'Net Features : adobe, social media

Predicting Facebook Post Popularity

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:05:00 GMT

The role that social citations play in the search marketing landscape is increasing dramatically. And don't think for a moment that smart software solution developers are not fully aware of that fact.

Adobe, for example, recently announced new predictive capabilities for its social media optimization platform Adobe Social (part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite).

What makes the development so interesting is that Adobe uses historical data — in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict engagement levels (as well as sentiment) around a specific type of Facebook post. The platform can recommend keywords, content types and even timing that could lead to a better response (deeper engagement et al).

Adobe Social users can see the estimated range for the amount of Likes, comments, and shares a post will receive, as well as identify other metrics that matter to them (which Adobe will then track and predict in the future). Before posts are published, the service will notify users if post elements exist that could be improved — for example, perhaps there is a better time to schedule a post.

Rumor has it that Adobe will quickly expand beyond Facebook (and that's good news as, apparently, Google+ is gaining ground on Facebook which is (also apparently) losing millions of users.

Facebook Engagement Grows by… 896%?

Allison Howen — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 01:04:00 GMT

Regardless of claims that Facebook is now forcing Brand Page owners to pay for exposure, engagement rates on the world's most popular social network seem to be soaring.

In fact, Adobe’s Q3 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update reveals that fans’ engagement with brands on Facebook, which includes likes, comments and shares, grew by 896 percent year over year. Adobe concludes that this growth is the result of Facebook’s Timeline redesign as well as new acquisition and engagement metrics and more effective social marketing by brands.

An additional factor that is undoubtedly influencing fan engagement rates on Facebook is mobile. According to the study, mobile users now account for nearly a quarter of all Facebook engagement, which is a four-fold increase from the period prior to the Timeline change.

However, despite this study, Facebook’s Timeline feature has been controversial, to say the least. Aside from the general public’s typical moans and groans about getting accustomed to the new design, many Page owners have complained that their content doesn’t reach as much of their fan base as it previously did – unless, of course, they promote their posts. This means that brands actually need to pay to have more of their existing fans see their content, unlike the pre-Timeline era when brand content was sent to every fan’s newsfeed – for free.

Has Timeline affected your brand’s engagement rates on Facebook? Has promoting your posts led to a positive ROI for your brand? Let us know in the comments section below.

Three New Additions to the Adobe Marketing Suite

Michael Garrity — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:00:00 GMT

At this week's Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in London, hot on the heels of the release of Creative Suite 6 and the Creative Cloud, the software company announced three new products.

Each release is aimed at helping marketers “Build compelling personalized experiences that address complex digital marketing problems,” says Kevin Cochrane, Adobe's vice president of enterprise marketing.

Content management on the Web is fundamentally changing and it was with that in mind, Cochrane explained, that Adobe crafted a set of new products to help digital marketers focus on creating not only compelling content but also compelling user experiences. He identified three primary issues that digital marketers face in the current environment.

The first is, obviously, driving revenue growth, especially with consumers who seem to become increasingly indifferent toward online advertising. On today’s Web, users are interested in targeted, personalized experiences, or they’re not interested at all.

The second consideration Adobe made was with regards to marketing budgets, specifically ensuring that every dollar spent on a digital marketing campaign is spent wisely. Thus, Adobe's solution is designed to help marketers optimize their spending by measuring and analyzing the impact of their efforts to determine the most efficient places in which they spend.

Finally, Adobe wanted to find ways to monetize a marketer’s audience by making each user they reach a valuable asset in driving conversions.

The resulting products were Adobe CQ 5.5 Social Communities, CQ eCommerce and CQ Cloud Manager.

Cloud Manager
A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) app for businesses to quickly launch marketing initiatives in the cloud, providing access to an integrated set of Web Experience Management (WEM) services for the creation, management, measurement and optimization of user-personalized experiences on websites, mobile devices and social media.

After starting a marketing campaign, Cloud Manager lets users remotely control a complete digital marketing solution from the cloud, leverage capabilities available through a rich partner ecosystem and monitor Adobe CQ and cloud infrastructure using real-time metering capabilities, among other handy features.

E-Commerce
An integrated solution that also leverages Adobe’s WEM platform. eCommerce manages and optimizes the buying process for websites, mobile devices and social media by delivering a branded, personalized experience incorporating the hybris multichannel commerce software.

Extending the reach of personalized digital marketing campaigns across these channels allows marketers to present a targeted experience to consumers from the point-of-engagement to the point-of-sale, regardless of the device they’re using. In addition, e-commerce sites and apps can be delivered on-premises or from the cloud, and using eCommerce in tandem with Cloud Manager lets marketers speed the creation of branded, personalized e-commerce sites that continuously scale to meet demands across all channels.

Social Communities
Marketers can better leverage social engagement across owned digital properties to build loyalty and drive conversions. Information from leading social networks (gathered, again, over multiple channels) helps organizations make a social connection with users by allowing them to log into their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and then use their profile information to personalize the consumer’s experience.

This product can also be used with other sources, like a CRM or website profile, to create a more comprehensive view of each unique customer.

Plus, new social plugins make it possible for customers to share content with their friends, making every new customer a potential brand advocate, and immediately increasing each consumer’s value. Using this solution with eCommerce lets businesses embed social elements into the product selection and purchasing processes of their owned properties.

This new suite of digital marketing products has been built to appeal to each unique consumer’s interests from the beginning, and then maintain that personalized experience throughout the purchasing process to increase the chances of conversion, maximize the value of the money spent and, with any luck, create a lifelong customer and brand advocate.

HootSuite Adds Adobe Integration

Allison Howen — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:15:00 GMT

A HootSuite integration with Adobe provides HootSuite Enterprise users with a new toolset for tracking on-site social media ROI.

The HootSuite and Adobe Genesis integration connects social media messages to website conversions and statistics, which allows HootSuite Enterprise users to optimize their social strategies and compare social media ROI against other digital channels.

The Adobe integration provides users with the ability to access metrics on social team members, social networks and social profiles to help optimize posting schedules. Additionally, users will be able to automatically track and tie social media actions to specific metrics, which allows for accurate comparison against other digital channels like email and paid search.

The integration measures message efficacy (how many on-site conversions were driven from a particular message), employee ROI (which employee is driving the most revenue from social), social account success, social network value (which social platform provides the greatest ROI per post) and optimal time of day for posting. However, the integration is only available to Enterprise users, so non-enterprise users must fill out the Enterprise demo form and talk to a HootSuite Account Executive about changing their plan.

“Businesses are in dire need of ways to measure social media ROI, and for the first time HootSuite’s partnership with Adobe will tell them where their marketing dollars are going,” says HootSuite's CEO, Ryan Holmes of the integration. “The partnership makes it possible to directly connect social media activity to a business’s bottom line, providing marketers with the necessary instrumentation to accurately test, measure, and optimize the impact of their social media strategies.”

The Adobe integration is just one of multiple recent announcements from the social media dashboard provider. Other announcements include an integration with social media optimization platform SocialFlow – which helps Enterprise clients manage Twitter and Facebook updates, the availability of push notifications for iOS users, as well as updates to the HootSuite Tumblr and Trendspottr apps.