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as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook has made some updates to help deliver value to businesses through Pages beyond just News Feed distribution.

Facebook Page is becoming more like a website for your business — a destination people will come to when they want information, or even make a purchase or booking, as well as a place to engage with great content.

Facebook has made it easier for people to recommend your business by bringing Recommendations to your Page. As shared by Facebook: People will now be able to post a Recommendation for your business including text, photos and tags directly on your Page. And Recommendations will also help you reach people while they’re searching for or talking about your business.

"Four out of five U.S. adults are involved in a social network," Band adds. The result: Businesses are increasingly trying to follow their customers' social networking updates. It's a logical extension of CRM, which is designed to help businesses broaden their understanding of customers' interests, needs, and concerns. Many business relationships today begin on the Internet, as customers increasingly find businesses from Google searches, Facebook fan pages, and Website visits, adds Brent Leary, a CRM and small-business technology analyst. So it makes perfect sense to track and build those relationships using cloud CRM services, especially if they offer social network monitoring.

• Highrise is a cloud CRM system that many small businesses like. Along with its CRM features, the system provides various third-party customer service applications, such as MailChimp, an e-mail marketing campaign service. Highrise offers a free plan for two users with up to 250 contacts. Beyond that ceiling, monthly plans start at $24 for up to six users.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”

550 businesses with less than 100 employees in the U.S. and found that only 3 percent of their total advertising dollars flowed online, compared to as much as 16 percent for big companies.

most of these business do not have a professional marketing person whose job is to drive marketing," Rose said. "It's pretty hard for them to winnow their way through the 20 to 40 unsolicited requests they get a month to use digital marketing product A versus digital marketing product B."

In fact, according to McKinsey, companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50% increase in customer satisfaction, 48% increase in business leads, and 24% increase in revenue.

Social business apps allow users to follow the people, data and documents that matter to them at any given time.

To be transformative, social can't be an add-on. Social must be a strategy that is integrated into business processes across the organisation.

37% of Facebook store operators were using the site as their sole sales channel.

No matter the size of the business, consumers still express hesitation when it comes to making purchases on social networks. According to JWT Intelligence, privacy was shoppers’ main concern when asked about F-commerce in June 2011. Similar percentages of consumers questioned whether Facebook was secure enough to be a safe purchase platform.

small businesses find the channel appealing because it lets them “leverage their scrappiness,”

American Express cardmembers and merchants can register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis and also receive $100 in advertising credits to put toward bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts

The company is also focused on reaching the market for its political ad products and scaling its international ad offerings.

(Twitter currently allows for city-level targeting at its most specific.)

A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate: Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

“How Much Do You Open the Kimono: Does “Thought Leadership” Cannibalize Your Ability to Monetize What You Know?”

hey create content for the (estimated by Eloqua) 85% of the market that doesn’t know who they are, instead of the 15% that do. This is a key finding, as most content is targeted to mid and late funnel thinking and objection overcoming, rather than top of the funnel awareness building. To that end, Eloqua often invests in content that’s not particularly related to their actual business.

As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises.

potting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts

Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.