360DigitalInfluence

With those summer whites put away, most brands are now in the midst of planning for 2012. As well as brainstorming big ideas, this involves looking at which marketing activities worked well and those that were not so effective to decide the exact mix for the next year. Which for many includes looking social media. 2011 has certainly been a break out year for social as brands continue to move up the social media adoption curve from the late adopters to brands where social is being applied across programs and being operationalized regionally.

Our series of posts this week casts a gaze ahead for those planning the next 12 months and look at where social media fits in the mix. We aim to provide practical takeaways as well as predictions for the platforms that should feature in your  planning, starting with 5 key considerations for social media when in those ideas meetings over the next few weeks.

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I see posts on lots of social media blogs with weekly updates on the most successful Facebook Pages or types of Facebook Pages (example below) and they always include the same metric: number of fans (now called “Connections”). Likely this is because that number is the most public metric to compare but a little digging into the engagement on a Page came tell you a lot about its success.

You would never measure the success of a retailer by how many people entered the store or the success of a services company by how many people visit the website so why do people get to lazy with Facebook? Here are the metrics that really matter in a successful strategy and while fan count is one of them it may not be your most important. continue reading

Now that 70 percent of Facebook are non-US and the network serves 70 different languages, multinational brands are asking for more geo-targeting capabilities and dealing with questions about how to manage a multinational fan base. I’m confident that Facebook will be have expanding options over the next six months but until then here are several tips and tools for running a multinational Facebook presence.

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