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Facebook Marketing
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Social networking sites are now more popular with consumers than the telephone, it has been claimed.
Daniel Chubb, chief executive officer at Dansway Communications and Online Social Media, said many people especially are using websites such as Twitter and Facebook more times a day than their mobiles and landlines ? comments which may interest marketing professionals seeking opportunities online.
He claimed that the younger generation in particular “cannot live without social media” to keep in touch and shape their leisure time.
“Facebook overshadows all, but niche social media sites are more popular with many users with specific interests,” Mr Chubb stated.
Research published by InSites Consulting this week revealed that 72 per cent of internet users are part of at least one social network, which translates to 940 million users worldwide.
According to the study, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform with 51 per cent of global internet users, followed by MySpace (20 per cent) and Twitter (17 per cent).
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Is your social media marketing campaign working for you, or is it more in the nature of a kamikaze mission?
Social media marketing on sites such as Twitter and Facebook can do wonders for your online business IF you use them correctly.
However, if you are making major mistakes in your social media campaigns, you might be on the fast track to the ecommerce graveyard!
Here are some common mistakes that you don’t want to make in social media marketing:
Too Many Advertisements. This is a huge no-no! Internet users in general and social site members in particular find pop-up and flashing ads extremely annoying. Ditto for too many ads of any kind! If you have any sly thoughts about disguising your ads as regular content—forget it! Web folks are savvy to that sort of subterfuge and you will find yourself a social site pariah in nothing flat by using those tricky techniques.
Spamming. Never, ever spam! Don’t send blanket messages to every one of your followers or people on your Friends list, either, or this can be considered spammy behavior. Only send messages where they are relevant. Every one of your followers may not be interested in the same things, so try to keep your messages pertinent to the recipients.
No option to share. Make it as easy as possible for your content to be shared. On Twitter, for example, you can ask for your message to be shared by including “Please RT,” which translates to “Please retweet.” The best and fastest way to get your content passed along is to make it easy and painless for readers!
Being selfish. Don’t just share your own content! Pass along any message or post by other users that is interesting, entertaining and/or informative to others.
Only using one social site. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and wind up not doing a good job of marketing at any site, but it doesn’t pay to put all of your eggs into one basket, either. Try several of the most popular social sites, and then narrow it down to two or three that work best for you.
Don’t make mistakes that amount to social media marketing suicide!
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For some companies, marketing through social networks isn’t enough, they want to create their own social spaces to attract visitors.
Here are ten tips for building social networks and forums…
Occasionally, firms, especially larger brands, choose to build forums into their websites as part of their marketing strategy.
The idea is that the social network or forum will attract new and repeat visitors, build brand loyalty and recognition, boost your organic SEO and increase trust in your website.
Without a doubt, a successful forum can do that, but it can also be a huge amount of work and a gamble, since most forum attempts fail.
Recently, a few of my clients asked about forums and so I’ve been considering best practice. Here are my ten golden rules.
1. Set out some ground rules
Whatever industry your forum is geared towards, you’ll need to lay out some rules. Some are to protect yourself – for example, people must not write anything that could be considered slanderous.
Others are to protect the forum space itself, rules that even you as webmaster will follow. No spamming, no pestering, no trolling, that kind of thing.
2. Break it up
Any visitor to your forum should know exactly where to post their comments or query. If your sub categories are jumbled and confused then visitors won’t know where to browse for answers or leave their own questions.
What those sub categories are depends on your preferences – you may choose to set out an area for debate, one for people seeking help, one for sharing industry news.
Alternatively, you might prefer to lay it out by topic – for example an online marketing forum could have organic SEO, pay-per-click, email marketing and so on.
Just make sure it’s clear.
3. Don’t censor
Sometimes, your visitors may write things you don’t agree with. Of course, if they’ve broken your rules then you can delete their post. However, if they haven’t then you mustn’t arbitrarily delete their comments.
If you start doing that, you’ll soon find people lose trust and abandon the forum. Even on your corporate site you must remember that a forum isn’t your space, it’s theirs’.
4. Don’t sell
Don’t try and use a social space to pitch – it will alienate users and harm brand trust.
The benefits of a forum are more subtle, it isn’t just a space for you to shout about your products. If you’d consider it spam if someone else did it then don’t do it yourself.
5. Don’t lie
We’ve all seen it – a convenient forum post asking a question about a product that allows the forum owner to go in and pitch. Nine times out of ten it’s obvious that the company has set up that question to allow it to rave about a product or service.
This is even worse than spam, it makes it look like the spammer thinks the forum users are stupid.
6. Moderate appropriately
Your forum will need to be moderated. Leave it to its own devices and it will descend into a storm of spam, bitching and off-topic nonsense.
But also consider how heavily you plan to moderate your forum. You don’t want to leap down the throat of everyone who skates close to the edge of the rules, you’ll frighten people off.
Work out how involved you want to be – and stick to it. Let other forum members tell posters when they overstep the mark and give them a way to flag issues with you.
7. Be even-handed
When you’re moderating your forum, don’t blow hot and cold. If you ban someone for spamming on Monday but ignore someone doing to same on Friday, people will become suspicious about why. Do you have a commercial interest?
Nothing will clear your forum faster than unfair moderation.
8. Protect your data
If your forum collects email addresses, make sure they’re safe and don’t communicate with them without permission. No one will return to a forum if they don’t trust you with their data.
9. Promote it
Forums are hard work and they take a lot of promotion to get going, so make sure you’re shouting about yours. Tweet particularly interesting posts, blog about it, mention it in your email marketing, that kind of thing.
Until your forum becomes self-sufficient, it needs feeding with constant promotion or you’ll find it withers and dies.
10. Know why you’re doing it
Before you plough hours of work into your new company forum, work out why you’re doing it and make sure your bosses know.
A forum is an odd asset. Because you can’t use it to directly sell through, it can be hard to justify maintaining it. Make sure your company understands the benefits of a forum to the wider online marketing picture.
The last thing you want is your boss to suddenly demand the forum is used for advertising or that the email addresses of members are used for marketing.
Justify the forum early on, when everyone’s excited about it – not later on when budget cuts are looming and you have to prove a financial return on the investment.
source: http://econsultancy.com/blog/5460-ten-golden-rules-for-building-social-networks-forums
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Marketers still on the fence about increasing their budgets for social network marketing – be it for B2C or B2B – may be missing the boat.
January data from on Compete.com’s list of most visited internet sites showed that Facebook continues to grow, recently leapfrogging Yahoo into the number two spot on its list.
Facebook topped 134 million unique U.S. visitors in January, according to Compete.com.
This is the first change at the top of the list in two years. At that time, Google unseated Yahoo as the most popular website.
But marketers don’t need to eschew Google as it continues to hold the number one spot based on visits for the month, the company said. Its overall grasp on web surfers trails Facebook.
Over the past year, Compete.com shows that time spent by all visitors online at Facebook more than doubled to more than 11 percent in January 2009, versus the prior year. At the same time, both Google and Yahoo saw their numbers hover just above the 4 percent mark Yahoo came in at 4.25 percent while Google had 4.1 percent in January 2010.
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With Twitter co-founder Evan Williams announcing that the social network set a new record for daily traffic last month, marketers have been reminded not to overlook the value of such microblogging sites in raising their profile.
Indeed, the addition of Twitter to Google’s real-time search saw its overall unique visitor numbers rise by nine per cent from December to 21.79 million in January, according to comScore.
This rising traffic suggests the social network is more than just a fad – and that it can play a valuable role in helping marketers to spark interest in the mainstream.
Sam Tilson, director of marketing strategies at online supermarket Zoombits.co.uk, recently said that sites such as Twitter and Facebook should be increasingly important for search engine optimisation (SEO).
“If you are doing SEO for a contemporary reference, it is vital to ensure your message is placed on Facebook and Twitter to ensure [it is] included in the Google real-time search,” he said.
According to comScore, four out of five US internet users visited a social network at least once a month in 2009.
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Viral marketing is a low cost marketing technique used to produce impressive results such as improving brand visibility and building public awareness regarding one’s product or company. Due to its many advantages, viral advertising has become an extremely powerful and popular method of advertising.
Use Viral Content to Market Your Business
Viral marketing is an ethical Internet marketing strategy by which a marketer creates a campaign to spread your business message. Usually, a viral campaign consists of passive as well as interactive components including video clips, images, music tracks, podcasts, interactive Flash games and text messages.
Market your online business through viral channels. As part of the viral campaign, create viral content that is easy to understand, spread and share. Utilize the most popular existing social networks including Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Dig, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Technorati and other online resources for spreading viral content among a targeted audience.
Key Advantages of Viral Marketing
Viral content has great marketing potential and will help you achieve exponential business growth. When using this powerful tool to your advantage, you can achieve various marketing objectives:
• Announce your website’s existence
• Improve your rankings on search engines
• Generate a steady flow of traffic
• Increase awareness of your brand or business
• Increase sales
• Increase advertising revenues
• Improve customer retention
• Earn a positive reputation
• Generate inbound links
Take Advantage of Viral Marketing Opportunities for Your Online Business
If you wish to improve brand visibility with viral marketing, just get in touch with an online advertising solution provider, who can offer smart and appealing viral solutions to enhance your brand recognition. These providers offer excellent online marketing services including consultation services for strategic viral marketing, planning, designing and development of marketing plans, content development and lots more to achieve positive long term results.
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Need another sign that social games are big business? A new report suggests that Zynga, the publisher of games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars could be worth more than $3 billion — more than half that of Electronic Arts ($5.4 billion).
With a monthly active user audience of about 230 million just on Facebook, Zynga is “one of the largest developers of social entertainment widgets and games,” says the report from Next Up! Research and SharesPost, an online service for trading shares of private companies.
Thanks to expected compound annual growth of 35% until 2014, the analysts estimated Zynga’s value at $2.8 billion to $3.3 billion with a projected share price of $14.97 to $17.68. (There has been rumblings that Zynga is poised to go public.)
The report notes that five Zynga games — FarmVille, Café World, Texas HoldEm Poker, FishVille and Mafia Wars — rank among the top 10 Facebook apps. And Zynga has a “significant presence” on sites such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Tagged, Yahoo and iPhone.
Analyst Michael Pachter with Wedbush Morgan Securities says that even though “nobody but Zynga knows enough about the company’s revenue, margins and growth trajectory to have an informed opinion about what the company is worth” he considers it “reasonable to believe a high value for the company.”
A $3.3 billion valuation, he says, “would suggest sustainable cash flow of $200 million or more. Clearly, Zynga isn’t there yet, as their revenues are probably only a tad above that level, and they incur costs to generate those revenues. Yet, it’s possible to come up with that value if the company can show a path to $200 million in annual cash flow, or higher. If we accept that Zynga will have much higher revenues in a few years (highly likely), and assume that the incremental margin on revenue growth is very high (also highly likely), it’s easy to see how they could get to $200 million in free cash flow at a realistic $500 million revenue level, and how they could get there in a few years.”
The report projects revenue of $460 million this year, increasing to $1.1 billion in 2014.
Other notes from the report:
Zynga’s user base has increased from 30 million in April 2009 to 228 million in January 2010.
Only 2% or 3% of users spend money on Zynga games and less than 1% consistently purchase virtual goods. Zynga makes nearly 40% of its revenue from those sales. Other revenue sources include in-game advertisements and marketing offers.
Upcoming Facebook changes could affect Zynga’s apps. Next month, Facebook is expected to adjust its notification policy for games, something that could “affect Zynga in unintended ways.” The report notes a Facebook change in July 2008 that turned off viral components for the Super Wall application. As a result, average daily users fell from 2.4 million to 0.6 million in a month. Currently, Super Wall users number 0.3 million average daily users.
Next Up! Research made news in November with its evaluation of Twitter, estimating it at perhaps half that of its popularly held $1.1 billion valuation. Next Up! also estimated Facebook at roughly $5 billion-to-$6.5 billion, compared to some estimates of up to $14 billion.
Source:http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/02/value-of-social-game-company-zynga-perhaps-more-than-3-billion/1
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Social media, such as blogs and Facebook pages, is becoming an increasingly important tool for helping small firms to identify and attract new customers, research has found.
The Small Business Success Index from the Center for Excellent in Service (CES) at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and Network Solutions shows adoption of social media among these companies doubled last year from 12 per cent to 24 per cent.
In the main, firms are looking to blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook pages to build on their other internet marketing services, with 61 per cent saying they use them to bring in new clients.
Among companies that have added social media to their marketing mix, 75 per cent said they are on a social network and 57 per cent use business sites like LinkedIn.
A further 45 per cent believe social media will be profitable to their business over the coming year.
CES director Janet Wagner said: “Time spent on Twitter, Facebook and blogs is an investment in making it easier for small businesses to compete.”
David Wilson of the Sydney Morning Herald said search engine optimisation is vital for smaller firms looking to get blogs and company websites on the first page of search engine results.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
source: http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com/Social-media-boosts-small-firms-internet-marketing,-says-report/19620434/
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