Sendible Blog

We’re extremely honored to be on Website Magazine’s list of the 50 top software solutions to explore in 2012 alongside so many great software companies!

According to Website Magazine, the rankings are based on the following methodology:

Website Magazine’s Top 50 rankings are a measure of a website’s popularity. Ranks are calculated using a proprietary method that focuses on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time, as reported by multiple data sources. The website with the highest combination of factors is ranked in the first position.
 

Below is the complete list of companies:

1. Adobe.com
2. infusionsoft.com
3. zoho.com
4. rackspace.com
5. vertex42.com
6. carbonite.com
7. silverpop.com
8. 37signals.com
9. freshbooks.com
10. successfactors.com
11. woopra.com
12. marketo.com
13. wordstream.com
14. brightedge.com
15. Mozy.com
16. rightnow.com
17. egnyte.com
18. ibusinesspromoter.com
19. taleo.com
20. whoson.com
21. onestat.com
22. sugarcrm.com
23. outright.com
24. Crashplan.com
25. salesforce.com
26. hubspot.com
27. netsuite.com
28. atinternet.com
29. webtrends.com
30. coremetrics.com
31. dynamics.com
32. getclicky.com
33. webceo.com
34. ektron.com
35. eloqua.com
36. crazyegg.com
37. clicktale.com
38. piwik.org
39. clickdensity.com
40. 10gen.com
41. xero.com
42. engineyard.com
43. commence.com
44. blinksale.com
45. zuora.com
46. adaptiveplanning.com
47. aprimo.com
48. sendible.com
49. salesboom.com
50. liveperson.com

At Sendible, we’ve been working to hard to improve our Social Media Monitoring features. Some of the improvements include the following:

1. The ability to edit sentiment and relevancy for a given mention
Sendible’s sentiment analyzer is great, but there are times when it gets it wrong. You now have the ability to edit the sentiment score for a given mention. We understand that some mentions may be irrelevant and we’ve introduced the ability to mark posts as irrelevant so that they do not appear in your reports and mention results.

2. The ability to integrate your Google Alerts feed
Creating Google Alerts for your business or keywords is a great way to keep updated whenever Google’s crawlers come across a mention of your brand. You now have the ability to add your Google Alerts feed into Sendible so that Sendible is also notified whenever Google comes across a mention of your business. 

3. Tracking of new services including Google+, GetSatisfaction, Blekko and IceRocket
We have been extending our mention crawler to include mentions of your business from new sites such as Google+ and GetSatisfaction. If you have any suggestions for other sites you’d like to see crawled, please leave them in the comments below or send us an email.

4. Searchable results
We have added a search box so that you can now search your mentions streams.

We are excited to announce that you can now assign social media mentions, inbox items and other tasks to team members and clients using Sendible. The way this works is as follows:

1. Find a mention or post that you would like to assign to a team member so that they can respond.
2. Select the little drop down menu on the far right and click Assign.

3. You will then be able to enter a message and select which team member the post should be assigned to.

4. The team member will receive an email notification, informing them that a task has been assigned to them.

5. They can then respond to the task from within Message Box > Tasks. They can also collaborate on the task and post comments/questions.

6. Once they’ve responded to the task, they click Mark Done and the user that originally assigned the task will be notified that the task has been completed.

One of our most popular feature requests has been the ability to assign tasks to team members and manage the approval workflow from within Sendible. We’re excited to announce that this feature is now available on all of our multi-user plans!
Team administrators can now specify exactly which user needs to approve content before it gets published.  

To configure a workflow for a user, follow the steps below:
1. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Sendible account that allows you to manage multiple users/clients. For more information on how to manage multiple clients with Sendible, see this short video)
2. Go to My Users and either create a new user or edit an existing one.
3.  You will now see an Approval Worfklow section. Click edit to define who this user needs approval from before they can publish content.

4. Follow the steps to Save or Create the user.
5. Now, when this user creates their content from the Message Box, they will see a Submit For Approval button.
6. The user has the ability to add a message/comment that will be sent to the user from whom they require approval. This user will receive a notification, informing them that they need to either approve or reject the content.

Klout is a social media analytics company that uses data from a number of social networks to measure the size of a person’s following and how valuable the content they produce is. The result of analysing this data is a score ranging from 0 to 100 that is used to give you a representation of your overall social influence.

So how do they work out this score? The Klout algorithm is quite clever, it takes into account three statistics , True Reach, amplification and network score before working its magic and coming up with a number based off of these figures.

True Reach is basically the size of a person’s actively engaged audience. That is the number of followers that regularly interact with the users social profile in the form of reading, clicking links and responding to content.

Amplification is used to gauge how valuable or viral the content you offer is. This is judged based on how probable the person’s content is likely to be acted upon i.e. retweeted, commented, liked etc.

Network score is based on how influential the users engaged audience are. For instance if a celebrity with a high Klout is a member of a person’s engaged audience than that persons score is likely to benefit a fair amount from it.

In order to achieve a reasonably high score you need to keep track on and improve all three of these metrics. It doesn’t matter if you produce a lot of content and have a large audience if what you spread is worthless your amplification score will suffer. The best way of reaching a high level is to produce content people find valuable, your audience will then spread it on for you and your number of followers will grow. In the mean time keeping an eye out for other influential users and engaging with them will only likely increase your score further.

But why is this number important and why is it worth tracking? While its accuracy has sometimes been questioned by some it is generally considered the best method of determining whether you’re social media campaigns are going well and provides a clear and quantifiable number that is easy to follow.

Outside of tracking your own performance it is also a useful metric that can be used to evaluate others or for them to evaluate you. This can come in handy when you want to spread your message as far as possible. For instance if you were in the process of advertising your product, you could approach users with higher Klout scores and ask them for a review.

Their message due to their large active following will spread far wider than if the message had been passed on by the average user. Klout provides a simple way of identifying who these “influencers” are. This method of advertising has been practised by a few companies and is growing in popularity. One example of a company doing just that was when Audi asked designers with high Klout scores to come and test drive their new A8 model at an exclusive San Francisco event, and I’m sure most of them obliged.

So if you are not doing so already, make sure you keep an eye on this statistic or you will be passing up on a very useful measure for your success.

Great video demonstrating how to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts using Sendible courtesy of YourChurchFanPage.

These days, it’s harder than ever to get your updates noticed on Facebook. Due to the sheer volume of posts hitting the news feed, there’s a good chance that your updates will be missed or simply overlooked due to all the other noise. For this reason, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your updates are noticed and acted upon. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how with 6 simple tricks, you can increase your exposure on Facebook and generate more click-throughs to your website.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

We are excited to announce that we now support embedded Wistia videos within Sendible. To distribute your Wistia videos through Sendible’s email marketing software, follow the steps below:

1. Sign into your Wistia account, create your video project and upload your videos.

2. Select a video and click Embed.

3. Select “For Email Marketing”

4. Copy the Video merge tag and open up your Sendible message box.

5. Select the HTML view on the message editor and insert the code into your HTML editor.

6.Click Update and you’ll be ready to send your message.

You’re spending serious time and money on social media marketing, but are you measuring your return on investment? If not, how do you know it’s even working? By measuring these 5 social media metrics, you will be well on your way to getting an accurate representation of your ROI.

Referring Sites (or where your clicks come from)

This metric tells you which percent of your clicks came from which social networks and is more useful than you might think. By measuring where the majority of your clicks are coming from, you can determine where you should be spending more or less time. For instance, if only 2% of your clicks come from Twitter but 65% come from Facebook, then you know that your audience is more present on Facebook and you should spend more time there. There are some social media management dashboards out there that support this metric, but if you sign up for a bit.ly account, you will be able to track it there.

Comments

Comments may sound like an obvious one, but are you using a social media monitoring tool that can provide you with a chart that represents comments over time? If you monitor your comments over time, you can see which topics got your audience talking and continue to post about those topics. If you have a Facebook Business Page and monitor your Insights, you can find this metric in the “Interactions” portion of your Insights page.

Klout

This metric probably deserves an entire blog post for itself but I will try to be brief and highlight the key things you should be paying attention to. Klout summarizes your Klout score as “The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure:

How many people you influence (True Reach)

How much you influence them (Amplification)

How influential they are (Network Score)”

Your Klout score will be on a scale of 1 to 100. Don’t worry if your Klout score is low, you should view this as a work in progress and something that you are constantly striving to improve upon.

Your Klout score is broken down into True Reach, Amplification, and Network Score. These are used to determine your Klout score.

Your True Reach is the number of people that you influence. Klout’s True Reach count focuses on people who act on your content by responding to it or sharing it.

Your Amplification is how much you influence people. Klout explains this on their site, “When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score”.

Your Network Score indicated the influence of the people within your True Reach. Klout explains, “How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network Score”.

Sentiment

Since I just complicated your life with that really long explanation of Klout, I’ll keep this one brief. Sentiment is simply whether people are saying positive, negative or indifferent things about your brand. There are several tools that can be used to measure this, but make sure that they measure sentiment for each individual message so that you can address negative comments. An overall sentiment score is useless if you can’t take action to improve it.

Mentions by Source

If you are using a tool to track mentions of your brand, make sure it measures mentions of your keyword/brand by source. If you aren’t using such a tool, keep in mind that listening is a big part of social media and you should really try to do this. Mentions by Source will tell you where people are talking about you, which gives you the perfect segue into the conversation. For instance, people may be asking their friends questions about your brand on Twitter; you could chime in and help answer them using a twitter management tool. If this metric is measured correctly, it will tell you what percent of your mentions are coming from blogs as well as social media. You then should be able to view each mention and see the sentiment.

If you start measuring these 5 metrics, you should have an idea of your return on investment and whether you are spending your time and money wisely. By ignoring these simple metrics and continuing your social media strategy blindly, you are just throwing away your time and money. Do yourself a favor and start by finding a social media management tool to help you monitor these metrics today.