It is essential for brands to know the ROI of what they spend on advertising. Technology and social should make this easier by tracking clicks and so forth, but the science is not yet perfect. More importantly, people may be prompted to take an action or make a purchase because they saw something, although they didn’t both to click on it.

Facebook is trying to build products that help solve this problem, and give more value to their advertising products. They are rolling out further a “View Tags” cookie, which was rolled out as a small beta test last year. The idea is to make sure Facebook adverts get the credit for purchases made due to ads they have displayed, instead of Google.

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A survey by Twitter and Compete has shown that people exposed to brands via Twitter are more likely to make online purchases. The report says: “Overall, Twitter users are heavy online retail shoppers and buyers. Additionally, the more Tweets that Twitter users see, the more likely they are going to buy. This provides support to the hypothesis that Tweet exposure is a driver of purchase activity.”

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Brands often talk about their online communities, when what they mean is their branded Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn page, or Twitter feed. All of these usually start as broadcast channels for brands – you’re incredibly lucky if your Facebook fans are all engaged enough to be considered a community from the outset – but, with time and effort, can become thriving communities.

Building a community starts with the fundamental principle of marketing: having a basic value proposition that your members believe in. If people feel they are part of something bigger – a group of people with a common interest, or part of a movement – they’ll work with you to help that community grow. Read More »

Nice infographic here that looks at how shoppers use their mobile phone as they increasingly become a very handy shopping companion. While mobile commerce is still relatively small massive growth is expected  in the the next three years. In the US alone the market is set to grow by 362% by 2015.

For now the main way that many of us use our mobile when it comes to shopping is as a price comparison tool. We’re also using it for quickly search for coupons to get better deals. Read More »

Yesterday Twitter announced that is will be giving $100 in free credits to the first 10,000 American small businesses that apply and are eligible. When they ran a similar scheme with American Express back in February, they brought thousands of news businesses into their advertising products.

In a blog post, Twitter said that the successful applicants could use the credit to purchase Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts services to help boost their online following:

“With Promoted Tweets, small businesses can extend the reach of their Tweets to a broader audience…Promoted Accounts can also speed up the growth of a loyal follower base for a small business.”

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More useful research here from Dan Zarrella who has previously looked at ‘How to get more clicks on Twitter’, more effective ways to Tweet and looked at how question and exclamation marks don’t work very well when it comes to 140 characters. His latest research looks at the levels of engagement we think we are getting when we see our Tweets being retweeted.

While most of us would take a retweet as a sign of success he says all too often the reality can be different. Zarrella looked at 2.7 million Tweets that contained links and he found something very interesting.

He says there is apparently “no correlation between retweets and clicks”. In fact, 16.1% of link-containing tweets he looked at generated more retweets than clicks. Simply put that means many people will retweet a Tweet with a link without even clicking on that link themselves. They might give the impression that they have read it, but the truth is they probably haven’t looked at the content the link carries. Read More »

Facebook appear to be testing out some new features to keep users engaged. According to The Next Web these are Upcoming Events and Recently Released Albums. Both will appear in the News Feed.

The AllFacebook blog discovered the new NewsFeed based feature, which lists events in a user’s area that they may not have be invited to. The module’s additional information message reveals that the feature gives “suggestions based on what’s happening nearby.”

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