Sales & Marketing Consultant, Bestselling Author & Sales Conference Speaker

Facebook is the most renowned social network in the world, but I’m guessing you knew that already! With over  980 million users across the globe, Facebook really is a great platform through which to distribute your marketing campaigns. After all, why would you not want to tap into such a vast offering of potential customers?

Using traditional marketing techniques on Facebook, however, can prove rather less efficient than you think. People do not want to spend their time on Facebook reading commercials. In order to capture their attention, you need to think up new advertising models specifically for the platform. If inspiration fails you at the moment, here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Get involved in the app wave

Applications are an entertaining way to get your information across. When promoting a product, think of an application that Facebook users would like to use. You can create something with useful applications, such as a calorie counter for a get slim product, or something entertaining, such as an arcade game, in which a symbol representing your product is the jackpot. Whatever ideas you choose need to be clever and entertaining.

Organise your brand page

The best Facebook advertising campaigns are run through brand pages. This is a method used by large companies in particular, as they have already learned that having a powerful presence on the popular social platform is a must in this day and age. Your brand page must be attractive, dynamic, and be regularly updated with new information

Avoid spamming

Send new posts to the people that have already liked you only when needed. Spamming them with useless content will eventually annoy them, and they will simply stop following you online and disregard your company as one they are likely to do business with.

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

(Image by Pshab)

Social media optimisation is the new marketing strategy that is taking over more and more, even by gaining more ground from SEO, the tool every small business wanting to make a success of their business online now knows how to use.

Unlike SEO, that concentrates on content and what kind of keywords are used, social media optimisation (SMO) makes the results returned from social media avenues score higher in Google than anything else. Basically it means that if you have a well established presence in the social media environment, and your company name or your product name is mentioned by individuals often enough, then you have more chance of getting the much sought attention from search engines – such as Google – than ever before.

But can SEO help you adjust your SMO campaigns? Actually, the two should go hand in hand. Whilst you cannot intervene directly in what individual consumers say about you or your products, you are always free to take part in the discussion and offer advice or opportunities for your audience to engage with you. Some companies consider SMO so important that they now have an entire department dedicated to harvesting data from social networks in regards to how their products or their brands are reflected by consumers frequenting these platforms.

Practically, you can employ the same old SEO techniques when producing SMO for your business. Search engines still need keywords and key phrases to search upon, so these terms should be included in all the discussions you undertake with your current or potential customers over the most popular social networks. The one thing that makes SMO stand out above traditional SEO, is that the results from social networking posts, tweets, discussions and so on, are likely to rank higher in search results because they are independent comments left by individuals outside of your company.

So, is SMO better than SEO? In a way it is, but the key thing to remember is that SMO has naturally evolved from traditional SEO – so the two should be used in conjunction to best support your success on the Internet.

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

(Image by Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Marketing trends have changed a lot over the last years, especially because of the social media boom that transformed the way people use the Internet today. Having an ad placed somewhere on the Internet is no longer enough to draw customers to your website. Your marketing strategy should include much more than that.

Marketing specialists believe that there are two basic words that should define any strategy you start from here on out: engaging and shareable. For most, the two terms will instantly make you think about social media networks, which is exactly what you should be thinking about.

Your marketing campaigns have to be engaging because you need to ensure that people get involved and respond to your marketing efforts. In the case of social media, this type of behaviour translates in shares, likes, tweets and so on. Deals and rewards should still be part of your promotional campaigns, but you should not count on them alone. Actually, by offering giveaways and prizes, you may be able to get people to participate in contests and other similar events.

Now, even after you have got people to engage with you, you may not be able to make them share their experience with others. Which brings us to the other term: shareable.

If you succeed in delivering content through your marketing campaigns that people like to share with others using their social media networks, then you will be able to tap into a larger audience than through direct advertising. If people like what they see and are willing to share their knowledge about your products and services with their friends and acquaintances, then you are actually reaching other people that were not part of the initial plans for your marketing campaign.

In order to make a social media campaign shareable, you also need to make it engaging. The two go together, so you must focus on these two aspects when planning your future marketing campaigns.

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

(Image by Master Isolated Images at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Return on investment, or ROI as it is better known, is one of those things that marketers would like to know for every advertising campaign they run. However, measuring this particular value for social media campaigns can be difficult, because of the large variety of aspects that need to be taken into consideration.

For starters, you need to have very clear goals in mind. What do you expect to achieve through your social media campaign? Do you have a certain number of likes, shares, tweets and so on that you want to achieve? When using social media, there are plenty of things to keep in mind, such as the fact that it is near to impossible to calculate the number of clients you have won over through your campaign. For starters, you are likely to be using other marketing techniques besides this one which could’ve contributed to your success. Also, a social media campaign can spread through likes and shares to a larger audience that you cannot even gage at first glance.

Once you have set out your goals in terms of likes and shares, you can start to use certain online tools in order to estimate the impact of your social media campaigns on potential consumers. For instance, you can use Google Analytics, to analyse incoming traffic, and see where your visitors have come to your site from, and how they have moved around your site and engaged with your social media accounts as well.

You can also track people’s movements around your social networking sites via tools such as Omniture, which calculates Facebook and Twitter metrics, in order to evaluate the impact of your campaigns within these social networks.

Then all you have to do is evaluate whether the impact is positive or negative. Finding that people have commented about you on Twitter may be a good thing, but not if everyone is badmouthing you. What you need is a sentiment analysis tool – like Tweet Feel or Sentiment Metrics – that establishes how many mentions of your company or your products contain positive and negative comments. Then you can start to gage the real response to your social media marketing campaigns.

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

(Image by Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)