Why Facebook Advertising Fails, and the Case for SEO companies. guest blogger
Online marketing is a big business today. Various models are available to people who want to advertise their goods. Pay per click, pay per view and so on.
A way of gauging the effectiveness of marketing is how much traffic arrives at your site. Brand awareness is also a good way of measuring this, and social networking tools like twitter and Facebook are two very popular tools that companies use to build brand awareness.
Comparing the Different Options
As far as online marketing goes Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and Google sell adspace. While Facebook might trail the search engines on number of visitors, it is by no means a lightweight player.
If boasts over 500 million active users as of this year. Those are users that have pages there, and return to facebook regularly. 50% of those are active on their profiles at least once a day.
Let’s put this in perspective – by population Facebook has more people than the USA, 200 million more. Active users are more than the population of Indonesia – about ten million more.
Those are a lot of prospective clients.
The average user on Facbook has about 130 friends, so if you get 1000 people to “like” your product or brand, you have potential exposure to 130 THOUSAND people who know of their friends liking this.
The social aspect of this is important here too – People tend to value their friends opinions, so a “like” means a lot more in marketing value than a simple popup banner does.
Why Doesn’t it work then?
Advertisers complain that placing ads on Facebook are not as effective as placing a Google adword is. Why? Even if you even out ad impressions to negate the obvious advantage that Google has in traffic you get worse results on your Facebook ads.
The reason is actually very simple – People going to a search engine tend to be “on their way” to somewhere. Someone who is on Facebook is already where they want to be.
If you have a targeted ad in a search-engines results your visitor is more likely to visit your site. A search engine is a portal, not a destination.
If someone is on Facebook, however, they are already at their destination. Market research confirms this – people are loathe to leave Facebook. A targeted ad is mostly an annoyance, at best given a cursory glance.
If you read online you will see that Facebook advertising simply does not work for most people.
Click through rates of as little as 0.3% are common – and that is with ads who have millions of page impressions.
Does Facebook have a place in your online marketing portfolio?
Yes. If you use it right it can be very powerful. Facebook pages and groups are awesome marketing tools, but they are a lot of work.
You need to build one for a start, and getting a professional and visitor friendly Facebook Page can be a challenge. Then there is the upkeep of the page, and the interaction with your community.
Hard work, but the rewards are great if you persist.
With Facebook marketing the keyword is “presence.” If you can build an online presence and keep your audience interested there is a real possibility of business, targeted business, coming your way.
Summary
Online marketing is tricky. You have the potential of wasting a lot of money very quickly – imagine paying $0.03 per click and 8MILLION people click your ad! If your advertising is ill conceived or the clicks do not lead to enough business to cover the costs of advertising you stand to lose a lot of money.
If you want to do online marketing for your business, or build an online presence, enlisting the services of a company that specialises in this would be a wise move.
Life Before And After Social Media Platforms
How did we socialize before Facebook and Twitter? It must have been a horrible way to live our lives. Can you imagine that a person would have to actually pick up a phone or even worse pick up a pen and write a letter? Now I admit, I have not written a letter by hand in years. Let’s face it e-mail has made writing letters easier.
Still, what did we do before we had social networking? As a kid, most of us belonged to social clubs, whether it was your choice or your parent’s choice to be part the specific social clubs. Then there was also the telephone. Yes the telephone that was connected to the wall and you had to sit when having a conversation. You could not call a friend while driving or send a text message while in a movie or in a meeting. But now we are older, some of us are married, have kids and live far from family or friends. But anyway let’s face it we don’t have time to be part of social clubs anymore. After a hard day’s work we don’t have time and energy to socialize as we used to in the past.
Today we become more and more dependent of social media platforms. People make use of Social Media Platforms to communicate with friends and family. It helps you communicate with people you don’t see every day and people and friends from your past like old school friends, varsity friends. Users can add people, send those messages, update their personal profiles and upload pictures. You will be amazed how many friends ‘reconnect” when on Facebook.
Social Media is now becoming an important part of our lives and part of most businesses. A lot of events get noticed through announcements on Social Media Platforms. Businesses start to advertise job positions, some are running competitions and some is giving market and industry related information. One can build relationships through Social Media Platforms.
Research has shown that the percentage of Companies that have started hiring or planning to hire through Social media websites have increased to 92%. The Highest Share is occupied by LinkedIn that has about (78%) of the overall Market Share. Facebook takes the Second Spot with a percentage of 55%. Twitter has 45% of the share.
A recent report by eMarketer looked at the Social Network usage of multiple generations. They broke up the generations as follows: Millennials (14-26), Generation X(27-43), Boomers (44-62), Matures(63-75).
Here is a breakdown on 3 popular Social sites:
Facebook:
73% of Boomers Maintain a Facebook profile
17% of Matures maintain a Facebook profile
Twitter:
13% Of Boomers maintain a Twitter Account
17% Of Matures maintain a Twitter Account
Linkedln:
13% of Boomers
4% of Matures
Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and better lives and keep them connected to family, friends, co-workers and, eventually, healthcare providers.
Day by day we are more dependent on Social Media Platforms. We are so into the technology today that I think nobody will survive if we go back 10 years.
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Benefits of outsourcing your Social Media Marketing
Between blogging, tweeting, Facebooking and updating a LinkedIn profile, it’s a wonder how a business owner has any time to answer e-mails and phone calls, much less run a company.
Some of you are thinking whether you should outsource it to an Internet Company or to do it yourself.
Outsourcing your social media marketing to an expert online marketing Company will spare you money and time because your business does not have to invest money for training individuals on the relevant tools involved in marketing your business on social media platforms. This will also mean that the online marketing Company that you choose will be able to handle the ins and outs of the different social platforms. The company will have a dedicated team which will work on your Social media platform. They will know exactly which platform will be best for your business, spreading your message and how to interact on your social media platform. They can help with everything from recommending the right Social Media platforms and setting up profiles, to finding potential clients and networking groups and maintaining communication with them.
An online marketing company will be able to provide you with a strategic plan that you will be able to follow, and be involved with. It is very important to be involved in your social media plan. The social media expert you choose, will sit down with you and discuss goals, help you set them as well as help you in setting expectations and, providing you with information on how they will be monitoring the results of their social media marketing efforts.
An expert online marketing company will be able to accurately measure your social media campaigns. They will be able to ascertain the amount of traffic to your social pages by utilizing Google Analytics. Tracking the volume and quality of comments and tweets are another important measurement that they will also be able to provide you with. Driving customers to a social media specific landing page on your website will help you to easily track sales and calculate an accurate ROI.
There are times that you may need social media for more than just simple marketing and advertising, such as when your company has a crisis, which could be anything from your website being down to something that may seriously damage your reputation.
Social media can play an important role in crisis management. Having your social profiles and networks already setup and running smoothly prior to your crisis will help you be able to send an upfront message early on in the crisis to an established audience. The online marketing company will help you in figuring out the best way to respond to any mentions of your brand and to help shed a positive light on a bad situation.
Last but not least remember that a social media expert is a person who does more than sit and eat chips, while watching the Soccer World cup and tweeting all day. There are many out there that claim to be social media experts, there are few out there that can prove they are worthy of this title.
Why use online marketing professionals to do your online marketing.
Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.
This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.
Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.
People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.
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Social Media Goals
It is very important to clearly define a set of goals before you start any social media marketing campaign. Without clear goals that you wish to achieve you will only waste your time, and measuring success will be very difficult.
Here are some goals that you can work towards in you social media marketing campaign:
Brand Awareness:
By creating interesting content and spreading it through social media platforms, people will start to get more familiar with your brand. Keeping your content unique will make you stand out from your competitors. You will not only make people more aware of your brand but they will also have the ability to engage and interact with your brand, by taking part in blog discussions etc.
Reputation Management:
You can use social media to influence the way customers perceive your brand. Social media give customers the power to complain about your company or say positive things and it is there for the world to see it. By making sure you give attention to any comments made by customers social media can work well.
Increased Traffic:
If you create unique relevant content on your social media platforms you will get relevant visits to your website. The people in your online community are interested in your products or services so make sure to give them relevant information. Also make sure you join communities with a similar audience than yours, to broaden your reach.
Promoting a product or Service:
You can also improve sales for specific services or products by advertising it through your social media channels. If you have already build up a big community and the products you are advertising are relevant, your advertisement will be very targeted.
If you set goals you will stay focussed and remember why you are blogging and tweeting.
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