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It’s easy to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account. And then you can say you are doing social media marketing, can’t you?! But, think a little harder: are you making a rod for your own back in the long term? Do you know what consumers want or do you make assumptions about what the brand thinks they want?
A recent report by Exact Target called The Social Break Up may not make comfortable reading for the many companies who think that simply creating a Facebook page with offers or tweeting marketing messages is effective social media marketing.
It would seem that consumers are becoming much more discerning in what they sign up to, engage with and are willing to receive through their social streams. For many brands, unless a dialogue is established and the offers are compelling, it is as easy to Unlike or Unfollow as it is to just allow the messages to fill your stream. And this may come as a shock to brands who have failed to understand that the rest of the Web is just one click away. Not, as it used to be, a click leading to another website, but a more permanent click that removes the brand from the consumer’s stream and mindset, potentially for good.
There is something almost final in removing a brand from your social stream. Whilst it may only be a simple click to Unlike or to Unfollow, there is a level of psychology associated with that process which runs deeper into the psyche. You have chosen not to associate with that brand any longer. And it may be that next time you see that brand on a supermarket shelf or in a retailer or advertised on TV, you think about the fact you have unfollowed them.
And why did you unfollow? Was it that there were simply too many marketing messages? Aka spam in many people’s minds. Perhaps the offers were of no interest? Perhaps a suggestion, feedback or an Direct Message you sent was ignored or not replied to?
However, there are some very interesting stats in the Social Break up Report.
For instance, 24% of Facebook users surveyed said that they had UnLiked a brand because there were not enough deals/offers, whilst a strikingly similar 24% said that they had UnLiked because there were too many promotions. So, there is a balance to be struck here if you want to continually avoid putting off a 1/4 of your Friends.
26% said they had Liked a brand simply to take advantage of a deal to then UnLike once that had been acquired. Consider this quote from the report:
Marketers should consider their goals when offering promotions through Facebook—are you looking for a long-term relationship, or just a one-night stand?
Whilst every brand must expect churn and an ongoing win-lose of friends, customers etc, understanding what you are likely to gain from your social relationships is vital if you do not want to give away too many tempting goodies only to watch the punters turn their backs on you immediately.
After the launch of the send button by Facebook last week many thought that it was just Facebook adding more buttons making their pages full, but now many are considering it to be a smart move, eventually seeing Facebook as the master of all when it comes to Internet marketing.
According to searchengineland.com it could have been one of the best moves Facebook could have made and could now potentially be the one true login for the Web.
Soon there could be one unique login that allows you to log-in using Facebook but will allow you to navigate around many more sites, meaning that just one password login details would need to be remembered.
Up until recently users signing up for a Facebook account could do so via their Google mail accounts without the need to log on directly to Facebook itself, which could signify the way in which the site is heading towards for the future.
The process has already started with the Like button and the ability to move to other sites from the Facebook site itself, which came with the introduction of social plugins.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the importance of social media in a coherent marketing strategy, both on and offline. In the next parts, we are going to focus on how to use Twitter as one of your social media marketing tools to do so.
Too much time is spent developing marketing strategies which then fall into the grip of unintended consequences. Do not waste time nor money endeavouring to guestimate what the results of a campaign will be.
Social media is all about human interaction, and there can be nothing more unpredictable than people.
Don’t strategise, Just Do It!
What is more important is to develop rules of engagement, and then test, test and test again.
Step 1 – The Basics: Learn to use Twitter.
In brief, Twitter is an opportunity to communicate in 140 characters. With people and brands around the world. There are rules of engagement, but understanding the netiquette of Twitter is not rocket science – it is about understanding people.
Set up a Twitter account, where possible using a very short but recognisable version of your brand or company name. e.g. you can follow us on @clickthroughsem
Find out who within your company or tribe can already use Twitter. Ask them to share their experience and knowledge with everyone else within the company who will be helping to execute this strategy. A simple 30 minute training session in-house will reduce the need for individuals to ‘work it out for themselves’.
Learn how to use hashtags and which hashtags will help you to reach your core audience. (Hashtags make it easy to search, follow specific conversations, tune into ‘channels’ identified by certain hashtags and reach target audiences).
Click on the hashtag image for some more great links to hashtag advice…..
Part 3 tomorrow…..
Without an online marketing strategy, many businesses with suffer if not find it impossible to grow online without the use of SEO, PPC and social media according to econsultancy.com.
With this in mind you would have thought that more companies would want to get their online activities in-house but statistics have suggested that a growing number are outsourcing their work to outside marketing agencies.
The survey asked 900 client-side advertisers and agencies and found that companies who handled their own SEO and PPC campaigns themselves dropped from 51 per cent in 2010 to 44 per cent at the start of 2011’s first quarter.
Those handling paid search in-house also fell from 47 per cent to 38 per cent over the same period of time.
As well as the SEO and PPC campaigns many companies are also outsourcing their social media voice, with most outside marketing agencies offering the social media maintenance as part of their packages.
Great news for search marketing agencies.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
As 2009 rolls to a close, everyone is considering the changes in the world of search during the year. So, we have gathered together the views from some of our experts in the Clickthrough Marketing office of what we may see in 2010 as a result of those changes.
Adam Symes, Head of Paid Advertising:
2009 has been a year of great change in social media. MySpace and Bebo have seen huge decline and yet back in 2006 they were the top two searched for terms on Google. Conversely, the Global Language Monitor has named ‘Twitter’ the word of the year. The last 12 months have seen a huge increase in the use of Twitter and although this may plateau in 2010 it will still remain a huge force as Google continues to integrate tweets into real-time search results.
Another trend that has experienced significant shifts is the use of retargeting, a form of intelligent behavioural targeting where an ad / banner is displayed on a site (sometimes unrelated) a user visits after the user visits the advertisers site.
Adrian Epstein, Paid Search Account Manager:
Google continued to develop AdWords opportunities this year. It is now allowing Google advertisers to place additional site links into ad creative when bidding on performing campaigns. These additional site links take users directly to the other categories within your site from within the ad; this is great for additional shelf space. Advertisers can now opt in to ad extensions taking products from the Google Merchant centre, this then provides selected products that are relevant to your ad, increasing conversion opportunities.
Finally, rumour has it Google is taking into consideration the page load times as a factor for ranking. That pushes the focus back on hosting companies and more importantly developers who can decrease these page load times. Whether or not Google make page load times a factor in rankings, it is one that should be a focus.
Bryn Firkins, Director of Paid Advertising:
The iPhone has now shifted around 33 million units worldwide, by default bought by affluent consumers. For many, mobile marketing has been about banners and search. Now, iPhone apps have given marketers a powerful way to get their brand message in the hands of people who have proven they are happy to spend. The iPhone App store has gone from holding around 10,000 apps at the start of 2009 to just over 100,000 now.
Advertiser spend in developing these apps can sometimes sit outside usual online media budgets as they can be a powerful source of direct revenue in their own right. With Google Android now gaining some traction, and the relative portability of iPhone apps to Android, expect apps to continue to grow in importance in 2010.
Rob Stoubos, SEO Account Manager:
Brand building and online awareness through online PR and Social Media is becoming increasingly important. Online PR and Social Media are being factored into Google’s natural search algorithm increasingly, and Google wants to use ‘public opinion’ when it comes to deciding which sites to promote in natural search. Companies who don’t establish themselves in these areas and as a result increase their traffic referrals from these areas may begin to fall in rankings when Google’s new Caffeine algorithm comes into play in 2010.
What do you feel may figure highly in the world of search in 2010? Do you agree with our experts? Where will you be committing your online marketing budget next year, and where do you expect the big wins/losses to occur?
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Started by a father of three who wanted to add a little spice to the race for the Christmas number 1 in the UK charts, the Rage Against The Machine shows just how a social media campaign can go viral.
Joe Morter is not a highly paid media/PR exec, he is a hi-fi engineer, and along with his wife, Tracey, they set up the Facebook campaign to attempt to dismantle the monopoly on the charts which Simon Cowell’s X Factor has enjoyed over the last few years.
Seemingly, this campaign had everything that it needed to go viral….and it did. Rage Against The Machine were yesterday announced as the UK No 1 with their single, “Killing in the Name” instead of the X factor entry by Joe McElderry, who won the X Factor this year.
The purpose of the campaign was to encourage as many people as possible to download the RATM single, instead of the X Factor single. There was a Facebook group, which quickly garnered 450,000 fans. There were banners and images produced for everyone to use on their Facebook status, websites, blogs, Twitter and so on, thereby spreading the word very quickly about the campaign.
Why did it succeed? Well, one reason must be that peculiarly British trait of loving someone until they become successful and then seeming to delight into attempting to bring that person to their knees. Simon Cowell has become a bit like Marmite – you either love him or hate him, and right now, there are an awful lot of people who feel shades of the latter towards him for being so successful and dominating the charts. This is often seen to be at the expense of other, possibly better bands who do not have the (mis)fortune to be signed to Cowell’s record label.
Whilst it is likely that there will be similar campaigns that endeavour to replicate the success of this one, this is a first in “People Power” using social media to upset something as trivial (and I say the word carefully, knowing how some people feel about the charts!) as the Christmas number 1. There are far bigger and more meaningful causes that could potentially be similarly supported by the average citizen, and it will be interesting to see what happens in 2010 with social media people power campaigns.
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As more of us become reliant on social media, not just for marketing campaigns but as a means to find out news, engage with peers, and so on, the need for search engines which specifically bring blog posts, Tweets, Diggs, social bookmarks etc to us has increased.
So, we set off to find some of the social media and real-time search engines that are already in existence. Get away from Google for a few hours and explore the many discussions and conversations on topics of interest to you!
LeapFish – this is a great little engine. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, tweets, diggs, autosuggestion tool for searches, and much more. Definitely worth using.
SocialMention – interesting ranking system, plus regular users, sources, social media alerts, trending topics, and a blog widget.
Whostalking – search by category eg news, blogs, forums, images, videos, networks and tweets.
Samepoint – offers a wide range of searches across wikis, news, blogs, tweets, bookmarks, networks, podcasts, videos, news and so on.
OneRiot uses social networks to influence the results you receive. One Riot basically looks at what is being shared and trending at the moment, so that it is bringing you the most popular items.
AardVark is an interesting example in that you submit a question and the search engine finds the best person to answer for you across your social networks of friends and FOAFs (Friend of a Friend). An interesting idea, but one wonders if it implies that you can’t know your friends very well if you don’t know who to ask for yourself!
Fluther works in a similar way to aardvark, although it also shows all questions recently asked, and you can discuss your questions and answers in real time with other users and experts.
So, there’s a few to start with. Please let us know more – these are great fun as well as providing fascinating insights into what people are looking for from the social media they adopt.
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Spamming Twitter is a no-no.
Even though Twitter has only a few days search capacity for previous Tweets (due to the monster amount of tweets that are written every minute, let alone day), there is no need at all to keep posting the same Tweet over and over again. Nor to pick on a trending topic and put those hashtags in if they are not relevant, as Habitat discovered!
Today, some plank who claims to be an SEO pro has spent the entire day spamming certain channels on Twitter. I cannot begin to imagine what that has done to any business opportunities he may have been seeking to gain, but I do know that several people have tracked down the culprit and as he is US-based are now taking matters into their own hands to get his ISP to disconnect him.
Repeatedly tweeting the same message is bound to get people’s backs up. Why do it? Unless you change the text every time, the only people who will see it are your followers (watch them unfollow, fast) and those scanning for/monitoring certain keywords – as I was.
Before you develop a social media strategy, and adopt tools where required to do so, make sure you test them and don’t do anything like automate repeat tweets that will undoubtedly gain you far more enemies than friends.
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Retailers are fast catching on to the benefits of Twitter by advertising sales and discounts to their followers, and hence through their followers to many more than a normal advert could reach for even a fraction of the spend.
Using tools such as cheaptweet, retailers can clear end of line stock, raise brand awareness, and pull people onto their website with only 140 characters.
Whilst there are likely to be many more applications in the near future that supercede Twitter, right now it is one hectic space where you can make sales, and hence make money.
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Continuing with our look at Twitter for those who are new to it all…..
Qwitter – if you want to know who has unfollowed you, and what the post was that you wrote just before they decided to depart, Qwitter only requires that you enter the Twitter name plus an email address and it will email you when you are unfollowed. There are additional uses for this too beyond tracking your own user stats, like tracking those of your competitors!
As a market research tool, this can be very useful to see which posts turn people on and which turn people off. Find someone with authority in your subject area and follow their unfollowers movements. You can obviously only make an educated guess at why anyone chooses to unfollow, but you may well see some trends that could help direct your social media marketing strategy.
Twitterfeed allows you to automate the posting of tweets from your blog (or any RSS feed) straight to your Twitter account. If there is an RSS feed on a website that you know will be of interest to your followers, you can add that RSS feed directly to your twitterfeed account too eg from the BBC site or similar. This means you can put constantly updated quality content straight into Twitter without lifting a finger. Very useful!
TweetLater does more than the name suggests. Firstly, you can use it to automate your welcome DM (Direct Message) to new followers, and change the messages you send out so they rotate between different messages, and you can manage your own DMs and DM spam. Then you can automatically follow and unfollow those who un/follow you. You can schedule tweets to be sent out at certain times, as well as monitor keywords and phrases and receive alerts on activity with those keywords. All in all, there is a lot to this tool, and how you use it to maximum benefit is down to how much time you spent configuring it.
Go play!
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