Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Nov 09
2011

Facebook Ads Webinar ScreenshotSecond webinar in a series of marketing tips from Facebook.  There’s some great information here, not only great practices to follow, but we’re listening to the “horses mouth”, so they could answer any questions about the interface.   If you are a Facebook Fan Page admin/owner looking to beef up the activity on your page,  I strongly recommend attending them – click here for more info on the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp .
This particular one was on Facebook Ad’s.    As Facebook’s bread and butter, sure – this is where they make their money from you, but the system works – getting you large groups of laser targeted audiences due to their ability to segment their 800 million users by interest!

Here are some notes on how to use Facebook Ads to effectively market your business or Facebook Fan pages:

Use Facebook ads to drive fans to your page and even more than that, use them to reach friends of those fans.

-800 Million active users on Facebook – scale of TV, precision of direct marketing, as well as ability to harness power of connections between friends.

-There are 4 ad formats:

  • Standard Ads
  • Application Ads (app)
  • Like Ads (FB Pages)
  • Event Ads

-The last 3 include a powerful tool – social context (meaning they can display “[Your Friend] likes this”, which is more likely to inspire “trust” and thus, better chances at click-through).

Important Steps:

1) Make sure you’re targeting efficiently.

Understand your audience. Ex. Are you a brick-and-mortar store? Then a good question would be “Where is my audience located?”

Other things to consider: Demographic targeting?  Does a specific gender come to my store?  What’s their education?

More precise targeting: Likes and interest?  Ex. Are you a restaurant?  Then try touch people who like a certain type of food.

 

2) Design an engaging ad.

Make sure to get the “creative” right!  This could be the difference between someone clicking on your ad, or not.

Succinct copy!  Be short and clear, but compelling.

Use an image that is eye-popping.

Make sure to have engaging content – Promos (“Free Download!”).  Questions (“Do you like pizza?”)

Your ad should be action-oriented – explicitly tell them what you want them to do.  ” ‘LIKE’ our page!”

 

3) Setting correct budget and bid – you can only reach certain people with a certain budget.

Lower bids get lower chances of ad’s being run.  Bid a good number and if your ad is doing well, bid on the high end.

 

4) Analyzing and Optimizing

Test multiple versions. Multiple text, headers, images, etc.  Choose the most optimized.

“Page Post Ads” – if you have a good post with good comments – you can create ads out of those to reach people it normally wouldnt.   Links, events, questions, photos, videos, etc.   Target posts.

Define strategy.  Do you want to drive sales? Or get more fans?

More best practices to drive traffic to your page:

Select to run a “Page Post Ad” – sometimes you have a great post on your page and you want more than just your fans to see it.   Facebook Ads allows you to run this.

Choose a image that’s engaging – human interactions are usually more successful.

Ad copy needs to be engaging – asking a question, promoting a discount

Create a sense of URGENCY – let them know when promo is ending.

 

Questions from the Audience:

I set up campaign, but I have very few impressions?  What do I do?

Make sure to set bid high so it’s competitive.

 

Can I give access to someone else to manage my ads without giving them access to my profile?

Go to Ads manager and you can add verified users to see ads.

 

How often should you check the results of your ads?

Every couple days.  Make changes based on results of engagement.

A good indicator that your ad is working is if you hit your budget everyday.  If not, you may have to up your bid.

 

What does “Targeting by broad category” mean?

Broad category are common categories.  Ex.  Broad category are “pets”.  Precise interest are “dogs”.

 

Is it better to have broad or precise targeting? 

Depends on your own goals.  If you want people with likes or interest similar, go with broad targeting.  But if you’re advertising a product that is specific, then go with precise interest.  You may want to add several price interests.

 

If I don’t bid high enough, possible my ad wont show?

Yes.  You need to bid high enough.

 

How long would you run an ad before adjusting it?

Every couple days.  At least every 10 to 12 days to make sure your ad isn’t going stale.

 

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Nov 02
2011
Facebook Marketing Bootcamp Logo We usually look to different industry experts for their experience and insights on Facebook Marketing, so it’s nice to finally get best practices directly from Facebook.  Since it’s their product, they can validate what practices really do work and what are meant to be used with their system (though, of course, we can’t forget there’s a definite “sales” element involved in them trying to get us to try their Facebook Ads :) ).  The Facebook Marketing Bootcamp is providing free webinars over the next coming weeks.   Register and you get a free $25 coupon for Facebook Ads, so you might want to register here.Today’s webinar was the first in the series and it was titled “How Your Business Will Be Better In A Connected World”.  It gave a general overview on how Facebook can benefit your business and what technology Facebook has to offer.

Here are some summary notes:

Our lives our made of connections to things we care about: people, songs, hobbies, sports, places – this makes us who we are.

Technology (such as Facebook) brings us closer – transforms how we connect and share our lives – on an ongoing basis.

Benefits to businesses?  They can connect to friends’ friends – through word of mouth.

Stats:

  • Word of mouth is twice as likely to cause engagement, 4 times as likely to cause purchase.
  • 800 Million on Facebook
  • 350 use mobile
  • 2 billion posts/day
  • 500 million log in
  • 250 million photos uploaded

Conversations and sharing are happening in a way never done before

It’s up to you to build essential connections – not just count clicks.  Our job to spark conversations, inspire sharing.

How to Grow Your Business

Pages

  • Upload photos and info to express your business
  • Engage – this is how you let people know and communicate with your audience – ask questions, exclusive offers.
  • FB recommends to connecting to at least 10% of your base – statistically, these are your influencers.
  • Updates, photos, events, etc – posts go to their newsfeeds

Ads

  • Simple to reach your fans and their friends per ads.
  • Utilize Facebook Ads, sponsored stories.  Granular targeting – by interests, local reach.

Sponsored Stories – shows your target audience how their friends interact with businesses.

  • Take actions already happening with your page and make it visible by friends’ friends.
  • Ads manager – you can turn on sponsored stories
  • You want them to always be running – you can boost your reach

Social Plug-ins

  • Simple line of code and you can integrate your site with Facebook and its social capabilities
  • Have to ask yourself though, “Is it good for my kind of site”
  • American Eagle added a “like” button so people can share with their friends.

1-800-Flowers – make sure everything they do is social.  Contests, promos, etc.  Starts every campaign with the question “Is it Social?”

It allows you to communicate with customers on a consistent basis.  Facebook page allows you to blast message to fans already interested.

Increase Facebook fan base by “marrying” offline and online together – in store signs, receipts, etc.  Add “Facebook” info to your offline literature.

Success Stories

How consistent should we post?  There’s no exact science, it’s on a page by page basis.    But there are a couple rules of thumb:

  • Post at least once a week
  • Set up a post calendar – post certain types of content on certain days to keep users engaged.
  • Most effective? It will vary between business to business, but mix it up.
  • Put questions in your posts to get feedback.
  • Utilize photo/video to grab attention.
  • Over time, you will see what kinds of posts gets you the most amount of feedback.

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Aug 25
2011

Social Media 3d MenI attended what apparently was a Guinness World Record setting webinar – “The Science of Social Media” conducted by Dan Zarrella from Hubspot.  30k people registered for the event and I believe 5k attended.  Here are the recording and slides in case you are interested in viewing it yourself.

What was great about this webinar was that while Social Media workshops give you the typical tips (referred to as “Rainbows” & “Unicorns” by Dan) like “engage your members” or “love your fans”,  Dan actually had data supporting his claims and recommendations and data even disproving some common myths.  While he does bring up a lot of “correlations” and not so much “causations” (so we cant really say that implementing his tips will directly result in, say, more exposure or reach) they are still important points to consider.

Some Key Points:

  • Myth: Ideas spread because they are good.  Some ideas are bad and they spread (Rebecca Black’s “Friday” being an example) and some are good but go no where (can’t think of any examples here ;) ).  There are other factors involved in spreading an idea, which he gets into later when he talks about “contagiousness”.
  • Myth: Viral growth is an exponential pyramid.  According to Dan’s data on examples of viral growth, an idea may start slow, but there are usually key moments where an idea is exposed by the right people or “influencers”, resulting in it going viral.  Then, the idea eventually dies out.   This is opposed to the typical “first day one person shares to 2 people, second day those people share” pyramid.
  • Contagiousness.  In order for an idea to be contagious, the following 3 pillars need to be established:  EXPOSURE + ATTENTION + MOTIVATION

Formula for Contagiousness
EXPOSURE

It’s really important to have as much exposure as possible, a large REACH – followers, email subscribers, Facebook likes, etc.  If you don’t, it’s important to do your best to connect with an influencer who does (but here’s an instance of chicken and egg, because he states to increase your chances of getting an influencer to follow you, you need to increase your followers).

  • Myth: Engaging in the conversation builds reach.  He’s not saying engagement isn’t important – this builds rapport, customer loyalty, etc.  However, it doesn’t directly increase reach.   According to his data, twitter accounts with over 1 million followers were less conversational than accounts with less.  (I would question if these accounts were conversational before they got too big to respond to their followers, or even feel the need to respond).
  • Valuable content!  According to his data, accounts that pushed valuable content and links had more followers than conversational accounts.
  • Myth: Don’t call yourself a guru.  While it may seem pretentious, there is a correlation between accounts that make claims authoritative claims and having more followers.  He recommends to use authoritative titles like “Official”, “Expert”, “Author”, “Founder”, etc.  I have to admit, when I read a Twitter bio, I am usually duped by titles like this, only to be surprised when I found the “CEO and founder of x company” has only 10 followers.  While the pretentiousness here correlates with having more followers,  constantly emphasizing your authority in your content may result in the opposite.
  • Positivity.  Positive users have more followers than those that are always negative.  People come on Social Networks to be happy.

 

AWARENESS

The human brain takes in so much information per second but can only process so much.   Thus, it is wired to filter what’s important to it.  That’s how a lot of advertising or ideas get ignored.  You need to have an idea or service that triggers followers to put you in the “relevant” category and avoid being filtered.

  • More tweets per hour = lower CTR.  Don’t crowd yourself out.  Tweet maybe once an hour, give it time to breathe and allow people to read it.  If you tweet too much too close together, that’s one way to get ignored.
  • Myth: Friday, Sat, Sunday are bad days to publish.  Since less people are publishing these days, theres less garbage to filter from.  Emails have higher CTRs on Sat and Sun.  Facebook sharing have more shares on Sat/Sun.
  • Experiment. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – always experiment to see what works for you.

 

MOTIVATION

This is the difficult part.  While one may be interested in viewing your post, to be really contagious, your idea/post needs to be interesting enough to motivate it being shared.

  • Information Voids.  Find out what people want or are looking for, and create content that answers those questions.  You can search for questions on twitter.
  • New Information.  People want to share what’s interesting and new, not something that has been shared 1000 times and that everyone already knows.
  • Simple language.  Write simply and plainly as not to lose readers.   Writing less and being more engaging is actually harder than writing more.
  • Request explicitly to share.  Data suggests that actually asking readers to retweet, repost, or share makes your post 4 times more likely to be shared.  Sometimes, your readers may not actually think to share, and simply asking them will trigger that since they already have rapport with you.

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Aug 04
2011

One of the unique features of Google+ is the ability to edit comments and posts. In Facebook, if you misspell a word in your comment or status update, the only way to fix it is to delete the entire post and rewrite it.

PRO

With the “edit” feature in Google+, it does not matter how many errors you make, because you always have the ability to go back and correct them.

CON

There exists the ability to edit/change thoughts on a conversation after comments have already been posted. This could possibly lead to misleading situations.

Take the following scenario: I start a discussion on a certain topic and after people have engaged in the conversation I change the existing subject all together and without notifying the participants.

Here is a Google+ update I posted today to my work circle:

After I got few answers to my question, I changed the question to how I like to see it :)

In reality this change of context does not happen in human interactions without the awareness of all participants…unless you were interviewed by an unfair news station and when later watching your interview you realize that it was butchered and only passages were aired taking everything out of context.

Request to the Google+ team:

To be fair and accurate to all participants and readers, comments should always be attached to the original topic they’ve posted under/replied to; whether they were a reply to an original post or to someone’s comment. Once a preceding piece was edited all those who commented should be notified of the change and have the ability to approve, delete or change their reply based on the alteration to the original topic.

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May 04
2011

I just attended this webinar hosted by HubSpot, called, How to Benefit from Facebook 2011 Updates. They began by introducing the new features that were added on Facebook in 2011, then went straight into question and answer session. Advertising on Facebook has been around for sometime now but people are finally starting to figure out how it works and how to put it to good use to help benefit their businesses.

What’s New on Facebook

  • Send Button – it’s a selective Like button. It counts in the Like total on your page as well, and can be delivered as a Facebook Message or on a group wall.
  • Deals is still in test mode and is only available in 5 cities. But the point is that it will get groups of friends to discover the business by sending out deals with no upfront costs.

What benefits can I get from using iFrames on my page?

iFrames are frames that allow a visual HTML Browser window to be split into segments. Ultimately by introducing iFrames into Facebook pages, companies are now able to brand their pages.

  • Now you can use styles on Facebook as you use it on your website, this is great for branding your company.
  • You can also track page views using Google Analytics
  • Google Website Optimizer – is now available to be used on the tab pages.
  • Links can open within the iFrame as if you are on your website. For example, you can have a whole cart process within an iFrame and NOT leave Facebook at ALL.
  • If you want to know how to set up an iFrame on your Facebook check out Hubspot’s blog post on “How to Set up a Facebook Custom iFrame Landing Page Application.” You can also download for FREE “The Facebook Marketing Update – Spring 2011” E-Book which includes a step by step process of setting up iFrames for your custom facebook pages.

Can you use photos and videos as marketing?

  • Photos and videos are much more visible on the news feed because they take up space, so this would be a smart technique to attract attention from your fans.
  • Also, keep in mind that videos are much more engaging than pictures because fans will more likely click play and tune in than Like an image.
  • Tip: Turn images into Call to Actions to see what kind of interaction you may receive.
  • And now with Google Website Optimizer, you can test videos and photos to see what interests people more.

What to do about Negative comments?

  • Don’t ignore negative comments, that will only make things worse.
  • Address the comment and take it offline.
  • Suggestion: Have a customer care person who is not the same person updating the facebook page to address negative feedback to try to assess and fix the issue.

When is the best time to post?

  • It depends on your audience, no one set rule for everyone, it just depends on the kind of site you have. Keep in mind, if they are across the world, they won’t necessarily see the post because of the time difference. By the time people get to the post it may be buried, so if your target base is in another country across the world, make sure to post in their waking hours.
  • Keep involved but don’t over do it.

Which brand is doing Facebook advertising best?

  • Audi – more engaging than Justin Bieber – they have 3.5 Million fans. This is because there is a lot of interaction and discussion. By answering comments and engaging users, they have gained a heavy fan base.
  • Mail Chimp also has a lot of interaction and comments. They have a human element by commenting, it’s not just a faceless brand.
  • Retail sites are hard to get engagements but Sephora does it well
    • Fans talk to each other about products and advice on which product works best.

The webinar was based off of the FREE HubSpot E-book, “The Facebook Marketing Update – Spring 2011

Follow @HubSpot‘s hashtag #FB2011 to see what others are tweeting about today’s webinar!

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