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How To Market Through Facebook

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

In terms of Web 2.0 applications, Facebook has dominated the social networking scene and took the Internet by storm. More social interaction takes place on Facebook now than ever before, and marketers are taking advantage of that to expose their audience to their business and products. If you aren’t using Facebook to get the word out about your business, you’re simply losing on the opportunity to reach out to a wide market of millions of active users. There’s no doubt that Facebook is the most popular tool to communicate with your social circle, which is why people spend a large amount of time to stay in touch with friends, make new contacts, play online games and join various groups of interest. Now, imagine your message being displayed to such active set of people. Not only will more folks know what you are offering, it will bring you higher traffic totals before you know it. In this article we will be looking into how you can use Facebook to market your product/service and get results.   Once Facebook reached a couple million users, they began to monetize their service. They launched a service called Social Ads that lets you display targeted ads on Facebook. This service is as simple as it gets; compared to Google Adwords, it’s practically effortless to execute. Due to the ability to target your ads to people who might be interested in them through their Facebook information, you can get higher conversion rates. With Facebook’s target feature, you can make sure that your ads aren’t being randomly served to people that don’t care about your product. However, due to the targeting that these ads perform, just the right people will find your ad. Therefore, your click through rate will be much higher, giving you more traffic in the long run. If you want, you can also add a relevant picture to your ad, something that you shouldn’t ignore. You’ll be able to increase the trust factor and the appeal of your ad, making it more responsive.   There are more ways to advertise on Facebook beyond their Social Ads option. One of these is by starting interest pages or groups for your market. It is a virtual viral phenomenon for Facebook users to add pages that they are fans of, or join groups for which they hold an interest. You should be able to tap into this phenomenon and use it to promote your business. Simply establish a page or group on Facebook about your company and include pertinent information about it; however, be careful not to be too verbose. Influence others to become a fan of your business or join your company’s Facebook group. You can invite other Facebook users to become a part of your group page but your personal page is not set up for this kind of marketing. In this instance, you can use other means of advertisement to divert visitors there. Whether you create a group or a page is up to you but in the end, the kind of response you get will be amazing, if you get everything right.   There are no signs that the popularity of Facebook is waning, so now is the time to get in on the action. There is an ever growing user base that is intimately involved in the network. However, there is still a chance to get in on the competition before it becomes too difficult to make inroads on this useful platform. Generating ads on Facebook is often a monotonous task. If you are earning profit with Facebook pay-per-click, then take a look at purchasing FB Ad Manager . It’s an amazing product to automate the operation of building Facebook ads. Article Source

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How To Market Through Facebook

Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.] It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data. Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include: It’s too confusing Information overload What am I supposed to do with all this data? Won’t all this tracking be expensive? All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided. Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table. Beginning the reporting process: 1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app. 2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format. 3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place. 4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become. In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report. 5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations. Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on. Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic. With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI. Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms. Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic). Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site. Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic. Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for. Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary. More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable. Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor. Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity. Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy . Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise. Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate? Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination. Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge. Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence. Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic. Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates. Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat. Wrapping up Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth. As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

Customer & Influencer Research in Social Media

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” Pink Floyd, The Wall. That quote from Another Brick in the Wall reminds me of the cart horse situation with social media marketing:  If you don’t know your customers you can’t engage them. How can you ever hope to engage your customers if you don’t understand who they are? There are so many questions from marketers and agencies alike about how best to grow businesses through online channels.  Questions are particularly popular when it comes to best practices for social tools. “Always do this” and “always do that” is what most marketers have been bombarded with for as long as there have been conferences to attend and email newsletters to subscribe to. Inevitably, many of the most pressing questions about social media come down to understanding who you’re trying to reach. For example, some common questions I hear a lot at conferences: Q: Should we blog or focus on Twitter? Is Facebook or LinkedIn a better fit? Foursquare or Gowalla? (Or other shiny object) A: Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too. Q: What type of social content should we create? How often? Where? A: Study your customers as they create, consume and share content.  Then you’ll know the what, how, when and where. They why has to come from your organization. Q: What  is the most overrated social media site? A: The one your customers aren’t using. So much time is spent on tactics without a good understanding of goals, audience and how to measure success with social media programs.  As we discuss Roadmapping social participation with companies, audience research is one of the key areas of importance. As I mention above, how can you reach and engage customers if you don’t understand them? Let’s say you’ve used a social media monitoring tool like SM2 to identify who is talking about your brand and topics of importance to your prospects and customers. Within this analysis, you’ve noticed that there’s alot of activity on Twitter. A logical next step might be to further investigate influential Twitter users.  If a paid tool like Radian6 or SM2 don’t fit your budget you can try free tools Trackur or Social Mention to gain some insight into content types, commentary and sharing/publishing platforms. Other tools you might use to identify influentials on Twitter include directories like wefollow. Under the tag, “ SEO ” you can see that Matt Cutts is the most influential.  Since reaching out directly to a popular person on Twitter, especially a Google employee, might not be prudent, it can be helpful to learn more about that individual and who they are influenced by as well as who they influence. Using the site Klout, you can see a Twitter influence score (78 is pretty high) and other information including predictions on who is most influenced by Matt and more interestingly, who may be an influencer of Matt Cutts. There are other tools that show communities surrounding an individual such as Top Twitter Friends. As for understanding what kind of content someone likes on Twitter, you can look at retweets and @ responses. You can also look at what kind of content and what user tweets get favorited most,. Favstar is a tool that does just that. In this example, Favstar shows which Tweets Matt Cutts has favorited . The types of content and users can be noted for guidance with future outreach. I mentioned free social media monitoring tools above including Social Mention. Below is a screengrab that shows how much information you can get from Social Mention with options to download into Excel friendly formats. Other Twitter user analysis tools worth looking at include Twitter Analyzer and Twitalyzer . The basic tools I’ve shared here are just that, basic. They’re good for poking around and getting familiar with discovery of social content and influencers.  However, it would take a more robust tool set (which is what Agencies and larger companies do) to scale monitoring over many topics, influencers and conversations. Other customer social media research tactics include: Survey your existing customers for social preferences and behaviors Review web analytics for social media sources and behaviors Tap into Compete, Quantcast, Alexa  information on specific social sites Leverage profile information provided by advertising staff on social sites themselves In combination with directly observed and experienced customer behaviors and preferences, general site data can compliment understanding of customer social content needs.  What are some tactics and tools you’ve found useful for researching customers on the social web?

Easy Tips To Turn Squeeze Pages Into A Prospect Converting Machine – Be Your Squeeze Page Manager

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If you use squeeze page templates, chances are that you are already approaching its limit to convert. Or you must have already noticed a significant dip in the number of converts. This situation calls for some change in the way you look at these web pages. First a squeeze page is supposed to get the visitor to sign up or lead him to another page. Your list building takes a hit if it is unable to do this. Before we examine why it is not able to convert, you should get the idea of an ideal squeeze page. - It has a title that is catchy and questions the user about a problem that he is facing. This kind of a title works to build trust in the visitor. A visitor is always looking for something that demonstrates an understanding of his plight. - If you show that you can understand his plight, then you have his attention. Also the time spent on a page is very less hence your title is the only thing that has the chance of captivating the visitor. - After the visitor has decided to stay on the page, the role of the body comes into play. A visitor is always thinking- what’s in it for me? If you answer that question then you have made a sale. To answer this question, highlight a few benefits of the product. But this is not the goal of your page. - Next is the offer. This is what you are giving the visitor in return for his mail id. This could be anything. The offer has to be very attractive because even if you don’t make a sale, you have an addition to your opt in list i.e. your future. The above are the basic features of a converter squeeze page. Most of the squeeze pages that fail are template based. They fail because they fall short of the above mentioned benchmarks. Also they are graphically not of a good quality and are not unique as a large number of people are using them. If there are two similar looking pages, one eats into the other’s share. Hence to give your page a unique look, get it designed by a professional by stating your ideas. This will give true value for your money and the desired result. Don’t settle on a replicated or overused squeeze page template. For the most professional and affordable custom video squeeze page design services that will brand you as an authority in the already over crowded marketplace online. Venkata Ramana runs a professional internet marketing outsourcing company for 5 years. His company has delivered over 600 custom tailored video squeeze pages to over 300 top internet marketing clients! Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sagi_Venkata_Ramana Article Source

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Easy Tips To Turn Squeeze Pages Into A Prospect Converting Machine – Be Your Squeeze Page Manager

How Journalists Use Search & Social Media

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TopRank ran a survey of journalists, reporters and editors on their use of search and social media in 2008. We found 91% use search engines like Google to do their job. 64% use social networks.   Published in Jan 2010 , a George Washington University and Cision survey of journalists reports 89% use blogs and 65% use social networks to research stories. As prep for a presentation I’m giving Thursday at Online Marketing Summit on the intersection of SEO, Social Media and PR , I reached out to a few local journalists and industry news contacts and asked for examples of how they used search engines or social media to do story research. Newsrooms are cutting staff and reporters and editors are hard pressed to do more with less. Tools like search engines and social media make available a tremendous amount of information in real-time.  The news world is a world of deadlines and it would seem the use of search and social networks to source experts or people/companies that fit a story angle would be ideal. Even respected news organizations like the BBC are encouraging their journalists to embrace social media . This kind of insight is very helpful to understand how companies can make their news content more easily discovered via social web participation, content and optimization.  Why is that important?  According to TV News Reporter  Jason DeRusha , “Private business does a horrible job cataloging their expertise in a manner that’s search engine friendly.  This is a real opportunity, as journalists become much more crunched for time, and use search as quick way to identify local experts.” National Public Radio’s  Jon Gordon uses search and social in a way that epitomizes the response we received from all types of journalists: “I use search engines on almost every story.  I use social networks to find additional sources, as well as for story idea generation and story feedback.” Here are a few examples of how journalists use search engines and social media tools to connect with story subjects. Not all of them are business situations, but are helpful as feedback on where to spend time creating, optimizing and socializing news content. I begin every day at search engine. It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always starts with a search. I work on a segment called “Good Question,” so I often type my question directly into Google, and see what comes up. When searching for local experts, I’ll often take the subject matter, tack on the word “Minneapolis” and add the word “expert.” For example, last week I did a story on whether cursive handwriting was vanishing because of e-mail. I typed “Minneapolis handwriting expert” into Google, and found several local handwriting analysts. Next, I searched for private schools (because public schools are often challenging to get permission to shoot at) and found the school we used for our story . For my story on whether we get enough Vitamin D in Minnesota , I searched “Vitamin D” “Minneapolis” and “expert.” If a local company showed up very high with their own expertise in those results, I would have called that company. Jason DeRusha, WCCO (CBS) TV News Reporter Often times, the use of search engines and social media sites intersect. Here is an example provided in our initial survey: I was writing a column about the planned partnership between Google and Yahoo. I tracked down potential sources first using Google and LinkedIn, and came across a white paper prepared by a senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute. While I could not easily find an e-mail address, I went to Facebook where I located him, then sent a message. He replied and we followed up with a phone interview. Marketing Industry Journalist In some cases, news publications also run real world events. Example: iMediaConnection has ad:tech, MediaPost has OMMA, Search Engine Watch has Search Engine Strategies. Here’s some great insight from MarketingProfs on how they’ve used social media tools for finding writers, case studies and speakers: We do use social networks extensively to find key writers or speakers for our events or publications. I also use it to monitor key issues to cover in our newsletters, seminars, research, and so on: Social networks are a great way to take the “pulse” of a topic. What are people talking about? Is this a hot-button issue or not? For events: Social media is integral to programming the agenda. We always distribute the proposal form for potential speakers via various social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). Same for our case study collections: We mine for good stories by asking Twitter/FB/LI. For example, “Who has a good story on social media ROI?” We always harvest an abundance from this “social Google,” open-ended approach. Once we have harvested leads from those channels, our seminar programmer or writers can follow up via email or DMs, whichever. LinkedIn is a great place to mine client-side folks. It’s especially valuable for us as we try to include a significant percentage of client-side speakers at our events, and often client-side folks are harder to uncover/book. And obviously, our case studies always feature client-side folks. We also use Idea Scale to crowdsource topic ideas for our event agenda. We use Flickr all the time to find creative common graphics for use on the blog (or for the contributed pieces I do for AMEX Open Forum); we use YouTube and Slideshare to see possible speakers or presenters in “action.” Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs Some Journalists are more tech and social media savvy than others resulting in some unconventional uses of social channels to create efficiencies in reaching sources: “One of my key social-media tactics for work is a bit obscure: I autofollow everyone who follows me (using SocialToo). The reason for this: Crucial exchanges for stories occur via DM, which is why I do not want to ever think about whether there is reciprocal DM-ing with this or that person. Once this is set up, I can use Twitter as a sounding board with questions related to stories, get initial responses via public tweeting, then take them into private DM-ing as needed (or switch to e-mail or the phone). With close to 10,000 followers now, this is a system that works well – with parallel sourcing via ProfNet and HARO, which I see as two legs of a tripod. Twitter is the third.” Julio Ojeda-Zapata , Technology Editor at St. Paul Pioneer Press Sometimes the information found isn’t what companies or individuals would want a reporter to find: I routinely track down potential interviews by sending out a Tweet. Most recently, we came across a number of Toyota car owners who fell under the recent recalls. It would have been very difficult to find those people in a short amount of time without this type of technology. Just today I was feeding and getting information through Twitter on the house explosion in Edina that helped our crews navigate around the situation and get better pictures of the breaking news. Also, I used YouTube to find video of a man who is being investigated by a Ponzi scheme by the Secret Service. It turns out he had many videos of himself giving sales pitches to potential customers. We used the video on the air where otherwise we would have never known what the man looked like. We often use Facebook to get photographs of crime suspects and or victims. And police investigators tell me Facebook is one of the first places they check when investigating someone involved in a crime. Chris O’Connell KSTP (ABC) TV News Anchor/Reporter Sometimes it’s not your content that gets discovered, but a connection to someone else that leads to being found: This fall I was working on a feature about ethnic weddings in the Twin Cities, for our Weddings magazine. I was looking for recently married couples of various cultural backgrounds. I posted a query on Facebook to my recently married or engaged friends. Their responses led me to three of the five couples interviewed (via email contacts). After initial email correspondence, I interviewed the couples by phone and in person. Senior Editor, Mpls.St.Paul magazine I think this quote from Chris O ‘Connell sums it up nicely: “social networking has changed the way we do business and how we are able to get news and sources faster when deadlines matter.” We’ll be conducting a new survey on Journalist Use of Search soon and will be posting more detailed data on how stories are sourced, tools used, preferences of types of information and more. If you are attending #OMS10 be sure to check out our session on Social Media, Search and Public Relations at 3:15 . It will be a very informative and engaging set of presentations from: David “dk” Klein, Dana Todd, Rand Fishkin, myself and moderator duties handled by Sally Falkow. Does your company incorporate news optimization as part of your online marketing and content strategy? Do you optimize and promote news content differently than marketing content? Do you track whether the media finds your content via search or social media?