'Net Features : social media advertising

Constant Contact Founder Builds New Biz, Mobile-Optimized Sites

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:31:00 GMT

As someone who has listened to and observed small businesses for more than 20 years – to the point of camping out in them – Randy Parker, who previously founded Constant Contact, is an authority on the needs of small (and very small) businesses.

And right now, there is a rapidly increasing need for mobile-optimized websites. So it’s no surprise that his new business, PagePart, targets this need and group. Parker’s experience taught him that the day-to-day operations of SBs can be so frantic, that an hour to think about website strategies is a luxury often not afforded to this segment. They want the most bangs for their bucks and 15 minutes to do it in.

PagePart can create a mobile-optimized website in less time than that. For the unfamiliar, PagePart is an all-in-one platform that gets VSB and SMs fully engaged on the mobile Web, as well as on their existing site and on social media.

This platform is a blend of “do it for me” and “do it yourself.” Web designers, development teams and consultants will find PagePart to be a structured platform, but with fully white-labeled, customizable options. These partners (as PagePart calls them) can create the website, and SBs can use the self-service dashboard to post promotions, view analytics, update social media or even change design elements. The partners will also have access to their own dashboard, where they can track all of their client’s data, which they can use to proactively contact their clients to become a strategic mobile advisor.

PagePart also empowers partners with selling tools. Since recruiting SBs directly can be a very expensive game, PagePart strategically works with partners to recruit SBs on the platform’s behalf. Selling tools include white labeled leave-behinds, statistics, studies and other material to get over the goal line.

“We’re all in the business and understand the importance of mobile, but sometimes convincing small businesses to take the extra step is tough,” said Parker.

PagePart hopes its Comparison Tool can help. It works by taking a SB’s existing site and comparing it to the site created with PagePart (think before and after diet advertisement). Like any compelling visual, the Comparison Tool can relay what “mobile optimized” really means.

For example, Parker recently had a conversation with a partner who brought in eight SBs who all said they had mobile-optimized websites. Seven out of eight sites were not mobile optimized. By educating clients about what that truly means with the myriad specific use cases available, partners (Web designers, development teams and consultants) are able to bring clients on board for themselves and PagePart.

PagePart is also doing its part in meeting SBs where they are. And in the company’s research, north of 70 percent of small businesses are on Facebook. SBs are actively engaged on their Facebook Pages, and in a structured way. So PagePart’s automatic site-builder can generate a mobile site based on information in partners’ clients’ existing Facebook Pages.

Here are examples of SBs using PagePart for custom mobile websites.

Learn more about the PagePart product, which is currently available with a six-month free trial, by clicking here.

Paid Social Ads To Increase in 2013

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Most, if not all, digital brands invest in non-paid social media marketing efforts today, but a new report from Nielsen-owned Vizu indicates that many online marketers are planning on spending more on paid social media ads.

The Vizu/Nielsen report indicates that 64 percent of online marketers say their budgets for paid social advertising will increase this year, while 34 percent said their budgets will remain the same. Just 2 percent will decrease their budget.

There were some other rather interesting insights from the study, including that the majority of respondents (advertisers and agencies) had been using paid social media advertising for less than three years. That alone isn't terribly surprising, but what is interesting is that 20 percent said they'd only started in the past year. While social media advertising receives quite a bit of discussion in new media and digital marketing circles, a whopping 70 percent of respondents dedicated just 10 percent or less of their 2012 online ad budget to paid social media.

Is there a future in paid social media advertising?

Can Facebook Ads Prompt Purchases?

Michael Garrity — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:15:00 GMT

Facebook is going to be making its own unique splash on Black Friday, at least for marketers, as the social network is looking for a little more recognition for all of the customers it drives to online retailers.

On Friday, Facebook is going to launch another brand new advertising tool for conversion measurement that will let merchants actually track which purchases were made on their sites by Facebook users that viewed the retailer’s ad(s). This fits into the company’s collection of new advertising features that are, essentially, trying to convince marketers and advertisers that the social network is worthy of their sought-after ad money. Other recently added advertising capabilities include a conversion measurement service for big brand advertisers through a partnership with Datalogix that helps track Facebook ad influence on brick-and-mortar spending, as well as new tools for local businesses that provide a new online coupon service and promoted posts.

Designed for direct response marketers, this new conversion tool helps navigate the path-to-purchase from Facebook, which is often more erratic than those from search engines, which are usually able to deliver ads to consumers as they’re actively looking at or for a specific products. The conversion measurement tool will let marketers look at the impact that their Facebook ad(s) had on business for up to a week beyond when a user may have viewed it; in the end, this gives the advertiser a much clearer understanding of the role that the Facebook ad played on purchases.

In addition, the tool has an option that lets advertisers aim their ads at specific segments of Facebook users that share attributes similar to those users that “responded well” (i.e. made a purchase) to their ads in the past. However, advertisers will only see anonymous sales information about the buyers, as merchants won’t be able to give up any data that could identify the individuals.

Fab.com has been testing Facebook’s new advertising service and ended up reducing the cost it paid for each new customer acquisition by an impressive 39 percent when ads were served to consumers that were considered the “most likely to convert,” which was defined by Facebook as a completed sale or a consumer taking another desired action on a website (e.g. signing up for a newsletter).

Facebook Offers' Test Over, Merchants to Pay

Michael Garrity — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:35:00 GMT

Looks like it’s time for Facebook to finally try to make itself even more profitable.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced the test launch of Facebook Offers, a service that allows businesses to send promotions directly to users via their news feeds. In return, fans can redeem special vouchers for discounts. But that test period is coming to an end, and now all Facebook Pages, with more than 400 fans, can send discounts and promotions through their networks. (There is an exception for pages operated out of Japan, but they will be eligible next week.)

However, while users can still claim these promotions for free, it will now cost merchants a minimum of five dollars to run an Offer on a related ad product and promote it to a specifically targeted audience. In addition, they can now include bar codes and unique promotional numbers in their Offers, making it easier to track and claim at in-store checkouts or on third-party sites.

Since the service's inception, Facebook has worked with a group of local business pages to test and optimize Facebook Offers, allowing merchants to share their offers with their fans free of charge. Not only did this help extend a merchant’s reach through Facebook’s ad products, but also every time a user claimed an Offer, it would then appear in his/her news feed and appear organically to their friends.

With Facebook Offers, local merchants are granted another opportunity to advertise their deals and promotions online beyond just Groupon, Foursquare and Google Offers, and unlike those avenues, Facebook Offers comes complete with access to the social network’s 900 million-plus users.

Thus far, Facebook seems optimistic about the service's potential, despite having shut down its similar predecessor, Facebook Deals. The optimism stems largely from Offers' ability to provide an individually targeted approach to sharing promotions on the social network.

Now, we’ll just have to sit back and see how many merchants will open their wallets to promote their deals on the social media site.

Twitter Ups Relevancy of Targeted Ads

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:20:00 GMT

After a significant amount of time spent testing and tweaking, Twitter has finally rolled out a new feature to all of its advertisers that may dramatically improve the relevance of targeted ads on the microblogging social network.

See, before, Promoted Tweets or Trending Topics were displayed without taking into account how relevant or useful the ads were to a given individual user. This was largely because the site, by its nature, isn’t able to cull the kind of personal information about its users as Facebook can, since they don’t specify their interests on their profiles.

Twitter is now developing a way to glean this information from what users are actually saying on the site, as well as who they follow and some of their other activities. Unfortunately, that’s about all of the information the company has given up so far.

These changes will also allow advertisers to specify the specific @handles of users, but rather than only target those individuals, Twitter will show ads to all of their followers who share interests with them. So, for instance, if you wanted to target people who like a certain type of food, a marketer can use this feature to target people who follow a restaurant that serves a similar menu.

Targeted Tweets Reach a Relevant Audience

Michael Garrity — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:45:00 GMT

In the realm of social media advertising, Twitter has procured a specific role, primarily for businesses to build brand awareness, but also allowing them to advertise, offer special promotions, provide customer support, answer questions, and more, all in 140-character bursts.

However, one thing that has been missing from the platform is the ability to show highly targeted tweets to users based on unique characteristics, such as location. When it comes to advertising, this ability can be incredibly advantageous, as it allows companies to get specific information to the most relevant of their followers without bombarding others, which improves the overall effectiveness of their tweets.

Late last week, Twitter announced that it was going to start offering targeted Promoted Tweets, which give brands the opportunity to reach out to specific audiences on the social network without sending a tweet to all of its followers. Advertisers will be able to compose targeted tweets with the new Tweet Box on Twitter Ads, and (as is the case with all Promoted Tweets) they’ll only have to pay when users actually engage with them. Twitter ensures that those tweets that receive the most engagement are likely to appear more often.

Brands can use this new feature in a multitude of ways. For example, when a global company releases a product on different dates in a variety of countries, they can send tailored tweets to only those followers in a specific region on the launch date.

Twitter has been testing these new tailored Promoted Tweets for a few weeks now with British Airways, Coca-Cola, the Washington Post, and Wendy’s, but the feature is now available to all advertisers on the site.

Video Advertising Gets Social

Michael Garrity — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:45:00 GMT

Online video is hot. Social media has mostly taken over the world. So, why haven't these two highly popular advertising avenues been married yet? (My guess is fear of commitment.)

Slowly, but surely, it's starting to happen. Recently, video advertising solution provider Innovid announced major enhancements to inRoll Studio that will allow users to to create interactive video ads that offer social media and microsite functionality. These ad units will be able to quickly launch on all sites and devices almost effortlessly.

The inRoll platform allows advertisers to add interactive elements to pre-roll video ads to improve interactivity (obviously), increase awareness, foster brand engagement and introduce better tracking and targeting capabilities into the videos. This new update will help make inRoll enhancements more social, which is never a bad thing on today's Web.

Innovid is even helping to tailor specific features to some of the Web's most popular social networks to help customers get the most out of their ads. For instance, they can include actions to drive users to their Facebook profile pages by encouraging them to "like" the pages with interactive elements over the pre-roll.

Other social network-specific options include the ability to display real-time Twitter feeds over their pre-roll, let users tweet and retweet the content from the pre-roll, add streaming YouTube videos, include "like," "subscribe" and "share" functionalities for YouTube and leverage a variety of other social media channels (Digg, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest) with a "Share This" feature to let users share marketer information.

According to an Innovid press release, advertisers using inRoll Studio are seeing an average 500 percent CTR increase over their banner ads.

Microblogging Site Tumbling into Ad Sales

Allison Howen — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

The popular microblogging site Tumblr will start selling advertising space next month.

The blogging site’s CEO David Karp made the announcement at the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York. The announcement was somewhat surprising because back in 2010 Karp had very publicly said that the company was “Pretty opposed to advertising.”

Although there are still uncertainties about how these ads will work, they will reportedly be featured on Tumblr’s radar service and advertisers will be able to start purchasing ad space starting on May 2nd.

With social media proven to be a valuable advertising option for marketers, opening up Tumblr as an advertising platform may just be what the company needs to take it to the next level.

More SMBs Getting Social with Their Local

Linc Wonham — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Social media advertising continues to perplex some small business owners, but at least one highly respected research firm is predicting that will change dramatically over the next four years.

BIA Kelsey’s first-ever forecast of geo-targeted social media projects that the local segment of U.S. social media advertising revenues will grow from $400 million in 2010 to $2.3 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.3 percent. During the same forecast period, the firm expects overall U.S. social media ad revenues to grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015 – a CAGR of 25.7 percent.

“To date, local targeting has not been widely adopted by SMBs or national brands,” says Jed Williams, analyst and program director of BIA/Kelsey’s Social Local Media practice. “However, the paradigm is moving to performance, with Facebook and other networks focused on improving format, creative and targeting to boost rates and drive deeper ad engagement. We expect social local ad spend to steadily increase through 2015, especially as smaller businesses learn how to leverage targeting features to optimize results.”

The predominant social ad format continues to be display, spending on which will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $7.7 billion in 2015 (24.2 percent CAGR), according to the forecast. BIA/Kelsey expects the social non-display segment to grow from $50 million in 2010 to $610 million in 2015 (51.6 percent CAGR).

BIA/Kelsey defines social media advertising as money spent on advertising formats across social networks. It does not encompass virtual goods and rewards, social gaming, social commerce or social marketing.

The Perils of Branding on Facebook

Michael Garrity — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT

The modern climate of Internet marketing (heck, marketing in general) continues to drive home the importance of having a social media presence. However, now that this has become standard practice for brands, as opposed to something new and experimental, some studies have been suggesting that maybe, in hindsight, promoting your brand on Facebook is more futile than fruitful.

It should be shocking to very few of us that most brands find their page buzzing with activity more frequently when they're offering special deals or promotions; in fact, that's kind of a given.

Still, unless you're willing to offer an endless string of promotions, you're Facebook page is eventually going to stall and you're going to see a rapid drop in activity. These "in-between" times often lead to many fans forgetting about, or losing interest in, the brand's they follow, leading to them abandoning your page, either literally or just symbolically. Factor in evenings, weekends and holidays, those rare times when people may have something more interesting to do than find companies to follow on Facebook, and suddenly finding away to engage users without resorting to promotions becomes a pretty difficult task.

The thing is, you can offer promotions in a variety of ways, not just through Facebook or other social media outlets. The reason you present these deals on social networks is just to goad users into taking the initial plunge and connecting with your brand, and from there you've got 'em -- endless hours of active engagement will abound and you'll have yourself a lifelong income generator, all thanks to the new social world in which we live. Unfortunately for even the most optimistic brand strategist, that tends to not be the case.

This issue comes to light thanks to a recent survey by DDB Paris and OpinionWay in which over 40 percent of respondents tended to "unlike" a brand's Facebook page once a promotion or campaign ends. It seems to be a case where "a lot of the unliking seems like fallout after brand promotions end -- people click like in order to claim an incentive, and ultimately purge clutter from news feeds."

Among the reasons for why users chose to eventually disengage with a brand were because it no longer interested them (49%), the available information was no longer interesting (46%), content was published too often (36%), the brand published information that the user didn't appreciate (27%) and because they did not post content enough (14%).

You can check out an infographic of the survey's findings below, with the added bonus of having the percentages broken down by country:

What it comes down to is that most people don't appear to be that "interested" in a brand to begin with, but rather just the promotions that they are offering. This doesn't really scream "building brand loyalty" the way I'm sure most businesses would want it to. What's more, it seems like trying to foster engagement with existing fans can be hazardous as well, as over one-third of the respondents said that they "unlike" a page because they publish content too frequently.

This seems to mesh particularly well with the results of a study conducted by Market Sentinel, in conjunction with Skyttle Friends, about the very low volume of users who repeat engagement on Facebook pages that they have "Liked," with even some of the world's biggest celebrities only having a fraction of their millions of fans actually making an effort to interact with their pages regularly, if at all. The average percentage of so-called "core fans" (those who have commented more than average for the page) was 0.002 percent.

If even a landmark bastion of American entertainment like Linkin Park struggles to get any sort of significant engagement with their 31,000,000+ Facebook fans, how does that bode for a small business with a couple of thousand fans who want to create meaningful customer experiences that encourage brand loyalty?

Remember, a big part of a user's news feed, and how much content they see, is determined by Facebook's Edgerank (at least, it was before the roll out of the new Subscribe feature), which heavily weighs how much a user and page interact. Ipso facto, if your fans aren't interacting with you, you're in great danger of disappearing from their walls and, thus, out of their social world.

This isn't to say, of course, that abandoning social media branding is the way to go. What it should do, however, is alert you to the real pitfalls of trying to navigate such a new advertising realm that is already littered with tons of brands competing for the attention of users. Innovative solutions are the way to go about establishing your own unique presence on Facebook.

Do you see these types of problems with your brand on Facebook? What have you done to combat this issue?

Survey Finds Most Small Businesses are Pessimistic

Allison Howen — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 15:00:00 GMT

A recent survey shows that most small businesses do not plan on hiring within the next year, and are pessimistic or neutral in regards to the overall business environment.

The Small Business Authority Market Sentiment Survey shows that 69 percent of small businesses do not plan on hiring within the next year, 50 percent are pessimistic about the future business environment, 30 percent have raised their prices in the past year and 72 percent do not plan on utilizing cloud computing within the next two years.

"Technology utilization needs to be embraced by small to medium sized business owners over the next several years,” says Barry Sloane, President and CEO of The Small Business Authority. “It is the only area where internal costs to run one's business can be reduced as well as produce efficiencies in performance and production of one's labor pool.”

If your small business falls into the “pessimistic” category, here are a few ways to utilize technology for saving money and increasing sales:

Cloud Computing- By switching to cloud computing, a small business can save money because there is no software or hardware to purchase. Additionally, maintenance and support costs are usually included in the price of the solution. Cloud computing is also convenient, with files being accessible from anywhere and on any computer. A few cloud computing solutions worth checking out include Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Quickbase.

Email marketing- By implementing an email marketing program, small businesses can endorse promotions, sales and events— which will send consumers to e-commerce sites or bring them into brick and mortar stores. This direct marketing option is low in cost and doesn’t take much time to execute. For email provider solutions, check out StreamSend, ConstantContact or EliteEmail.

Social Media- Social media is often mentioned when advising businesses on ways to increase their sales, and this is because social media is a big platform that a business owner has total control over. By taking time to make a social media campaign strategy, a business can gain more fans and followers that may turn into consumers. By consistently and constructively using social media (not being a spammer), a business can increase sales and brand loyalty— and the best part is it is free! If time management is a concern when it comes to social media, try a monitoring solution like HootSuite.

Social Media Ad Spending is Soaring

Mike Phillips — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:27:00 GMT

According to analysis by eMarketer, U.S. social media ad spending will surpass $3 billion in 2011. That's an astonishing jump, compared to $1.99 billion reported for 2010, and a full $1 billion more than eMarketer's last estimate just five months ago.

Leading the charge, of course, is Facebook. Predictions charge Facebook as being responsible for $2.19 billion in 2011, up from $1.21 billion in 2010. When you add in non-U.S. ad spend on Facebook, the total for 2011 is predicted to be more than $4 billion. Facebook (and social media in general) is a very attractive option for penetrating foreign markets.

"2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. "In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore."

Interesting to note is that of the $1.86 billion spent worldwide on Facebook advertising in 2010, more than 60 percent came from small businesses - not the giant corporate advertisers like P&G or Coca-Cola.

Tired of Tweeting? Online Forums May Be The Answer

Linc Wonham — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:00:00 GMT

While advertising executives desperately search for the best ways to target audiences through Facebook and Twitter, there’s another social media format that is proving to be a highly effective tool for reaching consumers. According to a new white paper released from PostRelease, “If the Holy Grail of marketing is a band of self-motivated enthusiasts proactively recommending your product, then the Grail’s secret location could very well be the world of online forums.”

As opposed to tweets and status updates, in which they are intrusive at best, pointed product conversations are often the very forces that drive online forum discussions. Rather than sharing with the world what you had for lunch today, consumers in forums post such targeted questions as, “What should I look for in a laptop?” and “Can someone recommend the best sleeping bags?”

“In other words, forums are a communicator’s dream—the ultimate way to target,” said Justin Choi, president of PostRelease, which happens to be in the business of online forum advertising. PostRelease enables companies to insert clearly labeled sponsored posts as relevant content into targeted online forum discussions, using a unique hybrid approach to make forums useful to advertisers, marketers and public relations specialists.

The paper provides data supporting the case that forums are the most effective channel for reaching highly influential consumers. Forrester Research reports that 28 percent of U.S. consumers read online forums—making it the second most popular online activity, second only to watching video.

The paper also examines the following:

•    How forums work—their structure, and current advertising opportunities
•    What makes forum users such word-of-mouth powerhouses for a brand
•    Why participating in forum discussions can boost SEO rankings, with posts that continue to drive traffic indefinitely—increasing by an average of 100 percent one year after a paid campaign has ended
•    The importance of transparency and of following the rules and guidelines when participating in a forum community
•    How to be effective in forums by dispensing useful information, not promotional messages

“But it’s not as simple as just jumping in and starting to participate in the forum conversations,” said Choi. “There are challenges, rules and best practices that agencies and brands should be aware of. The purpose of this paper is to help demystify the world of online forums and give them their due as one of the best ways to reach consumers already predisposed to be interested in what you say.”

Online Forum Advertising (With a Twist)

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:35:00 GMT

Does advertising within social media environments such as forums sound appealing? For many marketers it does but the problem is that those wanting to actively participate in the word-of-mouth conversations occurring are often called out as spammers thanks to often poorly disguised commercial messages.

PostRelease, launched by Cie Studios today, hopes to change that by enabling companies (through advertising) to reach audiences at the point where opinions are being formed and buying decisions made - on the forums. Companies can insert posts that contain relevant content into targeted online forum discussions using the automated system.

PostRelease posts can include text, pictures, hyperlinks and links to video. The posts are clearly marked as from PostRelease, and they remain in the lead position (toward the top of the post list page) of selected forum discussion categories for seven days. Once released from the top position, the post remains part of the forum discussion. These posts are archived as forum content, so they continue to generate responses after a campaign ends.

From the release: The approach is automated but audited – all posts are reviewed to ensure the content is relevant to the discussion topic. It is this quality control that sets PostRelease apart from banner and text ads: in its year-long beta, PostRelease click-through rates averaged 33 percent, with highs reaching nearly 90 percent.

By the looks of the PostRelease forum network, over 100 publishers are using the system, although it seems to be focused primarily on the automotive industry at the moment. I see a lot of potential in solutions like these for forum owners/publishers.

“Forums are where the real product conversations happen – they’re the uncut diamonds of the social web,” said Justin Choi, founder and president of Cie Studios. “Forums are an ideal place for marketers and consumers to meet, because product conversations are not intrusive, they’re integral. We’ve created a solution that enables companies to insert relevant information, helps consumers learn more about products they’re already discussing and gives forum owners a much-needed source of revenue.”