Q4 Blog » Facebook

The State of Social Media 2012 [SLIDES]

Darrell Heaps — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:49:52 +0000

I came across this SlideShare earlier today and I wanted to share it here. It’s quite an indepth presentation that covers all aspects of social media. When you have a few minutes I highly recommend flipping through it. The numbers continue to blow me away, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

A quote from the author Esteban Contreras:

There might be saturation, but social media has changed the way we live. And this means social media is no longer a question for marketers. Companies of all sizes have accepted and even embraced the importance of social media. Investments are starting to increase and companies are now building teams to tackle the new risks and opportunities that social media has created.

The State of Social Media and Social Media Marketing in 2012

View more presentations from Esteban Contreras

Webinar Replay – The Current State of Social Media and Investor Relations On February 14, Darrell Heaps, our co-founder and CEO, and...
Q4 Whitepaper: The Current State of Social Media & Investor Relations In a continuing effort to share how public companies are...
Leveraging Technology: Online Communications and the Role of Social Media Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Deutsche...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

2011 UMass study of Fortune 500 companies and Social Media: 23% blog, 62% use Twitter, 58% Facebook

Sheryl Joyce — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:17:07 +0000

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently released updated findings that expand its prior research on the usage of social media amongst the F500. This time around, the study also includes information on the number of Facebook fans a company has as well as the number of Twitter followers.

The methodology and complete findings of the study can be accessed here: http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesandresearch/2011fortune500/.

Here’s some highlights from the latest findings:

Blogs in the 2011 F500

114 (23%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2011 F500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the last 12 months (this compares to 16% in 2008, 22% in 2009 and 23% in 2010).
In 2011, companies in the specialty retail space had more blogs than companies in the computer software, peripherals and office equipment (who all previously had the most blogs in 2008, 2009 and 2010).
Almost one third of the F500 blogs continue to come from the top 100 ranked companies.
In 2011, 91% of the F500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and allow users to sign up for email subscriptions (compared to 90% in 2009 and 2010).

Corporate Twitter Accounts

308 (62%) have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past 30 days (compared to 60% in 2010).
Specialty Retail companies (Home Depot, Lowe’s) have the most Twitter accounts (25), followed by food-related companies (23) (including Kroger, Walgreen’s and McDonald’s).
Of the 308 companies with Twitter accounts, Google has the highest number of followers, followed by Whole Foods, Starbuck and Southwest Airlines.
49% of the Twitter accounts belong to the companies in the top 200 on the list (see chart below).

Corporate Facebook Pages

289 (58%) of the 2010 F500 are now on Facebook (compared to 56% in 2010).
48% of the top 200 have a corporate Facebook page while 35% of the bottom use this tool.
Insurance companies continue to be the most company on Facebook, followed by Specialty Retail, and Food, Drug and Consumer Products.
Utilities companies are the least likely to have corporate Facebook pages.
Coca-Cola has the most Facebook fans, followed by Starbucks, McDonald’s then Wal-Mart.

The authors conclude that these latest findings may indicate a leveling off of the adoption of Blogging, Facebook and Twitter among the 2011 F500. It’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues. We’ll be sure to update the next round of findings.

Latest UMass study of Fortune 500 companies and Social Media : 23% blog, 60% use Twitter, 56% Facebook The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts...
Case Study: How NovaGold Uses Social Media to Augment Their Quarterly Reporting NovaGold Resources Inc. (NYSE-AMEX, TSX:NG) is a precious metals company...
Study finds social plugins on your website help increase reach & drive link mentions Recently, I blogged about how a balanced approach to your...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Study finds social plugins on your website help increase reach & drive link mentions

Sheryl Joyce — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:14:53 +0000

Recently, I blogged about how a balanced approach to your online communications strategy (that entails integrating social channels on a best practices IR website) can help drive visitors to your website and keep them engaged on there.

This week, I’m going to share some findings about how social plugins such as a Tweet button have increased link mentions for websites that can subsequently help to increase awareness about your brand. The study also revealed that more companies are linking to social channels such as Twitter and Facebook on the homepage of their website.

The findings from Brightedge were included as part of their Social-Share Analysis – a monthly report they issue on the adoption of social tools and links by leading websites.

The study included a detailed analysis of 4 million randomly sampled tweets and found and Tweet buttons drove 7 times more link mentions on average than websites that did not have the button.

It also found that over half of the top 10,000 websites now have social links such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn on their homepage. As the chart below indicates, Facebook and Twitter are the most common channels housed on the homepage coming in at 50.3% and 42.5% respectively:

The authors rightly point out the missed opportunities to drive additional traffic to the website and increase exposure for brands who do not have social plugins such as the Tweet Button on their website.

The findings here are geared towards marketing, although it is equally as important for public companies who use social media for investor relations to prominently display (and link to) all social channels on their website. It is also useful to make it easy for visitors to ‘share’ information directly from the website and this can be achieved by using the ‘sharethis’ feature.

In light of Brightedge’s findings, we thought it would be interesting to look into the social channels that are used the most for sharing amongst our clients’ websites. As the image below shows, the most commonly used ‘sharethis’ plugins on are Facebook and Twitter (data shown for the week of September 26):

In addition to driving traffic back to your website and increasing awareness of your company (as cited above), providing links to the social channels on your website will let investors know that they can get access to your company information and engage with you in the channels they choose. This is important given the increased adoption of social media by the online population.

How Q4 uses Facebook Social Plugins on Corporate IR Websites With Facebook now counting more than 600 million users, the...
2011 UMass study of Fortune 500 companies and Social Media: 23% blog, 62% use Twitter, 58% Facebook The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts...
Latest UMass study of Fortune 500 companies and Social Media : 23% blog, 60% use Twitter, 56% Facebook The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Trending on Twitter: What Q4 is reading & sharing on social networks – week of October 3, 2011

Sheryl Joyce — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:15:53 +0000

Here’s what we’ve been reading and sharing on Twitter this week:

Win the online discussion by playing nice: http://ow.ly/6NTGA

Dreamforce Video: Building your social strategy: http://bit.ly/mXNvXz

Warren Buffett on online investor relations: http://bit.ly/nViWBH

Companies find the Twitterverse as they turn to social media: http://bit.ly/pCqM6I

New Digital Communications Model – Time to Get on Board: http://j.mp/pLQP9y

The Best Countries for Business: http://j.mp/pnjkH9

Facebook Launches New Metric: “People Talking About”: http://t.co/JGQc70R7

HootSuite Integrates LinkedIn Company Pages & Groups: http://t.co/WfEwLtio

Trending on Twitter: What Q4 is reading & sharing on social networks – week of October 17, 2011 A lot of great stuff was shared on Twitter this...
Trending on Twitter: What Q4 is reading & sharing on social networks – week of October 31, 2011 The 25 most valuable Blogs in the US – 2011:...
Trending on Twitter: What Q4 is reading & sharing on social networks – week of October 24, 2011 Here’s what we’ve been reading and sharing on Twitter this...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Q4 Whitepaper: Public Company Use of Social Media for Investor Relations – Part 2 Facebook

Sheryl Joyce — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:41:55 +0000

In this second part in our series of whitepapers concerning public company use of social media for investor relations (the first addressed Twitter) we have found that Facebook has quickly become a popular channel used by companies – with 45% using it to provide investor-related material compared to 37% we cited in July 2010.

IRO’s continue to use Facebook to provide greater context to the company and its markets by sharing industry-related information and using multimedia to showcase assets. We are seeing emerging trends, such as increased engagement with investors and interesting new uses of Facebook, including a notes page to provide a weekly recap of new information and events.

The increased adoption of Facebook points to a changing attitude of the channel, from primary use by a younger demographic to a viable channel to connect with investors.

In nearly 50 examples, complete with screenshots and discussion, we give you a comprehensive look at how IRO’s are taking advantage of Facebook.

Get the FREE whitepaper today and you’ll learn:

How your peers are using Facebook to interact and engage with investors.
Innovative uses of video and photos to highlight particular aspects of your business.
New ways companies are using welcome, notes and corporate social responsibility pages to highlight important events and underscore sustainability initiatives.
What sectors, geographic regions and size of companies are leading the way in adoption.
Ideas to help formulate precise commenting guidelines and terms of use.
How to effectively integrate RSS feeds from your IR website or blog to populate Facebook pages.

Q4 Whitepaper: Public Company Use of Social Media for Investor Relations – Summer 2010 [caption id="attachment_2327" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Download the latest Q4 Whitepaper on...
Q4 Whitepaper: Public Company Use of Social Media for Investor Relations – Part 1 Twitter & StockTwits Q4’s fourth whitepaper on social media shows an enormous ramp-up...
INFOGRAPHIC – Public Company Use of Social Media for Investor Relations The following infographic contains most of the charts from the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How Q4 uses Facebook Social Plugins on Corporate IR Websites

Darrell Heaps — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:35:59 +0000

With Facebook now counting more than 600 million users, the reality is that a large segment of any corporate website traffic has a Facebook account. If you’re company has a Facebook page and you’re actively using it, then it makes sense to extend the capabilities of your corporate website with Facebook social plug-ins. Below are the 4 ways that we integrate Facebook social plugins into corporate IR websites.

Share to Facebook
Starting in 2009 a default component of all Q4 websites is the ability to share any page to a number of social networks, including Facebook. When we first launched this service we thought that email would be the most popular method to share investor web pages. Turns out we were completely wrong, Facebook was the most popular and continues to be today.

When content is shared from a Q4 website in this fashion a title, summary and thumbnail are shared to the users Facebook page (or it can be sent as a message through Facebook). This type of sharing benefits the company because their content is now presented to a wider group of users and the chance of attracting new users to the corporate investor site increases.

Like Button
Last year we began rolling out the new Facebook ‘Like’ button on selected websites and pages. The Facebook Like button allows anyone with a Facebook account to share a page with one-click. The button also tells you who of your friends has also shared the same content.

The Facebook like button virtually removes all friction between a user and their desire to share content. A simple click and it’s done. On Facebook this ‘Like’ shows up the users feed and is displayed to all of the users Friends. In a similar way to ‘Sharing on Facebook’ the Like button increases the reach of the corporate website content and attracts new or engages with existing investors and stakeholders.

Like Box
The Like Box is a social plug-in that displays the company’s Facebook page as part of the corporate website. It displays all of the news and updates that exist on the company’s page, along with all of the users friends that have ‘Liked’ the company. The Like Box also gives the corporate website users the ability to Liked the company with one click, or easily visit the Facebook page.

The benefit of embedding the Like Box into your corporate website is that it exposes your user to your Facebook activities from the conveys of your corporate website, allowing them to sample the activity and see who of their friends have already Liked particular content, thus helping them to Like the company as well.

Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin displays a list of recommended content based on what content Facebook users have shared or Liked on your corporate website.

For an example of a site that has all of the above features, check out the Facebook book page on TVI Pacific’s website as well as their press releases. http://tvipacific.com/Investors/Investor-Connect/Facebook/default.aspx

How Q4 Integrates Twitter and Facebook APIs with Corporate Websites IR Web Report recently wrote a blog post that explains...
Study finds social plugins on your website help increase reach & drive link mentions Recently, I blogged about how a balanced approach to your...
Q4 Announces Financial Content & Social Media Widgets for Corporate Websites We are pleased to announce the launch of Q4 Widgets,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Which vendors help integrate social media into the corporate website?

Sheryl Joyce — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:33:33 +0000

Back in January of this year a question was posted to Quora (the hot new social media question and answer community) asking which vendors help integrate social media into the corporate website.

Our CEO, Darrell Heaps responded to the question and his answer has remained the top ranked answer. I thought it would make sense to share it here:

Darrell Heaps, Co-founder/CEO at Q4 Web Systems

2 votes by Broc Romanek and Brian Chen

At Q4 Web Systems http://q4websystems.com/ we integrate social media with the corporate website in a number of ways.

First our web CMS allows clients to share any published content from the website to Facebook and Twitter in real-time. This is achieved using the API and not RSS (which has many issues). This allows clients to keep the content of the websites and Twitter and Facebook in sync. You can see a screenshot here: http://q4websystems.com/Tour/Sim…

In addition to this we integrate with our clients YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare or Flickr accounts and automatically pull content in from these sites as new items are published via their respective APIs. This helps to ensure that the corporate website is always in sync with the content on these social media sites. Here is an example of Vimeo and Flickr Integration: http://agnico-eagle.com/English/…

Finally, we integrate Facebook features into corporate and investor websites. Thereby allowing users to access and view the activity on Facebook and to “Like” content across the corporate website. Two examples: http://www.tvipacific.com/Invest…& http://www.tvipacific.com/Invest…

Q4 Announces Financial Content & Social Media Widgets for Corporate Websites We are pleased to announce the launch of Q4 Widgets,...
How Q4 uses Facebook Social Plugins on Corporate IR Websites With Facebook now counting more than 600 million users, the...
New Aimia.com corporate website showcases the power of Q4 and social media Aimia (previously Group Aeroplan) is a global leader in loyalty management...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How Q4 Integrates Twitter and Facebook APIs with Corporate Websites

Sheryl Joyce — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:44:16 +0000

IR Web Report recently wrote a blog post that explains how we work with the Twitter and Facebook API to allow our clients to easily share content published to their public website on both of these social networks. An excerpt from Dominic’s post:

By using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which enable web services to exchange information, Q4 is giving its clients the ability to post new information on their corporate websites while simultaneously alerting investors to its availability on a growing range of other sites. The approach is more secure and eliminates the typical delays and uneven access investors experience today when companies use PR wire services, feeds, email, or when they manually post information to a variety of websites and social network accounts.

We really appreciate the coverage and wanted to republish Darrell’s demo of how it all works:

We also thought we would take the opportunity to reiterate a few other key points on the features:

Authentication

We use Oauth for authentication, which is done by the client inside of Q4 Web. Once connected the client can then tweet in a number of different ways:

Adhoc – At anytime clients can click “Send to Social Media” and in the pop-up Tweet or post to Facebook.
Published web content – Any content published to the public website can be easily shared to Twitter and Facebook. When clicking the item, the system grabs the page title, creates a bit.ly link and adds any preconfigured hashtags. Clients can then customize the message before sending it to Twitter.
Automated Alert Filters – Q4 Web has a wide array of alerts such as press releases, presentations, reports and events. Each alert type has it’s own template so they can be customized and improved for all types of automated alert content. They can also be configured to automatically post to Twitter. For instance, rather then just being the press release title, the automated tweet can say “just posted our latest news “[press release title]” http://bit.ly #hashtag” and the system will auto truncate the press release title.

Automated press releases can also be filtered based on keywords or other identifiers in the press release. This allows the client to filter out certain types of releases they may not want in their Twitter feed. For example if a company has a Twitter account strictly for IR content they may not want product press releases to be shared to Twitter, which is easily accomplished using the filters.

Other settings:

Permissions

Standard configuration is that only publishers (those that can approve content to display on the live site can Tweet). Authors and other types are restricted from configuring or updating content on Twitter and Facebook from inside Q4 Web.

Other APIs

YouTube – client upload videos to YouTube and automatically embed on their site.
Vimeo – same as YouTube.
Flickr – upload and tag photos on Flickr and automatically arrange in gallery on the website.

If you’d like to learn more leave a comment below or contact us for demo.

How Q4 uses Facebook Social Plugins on Corporate IR Websites With Facebook now counting more than 600 million users, the...
Q4 Announces Financial Content & Social Media Widgets for Corporate Websites We are pleased to announce the launch of Q4 Widgets,...
Which vendors help integrate social media into the corporate website? Back in January of this year a question was posted...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Webinar Replay – The Current State of Social Media and Investor Relations

Sheryl Joyce — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:50:06 +0000

On February 14, Darrell Heaps, our co-founder and CEO, and one of North America’s leading authorities on social media for IR hosted a guided tour of “The Current State of Social Media” webinar in which he walked through a current snapshot of what’s happening in the use of social media for IR and why it’s important to your investor relations program. Here is the full replay of the session and the Q&A, it’s 1hr15mins long:

The Current State of Social Media and Investor Relations – A Q4 Webinar from Q4 Web Systems Inc. on Vimeo.

During the session participants were provided with an interactive demonstration of how social media is helping other public companies mitigate share value erosion, dramatically increase their website traffic and broaden their reach to potential investors. As part of his guided tour he also revealed:

Which social networks are being adopted by companies for IR first and why.
How these companies are using social networks and deriving value from them.
Tips to enhance engagement and streamline quarterly reporting.

Darrell’s presentation was loaded with over 50 examples and case studies of how public companies are using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and blogs to enhance their IR program.

If you’re thinking about if, when and how to integrate social media with your investor relations program, you should watch the video version of the presentation.

I’ll also be providing an overview of the session with lots of links in an upcoming blog post…stay tuned!

Sheryl

The Current State of Social Media and Investor Relations – FREE Webinar Join us on Thursday, February 11th from 4:00 – 5:00...
Q4 Whitepaper: The Current State of Social Media & Investor Relations In a continuing effort to share how public companies are...
Webinar Replay – Social Media and Investor Relations Trends Darrell Heaps, Co-founder and CEO of Q4 discusses the current...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.