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Author: unifiedsocial (page 8 of 8)

How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Despite Facebook’s News Feed algorithm (Often referred to as EdgeRank) that matches content with relevant users, plus the recent introduction of Page Post Targeting, it can still be challenging for Facebook Pages to reach their most important fans.

The definition of an “important” fan is different for every Page – for some, it’s the target demographic that is more likely to purchase the business’ product. For other Pages, like fashion and apparel brands, it might be the most influential consumers, whose tastes spread to a wider audience. These audiences can be defined by any parameters that are accessible in Facebook’s Self-serve advertising tool – demographics, precise interests, connections to other apps and pages, etc.

At PageLever we call these subsets of a Page’s audience the “target audience” – the portion of the Page’s audience that is most important to reach, because not all fans are created equal.

When a Page posts to all its fans, only a percentage of the total fans see the given post. Of these fans, an even smaller percentage are in the target audience. A post that reaches 10,000 fans might only be reaching a few hundred fans in the target audience. This is where many large Pages struggle to see ROI.

However, with a surprisingly small amount of money spent on Sponsored Page Post Stories, this is a completely solvable issue.

When used well, Sponsored Page Post Stories ensure that a Page’s content reaches fans in the target audience far more often than fans outside the target.

Let’s walk through how to create a Sponsored Page Post targeted to a specific subset of a Page’s audience:

1. Create a new Facebook Ad

Create a new ad, select the Page you want to promote, and select the radio button “A Specific Post on Your Page” – then, instead of selecting a specific post, check the box to “Keep my ad up-to date by automatically promoting my most recent post” – this ensures that the content that you’re promoting is current, and eliminates the complexity of creating a new ad for each post. Larger Pages, or those appealing to multiple target audiences may want to run individual ads for each post.

2. Select Targeting Parameters

Just like any other Facebook Ad, you’ll want to define who you’re targeting – here’s where you’ll define who is in your target audience. This could be defined simply by age and gender, or it could be focused around a set of precise or broad interests – maybe small business owners are your target, or maybe you want to target only your fans who like the Pages of your competitors, to ensure they don’t switch.

Fans in your target audience are likely to be friends with similar people, with similar interests – small business owners tend to know others small business owners. This creates a chain reaction – as the users you’re targeting engage with your content, their actions will make your post more likely to be seen organically by other fans in the target audience, because of how Facebook’s News Feed algorithms work.

Make sure to choose to show the ad only to users who already like your Page:

3. Use the Power Editor make your ads appear only in the News Feed

Facebook’s Power Editor is the secret weapon for making this happen. Only the Power Editor allows you to choose whether ads are displayed in the News Feed – this isn’t possible in the self-serve ad tool.

If you haven’t used the Power Editor before, make sure to read Facebook’s documentation – the process of downloading and uploading data is different from the Self-Serve Ad Tool.

Once you’ve downloaded data from your Account, click on the ad that you just created, and select the “Placements” tab. Here, you’ll be able to choose to show your ad in all placements, on Desktop Only (News Feed and elsewhere) or News Feed only:

4. Be patient and reap the benefits

The click-through-rate (CTR) of ads in the News Feed is significantly higher than elsewhere, particularly for Page Post Sponsored Stories (the type of ad you just created). However, there is less ad inventory in the News Feed than in the sidebar – if the target audience you’re trying to reach is just 10,000 people, don’t expect to reach them all in one week. We’ve found that Page Post Sponsored Stories work best as an “always-on” solution.

The beauty of Page Post Sponsored Stories is that they amplify the posts that you create – if you post great content that engages your target audience, your click-through-rate (CTR) will be high, and your CPC will be lower. Facebook ads, when used best, augment organic distribution of great content.

Questions? Already running Sponsored Page Post Ads? We’d love to hear from you, drop us a note in the comments section below.

How to Educate Bosses, Colleagues and Clients about Facebook Marketing (PDF Whitepaper)

August 13, 2012 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Getting bosses, colleagues and clients to understand Facebook Marketing is hard. Really hard. The success of a Facebook Page is measured in cycles, rather than the short burst campaigns that dominate agencies – the same client who approves a $500,000 budget for the media team won’t spend $5,000 on content development for Facebook, and asks you questions about Facebook ROI. If that sounds familiar, we feel your pain. To help you out, we put together a PDF that breaks down why Facebook is different, and explains how audience, reach, engagement and growth work together in what we call the Facebook Marketing Lifecycle. We tried to keep it short, since everyone is busy, but here’s a few additional talking points to arm yourself with next time:

“Pages that optimize for the content lifecycle on Facebook reach 2x, 3x or even 4x more of their audience organically.”

“When Pages post content, it only reaches a subset of their audience, so these unqualified fans are essentially “taking up space” and wasting valuable impressions – instead of reaching the target audience, the brand’s message reaches people who will never convert.”

“Overtime, if a Page consistently succeeds at driving their target audience to engage through these three channels, Facebook displays a higher percentage of that Page’s content organically. Put simply, Facebook incentivizes great content.”

Enjoy!

Download PDF – The Facebook Marketing Lifecycle

Introduction

For marketers, one of the most powerful aspects of Facebook is the ability to precisely measure each stage of how content is consumed and shared – whereas even sophisticated digital marketing of the past decade has often relied on estimation and imprecise audience tracking, Facebook’s value proposition to marketers and advertisers is precision in targeting and measurement.

Facebook is still a relatively young company though, and the industry of Facebook marketing even younger – to many agencies and brands, the dynamics of engagement on Facebook look like an overwhelming flurry of activity, and success looks like a stroke of luck.

There is, however, a distinct and measurable lifecycle to how content reaches fans of Facebook Pages, is amplified by paid spend and viral reach, and defines and grows a Page’s audience.

At PageLever, we’ve seen our brand and agency customers reach millions more consumers by measuring and understanding this lifecycle.

Too often obscured by the “vanity metrics” of Page Likes and audience growth, Pages that optimize for the content lifecycle on Facebook reach 2x, 3x or even 4x more of their audience organically than the average Page. The equivalent spend, in terms of Facebook Ads, that would be necessary to reach that same audience reaches into six or even seven figures for large Pages. The incentives to optimize both content and timing are at an all-time high, and the first step towards optimization is to understand the lifecycle of Facebook Pages.

For Facebook Pages, success is measured in cycles, rather than the short burst campaigns that have dominated marketing in the past.

We’ve defined four distinct stages of this cycle – audience, visibility, engagement and growth. Each stage directly depends on the one before it – there can be no engagement without visibility, because content has to be seen before it can be consumed and shared. An outstanding marketing team uses data to determine the weakest stages first, because they understand that the success of their Page hinges upon full circle execution.

Audience

Every brand has at least one target audience for their products, defined most clearly by demographic, geographic and interest data. While the parameters of this audience are well defined, overall size is usually at best an estimate.

By contrast, a brand’s audience on Facebook can be clearly measured by the number of people who like their Page(s). This leads many to assume that, because fans opted-in to liking the Page, they are potential customers and part of the target audience.

We’ve found that for most brands, there is a discrepancy between target audience and Facebook audience. There are two primary causes:

Poorly targeted paid spend. Over the past three years, many brands and agencies have, either themselves or through 3rd-parties, spent money on Sponsored Stories to acquire new Likes, in an attempt to appear large and successful to competitors, clients and bosses. Often referred to as “unqualified likes”, many of the fans acquired through these campaigns are outside of the Page’s target audience, sometimes in emerging countries where the company does no business.

Inactivity or perverse incentive structure. Let’s face it, reaching a brand’s target audience, that actually converts into paying customers, is challenging. The more expensive the product, the bigger the challenge. Many companies that under-invested in Facebook Pages, particularly in 2009 and 2010, attracted millions of fans outside their target demographic – from aspirational window-shoppers to kids who liked Pages to enter their free iPad giveaway.

When Pages post content, it only reaches a subset of their audience, so these unqualified fans are essentially “taking up space” and wasting valuable impressions – instead of reaching the target audience, the brand’s message reaches people who will never convert.

Instead of just looking at audience growth in terms of likes, we encourage our customers to use demographics to compare their Facebook audience against their target audience, and set goals for growth only within the target. After all, for a company selling luxury cars, 15 year-old fans in Indonesia won’t drive growth, but reaching just 3% more middle-aged fans in the USA could make a big impact.

Visibility

Three primary components determine the reach of a Page’s content:

Organic Distribution. Only a percentage of a Facebook Page’s fans see any given post organically, but not only can this percentage can vary greatly, it can be dramatically increased by understanding how it is calculated. Facebook uses relevancy algorithms to determine what content appears in a given user’s News Feed. Often referred to as “Edgerank”, these algorithms score content based on the user’s affinity and previous interactions with the Page – comments, likes, shares and clicks.

Paid Spend (Facebook Ads). At PageLever, we believe the most effective use of paid spend is amplification of page posts and Sponsored Stories. Let’s say we’re looking at Mercedes Benz Facebook Page – fans in affluent zip codes, age 40-60, are 10x, maybe even 100x more valuable to the company than the rest of their fans. By using paid spend to amplify reach, Pages can ensure that their content is seen by their most valuable fans.

Viral Reach. When a Facebook user sees a story about a friend liking, commenting or sharing a Page’s content, this counts as Viral Reach – the number of unique people who saw the Page’s content through a story published by a friend. Viral Reach represents the “snowball effect” that sticky, sharable content has, and is one of the strongest signals of successful content

Overtime, if a Page consistently succeeds at driving their target audience to engage through these three channels, Facebook displays a higher percentage of that Page’s content organically. Put simply, Facebook incentivizes great content.

Facebook incentivizes great content, but the but defining “great content” requires detailed analytics – for example, one of our customers, MTV India, discovered that when they posted photos as albums, instead of individually, over 1200% more people clicked on them, causing Facebook to show their content to a greater percentage of their audience. In a competitive landscape, discoveries like this, driven by analytics, represent massive competitive advantages.

Engagement

It’s easy to create and curate content that your audience will consume, but clicks and views don’t generate stories on Facebook – only when a user is engaged enough to like, comment or share content are stories generated in the user’s friends’ News Feeds, and in the lifecycle of content on Facebook, the viral reach from stories is a key driver of organic growth.

At its core, driving engagement is about optimizing content for user action, and this requires community managers to shift away from asking, “Is this interesting to our audience?” and start asking questions like, “Will this video drive our audience to share with their friends?”

For many Pages, there are clear, measurable signals that their content is being consumed, but few stories are being generates through comments, likes and shares. Then, seemingly at random, some posts will take off and are shared hundreds of times. How do you use data to determine why that particular post drove more engagement than the past 10 combined?

Take the guesswork out of content development. Facebook has become too important a marketing channel to allow Community Managers to operate on instincts alone. Managers and directors need data too – clear and meaningful analytics are critical to assessing the performance of Community Managers.

Test, analyze, optimize. As a startup, we follow a fast build, measure, learn cycle ourselves, and it’s our goal to enable our customers to do the same with the Facebook Pages they’re responsible for. We believe in marketing based on the scientific method – create a hypothesis, test it, measure results, and optimize content accordingly.

Can you identify not only which individual pieces of content perform best, but which types of content, or subject matters generate the most stories? All marketers should be measuring which content drives the most engagement, and adapt their content strategy accordingly.

Growth

Instinctually, many of us are wired to look to growth as the first and only metric for Facebook Pages. Nearly everyone involved in social media marketing is under pressure for “more likes” from clients, peers and managers with little hands-on experience.

Smart marketers and leaders know that growth is only one of many metrics, and our smartest customers, with the best performing Facebook Pages, spend their time thinking about targeted growth, asking questions like:

Where is our growth coming from? For most Pages, the majority of new fans do not come from the Timeline – they come from stories that appear in users News Feeds or Ticker. For brands with a strong web presence or blog, a significant number of likes may come from the Like Box or button.

Is this growth within our target audience? Growth feels great, but it’s only meaningful to a business if the new fans might convert and become customers. Breaking down growth by age, gender and location leads to a better understanding of growth quality.

Where are the surprises in the demographics of audience growth? We’ve seen our customers make all kinds of interesting discoveries, like finding latent demand for their product in a country halfway around the world, all by looking at demographic data and asking, why do so many people in this country like our Page?

When executed well, over time this lifecycle compounds – with a larger audience comes increased reach, with increased reach comes more engagement, with engagement comes growth, and with growth comes a larger audience. Whether you’re on the brand, agency or consultant side, you’re probably already seeing this cycle in action to some degree. At PageLever, we think great analytics can accelerate and refine this cycle by helping individuals and teams understand what works, so they can create better, more targeted content.

Summary

The terminology around Facebook marketing is new and different. Instead of impressions and clicks, words like reach, stories and consumptions take center stage. While they sound similar, it is essential to understand these definitions and develop a vocabulary for talking about Facebook Pages.

Facebook marketing is based on a lifecycle that is always on. Whereas digital marketing is based on campaigns that last a specific period of time, Facebook marketing is best understood as a lifecycle where consistent content and optimization drives growth, engagement and reach within a target audience. When executed well, the impact of Facebook Pages is far greater than any single campaign can deliver.

Set goals for each stage of the lifecycle. Drive your team to focus on measurable achievements, rather than intuition or generic engagement. The most important stage to focus on should be the one where you are currently weakest, because it is a roadblock for each of the other stages in the lifecycle.

Full circle measurement is essential. The impact of a Facebook Page is far greater than simply the sum of its posts, or its total number of likes. Many brands and agencies still use tools that only measure one or two stages of the lifecycle – maybe you already measure growth & engagement, but not reach or audience. The most successful Pages measure all four stages.

Twitter drives 4 times as much traffic as you think it does

July 14, 2011 / unifiedsocial / 1 Comment

Over the last few weeks, TechCrunch has run a couple posts using their own referrer logs to measure how sharing on various social services drives traffic. In these and other analyses based solely on referrer information, Twitter performs surprisingly poorly relative to expectations many of us have based on our own observations of the volume of link sharing on Twitter.

Does that mean the people you follow on Twitter who share links all the time are that atypical? Do most normal people just not click on links in Tweets? Is LinkedIn far more popular with the rest of the world than it seems to be with the people you know?

No, no, and no. There is a much simpler answer behind this disparity: referrers are a poor way to attribute traffic from social sharing.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers. Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed via dynamic web applications, desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern web — a network of people, not pages — to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities no matter what path they follow. So our system knows with certainty where each link was originally shared in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (i.e. referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

And in the case of links shared on Twitter, it’s very misleading: the referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25% of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.

Twitter is the perfect storm for referral traffic

We looked at awe.sm data from the first 6 months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were astounding:

only 24.4% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer;
62.6% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all (i.e. they would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics);
and 13.0% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (e.g. facebook.com, linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service — all the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API — so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise. Twitter’s openness and the many resulting ways users interact with it are what have made it so successful, but they are also the things that have made its value largely invisible to publishers.

‘Direct Traffic’ explained

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket. The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is — if a visit didn’t come from another webpage (i.e. no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

How Twitter sends traffic through other sites

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 2/3 of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients*, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.

While the incredible growth of mobile apps and desktop clients and their importance in the Twitter ecosystem is news to no one, the value Twitter drives through content syndication is a bit more surprising: more than 1 in 8 visits driven by Twitter sharing are actually referred from other sites. Many other sites use Twitter’s API to pull in Tweets that they display on their own sites, where links in those Tweets are then clicked.

For example, look at this screenshot of my LinkedIn activity stream. Notice that every update says ‘via Twitter.’ Yet when someone clicks on one of those links, the referrer will be linkedin.com, even though it only got to LinkedIn because someone shared it on Twitter first.

The same is true of Tweets syndicated to Facebook, About.Me, and myriad other websites that allow users to connect your Twitter feed directly. And because Twitter’s API is open and most Tweets are public by default, there are also many applications and sites that display Tweets based on hashtags, search terms, and other criteria without a user ever needing to connect their own feed.

In addition to the programmatic syndication of Tweets through Twitter’s API, sharing is fundamentally social and the human element is responsible for much of the serendipity that makes social media so powerful. A great example of that is this Tweet by @zeyneparsel, who only had 144 followers at the time. However, she happens to be a self-proclaimed “veteran hipsterologist” and this Tweet was on the subject of hipsterism (?!). As a result, the link contained in her Tweet ended up being included in a Psychology Today blog post on hipsterism (see UPDATE 3), which drove a significant amount of traffic.

In these cases, which showcase the amplification effect that makes Twitter so uniquely valuable to publishers and marketers, analyzing referrer data alone would attribute traffic to a variety of other sites, even though it all originated with sharing on Twitter.

Improving social attribution

Last week, MG Siegler noted that Google+ started rewriting all outbound clicks to come from plus.google.com. Facebook has rewritten outbound links for quite a while due to phishing/malware and privacy concerns. And both LinkedIn and StumbleUpon frame all external pageviews, which means you can see all the views they drive. As t.co rolls out to 100% of the links shared on Twitter (a topic we’ve previously covered in some depth), they may very well start rewriting all clicks on t.co links to show Twitter as the referrer. This would ensure Twitter gets the credit they deserve for traffic they send to publishers, but it would have the downside of obfuscating the diverse paths that a tweeted link can take.

Until then, it’s possible to correctly attribute visits driven from Twitter sharing by tagging your outgoing links using a solution like Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters. For example, the Tweet Buttons on Business Insider use links like this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/closing-bell-july-12-2011-7?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=social&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=moneygame

Google Analytics can then properly attribute traffic to those buttons. Google Analytics offers a handy URL Builder tool, and other analytics solutions, like Omniture, support similar campaign tracking parameters of their own.

Why awe.sm is, well, awesome

And if all you want is an accurate count of the aggregate traffic Twitter drives to your site, that should be enough. But our customers have found there’s a lot more value to be had in understanding the mechanics that drive successful sharing — who is tweeting, what they’re tweeting, where it’s being tweeted from, when it’s being tweeted, etc. So in addition to automatically building the outbound links to integrate our social attribution with Google Analytics, Omniture, and other web analytics solutions, awe.sm tracks the performance of each Tweet (and Like, etc) individually. By connecting the rich information we have about the context of each share with the visits, pageviews, conversions, and revenues it drives, we enables our customers to go beyond just looking at social data and to start acting on it (and to build cool stuff like this).

If you’re interested in learning more about how awe.sm can help your business harness the value of social, please drop us a line here.

* The full list of sources of clicks with no referrer information (i.e. ‘Direct Traffic’) not only includes mobile and desktop clients, but also web-users who have https security enabled for their Twitter accounts (which strips out referrer information).

*Content originally published on the awe.sm blog.

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

June 23, 2011 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1, part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow Button, Facebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance as a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up :D ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm :D ) and CrowdBooster.
Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied toreal conversion tracking.
Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to info@awe.sm. And please follow @Unified on Twitter so we can practice what we preach .

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

February 7, 2009 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

I just read a great post over on Mashable, that I wanted to share here:

Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media

While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:

Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
Starbucks Asks for Your Advice – Making your customers feel like they’re part of the process builds brand loyalty through a sense of co-ownership
Sun Microsystems and the CEO blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content = Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle – that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

How we hit a 9.679% CTR with Facebook Domain Sponsored Stories

August 21, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

At PageLever, we share our best Facebook marketing tips and tricks with our customers to help them succeed. I’ve been hesitant to reveal this secret though – it’s just too good. But over the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided that it’s time to let this one out and see what others can do with it. Read on and read carefully – this is one you don’t want to miss.

First, some context:

Below are some baseline numbers for average performance of Facebook Ads in both the News Feed and the right-hand sidebar. Even the Mobile News Feed, which outperforms nearly every other display or mobile ad unit, has an average CTR that is only slightly above 1% – still incredibly high, but nowhere near 9.679%.

If a good CTR on Facebook is 1%…

How did we achieve a 9.679% CTR?

Answer: Domain Sponsored Stories + News Feed

a.k.a. the ad that’s not really an ad at all

Doesn’t look like an ad at all, right? Just someone sharing a link, not even connected to a Facebook Page. Read the PDF below to find out why Domain Sponsored Stories work so well, and learn how to create them for your own website:

Facebook’s Best-Kept Advertising Secret: Domain Sponsored Stories