Scalar Enterprises Blog
This page contains news about Scalar Enterprises, work we have been doing for our clients, new features and services etc. From time to time I will also include useful information and articles from myself and from various other sources along with comments, tips and thoughts from myself. Hope you find it useful and why not let me know if you have a question.
Have you heard of Hootsuite ?
I recently attended a networking meeting in Fareham with a group called Business Builders where their guest speaker was Allan Beaton who is a “social media scientist” and an expert on an application called Hootsuite.
For those of you who have never heard of Hootsuite, it is a “social media management system” which basically means that it is a tool that provides you with a single dashboard from which you can manage all of your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+) in one place.
You can send your messages/posts/tweets and also you can monitor all of your accounts in it as well. You can post the same message simultaneously to all your accounts or individually if you wish and you can even set it to automatically post at set times if you wish so it even works when you are not around to do it yourself.
If you delve deeper into it there are also more tools which allow you to monitor analytics for your social media accounts (although you will have to subscribe to use these additional functions, the basic free account allows you to monitor up to 5 social media profiles).
Most of you I’m sure will agree that when you have several social media accounts, it is a difficult task to keep them all up to date and it is a real chore having to keep logging into each individual user control panel each time you want to do something so having something like Hootsuite is a real bonus.
Using this tool, you can display and access them all together in one window. The size of your screen obviously dictates how many you can see at one time but on a desktop monitor you can display them all alongside each other quite nicely. You can also get Hootsuite apps to run on your mobile platforms.
Like most similar tools, it takes a bit of time and experimentation to work out how they work and to get the best out of them. Training sessions / workshops can help reduce the time it takes to learn them so I personally quite like to attend these as it saves me a lot of time and speeds up the learning curve.
Allan Beaton is actually running a Hootsuite workshop in Southampton shortly so I am looking forward to going along and learning about how to make best use of the tool to optimise the time I spend on social media and hopefully make it work better for my business.
Are you using Hootsuite or any other similar tools to manage your social media activities ? Do you think they help ?
Author: Steve Wood of Scalar Enterprises
Social Media video 2011 update
I do try quite hard to keep up with the rapid changes in online marketing and social media but it is quite a task and it is getting more and more difficult as time goes on as there is just so much to follow.
One of the most popular videos produced recently about Social Media was by Eric Qualman, I included this in my blog some months ago and to date, his original video entitled “Social Media Revolution“, now has had more than 2.8 million views on YouTube.
Eric has just released an updated, slightly shorter version (June 2011) with some new and updated statistics included so I thought I would include it here so you can keep up to date.
Some of the interesting statistics I noted are:
- 93% of marketers are now using Social Media for business
- 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- only 14% of consumers trust advertisements
Hope you find it useful.
Social Media Security
It seems that the cybercriminals took a bit of a holiday over the Christmas period, with spam levels reportedly dropping from around 70 billion to less than 30 billion (measured on the 1st January 2011).
However, security specialists, Sophos, issued their Threat report for 2011 which indicates a 90% increase in people being sent malware on Social Networks.
Social engineering is a generic term for the psychological tricks used to persuade people to compromise their online security. This might a range of actions such as opening an email attachment, clicking a button, following a link, or filling in a form with sensitive personal information.
All kinds of scams and many of the different methods used to spread malware, make use of social engineering techniques to target human desires and fears, as well as just plain curiosity, to get past the caution we should all be exercising when online.
In July 2010, Facebook exceeded 500 million active users, making it not only the largest social networking site, but also one of the most popular destinations on the web with searches in Facebook actually exceeding Google!
With other social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn having massive growth as well, social media is clearly an ideal target for scammers.
One of the more common types of attacks hitting Facebook users is “clickjacking,” or “UI redressing”. Such attacks utilise maliciously created pages where an opaque layer is inserted above a real button (e.g. “like” or “share”) which means that innocent victims sharing or “liking” the content results in sending the attack out to their contacts through newsfeeds and status updates etc thus propagating the scam.
TIP – always worth a try and a good habit to get into – before clicking on a link or button, just hover your mouse over it and look at the destination link in the status bar at the bottom left corner of your browser. If it says something quite different to what you are expecting, be careful.
The importance of Social Media in B2B marketing
I did a presentation about Scalar Enterprises to my BNI Portsmouth Nelson Chapter this morning and I always try to include some information about the current state of the market and trends, statistics etc in these presentations so this time I made mention of the importance of Social Media in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.
I found a really great video entitled “Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)”, based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, which gives a very quick, but powerful, overview of Social Media. Several people asked me where they could find it to watch again so I thought I would include it here.
For those of you on LinkedIn, you might like to join this group that I started a while ago and join in the discussions with other local business people. (You probably will have to join the group before you can see the articles etc).
Social Media in B2B Marketing in Hampshire
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3446679
For those of you who aren’t yet on LinkedIn, you should be (and it is free). See https://www.linkedin.com/reg/join?trk=learnjoin
You can also now enter your business separately on LinkedIn so this another item for your to-do list. See http://www.linkedin.com/companies
Social Media is all about getting involved and joining in so join up, join in, and start contributing - ask questions and answer others.
RULE #1 – don’t use Social Media to blatantly advertise your business – you are there to engage and join in conversations, help others, ask questions, give advice etc.
This might also be useful – LinkedIn New User Starter Guide: http://learn.linkedin.com/new-users/
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