Author Archive
3 Ways to Increase Your Reach on Facebook
Facebook is a powerful and expansive channel for connecting with your target audience. However, as the number of posts and interactions increase, the likelihood of a specific user seeing your wall post decreases.
Here are 3 ways to change that.
1. Pin or Highlight Wall Posts
Pinning a wall post attaches it as the first post to appear on your Facebook Page’s timeline even when more recent posts are published. Pinned posts will automatically unpin after 7 days if it is not manually unpinned.
Highlighting a wall post enlarges the post to stretch across both columns of the timeline. Compared to pinned posts, highlighted posts still shift lower as new posts are published.
Both options increase the prominence of a post on the Page’s timeline.
2. Encourage Users to Comment or Interact
Newly published wall posts are typically seen by only a fraction of people who Like your Page. If a users comments, likes or shares your post, your post has the chance of appearing in the users’ friends’ news feeds. As a result, your post will be exposed to a secondary audience.
Users who regularly interact on your Facebook Page are more likely than others to see your wall posts on their news feeds.
3. Promoted Posts
Promoted Posts is a Facebook advertising option that lets Page Administrators pay to have specific posts displayed to users or friends of users who like the page. Facebook charges a flat fee based on the number of people the advertisers want to reach. Promoted posts are displayed within the news feeds of users.
Promoted posts may be a suitable option if you have an important event or conversion goal you want to promote.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Tags: advertising, facebook, pin, promoted posts, Social Media, strategy
Magnification Potential
Online marketing promotes or builds awareness for a product. Often, the decision as to which tactics are used depends on available resources – time and money.
There’s also an important factor to consider, which I like to call the “magnification potential”. By magnification potential, I mean the expected multiplication factor of a dollar spent.
Faced with limited resources, you’ll need to determine which marketing tactics will help you achieve your objectives within the given time. If your objective is to gain as much exposure as you can for your product in the next 2 months, tactics with a high magnification potential will be more beneficial. However, if your objective is to make as many sales as possible, a tactic with a lower magnification potential, but a stronger, more targeted message may be more beneficial.
So what determines a tactic’s magnification potential? It’s quite simple. The likelihood that the target audience will share your message with a secondary audience.
For example a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords has a lower magnification potential. A fixed dollar amount spent on Adwords will attract 1 visitor via 1 ad click. It is highly unlikely that this visitor will “share” or discuss the ad with someone else.
An email campaign has a moderate magnification potential. There is a low chance an email will be shared, unless it is requested. The number of people reached in the secondary audience will also be limited because the original email recipient will need to manually add each person to the forwarded email.
A contest that requires public voting has a higher magnification potential because contestants are encouraged to ask their friends to vote for them, hence increasing the motivation to share the message.
A Facebook wall post, depending on the content, has an even higher magnification potential because users are able to Like, comment or share the specific post. Any one of these actions will potentially expose the post to the users’ friends. A popular post may reach a secondary or even a tertiary audience. This is the key benefit of social networks.
When creating your next digital strategy, consider your objectives and the magnification potential of each tactic to ensure your campaign will reach the desired number of people.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: StockMonkeys.com
Tags: magnification, marketing, sharing, strategy, virality, word of mouth
Finding the Universal Marketing Metric
In our ALERT® digital strategy process we emphasize the importance of measuring your online marketing efforts. Measurement is important because:
- A marketing initiative needs to yield positive returns, otherwise it should be discontinued.
- Tracking and measuring helps you make better business and marketing decisions. For example, see the post about Using Google Analytics to Help Make Business Decisions.
- You need to be accountable to your clients, managers, investors, etc. You need solid metrics to report to stakeholders.
Relevant marketing metrics (especially online marketing metrics) have evolved in the past few years.
- In the early days, a basic ad impression or the number of eyeballs that saw your ad, was the ultimate marketing metric. This measurement was especially important on the broadcast medium (ie. television and radio) because it indicated how much exposure the ad received and subsequently the value of the ad space.
- Next came the ad click or a basic response (eg. newsletter sign up) from the audience. This was a better measurement because it tracked a reaction from the audience, meaning the audience was actually moved-to-action by an ad or message.
- Next came social media and the pursuit to “engage” with the audience. This greatly fragmented the number and types of metrics that could be tracked and reported. Each social media channel and digital property had its own terminology and way of measuring user interactions.
- Finally and most recently, has come the quest to measure user sentiment. Based on the tools I’ve seen and tried, that claim to measure sentiment for you… Let’s just say, we’re not there yet. The English language is complex. How would a computer account for idioms, slang, context and cultural expressions? For example, would you interpret the following statement as positive or negative, “That’s sick!”
As marketing professionals in the ever changing digital marketing space, we are faced with the challenge of making sense of all these metrics and conveying to our clients what really matters. Life would be a lot easier if there was one universal metric that can be used to measure all marketing initiatives.
However, in order to have a universal metric, there needs to be a common factor in every type of marketing initiative imaginable. As it stands, a user could click on a banner ad, or a user could click play on a video, or a user could compose and post a comment on a blog or a user could explore an interactive website — the list of actions and measurables are diverse, and go on and on…
The only common factor is — the user!
No matter what the marketing initiative, online or off, the user is at the heart of it all. Therefore, the universal metric must be measuring the human being.
If we wanted to measure a user’s level of engagement with a marketing message, we’d likely need to measure their level of brain activity. The more engaging the task, the more neuro impulses triggered in the brain. For example, a simple click of an ad wouldn’t require much thinking power, but writing a comment or navigating through an interactive website would. If human emotion could be monitored, we might even be able to accurately track sentiment. All marketing initiatives could then be measured against the level of positive brain activity from its audience.
So… Is there any hope of truly and accurately tracking this elusive and complicated universal marketing metric? With the progression of wearable technology (eg. Google Glasses) and brain scanning technology (eg. EEG), measuring brain activity may actually become a reality. We’ll just have to see where science, technology and society takes us.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: MikeBlogs
Tags: marketing, measurement, metric
Merging+Media Conference 2012 | ALERT-TV+
Merging+Media Conference is taking place from October 24 – 26. The event brings together cross-media thought leaders and award-winning strategies that will help you Innovate. Cross-pollinate. & Co-Create.
If you don’t have your ticket yet, Register Now!
If you registered already, don’t forget to check out some Hot Tips for the conference.
Our CEO, Moyra Rodger, will be participating in the “Who Owns What?: 360 Intellectual Property Rights” roundtable on October 24 (1:00-2:30 pm) and she will also be moderating the “Show Me the Money!: Financing + Distributing the 360 Property” session on October 25 (4:30-5:25pm).
Finally, other than attending the great line-up of sessions, be sure to come say “Hi!” to the ALERT-TV+ team at the Merging+Media 2012 Innovation Gallery. ALERT-TV+ is our online audience engagement system and it is designed specifically for producers and broadcasters to create effective cross-platform strategies that deliver measurable results.
We look forward to meeting you at the conference.
Tags: 2012, ALERT-TV+, cross media, magnify digital, Merging Media Conference, Moyra Rodger, transmedia
Engage Customers in 5 Simple Steps
Do you…
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If you answered Yes to 2 or more of these questions, you need to take a look at ALERT®: a simple 5-step process for creating, implementing, and monitoring digital strategies that work. This process is tried and proven.
ALERT® is an acronym that stands for the five phases. Assess. Locate. Engage. Respond. Track.
If you’d like to take advantage of our special offer for a FREE initial assessment of your current online presence, please click here. (Available only to the first 10 respondents).
Tags: ALERT®, digital strategy, marketing, online strategy, process, system, tool
