The social media field has changed dramatic over the past decade or so and many websites have completely altered their look and their important parts. And while customer trust in social media marketing of the classic persuasion, like banner ads, is as low as 8% there are increasing numbers of options and tools from popular sites with tools specially designed to enhance your social media presence so let’s have a quick look.
Twitter for Everybody
Earlier this month Twitter decided to expand its advertising dashboard from big spenders to everybody, including small ‘self-serve’ advertisers. This expansion now allows your social media campaigns to reach users with similar interests as the ones you’re already in touch with and can be customized by platform, device or range of interests and even by gender. The advanced options will make life easier for everybody in sales and marketing as well, be they affiliates or the affiliate marketing agency.
Facebook’s Ad Tools
Facebook hasn’t been idling on the advertising front either. The promoted post debacle did little to slow the social network juggernaut and in 2012 it implemented new advertising tools, much like the ones introduced by Twitter a few days ago. Custom audiences allows you to better target your marketing campaign at highly attractive groups through use of private details. The newly introduced lookalike audiences goes one step forward and allow you to target individuals similar to those that you already have in your lists, horizontally expanding your campaigns.
A Smarter Bing
Bing is shaping up to be a good Facebook contender both for basic users and advertisers. The Microsoft Search engine has now partnered with LinkedIn to provide better and more in-depth search results when looking for people, something that might make it a force in b2b. So while Google still reigns supreme think about optimizing specifically for Bing as well and put your company high on the SERP for business professionals to find.
Klout for Business
Klout is another service that is starting to get serious as it is slowly expanding, trying to find a good growth model. The Klout Perks program has been expanded allowing advertisers to reach different people based on their influence scores and, most importantly how you break down your network by social network. The exact value of the new dashboard, and Klout in general, is still uncertain but the new model shows marketing potential.
Graph Search
The biggest thing to come to Facebook since the Timeline, Graph is an innovative way for people to search the collective wisdom of their social network and Facebook in general. While the tool is still in beta it shows tremendous potential already allowing you to draw comparisons amongst your friends and followers and other parameters. You should already be using Graph to get acquainted but when it rolls out it should be big.
Author Bio
Carl is an affiliate manager for an affiliate marketing agency who uses Social networks quite a bit to keep in touch with partners. He writes on SEO and social media topics.