Radium

Who cares about Google vs. Microsoft when you have two search giants like facebook and twitter waging war on one another. Okay, not really but recently facebook rolled out a new and improved search functionality to a limited user base.
According to facebook:

You will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone.

Earlier today, MediaPost presented a research study conducted by Knowledge Networks. The study focused on how people use social media and specifically how social media influences consumer purchase decisions. According to Knowledge Networks, the study was based on responses from 418 social media users. While the study raises some important topics, I take issue with several items in the report.

During a recent new business pitch the perspective client informed me that in addition to strategy and design, the other two agencies in contention were proposing on the daily management of the clients social media campaigns. The agencies were offering to act on behalf of the client, posting content and responding to inquiries as if they were indeed the company. They told the client, you don’t have to do anything.

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t outsourcing your social media campaign totally defeat the purpose? If social media is about having your voice heard, what is the value in having someone else speak for you?

Still think you need a corporate website to promote your product? Glaceau doesn’t think so or at least they are heavily promoting their facebook company page over the actual Vitamin Water website. The latest television spots caused quite a response when viewers noticed they contained a URL to the facebook.com/vitaminwater page instead of the expected company URL.

I got the idea to write this post after reading ProBlogger and Pistachio’s article on twitter landing pages.
If you’re using twitter as a marketing tool, you may be overlooking a simple and effective way to convert more traffic into sales; a properly optimized landing page. Landing pages are web pages that users reach after clicking on an ad. In this case the landing page is the address listed in the “more info URL” displayed on your twitter profile.

Why is this important?
Any marketer will tell you, a poor landing page can kill your campaign. What good is sending traffic to a website if the user is simply going to leave once they get there? Open rates and CTR’s are good metrics but conversion rates are the real metric of success.

Because we love playing around with data and we wanted to see what the top 100 twitter users do for a living we compiled the following graph showing the top 100 twitter user by job category. For source data we used the top 100 rankings from twitterholic on March 31, 2009. For this post, “top 100″ is defined as twitter users with the largest number of followers. Although we believe there are better metrics to use, this was the easiest to quantify.