The popularity of social media seems to have come out of nowhere for most business owners. This leaves many scratching their heads wondering how exactly they’re supposed to utilize sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Mashable gives us 5 great tips for a successful social media content strategy:
“1. Know Your Voice
Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.
Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.
2. Time Your Content
Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.
Banana Republic’s tweeters got the memo.
Macy’s and Walmart didn’t.
3. Know Your Audience
Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its…” [Read more]
What is your social media content strategy? Leave a comment below!
Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time really. The more webmasters see how crucial Facebook is to their online presence, the more demand there will be for “likes”. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of companies popping up offering just that. Facebook fans for sale!
At the price many of these companies are charging, I can’t imagine these being real people liking your page. Even if you look at it as a strategy to simply get the ball rolling, there are better ways to get “likes”, and from real people at that. See my blog post here to find out how I was able to get 100 REAL “likes” in less than 24 hours.
“In our experiment, we decided to buy 1000 Facebook fans for an Australian fan page, and 2000 Facebook fans for a United Kingdom fan page.
Within days, we began to receive new fans, as promised. But there were some problems.
1. We paid extra for the “targeted fans” option, and clearly specified that we wanted Australian fans and United Kingdom fans respectively. However, it became clear early on that all fans were from the USA. When we replied to SocialKik.com to ask them why we weren’t getting geographically targeted fans, they did not reply. Unfortunately this did not improve and we ended up with almost exclusively USA fans.
2. Some of the “fans” began to leave weird comments on our fan pages. Things like “hello” or “i feel bad today”. That’s no big deal, but the thing is, some fans made identical comments on both of our fan pages. This leads us to suspect that many of the fans (or at least the ones that comment) are either junk profiles, or perhaps paid to join our page and comment. Why else would they join both pages and make the same weird/random comment on both of our seperate fan pages?
3. The fans don’t interact, or seem interested at all. This is no big drama, as we expected this. We can’t be exactly sure how SocialKik.com find the fans, but you can be pretty sure that they’re not joining your fan page because they are genuinely interested. So don’t expect much out of the fans, it’s really more about boosting numbers.
4. We had some issues getting the fans in the promised amount of time. For our UK page we were told that we would get 2000 fans in 21 days. In fact it took several months to get that number of fans, and only after several emails and complaints that it was taking so long.“
Any tools that can help us spot trends is very welcome. If you spot trends early enough you can position yourself in a market before there is too much competition.
“With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the space of Facebook Likes aggregation is about to get competitive. Facebook search engine Booshaka just released their own Facebook Likes categorization yesterday, for example. Likester just overhauled its platform, wanting to become the go-to Facebook Likes aggregator.
What Likester does differently from Booshaka is that it shows users realtime and popular Like trends, including what your friends are Liking, what everyone is Liking, what’s trending and a chronological log of all your friends Likes. A maps feature adds locality to what Likes are popular where.
As an example of the potential of this service, Likester is currently trying to predict the winner of American Idol by tracking how many people Like certain contestants during the show.
The best part about Likester is the drill down effects of item affinity when you hit the Details button on a specific Like. You can look into “Likesters who liked this also like” recommendations as well as suggest the content to friends and post it on your Facebook wall. Founder Kevin McCarthy says he is also experimenting with anti affinity, or figuring out what people…” [Read more]
So I finally decided to give Facebook ads a try, and I must say I’m rather impressed. I don’t know if it’s because I had a decent offer or because I set-up an iFrames Facebook “squeeze page” but I would say I was averaging about $.50 or less per Facebook Fan. If a Facebook Fan is anywhere near as valuable as an email subscriber, than I’d say that this is a steal!
I also noticed that the longer the campaign ran, the lower my CPC got. How much better can it get? I have yet to see a ROI but I believe it’s all a matter of tweaking the pieces you have in place here and testing different elements.
Have you advertised on Facebook yet? I’d like to hear about the results you’ve had. Do you have questions about my campaign? Feel free to ask by commenting below.
I’ve been doing some research on Facebook marketing lately to see if it’s worth my time to run a PPC campaign or not, and I stumbled across this simple trick to lowering the price you pay per click on Facebook!
