January 3rd, 2012
Didn’t get a chance to check out the Trada Webinar on making Facebook ads work for you? No worries! Here at BlitzLocal, we watched and learned, and took some notes for you. They started with an educational slideshow about the different types of Facebook ads, and finished by answering questions from the chat window. Here are our notes, and some additional article links for extra information.
The Bottom Line: Facebook Ads are the most versatile, targeted way to advertise online, and they have incredible reach.
Challenges with Facebook Advertising
- Banner Blindness
- You have to hire a graphic artist to make all the ad creatives
Facebook Glossary:
- Connections: The number of individuals who liked your Facebook page, RSVP’d to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing your ad or sponsored story. Basically, a connection is a conversion.
- Unique Reach: The number of individual people who saw your sponsored stories or ads.
- Social Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads because their friends liked your page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app.
- Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your campaign’s sponsored story or ad. This is helpful for measuring ad fatigue.
Basic Ad Formats
- Basic Ads
- “Like” ad: Links to tab on Facebook page
- Event ad: Links to event
- Application ad: Links to application
- Standard ad: Links to specific URL
- Sponsored Stories
- Page “Like” Story: Mary-Jane likes your page, Page “like” Story lets Mary-Jane’s friends know about the like
- Page Post Story: You published a post to your page’s fans. Page Post Story allows this post to show up in fans’ news feeds
- Pages Post “Like” Story; Alex liked one of your page posts in the last 7 days. Page Post “like” Story lets Alex’s friends know about the post like
- App Used and Game Played Story: Lauren played/used your game or app. App Used/Game Played Story tells her friends about this action
- App Share Story: Hayes shared a story from your app in the last 7 Days. App Share Story lets Hayes’ friends know about the share
- Check-in Story: Lisa checked in or claimed a deal using Facebook Places. Check-in Story lets Lisa’s friends know about it.
- Domain Story: Mike liked/shared content from your website or pasted a link from your site to his wall. Domain Story lets Mike’s friends know about this action.
The complexity and potential of targeting on Facebook
- There are so many ways of targeting that it can be confusing
- Age, likes, interests, birthday, apps, education, timeline content, friends, event RSVPs, fans
- When choosing targets, focus on two things:
- Narrowing your audience
- Demo and Geo Targeting
- Geography: Country, State, Province, City or Zip targeting
- Demographics: Gender, Age, Birthday, Relationship Status, Language
- Workplace and Education Targeting
- Workplace, Education, Preferred Language
- Likes and Interests Targeting
- Favorite TV Shows, Movies, Books, Music, Hobbies, Religion, Political Views
- Thinking outside the box – Let’s say you want to sell golf clubs
- Nick (who plays golf) is an obvious target
- Barbara doesn’t like golf – but she likes the Palm Beach Country Club
- Chaz doesn’t have the word golf anywhere on his profile, but he plays golf for a living: he’s a sales guy!
- Try the obvious targets, but Facebook’s best advertisers use non-linear thinking to target ads.
Campaign Organization Tips
- An “Account” in Facebook is similar to a “Campaign” in Paid Search
- A “Campaign” in Facebook is similar to “Ad Group” in Paid Search
- Warning: Don’t create campaigns with many different targets and ads. Keep your campaigns small.
- Do not put all segmented target groups in one campaign – as your ads are competing within the campaign.
- Prevent ad fatigue, or banner blindness by changing ads frequently
- As soon as CTR trends down, submit new content!
Q&A:
What is a good CTR?
What images work best?
- Logos traditionally don’t work well
- Images of people are effective
- Format design keeping small size in account
What is a preferred or optimal frequency?
- Keep it small!
- 6,7,8 is bad
Any issues with click fraud?
- There is a department at Facebook dedicated to click fraud with a sophisticated monitoring team.
- More difficult to produce in Facebook than in search where you can just search to make a specific ad appear.
How will timeline affect ads/business pages?
Fans much more likely to take some type of action than non-fans.
Targeting workplaces is a great tool for B2B marketing.
What sort of company uses page post story? How breaking should the news be? What types of posts work best?
- Entertainment, news businesses using these most effectively
- Have emotional connection so people will click
Is there advertising on Facebook mobile?
- In testing, not released to general public yet.
Notes taken by BlitzLocal Analyst Matt Prater
Graphics obtained from: http://www.slideshare.net/TradaPaidSearch/facebook-ads-you-can-make-them-work and www.facebook.com.
Tags: advertising, facebook ads, facebook ads platform, facebook advertising, Pay Per Click, PPC, Trada, webinar
Posted in Facebook, Learning Center | No Comments »
September 21st, 2011
Knowing and understanding the following, “6 Biggest Business Mistakes On Facebook,” will help any business tackle Facebook with a proper footing towards achieving tremendous marketing results.
6) Making The Wrong Type Of Facebook Page
*RcFishingWorld would be much better off on Facebook with a business page instead of a personal profile.
Personal profiles are the only pages most Facebook users will ever be familiar with, however, they lack many essential resources which business profiles otherwise would include. For example business pages give page administrators access to insights about your pages’ audience through statistical insights such as; page views, demographic views, traffic sources, and other key statistics otherwise absent in a personal profile. Even though business pages do not allow you to actually “friend request” your target market, they still give you access to your audiences news feed via the “like” button. Bottom line: make sure you make the right type of profile!
5) Not Posting Frequently Enough On The Wall
*Mortgage Advice is not engaging their 2,000 fans.
Take this business page as an example, “Mortgage Advice.” This page has over 2,000 fans, but they are not reaching out to any of their fan’s news feeds, because Mortgage Advice is not posting anything. By simply posting, “Check out Mortgage Advice… For such and such reason,” they would easily generate a couple hundred impressions and draw a small piece of internet traffic to their business, but they are not utilizing this potential. If Mortgage Advice added a few nice graphics and than reinforced their more professional look with some interesting wall posts, which were than updated and maintained, than even this business could generate some revenue on Facebook! Instead their simply letting their fans waste away.
4) Not Engaging Your Audience, or Worse Yet; Acquiring Fake Fans!
By neglecting fans, business pages are essentially shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. Edgerank and Post Quality Score are metrics of Facebook’s content management filters. Unlike the past, everything users post does NOT appear in your audience’s news feeds; information which users do not engage, is subsequently filtered out to save users time, relieving content which may be perceived as spam or unimportant to the user.
This also means fake fans will do more harm than good to your page because they bring down your engagement rates. Companies which entice clicks and engage people through interesting posts, will maintain contact, pages which do not engage their audience will be filtered out of their audiences’ news feeds all together!
Some tips for increasing your engagement;
- Make sure to respond to comments, and don’t worry about commenting on your own material.
- Never leave a fan hanging and always respond to whatever questions fans may post, positively enforcing fan engagement.
- Also feel free to “like” your own material, as this does not harm your Edgerank or P.Q.S. scores.
- There are many techniques to raise your engagement for example try to ask your audience questions, instigating engagement. Using these simple guidelines, can quickly garner huge results and massively improve your pages marketing on Facebook
*See how each post only makes impressions on 10% of CiviliansNews.com‘s audience?
3) Not Running Sponsored Stories
Sponsored story advertisements are displayed for current fans and friends of current fans, in order to spur re-engagement. Re-engagement is for fans who at one time “liked” your page, yet lost interest over time. After a fan becomes un-engaged, ignoring your page for some time, their news feeds will start filtering out your pages posts, losing contact to your audience member’s news feed. In order to regain contact with these fans you SHOULD run a sponsored story Facebook advertisement, if un-engaged fans click the advertisement than just like that, your page will start making impressions again on that user’s news feed.
A tip for sponsored story advertisements: try to focus on third party articles which positively endorse your organization. This makes the sponsored story appear as if it may have been run by a 3rd party, so you don’t look like you’re tooting your own horn.
2) Not Keeping An Eye On Your Competition
Later this year Blitzmetrics.com is going to be bringing FREE social media analytic dashboards to all businesses who sign up on their website. These dashboards will be full of information about your competitors’ social networks as well as your own fans’ engagement. However, this free product is still not scheduled for release until later this year. Until then let’s talk about keeping an eye on your competition manually.
It’s really as simple as “liking” your competitors’ pages, than following their activity in your business page’s news feed. When logged in as a business page, the business will maintain a news feed consisting of things the business page “liked.” This is useful because, by liking your competitors, you can personally monitor their actions on Facebook everyday. Commenting on your competitors’ pages is also allowed as well. Spamming a competitor’s page is an easy way to violate Facebook rules and policies, however, it is still not completely disallowed. Often times, large companies will even disregard this type of engagement because even if you’re shouting out your own page on your competitors’ walls, it raises your competitors’ engagement rates, making this tactic a double edged sword.
Ignoring your competition is a massive mistake: make sure to keep a close eye on what your biggest competitors are doing everyday. Check out how they are utilizing social networking and employ techniques that they have used successfully for yourself!
1) Being Overly “Business-ey”
Have fun! When utilizing the social networks for business, it is always important to remember what you’re doing and where you’re doing it. The social networks are still a taboo, unknown realm of marketing. Most users are young people, and most of their time on the sites are spent concerned with high school friends and ex-girlfriends, which will often take precedence over corporate marketing campaigns.
As far as posting content, remember that users are unlikely to engage with the same monotonous business messages. Try adding a bit of provocation to your posts. A sense of professionalism is always inherently mandatory, however, don’t be afraid to dive into a funny joke, funny topic, or peculiar interest. Stirring up, or aggravating fans increases engagement and inevitably will increase the volume for which your material is shared.
Hopefully these basic guidelines help you run a successful business or fan page on Facebook. Good luck!
-William Larsen, BlitzLocal Analyst
This is an article from one of our analysts, who we encourage to share opinions. It may or may not reflect the views of BlitzLocal.
Tags: facebook ads, facebook advertising, facebook analytics, facebook business, facebook marketing, social media marketing
Posted in Company Blog, Facebook, SEO and Marketing | Comments Off
September 16th, 2011
Dennis Yu is an expert at internet marketing, so when a friend asked if he would rank his new business on Google, Dennis had it ranked in 15 minutes! I once knew a business man that spent 3 years trying and still could not rank his business page on Google. Meanwhile, Dennis Yu achieved a quality search ranking for his friend’s business, faster than an episode of Sponge Bob Squarepants.
Ranking well for the proper keywords will generate targeted, high quality leads for any business. Customers who shop or price check online are constantly using Google search, and the businesses that rank well on Google meet potential clients who found them because of their search engine rankings. Dennis’ friend recently started a racquet stringing business out of his home in Boulder, Colorado. Knowing his customers often found racquet stringing services online, he asked Dennis if he would help him climb up the Google search results for keywords like “Tennis”, “Boulder”, and ”Racquet“, knowing his customers would likely use these search terms if they were looking to get a tennis racquet strung in Boulder. Often times competition for search results is fierce, making it a very competitive field. Take the term “Remote Control Car” for example. Searching even this three word term, causes Google to display 15 million results. Obviously, the results listed first will receive the most views from prospective customers; but how do you get your business to the top of the ladder?
Dennis started by explaining that clickable links online, termed “back links”, are essentially connecting web traffic together from one site to the next. For example, any link in this article, which takes you to another page, is a back link. Receiving high quality, “back links,” from reputable sites, is one of the major components Google uses when ordering search results, particularly when a search query returns millions of results. Essentially, the amount of back links and how well they fit the target search (among other things) determines who gets to be at the top of the search. This creates multiple dimensions to the importance of back links to your site. It is important to have back links because, not only do they account for a great source of direct traffic to your website, they piggyback off other sites’ traffic and funnel it through a direct link to yours, and play a vital role in how Google ranks sites in keyword searches.
The impact of a back link is determined by the rank of the page your site is linking with. This clout, or credibility of a website, is kept in a system of scoring called “Google Page Rank.” You can easily download a page rank application, which tells you the page rank of any page you are surfing, or linking to, displayed in the bottom right hand corner of your browser, after downloading this free tool from quirk.biz.com. The page rank scale goes from 1 to 10, but it is important to note that the page rank scale is also aggregate. An aggregate in this context, means that sites which rank even 1 level higher than others are ten times stronger than sites ranked even one level lower; exponentially rising and falling in the Google pecking order. In order to zoom past all the other search results on Google, it is important to score well on Google for back links, because Google takes into account the quality and amount of back links to your pages, ranking pages with more, higher quality back links, ahead of sites which are not as well-linked to the rest of the internet.
Although ranking a small business page requires more than simply 1 or 2 back links, even from a page rank 5 site or above, a single “PR5″ back link is usually enough to rank well on certain Google keywords. Particularly if your intended Google keyword queries return less than 2 or 3 million results, and the keyword results your seeking are not in heated competition with other websites. In more sought-after search fields, one must acquire more back links that are ranked higher; ideally with matching keywords and topics, to impact competitive search results the most. A good way to obtain back links on reputable sites is to guest-post material on other sites, for example a friend’s blog, but that is just one suggestion for anyone getting started tackling any major keyword searches.
To rank his friend’s tennis racquet business, Dennis started by quickly writing a short article on his PR5 blog, laced with keywords for Next Day Racquets, that he later hoped to rank for in Google search. He identified ”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” as the keywords that would work best, because the company is a start-up business in Boulder, Colorado that sells tennis racquets, and Dennis realized that it was feasible to rank even higher than his friend’s business rivals for these keywords. He again determined, “Boulder, Tennis ,Racquets,” was the ideal search term for his friend’s business by discovering that the term received an acceptable amount of highly targeted web traffic, while additionally targeted prospective local customers. Keyword research played a vital role in this process, whereby any search query with less than 2 million search results would be relatively “low hanging fruit,” that with a few steps could be overtaken on search results.
The material that ranks number 1 on Google, on average, receives 4 times the amount of organic traffic that the content ranking number 2 receives. So the importance of being ranked high, for any business, is tremendous. After determining the desired keywords, Dennis wrote a highly targeted article about,”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” on his PR5 blog. Dennis also went ahead and created a social media outlet, (his specialty), via a Facebook.com fan page, for his friend’s business (which it would use as a sales page for the time being). He then went on to link his blog to a new article post about Next Day Racquets, while intermingling another link into Next Day Racquet’s Facebook fan page. After linking the PR5 blog with Next Day Racquets Facebook fan page, he went ahead with a simple little trick that quickly allows Google to index the newly posted material. WordPress blogs are already great at pinging the search ladders, informing Google instantly about the emergence of new content, but a great way to get indexed even faster is to use the Google plus 1 system. By pushing plus “+1″on the newly formed content on his blog, Dennis actually got Google to instantly crawl the post and in turn got the post instantaneously indexed on the search ladder, with no wait or time-delay!
The result? Next Day Racquets ranked number 1 for the keywords, “Boulder, Tennis, Racquets,” in 15 minutes! By simply writing a high quality, keyword articulated article, on a reputable site (his own blog), then linking it to his friends business fan page and then “+1″-ing the results, Dennis instantaneously brought the Google indexing spiders running to the site and had it ranked number 1 on the search engine keywords just as fast. Dennis achieved what most business owners never do; he ranked Next Day Racquets in the top 5 of Google search for important keywords and search terms. Not only that, he did it quicker than I could have ordered a Domino’s pizza. After a few weeks the listing did fall from ranking very 1st on the ladder, down to number 4 on the search results. Even so, Dennis Yu was able to get his friend more Google recognition in 15 minutes than home businesses ever get at all! Not only that, he didn’t use any unethical business or black hat S.E.O. and instead properly mounted Next Day Racquets on the search ladder, for the long run. Dennis Yu is truly a professional. Check out more on his blog www.Dennis-Yu.com. I hope this article helps people maximize their search engine opportunities; it sure helped me!
-William Larsen, BlitzLocal Analyst
Tags: blitzlocal, Dennis Yu, facebook advertising, local search marketing, rank in google search
Posted in BlitzLocal, SEO and Marketing | No Comments »
August 25th, 2011
Soles4Souls is Not Letting Your Old Shoes Go To Waste
It is dysfunctional to think that Americans discarded millions of athletic shoes over the course of this past year; worse yet, leaving most of those shoes to rot away in dangerous landfills. It has been estimated that the average American owns between 3-5 pairs of shoes today. So where do most of these shoes end up? Most of the shoes are worn, then thrown away to later rot in landfills. When surveyed by the EPA in 2007, landfills were proven to be leaking pollutants in 82% of those surveyed.(http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html). With the increasing pressure to recycle, combined with the danger of modern-day landfills, many worn sneakers should be re-used or recycled across the world today.
Surely recycling is a better option than leaving shoes to rot, contributing to the massive waste piles and hazardous material leaking out of landfills today. As the world grows more connected, better uses for our used shoes are becoming more and more clear as well. Most Americans reap the benefits of a society of abundance, while other societies around the world do not know such peace of mind. Wayne Elsey, founder of the charity Soles4Souls, is attempting to help people in need benefit from the tremendous amount of American used athletic shoes in our landfills today.
Excess. The filthy little word that illustrates over-abundance and waste. When examining the different facets of an average Americans daily life, excess is everywhere; over-sized SUVs, gaudy jewelry and twenty five pairs of shoes in our family closets! While the average American will own between 3 and 5 pairs of shoes at a time, the point in which we decide these shoes are no longer usable is the subject of this article today. These days, some people deem shoes unwearable, even if the shoes only have a single scuff! Other more patient sneaker patrons, will wait until their shoes are a little worn down before abandoning them completely. A gritty working-class person may even let their shoes go until they are worn through to the sole before deeming them unusable. In any instance, these shoes can still serve a good cause and can still be recycled, even after the original owners are done with them.
Soles4Souls is one of the organizations I recently discovered that had the fundamental aspiration to distribute used shoes to the people who need them, all over the world. Wayne Elsey, founder of Soles4Souls, apparently looked at devastation around the world, and envisioned aiding other countries with Americans used footwear. The epidemic of improper footwear runs rampant worldwide. Soles4Souls tackles this challenge by literally taking one man’s trash and turning it into another man’s treasure; quite noble to say the least. I learned that with that vision in mind, Wayne’s organization Soles4Souls has collected and distributed over 14 million pairs of gently worn shoes worldwide, in over 127 countries.
Even our earliest ancestors understood the importance of recycling what they used, and not wasting their resources. Why is it that this mantra seems to have been all but lost in regards to today’s footwear? While some may find it difficult to envision the lives of those struggling overseas, it is important to simply know that others around the world are indeed people; people with emotions, ideas, creativity, imagination, thoughts and feelings, who need shoes just like us. When Wayne envisioned supporting others with Americans’ worn-down sneakers, I imagine he was thinking of these people. The abundance of sneakers in America today is ridiculous and the footwear statistics are staggering. In my opinion, giving your sneakers to Soles4Souls is not only empathy; it’s common sense. It has been estimated that Americans purchase nearly a million pairs of sneakers per day. Instead of wasting these massive amounts of used sneakers, give them another chance. The landfills don’t need these excessive reserves of used shoes, but other people around the world do!
Tags: environmental vlog, environmentalism, landfills obsolete, recycling, soles4souls, wayne elsey
Posted in Business of the Week, Company Blog | No Comments »
July 27th, 2011
Remember back when it was awesome to change your extended network bar on MySpace? Now you can accomplish the same on Facebook, and people will finally appreciate you as a human being and not just that guy that sits online all day…
Step 1. Open your favorite image editing software. I will be using Paint Shop Pro because I don’t have the patience to torrent Photoshop CS3.
Step 2. Create a blank canvas with the measurements 500px x 70px.
Step 3. Build the masterpiece you wish to place on your profile.
Step 4. Using the crop tool, divide the picture into 5 tiles, each 100px x 70px. (Most likely your software will display the measurements so you can get this precise size.)
Step 5. After saving all 5 files, upload them in REVERSE order and set them as profile pictures.
As you can see above, my masterpiece is in reverse order.
If you set each as a profile picture (in reverse order), revert your profile picture back to the original picture, your profile should appear like this.
Good luck, and let us know how it works out in the comments!
About the guest author:
Kody Wilcox is an Analyst with Blitzlocal and a Facebook enthusiast.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest bloggers, employees and partners are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BlitzLocal, its partners or client companies.
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Tags: banner facebook, cool facebook, facebook banner, make a cool facebook banner
Posted in Company Blog | No Comments »
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