Last week Gravytrain’s Managing Director, Kevin Taylor, gave a presentation at The Social Media Academy’s “Finance Communications in a Social Media World” seminar. Kevin went through the ins and outs of getting started in Social Media and how to best target your activity.

Social Media is becoming increasingly important in all sectors, including finance, and can have a huge impact on customer relations, brand awareness and visibility online. However, as Kevin discussed in his presentation, it is not enough to just sign up to Facebook and Twitter, a Social Media campaign should have clear aims, sufficient time dedicated to it and the backing of everyone involved.

Kevin also discussed how although Social Media can be a fantastic way of reaching a wide audience and connecting with your customers online, it can also leave you open to public criticism from unhappy customers. Kevin therefore pointed out that if you are going to embark on a Social Media campaign it is vital to have someone managing the accounts and responding to activity within a set time.

If run correctly Social Media can vastly improve a company’s brand awareness, website traffic and offer up a fantastic way to interact with customers. However, if neglected or misaimed it can cause more damage than good. If you are thinking of embarking on a Social Media campaign for your business it is therefore imperative to have a clear plan, strategy and aim in mind.

Less than 2 months after the Google +1 feature made its first appearance in the US search results, Google has released +1 buttons that can be placed directly on web pages. Using a small snippet of code, the button can be placed on a web page in a similar fashion to the Tweet and Facebook Like buttons.

The idea behind adding the +1 feature to the Google search results is to make each person’s results more personalised and also more social, promoting sites in their results that they and they contacts have liked with the +1 button.

With the new +1 button directly on sites this idea continues, with people being able to +1 individual pages and pieces of content on a site, as well as the actual site itself within the Google search results. But will people use it?

Competition with Facebook and Twitter
When it comes to the Google search engine, the +1 button can completely dominate as neither Facebook nor Twitter can add their buttons to the search results, and therefore the only option to like or promote a site will be through +1. However, when it comes to actual web pages, the Google +1 button may struggle to compete with the Facebook Like and Tweet buttons.

The idea behind the Facebook and Twitter buttons is to allow users to share the piece of content amongst their friends, through their own personal profiles. So, for example, the web browser sees a great blog post about a new Google feature, Tweets it, which puts a link to the post into their Twitter stream, and then the users followers can go straight to the recommended piece of content.

It is the same concept with the Facebook Like button but with +1 the idea seems to fall away slightly. Yes if you hit the +1 button people within your Google address book will be able to see it but you are not really promoting it on a profile or sharing it in an open format.

Sharing Content or Promoting the Site?
With +1 you are essentially saying you approve of the site and are promoting it in your personal search results, whereas with Tweet and Like you are sharing it. +1 then doesn’t seem to really fall in line with the Twitter and Facebook buttons and so may receive less attention because of this.

In fact, it is only early days, but if you look at sites that have already integrated this new +1 button, alongside Tweet and Like, you can see that it is not generating nearly as many clicks.

Of course as people become more aware of +1 and it becomes common on sites it will be used more, but will people develop a greater affinity to +1 than Facebook and Twitter? Google are dominant in practically every area of online but, for now at least, they are 3rd place in the rankings for social.

In one of our previous blog posts, we explained the importance of Twitter and how it is growing. At the beginning of this month, Twitter announced its plans to roll out a feature that allows tweeters to upload photos alongside their tweets, directly from Twitter.com (hosted by Photobucket).

Having a photo sharing feature on Twitter may encourage businesses to connect with their customers more, as they will be able to upload their photos easier, whether they are tweeting pictures of what events are happening, what people in their organisation are doing or what’s new at the company, without actually having to leave Twitter to use a 3rd party application to do so.

Third party photo sharing applications

Many people have already been sharing photos on Twitter via 3rd party applications such as Twitpic, Flickr and Yfrog. These applications have already allowed businesses to get some statistics to track the response and who has looked at their photos. Not only will Twitter also have the same features, but they will also appear in the results page when consumers click on a trending topic or when they search for something related.

With Twitter having their own photo sharing service, 3rd party applications are worried that they will be pushed out. However, a spokesperson from Twitter explained that “Twitter are still supporting other third-party photo services in our desktop and mobile, therefore users can choose the application that works best for them”.

Who actually uploads photos and what application do people use to do so?

Sysomos, a social media monitoring company recently launched a report to show which services tweeters are using to share photos and how often they included photos in their tweets. The tweets were analysed on 30th May 2011. Sysomos found that Flickr only had a contribution of 2.1% of the photos shared on Twitter for that day, whereas Twitpic was the most popular application (45.7%), followed by Yfrog with 29.3%, Lockerz with 17.4% and Instagram with 5.2%.

Of the all the tweets from 30th May 2011, only 1.5% contained a link to a picture from a photo sharing application and 14.9% of them contained a link.

Why share photos on Twitter?

Sharing photos is a great way to engage with people and potential customers on Twitter. People are generally interested to know what’s going on around the world and being able to see what other people see. If they like it, they’ll usually re-tweet it and share the photo with their followers.

It’s a great marketing tool for different types of businesses. For example, restaurants and foodies can upload pictures of their latest creations, making consumers want to buy and taste the food. Fashion magazines could upload a picture of their staff’s ‘outfit of the day’ which might start up a discussion, or cosmetic brands could upload pictures of their makeovers or their latest product, encouraging people to go out, buy and try their products.

As previously mentioned, even though Sysomos found that only 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo in their research, with Twitter having their own photo sharing application, it will build more of an opportunity to make photo sharing a more common activity.

Social media is all the buzz at the moment – everybody wants to do it, even the bad debt credit companies and oil companies. Indeed, we are very keen to stress to our clients just how important good social media engagement can be. What gets less consideration amongst the excitement is how social media can actually work against you. Big time.

When I was growing up as a teenager in the 90’s, we were going through the custom built computer phase, and shops building cheap PC’s were all the rage. I remember too well one particular shop in my village back then, which became immensely popular. To start with, the surge in popularity led to lots of new customers and before long queues were out of the door of the (relatively small) shop. The ever so slight flaw in their promising business plan was that they couldn’t actually build computers very well, or at least, didn’t have the time to do so. Before long, there were two queues out of the door, with of them being for people taking machines back that didn’t work. The business doesn’t exist anymore, having lasted all of around 6 months.

The big mistake of this former business wasn’t just that their product delivery was poor, or that they were growing too fast to cope, but that their most disgruntled customers were mixing with new prospects. The small shop with two queues just a metre from each other was a perfect environment for conversation between the two customer groups. The memory of the positive radio ads were quickly erased from the minds of possible new customers, replaced instead with the fear of getting their children a computer that didn’t work for Christmas.

Most businesses, especially those with customer satisfaction issues, understand the importance of keeping a safe distance between new and existing customers, and (sadly perhaps) do quite a good job of keeping them at arm’s length. What many of these businesses don’t realise however is how social media is turning this on its head – if you want to build serious engagement with your customers using social media, you simply can’t afford to have disgruntled customers. If you do have customers milling about with unresolved complaints, you can bet they’ll find their way to your Facebook fan page before long.

Only last week when I was idly browsing Facebook on my mobile during a commute, I saw a status update from a friend – the update suggested that by liking the Boohoo fan page, that she had received 15% off her next order. I’ve used Boohoo a couple of times before when buying presents for my girlfriend, so I naturally clicked with interest to their Facebook fan page.

However, what I saw was not encouraging – page after page of complaints:

Now, one slight caveat is that the page I pasted comments isn’t actually the official Boohoo page, but it does have over 5000 likes, and is being actively shared by users thinking that it IS their actual page. When I found their actual official page, it was better but still suffered from the same kind of problems:

Now, I’m not trying to have a go at Boohoo with this blog post – they’ve obviously had some issues with delivery partners recently and I’m sure they’ll get over this in time, but there’s no doubt that these pages are hurting them. Several people commented that they were put off ordering from them on the basis of what they had seen and it’s exactly how I felt.

The reality for brands using Facebook to reach out to their customers is that they need to be red hot at preventing and managing complaints before they spread to their Facebook page. Failing to do this, is pretty much like giving your most unhappy customers space on your billboards to tell people what they think of you.

Next time you are with a group of your friends ask them “what do you think of Twitter?” and I bet you will get the same response I get from every Jane Doe and Jo Blogs I ask “erm…I have a Twitter account but I don’t really see the point of it…I prefer Facebook”.

Yes, despite having more than 200 million users, Twitter still seems to have this odd reputation as being not as good or important as Facebook. What’s more, it isn’t just individual users who appear to have this thinking, but also many small to medium sized businesses as well.

Every day I seem to come across more and more small to medium sized businesses with well optimized sites, beautiful blogs and fantastic Facebook pages but have Twitter accounts with no Tweets, no followers and not even a picture!

For a few years now many small, medium and large businesses all around the world have been realising the importance of Social Media for online brand awareness, website traffic and Google Rankings. Yet despite these businesses doing excellent things with blogs and Facebook pages, their Twitter accounts seem to have been left behind, given less attention, time and focus.

Why Twitter is Becoming More Important
In recent months we have seen Google release 2 new features to try and make search results more personal, refined and more social. Blocked and +1 have both been developed to help make Google more of a social network, focusing more on individual user’s preferences, connections and tastes, to help deliver the most relevant results for each individual user.

With this, all signs are pointing to the idea that Google rankings are being more and more influenced by user generated content such as comments on blogs, Facebook Likes and of course Tweets! With Google apparently in the process of trying to acquire Twitter and already having access to their vast amount of user data, they appear to be attributing more and more importance to businesses Twitter accounts when it comes to rankings.

Links vs Tweets
It may seem farfetched to attribute higher Google rankings to the number of Twitter followers you have, but as we can see from the latest SEOMoz Ranking Factors data, as well as other research, Twitter seems to be having as big an impact as blogs, keyword focused content and even links.

Of course, this is not to say that traditional SEO methods, such as onsite optimisation, keyword focused content and link building, are no longer important, and a strong SEO campaign should feature all of these elements. However, it is clear that we need to keep pushing Social Media and start giving Twitter the attention it deserves.

We already know how important Social Media can be for brand awareness, online promotion and networking, but now it also appears to be having an even greater impact , affecting Google’s search results.