Social Media And Android Apps

Social Media is expected to be a $3.1 Billion per year industry. Dedicating some focus and energy to Social Media is one of the most cost effective ways a business can stay one step ahead of the competition, hence the need for Social Media Managers. Ad spending has reached nearly $450 billion per year and the fastest growth areas in digital are social media and ecommerce.

Google / Mojo Bistro

One of the best advantages of this area is its many benefits for business. As a new era in marketing distribution, social media should be an integral part of every business e-strategy. Social Media expands content distribution and makes it quick, easy, and affordable. The emerging marketing area provides new and exciting ways to engage with consumers.

Social Media Facts:

• 68% of people are more likely to buy from a positive Facebook friend referral

• 12% of Retail Businesses have employed full time staff to manage social media

• 23% of businesses monitor social media platforms but dont participate.

• 73% of people trust peer recommendations of products or services, only 14% trust ads

• 44% of businesses see social media as a new channel to properly engage with customers.

Generating rich customer insights, always central to effective marketing efforts, is more challenging and important in today’s environment. Companies must listen constantly to consumers across all touch points, analyze and deduce patterns from their behavior, and respond quickly to signs of changing needs. If companies don’t make the transition to social media, they run the risk of being overtaken by competitors that have mastered the new era of engagement.

Dummies.biz listed some popular social networking apps for Android devices include the following:

AppAware — Find Hot Apps (free): If you want to know what apps other folks are running on their Android devices, fire up AppAware. The Live page shows a real-time feed of what apps other AppAware users are installing, updating, and uninstalling (although you have to manually refresh the screen to update). You can also see what apps the users nearby you are adding and deleting.

Bump (free): Bump is an ingenious way to quickly share contacts, photos, and apps with other Android users. Just launch Bump on both devices, select what you want to share, and gently bump your respective hands together, which are holding your devices. A window pops up and asks you to confirm the transfer. It’s that easy!

DroidIn Pro ($1.99 US): LinkedIn is a social network for professionals — it’s a great way to network and look for work. Of the few LinkedIn apps available, DroidIn Pro is the superior choice. It gives you access to all of your contacts’ information as well as your own profile. You can see your contacts’ status updates and post your own status updates. You also can search LinkedIn for people and companies.

eBuddy Messenger (free): Use eBuddy Messenger to connect to accounts on AIM, ICQ, Facebook, Google Talk, Hyves, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!. If you have multiple accounts through the same service, such as an AIM account for work and a separate AIM account for your friends, you can sign in with all your accounts simultaneously.

Facebook for Android (free): If you’d like to access Facebook from your Android device, Facebook has the solution with its very own Facebook for Android app. The smart design of Facebook for Android makes it easy to quickly find whatever you are looking for.

Family GPS Tracker (free): You can’t put a price on peace of mind when it comes to knowing that your family is safe and sound. Family GPS Tracker lets you see the real-time locations of your individual family members on a map and send and receive nearly instant check-in and help-needed request messages. Family GPS Tracker is a great way for kids to check in and let their parents know that they’re actually where they are supposed to be.

Foursquare (free): With Foursquare, users advertise their current location to their friends. It’s a great way to find out about cool, new places to explore as you learn about locations from your friends. Foursquare is also a kind of real-world game, where users earn “badges” for visiting certain locations (see the figure on the left). Some businesses offer discounts to users who check in to their locations through Foursquare.

GetGlue (free): The GetGlue app connects you to the GetGlue network, where you share your preferences for TV shows, movies, music, books, and video games with other like-minded users. You can check in, letting everybody know what you are watching, listening to, or reading. You can see a Stream of what other users are presently up to. You can also rate movies, books, and the like and see what ratings others have assigned to them.

StumbleUpon (free): StumbleUpon gives new meaning to surfing the Web. Just tap the Start Stumbling! button and StumbleUpon launches a random Web page for you to view. It picks pages based on your favorite topics (which you have to configure on the StumbleUpon Web site) and pages that you’ve previously rated. You can also stumble through Flickr photos, YouTube videos, news stories, and even Android apps.

Twidroyd Pro for Twitter ($3.99 US): When it comes to Twitter apps for Android — and there are a lot of them — none of them holds a candle to Twidroyd Pro for Twitter. Hands-down, Twidroyd has the slickest interface, the most robust features, and the greatest number of user-configurable settings. In fact, Twidroyd is even more powerful than some Twitter clients for desktop computers.

*Dummies.Biz

Once a company designs how it will engage with customers, it needs the organizational capabilities to deliver: adding staff, building a social-media network infrastructure, retooling customer care operations, or altering reporting structures. Functions far removed from marketing often have important roles to play, so one or more marketing teams at the center may have to build skills in other parts of a company.

To truly understand how to engage your community you have to listen. In large communities, it is difficult to respond to every person, but if you pay close attention you will notice the trends and changes in the reactions from your social media customers and fans. We’re entering the age where social media and creativity will play an important role. You can’t just succeed by being there – you need to stand out from the ever increasing crowd.

Are You Ready For Social Media and Mobile?

1. How do you rate your mobile social media efforts?

2. Do you see social media as an opportunity to conduct customer research and improve customer retention?

3. Is is time to require a new kind of organization?

4. Do you have an interest in increasing sales through social media?

5. Do you want to use mobile and social media to better engage customers?

Have you realized the many benefits of social media? If you were able to answer yes and agree to the questions above, it  is recommended that you are ready for social media and should now begin developing stand-alone social media strategies to implement and ROI.

Initiate a development plan for social media before you move forward. Your role will clearly identify business or professional driving strategies. Then work to define early Social Media Strategies or Tactics which can aid you in achieving these ever important goals.