Women and Social Media

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Free But You Have To Know What You Are Doing

Social media is well recognized as a vital marketing platform. The click through rates for Twitter and Facebook are phenomenal; according to Social Twist stats it’s 287% for Facebook and a whopping 1904% for Twitter. 

Social media dominates the top ten strategic technologies in 2011 according to Gartner, so what are the latest trends in the social media ecosphere?

Why has social media become the rage over the past few years? These days it’s not enough for a brand to have a nice website, you’re not recognized by potential generation Y consumers unless you’re proactively participating in social sites. Online marketing of a more traditional nature continues to grow, but networking on social sites is growing at a much faster pace and the numbers of people subscribing is not falling off.

Marketing is a costly business, and online marketing comes cheap, though not as cheap as social networking, which is absolutely free (aside from time). The marketing strategy is to reach out to your clients and be interactive, and social sites are where young potential customers flock to.

Tweeting takes only a few seconds and facebooking, not more than a few minutes, but the returns are rewarding compared to the time spent. What’s more, these networks are accessible through any Internet enabled device such as phones, computers, notebooks and tablets; which means you can grab people’s attention when they’re mobile as well as when they’re at home. 

Social media has been a bastion for sharing but now shopping on social media sites are getting a foot hold. The trend set by social games on Facebook is now on the rise, with shopping websites integrating eCommerce on Facebook pages and micro sites. There are hundreds of brand pages on Facebook. What you could have done earlier was to ‘like’ them, but now you can shop from your social media account and then share your shopping list with friends … share … shop … share … shop. A successful online portal for a business like this relies on “share of click” in lieu of “word of mouth”.

Another trend that is sure to get bigger is to have your micro site on a social media website. This shift is quite evident; a lot of small website owners have moved from micro sites to Facebook pages. The Facebook pages have multiple tabs, notes and links, plus photos, videos and chats with followers. Moving to Facebook provides tools for promotions like the wall where new announcements, offers and messages can be shared; and once someone has been enticed to add the Facebook account as a friend, they get constant re-engagement.

According to Matthew Gain from Edelman Australia, "With a microsite you had to generate media to get people to the site. Then they would arrive, maybe enter a competition, and then disappear. With Facebook, you have an opportunity for an ongoing engagement, because to enter a competition they have to 'like' the page."

Social networking sites are continuing to make their services more useful for users and one feature in particular, location based networking, works really well for small and medium enterprises. By geo-tagging a tweet to cater to local customers, you’re more likely to attract real potential customers. Once more advertisers get on board, more people will search for local tweets advertising specials. This trend is going to become more popular and more specific with branded tweets.

Location based updates will also get a big boost next year with the increasing popularity of apps like Foursquare and forthcoming projects like Facebook places. Foursquare encourages people to explore their local businesses and submit reviews.

Another social media hot cake these days is a suggestion; this is based on what a user is currently doing and following what others are doing. This will help companies in preparing a social graph and target their ads to users accordingly.

"If you are a consumer brand or any major company, there is a whole lot of chatter going on." Nick Holmes from BuzzNumbers says.  "You can just sit back and listen passively to conversations, and determine what people are saying."

Although social media advertising campaigns are now widespread, not all businesses have started using it yet. According to a recent survey done by Optus on 380 Australian small and medium businesses (SMBs), only 28% of businesses actually use social media for networking and most have no immediate plans to start. Whilst they may be free to start, unless you know what you’re doing you’re probably tweeting and posting on walls in a void. According to Michael Said of Brand Strategy,"This is the number one marketing opportunity, but only if it's done properly. The three Rs of social media are regular, relevant and remarkable." Like any advertising medium, an online social media campaign is best conducted by professionals. After all, the type of top notch campaign being run in 2010 will be all but obsolete by 2011.

Cracking the Facebook Code

How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed? Tom Weber conducts a one-month experiment to break the algorithm, discovering 10 of Facebook's biggest secrets.

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

If you've ever spent time on Facebook, you've probably pondered that last one. The social-networking giant promises to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for pumping a steady diet of advertising at us—but the algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along can seem capricious or altogether impenetrable.

Facebook, much like Google with its search algorithms, consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and pans content (save a few glancing details this year about the enigmatic engine that powers it, EdgeRank). So, with the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook's personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

To get the answers, we devised an experiment, creating our own virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. The focal point of our experiment: Phil Simonetti, a 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti's only friends were a hand-picked roster of more than two dozen volunteers who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, dutifully recording any Phil sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook's Bias Against Newcomers. If there's one thing our experiment made all too clear, it's that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made "friends" never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil's perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

2. Facebook's Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways (more on that below). But you aren't likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don't have exposure in the first place. (Memo to Facebook newcomers: Try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items.)

3. The Velvet Rope: "Top News": The real fun began when we eventually instructed different subgroups of our volunteer-friend force to interact with Phil in a controlled manner.

Suddenly, Phil began popping up on feeds. But which ones? The current news-feed system offers users two options: "Top News," a highly selective feed of updates from friends, and "Most Recent," a "fire hose" that shows updates in reverse chronological order.

A bunch of interactions, however, still do not guarantee that you'll get on anyone's Top News, which is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information. Some of our volunteers reported frequent sightings of Phil's updates in their Top News feeds, while others saw him rarely—and in some cases, never. Top News will show you hours-old updates from some friends while ignoring newer postings from others.

Facebook has a reason to do this: If users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might be overwhelmed (or bored) and tune out—a disaster for Facebook, which needs eyeballs to earn revenue. But in doing so, Facebook's ranking system makes judgments about items it thinks you'll be interested in.

What became clear after two weeks was that it's not the amount of activity you have, but the type (more on that below).

4. "Most Recent" News Is Censored, Too. As veteran Facebook users know, it's a simple matter to switch from the filtered-and-prioritized Top News feed to the "fire hose" of Most Recent. In Most Recent, items are displayed in reverse chronological order. So many users naturally assume that Most Recent contains every update from all of their friends.

Not so, as our experiment showed.

Even with test-subject Simonetti posting updates, links, photos, and videos several times a day, a few of our volunteers found that the items didn't appear in their Most Recent feeds. (At least, not until we took additional steps to up Phil's visibility.) If you've never tinkered with the "Edit Options" button on your Most Recent feed, this underscores why you should check it out—there's a little-used setting that caps the number of friends shown in the feed.

5. "Stalking" Your Friends Won't Get You Noticed. Maybe you've fretted about it while poring over photos of an old flame or estranged friend on Facebook—or maybe you've diligently worked to get on someone's radar by clicking all over their page. Do Facebook's mysterious algorithms factor your stealthy interest in another person into that person's news feed?

To find out, our test subject spent several days obsessively checking out the posts and photos of some volunteers who had yet to spy him in their feeds. The result was clear: The stalking accomplished precisely nothing.

6. Having Friends Who Stalk You WILL Help Your Popularity. Stalking does work in the other direction, we found. After Phil spent days posting updates in vain, with most of our volunteers seeing none of them, we tasked a handful of friends to start showing more interest in Phil. Even though he wasn't showing up in their feeds, they sought out his Facebook page repeatedly, clicking on links he had posted and viewing his photos. This was the point at which Phil finally began to break through. It took a few days of constant clicking, but not only did the friends doing the stalking begin to see Phil in their Top News feeds—others who weren't stalking began noticing him as well.

7. Links Trump Status Updates. We're sure you consider all of your musings fascinating—but Facebook doesn't. At various points in our test, Phil switched between writing plain status updates and posting links to content elsewhere on the Web. Even before some of our friends began stalking Phil, for those who were seeing updates from him, links appeared more frequently than status updates—presumably because links are more effective at driving "user engagement," which translates into people spending more time on Facebook.

8. Photos and Videos Trump Links. Just as links proved more potent than status updates in making it past Facebook's filter, so did photos and videos Phil posted. Here, too, it is likely a matter of engagement. Think about times you've spotted a thumbnail-size photo from a friend in your feed and clicked to see it full-size. Facebook likes clicks, and photos deliver them.

9. The Power of Comments. If items you post attract comments from a few friends, it clearly raises your visibility overall. When our selected volunteers began stalking Phil, he finally appeared to many users for whom he had been a no-show. But when we stopped the stalking and moved on to the next phase of our trial, directing a different group of users to not only look in on Phil but also repeatedly add comments to his items, he surfaced on the feeds of still more friends.

10. Why Facebook Really is Like High School: After weeks of testing and trying everything from having Phil post videos to getting some of his friends to flood him with comments, by the end of our experiment, a few of our volunteers had still literally never seen Phil appear in their feeds, either Top News or Most Recent. These were the "popular kids"—users of Facebook with 600 or more friends. (Conversely, those with only 100 to 200 friends were among the first to spot Phil.) So the key, as you build your coterie of friends, is making sure to include some without huge networks. They'll see more of your feeds, interact in Facebook-approved ways, and up your visibility with all.

Facebook didn't respond to our requests for comment about our findings. To be sure, this experiment wasn't foolproof. Facebook can—and probably does—draw on variables beyond those in our test. And our volunteer force of friends was only human, and may have missed some of Phil's posts.

Still, we were able to observe firsthand how Facebook can elevate or bury the news you want to share with your friends. For average users, cracking the Facebook code is something of a fun puzzle. But for marketers trying to tap Facebook—or individuals who see the service as a way to promote themselves—understanding how content propagates through the system is anything but a game.

But it also means that many users may not be aware of how much power they've put in the hands of this electronic mediator. (The very concept of the news feed was controversial as soon as it was unveiled, as chronicled in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect).

Can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

You might think you've shared those adorable new baby photos or the news of your big promotion with all of your friends. Yet not only does Facebook decide who will and won't see the news, it also keeps the details of its interventions relatively discreet.

All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine "what's important to you" as "what's important to other people." In that framework, the serendipitous belongs to those who connect directly with their friends in the real world—or at least take the time to skip their news feed and go visit their friends' pages directly once in a while.

from an original report by Tom Weber

Facebook Marketing - Get It Right First Time

Whenever we begin on Facebook we could find ourselves all enthusiastic and lose our emphasis as well as purpose why we're on the Facebook system.

We all set in place a profile devoid of any kind of direction and without taking any kind of marketing skills into consideration.

Some times all of us allow everybody and anybody to join us and we don't categorize those individuals.

We want as many Facebook buddies as quickly and as feasible possible, and if you are like I was, thinking about the short term.

We all overlook that the Facebook profiles are designed to be that personal, not a platform for marketing our own products and services.

Precisely how many occasions are you or have you been offered a product or service by folks who you have never ever had a discussion with.

How many times have you recently been pitched or pitched somebody over the instant Facebook messenger.

At this point I am not proclaiming that we must not market on Facebook but if we keep Facebook as junk mail central then Facebook will probably start to shut accounts on a substantial scale. No person will end up being safe from this.

I have put down a few thing that I have discovered over the last month or two that I hope may assist people any time utilizing Facebook in order to market or even brand oneself.

Building Your Facebook Profile

Your personal user profile is actually a person's personal profile definitely not your business or even product this is there in order to brand you, when you're seeing through the eye balls of a marketer.

Do not have your organization name or even product name within your user profile.

Exactly how might you feel if you built up a solid following simply to end up being closed straight down by Facebook simply because you had put your business name in the actual user profile.

Your personal user profile is about YOU INC.

When establishing your own profile check out your privacy setting and make certain you don't have the year of your birth showing, take care of your Id.

Composing your biography.

The biography field in your settings can be a effective tool so take a little bit of time designing your bio.

Think in mind that you are on Facebook in order to connect with individuals but not necessarily just everybody you want the actual Big Hitters so write a good biography.

Right now a single factor that I over looked when I was with Facebook was I did not place any kind of key phrases inside my Biography therefore individuals which where searching for my services or even product could not find me.

Facebook is a major search engine just like Google is, so any time an individual puts in let's say multi level marketing directly into the actual search bar the Facebook search engine can look through individuals account in order to discover people in Multilevel marketing so when you have a well crafted bio with keywords you will probably appear.

Additionally you want to be able to start getting the right kind of individuals so the real Facebook leaders. These guys will probably read your biography prior to accepting you as a Facebook friend.

A massive turn off is placing links in your bio or links to a squeeze page. We would suggest that you simply write your biography giving enough detail to tempt folks to go and check out your blog/nerve center so leave a website link stating

Something like I would love to interact with you in a far more personal level for more information about me make sure you just follow this link or perhaps you may Skype me on.

I like Skype because a person can have a proper conversation with that individual and knock down all boundaries.

Your user profile picture ought to be a picture of you, people need to look at you and look in your eyes as well as become familiar with you a picture paints a thousand.

What should I look for in a Facebook Buddy?

How many Facebook friends have these people got?

When did they last submit something on their wall?

Is the actual wall full of spam?

Look for people with influence folks that are active, people which you might learn from. Maybe do some investigation on the person, take a look at his/her blog.

Therefore when anyone request the friendship you can easily touch upon their blog, this will set you in addition to the 95% of people who don't make any effort.

Begin considering long term and quality rather than quantity.

Begin to split your own Facebook friends into groups so that you can build more powerful relationships with the front runners and leaders.

Its now time to stand out from everyone else on Facebook

The last idea is begin to develop associations with group administrators.

Search for well run active groups with lots of members and then start to build a long term relationship with all of them regarding potential future JV.

3 Facebook Marketing Suggestions That Can Help

There are increasingly more people vying for high quality traffic which only makes things tougher for everyone else. But all is certainly not lost because there are places like Facebook where you can buy targeted traffic. While Facebook is not free traffic, there’s a tremendous audience there representing a wide range of profitable markets. In this article we shall be looking into a few tips to help you get the most out of your Facebook advertising experience.

The smartest move you can make at Facebook is having a fan page and sending traffic to it as much as possible. While it is understandable about beginners, they still must learn the value of a Fan Page and how to get the most out of them. First of all, when you send the traffic directly to your website the click through rate and the conversion will be lower than when you send it to the fan page. It’s really simple, though, because it’s just like relationship marketing and people develop a better warm fuzzy with your fan page. It’s just numbers and marketing, so the simple strategy is to collect as many fans as possible because then all of those people will see your offer.

Go ahead and test out this strategy and you’ll know for yourself how well it works. Have you made a fan page for yourself or anyone else? Actually, they are pretty simple to make. But you do need to understand that it’s not as easy as just having a page and get fans to join you. You’ll have to make your fan page interactive and make sure you get traffic flowing in to your main website. Just think in terms of relationship marketing, and that is how you deal with your fan page and your fans.

An effective Facebook advertising tip would be to use CPM to test out your ads instead of CPC. Let’s face it, CPC or cost per click isn’t that effective when it comes to testing, because the majority of your testing is done on the landing page. This does not make testing advantageous. However, you can improve testing by putting you ads on CPM or cost per thousand impressions and search for the ads that need the cheapest cost per click. This is where you might get a low CPC as it compares to the CPC bidding model where you tweak it by bidding for clicks. But when you are utilizing a CPM model, it will make you see the ads that give the most positive outcome and lower the entire cost of your campaign. By using CPM you can tell what CPC rate you should be aiming for so that you can see which ads have great results.

Then there are what’s called engagement ads for the homepage. However this strategy is only for those who have that kind of budget available. You can use this space to show your videos, start and conduct polls or get prospects to take some kind of action. But remember, these ads are expensive, so you need to be careful and plan out everything beforehand.

In conclusion, Facebook is changing just like other advertising systems. But the bonus right now is that it is still in the beginning stages which means that it can only get better.

3 Solid, Tried and Tested Facebook Marketing Tips

There’s no secret at all that Facebook is tremendously huge in terms of traffic, and more and more IM marketers are taking advantage of the advertising opportunities there. It’s no wonder at all that online entrepreneurs are scrambling to get a piece of the action at Facebook. In this article we shall be looking into a few tips on how you can leverage Facebook for your own marketing purposes.

One of the reasons why Facebook is working so well for online marketers is because it gives you an opportunity to create your own fan page where you can directly interact with your fans. You will out of necessity have to make your page so it gives you the kind of business results you’re looking for. In order to do this, it has to become popular and spread by word of mouth. What is it about a popular fan page? You want people to see that other people have been there, that plus putting great content on your page frequently.

So it really is important that you encourage interaction and discussion. Dare people to tell you what is on their minds, and you can do standard things like opinion polls and such. Once you communicate enough with your target audience, then you will eventually know them better which will help you enormously. So, in some ways you are doing massive market research as well as building positive relationships. Get into groups that are like your niche. You will discover network groups about a little of everything on Facebook, almost every niche you can ever think about. You will see that many people have their own networks set towards maturing their business. You can literally make hundreds of contacts using these groups, but make sure you don’t go on an adding frenzy because that can get you banned from the site. Just use it wisely and only add those people that will like your niche.

If you are unable to locate a targeted group about your niche, then make one yourself. With this strategy you can control everything when you post new articles, add new people, start new chats and make up new relationships. But even if you do locate groups within your own niche to join, still create your own. You might start your own trend by doing it this way.

Social networking and marketing are definitely entrenched and a part of life, so you would be wise to begin taking advantage of it. Don’t forget the basics such as testing and always looking out for more places to market your products and services.

Effective Facebook Marketing

Contrary to what many may think, effective Facebook marketing does not entail slick advertisements or cheap gimmicks but rather, the three “C”s—Community, Conversation and Content, said Ryan Lim, business director of Blugrapes, a performance driven marketing company which has provided Facebook marketing solutions to brands such as Puma, Microsoft and L’Oreal.

Lim was speaking during a Facebook Marketing 101 workshop organized on Sep. 20 by Mums@Work (Singapore), an online career portal and social enterprise set up to help mothers source for flexible work solutions, among others.

Commencing the half-day workshop with a few key figures, Lim shared that the global Facebook community currently stands at 500 million active users—putting things into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would have the world’s fourth largest population. And where attention is, there is money to be made.

After covering the basics such as the Facebook anatomy and the functional differences between “groups” and “pages” (the former acts as a platform for a by-invitation-only community of people with similar interests to hold discussions and share content, while the latter is a public entity deployed for broadcasting purposes with no access control), Lim branched into the various aspects of creating and maintaining a strong Facebook presence.

In order to attract fans, a page has to firstly be relevant and credible. A page that is created to attract the right type of audience and not merely to attract a high number of fans will be rewarded at the end of the day as the audience forms a community and generates content on its own.

One of the ways to increase a page’s number of fans is to determine user experience—by creating “fans only” content and thus controlling what a non-fan sees upon first landing on the wall of page, there is an added incentive for viewers to be converted into fans.

Beyond establishing a presence and promoting brand awareness, Facebook allows one to leverage on its analytics to conduct market research and competitive studies, leading to more effective marketing strategies. The availability of analytics offers businesses a detailed insight into how people are engaging with its Facebook presence.

Touching on an area misused by many, Lim also shed light on Facebook’s guidelines and restrictions regarding promotions—defined as sweepstakes, contests or competitions. Unknown to many, conducting contests (usually popularity or looks-based) which require users to vote by clicking on the “like” button are not allowed. In fact, using Facebook to run any contests, including the soliciting of votes, are forbidden. The restrictions are precautionary steps to protect Facebook, a US-entity, from class action lawsuits.

In order to work around the restrictions, users can submit their promotion mechanics to Facebook for approval (which normally takes nothing less than 10 working days), after which the promotion can be run through a third party application housed within the page. Alternatively, users can make use of the Google contest entry form to customize and run their contests. Yet another alternative is to create a microsite to inform fans about a contest, leading them to an external site off Facebook to take part.

However, contests are meant to arrest, not sustain attention. “Your fans should be there for your content, not contest. You don’t want to train your customers wrongly and have them come to you only when you’re having a sale or contest,” says Lim.

Lim also highlighted four key factors in creating search engine friendly pages—the density of keywords, inbound links (the number of “likes” a page garners), the Facebook page name itself, and the “Info” tab, which functions as a descriptor for the services or products provided. The final sections of the workshop covered creating and optimizing Facebook advertisements.

The workshop, the first in a series, was attended by members and affiliate members of Mums@Work who either hold marketing roles in their respective companies or run their own businesses.

Facebook Marketing: How To Use Facebook To Explode Your Traffic And Profits

If you are not already familiar with Facebook marketing and social media networking, you are missing out on a significant amount of highly targeted traffic.

If done correctly, all of this traffic can be yours for free. All that is required is some time invested on your part. Without wasting any more time, let’s get you making some money with this free traffic.

Facebook, The King of Social Networks

Facebook has been gaining market share at an alarming rate; and it is by far the biggest social networking site available. What does this mean for us marketers?

It means there are millions of people within these networks who are potential leads for our business. Can you imagine what a few million people would do for your bottom line?

Don’t get carried away just yet. As with anything worthwhile, successfully tapping into Facebook marketing is quite time-consuming and an elaborate process.  But don’t despair, because people are profiting from Facebook already.

Are you ready to take action to get your share?

Joining Niche-Related Facebook Groups

Facebook has thousands of groups that are free to join and hundreds being created by the hour. You are definitely bound to find some groups that are in your niche.

These groups are gold for any marketer because it literally gives you access to thousands of targeted people who are already interested in some way in what you are trying to sell them.

The key with these Facebook groups is getting members to invite you as friends.

To accomplish this, start posting on the discussion boards, post ideas and tips and answer other’s questions.

Just go in there with the mentality of making friends. Eventually, if done correctly, you will have people inviting you to be their friends and you now have leads for your business targeted to your specific niche.

 Do This With Facebook If You Want To Mess Up

At this point, you should have a few potential leads as part of your friend network on Facebook. Now you need to continue to establish your reputation with them.

It is extremely important you don’t go in and try to sell them immediately. You have to treat these people as your friends. They have to know that you are trying to help them, not trying to pitch them a product.

Imagine how used they will feel if as soon as you add them as a friend, you send them a message trying to sell them something. These people added you because they thought of you as a friend, and more importantly, an authority in your specific niche who is willing to help them. Don’t blow it with a premature sales pitch.

Successfully Engaging Your Facebook Friends

Now that you know what not to do, let’s discuss something that you should do that will eventually net you some sales.

Your status updates are a very powerful feature. Post useful information to your Facebook friends. Let them know some things about your life, engage them with your story, get them posting comments on your profile.

At that point, when you see that your Facebook friends are engaged with you, then you could start hitting them with subtle marketing links. This means directing them to a blog with an affiliate link, NOT directly pitching a product right on your Facebook.

Create a blog post with useful information, and then link your buddies to it while adding a subtle affiliate link in there. That is the best way to get your friends to convert into sales.

If you do this correctly, you should have an ever-growing stream of traffic to your site or blog every time you have something useful to say.

Expanding Your Facebook Empire

Joining groups and posting on discussion boards is great, but why limit yourself to someone else’s group? Facebook allows you to create your own group that you can market to. This is by far the easiest way to get a large list of people interested in your niche, together in one place.

Invite your friends to the group, let other groups in your niche know about the group you just created, and continue to grow your empire.

You have to treat your own group as a list because you can message all of your members at once whenever you like. The key is to grow your list and put in action the tips learned previously in this article.

To recap, do not spam your group. Add real value to your members and they will be much more receptive to your advertising.

Closing Nuggets

When doing Facebook marketing, always remember that people love putting a name to a face. Make sure your profile and your groups both have plenty of pictures and videos.

If possible, get a few of your friends together and hang out, tag people in your pictures and videos if they where there, and continue to grow your business virally.

Remember that successful Facebook marketing and social media networking is not something you can do in a day; it may take weeks or even months to implement everything correctly. But once set up appropriately, you could have thousands of targeted buyers at your disposal.

Facebook Marketing Strategy

A lot of people are now using the social giant Facebook to market their business, it used to my MySpace that was used but that is quickly becoming a thing of the past. With so many users from all over the place this social network has massive potential for anyone wanting to promote themselves there.

Unfortunately though most of the people using Facebook for business purposes are downright spammers. I'm sure you have experienced for yourself the droves of constant emails pitching biz ops and various other affiliate products, sometimes it's difficult to get away from it (depending on who is on your friend list), sometimes I don't even bother reading my emails in Facebook and just delete them.

Is it possible to use Facebook as a marketing tool? For sure it is, we just need to learn to do it correctly. Our main purpose with Facebook should be to make friends with people and network with them, that's after all what FB is all about. If we want to tell folks about our business we can do that at a later date in a non threatening way.

Lets look briefly at the strategy, here are 6 steps that you can take to effectively market on Facebook,

1. Make sure you include plenty of info in your page that is personal to you, pictures work great, make sure you always look happy :). The purpose of your profile is to let the world know about YOU, not just your opportunity.
   
2. Look around the various groups and find some that might have people in them that would be interested in what you have to offer. Vary things as much as you can, try not to be narrow minded and just go for the online marketing groups.
   
3. Start searching for groups to join in your niche market. You can then start posting useful information to the group 'wall', most group owners will allow this. I like to post my videos to group walls when I have published them, my videos will be offering value and NOT pitching my business but it attracts people to my blog and they get real value out of it which puts me in a favourable position and they are more likely to opt-in to my newsletters.
   
4. Create your own group that is relevant to the products that you market. By regularly sending out invitations you can grow your group. It's just like building a subscriber list but on Facebook.
   
5. Try putting your content on your friends walls and also to your own. That way your content can potentially go viral as many more people are going to see your information and get value from it. Again remember not to abuse this by spamming with your business opportunity, the end result of that will be that your 'friend' will delete you most likely.
   
6. Create a personal video greeting to your new Facebook friends and tag them to the video. There are not very many folks using this tactic and it is extremely powerful.

By mastering the Facebook marketing strategy secrets you can become an expert in a short space of time and leverage this very powerful tool.

5 Facebook Fan-Acquisition Strategies

These are the only five ways to get Facebook fans. If you have another way, it’s wrong. Just kidding.

The following ideas are 5 fan-getting techniques. The system is a two stage process for getting fans, then getting revenue. I’ll tell you below where to find more info about that if you’re interested.

Here’s what the system looks like:

This is more than just a pretty picture, because it came from real world testing of what works and what doesn’t. It was derived from proven results on Facebook for multiple clients, both mine and the work of a handful of other Facebook marketing stars in a variety of verticals and including companies like Axe and Hershey’s, but also local companies. And it can work for lead generation, with some modifications.

Here are the five fan acquisition strategies:

1. Turn Buyers Into Fans At Time of Purchase

This is a no-brainer. If they like you enough to buy, there’s a good chance they’ll like your Facebook page, but it requires a little work.

The easiest way is to make a Facebook Like Box the most prominent thing on your thank you/confirmation page.

A more difficult but stronger strategy is to use another incentive to get them to like your page- for example, a contest that requires liking to enter. With a little programming, you can require they fan you and post a message on their wall about you, and then you can add them to your database of contest entrants immediately. This increases your fan-base and gets some word of mouth out about you as well.

NOTE: There’s a lot of controversy about contests and the Facebook Terms of Service; the upshot is that if you talk to a Facebook rep and get yours approved, you can do more. The downside is that you’re not going to have a rep to have that conversation with until you’re spending 5 figures on Facebook advertising.

2. Incentivized Like, or “Reveal Tabs”

Facebook pages have evolved toward better business results. Here are the stages of evolution so far:

• Get a Facebook page
• Create a special landing tab for new visitors who haven’t LIKED the page yet, make that the default tab for non-likers
• Add a special reward (like a discount) to the landing page for Facebook users specifically
• Require people to LIKE the page before they can get the special thing – now the reward is an incentive

The “Incentivized Like” increases the percentage of new visitors that like your page. And if you run Facebook ads, that decreases your cost per new fan.

Matt Monahan coined the term “Reveal Tab” – I call the pre-like tab a “reveal tab” and the post-like tab the “revealed tab”.

And yes, the next stage of evolution uses Facebook Apps.

3. Facebook Ads (Social PPC)

Combine good Facebook Ads with the “Incentivized Like” strategy above, and you’re getting the most fans for your money. This combo-strategy can lead to up to 80% of visitors becoming fans.

4. Incentivized Word of Mouth Contests

[See the earlier note about Facebook TOS]

It has been found that, if you have something (or a variety of things) you can give away every week, you can boost

• Engagement,
• Word of mouth, and
• Fan growth.

If you don’t have anything, look for partners that do have things to give away that want more exposure themselves. Then you both benefit from the conversation and fan growth it drives.

The basic idea is:

“Hey, post X on our fan page wall, and whoever gets the most likes and comments wins a Y.”

X is the conversation, and Y is the prize.

• The conversation could start with any question relevant to your offerings, benefits, or audience.
• You can combine it with a survey need you have.
• Or most ninja of all, make them think about the core desire or dream your offering fulfills for them.
• Or the easy one: “Tell us why you think you should win the prize.”

You’ve told them they’ll win if they get the most engagement, so you’re incentivizing them to post and then tell all their friends to come to the wall to like and comment, and what do those friends have to do first? LIKE your page. ;-)

5. Email Transformation

This is a cool trick, it also might be a hole that Facebook will plug one day, so now’s the time. Depending on the size of your email list and how you value your social media list, it could be worth thousands of dollars to you.

Some say a Facebook fan is worth twice what an email subscriber is worth, because you have to ability to reach their friends too. It’s much easier to get a fan to bring their friend in than for an email subscriber to get you another email subscriber. And the value of a fan or email really depends on what you do with them. If you’ve made money from your email list, you may be able to make a rough guess what a Facebook fan is worth to you.

There are other more obvious wasy to turn emails into fans:

• Include Social links in all your emails
• Send an email quarterly about your Facebook page and tell them about your “Incentivized Like” discount

Then What? How Do We Make Money From These Fans?

That’s the next step. There are four or five primary strategies for that, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.

Content from an original post by Brian Carter

Facebook Marketing Will Boost Your Business Tenfold

To keep your business current in todays world, you must know how to use the latest social media, viral strategies and marketing techniques, including Facebook with its variety of powerful features and tools.

It is an awesome place to meet people from all walks of life and all areas of the globe.

Facebook has taken the world and the internet by storm in the last few years.

Only Google gets more visitors, as Facebook currently holds the number 2 ranking. It is a given that internet marketers would take a closer look at such a huge market, and it is inevitable that most of them would approach it the wrong way and shoot themselves in the foot. People can be very LOUD and annoying with their Facebook conversing, which is the main problem with most Facebook marketing strategies. If you do not want to annoy anyone on facebook, you need to read further to find out some great facebook marketing tips that will help you succeed.

Each social media site has its own unspoken rules and regulations, and since social media is somewhat new, you need to learn the inside scoop. It is not any different when it comes to Facebook. You have to be sure you play by the rules if you are going to market yourself or your business using social media on Facebook or any other social site.

On Facebook, you can connect with friends, family, people with similar interests, but its main purpose is to socialize. You can connect with like minded people who are in the same groups, have the same interests, or likes as you. Also connect and collaborate with individuals from all over the globe, posting events, photos, videos, meet new people, invite others to become friends with your friends, or recommend good groups to join.

Facebook allows you the potential to build relationships with your customers and get more connections faster than ever before. You can propel your business faster if you use Facebook Marketing to show your true self and gain trust with your connections. However, its purpose is not to spam members with your incredible new business opportunity or amazing new product. Business opportunities and new products are topics that many Facebook users are interested in, but there will be a time and place for discussing these topics.

Spam advertising is not for social media. Facebook is a place where you can build rapport and relationships. Its the same on any social media site, including facebook, that this is how it must be approached when looking to market yourself. Individuals on Facebook may think you are pretty cool, but that does not mean they will purchase any products or leave their business to join yours.

You must offer value and quality content. Content that makes you stand out from the competition and makes people want to find out more about you. Facebook is a free form of marketing that should be taken advantage of if you know how to do it correctly.

Marketing with Facebook, so how is it done? If you do this right, you can bring your message to thousands of people within the Facebook community with several different applications and options. There are status reports, groups, information boxes, video, and more. Put a link to your blog where they can connect with you and learn more about you. Do a name search of your prospects from your list and connect with them as this will increase your email opening and response rate.

Depending on how you use Facebook marketing techniques and strategies, you can make it or break it with your results. If you take some time to study these carefully, you will be well on your way to great success in social marketing.

The Real Way To Get Facebook Fans For Next To Nothing

If you want to build a Facebook audience cheaply, you need a Facebook Advertising process that works. The process discussed here is simple focused on relevant interest targeting and creating ads that fit them.

An ad with $0.07 cost per fan is the best so far, and this post will to explain how it was done.

That initial title created some buzz, so lets clarify: in the first few hours, the best ad in one campaign was $0.07 CPF. But overall, the first day, it was $0.14 CPF. That entire campaign with three ads, over the course of a week, has been $0.32 CPF for about 332 fans. Keep in mind that not all ads perform this well, and that scaling to hundreds of thousands of fans can increase the cost per fan.

1. Understand what you’re promoting

This is a favorite step, because you get to find out whether your client or the agency you’re working with understands marketing fundamentals. Facebook marketing requires solid marketing fundamentals.

• What existing marketing materials can they show you?
• Who is their ideal prospect?
• Where are these prospects geographically?
• Can you look at their web analytics?

2. Identify logical prospect interest targets

• Most obvious: The brand, the category
• Less obvious: TV shows, music, books related to the service/product/customers
• Geeky: Go to quantcast and check out the demographic info on related websites.

Let’s take Harley Davidson as an example. They already have a bunch of fans, but it’s a fun brand to brainstorm on. The prospects would be people who like:

• Harley Davidson
• Motorcycles
• Riding
• Sons of Anarchy (TV show)
• Lynyrd Skynyrd? Sorta kidding here. But hey, test it.

If we Quantcast the Harley website, we get:

Quantcast says they’re rich middle-aged white guys who didn’t go to college and don’t have kids in the house. That’s not totally true, because there’s a subset of rich educated CEO’s who like to go on vacation wearing a tough biker persona. I only know that because bikers are big in Myrtle Beach. How would you know that? You could Google “harley demographics” and find out 90% of them are men. And that quantcast data was estimated, not “quantified”.

This means you are still going to have to test a lot of targets.

Also, check out forums to learn the lingo… Here’s an HD Forum where someone said

Stuck at work on a beautiful Saturday while all my rowdie friends are in Fayettenam at BBB. Can barely focus ’cause all I’m doing is dreaming of being on my night train ripping through the pigs and soaking up this sun. Then, heading down to Dixon for some frosty cold ones.

Night train, ripping through pigs, beer… here are some interest target ideas.

3. Create ads to test interest targets

For each interest target you need:

• An attention grabbing image
• Simple copy

These will change depending on your objective. If you want $0.07 fans, then create a No-Brainer Ad. The no-brainer ad has these characteristics:

• Destination: Advertise a page by choosing it from the drop-down. Do not enter a URL.
• Image: Appealing picture of the interest target (choose from at least 5-10 images and pick the one that you wanted to look at more closely, or the one you looked at the longest)
• Copy: Write copy like “Click Like if you like [interest target]“

Of course they like it. That’s what you targeted.

If  you add anything to this copy, you reduce the Action Rate (which really is the Like Rate). You can also go for clicks to another website or phone calls- your copy will reflect that. You won’t get as many Likes but that’s not your goal.

When choosing images, think about the prospect’s core desire. Yeah, they want to ride their hog (with their woman) in a big pack of their buddies. But what else? They want to be James Dean and they think their woman is hot even if you don’t. It’s tempting here to use a picture of Marissa Miller on a Harley… that may work- or maybe a picture of a bunch of bikers coming up a highway. Is it the bike? The group? The woman?

Maybe something as hot as this:

Or maybe not- most of these bikers are middle-aged. Do they want to think of themselves this way? Maybe. Probably. But we have to test it.

4. Optimize or pause ads

This is a lot like all other PPC. But you’re going to need a good CTR, and that means greater than 0.1%. Even better if they’re higher, like the ads in the chart to the right ->

• Know your key metric: is it CPC? CTR? CPF?
• Choose a threshold for your key metric. Maybe you want to achieve a $0.07 cost per fan, which may require a $0.03 CPC. But not all your ads will perform at this level. What is an acceptable average? $0.20 CPF? $0.30 CPF? Then definitely scrap ads that cost more than $0.45 CPF.
• Pause all ads that perform worse than your threshold
• Keep testing new ads

That’s all there is to it!

From an original post by Brian Carter