Social advertising. That’s been the buzzword for a while hasn’t it? Well, it’s been one of the buzzwords that we like to throw around.
If you’re a serious digital business (and who shouldn’t be?) – you’ve probably been talked to about social advertising, or if you’re a digital/social agency, you’ve probably discussed social advertising with your clients at some point in the last couple of months.
The discourse began of course, once Facebook reach plummeted, and people realized the free ride was over. Sure, you’ll still find a ton of influencers and social gurus beating their chests on the sidewalk talking about how Facebook isn’t dead, but they’re leaving out the important part. Social isn’t free.
It never has been. You’ve always had to hire someone to run your social presence for you. It’s always been a cost for you, except now – there’s an add-on cost associated to it.
As supply remains the same and demand goes up, a product becomes more expensive. There is limited room that social networks have to work with when it comes to space for social ads, and while earlier it was easier and cheaper to get your word out, it’s going to get a lot harder – in fact it already has.
Prepping for getting on board with social ads? You know visuals are important, so perhaps this infographic will come in handy for you and your design team.
Get Your Social Ad Sizes Right!
What’s the Catch With Social Advertising?
There’s no catch really. The reason it’s come up with such a strong force is because there are thousands of posts that people are exposed to on all the networks that they’re on, and it’s hard to break through the clutter. With everyone fighting for space – it becomes harder to get your messaging out, and therefore social networks are making you bid for it.
The higher you bid – the more likely it is that your customer will see your content, the more likely you are to generate a lead.
What Networks Should You Advertise On?
Most people take the easy route and jump onto Facebook for their advertising needs. There’s a vast amount of content on Facebook ads that’s circulating the internet and you’ll find that it’s easiest to find help for Facebook ads than for any other platform (except perhaps Google AdWords). Most people have a presence on Facebook and therefore they try and amplify it through social ads.
Not something you should do.
Every network has its own benefits. And please, it’s not true that if you’ve got a B2B business you should only focus on LinkedIn and if you’re B2C you should only focus on Facebook. It’s all about the targeting. You might be a high end pen manufacturer, and while you are a B2C company in nature, you’ll probably find better leads if you were to advertise on LinkedIn and target CXOs.
Think about what would work best for you.
How Much Should You Spend?
There’s no “set” minimum spend amount, and it’s not true that you won’t get any results with $20 or that you’ll get results only with $2,000. Ensure that your targeting is incredibly sharp, incredibly straightforward and you’ll notice that both $20 and $2,000 will get you results – differing magnitudes of course.
Personally, I’d advise you to spend $100 – $200 in your first burst, and then figure out if it’s getting you the desired results or not, and tweak accordingly. It’s hard to measure anything on any network before spending a certain amount that can give you a big enough data set to work with.
All said and done – social advertising is something you’re going to have to get your hands dirty with, so you may as well dive in as early as possible and develop an expertise in it before your competitors do and sweep up your customer base!
Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion around the fact that there’s a problem with Twitter. Marketers believe that it’s undergoing algorithm changes similar to what Facebook has implemented and that soon marketers won\’t enjoy Twitter the way they used to. Another common problem that they feel with Twitter is that it’s crowded, and it’s hard to be seen.
Strategists aren’t convinced that Twitter’s ad platform is robust enough to allow them to get the right ROI or value from it, and on the whole – even though Twitter is a massive platform, it continues to fall behind the “lure” of Facebook for businesses. So what’s the problem with Twitter?
I caught up with Krisoffer Howes, CEO of Weal Media, an international PR firm. Kris is as an expert on the Social Marketer’s Quiz that we’re running, and a well-known social media expert on Google+ who frequents the Social Media Strategy community on Google+.
1. Heading up a digital PR firm today is fairly challenging. Do you have to spend a lot of time educating your clients on the benefits of digital? Or have brands and companies now started to “get it”?
Given that Weal Media is an international PR firm, we get exposure to a number of different geographical and cultural areas. In doing so, we have noticed that some regions are more receptive to digital strategies and are recognizing and embracing the shift from traditional media. Surprisingly, when compared to their neighbors to the South (United States) and East (Asia,) Canada has been significantly slower in adopting digital marketing strategies.
The challenge for most business owners and executives who resist the move to Internet marketing is to identify and measure the value in their contributions, whether they be time or money. This in turn becomes a challenge for digital marketers to provide metrics that can translate things like relationship-building and post views, into a language that speaks dollars and cents.
2. While Twitter has a huge number of “registered” users, a very small percentage of them are actually active on a weekly or even monthly basis. What do you feel Twitter needs to do to change this?
I do not think that it is something that Twitter needs to change, as much as I believe that marketers should re-assess the methods in which they communicate with their Twitter audience and build an active following on the platform.
To begin with I think that, by virtue of Twitter\’s 140 character limitation, marketers should already expect that their visitors will have a short attention span. That said, this highlights the need to focus on providing content that captures attention in a busy social stream and inspires consistent and meaningful engagement, particularly from active members and brand advocates. Ultimately, marketers should aspire to motivate the audience to seek-out their branded message, rather than produce a multitude of redundant posts that are left alone to desperately search for an audience of their own.
In Twitter\’s last update, the social network provided some important updates that can be used to identify a business\’ or brand\’s content that inspires engagement with the audience and also offers features to showcase the things the audience loves most.
3. Only 21% of marketers who took the quiz know that it’s possible to schedule a tweet on Twitter without using a third party tool. I remember discussing this with you when we were formulating the questions! How surprising is this stat for you?
This does not surprise me in the least. In fact, I am much more surprised that a number of people actually knew. I myself was surprised to learn that it was possible to schedule Tweets inside Twitter\’s \”Ads\” panel, easily and at no charge. As you called it, a hidden gem.Another is Twitter’s number of allowable lists. Would you believe that Twitter affords us up to 1,000 lists?
4. Did any particular questions in the quiz stand out for you as being incredibly interesting or useful?
I was stunned by your results for calculating Bounce Rate. This as a fundamental metric in the online marketing industry. Internet marketers use this measurement quasi-religiously to determine and improve a webpage/website’s performance. The fact that your quiz was able to identify this area as deeply problematic is a testament to its value and effectiveness in educating marketers.
5. Different brands and companies need to be on different networks, depending on who their target audience is and what kind of content they produce. However, if from all the big networks of the world, we had to do away with one – based purely on the fact that it doesn’t add much business value to brands in terms of engagement, sales and interaction – which would you choose to do away with?
At the moment, and without much hesitation, I would say Facebook. Over time, the leading social network has intentionally reduced business and brands exposure to their fans. And, to make matters worse, Facebook offers its own paid methods of exposure as (pretty much) the only viable alternative. The other option is for businesses/brands to build REAL and meaningful relationships with consumers, and consistently deliver content that entices fans and friends to independently seek out the company\’s updates and information, even when it is not immediately visible in their news feed. Regrettably, this is something too few social media marketers have done in the past, particularly on Facebook.
On the other hand, the platform’s competitors like Google+ and Twitter are introducing features that contribute to marketing efforts and help businesses and brands improve and maintain their exposure and engagement with fans, friends, and followers. In fact, even Tumblr and Reddit are providing services that benefit businesses and appeal to marketers.
You can add Kristoffer to your circles on Google+, or interact with him in one of the various communities of SMHangout! And if you haven’t yet, you should really take the Social Marketer’s Quiz!
For those of you who haven’t been under a rock for the last few weeks, you’d know that the Social Marketer’s Quiz has been going on in full force. And when we announced the launch of the quiz, we mentioned that one of the best things to come out of this quiz would be the insights. The ability to actually find out what marketers think is right, what’s wrong, what works and what doesn’t.
In one of the Social Media Hangouts, we discussed that we’d be talking about a couple of the insights that we’ve generated from this quiz, and when I was going through the data today, I came across some really interesting snippets of information. I decided to put together a quick list this week, that talks about five questions that marketers just can’t seem to get right.
1. A former employee reveals sensitive data on your Facebook page, acting as a whistle blower. The post starts a small crisis on your end. What do you do?
This one was interesting. It’s from our Ethics Round, and to me at least, the answer seemed fairly straightforward. Let me walk you through the options:
Treat the post like one of a regular community member. The fact that he’s been an employee doesn’t change your duties of professionally representing the brand and you need to remain fair and transparent.
Delete the comment since this is a special case and the data has unlawfully been posted. Directly contact the employee and alert the legal department immediately.
Try to downplay the incident by posting other updates according to your regular content calendar and try to avoid bringing too much attention to the issue.
Get a senior person involved, this is above your pay grade.
What would you have picked? Here’s what the split in the quiz was:
What would you have picked?
Now ethics questions are mostly open-ended. In this case however, our ethics expert told us that this is definitely a special case. The employee was under contract, and after leaving if they start leaking secrets, the company is well within their right to remove this sensitive information that it doesn’t want leaked through such a channel.
In spite of that, close to 36% of marketers thought it would be okay to treat this post like a regular community post. What I found a little interesting was that about 10% of marketers would go to a senior staff member and ask what the right way to handle this would be.
2. How do you handle a lack of interesting content on your page when not a lot is happening in the industry?
I pulled this one from our Content Round, called the Content Courtyard, and it poses an interesting dilemma for marketers. Here are the options for this question:
Post simple text updates and keep the flow going.
Stop posting until worthy content appears, you don’t want to give your fans trash.
Don\’t post mediocre updates, but devote more time to craft original stories and content.
Ask your fans what they’d like to see since there’s not a lot happening, they can tell you what kind of content would be good.
What would you have picked? Here’s what the split in the quiz was:
What would you have picked?
This one for me, really speaks volumes about the attitude that marketers have today. So there’s a little rut in the industry. Not a lot of news, interesting ideas or opinions are surfacing for your brand to talk about. And this happens very often. Every company and manager hit this a couple of times every quarter. Do you turn to your fans every single time to ask what they’d like to see?
Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to direct the content?
As the graphic illustrates – the right way to deal with this would be to focus on crafting better content, posting better stories, creating more original content and ideas. If it’s smart and speaks to your target audience, they’ll like it. Do a couple of re-caps on what\’s happened lately, perhaps make a couple of predictions for the future, highlight some of the best work your company has done. But the second you go down the route of asking your fans what they want to see, you go down the route of letting them decide what content you should post.
I found it interesting that 2.16% of marketers thought that it would be a good idea to stop posting completely. Insignificant amount – but those guys are still out there!
3. What’s the CTR of the ad below?
C’mon, you know what the CTR of this ad is right?
This question is brought to you courtesy of one of the tougher rounds in the quiz, the Analytics round. I was expecting a couple of people to fumble with this question, but was definitely not expecting what I discovered here:
Not even kidding.
Just 58.43% of marketers were able to get this right. That’s more than half, but that’s a crazy low number. CTRs are something that marketers are always obsessing over, and it brings up a point that Kristy Hughes raised in her interview with us earlier, that marketers are a little too quick to rely on tools and aren’t able to calculate social metrics themselves.
Perhaps marketers are just used to saying incredibly low CTRs for their ads, which is why they automatically gravitated towards the 0.01% answer.
4. Google Analytics tells you that 1,000 people came to a particular page on your website, and 250 of them went on to view another page from that page. What\’s the bounce rate of the page?
The Analytics Round was a little hard, I agree – but there were a couple of questions in there that I put in to ease the pain. Not all of them went according to plan, much like Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II.
Bounce rates are another metric that marketers obsess over. How many people are coming to my landing page and just running away? I want that number to be as low as possible, therefore my obsession with low bounce rates. However, here’s what the responses for that question looked like:
I’m yet to see a page in my life with a bounce rate of 750%.
I understand the confusion between 25% and 75%. I can comprehend it. It’s exactly why I put those two in there, but there are marketers who truly believe that a bounce rate of 250% or 750% is possible. The calculation of bounce rate isn’t hard, in fact – we had a question around how bounce rate is calculated. To me – the problem here isn’t about the calculation, it’s about the concept of bounce rate itself, given that the question had numbers like 1,000 and 250 involved.
Another argument for marketers relying too heavily on tools and not knowing how the metrics work?
5. A moderator of a Facebook page cannot do the following:
How well acquainted are you with the various Facebook admin roles? Are you aware of what an Analyst can’t do on a Facebook page and what the Editor can do? For companies and brands that have more than one person managing a Facebook page, knowing the roles and their capabilities becomes incredibly important.
Here are the options we gave all the marketers who took this quiz:
Send messages as the page.
Create ads.
Create and delete posts on the page.
See who posted as the page.
What would you have picked? Here’s what the split between the marketers is as of now:
Probably the most surprising result of all.
Only 14.92% of marketers who took the quiz got this question right. That\’s all. Most marketers thought that Moderators can’t create ads, which is a fairly rational decision to make since you’d expect a moderator to be a person who essentially responds to comments and tries to keep order on the page. Perhaps Facebook\’s roles and their capabilities are to blame for this one. 😉
Regardless, it’s important to know who can do what, and 85.08% of marketers aren’t clear about Facebook\’s various roles for page managers.
That was eye-opening! I’m not as shocked about the last one than I am about marketers not being able to calculate CTR, and understand the concept of Bounce Rate. If you haven\’t taken the quiz yet – you should definitely go ahead and take it! Are you smarter than the nearly 2,000 marketers who have taken our quiz so far? Prove it!
We’ll regularly release such insights and we’re planning on an extensive infographic very soon! Stay tuned. 🙂
Andrew Harasewych is one of the most popular faces in the marketing world on Google+ and beyond, primarily because of his live hangout every Saturday at 9 PM EST where he strips for viewers, free of charge.
Just kidding. Andrew’s one of the smartest people in social marketing that I’ve come across. What’s he good at? Engagement? Facebook ads? G+ marketing? SEO? What’s his speciality, you ask? The best part is – that as far as I’m aware, he doesn’t have a speciality. His speciality is basically being a no-nonsense marketer who knows a huge amount of every aspect of it. That’s probably why he’s COO of Weal Media, a digital public relations firm and internet marketing agency.
That, coupled with the fact that he’s a reliable and trustworthy person, is why I asked him to be the expert on the General Knowledge section of the Social Marketer’s Quiz.
Earlier this week, I stalked his new house, waited till his guard was down and then took him prisoner. This interview took place in the basement of his home.
Since you oversee a community of 150,000+ marketers – you’re exposed to a lot of views, opinions and ideas. What’s the biggest misconception that marketers have today?
That they are even marketers to begin with. Okay, I kid. But seriously… there are a LOT of people out there, who played around with Facebook in their spare time and decided to open a marketing firm. And what happens? We all get dragged down with them. I am, however, just so happy about how the Social Media Strategy community has turned out so far, from weekly Hangouts, which are growing in the audience, to the great discussions with excellent marketers, businesses, and independent professionals.
But I get off point here. As to the biggest misconception that I notice among even the more legitimate marketers, is this idea that EVERYONE and their mother has to blog, regardless of whether they can even generate new and original content themselves. Instead of immediately charging a business for writing content, you need to analyze the person’s or business’s budget, needs, goals, and target demographic(s).
Perhaps there is another marketing avenue which would require less of an investment with more benefit? Every business is different, thus we can’t expect the same answer to be the best for every business.
How do you, personally, stay up to date with the latest trends, news and opinions online?
I don’t sleep.
I’d say that’s a joke, but as I write this, my wife is begging me to come to bed. I’ve been able to keep up on most things simply by visiting the communities each morning and evening to moderate posts. Sure, I still have a few newsletter and aggregator subscriptions, but more and more I’ve been finding that Google Plus really is the best place for me to find updates on the news and information I need, and discuss it with people who really know what they are talking about when it comes to… well, just about anything.
The last round in the quiz on general knowledge has been a tough one to crack, what do you think that says about marketers, and is it a reason for worry?
What I’ve noticed with any quiz that offers free prizes or discounts, you get a lot of… freebie hunters who are not at all the target demographic of the quiz, and although they can get through some of it, they get stopped up when it comes to more specific questions and information they otherwise would never have come across. That aside, there are definitely marketers who will still trip upon at least half of those questions, if not more.
I admit, there were two, that when I was reviewing them, had me thinking for quite a bit (and one of those I finally had to google to verify myself!). That’s just the nature of the business. There are so many competing social networks, news sources, bloggers, and even local “Mom-and-Pop” brick and mortar businesses are all interacting with people on a global scale, meaning that there is an information overload for the average person, let alone the average marketer, spending most of their days online.
Did any particular questions in the quiz stand out for you as being incredibly interesting or useful?
Well, it’s actually one of the questions that I immediately knew the answer to, as to whether Facebook or Twitter have a better SEO benefit for your business. It’s NEITHER! There is no significant ranking benefit to using either Facebook or Twitter (as of writing this interview, who knows how things may change in the future, that’s half the fun). And that is a VERY common misconception with “Marketers” and “SEO professionals” that do not know as much as they think they do.
That, or they are purposely trying to mislead potential clients on their site, by claiming that their social media engagement will improve the search rankings for their business (unless they use Google+, which is the only way to currently boost potential ranking thanks to social search). There are still certain industries that are VERY underrepresented on Google+, giving a small business an amazing foot in the door right now, if they just work out a Google+ strategy!
If you had to choose between a marketer who had incredible knowledge around marketing on various social platforms, but wasn’t good with staying up to date with marketing news and trends and a marketer who had above average knowledge on marketing on various platforms and was always on the ball with the latest changes, trends and insights – who would you pick and why?
I don’t want this answer to come off like I am copping out of the question, so if I HAVE to pick one, I’d say the first: general knowledge on marketing on various platforms may be more important than being up to date on every last trend.
This is a tough question though, and even now, I already don’t like my selection. I’ve always been a huge fan of the “many hat” approach. No, I don’t mean white hat and black hat, I mean being able to fill multiple roles and positions within a company, whether it’s for a client, or for yourself. And that does require not only having that general knowledge base, but also keeping up on current trends.
Social Networks do all have their differences (did you know you can, without being shamed, use up to 30 hashtags on a single Instagram post? Do that on Google+, and you’ll have the villagers chasing you down with pitchforks), but in the end, A LOT of marketing is just common sense and building relationships. It’s something that carries over all platforms, and it’s something anyone with a pulse and a typing finger can do. You just need to be willing to listen, and then… /gasp/ respond accordingly and build the relationship!
[divider]
Due to the quality of his responses, I let Andrew go. He is now freely roaming the wild countryside of G+.
Andrew (and a TON of other well-known experts) hang around in SMHangout’s Google+ communities. You should also tune into their Social Media Hangouts, that are littered with great advice from the usual suspects as well as some great guest experts.
Everyone has a feedback form on their website, but not a lot of them put enough thought behind one. Most of the feedback forms that I see on websites and Facebook pages tend to have very similar characteristics. Enter your name, e-mail address, message and also solve this CAPTCHA created by Satan himself.
So how do you create the perfect feedback form? Or at least a really good one.
It’s an important factor of your website to pay attention to, given that this is where you’ll be generating sales leads, answering questions, getting feedback, growing your network, getting requests, it’s essentially the contact portal in many ways between you and your customers.
For the purpose of illustration, I’m going to use Circus Social’s feedback form that’s on their Facebook page and website. It was created using this tool.
The feedback form we’ll be examining today!
When I think about a perfect feedback form, there are four elements that I always like to pay attention to.
The header – The captivating visual at the top.
The form fields – What visitors are going to be filling out.
Messaging – Before your customers connect with you, are you connecting them as well?
Misc. – A collection of elements on your feedback form that complete the experience of connectivity.
None of these are more important than the other – I feel each of them should be given an equal amount of weightage. If either of these are lacking in quality, it won\’t make your customer not reach out to you perhaps, but it will make a dent in their experience, their expectations and their overall opinion of you and your brand.
So how do you sharpen these areas?
The Header
Here’s where the magic happens. Your header should ideally be a place where you’ve got a really catchy image, something that reflects your brand\’s persona. If you’re an insurance company, please don’t use a stock photo of a man shaking someone else’s hand. You can do better. What’s your brand about? What sets you apart? What do you do better than other insurance companies?
The header needs to be catchy and capture the attention of your audience.
For Circus Social – the pitch of the brand has always been that like the troupe of a circus, each person brings something unique to the table that helps their clients. The banner has everyone in the team, having a good time and being jovial. It makes someone reaching out understand what the tone of the company is most likely to be.
And beneath that – a catchy little one liner that tells visitors what they should reach out to you for. Should they get in touch for technical questions? Questions about new hires? Anything at all? It’s important that make it very clear what this particular form is for, especially if you have a number of forms that are handled by different people.
The Form Fields
The general rule for this is always to keep it simple. You don\’t want a long drawn out series of questions and entries here that ask your visitors about their date of birth, where they last had lunch and what their preferred choice of pasta sauce is. It\’s irrelevant. Ask only what truly matters in the very first interaction.
Hi, what\s your name and how I can help?
The form fields. Simpler the better.
In this particular instance, for Circus Social, there’s a slightly personal connection formed. You can choose to be connected to a particular person if you’d like. If you already know someone from the team, perfect. If you’re reaching out because you saw something someone in the team mentioned – great! If you’re looking to reach out to no one in particular, just pick someone who looks friendliest in the banner. 😉
It\’s little things like this that make feedback forms a little bit of fun, add a slight personal touch, and excite the visitor – and eventually, add up to making it a perfect feedback form.
Misc. Elements and Messaging
So you have the banner and you have your form fields. That covers the basic elements of your feedback form, and that’s where most people usually stop. But there’s always that question, What else?
And it’s hard to find where to stop. The two very basic things that you should definitely have in your feedback forms after you’re done with your form fields and banner image:
Alternate ways your visitors can contact you.
Links to your social profiles.
The other smaller elements add a lot of character to the page.
As in the example above, it’s also useful to add either a map that locates where your business is located or perhaps just a picture of where the business is. It adds that little natural element that makes the business appear a lot more real. Now of course, huge companies like Apple, Microsoft need not do this – but for smaller brands, entrepreneurs, cafes and the rest – it’s not something that you can skip out on.
And finally of course – who does the message go to? Hopefully not the CEO. All messages from the feedback form should go to someone in your communications department, or someone in charge of client relations/sales if your team isn’t quite big enough to have its own marketing department. If you’re an entrepreneur, you\’ll be very tempted to have all the messages come to you. Be very cautious, if you feel you’ll have the time and bandwidth to reply to these messages – go for it.
If you’re looking to set up a perfect feedback form – here’s the tool that you should use to create one!
