Archive for category: Social Media

We tell B2B focused clients to ignore Facebook,  other than setting up a basic business page and sharing blog posts, which in turn will drive “Bing” search results and ultimately Google. Here’s why:

• Facebook is an Ad Platform disguised as a social network: success on Facebook is not going to happen unless you advertise.
• Organic ‘fan reach” is dropping rapidly, as consumer newsfeeds are too crowded and Facebook is continuing to grow.
• Some businesses are bailing on Facebook due to lack of real organic reach with consumers via status updates.
• Facebook’s platform is designed for consumers not businesses! It’s painful to use for a business. See: round peg in square hole.
• It takes 6-10 hours to set up a Business Page; what’s worse, requires an ongoing dose of Facebook Advertising to connect with and build a community of any size and downstream growth!
• Expect to see huge swings in Reach and Engagement on the order of 50-75% - the biggest impact for these numbers is NOT sharing content and engaging– it’s advertising with Facebook. Remember it’s an an ad platform dressed up with a stream of unending selfies.
• You thought Google Analytics might be a tad complicated or hard to use – wait till you see Facebook’s Insights; simple analysis is easy but deep dives into the data are not.
• Facebook’s Edge Rank Algorithm is highly optimized for images (see: Instagram acquisition) – and you’re competing with every “selfie” geek in the world (consumers) uploading images.
• Facebook has over 100K variables that impact a Newsfeed

Facebook Alternatives for Digital Brands in Need 

Build your brand on Twitter – you’ll find a lot more businesses and execs on this platform. Google monitors “social signals” and indexes (finds and lists) most links shared on Twitter in 24-48 hours. #SEOSuccess

Create a Content Marketing Strategy – this can be as simple as 1-3 blog posts per week that are shared via Twitter and LinkedIn with a built in rinse and repeat cycle. Over the long haul content marketing does so much for a business.

Basic Content Marketing is: great for SEO (Google “sees” frequent updates), drives thought leadership, engages web site visitors, builds brand engagement (comments) & can be socially syndicated forever.

Setup a Business Page and Profiles for all staff on LinkedIn; join targeted Groups and post Blog content, answer questions, become a thought leader on this high-growth business focused platform.

Build a Newsletter list and use email marketing: it still drives stellar conversions for most businesses.

Create Presence and upload PowerPoint Presentations with SlideShare – it’s owned by LinkedIn and a paid Pro Account will drive much more targeted traffic than a
Facebook page.

Google+ has grown exponentially in the last 18 months - it’s great for SEO. Jury is still out on real demonstrable traffic via the channel.

Exec Summary for Consumer Facing Brands Building a Business Page

• You should be using Facebook and we don’t want to equivocate on this point - advertising on Facebook is a great media buy with much lower costs than PPC or most ad networks.
• Whether your a big brand or small business, the key metric for effective social media marketing on Facebook is creating great content and engaging with the community.
• Your profile description should be complete and your web site URL should be showing right at the top so it’s visible to anyone who visits your page, not buried in your text.
• Use Tabs to give visibility for your other social platforms and email newsletter signs ups such as Pinterest, GetResponse (email vendor), YouTube, Awebber; the list is endless - you can have up to twelve tabs with four showing at one time.
• Your Cover Photo should be creative and your Profile picture can/should be your company logo at launch; change these later and rotate images you think add some sizzle to your page.
• Use Advertising on Facebook to accelerate growth for your page. But, don’t rely solely on advertising to build a large community, as engagement rules this platform: Facebook’s Edge Rank Algorithm is tuned to measure how this community is engaging with you: comments, your comments back, virality (shares of your content) and how/when consumers are sharing your content with their friends. Think of ads as the icing on the cake with your content being the foundation.

• It’s a fools game to buy “likes” on this platform. Don’t do it - these consumers (if they are in fact real) will never engage with your brand and if you do this at some point you’ll have to delete your business page and start over.
• Nurture your community on Facebook and cross promote your other social media channels and remember to “rinse and repeat” your content, as only about 20% of your community will see your status updates at one time.
• Hasthtags are the new short form currency of the content realm. Don’t forget to use the same hashtags on Facebook your brand is (hopefully!) using on Twitter and Pinterest. These should be a brand specific hashtag that you can “own” and a series of second tier hashtags. If you are GEO Targeting we love the TrendsMap platform which will give you a visual representation in locales for trending hashtags.
• Use WishPond to drive consumer engagement - they are the market leader in contests, email campaigns and landing pages. Their customer service is excellent, services are low cost/high value.
• Facebook has a built in content filtering capability for businesses: use your “like” pages to curate content you want to see and share. Many brands never even use this built in resource on a business page.

Key takeaways: if your business to business focused Twitter, LinkedIn and maybe G+ may be better channels. But, if your targeting consumers, don’t ignore Facebook. Just know advertising on Facebook is now a critical component to a successful Facebook presence.

 

 

 

 

Most businesses have no idea that social media marketing platforms are not cost free, requiring curated content updates to drive engagement, monitoring the platforms, measuring social ROI and engagement.

A well done LinkedIn profile will take 4-6 hours to create and optimize and should be update on a regular basis. Read more →

Most brands used to think about Pinterest in the Context of Radio Caroline, the now infamous pirate radio station parked offshore in the English Channel, sending out a stream of rock and roll that offset the boring pulse of the BBC.

The signal was great but not a lot of market-share, or “scale” as start up geeks are prone to say.

That’s no longer the case.

Pinterest has morphed into a social media behemoth delivering stellar marketing ROI in the form of traffic, on site eCommerce incremental sales revenue and strong brand awareness.

Pinterest is Now a Must for Consumer Facing Brands

Publishers and brands ignore at your peril: he hard numbers underscore the blistering growth (especially among creative females), BuzzFeed’s second highest generator of referral traffic is now Pinterest!

Based on Comscore’s most recent numbers, Pinterest is in high growth mode (blistering) with an estimated 75M users as of the end of Q-2 2014. And, Pinterest user’s spend money, with an estimated $170. per purchase, contrasted with $95. via Facebook and $71. via Twitter users.

If your brand is targeted educated women buyers (you’ll strangely find lots of boards via men devoted to more mundane images) Pinterest is where you want to be.

With a demographic rich target market, comprising educated, sophisticated females with discriminating taste.

Who is on Pinterest: 52% between the ages of 24-34 (boomers are MIA), 57% have a four year college degree and a 88% have purchased a product they’ve pinned, win an average 105 repins on each image shared.

Content Curation Defines Your Brand on this Social Platform

If your images are primarily self-promotional and product-centric don’t expect repins (brand amplification) or interaction with Pinterest Users.

You can log in to Pinterest and find terabytes of funky images with descriptions written by amateurs with a low signal to noise ratio.

They aren’t doing anything for the brand they represent.

Spend time researching and sharing content - a good rule of thumb for image curation is 1-3 hours for a Pinterest Board with 30-40 images, 30-50% of images should be “lifestyle” oriented.

Check out Pardee Homes via Twitter and Pinterest - their boards are a superb example of stellar content curated and targeted for home buyers in Las Vegas and L.A.

Why Pardee Homes Stands Out

Pinterest Boards all have high quality images, with a good mixture of  Boards featuring their homes and Boards with lifestyle content visually targeted for their customer demographic.

Our mini critique: Pin descriptions are too short, with no hashtags on their pins - long form descriptions drive SEO rankings and deeper engagement on the platform.

Note: your brand will generate a much higher volume of Likes and Repins with well written Pin descriptions, potentially piquing the interest and social engagement of the viewer.

Don’t be boring on Pinterest with your brand - look at the Gucci’s Pinterest presence - it’s all magazine or print centric high quality images, with no soul, no real personality or anything that generates brand impact.

Boring and doesn’t engage the viewer.

 

This is an iconic brand no less and you would think they would invest a lot more in their digital assets - but their Boards are product and model centric, with the personality of a tree stump.

For another digital reference point, Forever21’s Pinterest Boards are just about as boring and mundane as Gucci.

It’s just product centric images, with no real lifestyle branding components (videos!!? MIA) - not what you would expect, especially for a brand that’s targeting a younger brand conscious demographic.

The images are glossy, the models are fashionably draped but the brand resonance doesn’t move the meter much. No videos, music, or how about featuring customers wearing the product. That would be cool and a great way to throw up a contest on Facebook.

Who Wouldn’t Love FreePeople’s Boards?

Free People has a great mix of boards. They are selling product but lifestyle elements boards are part of their content strategy.

There’s an embedded brand statement - something is being conveyed that attracts the visitor and drives engagement.

Board descriptions are wonderfully done: compelling and sophisticated.

Image content has been well curated and thought out.

Images are sophisticated, provocative, tasteful and thematically put together across multiple boards.

The sum is more than this parts.

Pinterest is About Brand Cachet and Good Tactical Marketing Execution 

Pinterest is a full blown social media platform: on site eCommerce, first generation analytics, more robust commenting process, deep linking functionality and more.

Many brands on Pinterest never get any traction just using low cost outsourced labor to create funky images, with a high volume lots of pins marketing strategy, with no real optimization for boards and pins.

That’s not a great marketing strategy.

Pinterest success can be conveyed in two words: content curation. 

Creating dedicated board with thematic content matching your target market, optimized with hashtags and keywords in the Pin and Board titles and long form descriptions.

• Create high quality content comprising images that resonate with the Pinterest community (it’s competitive BTW).
• Don’t be a boring brand (no guts no glory) - creativity has to be embedded in all marketing activities on Pinterest.
• Use Pinterest to leverage content marketing costs: repurposing all Infographics, Images, Staff, Company Functions, Events and Tradeshows, YouTube, Instagram (in some cases), Vine Videos, Blog images.
• Make customers part of your social fabric: use them in images and boards. #becreative
• Be social and engage with the Pinterest community - comment back on other Pins and Boards.
• Refresh your account 3-5 times a week at a minimum with 1-3% new boards as a per centage of your total number of boards.
• Map and assess Pinterest’s analytics against Google - we see some disparity in the former.
• Recognize success on Pinterest is again just content curation in purest form: your own and others.
• Remember, Pinterest is overwhelming female demographic (75% estimated): it’s about cachet, style, being eclectic and targeting the right demographic.
• If consumer facing brand, test ads via Pinterest vs. Facebook.
• Integrate some personality with a mix and match “board strategy,” blending product-centric boards with “lifestyle” boards consistent with your market focus.
• Deep link into your product pages with dedicated pins and a URL string mapping to the right page to drive SEO benefits.
• Download and use the Pinterest browser plugin to curate content as you move around the web.
• Verify your account with Pinterest.
• Twelve great WordPress plugins for increased efficiency.

If your a consumer facing brand you should be on Pinterest and investing $3-5K in creating a quality profile, a minimum of ten boards and 500-1K quality pins.

It’s going to drive traffic, help you position your biz against others (it’s a digital landgrab), generate incremental revenue and help you build a stronger social community.

As above, success on Pinterest is about sourcing and sharing great images resonating with your target market. And, engaging with them on the platform: think social.

Need inspiration?  Coolhunters click here.