Tag Archives: Facebook

19 Social Media Marketing Facts You Need To Know

Every now and then you come across some stats that tell a story better than any how to article ever could. These fast facts will arm you for those corporate arguments that generally start with “why are you spending time on social media” and end with the boss asking for “what’s the ROI?”

  1. $8.3 billion will be spent only on social media advertising in the upcoming year.
  2. Integration of social media with retail businesses will increase the number of people who share products on their personal profiles for up to 60%.
  3. 96% – 89% – 84% The percentage of social media advertisers that measure fans, traffic and mentions.
  4. Almost 46% of the people who want to buy a product will check out the social media page of the company or product they’re trying to buy.
  5. 67% – 78% marks the increase of companies that have specialized social media teams compared to 2012 stats.
  6. 66% internet marketers believe that social media affects their business, but only 9% of them actually know how to measure this impact in their revenue statement.
  7. The total amount of social media marketing budgets will increase its value by 100% over the span of five years from now.
  8. Consumer comments are important because the customers is on the first place after all, but only 20% of those comments get a response and the average time that companies spend in figuring out that response is 11 hours.
  9. 17% of bloggers and internet marketeers plan to improve their podcast or introduce them to their online business.
  10. B2B entities need to improve their social media exposure because 85% of buyers in this sector think that these companies should present their info pack on the social grid.
  11. Facebook stands as the number one influencer when it comes to online purchases in the US. Over 47% of American say that they check the validity of the product on Facebook.
  12. Facebook has a usage rate of over 94% in the B2C sector when it comes to social media platforms.
  13. Two thirds of the marketers that are active on Facebook claim how they’ve gained new customers using paid advertising.
  14. The same number stands for a post engagement in its first 5 hours after publishing.
  15. On the other hand only 34% of marketeers use Twitter to create a list of leads.
  16. 28% of the retweets you see on tweeter happen due to the fact that many marketeers include the “please RT” phrase in their posts.
  17. Google+ is a lonely rider on the Internet, but this is due to change because 19% of online marketeers plan to increase their activity on this social platform.
  18. 40% – 70% – 67% is the number of marketeers that use, want to learn more, plan to increase their activities on Google+.
  19. Users still spend four times more time on Tumblr and Pinterist rather than on Twitter

The original post was written by Aleksandar Spasevski and can be found at 19 Social Media Marketing Facts You Haven’t Known About.

Good Selling!

Image credit: Twin Design | Shutterstock

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Creating an Effective Facebook Brand Marketing Strategy

Facebook marketing strategies chalk talkIf it seems like no one’s visiting your Facebook page, there’s probably a simple reason.

Brand pages that gain viewers and likes have provided a reason for folks to stop in – again and again. There is fresh content, informative videos and conversations with others who are passionate about the brand or its category. Many times they are sharing tips and suggestions that draw in others to the conversation.

In short, these brands have created conversations and a relationship with their audience. Some followers have even become brand advocates who help spread the brand message to others.

Gaining brand traction on Facebook

Facebook brand page frustrationBut what if you have just created your Facebook page? How do you overcome the sheer brand awareness that FMCG companies have? Plus, you probably don’t have much money or content to put up on a Facebook page. Which is why so many pages get started but then fizzle out – a lack of time to create interesting, relevant contact.

Here are several tips that will get you started on building a Facebook page, creating conversations, and over time, building relationships and brand advocates to help you share your story

How you communicate is as important as what you communicate on Facebook

Getting heard on FacebookYour initial Facebook strategy is all about building your foundation:

  • What is your product?
  • How is your product used?
  • What does your company believe in and stand for?

These pillars — Product, Purpose, and Education – actually will make your job easier. They provide the framework to focus your content and keep you from posting silly or irrelevant topics that do nothing to build your brand.

Follow these 8 simple steps to build your online brand marketing strategy on Facebook

  1. Facebook marketing strategy tipsPost often – even if it seems like no one is listening. Build the base that will define your brand, educate and establish your purpose. You want your followers to keep coming back to your page, so make sure that they always have something new to look at.
  2. Use third party content to make your job easier. Mix in videos and articles that are of interest to your audience and fits your brand’s category. The goal is to have variety so that every post is not the same.
  3. Mix in real product education. You can post pictures or video or other materials you may have created to sell your customers. A little goes a long way.
  4. Like other non-competitive brands that are in your category. This could be your customers, for example.
  5. Create excitement. Can you give away your product in a quick promo? Use or celebrate a goal to create a reason or add urgency. Using Likes is popular tool to drive engagement.
  6. Promote a post. If there’s a post that you think deserves a broader audience, then for a minimal amount of money it can be promoted. This maybe a good idea when you run a promotion.
  7. Be topical. With the holidays being around the corner, you can post messages and create graphics that celebrate the holidays or New Year.
  8. Don’t just talk. Listen and respond when others make comments.

The bottom line on creating your Facebook marketing strategy?

Like buttonHaving a specific vision of what you want to achieve with your Facebook marketing strategy will help you make the most progress towards meeting your goals. If you only have a vague idea of what you hope to accomplish, you will find it hard to know whether your strategy is working. Have measurable benchmarks that you can use to evaluate your success.

Not surprisingly, many companies don’t see quick results from their Facebook page marketing efforts – and certainly not sales. It’s easy to say it’s not worth it.

Remember: you are helping someone solve a problem where your product is a possible solution. You are not selling them why your product is the best solution. Keep this in mind and over time, you will see real and measurable results.

Good Selling!

Using Content Marketing to Drive Sales

Content Marketing Is Driving Brand ConversationsSocial media offers brands a set of inexpensive tools that can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth and, properly managed, can deliver measurable results.

You can use content marketing to create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products.

Use a two-pronged approach to creating awareness and driving interest and sales

To do this successfully, you need to take advantage of both a top down and a bottom up approach to social media.

  • Your top down strategy is to create broad awareness and credibility among experts and consumers
  • Your bottom up goal is to drive consumer awareness and engagement through grassroots and in-market activities

How to spark and drive sustainable conversation and recommendation

Social media platforms for your content marketingHere’s how to spark and drive sustainable conversation and recommendation through social media:

  • LISTEN:  Track and identify key trends, stories, posts and influencers
  • DEVELOP:  Build content that makes it easier for consumers to share and recommend your brand
  • ENGAGE:  Work together with consumer influencers to drive discussion, posts, reviews, give feedback, conduct contests and share recommendations with others
  • OPTIMIZE:  Ensure both new and existing content is tagged to make brand discussions easily searchable and sharable
  • PROTECT:  Establish a protocol for responding to negative word-of-mouth and mitigating damage from competitors and brand detractors
  • MEASURE:  Build-in metric that demonstrate the impact of engagement at each point in the Conversation Engine

The most important step in building your social media foundation is creating a “sharable story”

Sharable story is like an elevator pitchA shareable story is basically an elevator pitch story with messaging that connects your key points together in everyday, natural language.

The sharable story shapes all engagement to ensure the story you want to tell is infused into all of your conversations.

Become the leading expert, resource, authority and trusted partner in your space

Next, you need to engage leading industry eminents across all relevant vertical channels. Find and engage those individuals who can influence people to consider your category and become interested in your brand.

Screen influencers using rigorous criteria to ensure identifying only the leaders:

  1. Reputation
  2. Reach
  3. Visibility
  4. Accessibility

Remember, these influencers are going to give you credibility so focus on engaging the right online influencers.

Track & identify key trends, stories, posts and influencers

Track & identify key trends, stories, posts and influencersThrough either subscription-based tools or through publicly available free tools, develop a daily monitoring routine to identify opportunities, influencers, and key trends.

Create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products

Social media platforms for your content marketing

Now you are ready to activate your online social media channels. You want to create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products.

Consider doing this in stages so you don’t overwhelm your team or confuse consumers by creating online content but not having the time or energy to keep it fresh and current. A possible phased approach is to launch on Facebook and Twitter initially.

Once you have Facebook and Twitter up and running smoothly, and the team is comfortable managing and posting content, it’s time to expand to additional channels like Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Google+, etc.

These channels allow you to broaden your content and create additional content that your created and control to help further enrich the consumer education process and provide opportunities to link into your customer websites with rich content.

Your goal is to drive fans and followers with these two sites. Remember, these sites require you to engage regularly. That means you need to manage and moderate daily, especially since you will quickly find consumers using these sites to post customer service, quality or warranty issues.

Don’t worry if there are negative comments. Ultimately your goal is to bury these comments under an avalanche of helpful tips and advice on where and how to buy your brand. It’s this kind of news that will ultimately shape your brand conversations.

Focus on building assets that make the benefits of owning your brand shareable and portable

This will allow you to leverage the full capabilities of online multimedia sharing sites to maximize visibility and reach.

  • Action Words Bullhorn Megaphone Motivation MissionCreate checklists for occasions or life events that should include your brand
  • Build video demonstrations and distribute to YouTube and beyond through services such as TubeMogul
  • Build photo libraries that illustrate specific benefits of safe ownership and distribute to publicly indexed networks like Pinterest, Flickr and Instagram
  • Encourage consumer-generated testimonials (stories, videos, photos) – leveraging the capabilities of Facebook and Pinterest for running sweepstakes and contests

A good way to draw consumers to your social media sites is to host contests. It’s a straight forward way to build followers of your brand and ultimately to have them “opt-in” to being open to receiving email offers from you for new products, services or promotions.

Create and share content regularly that engages consumers and encourages them to share, recommend and, ultimately, buy

The final step is to measuring the impact of your online social media efforts.  A great way to do that is with a measure call an Earned Digital Engagement or EDE.   Earned Digital Engagements are the metric you can use to measure the direct impact of your online social media efforts, independent of natural conversation.

Using an EDE methodology, you’re able to provide a comparable measure of the number of people reached online, but this form of measurement also accounts for their action.  The EDE measures the number of people reached through a brand’s social media efforts across channels – from blogs to Facebook to Twitter and YouTube and Flickr.

An earned engagement consists of the number of people influenced by an interaction with your brand that results in a:

  • Post
  • Tweet
  • Photo
  • Video
  • Or public Facebook engagement

Forrester Research said it best: “…interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.”