Simple starter guide to Facebook Advertising.
Good analysis of the top Facebook Pages in Ireland from Brendan.
So no new records on Twitter for the World Cup final.
Location-based classifieds. Twitter mixed with Foursquare for Craigslist?
Facebook tool that allows you to get more data about the fans on your Facebook Page. See are they talking about you.
Mobile video capture is obviously on the rise.
So you may or may not have seen the study we did with the National College of Ireland on Facebook usage. Check it out. It’s good! The main science bits are:
So we might have banner ad blindness going on around the web and maybe Google Ads on the right side of results don’t get much love but it seems for Facebook so far, ads work and people pay attention to them.
More importantly in my view is that people are naturally paying attention to information that shows up in their News Feed and a business is allowed to send their updates to this News Feed when someone Likes/Becomes a fan of the Business Page. So set up your Facebook Business Page and update on a regular basis. Tie it into a Marketing Calendar. The only cost is your time.
The Golden Age of mobile and online advertising is here?
Not just iPhone (though still the giant for mobile Facebook usage) that sees mobile Facebook usage. Android usage for Facebook? 7 Million a month.
Webinar: How can Nokia recapture the Youth market. June 23rd.
The PSFK London conference in September has some early bird tickets available. Well worth going to.
Twithority. Twitter search with results linked to number of followers.
Ford shows off their new car on Facebook first.
Big spenders on social networks? Heavy users. Wonder why Google, Facebook and the like want you online more?
In Media, PR and marketing (inc online pr and online marketing) knowing what events are coming up can be quite important so you can swerve away from them or tag on to them. Internally, knowing what’s going on inside and out helps everyone to coordinate their actions too.
When does your marketing start for a product and when does it end, when do you do press for an event, what day will that press release go out, does it clash with anything internally and any event externally? We all know the Government trick of burying bad news with their news dumps on a Friday evening but the date and time of all communications is important for an organisation. Being able to get a quick overview of what is coming up is vital for a busy organisation big or small. This is where the communications calendar comes in.
Photo owned by Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis (cc)
Advantages of a comms calendar
The first advantage of a communications calendar is that in a glimpse you can see what’s happening internally and externally over the next few days, weeks and months. Another advantage is that when external events pop up you might be able to modify your communications instead of ploughing headlong into the event. Knowing you have buffers around a planned event brings in a level of comfort and makes you adapt to a situation while looking professional. You can easily scroll back and look at past events that worked and didn’t work and gain insight for the next event too.
What type of calendar?
I find Google Calendar or one of the other web based calendars to be excellent as you can share them with a group. Having them on a wall works well and maybe even creating an analog version of the web-based calendar can work but a digital shared version means no matter where your team is, they can access the data and update it if needs be. If you do go digital though, make sure to make backups just in case there are connection issues or data loss.
What should go into it?
Newspapers will have upcoming events in their business sections such as company AGMs, results announcements and key Government events like budgets. They ought to go into your calendar, especially if you think they will dominate the news the day they’re announced. Over time experience will tell you which of these is important.
Measure results
With the calendar in place you can measure the effects of campaigns days, weeks and months after they have started and ended. If you add in resources put into the campaign and the impact of it you can visually see the value of the campaign for you and clients. Visual clues can often allow you to make better and faster decisions too compared to looking at data in just a spreadsheet.
Originally written for the Cork Independent and modified for this blog.
In this new phase of communications where earned media is the game then you need to not throw about “We’re great, buy our shit now will ya?” messages but instead become a publisher and advertiser. Creating something of use that can perhaps be reused or resent to people. We live in an age where content creation is a democratic idea but so is distribution of it. If you create good content then maybe the community you’re in online will spread it much further and it has more power as it comes from a person they know.
What do you want to get out of this?
If you’re going to invest time and resources creating content you need to be very certain what your endgame is. You need to figure out that if you are going to change the copy of your website, write some blog posts, work on status updates on Facebook or Twitter, that you are doing it for a purpose. For your business. What is that purpose? With your content, is it a way of showing off your authority, is it a case study of how you helped someone out, is it a direct way of making sales, is it a discount on goods, is it information that shows you care about the wider community? Lots of questions. Look at all the ones the communications bible brings up!
Who are those you want to energise?
Forget demographics, ask yourself who are the people you want to create good content for and as a result of good content, they interact with you and even help spread the word? Who exactly is the market for your products and services and what do they like online, on blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums etc.? Use the likes of the Facebook Ad system to figure out the volume of the people you are interested in interacting with and increase that by perhaps 30% for overall Internet numbers.
Themes
After figuring out what you want from working in an online media and who the people you want to work with are then you need a properly considered plan on when and what to send out. You can’t be doing anything adhoc or randomly. Unstructured might be more fun but a plan keeps you on message, allows you to measure how well you’re doing and makes people more comfortable and familiar by the fact you are interacting them on a regular basis. Themes could be a week long education initiative, a week of special offers/discounts, a week of tips on how to use your products more efficiently etc. Themes allow you to be repetitive with your overall message without using the same enforcing updates again and again.
Tweak their bits, get reactions
Interactions here are key. They might be weak emotional engagements but you every comment on a blog, every reply or ReTweet on Twitter, every comment or the weak but effective “Like” on Facebook is someone taking time out to react to your content. Not job done but certainly a recognition of sorts to what you’ve done. So figure out what people like by past experience or see how they presently interact with their friends on Twitter and Facebook, what content gets them going and see can you provide content like that. Getting interactions too might be as simple as asking for them. Solicit opinions with your content, go away from the broadcast type telling of news and lecturing. Ask on Facebook, blogs, Twitter: “What do you think?” “What do you think should be done?”
Update daily, measure weekly
On a weekly basis, evaluate how your content plan is going. Comments on the blog posts, links to the post. Interactions on Facebook using the Insights option. Views on your YouTube video, links to the video on YouTube. To start with you’ll be in prospecting mode, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. From that you’ll become more experienced with this, making it easier to gear up and plan well in advance and having much better knowledge what will work based on what worked before. The Insights tool especially will tell you what age groups and genders are being responsive and which are not which should give you crucial data on what to change and what to keep.
Content Curation
Knowing what people like, you can be the one that acts like a mini-newsfeed for them. Summarising industry news, interesting blog posts, showing videos they might like etc. Think of the daily papers they have on Newstalk or Morning Ireland, can you do the same with websites that apply to your area? The Fluffy Links blog posts I write are one such example of content curation.
Zeitgeists
Budgets, breaking news, elections, Apple products, volcanoes – They all impact people and all give us the opportunity to share our take and our authority on issues. Also, when you think about it, the marketing for these events has been done by the media already so it’s a nice opportunity to tie in to something relevant if you also have something relevant to add to the mix.
Want to find mass influencers? Find: Rich, iPhone waving, young people
Games and Apps on Facebook will now be able to send email invites to play the game (and join Facebook)
Online campaigns influenced UK voters, it seems.
Ten guidelines for running an online competition.
Passing the 100+ (genuine) followers on Twitter threshold is good for business.
Is marketing on Twitter a waste of time? Seems not.
Old but fantastic all the same. Watch the real-time purchasing map from Zappos.
Venue is Hogan Suite, Academy Plaza Hotel, off O’Connell street. Map.
If you want to attend this free event, please leave a comment.
Following on from the first Measure it! and with the feedback to hold another, the next one is on June 2nd. We’ll have two or maybe even three 10 minute presentations on social media and measuring success of a campaign followed by breaking into groups and coming up with solutions to a given task.
The aim of Measure it! is to get people thinking about metrics and measurements for social media and marketing. A side-effect of Measure it! is you get to meet people who are also looking an metrics and have some great ideas to share.
Measure it! is free to attend with the precondition you are willing to share some insights and thoughts. Do come along for the two hours.
Update May 29th:
There will be presentations from Realex Payments, O’Leary Analytics and Barry Hand.
There are 1.5 Million people using Facebook in Ireland. Almost 1 Million of them use it on a daily basis. There are lots of other stats we can dig out from Facebook and some are below. As of today you can see details of people in cities and get some pretty sweet extra demographics from a system that allows you to get details on age, gender, work, education, interests, birthday and whether they like your brand on Facebook already.
Lots and lots of cities and towns, here’s just some for Cork:
And the healthy stats as of publication:
1,575,720 people who live in Ireland
920,880 who live in Dublin, Cork, Limerick or Galway
699,800 people who live in Dublin
87,560 people who live in Cork
61,040 people who live in Limerick
70,320 people who live in Galway
90,980 people who live in Belfast
With this we can send targeted ads to people that use Facebook. Examples: Offer Leaving Cert grinds to kids in Cork. Offer last minute meal deals to people in Galway that like Italian food. Offer county themed T-Shirts to GAA fans in Donegal. Little bit of imagination and you can see how much fun it can be.
That’s ads. Expect to eventually do status updates targeted by Cities and location. Facebook interactions and marketing based on location details is around the corner too so stay tuned. Once you digest that and start to play with the ad system, remind yourself about Foursquare too.
RTÉ versus print news websites. Wrong battle lads and the wrong war perhaps.
Kings College Hospital asks the public to tell it how to improve.
10 tips for non-profits on facebook.
Meanwhile using Twitter for non-profits.
Google and Adwords and remarketing.
Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.
Facebook will get serious about location, very soon.
There’s money in virtual goods, we know this and money in location sensitive virtual goods too.
Genius. Tech support for your company via your Get Satisfaction Facebook Page Tab.
Paul links to a free e-book on pricing.
The big big news is what Facebook is going to evolve to. Facebook Pages all over the web.
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