It is often surprising to see how little creative effort companies put into their Facebook marketing, particularly given the level of noise they make about using the platform.
Creative resources can be scarcer at small businesses without big social media budgets, and Facebook does have a somewhat static format to work with. Yet it needn’t be costly to come up with some great landing page manipulation, and here are some tips that should offer some inspiration:
1. Use a large call-to action
The most obvious and relevant call to action is to invite visitors to click on the ‘Like’ button of your Facebook page. BMW has consistently used this tactic on its landing page, always updating the look and feel of the graphics in line with its current messaging. ..see BMW Facebook page
2. Create an interactive, user-oriented page
Depending on who your target audience is, encourage interactivity with suitable competitions, games and interactive video. Disney Pixar has done just this, framing activity on its landing page around its latest Disneyland project, John of the Jungle. Also observe Disney’s use of joined-up activity on YouTube, where visitors can upload photos to a competition…see Disney Pixar Facebook page More »
Marketers are placing both social marketing and content marketing among their top business priorities this year, as both channels are set to mature in 2012.
Some 70% of marketers cited social as their top priority for 2012, followed closely by content marketing, cited by 59%, according to the State of Social Media Marketing: Top Areas for Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012 report by Awareness.
Most encouraging is the approach that marketers plan to take in the coming year. Having already established and grown their social presences on the major channels (Facebook and Twitter), they now plan to extend their social media strategy to include previously overlooked sites such as YouTube, foursquare and Tumblr.
Content is playing a major role in the growth of social. Pairing both channels has enabled businesses to boost interactivity on their sites with social sharing buttons, with shared content proving ready-made fuel for social marketing efforts.
Along with this enhanced approach from companies comes a fresh focus on active social media management to improve lead generation and sales from social media.
Said Brian Zanghi, CEO of Awareness: “We expect less-experienced marketers to follow their visionary peers, adopting established practices as they move along the maturity continuum.”
Staffing remains one of the key challenges, according to the report. Most of the 320 businesses surveyed employ between one and three people to monitor their social media marketing campaigns, and nearly half (45%) claim to struggle to find qualified talent to manage most of their new media activity. More »
Why do some business blogs create a buzz, while others fail to get their community engaged and talking? Top quality content is obviously key, but a well thought-out social optimisation strategy should be just as high a priority.
Everybody gets the importance of SEO to drive traffic to your blog; adding keywords is standard practice. But in a persuasive article for Clickz.com, Lee Odden argues that it is possible to become blinkered in the pursuit of top keywords.
Social media optimisation (SMO) – essentially optimising social content to drive direct traffic to blog content – can also push up search engine rankings for blog web pages.
But before you embark on making your blog (and website) social media friendly – here are six questions Odden suggests considering:
· Who is the blog intended to influence? Are you trying to reach prospects, customers, employees, industry analysts, reporters or fellow bloggers within your sector?
· What blog content will you offer to meet the needs of your target audience? More »
Social media users have an insatiable hunger for content. The proof? A whopping 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month on Facebook including blog posts, news stories, photos, videos and links. So why is some content not seen by anyone other than the poster?
A brand new study of 2,500 participants from the New York Times in conjunction with Latitude Research reveals the top 9 reasons (or skip straight to the end for a somewhat surprising Key Takeaway):
1. Your customers don’t trust you
Corporate mistrust is rife. Globally, only 56% of people trust businesses “to do what is right” (Source: 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer), falling in the US, the UK and Japan from 2010 to 2011. People won’t share your content if there is a lack of trust, so use the social space to drive honest and open public conversations.
2. Customers don’t care about your brand
Sorry, but customers are a fickle bunch. If you don’t offer at a minimum: valuable information, great deals and a forum to meet other like-minded people, they will look elsewhere. Don’t just feed them what they want; actively exceed their expectations.
3. Your posts are boring
Intriguing and funny content gets the most shares. Look to Volkswagen for inspiration. Their Star-Wars spoof video ‘The Force’ racked up over 40 million views. Of course, it helps to have an established power brand behind you, but the principle is to create ‘got to share it’ content. More »
A new study shows that lack of sufficient time and resources continue to present social media marketers with the biggest headache rather than lack of strategy or objectives.
The study from social media marketing solutions firm R2integrated in November 2010, shows that of those surveyed, more than two in five said that time and resources was the greatest barrier to social media marketing. Return on investment was also a concern.
The findings indicate that although companies in the first instance are attracted by relatively low initial costs of a social media programme, internal time and resources to maintain and monitor a company’s online presence is often under estimated.
Matt Goddard, CEO at R2integrated, quoted in eMarketer said “Most marketers understand the basic need to provide useful content to social spaces, but they aren’t able to keep up with the ongoing publishing demands, and don’t know how to manage conversations around their content within a community of interest.”
The demands of producing relevant online content to engage consumers, is not a problem that is going away soon, since consumer demand to engage with the content and share it with others continues to grow. However there could be an answer for the savvy marketer in 2011 according to another survey … 55% of companies outsource content marketing,
Walt Disney would have been 109 this month, but the company is currently marking another milestone – exceeding 100 million fans on Facebook, making it the most popular company on the social networking site.
Significantly the dramatic rise in fans over the past 16 months followed the company’s decision to regularly update the content, as well as create more than 200 different fan pages. The overall number of fans are spread across the company’s pages which feature all of Disney’s films and characters – Disney’s main Facebook page has 15,060,404 fans followed by the Toy Story page with 11,416,127.
Statistics for the company’s social media activities are similarly impressive. Fans have commented more than 1.5 million times and ‘liked, shared or commented’ on Disney’s content more than six million times. Disney achieved 60 million Facebook ‘likes’ in its first year, and now attracts about five million new fans every month. 70% of the company’s fans are women. More »
68% of companies say they are shifting from traditional forms of marketing to branded content, including 61% who reported a moderate shift and 7% who said their shift was “aggressive” according to an eMarketer report.
The branded content refered to in the study covers material ranging from blogs, online video, Twitter promo or Facebook page, to ads and online gaming.The main consideration is that consumers genuinely want to engage with the content and share it with others; that it is entertaining and of interest, rather than interuptive and annoying.
The findings relate closely to a recent survey from King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42 – the 2010 Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability” study, which showed 73% of US companies with a social media strategy using branded content in their campaigns. More »
According to a post on Junta 42′s blog today, 55% of marketers are outsourcing at least some part of their content marketing.
A full report is to follow but the sneak preview further shows that companies with 1000+ employees are 60% more likely to outsource content marketing than micro companies (less than 5 employees).
While understandable, the post suggests that all companies should be outsourcing part of their content marketing for the following reasons:
1) Someone out there will have better ideas than you do.
2) You don’t have time to do everything.
3) You will not be as focussed as your appointed content marketing agency would be.
Thanks to Aeneas McDonnell from The Economist for sharing this great video ‘Did you know?’ about the changing media landscape, at the EPublishing Innovation Forum yesterday.
Maile Ohye, manager of Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, laid out her blueprint for a social media, content and SEO optimised website in an interview with TopRank’s online marketing blog last week.
The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.
Here’s what she said:
“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”
It is often surprising to see how little creative effort companies put into their Facebook marketing, particularly given the level of noise they make about using the platform.
Social media users have an insatiable hunger for content. The proof? A whopping 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month on Facebook including blog posts, news stories, photos, videos and links. So why is some content not seen by anyone other than the poster?
A new study shows that lack of sufficient time and resources continue to present social media marketers with the biggest headache rather than lack of strategy or objectives.
68% of companies say they are shifting from traditional forms of marketing to branded content, including 61% who reported a moderate shift and 7% who said their shift was “aggressive” according to an eMarketer report.
