Businesses are beginning to fully embrace social media as a vehicle to create and enhance brand awareness as well as drive sales.
Imagine, if you will, this one example: A small Minnesota firm beat out the likes of Target, Wheaties, and Dairy Queen for “Best Brand” in the state using social media. Can this be possible?
Well that’s exactly what happened to Creative Memories!
This Minnesota-based scrapbook supplies company beat 64 other brands to take the “Best Brand in Minnesota” title. And they simply relied on social media to make it happen!
Go to their site and see how socially friendly they are. http://www.creativememories.com/
How did they do this? It all began with Creative Memories monitoring Twitter for mentions and seeing a single tweet that mentioned a local newspaper brand challenge. The biggest player in the game was Target who had 5 million Facebook fans at the time. However, with just 60,000 fans themselves, Creative Memories went on Facebook and Twitter and posted the contest while simply asking their fans to vote for them. And vote they did. Their fans voted for them again and again through the various rounds of the competition and Creative Memories emerged as Minnesota’s Best Brand.
This is just one example of fantastic results, which provided fan engagement, and a small brand rocketing to increased brand awareness simply by recognizing an opportunity and turning to social media to make it happen. This example simply demonstrates how being aware and engaged in media where your fans spend their time can benefit you.
With that being said, Google + is saying that their Enhanced Ads are up to 10 percent more effective. It is worth taking a look at this platform as the “next thing” may become “the next big thing”.
Google Vice President for Engineering Vic Gundotra told the New York Times Tuesday that advertisements on Google sites with “social annotations,” such as thumbnails that indicates someone you’re connected to once clicked a +1 button on an ad, have experienced a 5% to 10% increase in click-through rates.
‘We have been in this business for a long time,” Gundotra said, “and there are very few things that give you a 5 to 10 percent increase on ad engagement.”
This sort of social recommendation is a proven boon to online advertising. After Facebook introduced new features to Sponsored Stories, which highlight Friends’ connections with marketers on each other’s profiles, Nielsen tracked 79 marketing campaigns over six months in order to determine the new format’s effect compared to ads on the platform that don’t include such information.
Ads that told users their friends had liked or interacted with a brand page saw a 55% rise in ad recall.
Gundotra pointed out to the Times one advantage Google has over Facebook in the social advertising arena. Google’s ads, socially annotated or otherwise, are delivered to users when they search for something directly.
What do I do when I’m looking to buy sunglasses? I Google “sunglasses.” That’s a great time to hit me with a sunglasses ad.
Although Google + is only consuming about 3.3 minutes a month of a typical users time, while Facebook is consuming 7.5 hours, the continuous improvements in the site make it worth getting in on the ground floor with Google +. After all, a single recommendation from a friend can be more worthwhile than a hundred print ads that are not read.
The following is a short introduction to Google +
Full articles can be viewed at:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/businesses-to-fully-embrace-social-media-in-2012-2/
http://mashable.com/2012/03/06/google-plus-ads/




























