One of the main reasons that I am glad that they aren’t around anymore is that no one, including me, connected with this project ever asked the question: What do you want this site to do for you? Of course now I ask the question as a matter of routine.

What I am noticing now that time has passed, business owners are doing the same thing with social media. ” We need a social media presence” and that’s the end of the sentence, and I suspect, the end of the thought process. That’s unfortunate, because with social media, you’re playing with fire.

If you plan to launch a new business, one of the things you need to consider is keeping your commercial space safe and secure. It is therefore advised to work with fire watch kansas guards to address your fire safety needs.

Brand Love

So how does a company build a community around their brand? There are a few steps, and not all of them are simple.

Define your brand as a persona: What does your brand like? Dislike? Stand for? Stand against? What is the ethos of your brand? What is your brand promise? Your brand story? And what kind of car would it drive? Some of these questions sound silly, but you’ll need to look at your brand as an individual actor amongst a group of actors in the social media ecosystem.

Once you have defined your brand as a persona, then develop a list of keywords that have a connection to your brand. This is a good time to break out that mind-mapping app and gather people who know your brand and whose judgement you trust. The more diverse the group the better.

Now that you have found your brand’s persona, who are the people that would gravitate towards the products and services that represent your brand at it’s best? What do they like? Dislike? Stand for? Once you have identified that audience, then come up with the keywords that connect to that audience.

See how those keywords mesh. When you combine those lists, you may come up with new keywords. Make that your master list.

Now, if you haven’t already, set up your social media touch points; Facebook and Twitter at a minimum. Once those are set up, make sure that all of your other touch points mention your social media presence. Current customers can be a great way to build your fan base.

Okay. So everything is set up to go after new fans. Four steps:

Invite: Through your social media and other channels, invite your target audience to join your fan page or follow you on Twitter. You can find these people by searching the Twitterverse or Facebook using your previously developed keywords and see who comes up. Engage them honestly in your authentic brand voice and ask them to check you out. Some will, some won’t. The trick is to keep at it.

Incentivize: Integral to the invite process is to create an incentive for them to like your brand or follow you. This incentive needs to align with the values of your brand and the values of your audience. If your brand is aligned against an environmentally-conscious group, perhaps a $1.00 contribution to reduce their carbon footprint for every like might get them to sign up.

Impress: Show your audience how authentic your brand is and gain credibility with this group and their trust. Give examples of when you’re putting your money where your mouth is, or show real world examples of how your product is helping people just like them.

Interact: Here is where many businesses drop the ball. Once you have initiated a conversation with your audience, you must continue to communicate with them and respond to them as if you are in a real conversation (because you are). You must also remember that your brand is just one of the people speaking in this many-to-many communications model. Of those that actually try your product or service, make sure that they are blown away. If you do create an impression on (hopefully delight) a customer, invite them (again) to make their thoughts known on your social media page, regardless of their experience. They will feel heard. Through this process, you will create brand advocates who will make the job of getting new sign-ups easier.

Remember those keywords? When you make a post, any post, make sure that at least one of those keywords are included in every post or tweet. Make good use of the hash-tag (#) in Twitter AND Facebook. This will make it easier for others to find you. Over time, your brand will become associated with those keywords and in the minds of your new, growing, vibrant fan base.

Mind map of social media strategy for Celebrations on Market

I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on the subject and any details about your experience creating/maintaining your social media strategy.

So let me give you a little more background: The user is presented with a Facebook ad that directs them to a landing page within the site. It is not a dedicated landing page per se, it is a page within the site that is germane to the ask in the ad. The user is instructed to read an excerpt from the author’s latest book. When a user clicks on the excerpt link, then we consider that a conversion goal achieved.

Landing Page for Facebook ads

This is a landing page screenshot for Cal’s Facebook ad campaign. In an effort to boost conversion rates, I added the badge on the first read. So far the numbers have gotten a small boost, running at about 11 15% since implementation. Actual landing page.

Conversion rates have been running from 0% on some days to over 20% on others, coming in at around 11 15% on most days. The research that I have done has indicated that I might be in the right range, although this is not quite a sales pitch nor is it an opt in. What I have noticed is that users are exploring the rest of the site which is good for brand engagement.

Email marketing opt-ins are coming in steadily at 1 per day, so a nice little audience is building which will make future marketing efforts that much easier.

More to come!

On location-based social sites, also known as “lo-so”s, like Facebook, Yelp! and Loopt, a user can “check in” to establishments near him/her and the savvy business creates incentives/rewards for doing so.

Tijuana Taco Shop is offering 50% off your meal for liking them, thereby creating a fan base that will advocate their brand, and 10% off your meal every time you check in, creating incentives and a pathway for deeper brand engagement.

Brand advocacy is then handled by the user who will transmit Tijuana Taco Shop’s message through their social network of friends, just like I did to my social network.

The beauty of this is that there is a non-existent barrier to entry and the initial cost of acquisition will more than pay for itself over time. The initial offer is presented on site to maintain control of traffic and therefore costs. Muy inteligente!

I’ve attached a photo.

The smaller the audience, the more specific and compelling the marketing message can be. The practice of delivering messages to very small audiences is called microtargeting.

As a marketer that serves small businesses, I rely on Facebook’s ability to make microtargeting easier. I am currently working on a second round of Facebook ads for my client, author Cal Smith. With some research, we were able to microtarget based on similar authors.

Originally, we lumped all of those people together and delivered a fairly generic message. The ads performed fairly well, around .028% CTR. But the cost per click began to rise steadily and conversions are very low. So once that campaign ran its course, we looked at new ways to reach that market.

We broke the larger group into smaller groups, groups that centered on one author, not all of them. We selected the three authors that are most similar in style to Cal and created targeted messages that let the reader know why they were seeing that message.

So far, the ads are performing splendidly. CPC is extremely low and the CTR is close to .16%! I’m sure that it will level off, but so far, Cal and I are pleased.

Check back for updates!

If you missed my first posting, I hypothesized that icons may do better in attracting attention and boosting CTRs than a traditional image due to image fatigue on Facebook.

So here is the setup:

3 sets of A/B ads, one with an icon, the other with an image. The copy will change slightly between them, but the general tone will be the same. One set will be a national campaign to generate fans for the client’s person page, the other two will be limited to geographic locations, in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region. I’ll be reporting on each of the ad’s performance and the loser after 10 days will be dropped. Stay tuned for the numbers!

UPDATE:

Creative Face-off (A/B testing results):

The ads are performing remarkably well, and of course, the results are inconclusive about what is drawing more attention. A well-shot (thanks) photo of the author for the fan page is going like gangbusters and beat out a graphic of the book.

A graphic of a skull rising in the Carribean beat out a picture of a nuclear explosion for the ad meant to get people to the main brand site to buy books.

Change in strategy:

Originally, the book ads were concentrated in geographic locations known for sailing. We targeted the area around Providence, RI and Annapolis, MD. While the ads performed fairly well, we noticed a high bounce rate on the landing page.  We’re pretty sure that the landing page is not the problem, since there is only two CTAs on the page. We traded demographic segmentation for behavioral segmentation.

We re-aligned the ad to the same population as the fan acquisition ad and so far, CTR is improved and visitors are responding better to the CTAs on the landing page. Hopefully those hits will turn into sales, but there, only time will tell. Stay tuned!

So both of these ads are running and are targeted to the same group of people: those that are 30 years old and above, who are not already fans of M19 MEDIA and live within 25 miles of Wilmington, DE. That comes out to about 186,000 people. I am reaching about a tenth of those people, but that is okay. I am only working with a $50 budget for the entire campaign, which was what my budget app recommended. I want to keep the reach small.

Facebook has added a Social Reach category, and it tells you the number of people that are friends of current fans. Your fan base can be leveraged to boost your click through rate (CTR) without having to do anything!

So up until two days ago, the icon was winning hands down in all categories, posting a healthy .039% CTR, kicking a** in impressions and social connections. Now the image is having a late surge with a mind-boggling .057% CTR (that number will certainly decline). There is still some time left in the campaign, and after tweaking the amount per click that I am bidding we’ll see how the numbers will pan out. Stay tuned!

UPDATE:

The campaign is winding down. With only $10 left in the lifetime budget, there’s little that can happen now to drastically change the statistics. The icon is the winner! Posting a healthy .020% CTR, it beat the image hands down. The image achieved a respectable .014% CTR.

While this is no means an exhaustive study, it does mean that mixing up your creative is the best way to maintain viewer interest and determine which approach is resonating with your audience. Test, test and then test again until you get your desired results.

Hang Time

I have had responses to Facebook posts, both professional and personal, weeks after the original post. That works doubly so when it comes to pictures. So I put out a message and others will respond when they get around to it, which is just fine by me. I want people to respond and for most messages, I don’t care about the time frame. And when you’re cruising a page that you haven’t been to in a while, a month old post is not quite as stale as a month old email. Think about that the next time you have something to say that isn’t time related.

Other addicts

Facebook addicts are celebrated. They are called thought leaders. I have a friend that will comment on my posts regardless of the time of day. She is always on. The good thing about that is that those people that are addicted to Facebook are also addicted to others that are addicted to Facebook…you see where I am going with this. If you develop a message that your addicts will respond to, you can guarantee that they will share this with others. Having a post get “picked up” is what every Facebooker lives for. Find those people and get them on board with what you’re doing and you’ll reach people you never thought you could, while if you need some sort of support you can always talk to a princessemzs4xo virtual girlfriend online.

It’s still cheap

Free, for the most part. And Facebook is still the cheapest way to build an online brand that I have found. I ran an ad for the holidays to get people to start design projects before the end of the year. The ad did not perform very well. I had few click-throughs, but well over 100,000 impressions. Was the creative bad? Probably not. The timing? Probably. The demo? Certainly not. The point being is that you don’t need to have a click-through stampede to build brand recognition. This isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but I don’t buy a lot of fast food, but I remember their ads, and by extension, their brands. By opting to pay for clicks instead of impressions, I get some brand recognition for free.

It’s better than a phone call

Don’t get me wrong: calling people is still a great way to connecting, but when you need an answer or a volunteer, sending a blast through Facebook is a great way to get the word out without activating a phone tree. M19 MEDIA hosts an Art Loop stop here in Wilmington, and I use Facebook to find new artists. How long would it have taken me to call people that I know that may or may not be connected in the art world…well, you get the idea. Another plus is that, like texting, a Facebook post is short, sweet and to the point. No chance of getting conversation drift like you would on a phone conversation.

(Unscientific) Focus Group, anyone?

One of my favorite activities on my fan page is to come up with some logo comps and share it with my fans. My fans (God, how I love them) come from all walks of life: some are friends from high school doing me a solid, others are professional links, others still are current and future clients. Showing my work on my fan page to get feedback is good business. Go ahead. Take an idea for a spin with your fans and see how it plays. Maybe they will provide a new twist that will make it a best-seller. Future clients will be impressed with the work that you’re doing and it may nudge them closer to doing business. Current clients may find new needs for your services. And your high school friends can remind you have far you’ve come as a professional.

Just fall backwards…

I tell my students every session that unless your audience trusts your brand, you’re fried. Pack it in. The great thing about Facebook is that there is a certain amount of trust that people give to the medium. Not to say that you shouldn’t be careful about what you post and the information that you make public, but the messages that you get from a friend on Facebook convey weight similar to the sought-after referral. “I know a guy who does that…” can mean big bucks for a small business. Use your friends/fans as referral sources. They can help you get your foot in an otherwise locked door.

It’s still the future

There’s still nothing that rivals Facebook in its reach, and they are constantly providing more. Even though it’s not even a decade old, it has transformed the way we work, live and do business. It’s still hip. It’s still effective. It’s still the future. Now that people have the opportunity to converse with each other and their brands, that genie is not going back in the bottle. Embrace it. Own it. Make simple steps to get your brand out there in the mix.

Or just drop us a line and we can do it for you.