Marketing

New Marketing Tools for Pages

by M. Dorn on July 24, 2012 · 0 comments

Pages are valuable tools for marketing your app or your brand. Recently, we added several powerful features that simplify managing and sponsoring Page posts. All below features are available in both Page admin UI and the API except the first one below, which is a UI shortcut for creating Page post sponsored stories.

Scheduled Page Posts

Many Page admins have requested a way for creating and scheduling page posts to be published at a future time. Now, using Pages Graph API, you can create a page post and schedule it to be published at a future time that is between 10 minutes and 6 months from the time the post is created. If you change your mind about the scheduled publish time of the post, you can change the schedule time or delete the unpublished post so long as the post’s original scheduled publish time is at least 3 minutes away. To create scheduled posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

Unpublished Page Posts

Another new feature is the ability to create Page posts that don’t show on your Page’s timeline. Admins frequently want to create Page posts that they can sponsor. However, these Page posts usually contain information that are relevant to only a segment of the Pages’s audience, e.g., 50% off all women shoes in all the bay area stores. Moreover, these stories don’t contain information that is relevant to the Page’s identity and story, which is characteristic of the content that should be on the Page’s timeline. Unpublished page posts allow for posts that can be promoted as sponsored Page posts, but they don’t show up on the Page’s timeline. Such promoted page posts appear only on the right hand side column, and not on the news feed. To create unpublished posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

You might ask how you would read a list of all scheduled and unpublished page post through API. Graph API’s Page object provides a new connection, promotable_posts, that lists all published, scheduled, and unpublished Page posts. Also, you can use FQL stream table for this purpose as described here.

Page Admin Permissions

Many Page admins use third party tools for Page content creation, moderation, engagement, or ad creation. These use cases require a Page admin to grant permissions for managing the Page to a third party app. However, usually such an app doesn’t require full admin permissions. For example, imagine an ads management platform that creates page posts sponsored stories and monitors Pages’ insights. Such an app requires permissions for managing ads for the page and reading the page’s insights, but it doesn’t need permissions for creating page posts and monitoring posts’ comments. The Page admin can add the admin of the ads platform as a Page admin with Ads Creator permission. Then, the Page’s access token that the ads management platform receives, will be granted with only managing ads and reading insights permissions for the page. To learn about Page admin permissions see here.

To get started using these new APIs see Pages Graph API.

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

3 Tips to Optimize Your B2B Social Media Marketing Mix

by M. Dorn on July 14, 2012 · 0 comments

Having spent a number of years marketing B2B products in the financial services space, the concept of marketing mix modeling has been beaten into me. For those who aren’t familiar, marketing mix modeling or MMM is the process of assigning meaning to changes in incremental sales volume based upon specific tactics used within the marketing mix, and is done by looking at historical data over a period of time. I won’t bore you with linear, non-linear and multivariate regression, but in a nutshell, it’s cause and effect analysis.

If you are a marketer, you’re always testing, and testing yields insight into how the marketing mix performs. The process should tell you how the control acts vs. the test with respect to several KPIs including response rate, conversion rate, cost to acquire, customer lifetime value, return on investment, and perhaps others.

B2B marketers often ask me how to apply traditional marketing mix modeling concepts to their social media efforts. Although the answer I give is not scientific in nature, my goal is to show them how analyzing data can lead to data-driven decisions for the marketing mix, which then can be measured in terms of KPIs. Here they are:

1. Learn to Think (and Speak) Like the Customer

What impact does copy selection have on your social media campaign? This means listening intently to what your customers and prospects are talking about within social, how they’re talking and ways you can meet them on their terms. You can leverage word cloud technology to see common keywords associated with specific social media audiences which can lead to testing calls to action within social media.

2. Correctly Interpret the Data

One of the most frequent problems with analyzing social media data is misinterpretation. A data set yields valuable insights only if it’s read correctly. One piece of criteria I use when looking at B2B audiences online is number of conversations by channel over the course of about 2 years. For instance, if I want to use the data to guide a decision about where to focus my social media marketing efforts, I will build a data set using monitoring software that shows mentions of a B2B brand, industry term or product beginning two years back, then comparing the same query with data from a year back assuming all else being constant. This helps me validate the selection of social media channels to focus the message.

3. Segment Your Target Audience

Part of being successful in B2B social media marketing is to really understand who the target audience is. Who specifically is the decision maker you traditionally market to by use of other marketing channels? Is it a C-level executive or someone else in the organization? In the past, one of the B2B companies I worked for targeted a person with the title of “Fleet Manager” because it was proven that this person had the most leverage in making a purchase decision. When building your social media campaign, make sure to take this into account when you go to market. Focusing on the decision maker can have a profound impact on how the message resonates and ultimately, how the campaign performs.

What other attributes do you look at optimize your B2B social media marketing mix?

Source: Social Media B2B

Content Marketing is Not a New Shiny Object Invented via Social Media!

by M. Dorn on June 19, 2012 · 0 comments

You’ve heard the buzz. Many business and marketing leaders that should know better think they have found a new shiny object in content marketing. They’re all hyped up about it and thinking it’s the next best band-aid for the broken business. Maybe even the thing to help them become the Twitter, Facebook and social media super star they have always dreamed of being.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media

4 Ways to Integrate B2B Social Media into Marketing Plans

by M. Dorn on October 19, 2011 · 0 comments

B2B marketers have long known that to succeed with social media they can’t view it as a stand alone campaign or tactic, but must integrate social media into their marketing plans. Here are four suggestions for doing just that.

1. A Social Website
A B2B website is the most likely destination for your prospects and customers with any campaign. A call-to-action from any source drives a visitor to your website for more information, to download a white paper or ebook, or even to contact a sales rep. The first thing you need to make sure is that your website supports the marketing campaign. Whether you have a landing page for the specific offer, or just a clear path from the home page (which is where people will wind up from anything that is not a click), make sure they can find what they are looking for. Making your website social includes providing other remarkable content, usually on a blog, allowing visitors to share and spread your content, and links to your social profiles, along with what visitors can expect when they follow or like your company.

2. Support Traditional Advertising
There are stil B2B companies using traditional advertising to drive leads into their funnel. If that is still working for your company, and your cost per lead is competitive to other tactics, it is not yet time to discontinue it cold turkey. It is time to review its effectiveness and cost, as you begin adding social media to your marketing mix. You do, however, want to support that advertising with social media. Create a blog post that provides more in-depth information to what was in the ad. If creating the ad featured an interesting photo shoot, post some behinds the scenes shots on your Facebook page. Shoot a video with the product manager talking about the development of the product and some of the customer feedback that was incorporated into the development.

3. Socialize Your Email
An email component is usually part of a larger marketing campaign. These can easily be social by adding social media profile buttons to follow and share, but there is so much more. Use your social meda profiles to encourage prospects and customers to sign-up for the email. Announce a week before and a day before that you have an email going out and ask your followers to opt-in to the message. Many email programs can automatically post a web version of the email to your profiles when you send it out. If your message is highly targeted and includes a specific promotion that you don’t want to send to everybody, you can qualify people online. Use the current email as the reminder to you to post a sign-up request, but send them a more general email, which still needs a call-to-action.

4. Discover Prospects
A marketing campaign begins with a target persona, a prospect list, a customer list or some other way to reach your audience for your product or service. No matter how you gathered this, there are more people out there that can benefit from your message. You can search Twitter for keywords that relate to your target industry, or even specific pain points. People ask questions about new solutions, and even complain about their current situations. Join LinkedIn Groups where people do that as well. No matter the platform, the first contact should be helpful and offer value. Unless it is clear that they are ready to make a buying decision RIGHT NOW, people are looking for recommendations, not sales pitches. Think of this step of expanding your list of prospects for a second phase of a campaign.

What are some other ways you have integrated social media into your B2B marketing plans?

Nominations Now Open for the Inaugural Facebook Studio Awards for Marketing Campaigns

by M. Dorn on October 18, 2011 · 0 comments

Facebook announced today that it is now accepting nominations for the first Facebook Studio Awards that will honor ad agencies who’ve produced they year’s best marketing campaigns. Th awards will serve to promote Facebook’s stand-alone marketing industry showcase. A panel of judges will look for campaigns that are social, scalable, integrated with other media, and use a wide range of Facebook marketing products. Brands and agencies can submit work to the Facebook Studio gallery here in order to qualify for the awards.

The chance to receive publicity by winning the award should encourage marketing industry players to submit their work. This will in turn fill out the gallery with examples and stories of success that can help others improve their own campaigns and attract more marketers to the Facebook platform. The awards are surely a bit of a PR stunt for Facebook Studio, but they’re still an opportunity for agencies to distinguish themselves.

Facebook has also made a few design improvements to Facebook Studio. New navigation options in the gallery allow visitors to find campaigns by agency, brand category, country, language, Facebook product used, and sort by recency, Likes, or whether the campaign has been spotlighted. The home page has been streamlined, and the Agency Directory is now easier to comb through.

Facebook Studio launched in April to create a dedicated space for the marketing community to browse each other’s work and learn about Facebook marketing products. Roughly 350 agencies and their international offices from 35 countries have submitted past campaigns to Facebook Studio. Facebook tells us 75 percent of pageviews are spent browsing agency-submitted work, indicating that marketers may be more interested in learning from examples than product documentation.

The nomination period for the Facebook Studio Awards runs from now through the end of 2011, and submissions will be judged in January. Winners will be featured on the site and will likely receive a flood of new clients, making the awards lucrative even without much of formal prize.

Marketing and advertising agencies are vying for brand clients that are increasing their spend on integrated marketing campaigns that utilize apps and Pages in addition to pure advertising. By creating an opportunity for top agencies stand out, Facebook may be able to populate the Studio website with more examples that will improve the overall quality of marketing on Facebook. This could help keep the site from being degraded by bland marketing that could push users away.

Source: Inside Facebook

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