Google Adwords has dominated the online advertising space for the last three or four years but Facebook I believe is positioned to really challenge Google for some of those advertising dollars.

We recently ran a series of campaigns for local events on Facebook and I was really impressed with the ROI that we got. It was much higher than anything that we have gotten using Adwords. So how did we do it?

Demographic Targeting
Unlike Adwords, Facebook users are not actively searching for your product or service. But by using Facebook’s demographics and location data we were able to really focus on our target audience.

Since our campaign was specific to a location we were able to target just the people who liked the brand we were promoting and who lived within 50 miles of the event.

This ended up being a really small group, but that was ok because the conversion event and CPC was really good.

Use Pictures
We tested ads with pictures and ads without. The ads with pictures all performed substantially better than those without.

Test Multiple Ads
When we run a paid campaign we always use multiple ad text, but it really is useful on Facebook. We tested new ad content every day until we were sure we had the most optimized copy. Then we let that as run until the end of the campaign.

As a father of a 12 year-old daughter I am very aware of the influence that social media sites like Facebook can have on teens and pre-teens. So when should you let your child onto these social media sites? That is one of the questions of Retrevo.com’s latest Gadgetology study that looked at parenting, technology, and social media.

Study Highlights

• 30% of parents think 13 – 15 years old is the right age to get a social media page
• 36% of parents think 16 – 18 is the right age to get a social media page
• 26% of parents say over 18 is the right age to get a social media page
• 8% of parents are okay with kids under 12 having a social media page
• 48% of parents on Facebook are “friends” with their kids. 52% are not.
• 29% of all parents don’t allow texting during family meals. 36% of parents of teenagers don’t allow texting during family meals.

Hello Mother… Hello Father… On Facebook
Should you friend your child on Facebook? FaceBook-using parents in this study were almost evenly divided with about 48% saying they are Facebook friends with their kids, where as 52% said they are not. Andrew Eisner, director of content at Retrevo adds,

“It looks like more parents with teenage children are more likely to be friends with their kids, although many admit it can be awkward at times but they say they do learn a lot about their teenagers, which is probably why children are so hesitant to friend their parents to begin with.”

Just Being a Protective Parent
Eisner added, “Not that it would be easy (how about impossible) to prevent a kid from having their own Facebook or MySpace page if they were determined to have one, most parents agreed that teenage years were the right years for a child’s first Facebook or MySpace page.”

I am really surprised that almost one in ten parents of pre-teen kids will allow them to have a Facebook or MySpace profile. And that number rises to almost 40% for kids under 15. That is a situation that as a father I am really uncomfortable with.

Listen to Your Mother; Put That Cell Phone Away and Eat Your Dinner!
If you ever have to tell your kids to stop texting at the dinner table, you’re not alone, but we were surprised to discover that only 1/3 of parents said texting was not allowed during family meals.

I am shocked at this statistic. I could never imagine interrupting a family dinner to exchange text messages with someone else.

Really interesting numbers from Retrevo. I feel that I am very much in the minority with how we protect our daughter. But  part of that is because I am in the social media world every day and there is a lot of stuff that I would rather not expose her too at this point in time.

What do you think is an appropriate age for a child to have a Facebook or MySpace account?

One of the most asked questions about Twitter, is how many followers do I need? What sort of reach do I need on Twitter to successfully generate leads?

Well according to a recent study by Hubspot called 2010 State of Inbound Marketing (PDF) that sweet spot is between 100 and 500 followers. Hubspot data showed that companies with 100 to 500 followers generated 146% more monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. Growing a large following of thousands of followers does not appear top generate any additional leads lift.

HubSpot also noted that more and more companies are now successfully using social media to acquire new customers.

It is not a surprise that in the B2B market, that LinkedIn is most effective social media marketing channels while in the B2C market, it is Facebook. What I did find interesting was that 51% of B2B marketers surveyed said that they had acquired a new customer versus Twitter.

I came across a fascinating new study from Retrevo.com about social media addiction. At first glance I was shocked at the addiction level that people have to sites like Facebook and Twitter, but after travelling for the last two weeks and seeing people checking and updating these sites from their phones, I came to better understand the numbers.
The study asked 1,000 social media user’s questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like Facebook and Twitter. Here are the some of the results.

Last thing At Night And First Thing In The Morning
Almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. As you would expect younger social media users said they tweet by night more than those over 25.

Twitter As A News Source
While almost 50% of social media users check Facebook and Twitter first thing in the morning, 16% of social media users say that these sites are how they get their morning news.

It will be interesting to see how this number grows over the next couple of years and what it means to news portals like Yahoo News and Google News as well as traditional media channels like TV and newspapers.

Facebook Addiction
Facebook’s continued growth has been phenomenal and one of the reasons for its continued success is its addiction. 56% of social media users need to check Facebook at least once a day and an amazing 12% say they need to check it every couple of hours.

Social Media Interruption
As part of the study respondents were asked how they felt about being interrupted at various times and occasions for an electronic message. With everyone texting away on their phones these days, not surprisingly, over 40% of respondents said they didn’t mind being interrupted for a message. In fact, 32% said a meal was not off limits while 7% said they’d even check out a message during an intimate moment.

Summary
It is pretty clear from the study that there are a significant number of people who are addicted to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, especially Facebook. It is also quite apparent that individuals expect companies to have a Fan Page on Facebook and a Twitter account as well as a web site. They expect your brand and company to be visible wherever they are online.

I received some interesting data today from Dessert Gallery (DG), a Houston-based cafe chain about their recent Facebook fan page campaign.

Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Emily Durham, a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston?based restaurant consultancy surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery (DG).

The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery customers, the company’s Facebook fans:

• Made 36 percent more visits to DG’s stores each month.
• Spent 45 percent more of their eating-out dollars at DG.
• Spent 33 percent more at DG’s stores.
• Had 14 percent higher emotional attachment to the DG brand.
• Had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward DG.

This is one of the few Facebook fan page studies that I have seen for small businesses. It would seem to indicate that Facebook fan pages can increase sales, word-of-mouth marketing and customer loyalty significantly among a subset of their customers.

The study will be featured in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Really interesting article in the Boston Globe yesterday on how the Boston Celtics are using social media to not only increase revenues, but also to reach out to fans who cannot see the team live.

What the Celtics are doing?
The primary goal of the Celtics online efforts is to drive people to their web site. Celtics.com features GameTime Live, an application that features real time scores, tweets, and blogging with supporters throughout the world. The team beta-tested GameTime Live during the 2009 postseason, and more than 50,000 unique visitors checked it out during the triple-overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the first round.

From the Globe article:

“Now that we’re at this sold-out state, it’s more difficult to get into the game and fans can’t get tickets,’’ said Rich Gotham, the team’s president. “We want to make sure we don’t forget about those fans. We want to keep them interested and keep them loyal.’’

Basketball buffs are demanding deeper interaction, or a “second screen’’ experience, as Gotham calls it. While fans watch the game on television, many are also tweeting and surfing the Internet – traffic on Celtics.com spikes 100 percent during games

“With sold-out games, we have 18,624 people in the building. But we could have over 20,000 online at Celtics.com,’’ said Shawn Sullivan, chief marketing officer for the Celtics. “It’s almost like there is a whole other game going on.’’

In addition to making Celtics.com a destination for its fans, the Celtics are also going out to other places online where Celtic fans congregate; namely YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/bostonceltics)
With less than 700 subscribers, the Celtics YouTube channel is not attracting a lot of attention at the moment. Most videos get around 1,000 views. However, the team recently began distributing exclusive locker room footage on YouTube which will drive more people to this channel and increase subscribers. This is a great example of providing different content for separate digital channels in order to make them more valuable in users eyes.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/bostonceltics)
With over 450,000 fans in its Facebook page, the Celtics are the second most popular NBA team on Facebook. Similar to the exclusive locker room video for YouTube subscribers, last week the Celtics launched 3-Point Play, an interactive stats prediction game for fans on its Facebook page.

Twitter (http://twitter.com/celtics)
With almost 22,000 Twitter followers, the Celtics have built up a good following. In addition to Tweeting quotes from press conferences and team events, the Celtics are also using Twitter to offer seating upgrades at games. The picture below was from earlier today.

The Celtics are a really good example of how to successfully use social media. They have a central point of contact (the web site) but they are also visible in the main social networking sites. And on these social networking sites they are investing in exclusive content specially for that channel to attract new fans and strengthen the relationship they have with existing fans.

“The last thing we want to do is sit on our hands,’’ Gotham said. “Our popularity has reached an all-time high, and we want to take advantage of the opportunity to build a bigger fan base so that during leaner times that will pay us back.’’

Getting results from Twitter campaigns are rare but Computerworld had an interesting article on the Georgia Aquarium which sold 2,500 admission tickets through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter earlier this year.

To get its social media followers to take action, the aquarium offered 25% to 40% off admission prices from February through May to people who followed it on Twitter or signed on as Facebook or MySpace fans.

The campaign used a specific URL for the promotion which allowed the aquarium to track sales directly, according to Dave Santucci, vice president of marketing and communication.
Buy using a specific URL for the campaign the Aquarium was able to measure the ROI of the campaign.

That’s a clear and trackable ROI, Clark says. “We had zero sales through social media last year, so it’s infinite growth,” Santucci says.

What made the Twitter campaign successful was that the Aquarium had a clear goal for the campaign (increase ticket sales) and they were able able to track results (specific URL).

Great interview of Scott Monty by Amber Cadabra from Altitude Branding. Scott is head of social media at Ford Motor Company and he had some very interesting things to say about how Ford uses social media.

Three interesting points that Amber and Scott discussed were:

What do you believe is the single biggest mistake companies make when integrating social media into their efforts?

Ah – you’re assuming they integrate. In my time working in social media, I’ve seen too many examples of companies saying “We’re ready to launch the campaign – now what are we doing to do for social media?” It’s not an add-on or afterthought. It should be completely integrated from the beginning. Just because much of the interaction occurs online does not preclude offline components of social media. And if you’ve effectively planned from the beginning, you can integrate such ideas early on.

This is such a good point. Social media marketing should be a part of your marketing strategy, just like SEO, PPC and online advertising are. It is not a stand alone product.

With the overwhelming amount of tools available, how do you determine which fit with your overall outreach strategy?

For us, it’s largely about mainstream. Joining a large company has helped me to understand that much of the social media experts/evangelists have their heads in the clouds with respect to the technology. We’re so far ahead of the curve, it’s not funny. For my audience, blogs & Facebook are safe havens, and Twitter is pretty advanced. If I said “Plurk” in a meeting, I’d be laughed out of the room (or asked if I was feeling okay). And for our customers – people who buy cars – are the mainstream.

So often we try on be on the cutting edge of social media running to the latest and greatest site that nobody else has used. Look at the sites that teens and college students are using. They are all the traditional social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

One of my goals this summer was to get more involved with Twitter and see how companies are using it. While I was researching the post about how a Wine Retailer is Using Twitter to reach a whole new audience I came across Rae Hoffman’s post titled “An Actual “Non Big Brand” Twitter Case Study”

Rae’s case study is about a  a BlackBerry related website called BBGeeks . BBGeeks has had a Twitter account for around eight months now and has grown from zero to over 500 followers in that time. For a web site targeting a very niche market, this is pretty impressive.

So how did BBGeeks do it: By implementing these nine steps:

1. One of the BBGeeks.com staff was assigned to become the voice of @bbgeeks on Twitter.

This is such an overlooked step, whether it is blogging or twittering. By making one person responsible for the content, not only do you have ownership of the content, but the site gets a consistent voice and message.

2. We decided that our goal should be for him to become a BlackBerry trouble shooter (.i.e. help people) first, promotional evangelist (i.e. drop links) for BBGeeks.com second.
3. The employee running @bbgeeks (to be clear, he is not dedicated to Twitter and spends about 30 minutes a day on it) was encouraged to also post off topic here and there and to join in the conversation with our followers and people we were following even if it wasn’t always BlackBerry related (i.e. we wanted him to get involved).
4. We participated in a group effort to post and cross promote guides on Twitter related tools and created a guide to TwitterBerry (the Twitter application for BlackBerry users).

This is a common theme amongst social social marketers. By being engaged in the community and helping people you can grown your brand without being too salesey.

5. We pimped the background with a more Twitter friendly design.

The design makes BBGeeks stand out from all the other BlackBerry accounts and help differentiate them to the user.

6. We decided not to have our posts auto tweet and instead decided to take the same approach with dropping links into Twitter that we did years ago with link requests – make it obvious that we were taking the time to do it personally.

Nothing turns people off faster than obvious spam. By taking a slower approach, BBGeeks was showing that were committed to the long run and were not looking to “crash and burn” BlackBerry users

7. Thanks to a tip from @graywolf, we learned about Summize (which was later bought by Twitter) and used it to find BlackBerry users (we’d search for “BlackBerry”, “8330? etc.). We’d follow those users and hope that they’d visit our Twitter homepage, see what a great resource we were, and follow us back. And even if they didn’t follow us back on first glance, we hoped we would catch their BlackBerry related questions by following them and earn their following if we could help solve it with an @reply.

Successful marketing is being pro-active. By reaching out to BlackBerry Twitter users, BBGeeks was able to offer them something that (customer support) that makes them different.

8. Completely of his own idea, the employee running @bbgeeks started doing small giveaways here and there of branded T-shirts and stickers to followers

It is amazing what people will do for a free t-shirt and it is another inexpensive way to interact with your community

9. We run occasional “twitter only” discounts at our software and accessories store

By concentrating on solving problems and building trust within the Twitter BlackBerry community, the members would be more responsive to a Twitter sales message rather being hit by sales posts every day.

What were the Results?

• BBGeeks now have 500+ people who want to hear what they have to say listening on Twitter – and they may not have found the site had it not been for that Twitter account and efforts.
• They receive several hundred visits to their site each month from Twitter
• BBGeeks is able to get instant feedback from our followers by using informal Twitter polls and keep our site going in the direction our readers want it to continue heading.
• They get tons of content ideas from the various questions and problems they see their followers experiencing.
• They were able to get into exclusive press conferences during their CTIA conference coverage and have also received promotion of things like their podcast as a result of people responding to guest requests on Twitter.

So that is two small companies Bin Ends and BBGeeks who are successfully using Twitter to promote and grow their business. What other successful Twitter stories have you heard?

About six weeks ago we began to develop and implement a social media marketing plan for a soccer web site. Soccer Tickets Online is a new site and the initial focus of our social media marketing efforts has been to build brand awareness.

As I mentioned, Soccer Tickets Online is a new web site so the first goal of the campaign was to make people aware that the site exists. There are many different ways to approach that sort of goal, but the one we took was link baiting. We developed a page called “The best 5 soccer players of all-time” and submitted it to Digg. The post made the front page of Digg and crashed the server. Not a bad start?

Like any social media campaign there were a couple of key learning’s. One was that we saw that we only needed 95 Diggs for the post to go popular instead of the hundreds that posts in other categories need. The reason for this is that soccer is not as competitive as other categories.

We also saw that while the post got only 95 Diggs, Digg drove 2,213 visitors to the web site. This verified something that we had previously thought which was that Digg takes into consideration the amount of times someone clicks on a title in addition to how many votes a post gets in deciding whether to make that post popular.

This piece of information shows the importance of writing a Digg Headline that encourages people to click through to the web site. The headline we used “Top 5 Soccer Players of all-time” is something that “baits” people to click on through and see who the five players were.

Due to the success of the top soccer players post, we followed it up a week two weeks later with a similar “link bait” post titled “The Best Young Soccer Players in The World”. Note the only reason we waited two weeks, was because of the holidays!

With our second piece of link bait, we wanted to see how this type of post would work on other social networks, and we wanted to spread the submissions over several days to see if that would increase the buzz and traffic.

The three social networking sites we submitted the post too were StumbleUpon, Digg and Netscape. On Digg the post went popular again while the StumbleUpon numbers were very strong. All told this post had 3,400 page views and the web site got 1,333 visits from StumbleUpon and 788 from Digg.

Unfortunately the Digg post got buried as some Diggers though that the URL soccerticketsonline.com was too commercial. This is a problem that is happening more and more on Digg and is something that we need to take into consideration when we do addition posts on Digg.

Six weeks into this social media campaign we have created five targeted social media events focused around creating awareness for the web site. We have been lucky in that 2 of the events went popular on Digg and 2 made the buzz page at StumbleUpon.

Last month StumbleUpon and Digg sent over 5,000 visitors to the web site. If the two posts had not been buried on Digg, the traffic numbers would have been a lot higher.

In addition to creating awareness about the site, one the other goals from this phase of the campaign was to use social media to get this web site out of any search engine sandbox. With 270 referrals from the search engines we are on our way to succeeding with this goal.

Now that we have build awareness of the site, our next step will be to focus on developing relationships with the soccer community, especially those sites that focus on MLS teams. Phase one was like an all out advertising blitz where phase two is much more tactical in its approach.

I will keep you updated in 30 days about how phase two of our social media marketing plain proceeding.