Regardless of your expertise in social media marketing, it’s always helpful to go back and review the basics from time to time and compare your company’s campaigns and strategies to these building blocks. Have you set a secure, stable foundation? Are you working efficiently to save time and money?
Leiden Johnson, of Business2Community, has a few of these social media marketing basics for you to keep in mind. Make sure you haven’t strayed too far from the path in your own campaigns.
Are you hoping to grow your business through Facebook? Chances are, if you’re here, you are trying to do exactly that. It seems like everywhere you turn there are articles dispensing advice about what you should and should not be doing to gain a fantastic ROI from your company’s Facebook page. Many of those articles give you fairly similar advice about engaging with your audience and posting interesting, engaging content. While those are certainly great ideas to get the ball rolling, it’s refreshing when you read an article that has something different to say.
Such is the case with the article posted on the unofficial Facebook blog, AllFacebook. Head over and check it out to get a rare perspective about how Facebook apps can help your business grow from an employee of an app company. There are some other tips as well, which, while useful, are mostly things you’ve heard many times before. Concentrate on the advice concerning apps. It’s a unique perspective you won’t find many other places.
You may have heard of Zappos, a web site known primarily for selling shoes. They recently revealed some of their online marketing strategy, including some successes and failures, that could be helpful to many businesses, both big and small, as Laura Stampler reports for Business Insider.
For instance, Zappos’ Digital Marketing Director calls sponsored posts on Facebook “a necessary evil” and “the difference between 1000 likes versus 10.”
He also discusses a shift in their message on Facebook. Rather than talking about what was happening locally around and in their home offices, they emphasize their products and have seen an increased response. This particularly seems like a simple and obvious change, but one that might be helpful to apply to your own Facebook page.
One other important message from Zappos was the far reaching effect of the right wording. Posting an identical message, but with slightly improved wording can be the difference between seeing 10 people share your story and 100. Zappos saw a 7-percent increase in users who created a story on social media about their purchases after such a slight change in verbiage. That adds up to a much larger audience over time.
When it comes to online marketing, images are very in. Facebook has taken notice and plans to up their advertising haul by expanding image size within their sidebar ads and tweaking the format.
Jennifer Van Grove, of CNet, writes that Facebook is currently testing the new ads on a small percentage of U.S. users’ screens. The image is larger and stretches from border to border of the right-hand column. Ad text, including a bold headline then appears underneath the ad.
This change makes Facebook ads more attractive to users, which in turn makes them more attractive for advertisers and brings in more money for Facebook.
Your ad for Facebook should be different from ads on other platforms. Even if you’re also advertising on other social media sites, your Facebook ad has to be unique, as would an ad for Twitter or Tumblr. That’s because you need to consider not only who is going to encounter this ad, but where they will see it and what mindset they’ll be in when they do. That seems like a lot but it is the key to crafting the ideal ad.
Robin Bresnark has an article at Business2Community that delves into this idea of incredibly specific audience targeting. Although I disagree with some of his finer points, everyone should agree on the core of the article, which is simply to think of who you are selling to before creating your selling tool.
The prevailing thought is ‘Facebook isn’t for selling’ so you’ll need to take a different route. Once you figure out what exactly works for Facebook, you can start trying to work within those parameters to find what works for your key demographic.
Though it seems that Facebook’s users are beginning to skew older each year, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can no longer reach the under 20 crowd there. But, there are certainly more direct approaches if you desire a bump in conversions from a younger market. Tumlbr is one of the social media alternatives that not only boasts a huge share of 13-25 year olds’ web traffic, but has also begun to make a significant push to improve their advertising options.
Sheila Shayon reports for Brand Channel that Tumblr is valued at $800-million, so if you haven’t heard of it, or still consider it a lower-tier social networking site, it is time to catch up. Multiple media deals have been handed out to Tumlbr authors, which means an increase in both users and visitors is likely on the horizon. Now seems like the time to capitalize so keep your eye out for announcements in the near future about ways Tumblr is welcoming in advertisers.
Can Facebook ads help business to business sales? Adam Proehl of Business2Community says ‘of course!’
There’s bound to be some opposition from those established in B2B marketing, but consider some of Proehl’s main points. Though users aren’t going to Facebook to look for what your business is offering, that doesn’t mean they can’t find your business that way. Because, regardless of why they’re there, all of your potential customers are likely visiting Facebook.
Plus, through remarketing, you can gain an additional way to reach users who visited your website and left without a conversion. At worst, you continue to make potential consumers aware of your brand and what you offer.
So, don’t think of Facebook as direct marketing, necessarily. But, do consider it helpful to your business.
On January 15th, Facebook announced they will be starting their own personal search engine called Facebook Graph Search. That’s right, the little white bar at the top of your page now has an actual purpose. The search engine relies strongly on “likes” and other relevant Facebook information such as page popularity and location signals.
While this new change could lead to some interesting methods of finding businesses close to you (for example, Facebook claims you will be able to search things like “Italian restaurants that my friends have been to”), but it also has business owners and SEO experts wondering how to take advantage of Facebook’s search. As Matt McGee found out however, Facebook was already ahead of everyone.
They released tips for how to make sure your business gets found in the Graph Search. Releasing these tips helps them as much as it helps others use the search, because it will help business position themselves to appear in the search while simultaneously populating the search engine for Facebook.
The most important things to know are that Graph Search is only available for a few right now, but it will offer local search from the very start, and the search results are created by compiling information created and shared by businesses, especially through their pages.
That doesn’t mean you have to have a page for your business however. It will help enormously, but businesses also will show up so long as customers or visitors have tagged them as a “place”.
We will have to wait to see just how Facebook’s Graph Search works once it is unveiled for the wider public. It could become another gimmick type feature of Facebook that many don’t use, like the FourSquare like ability to check into locations is treated at the moment. But, it is possible Facebook’s new search engine could be a useful tool for finding local businesses.
Though it isn’t a groundbreaking update, Facebook has made their ad tool a little more seamless by allowing users to create a new post without leaving the ad center.
This isn’t a development that will improve your ad performance or get you a bigger audience, but it might make your life just a little easier. Head over to Inside Facebook for Brittany Darwell’s article on the details.
Facebook mobile has allowed ads for less than a year, but they’ve put a lot of effort into making it an effective platform. Now they are seeing the benefits of that, as 20% of the ad buys on Facebook are for the mobile format.
The price of the mobile ads are significantly higher than their desktop counterpart, but they are worth it considering their higher visibility due to mobile showing only one ad at a time.
Head over to TechCrunch to check out the full story on the growing platform of Facebook’s mobile ads. If you haven’t already gotten started, you may want to consider allocating some of your ad budget there.
