advertising
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
What if Marketing Stopped Evolving
Change is difficult, but at times, necessary. There are many things in the world that we can understand, that we can predict, that we can control, people are not one of them.
At the core of any marketing or communications strategy is the connection between a person and a brand. As people and society continues to evolve and change, so does marketing and communications strategies. Failure to do so, and the connection between the person and brand is broken.
On March 9, Google published a post about its Project Re: Brief as part of a celebration to recognize 18 years of digital advertising. Google began an experiment to link the future of digital advertising to iconic ad campaigns of the past.
One of these past iconic campaigns was Coca-Cola’s ad in 1971 which featured young people from around the world singing on a hilltop. Google invited Harvey Gabor, the original art director of the ad, to join a Google creative team to re-imagine the Coca-Cola ad for the modern web. They created a video highlighting the journey they took to re-imagine the ad.
Technology plays an important role in changing consumer behaviour. How people choose to connect and interact today is very different from that in the 1970s. Coca-Cola’s TV commercial may have had a great impact in the 1970s, but if that same commercial was aired today, the reaction may be very different. Would consumers pay attention? Would consumers connect with the message? Would consumers even get exposed to the commercial?
Let’s continue to re-imagine marketing.
Victor
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: skippyjon
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Tags: advertising, coca-cola, evolve, marketing
The Progression of Ad Cost & Measurement
The cost and measurement of advertising has changed over the years. Traditional advertising was all about eyeballs and the cost of it was based on how many people were “expected” to see the ad. I emphasize “expected” because traditional media channels were not able to track exactly how many people saw an ad.
Now, with the online medium, advertisement pricing and measurement are beginning to reflect the changing environment of consumer behaviour. People are no longer passively consuming information, they are reacting and taking action on information they see online.
Advertising goals are not just about eyeballs anymore. They are about a higher level of interaction, a stronger conversion measure, a profitable action.
It was a giant step when the cost per click model for online advertisement pricing was introduced. Advertisers were only charged when users clicked on an ad.
The next step forward is the pricing models being adopted by social media platforms. These pricing models make a closer connection between the cost of the ad and the goal of the advertiser.
For example, as of May 25, 2011, YouTube “will change the billing terms of all Promoted Videos campaigns from a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis to a Cost Per View (CPV) basis”. This means the promoted video ads will only cost the advertiser money if someone views the video.
Furthermore, the launch of Twitter’s Promoted Products also include unique pricing models. Promoted Tweets, for example, are charged on a cost per engagement (CPE) basis where advertisers only pay when users retweet, reply to, click or “favorite” a promoted tweet. On the other hand, Promoted Accounts are charged on a cost per follower (CPF) basis, which means advertisers are only charged when a user follows their account.
These pricing models help advertisers more accurately measure the return on investment. Gone are the days where advertisers are only looking for eyeballs. Measure everything you do to determine the best course of action.
Victor
Photo Credit: Nesster
Tags: advertising, cost, measurement, ROI, Twitter, youtube
Facebook Ads Made Easy
Advertising on Facebook just got easier.
Ever since Facebook introduced Facebook ads, the popularity of this advertising opportunity has been steadily growing. ComScore estimates that Facebook is getting 31% of US advertising display impressions. This is a staggering percentage when compared to its closest competitor, Yahoo’s network, with roughly 10% of the market.
In the past, running an ad campaign on Facebook was not as easy or user-friendly as it is today. When compared to Google Adwords, the user interface, targeting options and reporting tools on Facebook were quite limited. Facebook click through rates (CTR) and quality of traffic were also low, compared to other ad networks like Adwords.
Over the past year, Facebook has continued to develop the platform and is now introducing a number of new features that greatly helps businesses launch effective ad campaigns.
In January 2011, Facebook introduced the, somewhat controversial, ‘Sponsored Stories’ ad unit which ties in a social aspect to ads. A study by TBG Digital reported Sponsored Stories ads have a 46% higher CTR, 20% lower cost per click and 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ads.
In May 2011, Facebook introduced another new feature that helps advertisers organize and generate ad creative. The Creative Library is a collection of all previous images, headlines and text used in the advertisers’ ads. This tool makes it easier to create different ad variations for testing, which can ultimately help improve a campaign’s performance.
Inevitably as more companies add Facebook advertising to their marketing mix, the competition for ad space will drive up the cost of Facebook ads. We’ve already been seeing the cost creeping up since the launch of Facebook ads. So if you’re thinking you might want to give Facebook advertising a try, sooner than later is wiser.
Victor
Tags: advertising, comscore, creative library, facebook ads, sponsored stories, tbg digital study
A Dead Web Could Be Good For Advertising
Last summer, Wired wrote a very widely debated article on how the web is dead. It was argued by Chris Anderson, “much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly.” For instance, “we’ll pay for convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes can sell songs for 99 cents,” as Chris points out, “An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser… We get the web. It’s part of our life.” It’s now that, Chris states, “the shift to the app model on rich media platforms like the iPad” is taking place, and “where limited free content drives subscription revenues.”
If the web is dead, which of late seems to be the direction it might be headed, this is good news for advertising. Appssavvy recently released a report that found in-app ads (apps inside social network apps or mobile apps) perform 11.4 times better than standard banner ads. Recently, a former Magnify Digital team member, Brian Wong launched his latest venture Kiip that gets advertisers and gamers thinking of screen real estate and in-game experience differently. Brian told Mashable that “[He thinks] that we have too long been fixated with screen estate and the attention exchange as being a key part of the advertising equation.”
Although “appvertising” is fairly new, app publishers continue to tweak and adjust their apps as need be to deliver unique and different advertising successes. Yesterday, Mashable discussed the three main types of “appvertising” that seems to be working:
Become Part of the Game
Finding a way to have a brand appear in a way that enhances the game experience. Last year, Appssavvy ran a campaign where they brought Windows Cloud into GodFinder All-Stars game. The user activity itself leveraged what a user was already doing in the game. In this six-week promotion, 10% of game player’s visited the Windows Cloud (6.1 million visits).
Bribery
Instead of blending advertising into the game experience, brands can ask players to sit through an ad in exchange for virtual game currency. Currently, SocialVibe is one of the main companies providing this type of service, but this is also the category where Kiip inserts themselves with a twist on “virtual currency” and instead providing real prizes.
Make Better Ads
Rich media mobile ads invite users to actually engage with the brand and ad itself, where the ad can be turned into an interactive game for users with a brand. For instance, users can swipe or tap on an iPhone that does an action to reveal a brands story.
With Mary Meeker from Business Insider claiming that 2012 will be the inflection point of which mobile devices will see significant growth, mobile advertising is about to take off. The transition from the “stay-at-home” desktop device to the “on-the-go” mobile device is being realized by marketers all over North America, with 75% of marketers planning to add mobile to their marketing mix in 2011 (Forrester Research).
If you’re not thinking mobile yet, you should be. The tipping point is approaching!
Tags: ads, advertising, app, ipad, iPhone, mobile ads
