Finding Customers In Different Places

February 7, 2010

I have been really busy launching an online sports network so my posts have been a little sparse recently. But something happened last month that I thought was worth sharing.

All the talk about social marketing these days revolves around Twitter and Facebook. By being so myopic on these two social networks, marketers are forgetting about the universe of other communities that are online.

I had written a post about the 25 Most Valuable College Football Programs just after Christmas. We did some work making sure the post was visible on the sports social networks, we tweeted it etc. Social media marketing basics.  Read more... (260 words, 2 images, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)

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What Your Followers Want

January 27, 2010

Companies “brag” all the time about the number of followers or friends that they have on Facebook or Twitter. But what motivates someone to friend or follow a company?

A December 2009 survey from MarketingSherpa of 500 social network users showed that the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online was to learn about specials and sales, followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

This data would seem to indicate that Facebook and Twitter is good for reaching people who already have an existing relationship with you, but not as good at attracting new customers.  Read more... (134 words, 4 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)

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Successful Twitter Marketing Strategies

January 18, 2010

Last week I looked at some of the marketing strategies that are working on Facebook according to the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers.

Today it is time to turn that attention onto what is working on Twitter.

Most marketers are using Twitter to simply drive more traffic to their web site. The most common tactics are direct linking to web pages or promotional pages.

As with the Facebook results, what works in the B2B market does not necessarily work for B2C marketers and vice-versa.

 Read more... (292 words, 3 images, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)

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Successful Facebook Marketing Tactics

January 13, 2010

I have been going over the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers to see what are some of the more successful tactics that they are seeing work on Facebook.

One thing is quite apparent is that tactics that work for the B2B market will not necessarily work for those marketers who are targeting the B2C market.

For those in the B2B space, the most successful marketing tactics used on Facebook are creating a survey of “fans” and friending customers.

Creating a survey of “fans” was the one marketing tactic that appears to work in both the B2B and B2C markets.  Read more... (216 words, 3 images, estimated 52 secs reading time)

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Social Media For Small Business

January 6, 2010

Some interesting data from a new report from Ad-ology called the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010”). According to the report, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for US small businesses (50% of respondents), keeping up with the industry (45%), and monitoring online conversations (44%).

The No 1. Roadblock to using social media is the perception that “our customers do not use social networks,” claimed by 31% of small businesses. Nearly as many (29%) say they do not have the time or staff available to do a good job with social network marketing.

 Read more... (160 words, 4 images, estimated 38 secs reading time)

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Social Media Marketing Becoming More Strategic

January 3, 2010

A new report from Marketing Sherpa called the “2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report” shows the importance of social media marketing now from a strategic perspective.

As social media marketing has moved from the trial phase to the strategic phase, the ability to measure success becomes more important.

“Defining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle. The other half is aligning those objectives with corresponding metrics,” according to the report. “This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.”

 Read more... (134 words, 3 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)

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Twitter Growth Starts To Flatten

December 28, 2009

It appears the hockey growth phrase of Twitter is over.

Twitter’s international traffic has flattened. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. That translates into an increase of only 3.5%,

Here in the U.S. the news is even worse. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.

The flattening of Twitter’s growth rate can be seen in this chart from TechCrunch

 Read more... (192 words, 3 images, estimated 46 secs reading time)

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Interview with Ethan Bloch of Flowtown

December 21, 2009

Last week I had the opportunity to beta test a cool new product from Flowtown. By entering in someone’s email address into the Flowtown system you can find out who a person is: their name, age, gender, occupation, and location.

The cool feature is that Flowtown also lets you know the social media profiles that are attached to that email addres. So you canfind out whether a prospect/customer is on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc and so can tailor a campaign specific to them.

Last week I spoke with Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown to learn more about their company and product and this is part of that conversation  Read more... (520 words, 2 images, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)

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We Made The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year 2009

December 18, 2009

Evan Carmichael just came out with his Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year and our post on Don’t Forget Search made his list. Certainly an honour considering some of the other great posts that Evan has on the list.

For those of you not familiar with this site here are some details:

EvanCarmichael.com is the Internet’s #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies. With over 450,000 monthly visitors, 4,650 contributing authors, and 78,000 pages of content no website shares more profiles of famous entrepreneurs and inspires more small business owners than EvanCarmichael.com.


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Targeting Students Via Social Networks

December 15, 2009

If your target demographic is college students, there is no better way to reach this group that through Facebook.

According to the “American College Students Survey” Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students; it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics.

Among seven leading social networking sites ranked by college students in the Anderson Analytics 2009-2010 GenX2Z American College Student Survey conducted this fall, Facebook was viewed as “cool” by a whopping 82% of males and 90% of females. All other SNS’ were deemed “lame” by significant percentages of both male and female collegiate users. In particular, MySpace–the granddaddy of SNS’–was considered “lame” by the largest portion of college students (31%).  Read more... (340 words, 3 images, estimated 1:22 mins reading time)

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