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Social Media: It’s Time Marketers Start 6 Facebook Marketing Strategy

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Social Media: It’s Time Marketers Start 6 Facebook Marketing Strategy 21

Introduction:

After years of aimlessly chasing fans, it’s time marketers start driving real business results from Facebook. This requires building a Facebook page that has a clear focus and offers value to customers, leveraging the entire Facebook Social Media: It’s Time Marketers Start 6 Facebook Marketing Strategy 22tool kit, and integrating Facebook into a broader marketing strategy. To accomplish this, interactive marketers must be both an “oracle” who teaches their organization about Facebook and a “gatekeeper” who manages access to the platform. As marketers mature with the social network and Facebook increases its commitment to brands, together they will revolutionize the advertising industry.

Marketers haven’t cracked the Facebook code:

From toppling governments to inspiring award-winning films to bring long-lost family members together, Facebook is often the center of attention. And marketers are swarming to it like moths to a flame: 96 of the top 100 advertisers now use the site. Yet while millions of people have “liked” brand pages, most marketers fail to derive value from those relationships. In fact, engagement rates on brand pages are declining rather than increasing. The result? Believe it or not, most marketers don’t even see Facebook as their best option to drive audience engagement (see Figure 1). Marketers are failing to use the platform to its full potential because:

  • They lack focus. In their race to start a Facebook page, many marketers forgot an integral step: setting clear objectives. Now they’re left with Facebook pages that have no purpose other than collecting “likes.” This lack of objectives not only hurts from a business perspective but also means that fans don’t get any real value from liking the brand.
  • They don’t understand the platform. Facebook is unlike any platform marketers have ever seen — it’s like a miniature Internet with its own set of rules. EdgeRank, Facebook’s system for deciding which content appears in the newsfeed, is similar to search engine optimization (SEO) but requires a different kind of optimization. Facebook Ads are a cross between banners and paid search — and don’t quite follow the conventions of either. Marketers struggle not only to understand each of these pieces individually but also how they work together and how they’re evolving.
  • They don’t have the right resources in place. Facebook doesn’t cost as much in money as it does in manpower — but many marketing organizations don’t have appropriate manpower in place — the dedicated people or the content development and sharing processes needed to be successful.
  • They seek the wrong measurements. Marketers say that measuring return on investment (ROI) is their biggest challenge in social media, and measuring Facebook is no exception. Too many marketers ask “What is the value of a fan?” and not enough marketers understand their fans’ value in terms of loyalty and influence or Facebook’s impact on their business. Marketers won’t be able to prove value until they begin to ask the right questions.

Facebook Hasn’t Made Brands a Priority

Just as marketers have struggled to use Facebook properly, Facebook has struggled to help them succeed. In fact, for a company that relies on advertising revenues, Facebook hasn’t done much to make life easier for advertisers:

  1. It does not make content management easy. Marketing on Facebook requires a constant flow of content. Yet marketers aren’t set up to be publishers — and Facebook offers only limited options for managing multiple pages or handling multiple languages. Coca-Cola experienced this downside when Portuguese-language content accidentally appeared on its US page, inciting some users to respond with hate speech on a page that promotes happiness.

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  1. It constantly changes the rules without warning. Facebook’s frequent and unilateral policy changes make it difficult for marketers to trust and invest in the platform. Just ask any pharmaceutical company: When Facebook recently removed the ability to disable user comments, it put the pharma companies at direct risk of violating government regulations and ultimately forced many to shutter their Facebook pages.
  2. It offers marketers limited data. Facebook is one of the only major websites that doesn’t allow third-party ad tags. Not only does that force marketers to rely on Facebook-provided data that one social analytics executive described as “lightweight,” but it means marketers can’t compare Facebook campaigns with other channels like search and banners or include them in attribution analysis. Without reliable, comparable data, brands can’t determine how important Facebook really is to their marketing mix.

Follow 4 Steps to Make Your Facebook Marketing Work:

Collecting fans without purpose isn’t enough; marketers must get serious about driving business results from Facebook. To do so, take four steps that will help you squeeze all of the possible value out of your Facebook program:

  1. Set clear objectives. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you probably won’t achieve much at all. Define objectives that provide real value to your business.
  2. Build a page that provides value for your fans. Bring focus to your Facebook marketing by building a brand page that not only accomplishes your business objectives but also gives fans a reason to continually engage the brand.
  3. Use the full Facebook tool kit to increase reach and engagement. A brand page shouldn’t sit on its own. It’s imperative that you combine features such as ads, events, and apps along with your brand page to get the most out of the network.
  4. Integrate Facebook into your marketing mix. Facebook is not an island. It’s as important to integrate it with the rest of your marketing as with any other medium.

Set Clear Objectives

Start by rethinking what your Facebook page is going to accomplish for your business. Facebook’s versatility lets you choose from objectives that span almost every part of the marketing mix, including:

  1. Generating word of mouth. Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to share” — and it has succeeded spectacularly. Over 4 billion “things” are shared every day, often related to products and brands. Facebook is the No. 1 site where consumers see social content about products and services, well ahead of any other social network. And according to Forrester’s Tech Marketing Navigator, the word of mouth generated on social networks plays a growing role in the purchase path for consumer technology products (see Figure 2).

Social Media: It’s Time Marketers Start 6 Facebook Marketing Strategy 24

  1. Driving people down the sales funnel. While it’s unlikely to replace dedicated direct marketing channels like Google AdWords, Facebook can drive some forms of direct response. John Deere uses Facebook content to tempt its half-million fans into a lead-generation site and reports that Facebook drives leads at a rate comparable to direct mail.

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  1. Increasing loyalty. Facebook offers marketers a new way to engage their most loyal customers — and to get them to spread marketing messages. For instance, Tasti D-Lite allows fans to link their TastiRewards accounts to Facebook. Then every time they make a purchase, a customizable message is posted on their Facebook page.

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  1. Helping your peers in product development or eBusiness. Savvy consumer product professionals are tapping Facebook for new ideas and to create new functionality. Starbucks created an application that allowed people to create their own Frappuccino online and then share with friends on Facebook. And Facebook has the potential to drive shared purchases. For instance, LiveNation’s Ticketmaster has integrated Facebook’s social graph into its interactive seating chart, allowing people to see where their friends are sitting and buy seats nearby.

Build a Page That Provides Value for Your Fans

Today’s brand pages are littered with a random mix of company news, promotions, advertising, and other content focused on what marketers want rather than what fans want. Carolyn Everson, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook, says that the brands that succeed on Facebook are “the ones that give people a reason to be fans.” To provide value to the fans you should:

  1. Learn who your fans are and what they want. Facebook doesn’t provide much data on your fans, but there are ways of getting more information through opt-ins. EMI worked with campaign management platform Neolane to develop a Facebook app that collected opt-in customer information and then integrated it back into EMI’s customer database. Knowing who your fans are can help you determine not only how valuable they are as customers and influentials, but also what kind of content and engagement they’re looking for.
  2. Use Facebook data to dynamically optimize your content plan. While Facebook data is limited, dig through what’s available to learn how your community is responding to your posts. PageLever — an analytics tool that specializes in optimizing brand pages based on available Facebook data — pulls near real-time data from Facebook’s application
  3. programming interface (API) to help companies learn what content types are performing the best, which demographics are responding, and what time of day is optimal for posting. This data can then be used to create a dynamic content plan that gets the best response out of the community at any given point in time.
  4. Use apps to create a richer experience. A “like” allows fans to read and comment on your posts, but to create deeper engagement like games and contests you’ll need an application. For Valentine’s Day 2011, Target ran a contest called “The Super Love Sender” that let people vote on which charity would receive $1 million from the brand. Target’s Facebook app allowed fans to send friends personalized valentines and get real-time updates on which charity was in the lead.
  5. Keep your community active — even in down cycles. Your Facebook page is not a campaign, it’s a community of people who have raised their hands as brand advocates. As Scott Weisbrod, VP of strategy at Blast Radius told us, “Facebook allows for a more meaningful relationship than search or email. It’s important to build a content plan and calendar not only for your big campaign pushes but also during the down cycles when you’re not doing campaigns.”

Integrate Facebook into Your Marketing Mix

Facebook is too often treated as an isolated asset rather than an integrated part of the marketing mix — creating inconsistency in both the marketing plan and with the end-user. To integrate it interactive marketers should:

  1. Incorporate Facebook’s social graph into your existing web properties. Facebook makes it easy for you to bring its massive sharing network to your website, creating additional reach and interaction with your content and experiences. Toymaker Step2 built a Facebook Connect login into its site so customers could repost their product reviews on Facebook as well. The results: The amount of traffic it got from Facebook grew 135%, and the revenue from that traffic grew 300%.
  2. Make Facebook promotions the foundation of broader campaigns. Chances are that your broader campaigns will create at least some conversation on Facebook; by making Facebook the center of that campaign you can incite both conversation and participation. Corona’s “the most liked beer in America” campaign featured the faces of its Facebook fans on a billboard in Times Square — both creating reach (signs in Times Square typically get 1.5 million impressions per day) and driving 200,000 new “likes” for the brand.
  3. Use Facebook data to make other marketing programs more effective. While Facebook makes it hard to learn who your users are, it’s relatively easy to track their actions — and use that information to improve the rest of your marketing programs. For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Merkle can connect Facebook fans to existing CRM data. And marketers should work with vendors like DataXu, a demand-side media buying company, which now includes data from Facebook campaigns in its display media optimization algorithms.

The leading performance media platform for agencies, Social Media Marketing Services helps agency marketers buy, track, manage, optimize, retarget, and report on media across all channels—including search, display, and social media.

Dynamic Buzz provides the social media management for agencies buying ads on any online channel, helping them handle all tasks associated with performance advertising within an integrated platform.

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8 Content Ideas To Boost Your Real Estate Blog

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8 Content Ideas To Boost Your Real Estate Blog 32

When you have a real estate blog, sometimes it can be difficult to come up with enough topics
to write about on a regular basis. If you want to be successful with your blog, you have to make a commitment to creating new content regularly. Otherwise, the search engines will look past you in the rankings. Here are eight content ideas that you can use to boost your real estate blog.

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1. Local Events

One of the best things that you can create content about on your real estate blog is local events. If you are just writing about houses and properties, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity. If you want to sell people in the area, you need to promote the local culture and all of the events that take place there.

2. Write About a Sold Property

Instead of only listing properties that are for sale on your website, you may also want to write
some blog entries about sales experiences. This makes it look like you know what you’re doing, and it also helps people understand the process better. If you have a first-time home buyer story, this makes it that much more attractive.

3. How To

Writing a “How To” post is another good way to get some great content for your website. Whether you are writing about how to refinance your existing home, how to determine home value, or how to do a home improvement project, it can help with some great content.

4. Lists

List posts are a great tool to use when creating content. For example, write an article about
the “Top 5 Ways to…” or “Top 7 Mistakes New Homeowners Make.” These posts are easy to read, and they really can get some attention from your readers.

5. Explain Terminology

You should also be able to come up with some good blog posts explaining real estate terminology.  There is a lot of industry jargon that regular people may not necessarily understand. If you can write some blog posts defining some of these words, you should be able to get some traffic.

6. Industry News

While you want to focus on your local market as much as possible, it is also a good idea to
occasionally write about some industry news. For instance, if you want to write about how the real estate market improved nationally last month, this might be some good subject matter.

7. Write About What You Want to Attract

When writing content, you should write about the type of business that you want to secure. Don’t write about selling multimillion-dollar beach houses if your main customer is buying a townhouse in the city. You’ll bring in more of what you focus on.

8. Include Some Video

Instead of always just writing more posts, you may also want to include some video content on
your blog. For example, you could do a video walk-through of some of your properties and put the video up on your site. You could do a video of yourself talking about something relevant to the real estate industry or to home improvement.

Regardless of what you try, just make sure to keep your content fresh. This will go a long way
toward helping your blog rank higher in the search engines and help you get some customers.

About The Author

Ben Sawyer  is an internet marketing consultant and a part-time blogger. He is also a consultant and content contributor for www.arvernebythesea.com official blog. In this article, he revealed tips he is using for his internet marketing campaign.

www.arvernebythesea.com official blog. In this article he revealed tips he is using for his internet marketing campaign.

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A Tweeter Guide to Branding Marketing Stars-Luminaries You Should Follow

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A Tweeter Guide to Branding Marketing Stars-Luminaries You Should Follow 35

A Tweeter Guide to Branding Marketing Stars-Luminaries You Should Follow 36

When it comes to your business, marketing is extremely important. With the popularity of social media, gaining marketing tips can be much easier than years before. There are plenty of branding and marketing gurus using social media sites like Twitter to share their expertise with others who are interested in similar topics. If you want to gain more valuable information about branding and marketing your business, then you want to make sure to follow these eight people on Twitter.

1. Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a very smart marketing and online communication guru, and if you’re interested in either topic, then you’ll certainly want to follow him on Twitter. He regularly uses the social network to share his opinion on certain technologies and platforms and will even provide his followers with marketing advice and insight on a regular basis.

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2. Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is very insightful when it comes to branding yourself or your company, and he’s a great person to follow on Twitter. Along with following him for his branding tips, you will also gain links to his blog that will further educate you on the topic of personal branding.

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3. Keith Ferrazzi

Keith Ferrazzi is a very popular marketing expert who has shared his expertise at a number of marketing and branding events. Along with discussing how to market and brand yourself on platforms like social media, he will also teach you a thing or two on how to market your business by building relationships.

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4. Maria Duron

When it comes to branding your business, Maria Duron is the person you want to follow. Along with tips on how to successfully brand yourself or your business, she’ll also provide you with tips on how to improve your brand’s image if you were to ever come into a PR nightmare. Her tweets are definitely tips you can’t afford to miss.

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5. Karen Kang

Personal and corporate branding in the area of expertise for Karen Kang, and she uses Twitter to share her knowledge on both topics as well as provide her followers with branding ideas and news.

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6. Liz Dennery Sanders

If you’re a woman business owner, then you’ll certainly want to follow Liz Dennery Sanders and take in the advice she has to offer. Her focus is on branding for women-owned companies, and she will certainly inspire you to bolster your company’s branding through the use of one of her many great tips.

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7. Kim Brater

Kim Brater focuses on branding, telling her followers what works and what doesn’t. Not only will she share valuable tips to help you better brand your company, but she’ll also give you insight into which branding and marketing mistakes to avoid in order to keep your business up and running successfully with a healthy brand image.

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8. Jennifer McClure

Branding isn’t just important for marketing—it’s also important when you are personally looking for a job. Jennifer McClure will help you learn how to brand yourself so that you are seen as a must hire to employers. She also offers advice to employers to teach them how to brand their company so that people want to work there, and also so that they know what to look for when it comes to hiring new employees.

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Selma Jones is a writer, social media aficionado, and marketer for Cloverleaf Innovation. She currently lives in Chicago where she has practiced her profession for over eleven years.

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Lost? Since You Can’t Trust Apple Maps, Check Out These 3 Apps Instead

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Lost? Since You Can't Trust Apple Maps, Check Out These 3 Apps Instead 54

Lost? Since You Can't Trust Apple Maps, Check Out These 3 Apps Instead 55

Maybe you have the new software on your Apple device that has made headlines as not being reliable, or perhaps you’re just tired of the rivalry between Apple and Android. Either way, if you have a smartphone or tablet, you may want to invest in some apps that can get you from Point A to Point B without any hiccups. If map apps are what you want, these three are good places to start.

1. MapQuest

Well, before Google Maps was popular, you probably looked directions up on your computer through a bit of website known as MapQuest. Well, MapQuest now has an app, and if you have a dedication to the web version, you’ll undoubtedly want to download the app.

MapQuest is not only free to use, but it will also provide you with voice-guided directions, which can help you from having to look at your screen while driving. You’ll also receive turn-by-turn directions, so there’s no need to try and guess where the map is trying to take you or how to get from one street to another. You can also use the app to check current traffic or look for restaurants or other establishments in your area.

2. Waze

With over 30 million users, you can rest assured that Waze will help you get to your location. Not only does the Waze app serve as a GPS, but it will also provide you with real-time traffic information and give you route options to take. In addition, the directions are voice-guided, so you’ll never have to look at your phone for directions. And if you end up in a traffic jam, Waze will help you find the best way to get out of the jam and get to your location.

Waze uses the information from its users to determine roadblocks, traffic jams, and times, so if you’re using Waze, you’ll be helping others in the area learn the best routes. And to make Waze even better, you can also use the app to find the cheapest gas in your area.

 

3. Motionx GPS Drive

If the first two don’t sound appealing to you, you still have Motionx GPS Drive. This app will provide you with real-time and predicted times for your trip. You can view the app in both landscape or portrait mode, and you can also see the designated speed limit for the road you’re traveling on the right on your screen.

This app also has voice-guided directions, and you can choose the voice you want to hear. They will also give you detailed maps to ensure that you stay on track when coming to complex intersections. You also have the option to integrate the app with both Facebook and Twitter, and if you’re not traveling by car, Motionx GPS Drive will also give you walking directions.

Nobody likes getting lost, and sometimes you want something different than Google Maps or a non-functioning Apple Maps. If you’re headed out, make sure to have these apps on hand to keep you on track.

Jacob Smith works for Nissan auto in the sales department. He is an avid blogger and enjoys writing about his favorite car models and the dangers of drunk driving.

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