Social Media Marketing

Wednesday, 10 September 2014

How Not to use Your Facebook Page

Don’t use your Facebook page as your website; it screams amateur. Everybody has a website these days, even if it’s only on WordPress. Not just for bloggers anymore, WordPress sites can be made to look like topnotch professional websites through the use of fabulous and highly versatile WordPress themes that can be purchased quite reasonably. Purchase your own domain name as well and no one will ever call your website a blog. But there is a place for blogging… enter, Facebook!

Save the Blogging for Facebook

Your professional website site is where you will have all the slick ad copy, graphics and cool themes. Your Facebook page is where you want to do your blogging, post news happenings and so forth. This is your friendly page, hence the term

social networking.

That said, do actually blog on Facebook. Nothing is more of a turnoff than to visit a company’s Facebook page and see that it hasn’t been updated in months, or years even. Some companies create a Facebook page with minimal information and then forget about it. Why even bother? They are losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

Post a really good bargain on your Facebook page and encourage your customers to share it with their friends. You’ll get new customers without having to pay for any advertising. And since you’re not paying for the advertising, you can afford to make it a really enticing bargain.

Don’t Spam Your Customers

If you post too often on Facebook, friends and customers may not go so far as to unfriend you, but they will turn off your posts, which is like unfriending you without you knowing it. We all have friends who seem to have nothing better to do than update their status on Facebook, and they’re just plain annoying. When a business does it, we have no compunction with turning them off.

Every other day is about the most frequently a business should post updates to Facebook. Posts should be interesting and of real value, as well as short and to the point. Some good topics for Facebook updates are significant discount offers, brand new products available, expanded business hours, addition of a new employees, as in a new hairdresser at a salon or masseuse at a spa, or anything else that might be of actual interest to the customers.

Social Media is a Two-Way Street

The great thing about Facebook and other social media sites is that your customers can give you feedback. Be sure to respond to customer comments right away. This shows that you’re active on your site and that you care. And don’t delete the occasional negative comment. Customers hate that; it’s like hanging up on them. Instead, respond as reasonably and politely as you can. Remember, the customer is always right, even when they’re wrong. Other customers will see crabby remarks for what they are and admire your tactfulness and restraint.

Don’t Make it All About You

Your Facebook page is not your website, it’s a forum. It’s a place where you can engage your customers in interesting, relevant discussions. Bring in fresh content from other sites, the news, wherever you can find it. Let your customers get to know you, by showing them what you’re interested in. They don’t need your curriculum vitae, although you can put relevant qualifications on your information page, once.

Mind Your P’s and Q’s

We’re not talking about please and thank you here, but punctuation errors and questionable grammar. Rather than typing your blog posts straight into the Facebook page, try composing them in a word processing document, one with some form of spell check. This will allow you to come up with a thoughtful, well composed post and make sure that it’s grammatically correct at the same time. Cut and paste your finished post into your Facebook page. Save a document with all your posts for your own records.

Facebook and other social networking sites are a great tool to develop a successful relationship with your customers, but like any other tool, it needs to be used the right way and for the right purpose!

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoneysteiner/5713704415/

Article Source http://wearesocialpeople.com/how-not-to-use-your-facebook-page/

Monday, 8 September 2014

Social Media Marketing Plan 2014-2015

Sunday, 7 September 2014

How to Apply a Startup Mentality to Significantly Improve Your Online Marketing

Over the last few years, I have been dealing with more and more startup entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their businesses. They've had to in a time when funding a new business isn't easy. Banks aren't lending, and venture capital is harder to come by.

Bootstrapping requires startup entrepreneurs to be creative and efficient, because they don't have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets or teams of people to help them. Here are 10 things I have learned from startups, much of which can be applied to businesses large or small.

1. Measure everything

If you are doing any sort of online marketing, you need to be tracking your website traffic and conversions properly. Doing so is not expensive, but it can take a bit of time to set up.

Google Analytics is your friend. It is free and easily installed, and the data you can collect is extremely useful whether you are a small or large business. (The 2014 Kissmetrics guide to Google Analytics is one of the best I've found.)

With the additional features of Google's Universal Analytics, tracking is more advanced than ever before. Universal Analytics allows you to track a single user across multiple devices.

For example, a user might visit you from a Tweet on mobile, browse your site, leave, and then come back in a week to make a purchase via a desktop. In previous versions of Google Analytics, if the user didn't convert on first visit, you would have no way of attributing the sale (or the "assist") back to the original Tweet. Now you do.

2. Test first, then scale

Test your landing pages on a small sample group before scaling. Nothing is worse than launching a full blown campaign if your landing pages have usability or other obvious errors.

Regardless of the size of your campaign or available resources, there is no excuse not to test first. If you do not have the luxury of a whole team to help with feedback and testing, consider a service like FiveSecondTest. Don't forget: What you might consider usable or intuitive might not be to a casual visitor. By getting feedback from real users early on, you can save yourself considerable time down the line by addressing issues early.

3. Keep it simple

With any business it is tempting to overcomplicate things. A complex and detailed plan often looks more impressive than something more basic, so the simplest (and often best) ideas can be overlooked, especially in larger companies.

Simple ideas are often best, however. Billion-dollar companies have been built from very basic initial concepts that were highly appealing to the mass market.

Another benefit of creating something simple (whether a product, marketing campaign, process, etc.) is that it is easy to replicate and teach, which aids scalability and explains why so many of these small ideas can grow so big.

The Post-It note has sold billions of units (Photo by Katy Warner)

4. Improve a lot of things by a little bit

"The Aggregation of Marginal Gains," coined by David Brailsford, seeks to break down an entire process and improve each element of it by a small amount. When it's reassembled, the overall result would be a large improvement.

As a busy marketer, you can easily lose track of the small things and focus only on the big wins and major areas for improvement. By adopting a marginal gains mentality, you should be able to create improvements from day one. To use this methodology practically, consider creating a master list of tasks and then breaking each down into variables that could be improved.

For example, if you are looking at design and content of a Web page you could break it down as follows:

Headline
Navigation
Copy
Readability
Fonts
Images
Trust Signals
Video
Breadcrumbs
Footer
Ad Placements

Look to work through each in order, and make improvements at every stage. Anyone can do this; it does not require a full redesign, so progress can be made cheaply and effectively. Some improvements will be simple (such as adding more trust signals), others might be harder (such as improving the footer). Some will not directly affect your revenue (such as fonts), others will (such as ad placements).

Below is a wireframe of new ad placements we used on a website that previously had a 3% CTR on its ads. The new layout improved that to 6% with no negative effects on bounce rate or other usability signals.

5. Make the most of free tools...

A common myth that many marketers hold is that content marketing is an expensive luxury; but with so many affordable tools and readily available data sources on the Web, it's easier than ever to create content that isn't going to break the bank.

For example, here are some great free tools to create good-looking visualizations that can be embedded straight into a blog post:

6. …and free data sources

Thousands of open source data resources are available for use. If you are comfortable with handling large amounts of data and can find an interesting story to tell, then here's a huge list of them to get you started. If there isn't a free data resource available, you could approach a government agency or relevant nonprofit with a Freedom of Information request.

For example, Will O'Hara contacted the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) about websites that had received complaints regarding recent "Cookie Law" changes (UK); surprisingly, only 18 websites had received more than one complaint in 2013.

7. Look for interesting stories

If you have a little cash to spend and would prefer to get your information from people in your sector ,then carrying out a survey is a good way to go. The most important thing here is that when you get your data back you should look for an interesting story.

For example, Stacey Cavanagh surveyed 1,000 US citizens, asking them to name a British city other than London, spending $100 using Google Consumer Surveys.

When the results came back, and included both Paris and Wales as popular choices, she knew she had an interesting story, which was backed up by press attention and got featured on Buzzfeed and Huffington Post.

8. Repurpose internal resources

Most businesses create large amounts of content strictly for internal use, but with a little editing a lot of that information could be used as content that your customers will find educational or otherwise useful.

A great place to start is company presentations that could be uploaded to a document-sharing website such as SlideShare, which is like the YouTube of document sharing; it can generate a lot of awareness of your content , especially if you manage to make it as one of the most popular pieces of content on a given day.

Other ideas:

Turn customer service training guides into an FAQ page for your site.
Use internal sales and marketing memos to create blog posts.
Take photographs of your office/local area and upload them to Flickr with creative commons rights.

9. Become a curator

Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing, and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest.

By bringing together other people's content you can create resources that your users will find useful. Here are five models of content curation:

Aggregation is about pulling together all the relevant information about a topic into one location.
Distillation is the process of curating information sources into a more digestible format.
Elevation is the act of compiling lots of smaller pieces of content to identify a long-term trend.
Mashups involve compiling different content formats to create a different point of view.
Chronology is the creation of a timeline of events about a topic.

An example of curating content to create a useful resource can be seen in our Website Penalty Indicator, where we have distilled the different Google Penguin and Panda updates into a timeline so people can see whether their website might have received a penalty.

10. Focus on the important things

However you look to improve your marketing methods, it is important to remain focused on the end goals: growth and profit. Although it is important to give marketing ideas sufficient time to flourish, tying everything back into profitability is the only sensible route.

Article Source http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/25948/how-to-apply-a-startup-mentality-to-significantly-improve-your-online-marketing?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

Saturday, 6 September 2014

Tips for successful marketing through Facebook

To market your business successfully on Facebook, you need to understand Facebook's unique opportunities, and how it differs from other media. Just as you wouldn't run a radio ad on television, you shouldn't market on Facebook the way you'd market in a magazine or on your website.

Don't use Facebook for the 'hard sell'

People regard Facebook as a fun social space where they chat to friends, check out photos and videos, and relax. You need to join conversations and become part of a community, rather than being a business 'outsider' who tries to sell aggressively.

Hard-sell tactics - such as using advertising slogans, posting repeatedly about a particular product or service, or providing lists of products and prices in isolation from any related conversation - will result in other users 'unfollowing' you. They may even post negative comments about your business.

Have a clear goal and strategy

It's important to have a clear goal for using Facebook, and a strategy to achieve that goal. For example, a coffee shop might decide that its goal is to increase sales generated by Facebook by 10% in the next 6 months. Their strategy could include:

creating a post every morning featuring a special of the day, using a coupon code so that the sale can be tracked to Facebook
posting a daily photo featuring a customer who is its 'Coffee King or Queen' of the day
encouraging users to post their own photos of them enjoying a coffee.

Setting a goal and strategy gives you direction for your Facebook marketing and a way to measure your success.

Create a human voice for your business

Facebook users like to talk to other people - not to an impersonal business. Whoever manages your Facebook page must be able to write in a voice that sounds real and likeable, using a style that suits your business. They also need permission to express things in their own words, not in the company's jargon or 'official line'.

Post regularly

Unlike traditional media (such as magazines or television), or other online media (such as web pages), social media are built around frequent updates.

Statistics show that around 50% of all Facebook users check their page at least once a day, and they need to see that you are regularly posting new material. Some guides recommend posting at least once a day, but the core principles are to post when you have interesting content, and to judge how often your audience wants to hear from you.

Encourage comments and reply quickly

Encourage other Facebook users to respond to your posts or to post their own comments about your business or a topic that's of interest to them and you. When they do post, respond quickly - within 24 hours is best. Failing to respond will weaken your Facebook friends' willingness to engage with you, and they will gradually drift away.

Use pictures and videos

Pictures and videos are a major element of Facebook's appeal. Use them frequently to keep your friends engaged and entertained. For example:

a clothing retailer could post photos of new stock as it arrives
an architect or builder could post day-by-day pictures of a house under renovation
a personal trainer could post an instructional video of how to do a particular exercise.

Get interactive with offers, contests, games, surveys, etc. People like it when Facebook is fun, and when it delivers something that they can't get any other way.

Research shows that discounts and giveaways are the most popular reason for a customer to follow a business's Facebook page. Likewise, contests and games can be used to liven up your page.

Facebook can also be used to distribute customer surveys. If you do this, make sure that you keep surveys short, and provide a survey link that users can easily click, ignore or share with their friends.

Nurture your relationships

It takes time to build good relationships with other Facebook users, so be patient. Engage sincerely in conversations, provide useful content, and develop rewards for loyal customers to help foster positive relationships.

Promote your Facebook page

If you have a Facebook page, promote it throughout your business so that your social media works hand-in-hand with more traditional marketing methods. Provide your Facebook address on your letterhead, business card and website, in store, in advertisements, and in your email signature.

Use Facebook Insights to learn more about your customers

Facebook Insights can tell you more about the people who choose to like your page. Once you know your Facebook friends' characteristics, you can tailor your posts and offers to meet their needs and interests.

For example, if you're a book store that caters to customers of all ages, but most of your Facebook friends are aged 18-25 years, your Facebook offers might concentrate on books suitable for that age group (while your in-store offers are broader). Or, if you're an online seller who never meets your customers, you might be able to get a clearer picture of what they think and feel by reviewing their interests, ages and locations on Facebook.

Learn more about Facebook Insights.