By Paul Rosenfeld on February 26th, 2010
For those who have used Facebook you don’t need the survey results to tell you how effective Facebook is for marketing, but a new survey shows that is very effective.
Particularly encouraging is the following paragraph below from the survey:
“The fact that only about 5 percent of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”
Five percent is nothing to sneeze at. That’s 650 new Facebook fans in three months. For some small businesses, that would be fantastic growth. And 650 new fans could lead to a few good sales. Just a 1% conversion rate on that would be about 2 new sales a monthwith zero expense. If your average sale is $100 then you have a $200 return on investment per month.
The size of the numbers don’t matter. Some will be larger and some will be smaller. The fact is, Facebook fan pages can be effective marketing. Even if effective as niche marketing programs, which can often be more effective marketing programs anyway, Facebook fan pages work. The evidence is in.
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By Paul Rosenfeld on February 26th, 2010
According to data from Compete, Facebook has surpassed Google as the top source of traffic for major portals like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. In December, 15% of traffic to these sites came from Facebook and MySpace. 13% from just Facebook. They say it’s among the top traffic drivers for other types of sites as well.
In a recent WebProNews article, I asked if it is becoming increasingly less critical for businesses to have websites, when they can just have things like Facebook pages and Google Place pages. The discussion is more complex than just that (feel free top participate here), but the general point is that you can have a strong web presence without having an actual web site (although I still recommend having one in most cases).
By Facebook’s most recent stat counts, the site has over 400 million active users. Half of them log on each day. Over 35 million upate their status each day, with over 60 million status updates posted each day. Over 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week, over 3.5 million events are created each month, and there are over 3 million active Pages on Facebook.
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By Paul Rosenfeld on February 26th, 2010
Mobile marketing is increasingly becoming an important marketing tool. Mobile phones are no more a communication device only. The new age mobile phones are hi tech gadgets, which can be used for multitasking. From receiving calls to promoting a product, mobiles have now brought the entire world at our fingertips. You can make calls and browse through the Internet simultaneously without much investment. Marketing gurus were very impressed with the multiple applications of the mobile phones. Soon they developed strategies through which business organizations could reach their target audience by adopting marketing campaigns done via mobile phones.
Technologies of short messaging service and video streaming have facilitated the customers with easy access to business information.Mobile marketing is perhaps the only marketing tool using which you can directly contact the existing and potential customers. Investment is meager but returns are very lucrative. Mobile marketing is done especially in two ways. Buyers can be addressed by installation of particular signal technology or registering a preset social faction or customer group beforehand. Public places, specifically the entertainment zones like museums, bars and nightclubs can be the points of signal installation.
Mobile marketing is different from the other tools of marketing because it facilitates personalized targeting. This saves a business organization from spending a huge amount of money on advertisement initiatives, which at times unintentionally address the uninterested parties as well. Initially when mobile marketing came into the advertisement scenario, messages reached the customers without any discrimination. At times mobile users used to get irritated with the number of irrelevant messages. Now, the Mobile Marketing Association has given guidelines to all the companies, failing to follow, which might fetch exemplary punishment to the organizations. The new format laid down by the mobile marketing association has helped in making mobile marketing more regulated and safe.
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By Paul Rosenfeld on February 26th, 2010
It seems like the one question I inevitably get from people around the country is, “What’s next?” There’s always an implication that they mean, “Which social network is the next Twitter or the next Facebook?” My answer is normally that I don’t know that there will be a next Facebook or Twitter. Sure, there might be, but I see the Web 2.0 boom settling down and becoming more about consolidation than more companies popping up to stake a claim on user’s time.
Instead of worrying about whether or not Foursquare is the next big thing, I think social media marketers, public relations professionals and communicators should focus on the technology. The networks and applications won’t change much. Sure, you need to watch them, understand them, and find ways to communicate, provide value to those communities and so on, but the next big thing will be predicated on function, not form.
If I had to pick one “next big thing” I would say that it’s already happening and it’s mobile. Smart phones happened fast. Because of the open source culture of the web and Apple’s ability to come to its senses and let any developer build applications for their iPhone platform, the technology got ahead of the users. Instead of playing with a machine we couldn’t visualize how to use, we suddenly had easy apps that did real things for us literally at our finger tips.
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By Paul Rosenfeld on February 26th, 2010
That whoosh you just heard was the rush of thousands, nay, millions of businesses moving to online ads and other paid inclusion search marketing programs to help drive sales and growth. Call it search engine marketing (SEM), keyword advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) — whatever name you use spells the same thing: a great, cost-effective way for small and medium businesses to reach prospects anywhere, anytime.
Almost any business that wants to attract prospects and customers should consider it. For reaching broad market segments via the web, it can’t be beat. For reaching specialty markets, it’s great too. It’s also great for advertising locally; and especially great if you are the type of entrepreneur who likes keeping an iron grip on your budget. Top benefits include:
- Speed, flexibility and control. Write your copy, open an account, set your budget and see your ads online within hours. Quickly change your ad message and keywords or turn your ad on/off with a mouse click. Manage your account from the comfort of your office PC.
- Establish a monthly spending cap so you never spend more than you want.
- Track results with greater control and precision than you’ve ever had before. See detailed, up-to-the-minute performance reports 24/7.
- Target your effort locally, to special topic interests, market segments or in other ways.
- Pay only to reach people who show an interest in your product or service by reading and clicking on your message, ad, content, location map or whatever you use.
- Start as small as you like and build your budget as your business grows.
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