“It doesn’t matter how many Facebook fans you have.  It matters how many people are talking about your brand.”

NY Life’s Social Media AVP, Gregg Weiss, believes you can measure social media. 

First, companies need to get people talking about them, in a positive way.    Benchmark existing, relevant conversations online then have your company begin participating. Once you get the conversations going,  you can measure the impact by analyzing:

1.  How many people are actively talking about your company/brand?

     o  Utilize Facebook’s “people talking about” metric to help you measure conversations.
     o  Example metric: NY Life had 116,000 fans, 2,800 conversations going on and 2.4% of fans participating.

2.  What are people saying?  Do the comments, and the tone, indicate they think well of your company/brand?

     o Example metric: 1 Billion positive impressions about your company.

With so many forms of social media and the world buzzing from every corner, should we all be flooding the Twitterverse with random news and information or should our tweets be a bit more targeted? Perhaps it’s been too long since we talked about Twitter etiquette:

1. Don’t aggravate your followers by flooding their timeline with endless tweets every day. Be mindful of the quantity and quality of your posts.

2. @ replies are arguably Twitter’s biggest cause for confusion. Messages that start with “@ HANDLE” can only be seen by those who follow both the sender and recipient of the note. If you want to ensure that your message is shared with both current and potential followers, have your message re-worked to include the ‘@’ somewhere else in the message.

3. What’s with all the abbreviations? Spelling still counts on Twitter, so let’s try and talk as we do in real life. If you have so much to say that you need to abbreviate words to fit them in a tweet, consider sending multiple tweets or calling someone instead.

4. When and Where to tweet. This seems like an obvious one, but so many people fail to recognize when and where it is appropriate to tweet. For example, it is NOT ok to tweet in the middle of a company presentation, client meeting, from an awards ceremony or seminar. Save the tweets until you get home. Tweets do have time stamps, and you don’t want to give the impression you weren’t paying attention. Use your manners!

5. Trying to retweet but it causes you to go over the character limit? It’s important to include “RT @username” so it’s recommended to cut short the end of the message or reword slightly to make it fit.

6. Don’t self-promote! While you may think it’s important, consider your audience. This applies to businesses and individuals alike. If all of your tweets consist of continuous plugs for yourself, your business, or your clients, expect to lose followers…and rapidly.

7. Twitter is public? No way! Crazy that people forget this right? Don’t expect to say something private on Twitter. It’s not happening. Not by DM, not by using @, no way, no how.

Google+ continues to grow daily, in fact it only took 21 days after the launch of Google+ to reach 18 million users! At this rate, Google + has the potential to fundamentally change the social media landscape. So what’s next for Google+?

The feature that has been the topic of many conversations is Google+ for brands. Similar to Facebook and other social media platforms, Google+ plans to create brand pages. The brand pages are expected to exceed the consumer pages in terms of their usefulness to businesses.

In a recent Mashable article, Christian Oestlien, the platform’s product manager, mentioned that upcoming brand pages will offer a deeper experience than personal pages as a result of integration with Google AdWords and potential for in-depth analytics feedback. 

Additionally, Google +’s newest “plus one” feature, which allows users to share a webpage with designated circles, has the potential to drive search traffic for brands.

I had the opportunity recently to tune into a PR News Google+ Webinar with presentations by marketers Marcy Massura, Joshua Nafman and John Bell.  Below are six ways they predict brands might utilize Google +:

• Fresh approach to customer service and engagement
• Segmenting and organizing brand fans, customers, influencers
• B2B sales force enablement
• Create and promote branded “sparks” to establish thought leadership
• Enhance search results with Google+ pages for brands and socially enabled team
• Use as a collaboration platform for teams (Google docs, video chat)

You may have noticed some recent changes on your favorite brand pages on Facebook. On March 10, Facebook officially changed all brand pages to more closely resemble individual Facebook profiles. And not only do they look similar, brand pages now have more of the functionality one finds with their personal profile.

What opportunity does this present for companies with brand pages?

• Brand page administrators can now post content and interact on their respective pages as either individuals or as the brand itself. This can be very useful for customer service situations as fans can interact with an individual administrator Facebooking on behalf of the brand.

• Brand pages can interact with other pages, including liking content or commenting on other brand pages. This means brand pages can receive a news feed from other pages your brand may like—just like an individual. This can be used to engage influencers of your brand, such as bloggers or partner businesses.

• Page owners can now integrate tracking platforms like Google Analytics thanks to the improved iframes of the tabs. This allows users similar functionality found on normal websites.

For additional insights, David Berkowitz, an Ad Age blogger, outlined three of the biggest changes and provided tips on utilizing the redesign for your brand page’s advantage—a must read.

Here is the official Facebook announcement.

As the new year approaches, we’ve been keeping an eye out for trends and new mediums in 2011. How we consume news is ever-changing, and 2010 was certainly the year of mobile apps and mobile news media.  What will next year bring?

The below article provides a good snapshot of what’s in store for PR professionals and the media in general in 2011. It should be an exciting year!

10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011
Source: mashable.com