10 Reasons You Should Attend Social Media Marketing World 2014

Do you attend conferences?

What if you could rub shoulders and soak in knowledge from the social media pros you follow online?

Imagine networking with 2,000 fellow marketers in beautiful San Diego, California.

Now add the waterfront Manchester Grand Hyatt, an opening-night party on a naval aircraft carrier and 60 expert-led sessions.

You can now bring this vision to reality.

Introducing Social Media Marketing World 2014…

Social Media Examiner founder and CEO Mike Stelzner and his team have prepared the social media marketing conference of the year—Social Media Marketing World 2014!

Running from Wednesday, March 26 through Friday, March 28, 2014 in San Diego, California, this in-person conference is designed to offer outstanding content infused with a truly social experience.

Watch this quick video for an event overview.

Here are 10 reasons you should attend Social Media Marketing World 2014.

#1: Amazing Content

The most valuable and inspiring social media marketing content will be at your disposal at Social Media Marketing World. And the best part is there’s something for everyone! Whether you’re a social media rookie or a pro, you’ll have your choice of 60+ expert-led sessions to attend.

Tracks will include social tactics, social strategy, community management and business development, and content marketing. You’ll leave incredibly energized and inspired by the amount of knowledge you’ll gain.

#2: Priceless Networking

Social Media Marketing World will be the networking event of the year! While the conference is guaranteed to provide extraordinary value in terms of content,the people you’ll meet will be the highlight of the event.

Be prepared to make priceless professional connections that will last a lifetime. There will be multiple networking opportunities to meet with speakers, peers and people in your industry. Here are some of the ways you can expect to network:

• A pre-event LinkedIn group
• A mobile app to help people meet and connect with each other at Social Media Marketing World
• Different interest groups will be meeting throughout the event
• A team of dedicated networking ambassadors will help you make the connections you’re looking for
• Two networking parties and four dedicated times reserved just for networking

Marketers getting to know each other…

#3: Entertainment Galore!

The opening night party will be held on board a Naval aircraft carrier—theUSS Midway—the world’s largest ship until 1955. You’ll enjoy mouth-watering food and stimulating conversation, experience giant hanger bays, view San Diego from the 4-acre flight deck, fly simulators and explore this massive ship. It’ll be a truly unforgettable evening!

#4: Meet the Speakers

Social Media Examiner is bringing together over 75 of the world’s leading social media experts to be your instructors.

How would you like to meet them face to face?

Your presenters include the experts you’ve come to know and respect, such as Mari Smith, Jay Baer, Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, Nichole Kelly, Lee Odden and many more.

You’ll also get to meet new instructors who have very interesting things to say.

In addition to those listed above, instructors include:

• Michael Hyatt
• John Jantsch
• Michael Stelzner
• Mark Schaefer
• Laura Fitton
• Steve Farber
• Joe Pulizzi
• Marcus Sheridan
• Gini Dietrich
• Cliff Ravenscraft
• Pat Flynn
• Simon Mainwaring
• Steve Spangler
• Viveka von Rosen
• Pam Moore
• Kim Garst
• And many more!

#5: Rave Reviews

Last year, 1100 marketers attended Social Media Marketing World. Here’s what some of them said about the conference:

Click Play to hear what people said about our 2013 event.

“Outstanding job—this is one of the most well-executed, high-class conferences I have attended.” – Lisa McManus

“The quality of the content and speakers were a huge draw. They gave practical tips that I can implement in my everyday work—not high-level theory.” – Ashley Levesque

“It’s hard to say whether I loved the networking or the speakers more! I loved the opportunity to meet and talk with so many speakers and to build lasting relationships.” – Alexander Briggs

“Hearing from experts in their fields was very valuable. It made me want to read all of their books! I found the conference incredibly energizing as a whole.” – Rachael McGovern

Hear what other attendees said here.

#6: Leading Brands

When you attend Social Media Marketing World 2014, you’ll hear from experts from leading B2B and B2C brands around the country. Last year, speakers came from Sony Electronics, Petco, Walmart, Whole Foods, SAP, Citrix, Sharpie and more.

If you want to hear what other large companies are doing, you can hear from industry panels at every session.

#7: Impressive International Attendance

Over 2000 marketers from around the globe will be attending Social Media Marketing World 2014. Last year, 1100 participants came from 30 countries including Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, India, Philippines, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, France, Italy, China and many more.

#8: San Diego

In keeping with tradition, Social Media Marketing World will return to ‘America’s Finest City.’  If you’ve never been to San Diego, prepare to be amazed—it is breathtaking!

The city boasts wonderful weather all year round, 70 miles of pristine beaches and a dazzling array of world-class family attractions, which make it a truly unforgettable destination for you. When you get here, you’ll understand why Social Media Examiner chose San Diego as its headquarters.

If you’re coming from the East Coast, this will be the perfect place to thaw out after a long, icy winter.

#9: The Venue

The conference will be held at the bay-frontManchester Grand Hyatt, which is just 10 minutes from the airport. It’s located on the waterfront in scenic San Diego, California, adjacent to Seaport Village, the San Diego Convention Center and the historic Gaslamp Quarter. The hotel is gorgeous!

If you book early, you’ll be able to stay in the same venue where the event is taking place (the hotel has capacity for all 2000 attendees). That means you’ll have plenty of chances to bump into your peers and speakers while you’re on your way to the pool, gym, spa or any of the other luxury amenities that are complimentary to hotel guests.

#10: Vacation Getaway

Social Media Marketing World starts on Wednesday, March 26 and ends on Friday, March 28, 2014. Why not stay for the weekend and make a vacation out of your trip? If you’ve never been here before, you’re in for a treat!

San Diego has some of the finest shopping and dining experiences you can imagine. You’ll have a variety of eateries, including gourmet restaurants, sports bars, coffee houses and quick ‘grab-and-go’ outlets.

Check out this video for some inspiration on what you can do while you’re here:

San Diego is calling you!

Want to Save Money?

For a limited time, you can save hundreds of dollars off the regular registration price. Click here to register.

Your Turn

Are you pumped up about this conference? Don’t take our word for it. Come and experience the excitement and opportunities in store for you at Social Media Marketing World.

4 Tools That Improve Your Social Media Analytics

Do you want more insight about your social media activities?

Are you looking for a tool to bring important analytics to one place?

In this article, you’ll discover four social media analytics tools that deliver clear insights about your business’s social media activity.

Why Analytics?

Social media analytics are more than numbers.

Analytics give you the data you need to improve your social media engagement, make marketing decisions and tie social media to your bottom line.

To use analytics effectively, the data needs to be presented in easy-to-understand formats.

Here are four tools worth checking out:

#1: Receive Automatic Reports Daily Via Email With Social Report

The one thing we check every day is our email. So it makes sense to get social analytics and updates automatically delivered to your inbox.

Social Report is a comprehensive analytics tool with a very affordable starter account that lets you to monitor up to five projects, each with an unlimited number of social accounts for only $9 per month.

To get started, sign up for a 30-day free trial of the plan that best fits your business.

Once your account is created, you can set up your first project. Under your project dashboard, click on the Add Social Media Accounts option to start connecting all of your social media accounts and other important business accounts.

Account options you can choose for your Social Report profile.

Social Report connects to all of the major social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare and many others. You can also add any individual groups you own on Facebook and LinkedIn, your Google Analytics and online stores.

Once you’re set up, you can access lots of graphs to analyze audience growth, engagement, reach and activity. You can also find demographic details about your social audience on each social network you’ve connected.

Demographic information about your social media audience.

What you’ll really love about this tool is that you can get a daily digest summarizing the most important activity from each of your connected accounts (pages, profiles and groups) via email.

You can learn more about members of your LinkedIn group.

LinkedIn group insights from a Social Report email.

Get a quick summary of your audience and activity on Twitter followed by a list of your tweets, mentions, direct messages and new follower details.

Twitter profile insights from a Social Report email.

Get a list of new activity on your Facebook page, a summary of your fans, page views and referrer URLs leading traffic to your page.

Facebook page insights from a Social Report email.

Social Report’s daily digests keep you up to date about most—if not all—of your social media activity, without you leaving your inbox!

#2: Share Analytic Reports With Stakeholders Via Cyfe

Like dashboards? Then you’ll love Cyfe. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards with an unlimited number of widgets for only $19 per month.

To get started, create a free account and get a feel for the way Cyfe works, then upgrade to the premium plan to go unlimited.

Once you’ve created your account, set up your first dashboard.

Create a new dashboard on Cyfe.

Inside your new dashboard, you’ll add widgets to track your social accounts. The following are available for social media.

Add a variety of social media widgets in your Cyfe dashboard.

There are also widgets for Twitter, Twitter search and YouTube.

Depending on the network you choose, you’ll be able to create widgets to display your audience size, activity and keyword searches.

Configure your social media widget.

You can also create dashboards and widgets for many other platforms includingGoogle Analytics and AdWords, WordPress, AWeber, FreshBooks, PayPal and Moz.

View your social media activity in dashboards with Cyfe.

In addition to being able to quickly see the most important information about your social accounts, you can create reports based on your dashboards. Cyfe sends the reports to you at your preferred frequency.

Create reports for yourself, your boss and your clients.

Keep everyone up to date on the status of your social media marketing with dashboard data emailed to you, your boss and your clients.

#3: Establish ROI With SumAll

Want to connect your social media activity to other areas of your business?SumAll can help you do that. First, you’ll need to sign up for your free trial. Then you can start connecting to your social networks.

Choose platforms to connect within your SumAll account.

To get the most out of your SumAll account, be sure to connect to other platformssuch as Google Analytics, Constant Contact, Amazon Payments, eBay and Shopify. This helps you visualize how your activity on social media affects other areas of your business and your bottom line.

Once your data has loaded, you can add various streams of data to your chart by selecting them from the library on the left side.

Select platforms from the SumAll library menu.

As you add different data points, they’ll appear on the chart. This allows you toanalyze how your activity on one platform affects the activity on another.

For example, chart your Twitter activity and PayPal transactions to see if an increase in tweets leads to an increase in income.

Compare social activity with other important business data.

Now, you can find out if an increase in Instagram posts leads to more Facebook engagement, or if an increase in followers on Twitter leads to an increase in sales on Shopify. The potential to find social media ROI is limitless.

#4: Explore Social Audience Demographics With Google Analytics

Last but not least is Google Analytics. Goals help you link your social media activity to conversions on your website.

The easiest way to get social media data from Google Analytics is by using the standard social media report under Traffic Sources > Social.

Learn more about your social media activity in the social media overview.

Here, you learn more about the website traffic you receive from top social networks. Note that this only covers popular networks—Google Analytics doesn’t officially categorize a lot of smaller niche networks as part of their equation.

Under the Conversions section of the social reporting area, you can find out which social networks have led to the most conversions, including the value of those conversions if you set up values in your goals.

See which social networks drive visitors who convert the most.

Alternatively, if you’d like to view all of your Google Analytics data based on traffic from social networks, you can create a Custom Segment. To do this, click on Advanced Segments and then + New Custom Segment.

Click the + New Custom Segment button to start a new custom segment.

Name your custom segment and start adding the domains for each social media network you want to analyze. Each line should say Including > Source > Containing > domain.com. You can add up to 20 sources total.

Creating a custom segment in Google Analytics.

Save your custom segment and you can view everything in your website’s Google Analytics data based on traffic from the social media networks you specified.

Custom segments can show you the top content consumed by your social media referrals, how many social media website visitors come from mobile devices, what countries your social media website visitors live in and other specific insights that will help you do better online business.

Over To You

These aren’t the only tools available to help you track and use the data from your social media analytics, but they do show that measuring or reporting social media analytics doesn’t have to be difficult or overly time-consuming.

What do you think? Which of these tools do you find most interesting? What tools do you use to measure and report your social media analytics? Share your favorites in the comments!

Facebook Page Insights Updated: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Rolls Out Updated Page Insights: “After gathering feedback from the early users of the new Page Insights,” Facebook is “rolling out the updated Page Insights to all page owners, and introducing some new, highly requested features as well.” Click here to find out what’s changed.

"Page Insights allows you to see not only whom you've reached—but also whom you've engaged."

Facebook Redesigns Ad Buying and Reporting Tools: “Now, the ad buying process will start with a simple question: What’s your advertising objective?”

"Based on the objective a business chooses," Facebook will "now recommend an appropriate ad-type (i.e., a page post link ad to drive clicks to a website)."

Facebook Deactivates the “Who Can Look Up Your Timeline by Name?” Feature: If you used the “Who can look up your timeline by name?” feature to make your name unsearchable, this feature will be stopped. You’ll have to use the other privacy settings to control who can see your content.

If you used the "Who can look up your timeline by name?" feature to make your name unsearchable, you'll be seeing a message like this to say that your name will now be searchable.

Twitter Introduces New Features for Mobile: The new version of Twitter for Windows Phone now has “features that you can customize specifically for the Windows platform.”

"Photos and tweets can now be the backdrop of your Windows Phone lock screen."

Foursquare Rolls Out Upgrades: “You’ll notice an updated look and feel, with a simple feed that shows you what’s most relevant nearby, right now.”

Foursquare has "added a 'nearby' button. Tap it to see which of your friends are around."

Here’s more interesting news to follow:

Instagram Launches Ads: In the next couple of months, you may begin to see “an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the United States.”

Pinterest Starts Testing Promoted Pins: “You may spot a few in your search results or category feeds on the web or in mobile apps.”

"They work just like regular pins, only they have a special 'Promoted' label, along with a link to learn more about what that means."

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ Pros Help You Master Social Media Marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author of Platform), Jay Baer (author ofYoutility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author of Launch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.

Social Media Examiner Is Four Today! Social Media Examiner was launched four years ago on October 12, 2009. Here’s the story of how it all started.

Our journey at Social Media Examiner continues to be an adventure. And as social media continues to evolve, we’re sure to have a lot more in store for you in the future.

Thank you for being a part of our community!

What do you think? Please share your comments below.