With more and more businesses recognizing the value of online referrals, it’s easy to overlook why the advertising technique is so effective in the first place—it’s social! Every day friends and colleagues interact with each other on social media sites in ways that weren’t possible even two years ago. But guess what? They’re interacting with your brand as well.

Research shows that the positive word of mouth (WOM) surrounding brands outpaces negative by a 6 to 1 ratio. But this doesn’t happen on its own! Whether you’re a B2C or a B2B business, nurturing relationships with your customers is one of the most important factors for leveraging positive referrals and decreasing customer attrition.

Social Media Referrals Are the Most Important Metric You’re Not Tracking What is the most important key performance indicator (KPI) for measuring success on social media? Likes, retweets, and shares? Not necessarily. While these metrics tell a story, they don’t equate to tangible sales.

Social media has always been about engagement. It's a place where conversations, networking and relationship building flourish. Unfortunately for business, this is difficult to scale. So many succumb to using the platform strictly for racking up fans and blasting promotions.

Moving your brand onto social media sites presents a lot of great opportunities for online marketing, but simply setting up a Facebook page won’t be enough to help you reap the full benefits. While marketing has always been about communicating with customers, social marketing is actually a two-way conversation. This brings up an interesting question: What does your brand sound like to real people?

It’s widely accepted among dog trainers that the most effective and humane way to train a dog is through positive reinforcement. Basically, it means you reward the animal’s behavior that you want to see repeated and ignore the behavior you don’t.