However, I’m not here to debate the merits of Twitter with you.  If you’re reading this post, I assume you’ve already come to your own conclusions about Twitter.

So, without further ado, here are nine tactics your brand can use to up its presence on Twitter.

Tactic # 1 Include industry key terms in your bio.

Don’t fill your bio with a bunch of corporate speak and generic mission statements. Instead, fill it with meat:  contact details, sales pitches, and, most importantly, industry key terms. Use all of these details to tell your brand’s story in 160 characters or less.  Doing this will increase your Twitter searchabilty and tells potential customers why they should care about your brand.

Tactic # 2 Make a custom background with contact info.

While you’re limited to only160 characters that the bio offers, your brand’s story isn’t. Create a customized Twitter background and give more information or pictures that can help tell the tale.

If you’re a pizza shop, include pictures of how the shop looked ten years ago and how it looks today. If you’re a shoe retailer, like zappos, include extra contact info such as your email address, Facebook page, or telephone number.  And extra points for anyone who uses a QR code in their background, as @socialmouths does in their custom background.

Tactic # 3 Retweet the experts in your industry with @theirname.

This tactic is particularly useful for brands in the B2B space. When someone comes to your Twitter  page, your bio and custom background aren’t the only things on display—visitors will also be paying a great deal of attention to your individual tweets.

Your tweets – the kind of information you provide, what types of relationships you’ve developed and how much you value customer feedback - tell a lot about what you value as a brand.

So when you tweet make sure to mention experts in your industry and include their @twittername. This not only shows visitors that you are knowledgeable in your field, but it also gets the attention of the experts—who will then retweet your tweets, essentially widening your engagement loop.

Tactic  # 4 Include Images of your team and events in your tweets.

This is a new ability on Twitter, which may explain why it’s so underutilized.  Adding images to your tweets is a great way to project a human element to your Twitter feed. Show company employees cutting lose at functions, show successes, show customer interactions.

All tweets that include pictures show up in the recent images tab, so if there’s an old picture you want to stay up there, you’ll have to keep retweeting it.

Also, one warning: don’t post one dimensional, “safe” pictures (i.e. just staged pictures or generic pictures).  Your followers will sniff out the fake as soon as it’s up.

Tactic # 5 Find industry contacts through Follower Wonk.

Follower Wonk is amazing. Unlike the Twitter search box, which just searches recent tweets, Follower Wonk can dig through the millions and millions of Twitter user profiles, searching for relevant key terms listed in the bio.

If your brand is looking to connect with more people within the Advertising industry, just do a Follower Wonk search for “advertising”, or make it even more specific by searching for “IAB” (Interactive Advertising Bureau).  And, best of all, you can follow all of these users in app (saving you a boat load of “loading time”), and you can sort the list by relevancy or follower/following ratio.  It’s a quick way to find the social media influencers in your industry.  A must have for B2B companies.

Tactic  # 6 Find more experts/similar companies by following lists.

After locating an industry contact through Follower Wonk, check to see if they are on any relevant lists.  More than likely other users have searched for the same type of social media influencers, and have created a list of similar Twitter accounts.  For instance, if I were looking for a recruiter or job site’s with Twitter accounts, I would check out the lists that @CareerBuilder is listed on.  And if I’m a distributor of ice cream hardware products, I would check out lists that @cherrygarcia (Ben and Jerry) is included on.

Tactic # 7 Join established industry chats…or start your own.

Of course, joining an established chat is a great way to network and establish your expertise within a given industry.  Each chat is checked by using a hashtag (i.e #eventprofs), and those comments which include this feature are read by everyone participating in the chat. To find relevant chats within your industry, search for industry keywords on Hashtags.org.

Tactic  # 8 Join WeFollow.

Want Tweeps to find you?  WeFollow has a large network of Twitter people, expands across a number of categories, and is free for anyone to sign up.  Many people use WeFollow to search for industry contacts, so sign up for this free service to increase your Twitter presence.

Tactic  # 9 Create a Publishing Schedule through Hootsuite.

Having consistent content on your twitter feed increases the chances that customers will continue to return.  And one way to do this is to schedule tweets through a publishing platform, such as Hootsuite.  With Hootsuite, you can set-up tweets days, weeks, even months in advance, ensuring your feed is always filled with content.  Industry related tips or quotes is a good piece of content to schedule out in this fashion, as I’ve done with @Exec_comm’s tweets in the picture above.

And for those worried about over flooding your followers feeds—don’t be.  Read the study by  Kiss Metrics for a full explanation.  But as a general rule of thumb, schedule no more than 4 tweets per hour.

Any tips tactics that I missed?  What has your company done to increase it’s presence on Twitter?  Please let us know in the comments section.

With everything on the Internet pointing towards mobile in some form or fashion, it only seems logical for online properties to find ways to provide geo-location services. A number of companies such as Gowalla, Loopt and even Facebook with “Places” threw their proverbial hats into this arena recently with limited success but when the smoke cleared, two popular services took control of the space: Foursquare and Yelp.

Interestingly enough, while Foursquare and Yelp started in different directions – the former starting as a geo-location with a side of gamification and the latter as a review service – but as time passed these companies’ services have become quite similar. This recent connection between the two has led to a rivalry of sorts. Since we’re about unity in this space, and with both having their pros and cons, we will explore how each in their present states can live harmoniously in today’s world.

Is checking-in a one-trick pony?

This is a notion I’ve read in some posts online. There is obviously some value in checking-in. If there wasn’t, I doubt that so many companies (such as Yelp) would have added the feature, or want to add it or at the very least are trying to add it. Notwithstanding this point, providing a service where checking-in is the only enforceable action will most likely shorten your company’s life cycle to that similar of a fruit fly. There must be something more.

For example, when Foursquare launched they added a point system which added a level of competition—perfect for today’s hyper-connected and competitive society. Yelp decided to emulate (copy is probably  more accurate) this model with the introduction of their check-in service in January of 2010. In addition, both give users the ability to attach pictures, share with Facebook friends and Twitter followers, post tips and gain mayor status and other honorary badges. Given this, I’d suggest Foursquare gets a slight edge in regards to checking-in: 1) for making it popular and “cool” and 2) for extending check-in and its subsequent “rewards” into a product line extending its “cool” factor.

Business perspective: Providing something value added will continue to be a key component for any location-based services.

 The Mobile UX

Finding multiple channels to market to is a great tactic and, in turn, I would advise against a mobile-only experience. For now, at least. Nonetheless, geo-location is inherently mobile—unless you’re planning to walk around with a laptop or a desktop all day. When it comes to the majority of Foursquare’s user experience, it has to be mobile.

(Above: Mobile Growth Hitting All Segments)

While Yelp’s mobile experience is, as we mentioned earlier, very similar to that of Foursquare, it does allow you to draft a review of any venue you visited or search online at home and then migrate to mobile as you move about. Some users, however, may feel that not being able to finalize their thoughts from a mobile device is a missed opportunity, especially since reviews are Yelp’s claim to fame. Drafting a review does allow you to get your thoughts on virtual paper though, and you’re less likely to forget anything, good or bad, that took place at the venue. In this case, for its purpose, Yelp will get a slight nod.

Business perspective: The best (and cheapest) advertising your business can find is through current clients. A platform that allows consumers to share their experience will drive even more through your doors.

What’s the Deal?

To quickly go back to the idea of checking-in for a moment, let’s think of this situation: I’ve checked in, got my points, got my badge and even possibly became a regular or a mayor. Now what? Why should I continue to check-in besides trying to beat my friends in this game?

Both companies have overlaid deal structures with their services: Yelp with their own branded deals; and Foursquare partnering with the likes of Groupon and American Express, most notably on Small Business Saturday. These deals have certainly helped both entities grow. The ability to save a couple of dollars by simply checking into a restaurant, retail store or other place is a more than fair trade off and opens the opportunity to breed brand ambassadorship.

Business perspective: In the deal category, it is Foursquare’s aptness to work with both the venue and third parties to form deals for the user that presents a small advantage.

Content provides engagement and long-term value

There’s no denying this fact—particularly when you’re talking about social media. We all know that engagement is a big deal. Yelp’s platform gives people a chance to submit detailed reviews and, obviously, people can then respond. Furthermore, Yelp’s rating system also extends user engagement thus giving it a leg up on Foursquare in the content realm. Foursquare provides its engagement at a much more mobile level. Although there is no rating system, users can still make comments on venues, leave tips and also comment on people’s check-ins—all forms of engagement that make sense on their platform. Yelp, by design, is the winner in this category. It was built on content, with content and through content.

Business perspective: User engagement is the cornerstone of online and mobile business. The more content you provide the more likely consumers will interact with you. The more they interact, the more likely they are to become customers. Period!

The moral of the story is: Finding what works best for you is what’s most important. Yes, Foursquare and yelp may share much of the same audience, but both sites still have their own unique spaces even though they might not be as disparate as other competitors in other industries. Once you’ve gained the knowledge of both, your decision simply boils down to choice. I use both. How about you?

Santa’s Google Search Tips Rap

Siri: The Holiday Horror Movie (Trailer)

FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor

MTV – Sex is no Accident – Flying Girl

Some stories this week you many have missed:

Tech
The best and worst tweets of the year
Steve Jobs Wins Posthumous Grammy Award
Will Computers Be Able To Read Your Mind in Five Years? IBM Thinks So.
Google, Mozilla Renew Firefox Search Deal For 3 More Years

Search and Social
Bud Light Searches Facebook For a “Correspondent” to Cover Super Bowl
Global Happiness Is Declining… At Least On Twitter
Hitwise: For The Third Year In A Row, Facebook Was The Top-Searched Term In The U.S.
Brand Google+ Pages Showing up in Search Results (SERPs)

Didn’t know that could happen? Well, according to Google the company must comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), under which children younger than 13 must provide the permission of a parent or guardian before giving out personal information online.

In a letter tittled ” Google, thanks for making my daughter cry” posted on Reddit, the girl’s father blasted Google for not clearly stating the age restrictions during the sign up process. ”I set up a gmail account for my daughter so she could send email to her grandparents,” he wrote.

The decision has sparked a bit of controversy and also reopened a long dormant debate over how young is too young for the Internet.

Google’s decision is a bit strange especially when you consider the “Dear Sophie” campagin they ran last year.

Two can play that game. Kremlin wants protestors to Like them.

After a tumultuous year in which many uprisings around the world were waged through social media, it appears Russian officials  are trying to quell anti-government sentiment by posting heart-felt messages on Facebook regarding possible violations at polling stations during the December 4 election of President Dmitry Medvedev.

The British newspaper “The Telegraph” first reported the post and the continued subtle dialogue being waged by the president across his official Facebook page.

“People have the right to express their views which is what they did yesterday,” wrote Mr Medvedev. “I don’t agree with the slogans or the declaration that rang out at the meetings. Nevertheless, instructions have been given by me to check all information from polling stations regarding compliance with the legislation on elections.”

Bad news for Moscow: The vast majority of comments were negative.

Russians play rough over Twitter

In other Russian social media news, the BBC reported that hijacked PCs may have helped drown out online chat about Russian election protest. Trend Micro researcher Maxim Goncharov discovered pro-Kremlin Twitter messages were being auto-generated by computers, spamming conversations and pushing down the voice of dissent. The bots used the protesters’ hashtag #триумфальная (Triumfalnaya) to drown conversations, while posting up to 10 messages per second, according to the report.

If at first you don’t succeed, try something underhanded and illegal.

Up until earlier this year LinkedIn Company Pages were isolated outside the stream of regular users; an island unto itself that was difficult to discover unless specifically directed there. Engineers at LinkedIn, however,  have since tweaked the pages to provide businesses an opportunity to show the human side of their organization by enabling followers to receive updates and insights about job opportunities, company and product news and recent employee moves.

And sharing through this stream is increasingly important as more people move to social platforms to learn about businesses and products.

According to recent study 21.3 million people in 2011 discovered a new brand or company through social media, and another 22.5 million say they use  platforms such as LinkedIn to learn more about brands and products. That’s a lot of opportunity you may be missing.

Below are six suggestions to help optimize your LinkedIn efforts.

1. Set your goal for Company Pages
Rebecca Corliss, marketing manager at HubSpot, says her company uses LinkedIn Company Pages primarily to generate new leads and promote company products.

“We consider our followers potential leads and promoters for our company,” said Corliss during a recent webinar. The idea, she says, is to engage an audience with top quality content so that even people who will never be leads can share with others who might become leads.

In fact, she says, through LinkedIn HubSpot has a 20 percent visitor/lead rate.

What does that mean? Well, for every  1,000 visitors that arrive to HubSpot through LinkedIn 200 become qaulity leads. Pretty impressive numbers.

Decide what you want to accomplish through Company Pages and tailor a plan to meet those goals.

2.  Complete your company page
According to LinkedIn, there are over 2 million businesses with a Company Page. The network provides users an opportunity to integrate rich media content, hyperlinked banners, Twitter feeds,  links to websites and blogs, as well as videos from YouTube into a profile.

To leverage these options focus on the following:

• Build out your products and services pages on your profile.  Include an image, business description, list of key features and a landing page URL to your site. Also consider adding a link to a special promotion as well as embed YouTube videos featuring both on the products and services.
• Showcase your company using available customization options. Post available jobs in the LinkedIn company profile page.
• Feature products and services on your company’s LinkedIn page, and solicit recommendations from satisfied customers.
• By inserting your blog feed URL your most recent posts will appear on your Company Page.

3. Build followers 
The more followers you have the greater your visibility. It’s a simple concept yet so many people seem to struggle with different ways to grow this important network. Your followers are your network and promoters and the more you promote your Company Page the greater ROI you will experience.

Below are four ways  to quickly build up a community for your company page:

• Flourishing on LinkedIn is a team effort and the best way to succeed is employing a holistic approach that enlists utilize company pages, groups, and individual users. Encourage employees to link up with your Company Page to extend your messages overall reach. The more they share the more you succeed.
• Don’t neglect other players in your space. Watch and follow their activities and interact with them. The more you interact the more attention you will receive.
• Let everyone know you are now on LinkedIn. Send a message to your list of customers and prospects.

4. Engage and network
Imagine attending an industry networking event and never speaking to anyone. In that same vein, you can’t just throw up a Company Page and think your work on LinkedIn is done. You have to engage the people and businesses you’d like to work  with to expand your influence.

6. Monitor and focus your efforts
The Analytics tab for Company Pages provides detailed data on the page’s visitors that  is visible only to administrators. Follow these three steps to make sure you are measuring results properly.

• Monitor analytics to learn who’s visiting your company’s page, which areas interest them, and how this data compares against similar companies.
• Study monthly data graphs on traffic and how users interact with your content to help tailor further efforts.
• Analyze data on industries, functions, and companies that make up your followers.

To learn more about LinkedIn Analytics here.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me at tim@bluefountainmedia,com or use the space provided below.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school,” he says in the 30 second spot called “Strong.”

At least he gets through the piece without once without losing his train of thought.

Is he crazy or a political genius? You decide.

Twitter redesign

Twitter introduced a new version of Twitter and TweetDeck this week simplifying the design to make it easier to follow interests, connect with others and discover something new. The new design can both be seen on Twitter.com and mobile phones, so that you’ll have a familiar experience anytime, anywhere, the company said.

Facebook goes thumbs down?

According to reports, engineers at Facebook are fussing around with a Thumbs Down button. The negative sentiment analysis feature for pages would allow users to register their “dislike” for posts. Facebook’s Like (Thumbs Up) option has revolutionized how people use social media.

As the shopping masses head for the strip malls and big box stores this Friday, it’s important for marketers to remember how all these people ended up there together in the first place: we told them to go!

Black Friday got its name because traditionally most retailers operate in the red for nearly 11 months of the year and only begin to see a profit (the lucky ones at least) once they swing open their doors the day after Thanksgiving to kick off four weeks of delirious, and mostly gratuitous, shopping. Somewhere along the the way some savvy marketing professionals started piecing together shopping habits after Thanksgiving and gave name to the great shopping migration making it even more popular.

In fact, retailers in the United States make approximately one-fifth of their total sales during the holiday season; ringing up nearly half a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of Legos and sweaters.

In recent years the migration to online shopping has seen marketers push forward an alternative to the often chaotic shopping experience that occurs on Black Friday through the creation Cyber Monday. The idea, so the thinking goes, is to persuade people to stay at home and shop online.

As a marketer it is smart to determine the best ad planning path for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday and proceed from that point. Of course. some measurable statistics will help.

A quick scan of this chart reveals that Black Friday is five times more popular than Cyber Monday, according to data (above ) from Google Trends. Obviously millions of Americans are ready to part with their money the day after Thanksgiving to lavish gifts on friends and family, so you should be planning your holiday promotions and campaigns accordingly.

From PPC to Display Advertising

Black Friday should be a big focus for pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters, display ads, blog articles and other marketing channels.

In the past month interest for Black Friday has risen dramatically while Cyber Monday remained rather flat. Pay-per-click and display ads targeting Black Friday are expected to receive substantially more impressions than those for Cyber Monday. If your budget only allows for you to focus on one of these days, your efforts will be most effective targeting Black Friday.

We have already seen spikes in organic search engine traffic for related phrases on internal and client websites so it’s not too early or too late to start your promotions.

Social Media Makes an Entrance

This year marks the first time social media is going to play a major role in both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. LivingSocial announced  it will offer discounts from national businesses such as Verizon Wireless, Electronic Arts Inc. and Sketchers USA Inc.,  which is a  move away from the more local fare they’ve so far concentrated on such as restaurants and weekend getaways.

Instead, the company will provide national brands access to social media-savvy customers who might otherwise choose to remain at home instead of braving the crowds.  This is also the type of marketing brands love because it can be shared and spread across Facebook and Twitter for a nominal cost.

Chicago-based Groupon, LivingSocial’s largest competitor, says they will skip Black Friday promotions this year; so picking an online deal firm to allocate your marketing spend just got a little easier.

While much has been written about the many different ways to effectively float your message and brand across the social media space,  little is being offered about the functionality of design in social media integration.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled some thoughts on how to increase your return on investment when designing and configuring social media sharing buttons.

A few best practices to always consider:

• Do NOT use social media icons to simply link out to profiles. This is not only out-dated but also minimizes the potential value of social media integration.
• As much as possible, show the number of times a piece of content has been shared or the number of Likes, or the number of followers.
• When pieces of content have very few shares, or a user has few followers there are two options: Either round-up everyone you can to increase the number of shares,  or do not display the number of Likes, followers, ect.
• When placing share icons in the masthead, or the footer (site-wide): ensure that the icons are sharing a unique URL (the website homepage, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, Twitter profile follow) and not the page they are on.
• Snippets should be customized for optimized sharing of content. By default, a share button will share the page title of a page, whereas we should be sharing, say, the product name and description.

There are two main types of uses for social media sharing buttons:

• Share this piece of content/page that I am looking at right now.
• Follow, Like, join, subscribe to the entity providing this content.

Below are different design options for both these types of buttons and where to go to configure them.

Sharing Content

•  Facebook – Configuration Page

• Facebook provides three elemental options:
• Standard -This displays social text to the right of the button and friends’ profile photos below it. Minimum width: 225 pixels. Default width: 450 pixels. Height: 35 pixels (without photos) or 80 pixels (with photos).

• The Button Count - Displays the total number of Likes to the right of the button. Minimum width: 90 pixels. Default width: 90 pixels. Height: 20 pixels.

• Box Count -The box count displays the total number of Likes above the button. Minimum width: 55 pixels. Default width: 55 pixels. Height: 65 pixels.

Additionally: you can change “Like” to “Recommend” and add a “Send” button (which is like an “Email This” feature but instead emails to your Facebook friends).

•  Twitter – Configuration Page

The idea behind the Tweet button is to allow people share content on Twitter without having to leave the page. It also helps to promote strategic Twitter accounts at the same time while driving traffic to your website.

• Twitter has three display options:

Twitter share vertical button.

Twitter share horizontal button.

Twitter share no count button.

Place the client’s Twitter username under “Recommend people to follow”.

•  Google + – Configuration Page

Adding Google +1 to pages  helps your site stand out and allows visitors to recommend and share your content on Google Search.Try placing the button above the fold and near the title of the page. Visitors eyes usually move to this spot first. Also, it can be effective to place the +1 button at the end and the beginning of an article or story.

There are 12 different size configurations available. Here are the basic content configurations:

Medium + Bubble:

Tall + Bubble:

Medium + none: (20px wide)

•  LinkedIn – Configuration Page

More than 100 million members use LinkedIn to manage professional identities while building and engaging with a chosen professional network. Incorporating the network’s social media button can greatly enhance your presense among professionals.

• Three main display options:

Publishers can choose between three share buttons: vertical with a share counter, a smaller, horizontal button with the counter, or a horizontal button with no counter.

How To: Set Up the Buttons

Liking Facebook

Enter in the URL of the client’s Facebook page when configuring the widget.

Follow Twitter

Use the follow button (see below) rather than the share. Find the follow button here.

Going with Google

Use the Google+ Badge Configuration tool to generate code.

Share LinkedIn 

Use client’s main URL to share LinkedIn button.

Let’s say a few of your clients are holding off on that social media spend until you can prove your ability to measure ROI across these popular platforms. From my perspective, challenging the efficiency of social media based on number crunching is wrongheaded, but marketers still need to demonstrate to the people controlling these budgets that there is a proper way to go about effectively measuring ROI.

After participating in the OMMA Global Social Media track this week in New York City, I’ve gleaned a few insights from Facebook reps, Foursquare biz dev mangers and even Google engineers (among a myriad of marketing professionals anxious to share their opinions) on the best ways to measure returns on social marketing spend.

Translating Clients’ Non-Monetary Goals Into Dollars

“We are in a world where owned, earned and paid media is coming together more than ever before,” Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, said during an entertaining session titled ‘Is Social Media ROI for Real, Or Is It a New Oxymoron?’ ”It’s still very early but there is an ability to attach ROI to social media.”

In other words: The days of spray and pray are over when it comes to launching social media campaigns, and the best efforts not only engage a wide audience effectively, but provide measurable metrics for CFO’s. While social media shouldn’t be done only with the goal of making direct conversions, having a firm understanding of a client’s bottom line before implementing any social media program is the first step in truly understanding this future ROI.

First examine these basic business metrics:

• Revenues
• Profits
• Customers
• Transactions
• Online traffic

“Make sure you are being efficient in testing and learning,” said Jennifer Kattula, Head of Agency Marketing at Facebook. “Make sure you know what those KPIs are and what success looks like. Paint picture and build a roadmap.”

As a professional marketer you already know how to engage (Return on Engagement ‘ROE’  is your specialty!) but many pros seem to have trouble expressing this in monetary terms for clients. Because Facebook is the biggest platform – it accounts for more than 12 percent of all time spent online, and 38 percent of all page referrals – we will use it as our social template.

Let’s say client A wants to know how to find the correlation between the percentage of Facebook Fans who make purchases and those who aren’t fans but still buy. What you’ll also want to know is if your Facebook’s fan-base grows by let’s say 1o percent then what’s the corresponding increase in frequency of transactions.

Actions to take:

• Identify users that  engage through social media.
• Assign the appropriate value to social media interactions.
• Determine if the social media user converted to a sale.
• Track goal conversions for your website in Google Analytics.
• Analyze only social media referral traffic in a customized segment.
• Measure the correlation between social media referral traffic and goal conversions.

Another great way to measure is incentive-based planning. Offer various incentives to track people from online to offline. For example, provide Facebook fans special deals that can be used offline and then measure the results of those activities.

Use these metrics to demonstrate usability and measurability for other clients. After you have collected this data, you will be able to make pretty good predictions about how different social media activities influence monetary goals.  If client’s sales are mostly online then it is easier to measure all those metrics.

Note: Keep experimenting. Use a percentage (around 5%) of a marketing budget for experiments.

Using Measurable Analytics to Improve Retention and Generate New Clients

According to a report released earlier this month from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 28 percent of American adults use some form of location-based service, either on a mobile device or via a social network.

That’s a pretty hefty number of people checking-in and checking-out locations. So it’s no wonder Foursquare Director of Business Development Eric Friedman told a packed OMMA session that “Foursquare its not just a fun play tool anymore.”

If you’re running a digital marketing campaign consider adding mobile to the marketing mix by designing location-targeted messages. Perhaps more so than other other social media, Foursquare is demonstrating unequivocally that you can measure results in amazing, consumer focused ways.

Fast Foursquare facts:

• Three million check-ins per day.
• One billion check-ins to date.
• More than 500,000 verified merchants.
• Available on all mobile devices and in 11 languages.

Let’s consider the company’s deal with RadioShack (RS) to demonstrate the numerous ways including Foursquare in a social marketing mix can directly assist in measuring ROI. The electronics retailer signed up all of its 5,700 locations last year and began offering what Foursqaure calls Holiday Hero discount, an incentive program designed to bring new users into locations and lure repeate users back with extra loyalty incentives.

Customers that checked-in to different locations across the country were offered discounts of up to 25 percent on products. Existing customers were sent aditional incentives when checking-in at other places in the vicinity of a RadiShack outlet. Segmenting these users with Foursquare’s four analytics dashboards immediately allowed RadioShack to view important, implicit data including: busiest times of day,  busiest stores and least busiest stores, and days of week with the most traffic among many other measurable factors.

“You can really dig in and feed into your business intelligence system,” said Friedman, who also noted that the same tools are available to Joe’s Coffee Shop that Starbucks uses.

The measurable results:

• RS gained 20,000 new followers by broadcasating out to social channels.
• Consumers following location-based messages bought 350% more than people coming in off the street.
• Tracked over 50,00 followers (end of last year).

Interesting ROI point regarding this campaign: For its next social initiative RS now has a large trove of  data and an increased  presence to come back to in the future.

Additional Tools

• Traffic: Google Analytics,
• Leads: HubSpot
• Reach: Facebook Insights, Twitter Counter, HubSpot
• Buzz (Mentions): PostRank
• Customer Support: CRM, Salesforce.com

This is particularly true as companies are placing a greater emphasis on customer acquisition – a goal that is best reached using search as the primary tool. Overall, U.S. spending on search engine marketing (SEO) is expected to have doubled from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $23.4 billion in 2013, according to a report from eMarketer.

That’s why events like last week’s Search Engine Expo (SMX) East in new York City are so valuable for anyone trying to optimize online business efforts. After all, what good is knowing about Google’s Web Crawl without understanding its relationship to SEO.

I’ve compiled few thoughts from the event for online marketers looking to improve ROI.

Crawl Budget

The Google Web Crawler provides every website with a “Crawl Budget” that is based on its perceived value, or authority. As demonstrated by Todd Nemet (@nemet) last week, it is increasingly important to review your server log files to see what pages and files GoogleBot is spending time on. This will ensure that your most important pages are getting a better share of your budget.

This is really a huge factor in your SEO success. Sure, there are multiple factors that determine the amount of pages crawled, but Crawl Efficiency has to be considered when developing an overall plan. If you are using up some of the Crawl Budget on duplicate content you aren’t leveraging your SEO to the fullest.

Google Pagination

To the delight of publishers everywhere Google now supports pagination (the sequential numbering of pages). During SMX East the search-giant introduced two new link elements to demonstrate the schematic relationshipsof documents that span multiple pages. This helps to more clearly identify duplicate content.

First, they evolved how they detect and cluster components of a series with a view all page and launched new rel attributes to enable content owners to specify components of a paginated series.

Vannessa Fox of Nine By Blue notes here that Google discovered that the best experience for Web searchers is to rank the view all page in search results. This process can be advanced by also using the rel=”canonical” attribute to point all pages to the view all versions.

In response to these changes, Bing’s Duane Forrester (@DuaneForrester) said that Bing does not yet support the tag, but added that if it is widely adopted and properly used, that the company would consider doing so.

Schema.org

Schema.org is an extremely important advancement toward informing search engines of various content types on your website. The most widely known and used today are for addresses, recipes, reviews, and product information. There are many more Schema.org tags, but not all of them are recognized yet.

Schema.org is a standards initiative that was jointly launched by Google, Yahoo! and Bing in June 2011. The  standard provides a common set of structured data for marking up content on Web pages. This markup provides search engines with additional information about the type of content on a page.

The plan is that search engines will begin listening to these signals more and more. It is a great way to differentiate your content from other results on SERPs. Websites that have implemented the microdata have seen better rankings as a result.

Guest blogging

When looking for guest blogging opportunities, don’t just look vertically, look horizontally. Sugarrae CEO Rae Hoffman-Dolan (@Sugarrae) provided an excellent example of this practice by introducing BBGeeks.com, where she not only targeted tech blogs, but also went after travel sites as part of a link building strategy.

Another helpful hint to snare those links: when pitching for guest blog opportunities, using the blogger’s first name in the subject line will dramatically increase the chances that they will open your email.

Down with Directory Listings

There is not much of a point in doing directory listings anymore. This includes the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and BOTW.

Funny Facebook Ads

Marty Weintraub (@aimclear), author of “Killer Facebook Ads” and CEO of online marketing agency aimClear, says funny is good when it comes to building ads on Facebook. In fact, Weintraub recommended Humor is one of the best ways of getting clicks on Facebook ads.

He also suggests  targeting publications as well job titles.

If you’re doing marketing for a cool, new product, why not target journalists?! Facebook ads have  been shown to decrease PPC CPAs, when done properly.

Timely Tweets

You might not think it matters that much, but it has been shown that websites with Tweet buttons get 7x more Tweets than those without, and websites with Facebook buttons get 3x more Likes.

If a Tweet is sent into the wild and nobody is around to hear it, does it make any noise? Not at all. So Tweet when it matters. Use Tweriod to find out when your followers are active. As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) and Micheal Gray (@graywolf) of Atlas Web Services demonstrated at SMX East:  most people don’t use Twitter all day long, consider retweeting something after 3 hours to get maximum coverage.

No Longer Personae non Grata?

When planning a new website or looking to optimize conversions it is important to create personas. Venessa Fox of (@VanessaFox) showed a session at SMX how to go about doing it: use sticky notes, figure out what tasks need to be accomplished by each “persona”, same queries they would use, what your website can provide to address their needs, some secondary needs (oh by the way), what you want the persona to do (actions to take on website), and reasons why they will do it.

Just like that!

Correlative SEO

SEO is, by its nature, is correlative and only very rarely, causative. As SEOs, we can only correlate events and results and try to isolate those events to come to hypothesis, but until Matt Cutts gives a definitive answer, one way or the other, it is hard to identify causal data relating to SEO.

Bing Likes Anchor Text Diversity

Bing likes anchor text diversity. Currently, this factor has more of an impact in their search results than in Google. Helpful hint for those looking to improve rankings: look at sites that rank well in Bing to come up with tactics to rank better there.

Authority Always Wins

If you are not the authority, link to the authority. When you have a page about a topic and there is a perfectly good piece of content out there, link to it! That increases the chances that someone will click-through rather than hitting the “Back” button – which is not a good signal to send to search engines.