Social Media Marketing

Contests are a great way to expand a company's marketing reach if the message gets out to the right people. Online promotions of all types, including contests, require a combination of paid advertising and a top-quality network to be successful. The network has to be large enough to generate traffic and interest to make the contest successful. Adding pay per click and advertising on social media platforms is needed to expand your reach. Before your next contest, create and execute a staged strategy to build community and interest.

Adding +1 buttons to your product pages makes it easy for your customers to recommend the products they love on your site with a single click. And thanks to recent improvements to the +1 button, they can take the conversation even further by sharing your products right away on Google+.

Facebook is getting out of the daily-deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. The world's largest social network launched Facebook Deals in April and started making offers in five cities with a small sales team arranging deals with local merchants. But the company also ran offers that were set up by 11 other daily-deal companies, including ReachLocal, Gilt City and Zozi.

New research from Buddy Media and L2 titled, Digital IQ Index: Specialty Retailers, measures the digital footprint of 64 speciality retail brands via 350 data points across four dimensions: site, digital marketing, social media and mobile.

What do Solo Cup, Kellogg’s, 3M, and Ecover have in common? They're the latest of more than 100 companies to use online storefronts that incorporate Facebook from Alice.com, an online marketplace for household essentials and e-commerce platform.

Gilt Groupe has announced the launch of its Facebook store. Supporting sales across the women's, men's, home and children's categories, the online store will offer products and partnerships unique to Facebook, as well as allow Facebook users to shop select sales before they are available on-site. 

Facebook and Twitter both broke records last month with the highest number of visitors seen by both sites, according to data released by comScore. For the month, Facebook was the fourth most visited website in the U.S., behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Chico's FAS announced it will implement SAS's on-demand social media analytics solution to understand what's being said about its brands and apply this intelligence to decision making. The apparel retailer will begin by analyzing data from Facebook and Twitter, extending its customer insights beyond the boundaries of brick-and-mortar.

Wal-Mart is planning to launch several new projects this holiday season based on the technology it acquired from the social media startup Kosmix back in April. Kosmix’s platform previously powered multiple services, including a Twitter search site called TweetBeat, a health vertical called RightHealth and a homepage where users could search the web by topic.

CVS has been receiving some negative press and social media commentary over the length of its paper receipts. Take this posting from the Facebook page "One Million Strong Against Unnecessarily Long CVS Receipts" as an example: "My last CVS receipt for $3.34 was 25.5 inches long. And that's too (expletive) long. I don't care that they use my CVS card to track me across the planet, I just want a receipt that isn't 1/3rd my height."