Unlike robust social media management tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck (both excellent tools), Buffer does one thing and it does it exceptionally well. Buffer is a status update scheduling tool, but unlike a more full-fledged social media management tool, Buffer doesn’t ask you when to post your updates. Buffer initially selects four times throught the day when your posts will go out (but you can add, subtract or edit any of those times). Each time you add a new post to Buffer, it simply throws it into the buffer queue behind your other scheduled posts. In the screenshot below, you can see that there are several posts scheduled to go out over the next 24 hours. This is how Buffer works.

Now, I can spend 20 or 30 minutes over lunch or in the evening reading news updates from my Google Reader account or (some of my new favorites) Flipboard (iOS app link), Zite (iOS app link) or even the Bloomburg BusinessWeek (iPad app link) apps on my iPad. Then, when I read interesting articles, I can add them to my Buffer knowing they’ll post later and not inundate my followers as I read each article.

Buffer also makes it VERY easy to add content, whether you’re sharing links of articles you’re reading or whether you just want to schedule a post without a link. Buffer has created more than a dozen different ways to add content to your account. In addition to being able to update from the website, you can also update with an Android app, iPhone app, Firefox and Chrome extensions and (one of my favorites) a way to add to your Buffer via email, it’s easy to keep your Buffer full wherever you are. Below is a screenshot that shows how to add an update to Buffer via email. You’ll receive your own exclusive @to.bufferapp.com email address and everything you send to that address will automatically get added to your Buffer. Just add the email address to your contacts and you can add to your Buffer from anywhere.

Buffer is a free service, but there is also a couple paid versions available. For free, you can have up to 10 updates in your queue, and you can have one account each of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. For $10/month you get up to 50 updates at a time, six social networks and up to two team members per account. There’s also a $99/month plan that gives you lots more.

I’ve been using Buffer for about six months now and it has become an indispensable part of my day and my social media routine. If you’re interested in checking out Buffer, click here (referral). If you sign up through my referral link, we’ll both get one extra space added to our Buffer queue.

**Update Thanks to Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0, you can use Tweriod (a free service) to find out the best times to tweet. Simply connect Tweriod with your Twitter account and it will let you know the historically best times to post content to get the most interaction from your followers. Tweriod is included as part of the paid Buffer subscription, but you can look up the times on your own for free as well. **

Related posts:

1. Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Hootsuite
2. Social Media Case Study: OK Go
3. Four On Friday: Social Media Recap

Report No. 8: The Social Breakup

The eighth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series focuses on the “social breakup” – how and why consumers “break up” with brands and stop following them via Facebook, Twitter and email. You might be surprised at how much similarity there is across all channels. Here are some of the highlights:

• Email
  • 67% of subscribers hit the unsubscribe button to end the email relationship rather than just deleting (17%), reporting as spam (8%), ignoring (6%) or setting up a filter to auto-archive the message(2%)
  • Top 3 reasons people unsubscribed from emails:
    • Too many emails from the company
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Email overload – too many emails in general, cleaning out the clutter
• Facebook
  • When fans no longer want information from a brand they previously “liked”, 43% of them go to the brand’s page and click “unlike, 38% click the “X” in their newsfeed to remove them from the wall and 19% just ignore the posts.
  • Top 3 reasons people “unliked” a brand on Facebook:
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users walls
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • They only “liked” the brand because of a promotion, discount or deal offered to fans, and “unliked” once they got what they wanted.

• Twitter
  • Nearly half of consumers who created a Twitter account no longer use it with 52% saying they found Twitter to be pointless, 38% saying it became boring and 23% thinking that Twitter was too chaotic.
  • Top 3 reasons people stopped following a brand on Twitter:
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Tweet stream became overloaded with marketing posts, wanted to clean up
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users tweet streams

Notice the striking similarity between why people unsubscribe, unlike and unfollow brands? While there are different strategies to employ for brand to get the most out of email, Facebook and Twitter, online consumers – across the board – seem to all be saying the same thing when it comes to ending their relationship with a brand’s digital initiatives: don’t talk too much and keep the content interesting.

Report No. 9: Mobile Dependence Day

The ninth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series really focuses on our increasing dependence on our smartphones and other mobile devices. Even within the past year, the share of US consumers with smartphones (as opposed to feature phones) has grown dramatically. Here are some of the high points about what it means for interactive marketers:

• 89% of US consumers 15+ own a cell phone. 41% of those have smartphones
  • Android: 33%
  • iPhone: 25%
  • Blackberry: 19%
  • Other: 23%
• Smartphone’s Big 5 (the five most frequently used functions on today’s smartphones):
  • Phone Calls
  • Texting
  • Email
  • Internet
  • Facebook
• How important is the smartphone to people who own and use one? Here is the percentage of people who would (if forced to choose) rather keep their smartphone than the following items:
  • Game Console: 72%
  • Dishwasher: 46%
  • Laptop: 40%
  • Microwave: 34%
  • Refrigerator: 13%
  • Car: 8%

The rest of the report gives recommendations of ways you can integrate your marketing efforts across all three communications channels and is definitely worth a read.

Have you looked through ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers series? What do you think about their findings?

Related posts:

1. Subscribers, Fans and Followers – How are You Meeting Their Needs?
2. Subscribers, Fans and Followers: Facebook and the Collaborative Future
3. Connections 2010: Video Recaps (Part 1)

Here’s where Qdoba comes in. Not only are there two Qdoba locations within about 2 miles of my house, but Qdoba is constantly sending out coupons through their permission email channels. When they launched their Craft 2 menu item last spring, they sent several emails letting their subscribers know about their Qdoba Craft Your Life microsite, which allowed you to play a short game, and rewarded you with a coupon at the end. The coupon was anything from a free order of chips & queso with the purchase of an entrée to a free entrée with the purchase of a drink.

Last fall, Qdoba  launched a promotion, Food Lovers Fighting Burrito Boredom, which allowed customers to make their own entrée online – which they can spice up however they want – in order to help fight burrito boredom. Just like with the previous promotion, Qdoba allowed users to place once a day per email address and awarded them with a different coupon of varying worth. Though the coupon portion of the promotion is over now, Qdoba has kept the microsite alive to continue to educate their potential customers.

Although the US has started to see economic growth in the past few quarters, high gas prices threaten to dampen some of that growth for this summer. For a fast casual restaurant like Qdoba, they certainly don’t want to dilute their brand’s quality perception by focusing solely on coupons, but by creating innovate campaigns like this, Qdoba is showing that they understand the economy we’re in now and are trying to build up brand loyalty for when the economy rebounds and discounting isn’t as common.

In addition to their promotions, Qdoba is also doing a great job of creating real conversation and interacting with their customers (below is a tweet I sent out that they quickly replied to).

Related posts:

1. Permission Email Marketing Case Study: Qdoba
2. Four on Friday: Weekly Social Media Recap
3. 7 Ideas for Marketing in a Recession

For the most part, by looking at your analytics software (I’ll use Google Analytics for example, since it’s what I use and it’s free), you can click on the Referring Sites section and see how many visitors came to your website from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare and other social sites, but the real fly in the ointment is Twitter. You’ll see Twitter.com in your Referring Sites section, but it’s likely that you’re getting more visits from Twitter than just the ones you see.

The visits you see from Twitter.com are just that – they’re only visits made by people clicking on your link while looking at their Twitter accounts on Twitter.com. In fact, Mashable just reported that Twitter just announced that 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices – an astounding number. This only underscores the importance of making sure you can track all Twitter traffic accurately. Currently, you won’t see mobile or desktop applications like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic show up in your analytics data. So, there’s a large group of visitors that you may not be properly attributing to Twitter.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track your web stats, it’s actually pretty easy to begin capturing all of your referrals from Twitter. We’ll be using Google Analytics Campaign tracking codes to do this. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic Campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name
• utm_source: The source for the link (HootSuite, TweetDeck, TwitterFeed, Email Newsletter)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (email, search, social media, twitter, facebook, etc.)

For example, if I wanted to point people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, I would post this link on Twitter from TweetDeck: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But to more accurately track those visitors from Twitter I’ll append the following data to the URL above:

?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interview

So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interviews. Nice long URL, huh? Not to worry, your standard URL shortener will compress all that to a nice small URL to post to Twitter (http://bit.ly/fwzSam).

Now, next time you log into Google Analytics, look under Traffic Sources then Campaigns and you can search for all the campaigns you ran through Twitter and find out how many people clicked through. You can even have one Campaign with different links you post to Twitter, Facebook, Email and other mediums and all you have to change is the utm_medium or utm_source parameters.

The best part is you don’t have to remember how to add all the parameters to your links, just check out Google’s free URL Builder and it will create the URLs for you. In fact, if you use TwitterFeed to push your blog posts through to Twitter or HootSuite to manage your social media presence, you can set up their baked-in URL shorteners to automatically append analytics tracking data.

TwitterFeed:

Log in, and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed. On Step 2, you can add services to push your feeds to, add or edit one of your Twitter services to see the ability to add UTM Tags.

I really like the ease of using TwitterFeed because there are several options they allow and you can push your feed to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. The ability to add in custom tracking parameters is a real plus.

HootSuite:

HootSuite is just as easy. When you’re logged in, click in the box where you add a URL to shorten, Then click on the down arrow to the left of the Shrink button. Select Custom URL Parameters and you can fill out either one-time parameters or you can add parameters in as a default. Now these parameters will be added to the end of any link you shorten through HootSuite.

If you selected the Always apply when creating Ow.ly links box, the parameters will be appended to every link you create, so if you’re linking to external websites, they’ll see your tracking code on their site as well, but as long as it’s included on links to your site, that’s what really matters.

Hopefully this brief walk-through helps you to start tracking more of your visits from Twitter. Have you noticed that your referrals from Twitter didn’t look as strong as you expected them to?

Related posts:

1. How To: Monitor Twitter Using Twilert
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. What is Twitter?

Bit.ly:

Bit.ly is the most popular URL shortener online today, and for good reason. After bursting onto the scene just a few short years ago, Bit.ly has not been content to sit still for long. They took over as the default URL shortener on Twitter (until Twitter’s proprietary t.co shortener took over a few months ago) and they keep coming up with reasons for people to keep using them. From their easy to access and robust stats to their simple to use API to the inclusion of QR codes, Bit.ly makes using their service very easy.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners. Since . The minimum length of a Bit.ly link is just 19 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• Easy to view click stats: Simply add a + to the end of any Bit.ly URL (http://bit.ly/SocMedrlgy+). You can easily see how many clicks your link received and where those clicks are coming from.
  • The stats even show you how many times your link was retweeted and shared on Facebook.
• Allows for easy customization of shortened URLs: (bit.ly/b4yn9p turns into http://bit.ly/SocMedrlgy) easily.
• Allows for link bundling: Let’s say you’re sending 10 links to some coworkers to look at some research you’ve been doing. You can bundle those links into 1 bit.ly bundle link so you don’t have to copy and paste 10 different links to each person.
• Bit.ly has a Pro option that is free and offers you the ability for your bit.ly links to be branded with your own custom shortened URL. For example, the New York Times uses nyti.ms, the Huffington Post uses huff.to. Just another way you can extend your brand and use a great URL shortener at the same time.
• Robust API that allows you to integrate your Bit.ly account to shorten URLs in many social media management applications like TweetDeck and TwitterFeed.
• Automatically creates a QR code: Bit.ly automatically creates a QR code for each and every shortened URL you create. This is hugely important as smartphones and QR codes are being used more each day.
  • Don’t know what QR codes are? Check out this good intro post for now. I’ll write up a post about QR codes soon too.

Shortfalls:

• Honestly, one of the only reasons I could think to not use Bit.ly is if you’re already using HootSuite or another social media management application that doesn’t allow you to use a third-party URL shortener.

Goo.gl:

Goo.gl is one of the newer URL shorteners. They originally launched exclusively for shortening links to Google-owned properties like YouTube, Google Maps and others, but recently opened up to shorten any link.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners. The minimum length of a Goo.gl link is just 19 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• Easy to view click stats: Follows the Bit.ly model of showing stats for each link by adding a + to the end of the URL (http://goo.gl/VdKMa+). You can easily see how many clicks your link received and where those clicks are coming from.
• Automatically creates a QR code: Just like Bit.ly (in fact, Bit.ly did it first), Goo.gl automatically creates a QR code for each and every shortened URL you create.

Shortfalls:

• Does not allow for customized URLs: http://goo.gl/VdKMa.
• Not used as widely as Bit.ly: This may not really be a negative, but it’s not used nearly as often as Bit.ly (check out this article on ReadWriteWeb all about the top shorteners)

Ow.ly:

One of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL hasn’t done much in terms of upgrading their capabilities in the past 8 years. TinyURL is a simple and plain URL shortener. The provide you with the ability to shorten any URL for display elsewhere on the web.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners.  The minimum length of a Ow.ly link is just 18 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• More secure stats: Since you can only view the stats on your shortened URLs if you created them and you’re logged into your HootSuite account, you don’t have to worry about others seeing the stats from your links.
• Through the HootSuite interface, you can download your clicks data to a csv file for manipulating offline.
• Allows you to upload pictures, files (and soon videos) to a shortened URL as well. This is great, because you don’t have to host the files on your own server – just let Ow.ly host them for you.

Shortfalls:

• Does not allow for customized URLs: http://ow.ly/3nmhr.
• No easy way to view tracking information outside of HootSuite. You can’t simply add a + to the end of your URL to view stats like you can with bit.ly. Instead, you have to log into HootSuite and use their stats interface to view info about each individual link.
• Does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

Budurl:

I used Budurl for about a year in late ’08 through late ’09. One reason I started using it is that I started getting more active on Twitter and I needed a URL shortener that would give me some statistics about how many clicks I was getting on my links. Budurl was one of the first URL shorteners to offer basic stats like that. Budurl now offers several levels of paid plans in addition to a free plan.

Features:

• Allows for customized shortened URL: budurl.com/socmedrlgy
• Preview function: By placing ? at the end of the URL (budurl.com/socmedrlgy?), users will see a preview to see where your shortened link will bring them. By using the preview feature, you can ensure you won’t be led to any risky sites without your knowledge.
• Basic click numbers in the free account: You can see the number of clicks each URL received.

Shortfalls:

• Fairly long”short” URLs: While a Budurl link isn’t quite as long as TinyURL links, it’s still relatively long. The minimum length of a Budurl link is at least 24 characters! That’s just over 1/6^th of the total characters allowed in a tweet (140)
• Very basic tracking metrics on free account: This is probably the biggest reason I’d recommend using one of the other URL shorteners I already mentioned. While the basic click-through numbers are nice for the free account, you don’t get into the really good stats until you start paying $8, $12 or $49 a month. Still, not a bad price for good analytics, but you can get a lot of the same features for free from Bit.ly.
• Free version does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

TinyURL:

One of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL hasn’t done much in terms of upgrading their capabilities in the past 8 years. TinyURL is a simple and plain URL shortener. The provide you with the ability to shorten any URL for display elsewhere on the web.

Features:

• Allows for customized shortened URL.
  • Instead of this url: tinyurl.com/2fr2atm I could create this one: tinyurl.com/socmedrlgy- slightly more customized and memorable.
• Preview function. By placing preview. before tinyurl in the URL (preview.tinyurl.com/socmedrlgy), users will see a preview to see where your shortened link will bring them. By using the preview feature, you can ensure you won’t be led to any risky sites without your knowledge.

Shortfalls:

• Long “short” URLs: Even though the link that TinyURL generates is significantly smaller than the original link you submitted, it’s still relatively long as far as modern URL shorteners are concerned. The minimum length of a TinyURL link is at least 26 characters! That’s nearly 1/5^th of the total characters allowed in a tweet (140)
• Very little innovation: While TinyURL has been around for almost 9 years, they have changed very little about the site and have not kept up with the new players in terms of innovation and features they offer.
• No tracking metrics: This is probably the biggest reason I’d recommend staying away from TinyURL. With all of the other big players in the URL shortener field providing some level of tracking and anlaytics, there’s just no real benefit to go with TinyURL over one of the others.
• Does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

You can decide which URL shortener works best for you, but it’s best to use one that will work in concert with your other efforts. If you manage a Twitter account, Facebook page, MySpace profile and a Foursquare account, it might make more sense to use Bit.ly or Ow.ly, since they can be hooked up with Social Media management tools. If you’re just looking for something simple and no-frills, Goo.gl or Bit.ly might be for you. Have you used shortened URLs before? Which service to you typically use?

No related posts.

1: Facebook Introduces One-Time Passwords Via Text | PC Magazine

Social Mediarology thinks: For as much flak as Facebook has received lately for their lack concern for users’ privacy, this is yet another step in the right direction. Facebook also recently released the ability to log out of other locations remotely and this One-Time Password feature is just another way Facebook really is looking out for their members. If you’ve ever felt nervous about logging into Facebook on a public computer, this is a great way to check in on Facebook without the worry.

2: Klout Now Measures Your Influence on Facebook | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: Klout’s influence score has become one of few widely-recognized and respected Twitter influence scores on the web today. You’ll find Klout’s scores baked into Twitter clients like HootSuite. Klout’s foray into Facebook is interesting because while finding a definitive influence score for Twitter or Facebook is nearly impossible, it seems much more difficult to do so for Facebook, where there are many more variables to take into account that for Twitter.

3: Skype 5.0 Busts Out of Beta, Integrates Facebook Friends | Engadget

Social Mediarology thinks: There have been rumors for a few weeks about the integration of Skype and Facebook and half of the equation is now solved. With the 5.0 release of Skype, Windows users can log into Skype and bring all their Facebook friends with them. Then next step will be Facebook pulling Skype into their own chat application to create Skype-enabled text, audio and video chatting. While many businesses are starting to use Skype more and more, their integration with Facebook will bring more users to Skype.

4: URL Shortener Bit.ly Now Generates QR Codes | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: QR codes are gaining popularity with the advent of mobile apps that can easily scan this new style of barcode. Foursquare even allows users to scan a QR code that will check them in to a location. While QR codes are still in their infancy, they are becoming more common and Bit.ly has done themselves a great service by making QR code creation so simple (just append .qr to the end of a Bit.ly URL and they’ll display your QR code. Take a picture of the one above using a QR code scanning app on your mobile phone and it’ll redirect you to SocialMediarology.com.

Related posts:

1. Four On Friday: Social Media Recap
2. Four On Friday: Social Media Recap
3. Four on Friday: Social Media Recap

Now, with the huge expansion of Facebook and Twitter users, not to mention Location Based networks and the continued importance of blogging, Google Alerts does a pretty good job of grabbing content from blogs and websites, but they haven’t quite nailed real-time streams such as Twitter yet.

That’s where a service like Twilert comes in. Twilert is a service that allows you to set up Twitter Alerts to be sent to you on a regular basis for any number of search terms. You can set up fairly broad searches, but you can also narrow down your search for very specific terms and even geographically target which Tweets to look at. This is extremely helpful for local businesses or for other organizations that only need to see tweets sent in their area.

Here’s a short screencast that shows how to get started with Twilert:

Do you use Twilert or another keyword alert system? More importantly, what do you do with these alerts when you get them?

Related posts:

1. Twitter to Launch Ad Platform
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. What is Twitter?

Mythbusting with Jeff and Morgan:

Throughout the Subscriber, Fans & Followers research, Jeff and Morgan were able to identify some really interesting information. Some of that information was picked up by local and national news outlets, but like with most research, you can make it say whatever you want it to say. Some news outlets ran tiny portions of the research, skewing some of the data. That’s where Myth #1 comes into play.

Myth #1: Email Usage is Dropping:

In the video below, Jeff and Morgan talk about how Nielsen just came out with data saying that email usage has dropped significantly in recent years. In short, the Nielsen study, only includes email accessed via the web – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc – but it doesn’t include email accessed via mobile platforms or even Outlook!

Myth #2: Facebook Fans are worth 136.38 dollars:

Some recent research said each Fan a brand has on Facebook is worth roughly $136. While that may be hard to prove one way or another, during the SFF research, participants were asked: Are you more likely to purchase from a brand after becoming a Subscriber, Fan or Follower? The results were different than you might think.

Only 17% of Facebook Fans said yes, while 27% of email Subscribers gave the same answer. The real kicker is that a full 37% of Twitter Followers said they’d be more likely to purchase from a brand after following them on Twitter. Obviously, this question only asks about intent and there aren’t any hard dollar figures behind it, but the fact that more than a third of Twitter Followers would be more likely to purchase from your brand after following should encourage you to start using Twitter.

Myth #3: Twitter is Dying:

2009 was a great year for Twitter and it became the fastest growing social media channel ever. At some point, the rate of growth was going to have to slow down a bit. Even though we’ve seen some higher profile users quitting Twitter recently (John Mayer, Demi Lovato), Twitter is far from dying. Jeff and Morgan remind us that Twitter users create six times more content online than non-Twitter users. So, while a few celebrities may come and go, the real influencers on the web still use Twitter heavily.

Did you attend the Connections 2010 Conference? What was the biggest takeaway you got from the conference?

Related posts:

1. Connections 2010: Video Recaps (Part 1)
2. Connections 2010: Conference Recap
3. Subscribers, Fans and Followers – How are You Meeting Their Needs?

Twitter Users as Content Creators:

Through their SFF research, Jeff and Morgan discovered that Twitter users end up creating six times as much content online as the typical online consumer. This is extremely powerful news and should be a wake-up call to marketers – just because only 5% of online consumers follow a brand through Twitter, those consumers are some of the most influential people online today.

In the video below, Jeff and Morgan talk about the tremendous reach and influence of Twitter users.

3 Follow-up Points to SFF Research:

The final report in the SFF study was released just before the Connections 2010 conference and Jeff and Morgan talked about three follow-up points to the research. First, SFF’s are long-term assets, not short term sales opportunities. If you only look at the short term, you’re overlooking the true value of your SFFs. Second, SFFs must be integrated and optimized. Once you’re involved in email, Facebook and Twitter, you must continually work to integrate and optimize the content across all three channels. Finally, leadership must unify email and social marketing – don’t look at email, Facebook and Twitter as channels in separate silos.

Keep an eye out for another post of videos from the SFF talk later in the week. Were you at the Connections 2010 Conference? What was your favorite session?

Related posts:

1. Connections 2010: Conference Recap
2. Subscribers, Fans and Followers – How are You Meeting Their Needs?
3. Subscribers, Fans and Followers: Facebook and the Collaborative Future

Also, if you’re attending ExactTarget’s Connections 2010 Conference on September 14-16, drop by the Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring session on Wedensday (9/15) at 9:45am – I’ll be speaking about how we’ve worked with Right On Interactive to nurture and score leads through the Visit Indiana Foursquare/Leaf Cam promotion.

Report No. 5: Facebook X-Factors

The fifth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series focuses on Facebook. After detailed reports of Email and Twitter users, how do Facebook users stack up? Do they want to interact with companies or do they want to keep Facebook purely personal and clear of marketing speak? Here are some of the highlights:

• The top four things that motivate users to follow a business are:
  • To receive discounts or promotions
  • To show my support of the company to others
  • To get a freebie (free samples, coupon) – very similar to #1
  • To stay informed about the company’s activities
• 70% of consumers who ‘liked’ a brand or company on Facebook didn’t feel they’d given the company permission to market to them (maybe Troy Thompson is on to something with his thoughts about comparing Facebook Likes to bumper stickers).
• Far and away, consumers use Facebook to reconnect with friends and maintain current friendships as opposed to maintaining and cultivating professional relationships.

So Facebook is used primarily for connecting with friends and less so for connecting with businesses. And consumers that do connect with businesses are really looking for a good deal. How can you leverage those opportunities to bring success to your company’s Facebook page?

Report No. 6: The Collaborative Future

The sixth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series really focuses on ingetrating email, Facebook and Twitter – keeping in mind the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. Here are a few insights gleaned from the sixth report:

• Email is more likely to drive increased purchase intent among the largest group of consumers.
• Facebook is the least effective channel to drive increased purchase behavior.
• Twitter is actually the channel that is most likely to drive increased purchases and recommendations after a consumer follows a brand.

The rest of the report gives recommendations of ways you can integrate your marketing efforts across all three communications channels and is definitely worth a read.

Have you looked through ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers series? What do you think about their findings?

Related posts:

1. Subscribers, Fans and Followers – How are You Meeting Their Needs?
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. Four On Friday: Social Media Recap