Merchant Technology Marketing is celebrating this week after we hit 500 organic followers on Twitter. Not the biggest number in the world we know but we’re proud to have created an engaged community of relevant followers, not just a bunch of random accounts linking to online pharmacies and unmanned twitter-bots.

The ability to buy Twitter followers, video views, Facebook likes, etcetera is a craze that has become popular with some in the online world. No one will admit to falling foul of boosting their social community numbers via paid for methods. Even pop prince Justin Bieber has reportedly resorted to buying YouTube views; obviously millions of hits just weren’t enough for him.

I struggle to see the benefit to be had from this scheme.  Firstly, I would have thought your real online community would notice your sudden increase in popularity. Secondly, there’s no sense of achievement by buying your social media credentials; you haven’t earned it by posting and engaging with genuine content. Most importantly, buying your community doesn’t help to organically grow your audience or expertise on social media. The scheme simply results in your online profile appearing fake, and out of kilter with your online activity, with a community that, lets face it, doesn’t care to engage with you: the main purpose of your social media activity.

Using Twitter as an example, this is a guide to organically growing your online community:

The basics…

From a personal perspective, it highlights a lack of effort when a Twitter page design hasn’t been personalised. If I see that ‘blue sky and clouds’ background, my opinion and desire to follow the Tweeter drops. Why should I spend time engaging with your tweets, if you haven’t spent time on branding your own online presence? The design doesn’t have to be detailed and time consuming, as long as it allows your audience to recognise who you are and tell them something about you, and your activity online.

It’s important that your audience’s online journey is not limited to your Twitter page: include further sites they can navigate to. This could be your company’s website or other social media pages such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc. 140 characters is a difficult format to negotiate when talking about your brand, if options for more information are not made available. Using the “bio” section to feature all of the additional links, positions them at the top of the page, allowing individuals to easily locate them: increasing the chance of clicks to your website and engagement with your brand. Don’t make them browse your tweets to find out if you’re relevant to them. By displaying the correct information, the audience knows immediately who you are, and what you’re likely to be tweeting about. If an individual can see your relevance instantaneously, they are more likely to want to follow you.

Thinking about the tweets…

The tweets that you send out should represent you and your brand. They’re an insight into the your opinions, work processes and industry relevant information. As an individual, you wouldn’t tweet about a subject matter that doesn’t interest you, or positively endorse a product that you dislike so make sure your business related tweets follow the same route. Each tweet must be relevant to you, whether it’s a news article, blog post, or general comment from the brand.

Use examples to back up your tweet using a link to a news article or blog post. Twitter is the place to share opinions across the online spectrum, but to boost the statement’s credibility it is useful to be able to link a tweet to relevant content elsewhere online. Perhaps make a general statement in 140 characters, with a link to a recent blog post of your own, to explain your stance in more detail. Simple one line tweets, with no links, work more effectively when a question is being asked that can spark debate or where a statement requires no further information to explain it.

Blog posts and news articles from over 48 hours ago are verging on old news. When checking Google for any recent activity, filter posts using the search tools menu, to ensure I’m only seeing updates from the past 24 hours. Twitter and social media thrive on information as it happens, requiring constant monitoring. Tweeting new or recently published information and opinions are key to impressing your potential audience on Twitter, showing them that you are on top of your social media, encouraging them to follow your page.

One hashtag per tweet is plenty, two at the most. Few things are more irritating and confusing than a tweet that, at a glance, appears to be in code due to the over powering use of a hash symbol. Use it to sum up the theme or reason for the tweet, and not in front of every word written.

Continuing with hashtags, it’s a mistake to use a “#” because it’s trending on Twitter, unless your tweet genuinely has some relevance to it. In doing this, the wider audience may see your tweet, but it will be the wrong audience. Those checking the tweets using the hashtag, won’t be interested in your subject matter, if it has nothing to do with trending “#.”

Now you’ve got your tweet content sorted, think about when to put them out to your audience. It seems rushed when brands publish tweets in bulk in the morning, and remain silent until the following day, only to repeat the process again: it doesn’t demonstrate the monitoring and effort that effective Twitter activity requires. This tactic doesn’t allow for the necessary community engagement such as retweeting, or for news stories and blog posts that appear throughout the day. Ideally, tweets should be intermittent, similarly to the ‘little but often’ theory. Applications such as Hootsuite can be used to schedule tweets so, if necessary, all posts can be created in one go, but shared one at a time, once an hour for example. In an ideal situation, blog posts and news articles should be monitored throughout the day, with relevant stories being linked to your Twitter page, as they appear online.

This ‘ideal’ can back fire however, if taken to an extreme. Your followers will begin ignoring and maybe un-following if they are always bombarded by your tweets. As always, relevance is the key. Only publish the content that best represents you, without being so ‘picky’ that very few posts make the cut.

There’s no harm in being able to test the quantity that’s right for your brand. Try different intervals and amounts of tweets, keeping note which combination gains you the bigger growth in followers. Note: it only counts if are able to sustain your number of followers!

Become an audience member too…

It’s all well and good, producing brilliant content, and abiding by all of the rules. But, if you’re not willing to be part of an audience, no one will desire to be part of yours. As well as your ‘bio”, an individual will look at your page ‘stats’ such as number of followers, number of tweets and number of “following.” Social media is a platform for engagement i.e. for you to engage with others as well as others engaging with you. If your “following” number is low compared with the amount of “followers”, many will be deterred from joining your community.

Having said this, don’t go mad and engage with everyone on Twitter. Follow those who have relevance to you and your brand. As with your content, those you follow should reflect your brand and its purpose.

Engage with content tweeted by those you follow. Clicking “favourite” tells the individual that you find their tweet relevant or interesting, and want it to appear on your profile, under the “favourites” menu. “Retweeting” or “quoting” a tweet, recites content that is of interest to you to your audience, allowing your additional comments when also “quoting” the tweet. This activity again highlights that you engage with your own online community, and are a valid member of others. It is possible to begin or join an online discussion surrounding a tweet via the “reply” option, allowing you to voice your opinion on a subject matter and encouraging feedback. This enables online relationships to form, and your online credibility to build, pulling a larger audience towards your Twitter page and created that engaged community that actually has the potential to have a positive impact on your business’ bottom line.

When it comes to advertising in the 21^st century, it’s no longer enough to simply describe a product or service’s various features and benefits. It is no longer reasonable to expect consumers to put their hand in their pocket based purely on the information deliveredthrough a print, TV or digital advertisement. In 2013, buyers are constantly being asked to engage with a brand, to ‘find out more online’ and made to feel like that the best stuff is reserved for those who interact through multiple channels.

For many of us, our ever growing need for that special offer, discount or additional benefit – which is only available through the brand’s online activity – means we succumb; after all, we don’t want to be the only one left out! We may remain a passive observer, not commenting or ‘liking’, but we’re still on the page, taking in the brand’s messages. It’s the “find us on Facebook” strategy we find ourselves vulnerable to every day…and it’s growing.

Despite this, and the constant encouragement to participate with the ‘second screen’ trend, research specialists, Gartner, has suggested that only 10% of social initiatives fulfil their purpose of driving sales for the brands they are implemented by. This seems like a very small percentage compared with the number of times we’re all asked to “find us on Facebook”. It is clear not every brand manages to find the right balance between creating a community of engaged consumers and the core purpose of most campaigns (to drive sales) because, it transpires, one does not always lead to the other.

So, what makes the difference between the campaigns that will fall into the 90 per cent and are effectively destined to fail and the 10 per cent which will succeed in driving sales?

I’m sure there isn’t one correct answer but I recently I saw a TV advert which had many of the necessary elements required to achieve success. The advert in question was for Vanish stain remover and featured a number of video clips created by the product’s consumers, showcasing their personal stain removal tricks with the help of the pink branded washing aid. As discussed, it advised us to find Vanish on Facebook, where it promised more stain removing tips and even the opportunity for theaudience to donate its own tips for getting rid of pesky stains…as long as it involves Vanish, of course.

As promised, once on the Vanish Facebook page, we find a tip exchange; a section designed to allow the audience to engage with one another, providing their own advice regarding stain removal. The section encourages users to upload videos of a ‘how to’ nature under the title ‘I’ve got a tip for removing troublesome stains’. For many products this could come across as a rather crass and transparent commercial exercise, like Coca Cola asking its customers to tell them about their favourite summer’s day…as long as it involves drinking coke. But, where my example and Vanish differ is that in the case of Vanish, it is creating a genuinely helpful resource, one that addresses a problem we’ve all had at one time or another.

One Facebook member uploaded a video highlighting how the plastic measuring cup, provided by Vanish, can be utilised to grind the powder into tough stains, another praised the benefits of leaving a tough stain to soak in Vanish for five minutes. User generated information like this, although considered somewhat trivial to many, features ‘real people’ providing genuine help and, from a brand credibility stand point, that is worth its weight in washing powder. Overall the campaign boosts the perception of theproduct’s effectiveness, expands the potential uses for the product and bolsters the brand’s overall credibility. The “tip exchange” and Vanish’s ‘social initiative’ highlights how a campaign can be created with a very clear and honest commercial objective, whilst also providing a genuinely useful and interesting social engagement tool, relevant to a broad international audience.

It’s that time of the year when we all look back at the year just gone, decide on resolutions for the year ahead and desperately try to stick to them. Brand Republic (BR), after looking back on 2012, have published a report, evaluating the facts and figures of digital marketing in 2012, establishing how we can improve in 2013, and how businesses may be operating in the future. It comes as no surprise that digital activity from mobile devices is on the up. In fact 10% of all website page views come from our portable technology. With more and more methods for accessing the Internet, mobile web traffic is rising at a rate of 78 per cent per year and it’s been predicted that by 2015, only 18% of computing sales will be for desktop machines, so it’s more important than ever for marketers to recognize this and change their strategies to incorporate these changing trends.
BR’s recent report found that 48% of tablet owners use them as their sole access point to social media accounts. The same report noted how despite its low ROI return and high-risk connotations, digital video will continue to be a key area for marketing investment this year. This fact is most true of B2B marketers. On average, marketers will be spending 67% of their 2013 budget on video content. Thinking that’s a huge investment into something that’s relatively new? According to Brand Republic, half of marketers won’t invest more than 10% of the budget in a scheme that isn’t “widely-tested,” so fingers crossed video content turns into money well spent.

Unlike video content, email marketing presented marketers with the highest ROI return in 2012, despite the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg famously quoting, “email is dead.” In 2015 it’s predicted that there will be 4.1 billion email accounts around the world. Despite the growing need to keep up with the ever-changing social media, it seems short sighted to write off email as a marketing medium, just yet.

Marketers must contend with the ever-growing necessity of speed communication, altering their strategies in order to appear on top of today’s needs. There are now 3 billion mobile instant messaging accounts, making the exchange of information easier than ever. This is just one digital opportunity marketers need to budget for. 2012 saw 92% of digital budgets heighten, the other 8% matched 2011’s financial allowance. The figures spent on digital activity will only greaten in size due to the expanding possibilities incorporated within the online spectrum.

When engaging with the online audience, creating good content is seen as the highest priority in order to make the greatest impact. As the numbers of people accessing the Internet via mobile devices is increasing, compatibility is a key consideration. If the content is not created to suit various technologies, the quality of said content will decrease in value, defeating the point of developing great copy. We have to be able to allow an individual to experience a site’s full capabilities wherever they are, using any device they choose.

Creating effective content is part of an all-encompassing, well-designed digital strategy, including evaluation of the strategy after implementation. BR’s research highlighted that 70% of marketers measure their digital marketing activity. Evaluation is undoubtedly as important as the activity itself. Without appraising the strategy and your online activity, no understanding of ROI can be obtained and no improvements can be made in areas which are not delivering an acceptable return, leaving the marketers at the mercy of the client’s belief that the campaign is working.

Evaluating or monitoring has its downsides if not implemented correctly. KitKat and Nestle famously deleted negative commentsmade on their Facebook page, and wrote rude, sarcastic replies on other posts. The uproar began when Greenpeace made a spoof version of their advertisement, pointing the finger at Nestlé’s lack of responsibility whilst sourcing ingredients. The video was reported and deleted, spurring Greenpeace to encourage Facebook users to bombard the Nestle/KitKat wall with derogatory comments, accompanied with sarcastic alterations of the brand’s logo. As said previously, Nestle/KitKat chose to either delete said comments or reply with posts such as “Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.” Not the best idea someone’s ever had… The brand quickly voiced their change of heart, taking to social networks to apologise for their reaction. Like most things, both good and bad opinions will arise from the crowd. Creating a comprehensive strategy for dealing with such criticism will ensure that your organisation’s voice is consistent and on brand and you don’t end up having to back track or apologise. A negative opinion on a social networking site can be turned into a positive if dealt with appropriately and consistently, using an appropriate comms plan. So, although many of us enjoy sarcasm, maybe it is best used from a position ofstrength and not directed towards angry stakeholders?

Engaging with publics and getting them interested seems to be the key with cross-channel marketing, involving interested on-lookersfurther. If responding to any comment left on a social media page, point them to the brand website, or another brand social media page. It informs that specific comment origin that you, as a brand, strive to make it as easy as possible to be contactable, along with the many other online users who willbrowse comments left on your social media pages.

With all of this in mind and in contrast to the phrase, ‘out with the old, in with the new,’ it may be beneficial to simply limit the old and spend more on the new. The methods of communication are not completely moving on, just simply expanding. Perhaps in the future email will be obsolete, but whilst we are still learning about all the new digital possibilities, the old methods with successful track records should not be forgotten, yet. Having said that, it’s shocking that Brand Republic came to the conclusion that 14% of marketers don’t have any form of digital strategy in place. This is not the way to go in this day and age. Change with your audiences needs and invest in digital, or you may find yourself being left behind.

1. Smartphones and tablets will continue to challenge traditional desktop working

With the full-scale deployment of Windows 8 and the continued increase in cloud computing, 2013 is going to see a rapid evolution in the way work.

2. Touchscreen will get better

With the development of lighter and more flexible touchscreen technology, the possibilities are pretty exciting.

3. There will be a new Xbox and PlayStation released

“Consoles have been central in everything from the way we consume media to how we keep fit so the arrival of new hardware in this sector is going to be important,” says Kieran Alger, editor, T3.com.

4. NFC (near field communication) will come into it’s own

Gartner predicts that this technology could be critical for the integration of the internet with the physical world – a trend that they believe will continue to develop in 2013.

5. The big technology battleground will shift to the living room

“This key space is wide open and the potential prizes are huge,” says James Stables, associate editor at tech. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft: all the heavyweights will weigh in on this gap in the market.

This article has been published with the permission of its original publisher, BCW, read the remainder of the article here.

Did you know that over 85% of all new business ventures ultimately fail? This statistic shouldn’t deter you from your dreams; it should just put you on alert. You need to realize that, since businesses fail so often, you need to do whatever is necessary to ensure that you succeed. This means focusing on the latest and greatest Internet marketing tips available. Below, you will read about ten website marketing tips that every small business should be using.

1. Create the Business Plan

Some people thinking about starting a web business believe that they don’t need a classic business plan. However, this is not only false, it’s actually completely reversed. Not only do you need a plan, but you need a more thorough plan to compete for customers via a medium that’s so tightly packed with competition.

2. Trade in Email for Mobile Marketing

Email marketing has long been a way to get a list of contacts and then to push people into a conversions funnel, but more and more people are receiving texts these days instead of logging into email accounts. So either trade in—or supplement if you want—your email marketing for mobile marketing. You’re building contacts the same way. You’re just receiving their mobile number instead of their email address.

3. Hone Your SEO Techniques

There are dozens of SEO tips you could learn from an article, but you should focus more on learning about the subject in general. Especially with how it relates to social media, SEO is a vital skill that could easily help you achieve success in business.

4. Be Very Social

Some of the tips listed above have already touched on social media, and you also need to touch on it if you’re hoping to achieve succeed. Facebook alone has over a billion users, and that’s only one of the many social networks out there. Create different social networking sites and keep them active.

5. Brand Yourself Regularly

Still keeping things in the social realm, it’s important that you use the social networks you’re on and your website to brand yourself properly. This is basically a public relations tip. Your brand is what people are going to recognize about you. It becomes synonymous with the way you do business.

6. Content Updates

Due to the way social media functions, not to mention Google’s updates, only regularly updated content is going to help you achieve a higher ranking. Having unique, interesting content that’s frequently updated will also bring more people back to your site time and again.

This article has been published with the permission of its original publisher, BCW, read the remainder of the article here.

This is the second in a two-part series looking at the reasons for success and failure of social networking projects inside businesses. The first part of the series looked at the reasons why, despite all the potential benefits they can deliver, many enterprise social networking projects fail in their first six months. This concluding part outlines seven phases that social business projects should include in order to increase their likelihood of success.

1. Gain Mandate

As discussed in part 1, the approach of letting social business adoption spread virally from the ground-up has been largely discredited. Yes, some organisations have succeeded in doing this, but many more have failed. The first, and most important, characteristic of a successful social business project is a mandate from senior management to apply social networking principles to real business issues. Without this mandate, employees will perceive participation as being optional, not part of their “real job”. And without this participation, the project will fail. A clear directive from the top removes any ambiguity as to whether this is a considered “real work”.

“Mandate” has a useful double meaning in this context. As a noun, it represents an authorisation, giving a social business team permission to proceed with a project. As a verb, it indicates a command from senior management. Both meanings are valid, as different organizations will require types of encouragement to push the project forward.

2. Plan Strategy

Once the project has a mandate to proceed, it is time to consider how to achieve the defined objectives. Successful projects form a small steering committee to plan the strategy for delivering the rest of the project. This committee needs to be large enough to represent all interested parties in the project, but not so large that rapid decision-making becomes difficult. This step should also define acceptable usage guidelines, identify the communities to be established, and the community managers who own them.

3. Establish Communities

Only once the implementation strategy has been defined should the social network itself be set up. Too many projects start by setting up a network without a strategy in place, which leads to somewhat chaotic adoption. In this step, community managers should create the communities they will be using, and identify a “content taskforce” who they will work with for initial population of these communities.

4. Populate Content

Inviting people into an empty social network and hoping they will use it the way you intended is simply not realistic. With no model of best practices in place, it is inevitable that bad habits are formed right from the start. So, instead, the community managers should work with the content taskforce to create seed content that gives the wider audience a reason to join the network when invited, and provides an example of how the network should be used…

This article has been published with the permission of its original publisher, BCW, read the remainder of the article here.

A lot has changed in businesses’ attitude towards social networks over the last few years. Not so long ago, senior managers were terrified of company secrets being divulged on Facebook and Twitter, and perceived internal use of social networking to be nothing more than a waste of time, a haven for office gossip.

Now, it is companies without an established presence on public social media that are the exception, and more and more businesses are exploring the benefits of social networking inside the company firewall.

This change of heart is undoubtedly driven by compelling statistics proving the benefits of employee social networks. A recent report from McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimates that social networking could potentially contribute between $900 billion and $1.3 trillion in annual value in just four industry sectors.

And whereas most business use of social networking so far has been external-facing, the MGI report finds that two thirds of that the potential value lies inside the company. It estimates that the use of social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing and collaboration can enhance the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers by 20-25%.

Yet the harsh reality is that many internal-facing enterprise social networking projects fail in their first six months. It is often tempting to blame these failures on the tools used, but with some companies suffering repeated failures on different technology platforms, it is clear that blaming the tools is often just a convenient excuse for wider organisation failures.

One of the most common reasons for failure of an employee social networking project is a lack of clear purpose for the network created. There was, for a time, a school of thought that said the best social projects were ones driven from the ground up – groups of employees choosing to use a tool, with use then expanding virally throughout the company.

This approach is largely discredited now, because while it is sometimes very effective at getting a social network started, these networks often have no established business objective and usage fizzles out.

Charlene Li of Altimeter Group describes in her report Making The Case For Enterprise Social Networks how “the reality of everyday work” catches up with employees and they are drawn away from the social network back to their “day jobs”, where they fall back in established working and communication patterns. Or, alternatively, without clear business objectives, the network degenerates into a chat room for gossip and trivialities – everything senior management feared would happen…

This article has been published with the permission of its original publisher, BCW, read the remaining part of article here.

Inbound marketing is marketing that’s useful. It means acquiring customers by attracting and nurturing prospects with exceptional, unique content, accurate data and genuine customer service, not interrupting them with spam. It means pulling prospects in with a magnet – where the magnet is your own content – not beating them over the head with a stick. In this instance, the stick refers to pure push marketing techniques, where the urecipient has no option to interact. Think of your sales and marketing process like a large, business shaped funnel. Fresh prospects come in at the top of the funnel and if all goes well, happy customers appear at the bottom. As a marketer, my goal is to maximize both the number of people we attract at the top of our client’s funnel and the number that come out the bottom as customers. Inbound marketers use three types of tactics to do this:

• Get Found — Tactics like online, and offline, PR, blogging and search engine optimization that aim to attract quality prospects to your website. The ‘best’ ways to attract potential customers differs from expert to expert but there is almost universal agreement that well written, regularly updated content and SEO are two of the best ways to increase your position in search engine rankings.
• Convert — Tactics like landing pages and lead nurturing that aim to convert website visitors to leads and long-term customers. This is all about making your site engaging and a place customers want to spend time, and money.
• Analyze — Tactics that aim to improve the efficiency of the entire process — to get more of the right people in the top and out the bottom. Google analytics can tell you so much so use it, and not to just find out how many visitors you’ve had. Examine the time on the site, the bounce rate and the number of page views, then identify ways to increase those statistics.

Although some people still associate the term ‘marketing’ with what has always been, in truth, ‘advertising’, i.e. putting an advert in the newspaper or purchasing a slot between two primetime shows on television, old-fashioned outbound techniques are reported to be yielding diminishing results. Last year’s Business Insider report speculated that television advertising could die within the next decade due to people now accessing media content in different ways. Just a few years ago this would have seemed like scaremongering, but now, is it hard to believe? How many viewers now watch their favourite television shows online or on a catch up service where the ads are removed? How many use TiVo and fast forward through the ads? All these technological developments are impacting our exposure to television-based advertising and that in turn, could signal the death nail for the medium.

The decline in the circulation of printed newspapers is also a well-documented phenomenon, but that does not necessarily mean that businesses can simply switch to advertising in the online versions of publications. An Econsultancy article from earlier this year was highly critical of the blundering way in which newspaper websites bombard their users with advertising, from irritating ads to an overkill of overlays. The end result is the defection of website users, annoyed by excessive advertising and lengthy page loading times. Econsultancy is equally scathing about the high failure rate of telemarketing programs, the reasons for this including a lack of segmentation of prospects and too many missed opportunities to collect data, with a corresponding inability to make adjustments accordingly.

Even some forms of Internet-based marketing are no longer bringing in good results, particularly for small to medium businesses. A recent New York Times article describes how big companies with huge budgets are pricing out smaller enterprises from PPC (pay per click) advertising. Few fledgling enterprises can compete with a firm like Amazon, which reportedly spent $54 million on PPC in the first half of 2012 alone. We can vouch for this from our own experience. One MTM client was spending between 20 and 70 pence for its PPC search terms in 2011, today the same terms are reaching five, six and even seven pounds. This sort of rise is not uncommon, but it does ensure that only those with the deepest pockets can justify their expense.

The continued growth of Inbound Marketing is transforming lead generation.
In these financially straitened times, businesses need a marketing approach that offers value for money and a measurable return on investment. The reality is that Inbound Marketing techniques are less expensive than traditional outbound strategies.

HubSpot’s 2012 report found that ‘Inbound Marketing-dominated organisations experience a cost per lead 61% lower than outbound marketing-dominated organizations’ – and this has been the case for the past three years running. Likewise, businesses were more likely to describe Inbound Marketing techniques as offering ‘below average costs’ compared to traditional marketing methods.

Moreover, Inbound Marketing features, such as maximising social networking use, maintaining a blog and creating a really user-friendly website, are proven to generate more leads. HubSpot’s Marketing Benchmarks survey, featuring 7000 of their customers, found a strong positive correlation between the number of pages on a company’s website and both the amount of traffic it receives and the number of leads which are generated through it. The same relationship can be observed between the number of blog posts and the number of leads. The more landing pages a website features, the more leads it will get. An increase in the number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans a business has also increases the amount of traffic to its website.

The rise of Inbound Marketing will mean the development of truly data-driven results, where marketing efforts can be subjected to real objective measurement and convey visible ROI and for a business, and that is surely the holy grail for marketeers.

Designed to help marketers and advertisers understand how much they are getting in return for their Facebook spend, the tool will be available via Facebook’s Ads Manager platform.

Facebook claims the tool has been launched after marketers calling for more transparency and data from Facebook regarding campaign activities.

The stats generated will include data harvested from non-Facebook clicks, generated after a user has exited Facebook via an ad.

The ROI calculator is a bold move from Facebook, as it will doubtlessly highlight some brands aren’t getting much value from the platform. Conversely, brands which see impressive ROI stats are likely to invest more in the platform.

Worldwide shipment of connected devices, which include PCs, smartphones, and tablets grew 27.4% during the second quarter of 2012 compared to corresponding quarter in 2011, while the shipment grew 2.8% over Q1, according a report by IDC.

In terms of revenue, total market increased 16.3% year-over-year reaching $131.5bn while the revenue recorded a 2.7% quarter-over-quarter decline.

In the US market, both unit shipment and revenue declined both a year-over-year and a quarter-over-quarter, showing the difficult time not only for PCs but also smart connected devices as a whole.

During the second quarter, the unit shipments in the US fell 7.8% sequentially and 5% annually to 47.4 million units.

Connected devices revenue also dropped to $24.8bn, recording a sequential decline of 10.3% and 8.6% annual decline.

According to the report, the smart connected devices market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% from 2012 to 2016.

Smartphones, which account over 59% of smart connected device shipments in 2012, will grow at 15.8% per year comprising 63% of device shipments in 2016.

Tablets will register fastest growth among connected devices, accounting about 13% by shipment by 2016 from 10% share this year which could have its impact on PC shipment, reducing PC share from 31% in 2012 to 24% in 2016.

Asia/Pacific currently leads in total PC and smartphone shipments, but tablet shipments are focused more towards mature markets.

IDC Clients and Displays programme vice president Bob O’Donnell said that the recent shipment data clearly shows the arrival of multi-device era, where individuals are buying and using multiple devices per person, most often with different combinations of operating systems.

“The implication of this development on application developers, device makers, Web service providers, businesses, and even individuals is profound,” O’Donnell said.

According to IDC forecast, worldwide shipments of smart connected devices will rise 27.4% over 2011, reaching nearly 1.2 billion units in 2012, and grow to 1.4 billion in 2013, recording 19.2% year-over-year increase.

In terms of shipment connected device units will surpass 2 billion units in 2016.