share special offers, rewards programs and sneak peeks at upcoming marketing campaigns? You could also use the Group as a means to communicate with these ambassadors. Even use Groups as a way to run new product designs by them and get initial input and ideas. A plethora of options here.

#7: Volunteer groups

For non-profit organizations, Posterous Groups would be a great way to keep in regular contact with one of their most important audiences: volunteers. Many non-profits say one of their biggest challenges is not having enough touchpoints with volunteers. Groups would provide an easy solution. After all, who doesn’t have access to email? (Even that 77-year-old woman who volunteers on Wednesday evenings has access to email.) And the best part? The volunteers themselves could contribute meaningful content to the Group.

You could ask volunteers to post photos from events that they capture—photos that you could use in newsletters and brochures down the road. You could also share news about upcoming events, organizational priorities and more detailed instructional information that would only be relevant to volunteers. This is a great, low-cost, easy way to keep in touch with your volunteer force.

#8: Customer forums

Your customers have questions. Why not address them all at once using Groups? You could even provide video responses to more complex customer issues/questions (I’m thinking about tech products here). Sure, there are definitely other ways to organize customer forums online—but Posterous Groups is free, easy and would tend to stay in front of customers because Groups would alert these folks via email each time a new post is made.

Those are my ideas about how brands could use Posterous Groups. What do you think? Any creative ideas on how your organization might take advantage of this new tool? Leave your comments in the box below.

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Facebook’s messaging platform. Now you can integrate your email, text messages and chat messages into one platform—Facebook. If you would like an @facebook.com email address, you can get that as well.

Putting it another way, “The platform has three components: seamless messaging, conversation history and social inbox. Conversation history places all one-to-one communications in a single strand, including chat, email or SMS,” reports DM News.

Email too Slow

Example of what messages now look like on your phone.

Zuckerberg thinks that email is too slow and the future is going to lead to faster messaging. “We don’t think the modern messaging system will be email.” He noted that the “‘next-generation’ messaging will be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short, but not email,” reports CNTV.

Through Facebook’s email, you’ll also be able to filter your messages from friends and others. According to Facebook’s blog, “It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new messages, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into another folder where you can look at them separately. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”

All-in-One Messaging

According to Inside Facebook, “The best part about new messages is how it brings chat into threaded, searchable conversation history. If someone sends you a message when you’re online, you’ll see it as a chat. If you send them back a chat and they’ve already logged off, it’ll be routed to their new messages inbox, and shown in the same thread as your previous chat. This means you don’t have to worry about conversations breaking down because one person changed the interface through which they were communicating.”

If you use Gmail, you may be thinking a lot of these new features seem very familiar. Priority Inbox filters important messages so you see them first, and if you use Gchat and go offline, you’re able to get the missed message in your inbox.

This has many people thinking, “Is Facebook the Gmail killer?” It’s too soon to tell, but Augie Ray, an online marketer, believes “it’s about facilitating and enhancing your personal relationships. Facebook wants to be the platform for personal communications and leave the boring stuff to Gmail and others.”

Groups

In the revamped Facebook’s Group features, you can now send one message to a group of friends that you choose. To do this, simply go to the Create a Group button on the left side of your home page.

This box appears once you hit the button.

From here you can select the friends you wish to invite and name the group. This way you can stay up to date on everything with your friends, colleagues and business partners. Facebook Groups used to be less integrated and more novelty, but now people can make groups based simply around a grouping of their friends to share information on a private platform.

Why This Is Important

Groups, when combined with Facebook email, could be a game-changer for email marketers in 2011. Instead of sending traditional email blasts, you can send creative messages via Facebook that are more likely to resonate with recipients. It’ll serve as a new and unique platform for receiving marketing messages.

Most users check their Facebook accounts more often than they check their email accounts, primarily due to mobile accessibility and connectivity across other social media platforms. As marketers, you need to stay up to date on how your audience is taking in their information, and this could be the next step.

With that said, email marketers need to realize their current subscribers may be changing their email addresses over to a Facebook address. Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop, tells CMO.com that “the Facebook platform is only going to hasten people to change their email address. If you don’t make it easy for somebody to change their address with you, they have to unsubscribe, and you run the risk of their not re-subscribing. And even if they do re-subscribe, you lose your history with them.”

For this reason, McDonald says, it’s critical that your email preference center includes an address-change option and that you link to it prominently within all your outbound email and (of course) on your Facebook page.

Word of Mouth

The reason social media in general has become so attractive for marketers is that it’s basically the newest way to spread word of mouth. “Two-thirds of the world’s gross domestic product, especially in the United States, is driven by word-of-mouth recommendations,” according to McKinsey & Company and reported by Standard Media.

Will this new messaging platform make things even easier for word-of-mouth messages? It seems Facebook is trying to make connecting to people as easy as possible. For B2B marketers, the new email could make connecting to CEOs and other decision makers easier. LinkedIn is another source for this, but with everyone having an @facebook.com account, it makes it much easier.

Last March, Social Media Examiner found that “44% of social sharing on the web is driven by Facebook.” Another report on eMarketer shows that the most searched term for the second year in a row is Facebook, and that Facebook “topped Google.com as the most-visited website of the year.” No matter where you stand on how to implement social media, the point is your audience is likely on Facebook.

Too Soon?

Even with all of the statistics and possibilities the new messaging platform brings, the fact remains it isn’t launching to everyone yet. Meaning we really don’t know how important this system will be for marketers. Critics of marketing with Facebook argue that people on Facebook are not engaging in the buying experience, and changes need to be made to Facebook to facilitate conversions.

What are your thoughts? Do you think this messaging system will be a game-changer for marketers or just another feature Facebook offers? Leave your comments in the box below.

Whether you use social media to market your business, increase sales, promote your blog, or raise awareness for a non-profit organization, here are six reasons social media might not be working for you—along with ways to overcome these problems.

Mistake #1: You Have the Wrong Connections

Imagine that you are asked to do a seminar about the future of Microsoft Office (with the opportunity to sell some Microsoft training courses).  You’re provided two options. You can have a large auditorium full of over 10,000 people or a smaller one with only about 500 people. Assuming you have no fear of public speaking, you probably want the large auditorium because it would hold a huge amount of sales opportunities, right?

But what if you learned that the large auditorium is full of users who are mostly students and artists, and the smaller one is full of business owners who depend on Microsoft Office. Now where do you see the greatest amount of sales opportunities?

This happens a lot in social media. We connect with tons of people on particular networks, get super-excited when we get a huge number of friends and followers, send out an announcement, and wonder why there is very little response. It’s not the number of people you are connected to that makes the difference, but the number of people interested in your niche that you are connected to.

Whenever you are seeking new connections on social networking sites, make sure to look for relevant connections in your niche or industry. There are many ways to find people who will be interested in what you have to say, including:

• Use Twitter directories, such as Twellow, that search for members based on their profile description so you can boost your Twitter following with targeted followers.
• Look at followers of another person in your industry to find some who would also be interested in you.
• Join groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.  Then participate and connect with other members.
• Find blogs on related topics. (Bloggers usually share their social profile links in their sidebar, header, footer, or about/contact pages.)
• Join forums on related topics—look for threads that allow members to share their social networking profiles with the rest of the forum. While participating, also look for members’ social links in their forum signatures.

There are also some don’t-miss guides here on Social Media Examiner, including how to increase your Facebook fan base.

Mistake #2: You Hide Your Social Media Presence

OK, so you might not think you’re hiding your social media presence, but you may be inadvertently doing so by not publicizing it. Simple ways to promote your social networking profiles include:

Social Links on Your Website

The first and most important place you should have your social media links displayed is on your website. Everyone who is active on social media, from corporations to freelancers to bloggers, should make it easy for visitors to their website to connect with them on their top social networking profiles.

American Express website header including Twitter and Facebook icons.

Toyota Sienna website header including Facebook and YouTube icons.

DawgHouse Design Studio footer including Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social icons.

Social Links in Your Emails

Chances are, you already have lots of people you email on a regular basis, either directly or through mailing lists. Why not add your social profile links to these emails and let recipients know where they can find you online? This can be done with simple text links below your signature, or with plugins such as WiseStamp, which will allow you to design a beautiful signature with social media icons, links, and even a link to your latest blog post powered by RSS.

Email signature created with WiseStamp.

Social Links on Your Business Cards

On your business card, you include (or at least you should include) your website address, email, and phone number as ways for your contacts to connect with you. Why not also add your LinkedIn, Twitter, or other professional profiles as well?

Creative integration of Twitter and Facebook profile links on a business card. Image by Ajda Gregorčič.

Forum Signatures

Do you actively participate in a forum for your area of expertise? As mentioned earlier, why not include your main social networking profile links along with your website in your forum signature? This way, if someone reads your response to a particular thread and finds it informative, they may connect with you on social media to learn more from you.

Mistake #3: You Send the Wrong Message

Let’s say I’ve just found your portfolio online while searching for a web designer, and I want to hop over to your Twitter profile to learn a bit more about you. So I visit your Twitter profile to follow you, and out of your latest 20 updates, I see the following:

• 5 updates from Foursquare that you are at Starbucks, work, McDonald’s, the courthouse, and L.A. Fitness.
• 7 replies to other Twitter members, obviously in the middle of a random conversation.
• 2 updates with some form of crude, foul language.
• 3 Twitpics of the last dessert you had, the weather outside, and a funny sign on a street corner.

Now if this was someone’s personal Twitter profile set up to connect with friends and family, these kinds of updates would be perfectly acceptable. But if you’re linking your Twitter profile with your business or blog on a specific subject, then your updates should stick to the same topic lines of your website, as people who are going from one to the other will likely be doing so to learn more about you in relation to the theme of those sites.

So taking the above example again, this freelancer could go with:

• 5 updates from FourSquare relating to a purchase for their work; for instance, you are at Best Buy buying a drawing tablet to use for a Photoshop design layout.
• 7 replies to other Twitter members answering questions about web design or giving helpful tips.
• 2 updates that relate to the industry in a humorous light, like a link to an Oatmeal comic on How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell.
• 3 Twitpics of your workstation, your library collection of web design books, and your newest business card.

How do you find people to reply to about your industry?

HootSuite allows you to set up multiple columns for keyword searches and Twitter lists so you can always see what is being talked about and be able to give a timely reply.

Also, think of the search engine optimization value that can be gained from having keywords in your updates on your social media profiles. Having updates with web design–related keywords certainly won’t hurt your profile, especially now that social search is becoming more prevalent in Google search results.

Google search results for web design include social circle connections on Twitter.

Mistake #4: You use Social Media Profiles for Link-building

It’s one thing to create social media profiles on sites that are relevant to your industry and that you want to use. But it’s a whole other thing to create them just to get a backlink to your website with no intention of going any further. There are better and more effective methods of link-building and other strategies to increase your Google ranking.

Some services out there will reserve your name on social media sites, which can be good for branding and reputation management. You certainly don’t want someone to sign up pretending to be you on a network. But you can’t assume that once you have over 100 social media accounts, they will automatically start benefiting you. You have to go out and use them by getting social before you see any results from social media.

Mistake #5: You Only Do Things that Can be Measured for Return on Investment

Ah, the elusive ROI. Some say it is a myth. Some say social media marketing can be measured, some say that it shouldn’t be measured, and some say it cannot be measured.

No matter where you sit on the fence of ROI, one thing you have to remember is that the best things you can do for your business on social media will not necessarily create a measurable impact on your bottom line.

Sure, you can spend all day on your social media profiles and only send out coupons with specific tracking codes or leading to landing pages that will tell you which profile is bringing you the most conversions. But then you will miss out on valuable ways of communicating with your fans, such as providing good customer service, managing crises, and otherwise engaging with them to create more loyalty to your brand.

Mistake #6: You Follow Too Many “Rules” of Social Media

There are many experts who suggest that you follow specific guidelines in how you use social media. While there are some things that should not be done (such as running a constant stream of advertising), there are some social media rules that may not apply to followers in your niche or industry.

The best way to see what works is to follow those who are successful utilizing social media specializing in the same subject area as you and analyze what they do. Do they reply to their followers/fans often? Do they share blog posts? Do they share industry news? How do they personalize their profiles, backgrounds, etc.?

How do you know if someone is successful in social media? It’s not the number of followers they have, but the amount of interactivity they have with them. If you do a Twitter search for @theirusername and see lots of conversation directed at them or retweets of their updates, then that’s a sign they are successfully influencing their followers. If on Facebook you see that their wall posts get a lot of comments, that is another sign of their success in engaging with their followers.

Is Social Media Working for You?

Do you believe social media is working for you? What do you think can help improve the success rate of individuals or businesses using social media in terms of creating a better overall social media presence?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box below…

The good news is social media has finally made it to the grand stage of “accountability.” A place where there are lots of people who want to measure it. The bad news is there isn’t a single clear-cut answer.

However, with a few simple steps, you can build a measurement strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Defining Terms

To start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.

Also, let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate fall into three categories:  social media exposure, influence and engagement.

With that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.

#1:  Measuring Social Media Exposure

How many people could you have reached with your message?

In social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

• Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.
• Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.  Facebook Insights provides value here.
• YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.
• Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
• Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Exposure is the top of the brand awareness funnel and represents your potential sales lead pool.

#2:  Measuring Engagement

How many people actually did something with your message?

This is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of action.

Fortunately engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6, Biz360 and TweetEffect. These metrics highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.

For a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post by Chris Lake is a great start.

• Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track @replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.
• Facebook: Determine the number of times your links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly tied to a specific social media campaign.
• YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and the number of new subscribers.
• Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and “where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to your site.
• Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.

#3: Measuring Influence

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?

You can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer, Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.

A great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the average Joe with a modest following?

If not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average user. Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to measure all of the different social media channels.

#4:  The Lead Generation Funnel

After you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts: the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.

Exposure, influence and engagement represent brand awareness in the measurement funnel.

Understanding your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a model to other social networks.

Now that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful? Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns, and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on. Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.

If you’re looking for tools to use for tracking, this post by Mani Karthik at Daily Bloggr gives a nice view of options.

To really understand the importance of measurement, here’s a great post on social media measurement from Social Media Examiner: Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate.

What about you? Are you measuring?  How are you measuring?  What metrics would you add? Leave a comment below and let’s talk.

By the way, MarketingProfs used a three-tiered approach to craft this study, including consulting with a panel of social media experts, surveying more than 5,000 MarketingProfs readers and asking comScore to mine its panel data.  This approach adds greater integrity and scope to the overall results.

#1: What’s “Normal” in Social Media Usage?

How often are marketers posting on some of the most popular social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?  Here’s a snapshot of the frequency of posts:

• Twitter: Half of the marketers surveyed reported updating at least once per day. Of those, 20.6% actually update several times per day.
• Facebook:  The largest group (33.4%) of marketers are updating “weekly.” However, nearly 30% are updating at least once per day.
• LinkedIn: Only 11.5% update daily with the overall consensus being weekly updates at 25.4%.

What’s hype and what’s fact?

Many of the findings in this report touched on some of the frequent hype-versus-fact dialogue taking place in the social media arena. “Is Twitter more popular than Facebook?” “Do companies with no money use ‘earned’ media the most?” and “Do a lot of followers mean social media success?” are some of the questions addressed in the results.

Who has higher usage stats, Facebook or Twitter?

If you look at the overall number of users, both corporate and consumer (with the exception of certain industries), Facebook comes out ahead of Twitter.

Here are some facts:

The average minutes per visitor on Facebook in 2009 was 182.8 versus only 25.6 on Twitter. According to MarketingProfs, “Part of why time spent on Twitter is so much less than time spent on Facebook has much to do with the design of these sites. Facebook encourages users to aggregate external content on Facebook to be viewed within the network, while Twitter encourages users to link externally, viewing content outside of the network.”

Also, about half of all marketers report that their employers or clients actively maintain a corporate Facebook account, while 42.8% reported their employers or clients maintain a Twitter site.

Who’s using “free” media? Based on the results of the study, “free” media, also known as “earned” media, is not just for small businesses with no money to spend. The data shows that “it takes money to build and staff earned media marketing materials. The word ‘free’ belongs in quotations for a reason,” says MarketingProfs.

This compares “earned media” usage against annual corporate revenue. Surprisingly it shows a steady usage amount across many of the “earned media” tactics, showing that annual corporate revenues are not necessarily a driving factor for “earned media” usage.

“Comparing earned media use against annual corporate revenue, we find a remarkably steady usage amount across many of these tactics. Private communities, share tools, SEO and email have nearly identical amounts of usage across all these levels of annual revenue. Those taking in less than $10 million do tend to rely more heavily on public online communities and blogs, while companies with lots of cash are more likely to invest in PR and viral videos. However, it is surprising how consistent usage is across all these categories.”

Do follower counts really matter?

According to the stats, there are three types of Twitter users, the two primary types being “those that value massive follower counts and those that want a very specific set of people to follow them.” And MarketingProfs points out that a third type of Twitter users might be those that want a lot of followers but have no clue how to get them.

This shows how the number of followers reported by corporate Twitter users is distributed. The steep curves shows that some users care about the quantity of followers while others care more about the quality of followers.

Although the report did not touch on the number of fans on corporate Facebook fan pages, it did report on corporate Facebook accounts and the number of friends associated with them.  Based on the results, only 6% of Facebook fan pages had 2,000 friends or more.

This shows the number of Facebook friends reported by corporate users. Similar to the Twitter graph above, there is a steep curve. This curve shows that very few marketers (only 6%) have been able to reach the 2,000 friend mark, meaning most marketers fall well below this mark.

#2:  Social Media Strategies: The Good, Bad & Ugly

On Twitter, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving sales by linking to promotional web pages (72.1% tried it) and 2) driving traffic by linking to marketing web pages (54.2% tried it).

On Facebook, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving traffic to corporate materials with status updates (55.3%) and 2) “friending” recent customers with corporate Facebook profiles (39.2%).

Here’s what you really need to know from the report:  The least-tried tactics often seem to work the best (something to consider next time you plan a social media campaign!).

Here are some interesting factoids revealed when marketers were asked the following:

• Monitoring Twitter for PR problems in real time? While only 50.8% actually tried it, 74.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Inviting Twitter users with positive brand tweets to do something? 33.2% tried it, 72.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Contacting Twitter users tweeting negatively about the brand? 22.4% tried it, 72.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Creating an in-person event using only Twitter invites? 13.5% tried it, 71.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Using Facebook user data to profile your customers’ demos or interests? 25% tried it, 73.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Creating a Facebook application around a brand? 24.6% tried it, 73.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Counterproductive Social Media Tactics

MarketingProfs’ expert panel weighed in on the counterproductive tactics many marketers are using today.  Below is a list of a few from the report.  Check them out and see if you or your company fell into any of these social media tactic traps:

• Pushing data: Companies that only push out their own messages and continually dump links to their promotions are missing out on the responses of their followers and fans. When they do this, they are missing the opportunity to engage and build valuable relationships.  This is a sure-fire way to lose followers quickly.
• Treating social media as a short-term campaign: It is easy to spot the companies that are not in it for the long haul and not interested in long-term relationships—just like the previous point, they are the ones pushing data and ignoring their followers.
• Thinking Twitter revolves around you: Two great examples of this are Twitter auto-responders triggered by a follow and not following most people following you on Twitter. These actions speak volumes and tell your followers you are in it for you… not them.

#3:  2010 Social Media Predictions from the Expert Panel

When MarketingProfs asked their panel of experts how social media and social media usage will change in 2010 and how these changes will affect marketers, their predictions touched on the surge of Google Wave, the onset of social media integration and growing skepticism overall. Here’s a snapshot of their predictions:

The Surge of Google Wave

One expert predicts Google Wave will “rock the universe” and thus blur the lines of online communication such as blogging and IM. “Efforts to make it easy for people to ‘take their network with them’ across sites will play an important role in the disruption of user loyalty to various sites and services.”

Social Media Integration

According to Jason Baer, president of Convince & Convert, we’ll begin to see more case studies showing the integration of social media with other prominent marketing initiatives. For example, we’ll see more examples of how social media integrates with email, banner ads, direct mail and customer service.

Social Media Growth and Skepticism

Heidi Cool, an Internet marketing strategist, predicts that social media will continue to grow and more consumers and marketers will get in the game.  And with this continued growth will come social media newbies who will introduce more “missteps along the way” (e.g., increase in Twitter spamming) that could negatively affect how we choose to use the platforms. She notes how thought leader Robert Scoble changed the way he uses Twitter due to the spamming issues and many may follow his lead as more missteps surface.  Cool points out that if “too many new marketers abuse the systems by using auto-following services, only pushing content without listening, etc., it will make users more skeptical of business usage.”

More Opportunity to Capture Market Share

David Alston, vice president of marketing & community for Radian6, predicts that more people will continue to use social media platforms to express their needs and challenges with companies (instead of calling or writing in their grievances). Alston notes that businesses that embrace this form of communication will have the opportunity to capture market share from those who don’t. Marketers that make listening and engaging the core of how they market will begin to grow in numbers because it is how word of mouth is powered and it is much more effective.

The report goes into much more detail and is definitely worth a read.  To check it out, go here.

So now it’s your turn.  What do you think of the findings? Have you or your company been victim to the “counterproductive” social media tactics mentioned above?

Posterous is known as the most “social” networking place of social media. It’s also the ideal solution for sharing content that’s too long for a tweet and too short for a blog post.

There are many different reasons and motivations to create a free Posterous account. Let’s have a look at the 7 most common reasons for businesses to use Posterous.

#1: Can Replace Your Blog

When a regular blog is not for you, Posterous can give you similar advantages to a regular blog without the work of setting up a blog and maintaining it.  All you have to do is send in your content by email.  It’s that simple.  This is why Posterous is great for lifestreaming.

This can be a good starting point for businesses hesitating to create their own blog. Posterous can provide a place to learn more about social media and develop the right content strategies.

#2: Fills a Gap Between Blogging and Microblogging

Posterous is an easy way to publish more content to reach different audiences. Steve Rubel says, “I still see a big space in between blogs and Twitter that allows you to have a hub and spoke strategy and post in multiple formats.”

And as Ted Villa says, “Posterous is clean and nimble, simple to use and a great tool in any organization’s social media toolkit. It’s a great way to extend a client’s footprint online and increase links to their site as well as their social media sites.”

This can fill a gap in your presence on social media.

#3: Can Improve Your Visibility

Posterous can help you improve your visibility in search results in two ways.

First, you have more updates for search engines to find. If you like to share photos and videos online, Posterous makes it very easy to do this (see reason #7 below for more details). And with photo and video publishing made this easy, you end up sharing more content to increase your online search results.

Second, you can publish your Posterous content on your own website. Unlike other social media platforms, you can set up your Posterous account on your own URL.  This means you can set up your Posterous account on:

• Your own domain name separate from your company website
• Or even use a sub-domain of your current website or blog

This is something important to keep in mind as the social media landscape changes over time.

#4: Gives You Another Voice on Social Media

Many business professionals also use Posterous to post content that would be off topic on their main website or blog and engage with a different audience online.

Posterous provides an easy venue to share different “social” content. A separate platform makes it easy to create an additional point of connection with your audience, with a different style, to engage different mindsets.  As Debbie Weil says, “There are distinct differences in how you talk or write for the different platforms.  Simply put, you write in a different ‘voice’ and, generally, talk about different topics.”

This makes it easy to reach out to different audiences.

#5: Makes it Easy for Groups to Publish Content

Posterous allows you to set up group accounts too.  This means you can set up:

• Posterous pages for individual team members
• Collaborative Posterous pages for different company employees to post on the same page
• Collaborative Posterous pages to bring people outside your company to collaborate on one Posterous page

Here’s one example of how Posterous brings social networking to a higher level: ClickIdeas

#6: Helps You to Segment Content for Different Audiences

You can use your Posterous account to create different points of contact with your audience.  Pat Kitano says, “I originally intended this slideshow (How to create a blog without “writing” one) for local businesspeople who wanted a blog for marketing purposes, but didn’t have the inclination to start a blog due to writing and time commitments. After posting the slideshow, I received feedback that Posterous was a great method to create new ‘blogs’ on a variety of topics and interests that were parallel to the principal blog. One mentioned how fast Posterous blogs were indexed by Google.”

This makes it easy to test different market segments outside of your main blog or website.

#7: Is the Easiest Option to Share Photos

Posterous is simply the easiest social media platform to share photos and videos.  All you have to do is email your photo or video to Posterous and it does everything else. This means you can publish your favorite photos and videos from any location where you have access to your email, even from your mobile phone.

This is why many users choose to post all of their photos and videos to Posterous and set it up to feed their Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles.

Bonus: Makes You Easy To Connect With

Sometimes a personal touch helps you to create a stronger connection with your audience on social media.  This is why some business professionals use Posterous as a place to provide a unique glimpse into their personal lives.

Jason Falls does a good job at providing both personal and business insights on his Posterous page: Falls, Off the Rocker. He links to these Posterous posts from his Twitter account and invites his Twitter followers to get to know him better.

A Step Toward Creating Social Connections

Creating a social presence and adapting to different social media platforms are not easy for many businesses.  Posterous provides a way for businesses to make a social connection between their own website and other social media platforms as they learn more about incorporating social media into their current marketing tactics.

Ready to Give Posterous a Try?  Here’s some good resources to check out:

• Read Mashable’s Posterous Guide.
• Have a look at Guy Kawasaki’s Twelve Tips and Tricks.
• And remember to subscribe to Social Media Examiner.  There’s more to come on Posterous and other social media platforms.

Now It’s Your Turn

• What are you interested in getting out of Posterous?
• Do you already have a Posterous page?
• How is Posterous helping your social media marketing?

Share the link to your Posterous page below and tell us what your experience has been so far in the Comments section below.

David Armano recently published his social media predictions for 2010 on the Harvard Business Blog.  Here’s a detailed analysis on whether his predictions will likely come true.

Trend #1: Social Media Networks Become Exclusive

Armano predicts we’ll begin to see more exclusivity of networks as users focus more on specific niche content.  Indeed, research supports the prediction that people will be willing to pay for access to specialty networking groups.  Payment models by their very nature will exclude many spammers and create higher-quality networks.

“The bottom line is that users are willing to pay for social network content as long as sites cater to specific market niches as opposed to broader, mainstream audiences,” according to eMarketer.

Trend #2: Corporations Scale Social Media Efforts

Armano predicts corporations will begin to incorporate social media initiatives on a larger scale, moving beyond their one-off marketing experiments and general communication activity.

Research also supports this prediction.  For example, 94% of companies sponsoring online communities plan to increase their social networking support as well as engage with other social media tools, according to the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study by Deloitte.

Trend #3: Social Media for Business Becomes… Fun

Armano predicts businesses will focus more on adding entertainment to their social media efforts to incentivize user activity.

There’s plenty of data to support this trend:

Games rank #1 in top-performing mobile applications, followed by social networking apps, according to a recent report by Distimo. Games and networking are often closely related in many social media environments (I see this often on Facebook fan pages).

Here’s a great example of a mainstream company taking advantage of this emerging trend:  Volkswagen recently went 100% mobile for their GTI launch and created a virtual game via the Apple App Store.  It includes a chance to compete to win one of six limited-edition 2010 GTIs.  This is a great example of social media “game” marketing—and relates to trend #5.

Word of Facebook caution! Companies that plan on running contests on Facebook need to proceed with caution. Facebook just announced that brands, advertisers, and marketers that want to run contests or sweepstakes on its platform have to go through an approval process first. And it could get pricey.  For more information, check out this post by Mari Smith.

Trend #4: Social Media Policies Become Standard for Businesses

Armano predicts in the coming months, your company will release the “rules of engagement” for social media activity. These will be social media guidelines.

Here’s some data to support this trend:

• 40% of companies actively block employee access to social media for any purpose and only 26% of companies actually encourage social media use to further business objectives, according to a report by Russell Herder.
• 54% of chief information officers (CIOs) do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while they’re at work, according to a similar study by Robert Half Technology.
• 19% of businesses permit social media use for business purposes only and 16% permit social media activity for limited personal use, according to the same study by Robert Half Technology.

Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, points out, “Professionals should let common sense prevail when using Facebook and similar sites—even outside of business hours.  Regrettable posts can be a career liability.”<

Trend #5: Mobile Becomes a Social Media Lifeline

According to Armano, with the banning of social media activity increasing in the workplace and smartphone sales on the rise, the social networking addiction will be carried over to mobile devices.

Here’s some research to support this trend:

• AT&T’s mobile data traffic increased 4,932% over the last three years and over 1 billion “heavy mobile data users” are predicted by 2013, according to a presentation given by Morgan Stanley’s Economy Internet Trends.
• 46% of users younger than 35 prefer to engage in all things social media via a mobile device,according to a Gadgetology study.
• 20% of all bloggers report updating their blog from a mobile device, according to Technorati’s recent State of the Blogosphere report.

Trend #6:  Social Networks Reduce Users’ Reliance on Email

Armano predicts sharing of content will be sent via social networking sites instead of via traditional email.

Here’s data to support this trend:

• 32% of Gen Y consumers share promotional offers with members inside a social network, according to a report titled Participatory Network Marketing Methodology.
• 34% of marketers feel integrating social media and email marketing is one of the most important email marketing initiatives, according to a study by Universal McCann.
• 81.5% of social network users (those who use the Internet at least every other day) say messaging friends is the top activity when visiting social media sites, also reported by Universal McCann.

Here I’ve highlighted the studies and articles that support Armano’s conclusions.  The research seems to affirm his predictions.

Do you agree with these predictions? Are there any you predict won’t surface as trends in 2010? What other trends would you add to the mix?  Please leave your comments below.

#1: By 2010, 26 Million (1 in 7) U.S. Adults Will Use Twitter Monthly

A new study by eMarketer surpasses their previous estimates of Twitter usage. The study, conducted just last month, found the following: “In 2009, there will be 18 million U.S. adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly. That represents a 200% increase over 2008 levels. Usage will reach 26 million U.S. adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.”

Earlier this year, eMarketer reported more conservative usage numbers, stating that there were indications of large numbers of users abandoning the site shortly after signing up and many others only using it sporadically. However, they recently revised their estimates because “recent data shows healthy—and growing—percentages of U.S. Internet users adopting the popular microblogging platform,” according to eMarketer senior analyst, Paul Verna.

Twitter is not the only social networking site to report record usage numbers. In September, Facebook officially hit the 300 million-user mark, making the social networking site nearly as large as the U.S. population.

#2: Americans Spend 17% of Online Time on Social Media Sites

As popular social media platforms continue to grow their numbers of users, it is logical to conclude that Americans are spending more time on social networking sites. According to a recent study by The Nielsen Company, 17% of the time spent online was at social networking sites (an increase from 6% in August 2008).

Among those paying the most attention to this recent trend are advertisers. Online ad spending increased by 119% to $108 million in August 2009.

#3: In 2010, Over 50% of Marketers Will Be Using Social Media

Marketers are becoming even more aware that social media marketing must be a key component of their media buy strategy. This was recently affirmed in the findings of the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” by the Center for Media Research, which examined the likelihood of marketers including social media in their 2010 marketing plan. Over half (56.3%) of marketers stated that social media would “realistically” be part of that mix.

The top 5 most popular media for the 2010 marketing spend were as follows:

• Email (56.8%)
• Social networks (56.3%)
• Keyword search (49.7%)
• Radio (42.2%)
• Magazines (42.1%)

In addition, 57% of media buyers reported they will buy non-traditional media, including online, display video, search, mobile and event sponsorships, while 43% reported they will buy the more traditional media, including TV, print and radio.

#4: Blogs Most Useful Social Media Tool, Say 51% of Businesses

McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey” examined companies’ overall assessment of the value of different social media technologies. As reviewed by eMarketer, “When it came to customer-related benefits, blogs were the most useful tool, bringing measurable benefits to 51% of responding companies worldwide. That was followed by video-sharing and social networking at 48% each, and RSS feeds at 45%.”

In addition to these findings, the top three reported benefits of Web 2.0 marketing included:

• Increased marketing effectiveness (52%)
• Higher customer satisfaction (43%)
• Reduced marketing costs (38%)

#5: 75% of Marketers Plan to Increase Social Media Use in 2010

According to a recent survey by virtual events provider Unisfair, marketers are most focused on attracting and keeping customers in 2010 and they plan to use social media to make this happen. A few interesting factoids from the Unisfair findings:

The 3 leading marketing priorities in 2010 according to U.S. marketers:

• New customer acquisition (60%)
• Customer retention and engagement (48%)
• Thought leadership (45%)

The top 5 marketing tactics U.S. marketers planned to increase in their 2010 marketing mix:

• Social media (75%)
• Web search/SEO (51%)
• Email campaigns (49%)
• Virtual events (48%)
• Online advertising (28%)

The study also asked marketers to rank the value of social media platforms. LinkedIn came in on top at 26%, Facebook at 23% and Twitter at 17%.

What are your thoughts? How might these study findings impact your future social media activities? I’d love to hear from you.