Social Advertising Archives

The Numbers Behind Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

October 10, 2013/by Corey Padveen

The numbers in this infographic help explain why Twitter’s IPO is such big news.

Last week, the biggest news to come out of the world of social media was undoubtedly that Twitter announced its IPO. The microblogging platform is looking to raise $1 billion, and the numbers behind Twitter help justify that price tag. One of our loyal blog subscribers shared this infographic with us.

For a long time, a certain stigma has been associated with Twitter by those that did not (and do not want to) understand it. It was seen as a hub for celebrities to tell the world what they were eating, and devoted fans to reach out to them. Anyone familiar with the network knows that this is not the case.

The numbers behind Twitter, showcased in the infographic below, explain why the network is worth every penny that it is looking to get. There are over two billion searches on Twitter every day. On Thursdays, the popular #ThrowBackThursday hashtag has the potential to reach over 30 million users. A proper Twitter strategy can mean major reach for the right brands.

With the new advertising features Twitter has rolled out, business applications are certainly growing.

Take a look at the infographic below and let us know which fact or figure you find most interesting. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Source: The Numbers Behind Twitter

5 Steps to Make Your Company a Social Business

September 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There are a few key steps your brand needs to take in order to be considered a ‘Social Business’.

In the last segment of this week’s ‘Social Business’ theme, we thought we would focus on the steps a brand needs to take in order to make itself a ‘Social Business’.

Some of these steps may seem redundant or a little too simple, but the reality is that every one builds off of the last, and the transition of a business into the social era needs to follow a clear outline. Making your business social is not simply about registering your company on Facebook or LinkedIn (although that is among the five steps); there is much more to it.

Step 1: Determine Your Social Business Goals

What is it your brand wants to achieve by becoming social? Like any other business endeavour, you need to set goals for the social functions of your business.

Some goals are going to be obvious and fairly superficial; you might want to increase sales, or improve customer service by offering Social Care. The key is to focus on the business applications of going social.

Every one of the objectives you set for yourself when it comes to making your business social should have a focus on creating value (Social Equity) in both the short and long terms for your brand.

Step 2: Bring Your Brand to the Socialsphere

Figure out what networks are going to help you best achieve the goals you have set for yourself and create accounts for your business on these networks.

Not every network will be right for your brand. Pinterest is a great resource, but only for certain industries. Not everyone is going to derive benefits from Pinterest. Figure out where the audiences that you want to target are active, and share you content with them.

Step 3: Engage Your Growing Audience

Your content strategy is going to help you determine what generates engagement for your three key audiences on social media that we discussed earlier this week. Once you have put together a proper content strategy, you are going to want to start engaging with your audience in order to keep them coming back.

People have an inherently short attention span when it comes to the web. With the virtually endless amount of content out there, you need to give them a reason to keep coming back to you. Being an active brand in the conversation is going to be key when it comes to building a ‘Social Business’.

Step 4: Leverage Big Data

Everything you do on social channels – from blogging to tweeting – is going to provide you with extremely valuable data that you should be incorporating into your strategy.

Simply sharing content is only half of the process – and not the more important half. Study your data, learn about your audience, customers and business and use that data, maybe in the form of Responsive Branding, in order to grow and expand your business in existing markets that you have yet to cultivate.

Step 5: Go Beyond Marketing

Your marketing and advertising departments might be the driving force behind your social selling strategy, but they should not be the only departments active on social media.

People do not necessarily want to engage with a faceless brand. Your C-suite and other departments should be engaging on social platforms and growing their audiences as well. In order to become a truly ‘Social Business’, it is going to take a lot more than your brand being on social. Every department needs to embrace the opportunities social offers.

Follow these five steps and it won’t be long before your find that you are a part of a ‘Social Business’.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s special segment on Social Business! Be sure to let us know what you think. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Media Measurability

September 20, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media measurability is one of the driving elements behind the value of social media.

There are few things that social marketers hate more than hearing the phrase, “You can’t measure social media.” Virtually every single aspect of your social media marketing initiatives is measurable, and it is this social media measurability that can add tremendous value to your business.

Consider other forms of marketing. Has there ever been an initiative or campaign as tangibly measurable as social media? It’s very hard to think of one. The Social Equity that this social media measurability offers can be considerable for quite a few reasons.

Justify Your Costs

When it comes to marketing and advertising, there are some initiatives that we simply have to trust blindly. With the exception of focus groups and questionnaires, it is hard to say whether a particular initiative worked.

When it comes to social media, you can easily justify the costs that it incurs. The ability to measure every single element on social and see exactly how your activity translates into Social Equity means that there is no longer a need to blindly trust an initiative. Justify every penny you spend, and showcase why a certain budget is required.

See Tangible Results

In keeping with the theme of the previous point, every single aspect can be measured in order to ensure that every single aspect is performing.

By incorporating the concept of Responsive Branding into the mix, you can make real-time modifications to your social media marketing initiatives in order to ensure that your program produces the highest possible returns.

Watch Your Business Grow

Another great feature that comes with social media measurability is the fact that you can see exactly how your business is growing online. Of course, Google Analytics provides insights into your activity online. But setting up your Google Analytics Social Dashboard and incorporating the performance monitored there with your other measurement criteria will mean watching how and where your audience is growing most rapidly.

The concept of Social Equity relates to using social media to build your business. As your social audience and results increase, so does the long-term value added to your company.

Everything on social is measurable. There is virtually no feature of a social media program that cannot be measured in some form or another.

What is your favorite measurement criteria on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Responsive Branding

September 6, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media offers great opportunities for Responsive Branding™, and that can add a lot of value to your business.

What is Responsive Branding™? The concept of Responsive Branding™ relates to making brand and marketing modifications based on the preferences, comments and reactions of your audience.

If there is one thing that people are not shy about when it comes to social media, it is letting the world know how they feel – about anything. This includes your brand. In his book, Socialnomics, Erik Qualmann notes that, “The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company’s flaws; the key questions is how quickly you address these flaws.”

Responsive branding is the way your company can address these flaws. As you monitor market reactions to your marketing and advertising efforts, you can make modifications in real time in order to appeal to the tastes of the market. Few other platforms offer such a feature, and the benefits can be astronomical.

Real Time Adaptation

Imagine knowing exactly how the market would react to a new marketing initiative before launching it. Sure, there are focus groups, and other conventional marketing and advertising techniques, but these are time-consuming, expensive and may not entirely accurate.

Responsive branding allows your brand to reach out to the market and gain their insights before the official launch of a program. A great, very recent example of this is Yahoo!’s logo redesign.

The search giant has been rebranding since Marissa Mayer took over roughly one year ago. Recently, they decided to present a new logo to the world. But were they going to have a creative team work on it behind closed doors and present what they thought was the best option? Of course not! Why waste money, time and resources doing that when you can let the market tell you which of your options is best for them?

Social Media Polling

As noted above, focus groups are expensive, difficult and not the most accurate. Social media eliminates much of the difficulty associated with focus groups and conventional testing.

Reach out to your audience on social networks. Your fans, followers and subscribers are your market. These are the people that have expressed an interest in your product or service and it is this demographic you should be catering to. Once again, the financial benefits associated with social media polling are significant.

Essentially, the Social Equity derived from Responsive Branding™ is obvious. A slew of new opportunities presents themselves with regards to your overall marketing and branding strategies thanks to your social media efforts.

Does your brand engage in Responsive Branding™? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Targeted Campaigns on Social Media

June 21, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Targeted campaigns on social media provide certain unique benefits that can add significant value to your business.

There was a time when a few carefully placed television ads would reach 80% of your targeted audience. Those days, however, are long gone, and to reach those same numbers today you would, in most cases, need to spend far more than your budget.

Targeted campaigns on social media, however, provide similar capabilities at a fraction of the cost, and generate a significant degree of Social Equity.

Targeted campaigns generate Social Equity for your business in two distinct ways. First, while your reach may not be extremely broad, it is far more specific than with conventional campaigns and therefore generates higher conversion rates. Second, targeted campaigns on social media are far more cost effective than other types of marketing and advertising that generate similar results – and those are few and far between.

Value Added

As noted above, the ability to target a very specific audience leads to higher conversion rates. When you are able to tailor an ad specifically for the audience that it is reaching, you can expect that the engagement levels will be significantly higher than a case where a generic ad is shared to a mass audience.

Of course, marketers and advertisers try to do this on other media as well. Using the available data, campaigns are launched to specific audiences wherever possible. However, on social media the ability to narrow down your targeted audience is far easier and the results of a well-executed campaign will be much higher.

One example of this is a social media case study we looked at recently about Vestas, a wind energy provider. Vestas put together a very targeted campaign and sent it to 50 companies. For each executive or employee that came into contact with the campaign, Vestas had created a version of the campaign targeted specifically towards that company. The results were high engagement, significant conversion and the campaign was an overall success.

Costs Saved

The second area in which Social Equity is derived from targeted campaigns is in the costs that are saved from engaging in this type of campaign on social networks.

As noted at the beginning of this article, reaching 80% of your desired audience was easy at the dawn of television, but today the cost is far too prohibitive. On social media, however, you can still reach your targeted audience at a fraction of the cost.

The ability to launch targeted campaigns geared towards engaging your desired audience for a relatively low cost (compared to reaching the same audience with other media) is a big value. Increasing your exposure and growing your business at rates comparable to those that involve significant ad spending will benefit your business significantly in the long-run.

Often, Social Equity is as much about how much you are saving as it is about how much you are making.

Have you executed any targeted campaigns on social media? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!

Monitoring Your Online Reputation [INFOGRAPHIC]

June 3, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Are you actively monitoring your online reputation?

Reputation management is of growing importance online, and your reputation can be tarnished with as little as one negative post in the right place, by the right person. In order to avoid such detrimental events from taking place, you need to be on top of your game and effectively monitoring your online reputation.

There are a few figures that you might find surprising. For instance, while it might not be shocking to see that 42% of U.S. adults have performed a search on an individual or a brand before doing business with that person or company, it might surprise to read that 45% of those people discovered something online that changed their perception, and ultimately their decision to do business with that person or brand. That’s an incredibly powerful tool!

It should also be noted that among the statistics in the infographic below, one of the most important to take into account is the fact that 92% of consumers trust opinions that they have seen online. This means that no matter how much of an outlier one customer’s bad experience might be, nearly everyone who reads will consider it when making their decision. Managing and monitoring your online reputation – whether it is on social networks, blogs, forums or other media – is an extremely important task.

The detailed infographic below highlights said importance of managing and monitoring your online reputation, and provides a few great tips that can help you effectively maintain a positive image for your brand online.

Take a look and let us know if you are properly monitoring your online reputation. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Big Value in Company Pages

May 10, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social Equity receives a major boost with the added value from company pages on different networks.

From LinkedIn to Facebook, there is a way to feature your company, its services, history and expertise on almost every network. the result? Major Social Equity.

In this week’s Social Equity segment, we look at how company pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube add value to your business.

Facebook and Google+

We all know about Pages on Facebook and Google+. But with so much taking place on the networks, it is easy for your content to get lost in the noise. The most frustrating part? You might have some great content and a product that attracts a lot of potential customers. Having Facebook and Google+ Pages allows those leads to find everything you are offering in one central place.

Facebook takes a lot of criticism for their EdgeRank algorithm. But the truth is, EdgeRank provides a means of filtering out the noise so that those who “Like” your page, product and content have all of the information you share to the pages featured on their news feed.

The value in Facebook and Google+ Pages is simple: these are hubs that allow reciprocal engagement between your brand and fans in a central place while offering you a chance to share content towards which they have expressed an interest. On the plus side (that’s a pun, considering the point that follows) +1 and shares from your pages add a considerable benefit to your SEO, which further derives value to your business.

LinkedIn

The Company Page on LinkedIn is the strongest in terms of adding value to your business.

First, there is the Services tab. The ability to showcase your products and services to an engaged audience disrupts the conventional model of print advertising. Furthermore, the ability to link these sections to appropriate landing pages means both the ability to create backlinks and the ability to drive sales and traffic through LinkedIn.

Second, there is the ability to build a following on your page (as with other networks) and share content to those followers in an effort to drive new business. Unlike Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn offers the ability to broadcast and showcase your business to the engaged audience following your page. Users are following you knowing that LinkedIn is a medium in which companies aim to derive new business, and an active, engaging and popular page translates into Social Equity.

YouTube

A YouTube channel is an important feature, and one that can be very beneficial both in terms of its value to your business’s image and your overall Social Equity.

The ability to centralize all of your videos means two things: first, viewers can easily find your videos and, on the channel, discover more about your business and research your company further, outside of YouTube. Second, the optimization of a channel and your videos can be a tremendous SEO tool. Lone videos in the YouTube universe can easily disappear. With a discoverable, optimized channel, your business is easily showcased to your audience in video form.

Effectively, the true value of all of these pages lies in the disruption they cause to conventional marketing. No longer are you required to focus on print marketing. These pages are your corporate portfolio, and they are live, evolving elements that continually showcase your business.

In which social media company pages do you find the most value? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

4 Tips to Creating a Great Facebook Ad Campaign

May 6, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Facebook can be a successful, cost-effective channel on which to promote your business, and these tips will help you create a great Facebook Ad campaign.

We see Facebook Ads every time we log into the social network. They may not always be captivating, and you may not always notice them, but they are always there and always trying to grab your attention. But more often than not, they are not achieving the goal of converting eyes into clicks.

Facebook Ads may be easy to use, straightforward and simple to monitor, but there are a few key factors that distinguish your average-performing Facebook Ads and great Facebook Ad campaigns. Below are four tips that should help take your Facebook advertising to the next level.

Do Some Research

The first time you put together an ad campaign on Facebook, you are going to be eager to get your content out there and watch the “Like” counter shoot up. Unfortunately, without at least a little bit of research, you are not going to see the results you are hoping for.

Look through your insights, study engagement levels and develop a campaign that both fits the brand you’ve created on Facebook and appeals to a specific audience. If you are trying to target everyone, you might end up reaching no one. (Don’t worry – that makes more sense after you see the next tip.)

Target a Very Specific Audience

When you first start building your ad and you see your options for targeting, you might be excited by the prospect of potentially reaching upwards of 150 million people (and that’s in the United States alone!). But the reality of the situation is, if you are not creating an ad directed at a targeted audience – namely, one based on the research you did before you got started – there is no telling who will see it, and you will likely miss out on opportunities to reach engaged audiences as opposed to a broad audience of uninterested persons.

To put it in perspective, if you are trying to attract people to your page about food and dining for female college students, a broad, unspecific audience might only show your content to middle aged professional men. The result? A lower-than-hoped-for conversion.

Create an Appealing Ad

Sure – it sounds like a no brainer. Why would you do anything else, right? Well, it is not as easy as it sounds. The key to a great Facebook Ad campaign is appeal. People should be intrigued by the content in your ad – and you don’t have much of it considering it might be as small as a little image and text on the right-hand column of someone’s news feed or timeline.

This is where you need to let your creative juices flow. The content and images in these ads should not simply be your logo and a brief description of your company. Leave that on your page. Share a fun fact, an interesting quote, an curious question or any other engaging bit of content. People should feel compelled to see what else you are offering when they see your ad.

Though it has been done by plenty of businesses, let’s look at the “abs of steel concept” we often see floating on the right of our Facebook screen. It might be for a personal trainer, a mail-order program or a diet, but they are showing a picture of a killer six pack and asking something along the lines of, “Do you want abs that look like this in 60 days? Then click here and get started today!” Even the skeptic is compelled to click, just to see what the offer is. Go for something irresistible and your click-through rates will be much higher than average.

Try, Try and Try Again!

There are a billion accounts on Facebook and your first campaign is not going to reach them all. In fact, you might be disappointed in the results of your first campaign. What went wrong? Were you targeting the wrong audience? Was your content not as great as you thought it was? That’s all part of the learning process.

You might find after a few tests that your most engaged market is nothing close to what you thought it was. That’s a great lesson and can translate into a lot more business, and it is not particularly expensive to figure out; your ads can be budgeted very modestly. Testing is the best way to turn your trials into great Facebook Ad campaigns.

Apply these tips and you’ll see your Facebook marketing take off in no time. Once again, one in every seven people on Earth is checking Facebook multiple times every day. Why not try and talk to them with a carefully laid out strategy in place?

What other tips can you think that help build great Facebook ad campaigns? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Communities on Social Media

May 3, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Building and joining niche communities on social media can be one of the greatest assets to your business.

Communities on social media have been a growing trend since the concept originated with the networks themselves. While any network – like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. – can be considered a community, the true Social Equity derived from communities on social media comes from the niche communities filled with like-minded and highly engaged individuals from around the world.

In this week’s Social Equity segment, we aim to understand how social media communities add value to your business, and where there are unique traits to these communities compared to other types of communities that may also be beneficial to your business.

Niche Communities on Social Media

One of the most touted features of Google+ is their Google+ Communities. In these groups, content is shared with each member without any filtration, as each community consists only of users that have an expressed interest in the content being published. These communities can range anywhere from five or six members to tens of thousands or more; it all depends on how interested people are in the content.

The benefits of communities like those on Google+, groups on LinkedIn and others around the social web is the ability to reach an audience far greater than what was ever possible. Furthermore, unlike conventional, expensive digital and print marketing, communities on social media offer an inexpensive way of reaching out to an engaged audience, sharing relevant content to prospective clients all over the world.

The Key Difference with Social Media Communities

As noted above, there are a few key differences between communities on social media versus conventional business communities. Think about your LikedIn groups and Google+ Communities. Every member is there for the same reason.

The only other type of communities like this that exist are business networking communities, and before social media, these were local business people who may or may not have shared an interest or mutually beneficial business opportunity. Of course, there were conferences, but for many small business owners the cost of attending one is prohibitive, and thus few people (relatively speaking) were able to take part.

Now, with these social communities, opportunities exist where there were none before, and for a fraction of what it would have cost to reach an audience as targeted and wide as those in these social media communities.

Social Equity of Communities on Social Media

The ability to build influence and drive new business in a community on a social network is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Social Equity derived from these communities. In an infographic we posted recently, we noted the importance of influence on social media. These communities allow you to build that influence with a very targeted audience, very quickly. This in turn results in your market power increasing and, subsequently, your business increasing.

In addition to influence, there is also the ability to reach targeted audiences worldwide without incurring massive costs as with traditional forms of marketing and advertising. Therefore, there is a twofold bump in Social Equity: business generated from engagement in social communities and expenses saved from your involvement in them.

Communities can be a major asset to growing your business, and there is no doubt that they add a considerable degree of Social Equity to your brand.

Where do you see the benefits of communities on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media: Week-in-Review, April 27, 2013

April 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

In case you missed some of the topics we covered this week, here is the social media week-in-review!

Effective SEO Tips for Optimizing Content on Your Page

There is an curious irony when it comes to SEO: everyone knows that it is important when it comes to getting found, but few people understand how it works. While it may seem like a complicated endeavour to optimize your content – what with all the talk about algorithms and pandas – there are few simple steps you can take that will make a big difference!

Social Media for Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social marketing is not something that should be adopted only y big companies. Businesses of all sizes, even small businesses, can use social media to their advantage and help grow their business! Find out how social marketing is helping small businesses in a great infographic!

What are ‘Targeted Tweets’ and How Should You Use Them?

Recently, Twitter unveiled their newest marketing tool: Targeted Tweets. This new feature brings in an entirely new advertising angle from which marketers can take advantage. Find out what these updates are and how you can use them to gain a competitive edge early!

Social Media Case Study: Honda

About a year ago, Honda noticed a growing trend and near-obsession with Pinterest. They decided that the best way to promote their newest CR-V was to launch a cost-effective campaign aimed at spreading the word virally. The approached worked and Honda created a campaign worthy of a feature in this week’s social media case study.

Social Equity: The Effect of Social Media on Your Brand

How does your brand’s image benefit from your involvement in social marketing? In this week’s Social Equity segment, we decipher how your brand equity increases both in the short- and long-run with the strategic use of social media marketing.

Have a look through some of these great articles and enjoy your weekend!

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