Author Archives: Matt Kapko

B2B social marketing received a significant boost earlier this month when Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. In the future, CIOs and IT professionals can play a critical marketing role within their organizations, because marketers need advocates, educators, integrators and strategic advisors to help them weave through the complexities required to effectively use social media. 

Much of the business-centric marketing that occurs on social media today is rudimentary and separate from other enterprise processes, but savvy marketers lean on the strengths of CIOs to elevate their campaigns. “CIOs can be critical to that ecosystem, because they’re in charge of IT, and you can’t do social media marketing unless there are solid IT underpinnings, not only for content creation, but distribution, analytics, and tying things into additional systems such as CRM,” says Rebecca Lieb, an industry analyst and advisor. 

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The number of people who use Instagram each month more than doubled during the past two years to 500 million monthly active users (MAU), according to the social networking company. The media-sharing platform says it added an average of 10 million MAU every month for 27 consecutive months. 

The growth further elevates Instagram as an elite force that continues to distance itself from the competition in social. The gap between Instagram and Twitter is especially notalbe in the United States, where Instagram has 100 million MAU and Twitter has 65 million MAU. While Twitter sputters along with 310 million MAU globally, as of the first quarter of 2016, Instagram says it has at least 300 million daily active users (DAU), or people who use the service at least once every day. 

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The 10 most sought-after U.S. companies that use LinkedIn to attract and retain talent are also technology pioneers. The professional social network says it analyzed billions of interactions between its 433 million users to rank the top companies based on the volume of job applicants, engagement between hiring companies and potential candidates, and employee retention. 

LinkedIn included only companies with more than 500 employees, and it based its ranking on interactions during the 12 months ending in February 2016. The company examined how often users viewed and applied for companies’ job postings, the number of non-employees that attempted to view job postings and connect with the hiring companies’ employees, and how long new employees stay on the job after they’re hired.

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Apple says it takes the enterprise more seriously today than ever before, and it has backed that claim with the release of a number of new business solutions during the past years. However, Apple’s enterprise efforts were barely noticeable at the company’s annual developer conference last week. 

Apple did not completely ignore the enterprise at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but it also didn’t make any significant business-focused announcements. The company mentioned enterprise only once, in passing, during its two-hour opening keynote, but some of the APIs in the upcoming iOS 10 software, discussed in technical sessions later during the conference, will enable new capabilities for many user types, including IT professionals. For example, the iOS 10 software development kit lets businesses build apps that integrate with iMessage, Siri and Maps. And enhancements to iCloud, Touch ID and a new common file system that syncs across iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS, called Apple File System, should also enable developers to build better business apps.

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The number of web surfers in the United States who use social media to find news nearly doubled since 2013, up from 25 percent to 46 percent, according to new research from the Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford. The organization commissioned market research company YouGov to query 50,000 online users in 26 different countries in late January and early February 2016. 

The report’s findings should come as no surprise to any publisher that’s paying attention. Facebook is the leading social source of news consumption, and it is the primary news source for 44 percent of survey respondents who use social to find news, followed by YouTube, with 19 percent, and Twitter, with 10 percent. 

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Microsoft this week reached deep into its coffers and made a massive bet on social media in the enterprise. The company says LinkedIn, which it purchased for $26.2 billion, will be a semi-autonomous entity under its ownership, but LinkedIn data will eventually be integrated with Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity tools.

“As Microsoft integrates profiles, preferences and other data more fully, business users will have a more consistent and personalized experience across the suite of Microsoft tools,” says Melissa Parrish, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “A LinkedIn-powered experience could start to look a lot more like a traditional B2C customer experience: smart and personalized.” 

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SAN FRANCISCO — Apple plans to give developers new access to some of its most popular apps and features, an unprecedented deviation for the company that will markedly change the user experience of the platform. This week at the company’s 27th annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple opened access to the “crown jewels” of iOS  through a series of new APIs for Siri, iMessage and Maps, according to Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. 

It is notable any time Apple relinquishes even a little control of its operating system, and with the release of iOS 10, which is expected in the fall, Apple will shift away from its isolationist tendencies and put the future of its most widely used native iOS apps in the hands of third-party developers. The strategic shift is also in line with similar efforts underway at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

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Social media is becoming a preferred channel for business-centric sales and marketing professionals, according to a new report from Forrester Research. While B2C marketers have been using social for years, it is now a crucial access point for establishing new and rewarding relationships in the enterprise, the report says. 

B2B marketers still lag behind their consumer-focused peers, according to Forrester, but the gap is closing, and more businesses will likely follow the trend as the ROI of these programs becomes more apparent. Forrester says B2B companies should incorporate social selling into their marketing strategies through tighter collaboration between marketing and sales, and also devise game plans that automate as much of the process as possible.

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Messaging is the most frequently used form of mobile communication among consumers today, but the majority of businesses fail to effectively use mobile messaging services to communicate with their customers, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The firm surveyed 1,943 U.S. smartphone users between October and December of last year to identify the messaging they consider to be the most effective and contextually relevant. 

While 96 percent of U.S. smartphone owners receive some type of messaging-service notifications (excluding email), more than half of those surveyed opt-out of receiving alerts because they’re irrelevant or arrive too frequently, according to the report. Only 23 percent of online businesses use push notifications for mobile message services to engage customers, Forrester found, and most don’t use real-time or contextual data to increase the relevancy of their messaging. (The report refers to all push notifications from businesses via any messaging service, not including email, such as alerts from SMS messages, dedicated messaging apps, and bots within messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger.) 

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