Internet Marketing News, Reviews and How-to's
Editor: This article was originally posted on the Trendsmap Blog
I Pity the Fool who doesn’t keep an eye on Trendsmap today!
Mr. T., April 1st 2011
Trendsmap has you covered with real time coverage of all the #AprilFools chatter on Twitter as well as trending links and media.
My wife makes stuff. hair clips, t-shirts, quilts, soft toys, etc. She also loves shopping online, and spends hours and hours lots of time on Facebook.
But a funny thing happened the other day, we were sitting in the lounge room (she was on Facebook) and she suddenly cursed the air and said…
If I’d logged in [to Facebook] 5 mins ago I wouldn’t have missed that sale! Now all the fabric I want is gone.
My ears pricked up. I’ve been keeping an eye on the F-commerce, Facebook Commerce, Facebook shopping cart (etc.) developments over that last 12 months, not for any reason other than I think it’s potentially going to be huge!
The sad truth however is that I’d not seen a lot to really get me excited. Sure there are ecommerce apps that you can add to your Fan pages (Payvment is awesome) and this is a huge step forward in terms of enabling purchases, but the whole shopping cart experience still feels destinctly ‘anti-social’. Do you know what I mean? A shopping cart is not inherently social (although you can ‘share’ purchases’), they’re transactional! Don’t get me wrong though I still think the e-commerce shopping cart apps on Facebook are great, they just don’t excite me as much as I thought an integrated social ecommerce application would…
But probably should ask…
Do you have your web site ready for PAID traffic?
It’s very easy to get carried away at the thought of instant traffic to your site in the form of AdWords clicks. But if that site of yours is not ready for traffic, then you’re just wasting your time and money.
I’m not talking about conversion optimisation here – all these things follow later. I’m talking about giving your business the best possible chance of generating ROI from your ad spend, and forming some kind of relationship with the user that just clicked through. Conversions that matter are not always transactional in the form of money in the bank and a product sold. They can often be as simple as an email sign-up or a ‘White Paper’ download. Building a relationship with the researchers and the information hunters is just as important as converting those ready to buy.
The idea here, in simple terms, is that even if this user (who’s click you just paid for on AdWords) does not purchase from you on their first visit, if you get your ‘hooks’ into them somehow, then you may be able to get them back to your site for free the next time when they are ready to buy.
Here’s a list of things I’d consider:
OK that’s just a few ideas for now.
The other question to continue to ask yourself even while you are paying for traffic is:
Are you also doing everything you can to build a consistent and reliable source of ‘free’* traffic?
* nothing’s ever free… in the case of free web traffic I refer to that which you have not had to purchase it via amedia buy. Eg. SEO versus PPC (SEO you pay for on-site dev, and off-site factors, not the actual click from the search engine).
Three marketers are doing research for a new beer they are taking to market…
The social media specialist walks into the bar and thinks “I need to find the influencers here, they are the key!”
The old school marketer walks straight to the bar, asks for the manager, and starts pitching a sponsorship deal.
The search engine marketer walks into the bar and buys the beer…
Ok so I decided to update my blog theme… check it out!
I’m not yet sure why there’s a big road in the top graphic, but it’ll come to me.
I just figured that it looked old school, like ‘The Information Superhighway’… 1999 all the way… When we were worried about Y-2-K…
So I admit it, I’ve been slack on the blog posts of late, sorry, but it’s been pretty busy at work.
I’m also the guy who tells his class at RMIT to ‘blog regularly, or not at all’…. so yeah, I FAIL.
But I will write more, so ask me questions here or on twitter or on quora.
I will answer them.
Next time you’re struggling to think of where to advertise your local business, don’t ignore the potential of Facebook. The example here is not a bad one, think about it.
If you were Pizza Hut, would you want to target people who like Dominos? Hell yes!
And if you were Dominos, wouldn’t you want to target people who ‘like’ Pizza Hut? Damn straight! It just makes sense!
Think of the potential.. throw up ads with Dominos coupons targeting all the fans of your competitors. sneaky, but that’s what Facebook targeting is all about – Being smart little marketers.
Another example… My father is a part owner of an organic olive oil business. Could Facebook advertising w
ork for him? (Dad, if you’re reading this – hint, hint!).
Let’s see what Facebook says.
Targeting: Over 25, Australian, expressed a like or interest in ‘organic food’, ‘organic’, ‘olives’ = 5,000 people. For a small business, that’s a market.
Editor’s Note: I’ve spoken with Dennis on many occasions about his view on using Facebook and Twitter for Business. Following is his very blunt advice. Agree? Disagree? Let me know!I get this question a lot. So let me put it bluntly. If you are not a celebrity or household brand, forget about twitter. Unless people care about what you just ate or who you were seen in public with, as is done in the tabloids, you’re not going to get enough followers for it to even be worth your time. My twitter account has 3,502 followers, while my Facebook account has only 2,082 fans. Facebook is the #7 referrer to my blog while Twitter is #20. So even though I have more followers on twitter, I’m getting 6 times the traffic from Facebook.
And if you consider that the Facebook fan page for Dennis Yu has only 496 fans, the contrast is more stark. Why?
Twitter is for existing brands and personalities that have massive recognition. What you can say in 140 characters can’t possibly have much depth, though you can retweet pithy sayings, post interesting articles, or even communicate casually with friends. But to generate more awareness, traffic, or sales for your business? Unlikely. The exception proves the rule– there’s that one donut shop that people cite as the example for small business success on twitter.
Facebook is where you can connect with real friends. You can interact with them and share in deep, meaningful ways (or at least as far as is possible online). I’d challenge you to tell me what share of twitter users are bots, what percentage of tweets are done by bots, and what percentage of tweets go unread. I’d wager that the ratio of spam pages on the internet approximates the spam ratio on twitter– although, I’d say that Facebook would be MUCH cleaner because of reinforcing mechanisms of the newsfeed filter and social graph.
Last week I sent this tweet venting my frustrations at how long CGU Insurance have kept me waiting for finalization of my car insurance claim…
Background – In May, my car got trashed by a hail storm in Melbourne and After much back and forward it has been written off.
So the good, is I don’t have to go through the headache of getting it repaired, the bad – I love my car… and to add insult to injury, I’d spent $900 replacing the radiator 2 weeks before the attack of the killer hail storm occurred.
Anyway… enough about me!
So my tweet was actually to see if CGU are monitoring their social media presence.
Verdict is no they are not.
Disclaimer: I received this one-sheeter from Google last week. While I don’t yet have any hard data to support 
these strategy recommendations, they’re definitely worth considering.
- Set up your campaign correctly from the start
- Make it easy for people to respond to your offer
- Manage your campaign closely as it ramps up, then put it on auto-pilot
Next week I’ll be speaking at Twitter Boot-Camp here in Melbourne (August 27th).
The Sydney event, held recently, received great reviews and I have no doubt Melbourne will be the same.
So what’s it about, and who should attend? Barry Smyth has set up this half day event in order to help people get the most out of Twitter as a marketing tool.
Who will benefit? Advertising / Marketing Professionals, Individuals, Business owners, and more. Ultimately, anyone interested in improving, or beginning, their Twitter experience.
The agenda’s fantastic and covers the following topics:
- How to use Twitter
- Writing for Twitter
- Correct etiquette
- Pitfalls to avoid
- Understanding the ROI
- Case Study
I’ll be discussing ‘What is the Return on Investment’ for your Twitter efforts so if you’ve any thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear from you.
I look forward to seeing you there!
