Australians are spending a significant amount of time on social media sites. In fact, Australians have been found to than any other nationality, according to a report by Nielson. With the digital landscape constantly growing, changing and evolving, beautydirectory has kept site users up to date with new developments throughout the year with a range of news articles, blogs and features. This year also saw beautydirectory hold its bd Digital Seminar Wrap-Up to educate brands on how best to utilise digital platforms. Here we take a look at some of the major ideas, advice and breakthroughs to hit the digital arena in 2011.
Ready, steady, GO!
With so many options available in social media – think technologies, platforms and creative approaches, it’s hard to know where to start. Digital strategist Patty Keegan says there are to get you on your way.
1. Check your social media domains – register your brand name before someone else brandjacks it.
2. Start listening – use platforms to tune in to what people are saying about your brand such as SocialMention.
3. Develop a publishing schedule – schedule your content so that it aligns with your other marketing activity.
4. Implement social media governance policies – provide your team with guidelines for using social media responsibly and effectively.
5. Keep an eye on the competition – the Wildfire app will graph your competitive landscape.
Being successful in social media
Many beauty brands have now included , however, just counting the number of posts or fans is just the beginning of what brands should be doing with their social media offerings. Marketers should be looking for ways to start a dialogue with current and potential customers. In social media, it is important to give people reasons for liking” your brand, interacting, sharing and coming back for more. The guide Building Your Business with Facebook Pages says the Patty Keegan: Google and Facebook - upping the ante in the social wars on Facebook are Build, Engage, Amplify.
Dipping a toe into online and social media
With a new report finding that combining e-commerce sites with social media leads to e-commerce + social media = success , there’s little surprise that many brands have either launched new websites, social media sites and apps or given their online site a major upgrade this year. Brands seen upping their digital offering in 2011 include:
Estée Lauder launches Make Me Up
Click to find more news on this year’s digital launches.
Tools to help with social media monitoring
It’s important for brands to stay on top of what is being said about them in social media. Fortunately there are many free online tools available to help Social media monitoring: how to do it. These include: Google Alerts, Social Mention, TweetDeck, HootSuite and Yahoo!Clues. Once you know what is being said about your brand, it’s important to know how to best approach negative comments in social media outlets. Tips from experts on how to do this include making your response positive, give helpful suggestions and always respond to criticism.
Apps
There is a growing appetite for apps. As of mid 2011, more than 15 billion apps had been downloaded. In the Apps-solutely fabulous: A look at three beauty apps, there are 414 iPhone apps in the iTunes Australia store tagged as beauty” and 179 iPad apps tagged beauty”. Top App-y Days on the market today include Dermalogica’s Speed Mapping, Garnier’s The Circle iPhone app, KMS California And Who Are You?, Lancôme Virtual Palette, Olay’s My Beauty Advisor, OPI virtual catalogue, Revlon All Access, Schwarzkopf Colour Advisor and Yves Saint Laurent Touche Éclat app.
Google versus Facebook
This year saw both Patty Keegan: Google and Facebook - upping the ante in the social wars in their social media offerings. The major news for Google was the launch of Google+, which is similar to Facebook but has the advantage of Circles – a dashboard that organises your own social media networks in one central point (for example, a work-related circle, a family-related circle etc). Facebook also announced this year that is has teamed up with Skype to offer videoconferencing. On top of this, , which instructs small businesses on how to set up a profile page, use sponsored stories and social plug ins and create targeted ads and deals.
Blogging on
2011 has seen the beauty blogging arena increase at a significant pace. To help address this growing industry, the Australian Beauty Bloggers Weekend wrap-up in September to educate and unite beauty bloggers from around the nation. An important topic that constantly rears its head in beauty blogging circles is whether there is any interest by the blogger to become professional. To help address this hot issue, The Plastic Diaries editor Kimberly Nissen asked if there was such a thing as Professional blogging: Is there such a thing?.
With so many exciting new developments and ideas being discovered in 2011, we’re already looking forward to seeing what news things are brought to the digital landscape in 2012.