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7 Tips For Marketers Who Don’t Believe in Facebook Advertising

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When it comes to Facebook ads, most marketers I speak to are skeptical about how effective they are. In my experience, those who don’t believe in Facebook Ads simply haven’t experimented enough.

Over the past five weeks I’ve been running a Facebook Ad Campaign that has a ~400% ROI for a client in the music industry. Every £200 we spend, we drive £1000 worth of signups.

What I find particularly interesting about this campaign is that there is no way it would have been a success if I had created it via any of Facebook’s recommended approaches. To cut a long story short, Facebook do not make it easy for you to run a really effective campaign. You have to experiment and learn what works for you.

Here’s an example to put this into perspective. This month I ran two identical Page Like Ads as an experiment. The only variable was the bid type. One had the bid type set to oCPM (optimised cost per thousand impressions) for reach, the other was set to oCPM for clicks. (more…)

7 Pieces of Public Speaking Advice I Learnt From Speaking at TEDx

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If you’ve watched a TED talk before, you’ll have probably noticed that they have a very distinct style to them – the talks are sharp, emotional, thought provoking, and ultra-shareable.

This isn’t by accident. The organisers of TED events invest a lot of effort into training their speakers to ensure the talks end up like that.

As many SoS readers are public speakers themselves, and with quite a few digital marketing conferences on the horizon, I wanted to share a few of the most valuable lessons and experiences I had in preparation for a talk I did at TEDxMelbourne last year. (more…)

Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?

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Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand’s marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of ‘who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?’ will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced. (more…)

Have Infographics Passed Their Use By Date?

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I don’t know about you, but when I see a tweet highlighting that the link goes to an infographic I find myself less likely to click on the link.

12 months ago that was a different story, anything with the word ‘infographic’ in had sexy connotations of it being a data-filled masterpiece, heck I think I once tweeted an infographic about how tea is grown – and I’ve been an exclusive coffee drinker for as long as I can remember!

Due to the overuse and low-quality production of infographics, the success of infographics is starting to get undermined. They’re also one of the most blatant forms of link bait kicking around, which I believe gives it a counter-productive effect on attracting links and shares, as it’s too obvious that the sole purpose of the infographic is to get links and shares. Although, maybe that’s just because i’m ‘in the know’. (more…)

Four Ways to Optimise Social Sharing on Your Website

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Recently, I was working on integrating social sharing buttons on a client’s high-traffic website, with the hope that even just by implementing the sharing buttons a small proportion of visitors will share / like / tweet various pages, thus having an impact on the website’s social referral traffic and number of social signals.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen straight away. There were several shares, but only just entering the double-digit threshold, which was well below my expectation considering the site had received hundreds of thousands of visits in that time. Apart from making the content more ‘shareable’, here are a few little tips and tricks I learnt that you can use to try and increase your rate of social shares without having to increase your site’s traffic. (more…)

Ten *Real* Ways to Get More Facebook Likes

This may be the bazillionth blog post written on the topic of how to get more Facebook likes. However, this isn’t going to be a post full of ambiguos advice like ‘make your page more engaging’ and ‘create a compelling landing page’!

This post is a collection of real methods for driving likes. You may already be aware of or even using some of these techniques already, but I’m hoping that everyone will be able to take away at least one of the tips presented here and apply it to their Facebook marketing campaigns.

1. Use Interactive Youtube Annotations to Drive Likes

After finding out about this absolute gem of a tactic, I realised that YouTube disabled the ability to link to external sites using annotations. However, you can now use linkedtube.com to add link overlays to your Youtube videos which can link out to external sites (e.g. your Facebook Page).

2. Encourage Likes in Your Employee’s E-mail Signatures

How many emails does your company send out a day? If you’ve got a large amount of employees, or employees who send out a lot of email then this is a huge opportunity to passively drive likes or social signals to your domain. I wouldn’t consider myself a major email user, and even I’ve sent over 1,700 emails in 2011!

3. Go where the people are, and take your camera with you!

Coming from a background in helping bands promote their music, this is one of few areas in Facebook marketing where bands tend to do so much better when compared to brands. When you take a photo of people and stick it on Facebook, people tag themselves, which is then displayed to their friends – use this opportunity to reach your audience’s audience.

If you’re not hosting events or if your brand doesn’t naturally lend itself to this sort of thing, attend some conferences or industry events with a digital camera and take some photos. If you let people know who you are and where the photos will end up, they’ll likely find your page, and they’ll then have to like it to gain access to tag themselves.

4. Work Towards a Cause

Getting likes is much easier when you associate the ‘like’ as being a step in the right direction for a movement or cause that the person liking your page agrees with.

This is part of the reason why many charities are so popular on Facebook, because people feel that by ‘liking’ the page, they are indirectly helping the charity achieve altruistic goals. However, many brands such as Corona have done a similar thing by setting the cause as ‘helping Corona to become the #1 liked light beer in America’, which is obviously something that fans of Corona feel passionately about.

5. Gate Off Something Your visitors Will Want

Another brilliant way to drive likes is to offer something valuable in return for a person’s like. Many companies have done this successfully by offering discount codes or freebies to fans.

6. Recruit From Facebook

Offering jobs and allowing people to apply via a Facebook Page can be an incredibly effective method of getting your page shared across social networks as it encourages your fans to share your page with any of their friends who are looking for jobs. It also encourages return visits to your page from people who are looking for jobs and encourages further engagement from people who want to know more about the positions.

7. Utilise the Power of Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads can be very effective at driving likes IF you either have a highly likeable brand that people won’t need much convincing to like once they’ve seen the ad pop up, or if your value proposition when they reach your landing page is relevant and of value to them.

8. Swoop in on Unengaging Pages

It’s amazing how there are still so many large brands who for one reason or another are not actively engaging with their customers on their Facebook Page. This is a massive opportunity to get likes. If there are pages in your niche where people are asking questions and not getting answers from the brand, be the one who provides the answers. By helping them out you will drive people to your brand’s page and appear more interested in your customers than the other brand.

AutoTrader are a great example of a page where they have a high frequency of comments on their wall, but it seems they very rarely respond to customers in this way. If you were in the automotive market, this might be an excellent place to build a few extra fans.

9. Drive Likes from the real world

Driving likes from the real world is the latest craze. Last weekend I went to a event that gave us wristbands with a chip in them that is connected to your Facebook account. When we scanned our wristbands at these ‘Facebook stands’ at the event it automatically uploaded updates and photos to our Facebook walls – it also automatically added us as fans to the event’s Facebook Page.

Diesel also did an excellent campaign, where they encouraged people in stores to scan a QR code next to their favourite pair of jeans to ‘like’ them.

10. Ask For Likes on Your Business Cards

Finally, another great ‘passive’ tactic for driving an extra few likes from the people who you interact with in person is to include a call-to-action to join your Facebook Page on your business cards.


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Five Ways to Encourage Branded Search Queries

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Incentivising people to search for your brand is more important than it ever has been. With personalised and social search growing in importance and prominence, the question that seems to be in the mind of a lot of online marketers is ‘how can we benefit from personalised or social search?’

The answer of course is to encourage more branded search traffic to make more searcher’s browsing history ‘biased’ towards results from your domain (Here’s a more in-depth explanation of how personalised search works by SEOmoz). (more…)

Is Facebook Good for You in the Long Run?

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When you hear statistics like ‘1 in 4 divorces are caused by things seen on Facebook’ and on that on average the ‘casual’ Facebook user spends over 200 hours per year on the social networking site, it does make you wonder, is having an account actually good for you in the long run?

This blog post isn’t going to be another list of the pro’s and con’s of having a Facebook account – that’s been done before and would only highlight the features that everybody reading this is probably already aware of. Instead, this post is going to be about some of the less-documented deeper psychological side effects and long-term impacts of heavily using social networks like Facebook. (more…)

How Important Are Facebook Likes for Search?

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At SMX London 2011 I presented the results from a few experiments I’ve been running over the past few months on the impact of Facebook Likes on search rankings. For those of you who didn’t manage to make it, here is a write-up of the experiments and results that I presented.

Following on from a great talk by Bas Van Den Beld on the changes that Google have made to become more social, I began my presentation by asking the audience whether they thought Facebook likes were an indexation factor – the response was mixed.
(more…)