Archive for the ‘Facebook Marketing’ Category

How do you know if your Facebook page is helping your business? A quick look at the page will tell you a little. Do you have more fans, more comments, more “likes”? If you do, then you’re reaching more people. Facebook offers “impressions”, which tell you the number of times an item you posted was shown. You can also view the page’s “insights”, the statistics about the number of monthly users, the number of likes and dislikes and posts. Just click See All in the Insights box on the left of the page. Surveys, coupons and sweepstake prizes can also help track the success of your page.

Social Networking is not a panacea, nor is it magic. It is an inexpensive and powerful way to promote your business. But you have to put the same amount of work, thought, care and consistency into it that you would with any marketing scheme in order for it to benefit your business.

Contact us for help. This is OUR business. This is what we do for a living, and we can help you benefit from this great advertising tool.

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So you’ve set up your Facebook page. Looks nice, eh? Like the billboard the company put up in the old days. Wrong! This is not static advertising. This gives you the opportunity to offer deals and coupons, keep customers up-to-date on company news and on new products. Add some photos, maybe a video. Ask questions, take polls, schedule special events. The idea is to get your fans reading and talking about your page.

You may want to have an employee in charge of ensuring that the content is always fresh, someone who can get a feel for what customers are saying and what they want…a sort of market research.

A word of caution here. Don’t overload or spam your fans with too much information. There’s a balance here. But whatever you do, engage them. Make sure you do something with your page to make it vibrant and to keep readers coming back.

If you don’t have an employee to spare to work on Facebook and other social networking sites, or you don’t have time yourself, we provide services to keep websites, blogs and Facebook pages constantly updated. Send us the information you want out there and, for a small fee we can do the rest.

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Here’s a new twist, or should we say tweet, on business and social media. Food trucks have discovered ways to notify their customers of their current location by using Facebook and Twitter. They also use social media to tell customers about daily market specials, promotions and hours of operation. They get feedback on food and suggestions for changes in the menu. Whether it’s ice cream, hot dogs or barbeque, these mobile businesses are digitally savvy. Whether your business is mobile or static, social media can be a powerful engine. Call us to help you take advantage of its power.

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Remember small towns and little neighborhoods in big cities where the local vendors knew your name, knew what you liked, where they ‘cared’ about you? A business lived and died by word of mouth. Life changed. Small town centers failed and moved to strip shopping malls. City dwellers moved to the suburbs. Businesses stopped caring. But according to social media guru, Gary Vaynerchuk in his latest book, The Thank You Economy, along came social media and turned the clock back. The author views the world now as a giant small town where businesses have to create that ‘caring’ attitude towards their customers. Anyone on Facebook or Twitter can type in their buying experience, local or not, with the possibility of starting a movement that could make or break a business. Greed isn’t good anymore. In the 24-hours-a-day Internet-connected world, you’ve got to ‘care’ more about your customers than your competition does. Vaynerchuk promotes qualities like good manners, patience, integrity, authenticity and above all, transparency, the art of being totally open and honest with the buying public. Vaynerchuk’s model is pro-consumer and he’s the first to say that not all businesses are on board yet. But he bets that they soon will be. Do you know what your customers are saying about you on Facebook?

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A social media marketing company, Syncapse, surveyed 4,000 people who have “Liked” 20 of the top marketing brands.

Companies are recognizing their need to understand the value of their fans, people who “Like” their products. A key question is “What do fans do for the company?”

• Fans spend money on the top marketing brands themselves.
• They also show a level of loyalty – they will buy again and again.
• They recommend the product by “word-of-mouth”, which includes their voice for talking and their fingers for social media.

Each of these factors adds to the value of a someone who “Likes” a product.

Social Channels Impact Marketing

The Syncapse report explains the importance of monitoring social media conversations:

Brands need to understand the causal relationship between their social programs and its effect on key performance indicators. Understanding Earned Media Value generated by a social base is a direct indicator of the amount of word-of-mouth conversation about a brand. Understanding Community Health is a leading indicator of the future sustainability of a community and the ability to nurture high value customers. Mining the conversation and understanding the tone and focus provide insights into the association fans have with a brand and how marketers can use such allegiance to their advantage.

While understanding the value of a fan is very complicated, many companies are developing ways to do it. Over time these measurements will be tested and their analysis will improve.

Click here to see the Syncapse report.

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Huck Huckabee

The “Like” Button On Non-Facebook Websites

The “Like” button was first introduced in April of this year. It has been implemented by over 350,000 websites and is still growing incredibly fast. Media sites were the initial users of the “Like” button but now it is being used by all kinds of sites.

E-commerce sites like E-Bay and Best Buy are using the “Like” button to promote their website content. But the jury is still out on the value to them.

To benefit from the “Like” button businesses need to get their site visitors to like their pages. Some Facebook users use it while others do not. The question is, do those users want to have an impact on who will read the content they read. People participating with the like button can be a powerful influence on their friends.

Facebook Is Keeping Their Data To Themselves

One thing that is making the “Like” button hard to put a value on is the lack of data available on who is Liking your website content. At some point Facebook may make this easier for us to access.

Click the play buttone below to watch the WSJ video on “Like”:

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Have you put the “Like” button on any of your websites? If so, are you getting any responses?

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Ford Explorer Introduced on Facebook and YouTube

Today Ford Motor Company is presenting the 2011 Ford Explorer on Social Media. This marks a major marketing change for the automobile industry.

On Ford’s Facebook page you can click on the “Reveal” tab and see 12 YouTube videos connected to the page. The videos are listed on a schedule. Their first video was available to view at 12:01 am. I am writing this article at 3:00 pm and at this time seven of the videos are available to view and five more are scheduled through the rest of the day.

Ford now has 48,919 people listed as “Likes” on their page. That is far above their goal of 30,000 fans. Keep an eye on this and see how it grows through the day.

Ford’s Facebook Page

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A Business Posting Daily

SteelMaster Buildings is a great example of how a business can use Facebook on a regular basis. In May they made 33 posts on their Facebook page.

So what could a business selling metal buildings do on facebook? Well, SteelMaster does everything from offering advice on how to choose a building to playing games on their Facebook posts.

As I’m writing this hurricane season has just started. So SteelMaster put a page on their website about what their buildings have done for their customers in bad storms. The page was simple to create and focuses on a current event of the season. Then they made a post on their Facebook page and linked the message back to that page on their website. From there, who knows, the visitors may have looked at other pages on the SteelMaster website.

Another item they posted in May was a game where visitors were asked to find the difference between two, seemingly identical, photographs. And that photograph was of one of their metal buildings. People who saw the item in one photo that was missing in the other got their name put in a hat. Then they drew from those names for a $25 VISA gift card.

These are two neat ways SteelMaster has generated traffic to their Facebook page and their Website. And they had several other items posted in May. Most were short and sweet messages with links to more information back to their website. So you know they generated traffic.

Visit SteelMaster Buildings Facebook page today and see what is going on now.

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