Facebook is now going to launch a new ad format that is called “Sponsored Stories,” which allows participating advertisers to promote their daily Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by their friends. This activity can include “Liking” a Facebook Page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application.
These shares, which would have appeared in your friends’ News Feeds anyway, are now ready to give special promotion by way of a Facebook ad that appears on the right-hand side of the homepage. The ad will display your friend’s name, picture, a photo and link to the relevant Facebook Page or application, plus any likes and comments as well. So now Facebook has become a big market player in advertisement industry.
How to use Twitter for Business Marketing !
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sometimes 140 characters is just not enough!
Did you know that you can now stream your webcam live on twitter?
The naysayers doomed twitter for its brevity but twitter just keeps going from strength to strength.With this latest addition incredibly you can now stream your webcam live to your twitter followers.
This service from stream live is as easy as one two three.
1: Connect your webcam
2: Login with twitter
3: Click the broadcast Button
Its as easy as that.
Twitcam posts your video description and link to Twitter for all your followers to see.
While broadcasting, you can chat with your viewers via Twitter right from your broadcast page.
Once you’re done going live,they archive your video and display it on the same page.
The importance of campaign structure plays a significant role in determining the overall success of a PPC campaign. Defining the structure of a PPC campaign can be defined by a series of best practices, but really what it comes down to is crafting your marketing communication mix and how you will want to interact with customers at all points of the purchase decision process. Your paid search campaign structure should adequately cover all stages of the purchase decision cycle while maintaining a sufficient ad frequency to be effective.
Determining the most effective structure comes down to really understanding what the goals of your campaign are and how you will need to market to someone from initial awareness right through to the end purchase. Of course, it all depends on what you are marketing and the duration of the purchase decision cycle.
PPC Campaign Positioning
Each campaign should be positioned at a unique point in the purchase decision process; whether that campaign be:
- Awareness focused campaign aimed at filling the top of the sales funnel
- Influencing campaign to guide the prospective customer through to purchase or
- Closing campaign aimed at generating the conversion
The marketing messaging associated with the campaigns should mirror the stages in the purchase decision process from ad copy through to landing pages and offers. Regardless of the position in the purchase process, the customer should be prompted to take some form of action on a landing page.
PPC Campaign Structure
The structure of the paid search campaign will closely align to the associated metrics with each campaign. It would be unreasonable to expect that a campaign targeted at the early awareness stage of the purchase decision cycle would generate a direct conversion (sale), but starting the education and branding conversations are more reasonable goals. A soft call-to-action such as the download of an educational whitepaper would be appropriate in the early awareness phase. It is also important to remember that the amount of information asked for on the landing page form is in alignment to the value of the offer. The contact information for a prospect is valuable to them and therefore the more information requested, the more valuable the offer must be. Awareness campaigns may consist of broad terminology associated with the products or services, pains-based terminology, and even direct or indirect competitor’s terminology.
Understanding how individual keywords are positioned at each stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in defining the overall campaign structure. As stated, the goal is to create a seamless communication message guiding the prospect from the awareness phase through to conversion.
Maximizing Visibility
As with many other forms of advertising, visibility and frequency is key to effective marketing messages. Focusing all efforts at only a particular point of the purchase decision process would lead to high acquisition and high attrition or low acquisition and low conversions. We all know that the vast majority of conversions require multiple clicks (especially in high value B2B sales) and ensuring effective frequency of ads is important to remaining top of mind while providing reinforcing messages through the subsequent stages of the purchase decision cycle.
Defining the message and the offers that are most applicable at each stage of the purchase process will ensure that ads maintain a high CTR, while landing pages are effective at providing more conversion-focused offers such as demos or free trials. Should the sale involve an offline sales force, it is important to create a paid search campaign aimed at satisfying the informational requirements (IQ Needs) of the prospective client, while allowing the sales force do the relationship development.
Controlling PPC Costs
Leveraging your campaign structure to control costs is about understanding how each campaign affects the other and ultimately leads to conversion. A keen understanding of the prospect’s path to conversion becomes necessary to developing the campaign structure. Knowing the value of each conversion or lead at the corresponding stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in bidding strategies as well as determining the appropriate budgeting requirements for each campaign. Several Bid Management tools are developing cross channel tracking technologies to assist advertisers with the determination of the value of associated campaigns. Multiple campaign attribution models are becoming more and more necessary as marketers attempt to become more intelligent about how to better balance visibility each stage of the purchase decision process.
As previously stated, frequency is important to paid search campaigns and therefore it is important to define the tactics to maximize that frequency. Most advertisers are in a deficit situation with regards to available budget versus available keyword search volume inventory. Leveraging day parting and geo-targeting can be effective tactics to concentrate the limited budgets into a smaller subset of the target to maximize frequency and coverage of the purchase decision cycle.
Once again Facebook has outraged its user base with the result being another round of calls for worldwide boycotts. Listening to users is not a Facebook principle. Run a search on “Facebook boycotts” and you’ll find some going back to 2006.
Clearly, beta testing is not done before rolling out any new functionality or user interface changes. It’s absurd to call Facebook a “social networking” web site when in reality, it is anything but social or community oriented. It’s an advertising medium first and foremost. Its users are pawns.
Facebook removes content without your permission from the “Info” you enter into your personal profile. Essentially, if you have something in your own profile they feel cannot be used to create a Community Page, they won’t permit you to keep your content on their web property. Without any warning, millions of Facebook users signed in to find their profiles were mucked up. Their content had been turned into links. Phrases were turned into links to Community Pages, whether it had any logic to it or not. I removed the phrase, “I’m very proud of her”, from my profile because I didn’t choose to be the owner of a Wiki called “I’m very proud of her”. Because Facebook manipulates our content to be used how they want it, I censored myself.
That we are forced to censor ourselves on a social web site should make everyone stop and think about what this means.
Bloggers and news sites have been writing about privacy issues . Facebook demonstrates a corporate arrogance and an utter refusal to consider the people who use Facebook. One wonders at a business model that is based on revenue generation and yet chases away the traffic at the same time.
Today, you don’t need to be accepted by anyone as a Facebook “friend” to be able to send them messages. This means anybody can be writing to anybody as long as they are Facebook members. Acceptance of “friends” doesn’t matter. Most of your profiles were made public, suddenly and without warning, forcing members to change their settings to limit what the world can read about them. Your “status” content is used god knows where. I see comments from people I know showing up on a CNN feed, as well as folks I don’t know. Why CNN needs Facebook comments is something I don’t yet understand.
Use these tips to make the most of your Facebook marketing efforts.
Facebook may have 500 million users, but having an outpost on the social-media site won’t necessarily increase sales or referrals to your website. But the right tools, used strategically, can help make Facebook an important part of your marketing, lead acquisition and customer-service strategies.
Here are some do’s and don’ts for your company’s Facebook page.
1. Do: Take advantage of Facebook Places. This location-based application allows users to “check in” — or alert their network — wherever they are. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, turn patrons into Facebook promoters by giving them freebies or specials offers if they check-in from your location, using Facebook Places. But be sure to connect your check-in page to your company page, otherwise Facebook users who click check-in links on their News Feeds and Walls will be taken to a generic Facebook page that doesn’t contain your keywords or branding.
2. Do: Use Facebook for customer service. Online support forums and live-chat services can be costly. But Facebook can help you communicate easily with customers who become your fans on the site. Facebook’s Wall, forums, status updates and other features let you answer technical and other queries, post new product upgrades or offer a frequently-asked-questions section. Additionally, your fans can help each other out.
3. Do: Go “tag” crazy. Tagging is simply to identify a Facebook user in a photo or video, an action that triggers an update to the user’s News Feeds. Tag your business and your customers in videos and photos as often as possible. Why? Tagged photos and videos, especially those tagged by your fans, have a higher likelihood of being seen by more people. If you decide to launch a Facebook promotion, try to find ways to integrate tagging into the plan.
4. Do: Befriend Facebook group administrators. Search out influencers on Facebook and offer them specials, coupons and other perks they can offer to their Facebook groups. A status update, Wall post or message from a group’s administrator will return better results than a mass message to their members from you.
5. Do: Add a well-placed “Like” button to your website and newsletters. Don’t just throw a “Like” button on your site, integrate it into the customer experience and surround it with a call to action. For example, place near your mailing-list sign-up form. Users are more likely to click a “Like” button while opting-in for a subscription. Test, track and adjust this tactic until you see results. Here is a link to some instructions to help you get started.
6. Don’t: Let your Facebook Wall be the first thing newcomers to your page see. The company page Wall is usually busy with status updates and user comments. Instead, use Facebook’s page settings to set up a “welcome” page (see “How do I change the default tab”). Make sure it inspires action. Perhaps you can post a short YouTube video about your company with a vanity URL to a big promotion website or design a custom background showing users how to sign up for your mailing list.
7. Don’t: Turn off your user comments function. If you promote your brand online, odds are good that you’ll receive some negative feedback. Whether or not these comments are warranted, your responses and communication with these individuals will demonstrate your commitment to customer service.
8. Don’t: Use the Facebook Events tab for RSVPs. If users register for events that you list on Facebook, you will not capture their data for your mailing list. Always require registrants to sign up for events on your own site.
9. Don’t: Send mass messages to your network. Most users will never even look at your messages. Should you be compelled to send a message, make sure it offers something of real value. Clearly state that value in the message subject line. Avoid general brand messages and announcements, or you’ll lose supporters.
10. Don’t: Link Facebook Ads to your Facebook page. Targeted and compelling Facebook Ads may get you results. But link them to a page on your website that hosts information about the promotion and encourages users to take action in as few clicks as possible. Remember to push users from Facebook to your turf– a web page — where you control the content, environment and functionality. Doing so may provide a higher probability of converting leads into sales and acquiring consumer contact information.
With social media and the social graph becoming more prominent sources of news and information, a new service is looking to make it easy to browse through what your friends are sharing.
FriendShuffle is a very simple tool that lets you surf through what your Facebook and Twitter friends are reading. Once you connect FriendShuffle to your Twitter and/or Facebook account, all you have to do is click “Shuffle” and you’ll be shown either links that your friends have “liked” on Facebook, or links that your friends on Twitter have shared.
That’s really about it. Every time you click Shuffle, you’re taken to a new webpage. FriendShuffle displays which friend shared the link and how long ago they shared it. You also have the option to like a webpage as well, which automatically shares it on your Facebook wall and Twitter account. While it’d be nice for the service to be more up-front about the fact that it tweets and updates your Facebook status on your behalf, the sharing feature makes perfect sense.
Essentially, FriendShuffle is a StumbleUpon powered by your social graph. It relies on the belief that your friends share content that you’ll find interesting. While that’s normally true, you will shuffle through links that you’d never visit normally. In other words, StumbleUpon is still more accurate at delivering content you’re going to like.
FriendShuffle doesn’t beat StumbleUpon, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. instead, it’s more like Flipboard, which aggregates the links your friends are sharing into one simple interface. FriendShuffle’s simplicity makes it enjoyable to use, but we’re interested to see what the service does next to make it easier to discover the content shared by your social circles.
With Groups, Facebook has created a new way to organize and communicate with your social circles. Does this make Twitter Lists obsolete?
A year ago, Twitter launched its Lists feature (yes, it’s been that long). Lists gave users the ability to curate and organize groups of Twitter users. Users quickly rushed to create lists based on industry, interests and friends. The reaction to Twitter Lists has been mixed; while several people make a habit of curating new lists all the time, most people ignore the feature. While there are many Twitter users with over 10,000 followers, only two lists have over 10,000 people following.
The new Facebook Groups, on the other hand, rely on “social solutions” to get groups of friends and associates to form mini-communities on Facebook. Features like private walls, group chat and e-mail threads have tech circles and the blogosphere buzzing. Still though, the question remains: will people actually use Facebook Groups?
Facebook Groups and Twitter Lists are the subject of this week’s Web Faceoff, our ongoing series where we pit two different tech products, tools or trends against each other for your vote. This week, we want to know which one you prefer: Facebook Groups or Twitter Lists? Do either pique your interest, or do they both disappoint?
There are two forms of duplicate content. You copy someone else’s content for use on you page.Someone copies your content for use on their page.
Google’s mission statement states “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. So how would Google be able to accomplish their mission when your ordinary Internet surfer typed in “Photography” and Wikipedia displayed as the #1 page with relevant information about a Photography, then for the next 3 pages it was the same exact content as the wiki page except on 50 different websites that stole their content. I think you are starting to catch my drift. That would probably get you frustrated if you were looking to buy a camera, and you would think twice about using Google the next time you had to search for something on the web.
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