Is Your Business Wasting Time On Facebook?

Look - I get it - we all need to be on the platform - that’s where the people are and that’s how we can be found - but this idea that once you’ve got your page up and running you need to keep your audience engaged by posting great status updates is just ridiculous.

Unless you have a dedicated resource and they’re really good at finding and identifying hysterical stuff that is even funnier than the stuff your own friends post and share - well - ain’t nobody got time for that!

Do This

Have a good looking business page, share your blog posts, shoot and boost video, otherwise use Facebook as a super targeted advertising platform to go and find new customers.

If you have no budget, use the time you’d normally spend finding and posting stuff and login as your page and start liking and interacting with other businesses where your customers might hang out.

There are of course exceptions to this rule but for most business owners who don’t have a marketing team, the days of organic reach are over - Facebook is an ad platform, and a bloody good one at that!

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: The Internet!

How To Build A Super Targeted Audience

The Past

Door to door salesmen - telesales calls during dinner - cultural memes that millennials don’t even know about, existed for a reason - they took a B2C product and put it directly in front of the consumer.  Aside from being massively inefficient, such an invasive approach pissed more people off than it pleased.

The Now

While ads on billboards, television and websites solve for efficiency and invasiveness, they lose out on relevancy.  Programmatic advertising is certainly more targeted but the ads are already super annoying as they follow you around the internet like a lost puppy.

The arrival of social media delivered the opportunity for digital door to door marketing, but just as before, people found it to be invasive and annoying and of course it took forever.  While targeting influencers to share your message is more efficient and brings secondary benefits, the sheer volume of content makes it hard to cut through the noise.

The Way

If you could identify the customer who was interested in what you had to offer and find a way to connect with them directly without freaking them out and coming across like a stalker - wouldn’t that be awesome?

I’m playing with a number of different tools but the one that’s really beginning to stand out is The Dao - http://darwineco.com/dao/.  Originally conceived as a research tool built around IBM big data and cognitive technologies,  I’m using it to develop an audience of people who are talking about what I have to offer.

If you’re interested in learning more about your market and building your own audience, I highly recommend checking it out.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Yin Yang - Wikipedia

What You Need To Know About Video

I apologize in advance if you think I’m beating you over the head about video - but if your content strategy is still driven by static text and imagery - someone’s about to eat your lunch.  Here’s a quick history lesson and a question.

YouTube

Back in the day it was all about YouTube - you’d film your video, load it up to your channel and then post that video onto your blog and share it out.  This would drive traffic to your website and give you content to share on your social platforms, (content that in turn would drive people back to your website.)

Social Embeds

We changed strategy a few years ago when social platforms started allowing embedded video to play in their streams.  Instead of posting the video on your blog and sharing the link to social - now you would load the video directly to the platform.  

This reduced traffic to your website but increased activity and interaction on social so it was worth the trade off.  The only hold out was Facebook that didn’t allow 3rd party videos to play in their news feed.

Live Streaming

The arrival last year of Periscope and Meerkat announced the beginning of live streaming. It was great for people who already had a large audience but not so much for smaller businesses as after you finished the live stream the video was only retained for 24 hours and then deleted.

The arrival of Katch.me was great as it saved the live streams enabling you to post them to your blog and then share out across social - pretty much the old YouTube model.  However with the death of Katch last week (over 1 million users but no revenue model) - live streaming for small business seemed toast, until…

Facebook FTW

January saw people on Facebook watch over 100 million hours of video a day.  The last few months have seen the release of live streaming capabilities to all business pages.

While video content is given a higher ranking than text or images, live streaming video is rewarded even further, giving business owners who experiment with live video much greater visibility in news feeds.

Is Video Right For You?

Where are you connecting with your customers?

This information is coming to you as text and imagery because email is my primary channel.  If Facebook was my primary channel I’d probably be doing this as video.

I’m bullish again on Facebook, particularly for small and medium sized businesses.  But, if you’re going to invest time and resource in the platform, video should definitely be part of your strategy.

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work? Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Machine Gun Ettiquette by drinks machine on Flickr

Get On Your Phone!

You know the difference between you and your customers when it comes to your business’ digital footprint?

You experience it on a big screen - they experience it on a phone.

Think about it - when it’s time for you to “do marketing” you’re at your desk using your office computer or a laptop.

Social Is Mobile

We all have Facebook pages, most of us have Twitter and Instagram accounts.  We have them in order to increase the reach of our messaging.

Having run several rounds of Facebook ads for different clients I can tell you that the vast majority of social traffic that comes through to your website is overwhelmingly mobile - in some cases over 90%.

Design For Mobile First

We just changed the landing page for a current Facebook campaign when we discovered that the average time on page for mobile visitors was less than half that of desktop visitors. 

Turned out that the beautiful layout that worked perfectly on a large screen became way too text heavy and complex on a mobile screen.  It was a simple fix, but with nine times as much mobile traffic as desktop - we should have started with the mobile design first.

Get Off Your Desktop

The next time you “do marketing” spend some of that time on your phone, you might be surprised at how different you look.

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work? Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Smartphone Abstraction by Jonas Smith on Flickr

Curious About Snapchat?

• 200 million+ users - growing rapidly
• Driven by Tweens & Millennials (and social media gurus!)
• Brands are all over it

Ephemeral Advantage

The biggest thing to wrap your head around is that information on Snapchat is temporary - it has a shelf life between 1 second and 24 hours - but after that - it’s gone.

This is its core point of difference and its core advantage.

To the generation who grew up with the internet, who subscribe rather than buy, who don’t own but share - not having to worry about storing something is actually freeing.

Authentic Information

Content is either 10 second videos or photos with text or sticker overlays.  You can’t use a video you created for YouTube or take your favorite Instagram photo and upload it - everything is created and experienced inside the app.

When something you share has a super short shelf life - there’s no real point in spending time making it look great.  As a result - the photos and videos on the platform are raw and honest and often humorous.

If social media so far has been our idealized selves - Snapchat is our actual reality.  

Stories & Interaction

During a 24 hour period you can add your photos and videos to “Your Story” - a continuous loop that strings them together to show your day’s “story” - after 24 hours the content is erased and a new story begins.

This the part of the app that is gaining traction and the one advertisers are most geeked about.  I know this all sounds odd but bear in mind that there are in-app celebs whose stories get watched on a daily basis by up to 4 million viewers!

Should You Be On SnapChat

Unless your primary target market is Millenials and you have an additional 30 minutes every day to personally invest in marketing - my view would be - not at this time.  I suspect that recommendation may change over time...

Written while listening to: Frustration by music2work2

Image Credit: Snapchat

Time to Revisit Facebook

I’ve not been a particular fan of Facebook for business.  Sure it was amazing in the beginning but over time if you didn’t have a huge budget and content team - it was tough to see any kind of ROI.

But as with everything in the digital marketing world - things change, check these facts out:

• Last year about 20% of the world’s population logged into Facebook - on the same day!
• Business’ organic reach - which has been steadily declining for years is now back on the rise
• In some markets, Facebook is sending more traffic to websites than Google

Google Ads Vs. Facebook Ads

Google grew because its core product - selling ads - worked and businesses made more money.

But what was Facebook’s core product for businesses?  A place for them to hang out & meet customers?  The ability to organically move their annoying message into the news-feed?  No - it was and is again - Ads, but for years Facebook Ads sucked.

Facebook Ads No Longer Suck

Whether it’s the amount of people, the easy to use interface or the incredibly granular control that allows you to target all single female nurses between the ages of 25 and 33 who have a passion for bodybuilding and theme parks, love beer, own a dog and have just got a new job,  I’m beginning to see Facebook Ads work for small businesses again.

There’s 3,500 people on the planet, using Facebook, who meet the above set of requirements.  Think about what image you could put in their mobile news-feed to grab their attention!

Huge Mobile Ad Distribution

One recent campaign we did for a local business saw less than 3% of click throughs come from the desktop- whereas 48% came from the mobile news feed and 47% came from off-Facebook mobile apps and networks.

Try It Out

You can get in the game for as little as $150, so long as you get creative with your Ad imagery and have a decent landing page that will convert.  If you need a hand - get in touch.

Written while listening to: Music to Grieve to - Acceptance #1 by music2work2

Image Credit: dinero facebook by Esther Vargas on Flickr