FreshNetworks Blog

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in June.

1. Gordon Brown’s YouTube trauma

Our most popular post for two months in a row, Charlie Osmond examines Gordon Brown’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements and why it isn’t always the best medium. There can sometimes seem to be a temptation to use social media to convey a message, but whether it’s marketing, communications, PR or engaging your customers, there’s a place for social media and a time that another route is more appropriate.

2. Build your own community or go where people are? Do both

Another popular post over the last couple of months, examining the debate about whether brands should engage customers where they are online (and so in social networks) or build their own site to bring them to (a branded online community). Here we look at the Hub and Spoke Model of Social Media Engagement. Showing how the most effective thing for any brand to do is to do both.

3. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.

4. How organisations can use Twitter – some examples

A presentation of three different ways that organisations are using Twitter and some ideas of how other organisations can do the same. Putting a public face on the brand, like Ford. Segmenting and targeting different groups, like Dell. Or using Twitter as a gateway to a broader social media engagement strategy.

5. People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that people are becoming increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages and install branded applications on their Facebook page or in other social networks. We look at what this means for brands and marketers trying to engage customers in social networks.