How To Perform Market Research Using Facebook Questions

I just stumbled across this great tip today. I remember answering a few questions on Facebook myself, but I never really thought about using it for market research purposes. This may not work too well for those who have yet to build a following on Facebook, but the way that Facebook Questions works makes it so you don’t need to have thousands of fans in order to get a lot of people answering your question either.

Vertical Response writes:

“What is Facebook Questions?

The Facebook Help site says, ‘Facebook Questions lets you ask any question and get quick answers from your friends and other people on Facebook.’ Questions is designed so that anyone on Facebook can help you find the answer. So when you ask a question, it is shared in News Feeds. If your friends answer or follow that question, it will be shared with their friends getting your business in front of many other people that might not know you.

How Can I Ask a Question on Facebook?

You can ask a question from a few different places:

- From your Profile: At the top of the page, next to where you would normally share a status update, select the “Question” link. Then enter your question and add poll options if you wish. Click “Ask Question” to share it.

- From your home page: At the top of your News Feed, next to where you would normally share a status update, select the “Question” link. Then enter your question and add poll options if you wish. Click “Ask Question” to share it.

- From your Questions page: Click “Question” next to “Share” at the top of the page. Then enter your question and add poll options if you wish. Click “Ask Question” to share it.

What Kinds of Questions Can I Ask?

You can ask any type of question, but Questions was designed to help you get fast, short-form responses. For example, you can use Questions to get recommendations from your friends (What are your favorite iPhone apps?), learn more about the people around you (What was your favorite movie as a child?) or start discussion about current events (How can I help the earthquake victims in Japan?).

Anyone on Facebook may participate in a question you ask, but answers are always filtered to show responses from your friends first. So, even if many people have responded, you will always see what your friends have said first. You can access the responses from everyone else by clicking “Others” within the “Posts” section of the question.

How Do I Create a Poll or Ask a Polling Question?

If you’d like to create a traditional poll where you specify all the options up front and other people may not vote for more than one option, click “Question” at the top of your home page or profile. Then..”

Continue @ Vertical Response!

SEMPO: Social PPC is Showing Google Adwords A Thing Or Two

This is great news! The more PPC options we have the better don’t you think? I still have yet to try PPC advertising on any social networks, but I think I just may after reading this news:

“SEMPO has released its comprehensive ‘State of Search’ report for 2011, and there are many key findings that are of interest to practicing search marketers, search strategists and PPC media buyers, to name a few. Over 900 agencies and companies from 66 countries were interviewed for the 133-page report. SEMPO research chair Marc Englesman of Digital Brand Expressions offered some key insights on the report for MediaPost. Of the findings, it is notable that social networks have become substantial alternative PPC networks, in some cases driving higher PPC participation than the Yahoo / Bing search alliance.

‘The SEMPO Report clearly shows that Facebook has rapidly become a top PPC advertising vehicle,’ said Engelsman. ‘This may be driven in part by companies looking to quickly and easily buy their way into social media presence instead of taking the time to build their digital outposts more organically. This would follow the trend we saw in the early times of SEO when many marketers decided to forego true search engine optimization in favor of paid search as a way to get fast visibility.

‘The reality of Facebook’s PPC ad growth (and to a lesser degree, the growth we are also seeing in use of LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and mobile) means the PPC model has expanded well beyond traditional search engines, and marketers need to understand and budget for the growing opportunities in this arena.’”

Continue @ Mediapost!

A Look At RSS Graffiti

I’ve been looking into RSS Graffiti to automate yet another mundane task. RSS Graffiti is a free Facebook application that pulls content from whatever RSS feeds you input and it then automatically posts to your Facebook page. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should never log in to your Facebook page again.

It’s still good to make updates on your Facebook page communicating directly with your fans instead of always just posting links. It’s something I need to work on myself, but I know it will only benefit me in the long run as it will help my “fans” and visitors to get to know which really brings us to what we’re all trying to do here… and that is to build relationships. Business and personal.

RSSGraffiti.com explains:

“RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify. You can get any feed written on any wall (Facebook Profiles, Fan Pages, Groups, Events and Application Profile Pages). In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.”

Continue to RSS Graffiti!

Organic Search Engine Marketing The Easy Way

We all want more traffic to our sites, this is a given. We also know that increasing our rank in the search engines (Google especially) will result in more traffic right? Right!

Here’s the problem: We have very little control over how high we rank in the search engines for a given keyword! The algorithms change all the time! Why spend countless hours on achieving a high ranking for one particular keyword, or set of keywords if you could easily lose those rankings tomorrow? I think there are better ways to spend my time that would bring better results, which is why I stopped handling my “search engine marketing” this way a long time ago.

So what is my SEO strategy?

1. I make sure my URL’s are search engine friendly by making sure the title of my post is included in the URL itself. Check out the URL for this post as an example. It is “http://truewebpresence.com/google/search-engine-marketing-simplified”. In order to do this in WordPress you have to go to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure and input /%category%/%postname%/ in the field provided (check out these free wordpress video tutorials for further instruction).

2. I make sure my title tags are search engine friendly. I typically have them arranged this way “(Post Title) > (Blog Name)”. Nothing too crazy. This the URL, Post Title, and Title Tag are all synced up.

After doing basic SEO, I simply focus on publishing the best content I can possibly publish. That’s it.

When you simply focus on publishing quality content your bound to please more human beings, which is way more important than pleasing some computer algorithm. Why? Because human beings are known to share things like wild fire, it’s called word of mouth. This is the direction the Internet is heading with social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon becoming increasingly popular and vital to a websites operations.

You have to remember what business Google is in. They’re in the business of providing relevant, quality content in their search results. So as long as you’re providing that quality, it’s Google’s job to find you, and even if they don’t it’s their loss. You will officially be taking the high road, and you will no longer need to depend on the search engines for traffic, for you appeal to a force far greater… human beings.

It has worked well for me over at my music blog/record store. Every month I get traffic from over 300 different keywords and that continues to grow the more I blog. I’m found under keywords I never even thought to target intentionally. I even rank in the top 3 for the keyword “punk blog” without even trying! You can expect different results depending on which market you’re in.

Obviously the kind of music on my blog is not mainstream, and I could get more traffic by blogging about more mainstream artists but that’s not what I care about on that site. It’s my hobby, and I only care to talk about music I’m passionate about there. Regardless, the strategy I’m applying is still working! So well that I decided to apply the same strategy to TrueWebPresence.com, so be sure to follow us here to see updates on our traffic and such.