Looking for a huge numbers of fans? Can’t wait a second longer? Then read on, this blog post is for you…

1. Buy your fans
This is definitely the easiest way to guarantee a following fast; decide how many ‘fans’ you want then simply go to any dodgy-looking site (probably via a Facebook ad) take your wallet out (remember to stick your head in the sand) et voila, success! But wait a second; by definition once you directly pay for a relationship what does that relationship become? What does it really mean? There’s a very obvious analogy here, one that doesn’t involve any love at all…

2. Give away loads of free stuff
Giving away free stuff sometimes isn’t a bad idea. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to give away a 3D TV if you’re an outdoors pursuit’s specialist. Clearly your fans are more likely to be couch potatoes than bouldering dedicatees. I recently heard of a company that gave away 30,000 pairs of their not-so-cheap product and now have somewhere near 45,000 Facebook fans. They don’t do much else in the social space and the giveaway didn’t involve anything other than a straight ‘Like in exchange for the product’* mechanism. At least they now have a ‘following’** and they know that following is interested in what they sell (which already beats the companies that have decided to go with the first tactic in this list).

* Now, of course, forbidden by Facebook’s fun-killing Promotions Guidelines.

** I use the word in the loosest sense of its meaning.

3. Do something really stupid
One ‘positive’ by-product of doing something so stupid that it ends up as the latest in a litany of high-profile social media #fails is that you get a short-term boost in following. Unfortunately this boost tends to be reasonably short-lived (and is the equivalent of people rubber-necking as they slowly creep past a car crash before they speed off, glad that it wasn’t them). It’s no use kidding yourself; they’re there for the spectacle and may even have started following you to join in the social media fury. Not good fans.

4. Be something (or someone) that everyone wants to follow who’s not already on social media
A footballing deity, a deranged former Governor of Alaska or a self-proclaimed drug-addled superhuman. If you’re one of the most famous entities on the planet and you’re not yet on social media you have a landslide of fans waiting for you. We didn’t mean you Gary.

5. Run a spectacularly innovative, successful campaign
Every now and then we see a great campaign achieve unprecedented, wholly-deserved cut-through and people flock to them like some kind of messiah. These campaigns are rarer than celebrities and quickly become fixed aspirational benchmarks for marketers everywhere. They are unlikely, difficult to predict and usually the result of a ‘eureka idea’ made real though serious hard graft, planning and (often) significant budgets. So many great ideas get lost, distorted and drowned but every now and again one makes it through.

By now I hope you’ve got my point. Usually there are no quick wins; that is the very nature of social media. It builds over time, if you do things well and keep at it. Smart campaigns will give you injections of followings if they hit the mark, but be prepared to experiment. Some brands will never have huge followings but if they can build quality followings they too are realising the opportunity.

The more we try to force old habits on to this new landscape the more we destroy the opportunity to do something really valuable. 

@adigoodsell 

Social media has clunked its way through many evolutions over the years. The past four has seen the digital world settle into a social rhythm. Facebook being the daddy of them all, Twitter is the cooler, younger kid on the block, and LinkedIn taking the lead as the place to hang out to talk serious stuff. The commonality with all of those platforms is they are essentially for everyone. The barriers to entry are extremely low. Most tech savvy people will generally have those three, even if they’re not active in all three (I bet everyone who reads this has all three).

For me, the above spaces are the terrestrial TV channels of the seventies. People were given three that catered to everyone in the UK on a basic level. This year feels like the year satellite TV made the break through, I’m not sure how it worked for the rest of the world outside the UK, but BSKYB gave us something we’d never had before… choice. If you wanted Sport, you had it 24 hours a day. If you wanted cooking, you filled your boots with as much Delia as you could stomach. If it was holidays, there was a place for you to indulge your passion.

This is the year that social goes satellite; the year the world finally has a dedicated home to indulge their interests. We’ve already seen a huge amount of buzz for social network Pinterest. I was desperate not to fall in love with yet another time drainer, but I have. A visual-based social network geared around your interests. Or how about the yet to be designed Manchester United social network that Sapient-Nitro are building? Talking football all day in a place designed specifically for that need. Instagram has been about for a while, but it’s really taken to the masses over the past 12 months with photography fanatics filling the space with arty snaps of their pugs. How about Path, the social network for sharing moments with your closest friends and family? Far more private than Facebook and slightly more intimate.

There are countless examples of smaller and more specialist social networks setting up all over the place. The question for marketeers globally is which networks work best with your product or service. My feeling is that 2012 social success is going to be more about pioneering ideas in new social spaces, the spaces where people might be more susceptible to brand messages, the places people aren’t being bombarded with different spins on tired ideas.

Which up and coming social networks are you keeping an eye on this year?

@PeterWood33

LinkedIn have been bevering away over the past few months making subtle improvements to their channel. The two stand out innovations are the ‘Ads by LinkedIn Members’ and the company status update.

One of the most pressing conundrums in B2B social marketing is working out ways to seed the content you’re creating into places where people are genuinely interested and grateful to receive it. Creating the content with the right company isn’t a problem; trying to share it in an organic way without spamming however, is time consuming and very manual.

Twitter has been taken to by many organisations, but developing a following is a notoriously tough task especially if you’re dealing in an industry that doesn’t have the glamour of, say, a consumer electronics or dot com start-up.

Even if you can develop a following, how can you put a value on them? You garner very little data from the micro-blogging site and from personal experience, click through rates from Twitter are incredibly poor (from a highly engaged passionate Twitter following of 11,500, my personal site only receives 0.3% CTR for links).

Facebook has always been a questionable avenue for true B2B organisations to share content; it’s not really the space for it- a bit like discussing utility bills in a night club. The outcome of this that generally, the best place to share content has been industry specific forums and specialist LinkedIn groups.

Well, that might just have changed with the new status update function.

Businesses can be followed by LinkedIn members who are interested (not exactly new), and now those businesses can take a place in the members news feeds and share content in status updates. Businesses can now engage with potential clients as an entity and their content can be distributed more organically.

What makes this even more exciting is that you can put a value on who is seeing your content because LinkedIn analytics (as well as manual investigation) allows you break down your following by seniority, job title and industry.

There is now an opt-in platform to share without spamming! Now the onus is on businesses to create relevant content and to make use of the space; setting up a company page is only half the battle, becoming social as a business is fast becoming unavoidable.

Combine this exciting communication upgrade with the ability to promote your company page in the same targeted way you can market to users interests in Facebook, well, you’ve got a recipe for some mighty fine B2B social communication!

@Peterwood33

Manchester United have struck a deal with Sapient Nitro to become their global digital agency and as part of that deal, word has it they’re going to create a social media platform that will allow the club to engage directly with their online fan base of nearly 660million.

Ignoring the numbers, because I think they are nonsense, the concept is very interesting and very forward thinking. Businesses gain plenty of benefits from engaging with their fans via the world’s most prominent social media platforms, but for me, once you surpass a certain fan/follower threshold in certain industries; you have to start thinking a bit more selfishly.

How can your business start harness that passion and turn it into something of more value?

Facebook gives you some interesting base data on your fan base, but it doesn’t really give you much else in the way of statistics. It also doesn’t make it easy to do much with those highly engaged fans. Twitter is a fantastic place to converse on a one to one basis, especially in the world of sport, but again, you never really own the data, you don’t really know much about the people you’re engaging with and because the platform is someone else’s, so is the really interesting data and so is the flexibility.

Someone else owns your conversation. Someone else is profiting from your fans. Someone else could potentially switch you off at any time (I know, I know, that last point was very dramatic).

If you’re a brand like Manchester United, you have the ability to move your fans wherever you want. If you can move the bulk of your fans behind a wall into a bespoke Manchester United community, you’re on to a winner.

Your ability to track data is greatly increased, there are no strict rules on competitions and you can incentivise an already enthused community to keep on coming back. Hey, you could even integrate the established social media platforms into your community! The possibilities are endless, the ROI far more measurable and far easier to influence than it would be in the major standard social channels.

Manchester United owning the conversation is the key here, what they do once they’re in control is when we’ll see exactly how social they’re planning to be. A move many will watch with anticipation, a move I’m sure many of the big boys will look to follow if it’s a success.

@Peterwood33

Facebook has always been about driving engagement, the problem they’ve had over the past few years is that their mechanism for engagement hasn’t gone much further than the inflexible ‘Like’ button, a share, or, if you’re lucky, a comment or two. This was great while it lasted, but it did open brands pages up for social media black hat techniques. We’ve seen a well-known socially irrelevant brand up their likes by 5,000 in the space of a week and take unprecedented engagement from people, that if you investigate, either work for their PR agency, or are praising the price of a product they’re ineligible to purchase. 

All very naughty and not in the spirit of organic brand growth.

Well, the days of being judged by how many times you can coerce someone into a one off like are in the process of abolition. Likes will still be relevant, only if you pay attention to the ticker in the top right hand corner of your screen and jeez, who pays attention to that? Not me!

A brands goal now is to integrate with Facebook’s new Timeline / Open Social Graph. They’ve opened up the ‘like’ to be any verb a brand so wishes, so now, a travel company could opt for ‘visited’ to be their new ‘like’ and the object could be a destination, say Scarborough. The idea being that developers could build a travel app that sits in your timeline and documents where you travelled in 2011 and if you fancied it, you could back date it over the past five years and keep a record of all your holidays snaps in a branded holiday scrap book (Scarborough beach never looked so grand).

This is fantastic, Facebook are effectively forcing major brands to make themselves useful if they want to be part of our lives. The Mark Zuckerberg vision realised (from the very start, even when Facebook was struggling for revenue, he was notorious for refusing advertising offers that impinged on the user experience).

However, this has put many brands in a sticky situation. What if your brand can’t inspire mass engagement? What if you can’t think of a way to integrate your toothpaste product into a consumer’s timeline? What then? Have Facebook alienated all but the most exciting, well-funded brands, from their platform?

Yes and no is the answer. It’s all about figuring out how to make your brand relevant. Being a manufacturer of cookers doesn’t limit you to conversation around the efficiency of your flame safety device. You could instead engage with people’s diet plans with a recipe app that clocks your calorie intake and promotes oven cooked food over microwave alternative (I know, a very cliché example, but this isn’t a pitch!).

Facebook doesn’t alienate boring brands; it alienates lazy and tired ideas. If you can’t be bothered to make yourself relevant, then join the ticker in the top right hand corner with the rest of the irrelevant drivel. Facebook has shaken up the game again, fat lazy brands beware, you’re going to have to put in a lot more effort if you’ve got designs on peoples newsfeed real estate.

Peter’s findings, published in this week’s The Drum, explore the growing online communities passionately commenting and blogging about football.  As Arsenal’s Head of Marketing Charles Allen put it, ‘We recognise we can’t accommodate all our Arsenal fans inside Emirates Stadium, but via social media we can give them a taste of Arsenal wherever they are in the world.’

You can read the full article here.

Friends. Followers. Contacts. Circles. Social networks can be fun and productive for work or pleasure.

But social networks are also time consuming – more than most of us probably care to admit. With the average person reported to have 130 friends and growing on Facebook alone, the continuous flow of updates from individuals and organizations is overwhelming. From that page you liked on Facebook, to that industry pundit you follow on Twitter, and many others in between, everybody is updating, tweeting, posting, liking, checking in, sharing, +1ing…

Here’s the thing. It’s too much. Admit it. You’re overwhelmed.

I’ve declared a few times on Facebook and Twitter my plans to carry out a cull. A few people or pages get dropped. But…what if that person notices? What if that ex-colleague goes to work somewhere interesting? What if I miss that industry announcement or insider tip? Better not be too harsh, better stay connected.

I’m now on five social networks – four public ones and one closed network for work (Yammer). This week I’ve faced the truth: it’s too much. Time for a cull. But where to start?

Facebook

I know instinctively that Facebook is my personal space – it’s where friends and family share photos and post personal updates. It’s where I go to get away from work – not to blend the personal and professional.

Step one: un-friend work-only contacts and pages. Step two: move them to LinkedIn or Twitter depending on their social media activity; do I want to only keep in contact with them (LinkedIn) or read what they have to say (Twitter)?

Twitter

I maintain several accounts for myself and work, and the work accounts have clear objectives and strategies. My own, I freely admit, doesn’t. It’s a collection of personal and work interests, and I’m a generous follower.

Time for a change. This is the worrying bit – do I follow my instinct, and cull anybody I don’t regularly find useful? Will I miss out? What will happen to my follower volume? Should I care?

I’ve decide to not rush in here – analyzing hundreds of followers and then making bulk changes, whether un-following or adding them to lists, isn’t particularly easy and I’ve yet to find a tool with all the functionality I want to speed this up. Instead, I’m removing accounts I don’t find useful when I see messages from them – cleaning up my Twitter stream as I go.

LinkedIn & Yammer

LinkedIn is the easiest to keep under control – I’m cautious of adding anybody who approaches me (especially recruiters). Yammer, as a B2B network, is even easier to keep relevant – I have 100 percent control over groups and who I follow (OK, so I’m an admin, which helps.)

Google Plus

Now that’s a blank canvas. So how will I avoid repeating the mistakes I’ve drifted into on Facebook and Twitter?

Circles. I’ve immediately setup three – Work, Family & Friends and Acquaintances. I know I’ll add a further one for “Hobbies & Sports” when businesses and organizations have official pages. I might split my work circle up in future – but I’m keeping them small, and have already started consciously ignoring some followers who I don’t want in my circles.

Social Media Relevancy

If I used to be your friend on Facebook, or I no longer mutually follow you on Twitter, sorry. Relevancy has been one of the underpinning characteristics of the biggest success story of digital – search – and the same applies to social media.

Life’s too short, too busy, and too rushed for the irrelevant. For that attitude, I won’t apologize.

It seems strange to me that a company who have a business model so deeply entrenched in genuine consumer opinion would opt to bribe bloggers with content inducements to disseminate bad press about a company that is hardly the poster child of good press.

Facebook fundamentally misunderstood the key driving factors behind being an esteemed blogger. It’s not about the money; it’s about the prestige of being a thought leader in whichever area their passion lies. Show me a blogger concerned about money first and foremost and I’ll show you a bad blogger.

Many businesses struggle with outreach because of this very reason. They’re still living in the days of media buying, a time when commodity purchasing was essential to the survival of publications. Times have changed, most bloggers write for to love of the medium, buying opinion is insulting and infuriating and the fact that a giant of the social media world made this mistake is incredibly ironic.

Our approach to bloggers is a simple one, be social, listen and never assume.

If there was a dislike button on this whole affair, I’d be clicking it…

Peter Wood, Social Media Account Manager

So, another day, another Google announcement that shakes the foundations of social and search strategies. Or does it? Here are our initial – and I stress initial – thoughts on Google +1. Right now we’re focusing on the search side of this as that’s the initial thrust of Google’s announcement, and where most consumers will encounter this functionality first.

What is Google+1?

Simply put, it’s Google’s equivalent of the Facebook “like” button – a way of saying “I like this” or “I recommend this”. Of course, Google aren’t using the word “like” anywhere in their PR.

Consumers can click it in both paid and natural search results – for the former, advertisers have to add it as an option. It’s very important to note that consumers need to be signed in to a Google account (AdWords, Analytics, Gmail etc) to see the button and click it. We have to wonder how many consumers are aware they have a Google Account as a result of using one of Google’s products – it’s not something Google have historically promoted.

If you are wondering about your own Google Account at this point, see this page and login to see which products Google associates with your login – and edit your Google Profile. Yes, you have a Google Profile too. Which brings to me to where Google+1 “likes” appear.

Your Google Profile

If you have a Google Account, you have a Google profile. It might not be public, you might never have filled it in, but you do. You can check yours here https://profiles.google.com/

When a consumer clicks the +1 button, this recommendation is shown in their public Google profile. As shown by Mashable’s example :

Will this Impact Search Results?

Yes. Google have stated this will affect SEO/natural search rankings. So, if your brand gets lots of +1 clicks, it could boost your position in results as Google views your site as “recommended” and therefore of interest to it’s consumers. No guarantees, as ever with Google.

Of course, there will be companies who try to “game this”. We already seen a brand encourage retweets as part of a competition, for example, on Twitter. Brands and their agencies will need to decide what they can do to encourage these clicks without crossing the line – and of course, Google will continue to develop their algorithm to counter such efforts; no doubt a sudden flurry of +1 clicks will be seen as of less value that a continual steam of them that suggest genuine “recommendations”.

This also means every time you click the +1 button you are effectively working for Google, helping them improve their results.

Paid Search and +1

PPC advertisers can opt to include the button on their ads. UPDATE: Google tell us will be enabled for all PPC adverts if the searcher is logged in. Then, when logged in consumers can click it and their friends (as determined via Google’s Profile system) will see they did so, as show in these two images from Google, where “Brian Walker” clicked to recommend an ad.

Will this Change PPC Quality Score and Rankings?

No. Google have clearly stated that unlike natural search, this won’t be used at the present time to determine rankings etc. No surprise – there’s an even clearer financial gain to gaming this if it did impact QS and therefore CPCs.

UPDATE: Whilst it might not affect Quality Score, it could increase CTRs and therefore have a beneficial advantage in PPC.

Beyond Search

Like Facebook’s “Like” button, Google will offer a version of this for brands to put on their websites – so start putting real estate on your site aside now.

This is when the +1 button will really take off – consumers may not be logged in, ignore it or not know what it is in search results. Engagement rates on features like “block site” and earlier feedback mechanism in search haven’t been high. On the websites of brands they like, however, they are much more likely to click the +1 button.

Big Brands Gain the Most?

One of our initial reactions to this here is that big brands will gain the most. They have the brand awareness, brand search volumes and onsite traffic levels to attract the most clicks via SERPs and more significantly via their websites when they’ve integrated the button – just like with Facebook’s button.

We’ll blog more and speak to our clients direct as we assess this more, but for now, here’s the initial action points we recommend:

1.     Educate your colleagues – they’ll start seeing the button on English language searches soon (send them this blog’s URL!)

2.     Warn your developers you’ll need some screen space in the future – unfortunately, date TBC from Google on the onsite button at the time of writing

3.     Discuss this for PPC with your agency – will your brand be recommended? Will this improve your CTRs – or a competitors to your disadvantage? Will Google’s Profile network actually connects your consumers and their friends? The penetration of Google in the UK at 90%, for example, won’t translate to that sort of penetration into consumer’s friend network via Google Profiles (did you know you could have one until today?) You can opt out – see the end of this post.

4.     Discuss your SEO and Social integration strategy with Steak. This is something we’ve been doing with clients for some time – in fact, we first engaged in the Yahoo Answers for brands awareness and SEO reasons for a client back in 2008. We’ve written about SEO and Social regularly on Search Engine Watch too.

5.     Open a Google Profile, and try this out for yourself – that’s the best way to understand it further.

Conclusion

This will be big – because it’s from Google. The real growth in +1 clicks will be once it’s onsite and not just in SERPs; but for search it is now part of strategies going forward.

In social, this could be the way Google finally manages to attract consumers to it’s social platform – whatever that will look like beyond a Google Profile – but it’s early days. It’s not a Facebook or Twitter killer, that is for sure; if anything, Google will try to be the place your profiles merge and connect across social networks and their product network.

The question is: do you actually want to connect those worlds? We’ll leave that hanging in the air for now…

We’ll post more search and social thoughts as our analysis of this develops.

Sources:

Google’s +1 Announcement
Mashable’s original post

UPDATE: We’ve just had an email from Google UK – sign-up to find out when the onsite button is available here.

UPDATE 2: It’s not opt in for PPC; it’ll be turned on as standard (above edited accordingly). AdWords customers can request an opt out here.

John Barton

Head of Planning & Social Media