Small Business Cost Efficient Facebook Marketing Through Tools
Running a small business can sometimes leave little room for marketing, both in terms of budgeting and marketing efforts. One great source and channel to focus on in this case would be through Facebook. Now, how can you market your business in an effective way? One effective way is to use a Facebook campaign manager tool to take care of the job for you.
One such tool is Qwaya. This is one of only 30 companies around the world that has access to Facebook API, which makes it a reliable product which keeps your ads always updated to the latest standards. Let’s have a look how you can use a tool like this for your marketing.
First off, you can use Qwaya in order to create bulk ads. This features mean that if you provide a couple of different images, titles and bodies for ads, the system can create X amount of combinations that you can try out to see which one fits you the best. Many of these campaign tools comes in different packages and in Qwaya’s case you can with the premium account run up to 1000 ads per week.
One really important feature when it comes to Facebook ads, and any ads for that sake, is to conduct A-B testing. This means that you need to try out and tweak in order to find the best fitting ad for your products and ads. Qwaya offers an interface through which you can follow up on these ads and see how each of these campaigns worked out.
How do you know who should see your ad one their page? Well here is why A-B testing is so important! One suggestion is to try running the ads with a broad demographic group in mind. Based on this you can then see how is actually clicking in to your business fan page. More than often you’ll be surprised that presumptions don’t meet the real target group. This is what makes Facebook such an effective channel, as you have a large community full of potential customers to target directly.
Summary
Many companies have a strict view on how to market themselves through Facebook and often miss out to reach the right target audience. By using a campaign manager tool like Qwaya you are opened up to an cost efficient way of promoting your company and products. By A-B testing different ads and tightly following up on these, you’ll soon find your real audience and can significantly increase your Facebook presence and make a difference in sales. For more specific information about the features in Qwaya, please look at www.qwaya.com
About the Author: Craig Robinson works with content for Qwaya and is also a Facebook marketing strategist. Besides writing for this Facebook ads tool, he also tries to be as active as possible in forums about social media and social context.
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Photo Credit: linh.ngân
Don’t Have a Facebook Business Page? 5 Reasons to Suck It Up & Create One Today!
If kids, soon-to-be-adults and millions of not-so-young adults are your future audience, then you need to have a Facebook Business Page as you need to be where your audience is. And, today, our children, teens, young adults and even older adults like my former room mates and my ex (who deny they are addicted to Facebook) can be found updating their profile, commenting and changing their status updates regularly.
The New York Times even wrote an article recently that showed kids are finding crafty ways to get around the increasing number of Facebook bans their schools are implementing. One eighth grader, who preferred not to be named, said he coached a school administrator on avoiding the ban last year. “She hated not being able to get on Facebook at work and asked for my help one day in the office,” the boy explained, more than a little sympathetic to her plight. “What could I do?”
It came as no surprise to me, and it’s speaking volumes of the need for small businesses, as much as they want to continue down that stream of FB Denial, to get on board and create a Facebook business page. It is time for them to put themselves in front of this next generation of Facebook addicts.
Need more proof?
5 Reasons Why You Must Setup a Facebook Fan Page Fast!
1) Kids, soon adults, and millions of young and not-so-young adults are your future audience and they are all there, “friending” Justin Bieber under their covers (like my daughter last night) when they should be asleep.
2) With over 600 million users and almost 50% of them on Facebook daily…. stop…. think about it….., AND over 40% of existing businesses already up and running on it, you want your business to be where your customers and potential customers are going, right? If you knew that your customers were passing by one of the huge billboards in Times Square every day and those billboards didn’t cost millions per month to be advertising there, you would want to be up there…wouldn’t you?
3) Your Facebook business page is like the huge billboard in Times Square except for the fact that it’s free. Your customers are there, their friends are there. And you can say a heck of a lot more on a FB page than you can on a billboard.
4) The search engines love a Facebook Business Page. Because a business page is a public URL and not a private one, your site will have a much easier time making it to the top of a Google search than your website. That’s unless you’ve invested a lot of $ into SEO (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
5) As mentioned earlier, your competition already has a Facebook business page, and not because they want to share about their favorite rice and beans recipe. The “like” button has become the new “link.” Many online marketers, myself included now believe that the Facebook “like” button is becoming just as significant as backlinks to a website. In other words, the more “likes” your page has, the greater the chance of it ranking high in the search engines for your specific field and keywords. So think of it as a link and encourage your customers to press it. Every time you update something on your page these customers will now see it as they have been “linked” to it.
There are so many good reasons to create one of these Facebook business pages I could blather on and on about them forever. For now, think about the math. The average Facebook page has 140 friends. When you post to Facebook, your “friends” and all their “friends” will view your post. Can you spell V-I-R-A-L? As insane as it might sound, there’s a reason why Shop Rite wants you to “like” them on Facebook.
About the Author: Suzen Pettit specializes in designing, building, marketing and maintaining optimized websites and social media profiles for busy small business owners. By using her strategic internet marketing techniques you will ensure your business is being found and that clients are seeing what YOU want them to see on the internet about you. For even more free tips, tools, strategies and resources, read her free articles at: http://www.omaginarium.com/blog/
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A “Stand-Out” Google Feature and Why F8 Was a Mistake
Google released the +1 in response to Facebook’s Like button, then Google+ in an overall response to Facebook and all other social media platforms. Huge numbers of people were fed up with Facebook anyway so they all migrated, found it unfamiliar and went straight back to Facebook’s comfortable, cozy familiarity. Read more
Is Google+ Like a Post-Apocalyptic Facebook?
It was all the buzz in June and July this year but the disappointment of early adopters means that Google+ is like a post-apocalyptic Facebook, technologically advanced but with none but a few jaded survivors populating the streets.
I’ve been an early adopter on a few trends, I registered for Twitter early enough to get me own name but then didn’t even look at it again for about 2 years while it matured, the same with LinkedIn and I signed up for Facebook when you actually had to know the person you were friending up. Such a difference from MySpace. Do you even remember MySpace? But I digress. The problem is, with being an early registrant, that no-one really knows how a platform works so those who aren’t really engaged go back to their familiar utilities while the die-hard fans make it a useable place to be. Finally those who had lost interest realise that all their friends are talking about it again and they take another look and realize things have really improved.
At the time of writing Google+ are asking business not to get involved on the platform while users get to know how the environment works and iron out any wrinkles that still exist. But that doesn’t mean that if you have a business you shouldn’t be getting to know your way around, investigating the facilities and strategising your activities when Google+ for business finally goes live.
Does Your Business Need Google+ Like It Needed Facebook?
In the same way that it became a truism that you business needed Facebook if it was to have any chance to survive on the internet, being on as many platforms as possible is equally as important. And when you bear in mind that anything you produce which you release publically (rather than targeted to specific Circles) will be crawled by Google’s spiders plus a plethora of other benefits you should be able to see why allowing yourself to fall behind the curve is a poor option.
In the old days of three months ago Facebook was the industry killer when it came to social media. Zuckerberg could make up any rules he liked regarding our privacy and we’d just go along with it because we had no option. We’d put our business on Facebook so that we could look into our likers’ and friends’ API and use it as part of our client relationship management strategies, it was an industry expectation and if you didn’t have a Facebook page people would think there was something wrong. Zuckerberg seems to have changed his ideas about whether users actually need privacy and want the same comments to be visible to all your friends rather rapidly and purely coincidentally as soon as Google+ introduced Circles.
Set up a Google+ profile and follow everyone who’s in your sector, build relationships in the same way it was recommended you did in Facebook but with circles you’re able to keep competitors separate from suppliers, stakeholders from staff (if you think that’s appropriate). In much the same way Twitter users generally follow back so will Google+ users. Add them to your Circles and every time they Google something, if you’ve written about it, your articles will appear in their first page. That’s some good looking SEO for nothing but an on-topic blog or two.
Keep On Doing Everything You Always Did, Just Add Another Platform
In the same way that everyone was encouraged to Tweet about their blog and any new developments in their industry Google+ allows you to reach your followers in exactly the same way only you can provide a couple of paragraphs of précis and a small picture. The comments you and your friends and followers add stay associated with the original post or commenter and conversations can be ‘muted’ if you no longer want updates on that topic but you can still hear from the same people making comments on other threads.
As well as these relatively ordinary facilities you can also start hangouts with followers and their followers even if you’re not connected directly. These can take the form of either instant messages or video conference. At the moment you’re limited to ten participants at a time, but any more than that would be an impossibility to organise and control. If you want to visualise ideas that you are talking about there are whiteboards which everyone can contribute to and then save, these developments make virtual team management and integration more than just a realistic possibility, they actually make it fun! And given that Google+ integrates seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar and Documents even if you don’t use it for client relationships, internally it’s a free resource that is provided by other organisations at a premium.
Seeing Off Panda
But getting back to SEO and SEM, post Panda Farmer Google’s SERPS have been based on quality and, increasingly, social, be that bookmarking, Tweets, Facebook likes and Google +1s et cetera. Reposting your blogs on Google+ means that you can increase your outreach and get double the number of +1 (on your homepage and Google+ profile) so that as well as being searchable your social is optimised as well. Talking of +1, if you don’t already have the button, add it now. Forbes published an article saying that if you didn’t you could forget about being indexed on Google. They had to pull it again sharpish but the suspicion persists. Plus, they wouldn’t have introduced it if it wasn’t going to affect search, would they?
Some people wonder if Google+ is here to stay. Look at the fuss they had with other tools such as Buzz and Wave. They were technologies which solved nothing and in the case of examples such as Buzz were intrusive and unwelcome. Google+ offers so much more. With increased, more intelligent security and privacy it’s hard to make the comparison. And if those early adopters who couldn’t see the benefits and kept to Facebook are right to stay away, is that such a bad thing? There’s a place for them and if they like it, fine. Google+ may become the ‘Facebook for Business’ that LinkedIn seemed interested in becoming for a moment. The thing is that Google can afford to do it bigger, better and direct into SERPs.
About the Author: @DanCash is a features writer living on the south coast of England. He’s taking his laptop over to a friend’s later to show them the advantages of using Google+ in SEO so they can replicate the method on their barebones PC.
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Top 5 Retail Facebook Strategies
According to the website Realfresh.tv, ASOS is the fastest growing online retailer in the UK. And guess what? ASOS is adding fans to its Facebook presence at the staggering rate of 280,000 a month. Read more
Is Google+ a Facebook Killer?
Google+ are currently asking business to withhold from signing up to the new service until it is fully rolled out with all the bugs beta’d out of the application. Which makes sense as over the past five years social media has taken off as the key means to develop relationships with users, clients and business partners, it’s far easier to follow some-one or invite them as a friend than it is to develop a relationship over the phone or via email.
Google Dominance
A quick search of search engine market share reveals that Google commands 83.62% of the global use of internet search facilities, next most popular is Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing comes in fourth with 3.5% of internet users choosing it above all the others.
While Google offers free search which can be tweaked to suit your preferences, free email which doesn’t have adverts in the body and is easy to navigate without doing unexpected actions if you click too many boxes when you finally get around to cleaning out your inbox (Yes Hotmail, I’m looking at you!) with the introduction of Google+ they’ve essentially guaranteed their ownership of the web (top layer at least, the invisible web is another story).
Many Issues with Facebook
Social media is a fundamental part of many people’s lives now but many people have a trust issue with Facebook, when it started it seemed that it was only going to let you network with people you really did know in the Real World but as the opportunities for business and marketing were realised each user became a potential target for marketing so change after change was introduced. Now many users find that things happen to their account and they have to opt out rather than opt in. They don’t always appreciate that kind of meddling.
But Facebook is a free service and they have to make their money somewhere so we can’t complain… But now we have a serious option. MySpace was once Facebook’s only relevant competition yet it’s been sold for a fraction of its purchase price from a few years ago and last week saw a search for MySpace directing immediately back to Google’s home page. Today things seem back to normal but you can probably remember the media frenzy when Facebook dropped out for a few hours some time ago. When it happens to MySpace: not a peep.
What Does This Mean for You?
But what does all that mean to consumers and users?Essentially, once business is able to register on Google+ Facebook could go the same way as MySpace. I’m already going through the long and drawn out process of migrating my data from Facebook to Google+, I like Chrome as a browser, I have been a big fan of Gmail since I started beta-ing that too so why wouldn’t I? And many other people will too, even if they don’t delete their accounts they will surely migrate away from Facebook and set up a new account, link it in with their RSS reader, calendar, email and docs and find that they have very little reason to look at Facebook, in much the same way that people don’t tend to look at MySpace any longer. Google will have achieved its master plan and taken over complete control of the internet.
Again, like Facebook, Google is a free application and if you don’t like it you can always use the other products which are available but if you’re in business and you’re involved in digital marketing or an active social media aficionado then getting a presence within Google itself, via Google+ is going to be far more important to SERPs than trying every-one to ‘like’ you on Facebook.
About the Author: @DanCash is a feature writer and SEO copywriter focusing on social media training. Follow me on Twitter for my views on the impending battle to the death of one or other social platforms.
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5 Low Cost Ways to Reach Gen-Y Dollars
The following is a guest post by Greg Rollett from Endagon Innovations, a new media and youth marketing boutique in Orlando, FL. Here Greg shares some cost effective ways to reach the worlds biggest generation! Check out their Gen-Y Hospitality Report here and read more from Greg on his personal blog.
As we head into early 2009 and budgets are shrinking and marketing dollars vanishing we are starting to see many businesses forget about an important demographic, Gen-Y, aka the Millennials. With over 80 million of them in the United States and over $150billion in spending power annually, this group is quickly becoming the go to generation for marketers.
As a small business tapping into this generation has its advantages and risks. Young people see right through marketing and like to be included and not spoken to. Finding the right mix and marketing to them on their own terms can be a huge win for your organization as their loyalty can extend as they grow, mature and have needs down the road.
Here are 5 low cost ways that Small Business can reach Gen-Y
Local college marketing
Many colleges and universities have market days for 3rd parties to set up small booths and interact with students and faculty between classes. The cost to attend is usually low, however you need to be able to engage these kids with sign-ups, prizes, games and activities.
Facebook advertising
By hyper targeting an age group in your local market you can assure that just the right people see your ads. If you have a product that attracts 18-29 year old males who like Bob Marley in Orlando, FL, you can set up ads to show in those profiles and pay per the click.
Sponsor large local music or culture events
By associating your name with a local film or music festival your name, logo, url and brand can be associated with many young people who are already engaging with each other and spending money. Be careful that you pick events that relate to your core values or you can end up harming your rep just as easy.
Start using SMS
On your receipts, in ads, on tv, heck anywhere. Let people text into your service and offer them coupons and special offers. The results can be staggering producing an ROI that will amaze you. Plus the list is yours to keep and continue to market to forever!
Start utilizing video
Be authentic in your videos. Gen-Y doesn’t need million dollar production; YouTube just compresses all of it anyway. Show your brand, what you stand for and make it short and memorable. YouTube is now the number 2 search engine (not video search, overall search) and can drive traffic and give your campaign legs with embeds, comments and ratings.
This is just a fast look at what you can do to attract young people to your organization and realize the potential that they have. Many Millennials travel in packs and utilize word of mouth marketing to learn about products and services. That means when there are 1 there are many and if you deliver a memorable experience there will be many more.
Here’s to tapping into the world’s biggest generation!
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