facebook – Intergration

Facebook Advertising Boom Time

May 1, 2015 intergration

If you’re a business owner, you’ve no doubt dabbled in Google AdWords and maybe even old fashioned banner advertising.

And if your experience is like most people’s, you’ve either decided it isn’t for you or slashed the amount you spend on it as you just can’t seem to make it work. (That is, if you aren’t using my PPC services, of course!).

But you may not have come across the concept of Facebook advertising. And if you have, you’ve probably found it a bewildering experience with all the different options involved, so have probably left it to one side for the time being while you concentrate on other ways to promote your business.

Well that would be a shame. As Facebook advertising is “the new gold rush” when it comes to driving quality, targeted visitors to your site – similar to the way Google AdWords operated 10 years or so ago.

With extremely affordable traffic and a fantastic variety of targeting options, you need to be investigating Facebook advertising now, before your competitors catch on to how successful it can be.

Check out my Facebook advertising service for more info and to see how you can benefit from this latest promotional goldmine.

Social Media Customer Feedback

April 28, 2015 intergration

In The Times today (always a good source of blog post material – see this post on Getting Ideas for Blog Posts for more), there was a pullout Raconteur section about “Brand & Reputation”.

As well as many other elements of promoting your brand and your organisation’s reputation online, the main thrust was to ensure you listen to your customers and act on what they’re saying, in order to improve your business and keep customers happy.

Now, in some senses, I agree that there needs to some monitoring of what people are saying about you online. You don’t, for instance, want to ignore a groundswell of opinion that could be damaging to the potential for attracting new customers – eg if people are scathing about your services or disappointed with your products somehow.

However, the idea that you need to be constantly scouring Twitter and Facebook to refute anything you think could be detrimental is something that’s really only come from a group of people calling themselves “online reputation managers” or similar. The facts in the Raconteur pullout speak for themselves – “..less than 10% of brand conversations happen online. The majority of conversations about brands continue to happen in the real world, just as they always have…” Hardly a ringing endorsement for the idea that social media is the be all and end all of promoting your brand – and remember, this is in a pullout aimed at promoting the idea of Brand and Reputation management.

So my own suggestion is that you should certainly pay attention to what people are saying – and definitely you should take the time to respond to direct questions etc on social media within a reasonable time frame (ie not just once a week) – but don’t obsess about it, taking you away from potentially more valuable activities that can help promote your brand through word of mouth – just like in the “olden days”!

Email – the Internet’s Poor Relation?

February 24, 2015 intergration

With all the fuss about social media over the last few years, you’d think the original posterboy for the internet – email – would be languishing in poverty somewhere, cradling a bottle of gin and bleating about how good everything used to be for it in the old days.

However, far from it. Email is still one of the most useful and effective means of communicating with your customers and potential customers that you can use – despite what the Social Media Marketers might want to have you believe!

Certainly people spend more time on Facebook and the like nowadays, with inboxes often being regarded as only attracting viagra spam and the like. But actually, there is more business done and more effective communications made via email than there ever could be via social media. Sure, social media is great for instant communication and building up an audience, but my experience suggests that 90%+ of people who become clients will contact you first by email, with quite a few still even using the phone.

So don’t be too quick to write off the value of the internet’s forgotten marketing tool – email is here to stay.

Social Media Horror Stories!

November 5, 2014 intergration

With Halloween already becoming a distant memory we will all have packed away our ghoulish costumes for another year. Sadly, this isn’t the case in the business world as they have to suffer a degree of horror all year round, particularly in the world of social media. Many have discovered to their chagrin just how black the dark side of social media really can be and the results of those public outcries can be very hard to come back from. Here are some right clangers you may or may not have been aware of.

The wrong way to promote your service

4AutoInsuranceQuote pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of providing the best auto insurance quotes online, shame they didn’t read the dictionary for the meanings of tact and diplomacy. The entertainment world was rocked in November 2013 when it was announced that the Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker had died in a horrific car crash. While everyone was in mourning this company decided it would be a good idea, the day following the crash, to post on Twitter that they hoped he had auto insurance, even posting directly on Walker’s own Twitter. Not content with that they went on to post the same question on numerous media sites. The public backlash was of epic proportion and rightly so, some so called digital marketing guru deserved a kick in the pants for that clanger.

Mayday!

One side of social media which has taken off big style is ‘complaintvertising’ where users who haven’t received satisfaction from the companies themselves buy advertising space on Facebook, Twitter etc in order to air their grievances and taunt brands. BA discovered the power of this when a hair care entrepreneur from Chicago used the Twitter self-service advertising platform to post a Tweet, which was featured, declaring “Don’t fly @British_Airways their customer service is horrendous”. He and his father had flown business class to Paris with BA and the company had lost dad’s luggage. When they failed to respond to his complaints he took the matter into his own hands. The ad cost $1000 and was viewed by over 50,000 Twitter followers in the US and UK where the ad was promoted.

Auto-Tweet Nightmare

Most corporations who Tweet seemingly constantly have auto tweets set up in advance and set to post at regular intervals. The failure to check these auto tweets proved to be extremely costly for Tesco. When the horse meat scandal broke and it was the only news in the media one of the supermarket giants auto tweets said that “It’s sleepy time so we’re off to hit the hay”. The complaints flowed in in their thousands and Tesco were forced to respond with an apology that the tweet had been scheduled before the situation had come to light and it was never their intention to make light of it. The following day several full page adds appeared in the national dailies apologising for the ‘unacceptable situation’ and vowing that the company would never make that mistake again.

Time those Q & A’s

Live ‘tweet ups’ where company CEO’s take part in the social media equivalent of a question and answer service are hugely popular as a way of raising the profile of a company and making it seem human. Timing of these is key and needs to be strictly managed, they should not be held on the day a company has announced a 10% price hike as British Gas did. Customer Services Director Bert Pijls was the unfortunate soul hosting this tweet up and you have to wonder who was behind this social marketing strategy and whether it was done on purpose.

Horses for Courses

October 17, 2014 intergration

If you run a business, you’ve no doubt been told that you need to be utilising social media, as “everyone is” and if you don’t, you’ll get left behind.

No doubt you’ve setup a Facebook page and a Twitter account (you may even have been persuaded to put a Google+ page together, following all the hype about its value for businesses over the last couple of years), and have waited for the customers to roll in.

And waited. And waited…

An interesting article on SiteProNews – http://www.sitepronews.com/2014/10/17/email-vs-social-media-marketing-facts-2/ – raises the same point, then goes on to suggest that email marketing is “where it’s at” in terms of promoting your business.

Certainly, there is far more value to a business in having a quality email list of potential clients than having a few hundred (or even thousand) Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers; for the simple reason that the key word in the description “social media” is the word “social”. ie people use Facebook to learn what their friends are up to and find out which Game of Thrones character they would be if they’d been born in Belgium (or something).

Similarly, Twitter is a means for making short observations about news stories and finding out about cool websites that your favourite member of One Direction has visited in the last few minutes.

So is there really a place for business in social media? If you’re like 90% of businesses, you’re almost certainly wondering what all the fuss is about. However, when done the right way, social media can be a great means of targeting prospective customers who you would never have been able to reach any other way.

Essentially, it’s a stepping stone to getting people to visit your website, then putting them into your normal sales process as you would do with anyone who makes an enquiry. There is an added bonus, too, in that Google is keen on sites having links from other sites, and social media provides a great medium for you to promote your website – thus acquiring links from bloggers etc over time. (Links directly from Facebook are not of any value for search ranking purposes – though Twitter links can be of some value in this regard).

So you should certainly include social media as part of your online marketing mix, but you need to play to its strengths – eg immediacy, shareability – rather than expecting it to provide a constant stream of new business through regurgitating the same old boring corporate rubbish that people have come to Facebook and Twitter to avoid.

Pay Per Click Social Media Advertising

October 11, 2014 intergration

Each of the main social media sites that businesses should be aware of – Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn – offer a Pay Per Click advertising service. So what does this actually mean and how can you go about promoting your business online? Here’s a quick overview of some of the options available:

1) Facebook Promoted Posts

Once you write a unique, engaging post on Facebook, you can then promote it to other Facebook users. (If you use Facebook, you’ve almost certainly seen these promoted posts in your timeline). You can target the type of user to show it to using several demographic factors, such as age, location, gender, likes and interests, education level etc.

This means that your ad will only show to the type of people who you determine are your main target audience – thus generating more interest from the people you want to know about you and ignoring people you don’t want to target.

2) Twitter Promoted Tweets

Similar to the idea of promoted Facebook posts, as outlined above, this service allows you to get your Tweets in front of your target audience. Just like with Facebook, you can target the type of people to show the Tweets to using various demographic traits including location, gender, interests etc, as well as by device – ie you may wish to only target people viewing the Tweet on a desktop machine, or on a mobile phone.

3) LinkedIn Ads

You may not be as familiar with LinkedIn as with Facebook and Google. It claims to be the “..world’s largest audience of active, influential professionals.” So it’s generally going to work well for you if you target businesses with your products or services – though many companies have also reported success selling consumer-related products, as after all, businesspeople and professionals are people too!

LinkedIn ads are similar to AdWords ads in the way they display on the page, though they can also incorporate video clips for increased engagement. The targeting options are more detailed than for either Facebook or Twitter, as they also allow you to target via job title and skillset.

Pay Per Click

If you’re wondering what this means, it’s the process whereby you only pay an advertising fee when somebody actually clicks on your advert having seen it on one of the sites above. You can set a maximum figure per click, as well as a maximum amount you’re prepared to pay each day, to ensure you don’t spend more than you wish to if loads of people click the ad.

One thing I always say to PPC clients of mine, is that you actually shouldn’t be afraid of spending a lot of money on PPC advertising anyway, as if it’s setup and managed properly, the more you spend, the more customers you attract and thus the more profit you make.

Intergration

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