Marketers rejoice! 2017 is your year to boost your social strategy and prove ROI. And we want to give you the resources to help you along the way. One way is through webcasts, but webcasts with real, tangible takeaways that will help you sharpen your social skills in 2017.   So, mark your calendars, because on Thursday, December 8, we’re excited to partner with MarketingLand to bring you: Social Media Marketing 3.0: Best Practices for Ramping Up Social ROI with Matt Sitomer of VaynerMedia and our very own @DayleH.   They will discuss the evolution of social media marketing and where we are today. But, more importantly, they will share actionable "best practices" to help brands overcome the most common social challenges and provide strategies to improve social return.   Plus, attendees will takeaway how to: Streamline content creation and planning across departments. Create a more seamless customer experience across marketing and customer service. Identify and measure key metrics that will demonstrate social ROI. Improve your brand authenticity by leveraging user-generated content.   It’s easy - register here and get an early head start to your social success in 2017. ... View more

  Finding the best social technology vendor for your needs can feel overwhelming. There’s so many options out there. We talk with many brands and have asked them what their ideal features list would be.   For social marketers and customer care professionals, a top priority is finding technology that creates a seamless customer experience. Customers want to converse with brands on the platform of their choosing and expect you to be able to follow the conversation no matter how many times it changes hands.   Some of the key points we hear marketers and care agents say they want their technology to do: Provide insights based on data to deliver better social engagements Eliminate or automate inefficient tasks Allow marketing and customer service to easily collaborate Keep the brand reputation safe with early warning alerts to potential problems Understand audiences’ unique preferences and social influence when engaging in interactions   We’ve asked and gathered critical feature lists to help you explore what your current or future technology vendor should do for you:   The Social Customer Engagement Checklist – download The Social Media Management Checklist – download   Check out these checklists to help guide you when selecting the best social technology for you.   ... View more

  One thing is sure, social marketing looks very different today than it did a year ago. New channels, trends, and tactics are emerging by the second, thereby impacting how marketers should be investing in their strategies.   During our recent webcast, we posed this question to our panel of social strategy experts: What does this evolution mean for brands and how should they strategize their social engagement programs?   Here are 3 key takeaways from posing that question.   Takeaway 1: Social media users are consuming content differently than they were a year ago.   For example: Video content used to be a solo category on its own, but now it’s broken into different types of visual content: traditional video (YouTube, Vimeo), live video content (Facebook Live, Periscope), and 24-hour video content (Snapchat, Instagram stories).   On the brand side, we’re seeing a rise of new ways brands can provide service to their customers through bots, Facebook Messenger for brands and even WeChat.   Takeaway 2: Not every platform feature is mature enough as a product to provide deeper insights.   Be wary of investing too deeply into the latest trend. While our panelists agreed that new ways of connecting with your audience is worth exploring, brands should also be aware that most new products and features don’t immediately provide analytics. This will make it harder for brands to make a case for continuing investment on a new tactic or channel.   On the other hand, leveraging data insights to personalize customer experiences is a best practice and a great way to lead a more sophisticated social media strategy. Pay attention to ways you can leverage account-based marketing, social selling, and surface relevant content to your target audience.     Takeaway 3: Experimentation is a must, so build it into your strategy.   We all know that experimentation has a cost – especially when certain capabilities are still maturing in reporting performance analytics. One thing on every social media leader’s mind is: How can brands prioritize experimenting with new channels and social trends without compromising their existing programs?   Our panelist Steve Harnsworth  recommends segmenting your social strategy in this way: 80% : Standard, high ROI social media programs 15% : Experimental social programs that may yield results 5% : Totally crazy experiments that will likely not yield results   You may never know what will work for your audience if you don’t experiment, so why not force your organization to keep pushing boundaries?  Watch the full webcast to get even deeper insights from our panel of experts.   Meanwhile, take part in a mind shift. Join us for an exclusive conversation with Forrester’s Melissa Parrish to learn how social media can power your business beyond marketing.    ... View more

It’s been a big month for Lithium Social Web here at Lithium. Over the past few days and weeks, we’ve announced a series of new features and integrations: brands can now initiate private customer care  on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, our integration with Twitter allows brands to collect customer feedback in real-time , adding a new dimension of customer experience metrics to the mix.   Today, we’re excited to share more about one of our most recent and cutting-edge product releases: Mobile Analytics . The business of social requires customer service teams to have quick visibility in order to be agile, identify trends early, and ultimately deliver the best customer experience possible. Our latest release will allow brands to do just that with an updated user experience and important analytics accessible on-the-go on Android and iPhone devices.     Mobile Analytics We are bringing web analytics to our mobile app starting with one of our most powerful analytics offerings: shared dashboards. Shared dashboards are customizable analytics dashboards which users can create and share internally with anyone in the organization to track the performance of customer care initiatives. We want  customer service leaders to gain more visibility within their organizations on the great work they are doing in improving their efficiencies and increasing customer sentiment -- and we’ve heard loud and strong from our customers that Shared Dashboards has been key to achieving this.   If you are interested in learning more about how to take advantage of our latest product releases, we would love to hear from you .   Is your team fully harnessing social for powerful customer care? Download a complimentary copy of our latest eBook, “The Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service Success in 2016 ” to learn more. ... View more

  Customer service on Twitter has grown an impressive 2.5x over the last two years.   It should not come as a surprise to brands that customers are increasingly turning to social media as their channel of preference to resolve their issues quickly and seamlessly.   As social media becomes a high priority customer service channel for brands, and the preferred communication channel for customers, it becomes all the more important to be able to manage social conversations at scale. We recently announced Lithium Social Web’s integration with Facebook’s Business Messenger , making us the first social customer service platform that allows social care agents to initiate a private response directly and privately with a customer.   Today we are excited to share two advanced platform integrations with Twitter that allow our customers to further manage social customer service at scale:   Seamless public to private conversations This new integration includes the ability for brands to let the customer to seamlessly transition Twitter conversations from public to private, making it easier for brands to take conversations offline to gather more information or diffuse a situation more privately. In Twitter, agents can include a custom URL that links users directly to a Direct Message conversation with the brand, allowing end-users an easy way to send private messages to brands.   Collect customer feedback in real time Additionally, in a further expansion of our analytics portfolio, in the coming weeks LSW will also support Twitter’s new Customer Feedback capability, giving brands the ability to initiate a survey to customers in-channel and extract Net Promoter Score (NPS ® ) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) data. The ability to tie  NPS ®  data with social channels provides customer care agents with a new way to demonstrate ROI. For example, one beta customer saw a much higher Net Promoter Score  SM  for their social channels, compared to other support channels.   These features will allow for an equally seamless experience for both brands and customers.   Is your team fully harnessing social for powerful customer care? Download a complimentary copy of our latest eBook, “ The Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service Success in 2016 ” to learn more. Loved this blog? Tweet it or Share on LinkedIn.   Related Blogs Enough is Enough: A Manifesto for Social Media Marketing How to use data to drive better Twitter customer service The 3 A's Behind Your Social Marketing Strategy   ... View more