A case study showing how to research the impact of Facebook on sales
The journey of measuring Facebook success has been fast paced. It started with how big your fan page was (counting likes), then to visits from social profiles, to getting very excited by the concept of Engagement Rate. Some opinion believes social media is best used to drive brand awareness, others for customer service. And there are brands that use Facebook as a successful sales channel.
There have been frameworks and methodologies as well as plenty of "proof" (largely published by service providers in the social media industry), yet the fact still remains that demonstrating the value of a Facebook page or Twitter account is still hard in 2013, especially if you're not a retail brand.
The reason? For travel brands like us it's hard to imagine that anyone is going to see a post of ours on Facebook, click through…
Follow Facebook conversations and key trends with #hashtag
Following the introduction of the new Facebook #hashtag this Summer, we have looked at how it's being used for Facebook content marketing. This infographic from Prestige Marketing's also prompts new ideas about using the approach.
It's interesting to see some examples of how marketers have been gaining traction since the beginning, and using it successfully to track trending conversations at different stages of their planning and campaigns.
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6 ideas for growing Facebook fans regardless of company size
Facebook may be the most widely used social network, but that doesn't make it any easier to gain traffic and leads. Competition is high and it's a fragile form of interacting that can make it or break it for brands. Tone of voice, what is said on-record along with your social media numbers will be the basis of first impressions.
This article will show you is how to improve this one aspect of your Facebook marketing recognising that evaluating success on Facebook goes beyond Likes, but that many marketers are judged on this.
Six Tips on improving your Facebook numbers
As I work with Facebook Pages I see six different common shortcuts to gaining fans in a short space of time, some of which are most appropriate to smaller businesses, others that apply to all sizes.
1. Exchanging Likes
Smaller businesses starting on Facebook will find…
Should you run competitions on your Facebook Timeline?
On October 24th, Richard Jones, CEO of EngageSciences, will give a talk at Social Media Marketing 2013 (London) on ‘What's Really Behind Facebook's Competition Rule Changes?’ To explain the opportunity and to get you in the mood, I’m offering my own take on how and when you should make use of Timeline competitions and when you should steer well clear. The change was first alerted to Smart Insights readers in Rhian Simm's post on Facebook's new competition rules on 29th August 2013 - so it's a relatively new issue.
Facebook Rule changes
First of all, let’s be clear on what the Facebook rule changes actually are.
For the past two years it’s been against Facebook rules to run a competition directly on a Facebook Page and all Facebook competitions have needed to be managed through a third party app –…
5 Ways to Utilize Facebook Posts for Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about creating relevant and compelling content in order to change or enhance consumer behavior that’s favorable to you. And where else to better utilize this strategy than in a billion-people social hub that is Facebook? So read carefully and jot down these important tips that will surely help your brand with content marketing.
Tips on using Facebook for your content marketing strategy
1. Content creation through Social Listening.
Probably the greatest thing about Facebook from a marketer’s perspective is that you don’t have to guess what your consumers are thinking since they’re going to post it anyway. So this is the best time to listen.
Tip: Find out how people relate to your brand, how they see it and use it on a daily basis, etc. by searching hashtags:
…
Implications of the changes to Facebook’s promotions rules
Importance to Facebook marketers: [rating=4]
Recommended link: PDF download of new promotion rules
To the surprise of many Facebook marketers, this week saw the release of updated Facebook competition rules, removing the requirement for businesses to run competitions and promotions through a app on their brand's timeline.
"We’ve updated our Pages Terms in order to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook."
Until now, it has been against Facebook regulations to run any promotion outside of a third-party app. For example, running a competition that required users to 'like' or 'share' a post for the chance to win.
This new change, now allows businesses to:
Collect competition entries by users posting on the Page or comment and/or liking a Page post
Collect entries through users…
Facebook Embedded Posts follow the Embedded Tweets model
Value: [rating=3]
Original 31st July announcement: Facebook developer blog
Facebook has now announced that this feature was now available to all on 20th August 2013 and has given more examples. We couldn't demonstrate it when we first alerted readers to it, but can now show how easy it is to add to blogs.
This example for "everyone's favourite band" shows how images and video are supported, just click on the down arrow on the "Like Page" button to image.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Post by Mumford and Sons.
This is a neat feature since the Twitter Embed Tweets feature has proved popular for adding tweets or pictures to blogs or campaign sites - they’re a great way…
3 examples of integrating social media and email lead generation from small and medium businesses
Many businesses are wondering what they’re really getting from the time they spend marketing on Facebook and, more importantly, how they can turn their hard-earned fans into customers.
To support the integration between social media and email marketing, Constant Contact created a tool, Social Campaigns, specifically designed to make it easy to get measurable results from Facebook marketing. With Social Campaigns, businesses can offer current and potential fans something special, such as exclusive content like prize draws or discounts that help grow their fanbase and generate sales, leads, brand awareness, and social word-of-mouth. The tool integrates with email to help capture email leads too. Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights asked me to share the examples since they show how Social and Email marketing can be used for Permission Marketing today using our tool or others. Editor's…
New "Story bumping" and "Last Actor" ranking changes
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook news feed announcement
It seems that for some businesses, gaining visibility in Facebook’s news feed is now almost as important or more important than gaining visibility in Google’s search results for your target pages. Like Google, it’s a challenge, in their briefing this week Facebook revealed how much of a challlenge it is…
“Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all…
we prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day.”.
If you’re concerned with encouraging more sharing of your content through Facebook you will know how it’s controlled by the EdgeRank based on the affinity, weight and decay of posts. Marie Page has given some great guidance on…
A tutorial on Facebook's updated business page insights
I was very excited to finally get Facebook's new Insights rolled out last week. Well worth the wait.
Not sure if you have the new Insights?
Take a look at your Admin panel and you should see this:
If not, then you are still awaiting the roll out. It's worth hitting the "Check out the new Page insights" button as it will simply tour you through the new features using your very own data.
Facebook describes the update this way:
"Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts' performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and…
