This post is not affiliated with my employers
Except it is of course, as is everything I say and do online in a public space.
The same goes for you: whether you like it or not you represent your employer online every time you hit ‘update’.
Amazon leapfrogs Topshop to become most popular retailer on Facebook
Amazon has overtaken Topshop to become the most popular retailer on Facebook, according to a new report from eDigitalResearch.
I’ll obviously lay down the usual caveat at the start – success on social isn’t just down to the size of your fan base. In fact we recently blogged about the dangers of measuring social based on fan counts alone.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to look at which brands are the most popular across various social networks.
Tiffany & Co. achieves highest Facebook engagement among top 50 US retailers: report
Tiffany & Co. achieved the highest engagement score on Facebook among the top 50 US retail brands in the first half of this year, according to a new report from Expion.
The research ranked the 50 retailers according to how engaging their Facebook posts were between January 1 and June 30, with engagement rated as the number of fan actions per post.
As mentioned, Tiffany & Co. proved to be the most successful brand by scoring a massive 28,741 interactions on each post. It achieved this by posting one high quality update per day.
On the flip side, although Walmart clocked up a higher total number of interactions it posted as many as six updates per day so achieved an average engagement score of 11,461.
The Death of the Author 2.0
With Google’s Authorship program, you might be tempted to think authors are on the up.
But maybe not. There are quite a number of reasons why authors are as dead as they ever have been.
Six awesome examples of Facebook campaigns by Ikea
Ikea has managed to achieve a decent following across social media, with millions of Facebook fans and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.
Obviously social isn’t just about the size of your fan base, but it’s still an impressive number for a furniture retailer.
Having previously examined how Ikea uses the four main social networks, I decided to take a closer look at its various Facebook campaigns.
For more information on this topic, check out our Facebook for Business Best Practice Guide or book yourself onto our Facebook for Brands Training Course…
Five ways niche ecommerce sites can beat Amazon
Fans of feel-good 90s movies will recall Meg Ryan’s valiant but doomed struggle to save her corner bookstore from Tom Hanks’s big box rival.
Ecommerce niche sites have found themselves in a similar drama, battling to hold their place in the market and the SERPs against mammoth retailers like Amazon, Staples, and Walmart.
While these larger sites certainly have both marketing and SEO advantages: fast delivery, aggressive pricing, enormous SEO budgets, big brand preference from Google, an easier time adding or removing links, it’s important for niche site marketers to recognize that, in certain aspects, they can have an edge.
Here’s how…
Content marketing case study: City Index and The Trading Academy
It’s always refreshing to see companies in old-school industries ploughing a load of money into content marketing.
When I say old-school, I’m talking about companies that have traditionally been fairly forward-thinking in terms of IT and tech, but not necessarily in backing marketing with anything other than straight ad spend on paid media.
City Index’s recent Trading Academy series and campaign was quite a departure, and serves as QED as far as ROI and content marketing is concerned.
Check out the campaign, which won an Econsultancy 2013 Digitals Award for best in financial services.
The four types of ‘always on’ consumers and their digital traits
Identifying customer personas can help businesses to segment their audience and increase conversions with targeted promotions and personalised web experiences.
To this end, new research by Experian has identified four distinct types of connected consumers that it identified as ‘always on.’
This includes consumers who constantly connect with friends and family, and consume various types of digital content from internet-enabled devices.
The results came from a national survey of more than 6,000 US consumers that explores the platform and device preferences, media consumption habits and the online and offline behaviours of ‘always on’ connected consumers.
If you measure social success by ‘likes’, you’re going to get click farms
Let’s be honest. Click farms aren’t exactly a big secret. Buying ‘likes’ and Twitter followers is a well-known shady practice.
What the Channel 4 Dispatches investigation on #fakefans has shown us is the process behind the (fake) stats.
Amazon Collections: 12 questions raised by the ‘new Pinterest’
Amazon has recently begun testing its new built-in Pinterest imitator, Collections.
The service went live earlier this month and it looks nice and simple. Some are surprised Amazon has so brazenly taken on a competitor, but it certainly feels like a good addition to the well-established Wishlist and ‘You might like’ features.
Will this new personal aspect add some needed character to Amazon’s marketplace? Will Pinterest be unaffected? I take a look at the new feature and ask some questions.
Could Argos do more to integrate digital into its print catalogue?
While strolling around Farringdon the other day I was handed a copy of the new Argos catalogue by a cheery store employee.
Having already reviewed several of Argos’ digital products, including its mobile app, I thought it would be interesting to see how the company integrates digital elements into its catalogue.
Print has long been the backbone of Argos’ business and no doubt still is, yet as times change digital will become a more important revenue stream.
So, here’s a quick look at how Argos is adapting to the changing times…
Pedigree teams with Zappar for augmented reality children’s annuals
We all loved The Beano, or Bunty, or The Bash Street Kids, or Girl’s Own, or Jackie, or Diana. We all loved them.
Now the annual has evolved, with Zappar and Pedigree books working together. Sonic the Hedgehog, Angry Birds, and others (admittedly not Desperate Dan) will have 20% of their pages embedded with content that can be seen through the Zappar app.
The content will include extended character profiles, extra stories and activities such as colouring, mazes, puzzles and a ‘make your own poster’ feature.