Incite Group is now Reuters Events - LEARN MORE
By Liam Dowd - December 3rd, 2014
How social are marketers? The top-50 Klout retailers. Visual marketing across Pinterest and how to develop internal social communications across your corporation.
The Klout 50
As a measure of influence whether your corporation believes its Klout score has any relevance is often a subjective decision. However, Klout has continued to develop and has now released its first top 50 rankings for retailers.
“The Klout 50 is the ultimate ranking of brands that are authentically connecting with their digital audience,” the company said. “These social elite brands are the most active on social media platforms and their audiences consistently share and interact with their digital content.
“Amazon lands the number 1 spot followed by Microsoft and MTV. These brands are reinventing the way they connect with people and share experiences on social media. They are authentic, create compelling and meaningful content as well as engage with everyone – not just the positive, most influential fans.”
The Klout 50 is based on the Interbrand 2014 Best Global Brands report and corresponding Klout Scores. Klout Scores are compiled using proprietary algorithms, determined by more than 400 signals from eight different networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as real world data from Wikipedia.
“The Klout 50 salutes those brands that know social is part of their consumer’s everyday life and for effectively connecting and sharing experiences with them,” said Katy Keim, CMO of Lithium. “However, this is also a wakeup call for the brands that are not on the list to understand that without social they lose.”
Where does your corporation rank?
Marketers: How social are you?
Research from the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) reveals that marketers are highly active on social media. Surprisingly, the ANA also discovered that LinkedIn and not Facebook was the most popular social media network amongst ANA members.
While Facebook and LinkedIn tied in terms of the share (92%) of ANA members using them personally, they were far more connected with others via LinkedIn (an average of 507 connections) vs. Facebook (an average of 385 friends).
The third most popular social network among the ad execs, not surprisingly, was Twitter (71% and 232 followers), followed by Pinterest (55%, 39 followers), and Instagram (51%, 116 followers).
While the ANA members are more connected via LinkedIn, far more described Facebook as being their “favourite” social network. And 45% of the ad execs described Facebook as their favourite, followed by 19% for LinkedIn, 16% for Instagram, 12% for Twitter, and 6% for Pinterest.
Compared to average Americans, the ad executives are much more voracious users of all forms of social media, especially for business-oriented network LinkedIn. More than four times as may ANA members (92%) use LinkedIn as compared with the average adult Internet users (22%), according to estimates from the Pew Research Center.
95% of Pinterest users have made a purchase
Visual shopping has been growing in popularity over the last year thanks mostly to the massive expansion of Pinterest. New figures from Curalate and their Internet Retailer 2014 top 500 guide, reveals that 4.86 million interactions on Pinterest between November 1st and November 21st of 2014.
Earned campaigns represented 82% of interactions. Owned campaigns only represented 18%, so it’s clear Pinterest is a fair market in which to earn your audience. More brands were using pin buttons on product pages (72%) as opposed to on their home pages (56%).
Corporations have known for some time that visual marketing is a powerful channel to leverage. These figures show that with shopping periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday gathering pace each year, enhancing your business’ visual marketing has a real commercial advantage. And with three-quarters of Pinterest purchases being made via mobile devices, focusing visual content that is optimised for these devices is a must.
Enhance your internal social communications
The use of social media has for the most part been a customer facing exercise. A new infographic offers an insight into how these networks can be used by your corporation’s employees.
If your organisation has Generation Y employees (those born in the 80s and 90s) these people will use mobile devices as a natural extension of their communications. Internal mobile communications are therefore key, but only 11% of businesses are creating apps for internal mobile communications.
Corporations are missing a great opportunity to leverage the desire to communicate across their organisations and the massive expansion of the BYOD phenomenon. Add to this desire the clear drive to use social media, and your corporation has a chance to create a dynamic internal communications system with social connections at its heart.
Until next time….
The Useful Social Media team.