News For Local Businesses: This Week In Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Facebook Deals Go Local: Businesses can now offer discounts to their local markets through Facebook Deals. And Facebook will be publishing these Deals stories in the Facebook feeds of your customers. This new service puts Facebook into direct competition with Groupon. 
Most Marketers Clueless About Social Media Conversations
Alterian’s 8th annual survey of marketers examined the changes affecting marketing professionals today. The results below show a developing shift—one that’s moving away from the typical broadcasting we’ve seen in social media’s early days and moving more toward higher engagement.
According to the survey, marketers admit to struggling with customer engagement on multiple channels. This makes sense as many marketers are just beginning to experiment with more engagement efforts, one channel at a time.
In the near future, we’ll begin to see this single channel engagement morph into a more synergistic engagement effort over multiple channels. As we’ve seen with other social media trends, these shifts take time.
Which is Better for Social Media Monitoring: TweetDeck or SproutSocial?
If you’re running social media efforts for your business, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve at least tried a free monitoring tool like TweetDeck.
But new social media management tools are popping up like weeds and a couple of them might end up being roses. One new such tool is SproutSocial.com.
Here are the 7 ways to tell if you’re ready to graduate from TweetDeck.
8 Social Media Trends Impacting Businesses
As businesses continue to integrate social media and become more confident and comfortable with social media tools and platforms, we’re starting to see a change in social media usage. A new study reveals what’s changing with social media.
SmartBrief recently partnered with Summus Limited to survey more than 6,000 of its readers across a variety of industries.
They benchmarked and measured the state of social media usage among businesspeople. The data identified eight prevalent trends that give great insight into the social media behaviors, beliefs and challenges of the majority of businesses today.
22% of Online Time Spent With Social Media
Is social media taking over the web?
Just in the last year, the number of social media users has continued to climb at record speed and the audience demographics have widened. And marketers have noticed the trend.
For proof of social media’s steep rise, take a look at the number of statistics that surfaced in the last month. These findings further support what most of us already believe: Social media is only getting bigger.
Most Marketers Not Profiting From Social Media
Are your social media marketing campaigns bringing in sales? If you answered “yes,” you’re part of a very small group found a recent study.
Although many marketers see the value and potential of social media marketing, most have yet to translate that into sales, found a new report by R2integrated.
According to the study, 65% of respondents said that their companies have not increased revenue or profited using social media. When asked about their biggest impediment, 36% of the respondents cited “not enough data or analytics to develop ROI” as their #1 challenge.
A few key finding determined what set the winners apart from the losers.
Study Shows Time Pays With Social Media Marketing
Have you asked this question: Is the time I invest with social media really worth it? Whether you’re new or an old hat with social media, chances are you’ve wondered if the time commitment is really worth the return on investment (ROI).
Make no mistake about it: a true investment of time and resources is necessary to see significant social media marketing success.
But the real question is, “Just HOW MUCH time is needed to see solid success?”
This question was recently answered in the new study, 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, authored by Michael Stelzner. Based on the report findings, ROI is top of mind for most marketers using social media.
