5 Social Media Marketing Tips to Increase User Engagement

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If you keep up with social media marketing news, you already know that if Facebook were a country, its 800 million users would make it the third most populous nation in the world. And, besides being the largest social network in the world (by far), it’s now the most popular website in the U.S., consistently beating out Google for the top spot.

If you keep up with social media marketing news, you already know that if Facebook were a country, its 800 million users would make it the third most populous nation in the world. And, besides being the largest social network in the world (by far), it’s now the most popular website in the U.S., consistently beating out Google for the top spot.

However, just because Facebook is the country’s stickiest site doesn’t necessarily mean that your Facebook page has any “stick” to it at all. How do you connect with your customers on Facebook, get them to engage and keep them coming back for more? Here are five social media marketing tips for increasing user engagement on your Facebook page.

Social Media Marketing Tip #1: Pick the low-hanging fruit first

Whenever you’re trying to improve your social media marketing, consider starting with the low-hanging fruit – the changes that you can make right away that offer a big return. When it comes to increasing user engagement on your Facebook page, the low-hanging fruit includes:

Respond to questions and comments right away
Post regularly
Run a poll, a quiz, a contest
Change your Facebook URL to something easy to remember (i.e., don’t allow your URL to stay as “http://Facebook.com/My-Company-Name/String-of-impossibly-long-numbers/”)

Social Media Marketing Tip #2: Time your posts to reach more users

We’ve found that big brands who post Facebook content outside of business hours have 20% more user engagement than brands who only post during the work day. And there are a number of social media marketing studies that concur with this.

Facebook user engagement for big brands peaks at three points each day: 7am EST, 5pm EST, and 11pm EST. In other words, user engagement peaks before people go to work, after they get off work, and just before bed time. If you post during the work day, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on your social media marketing user engagement windows.

However, different markets peak at different times. The entertainment industry peaks over the weekend – times when people might check out a movie or a concert. For the media industry, Mondays are weak, but the other weekdays are strong. Auto and retail brands see the most engagement on Sundays; healthcare, beauty, travel/hospitality, and fashion all peak on Thursday; and the business and finance industries peak on Wednesdays and Thursdays. If your business falls into one of these industries, post your content on days when user engagement is already naturally high.

Social Media Marketing Tip #3: Short ‘n sweet (except for URLs)

Posts of 80 characters or less – shorter than a long Twitter post – generate the most user engagement. However, when you include a full-length URL, as opposed to a bit.ly or tinyurl, people are three times more likely to click on it.

Along the same lines, if you want a post to generate more user engagement, ask them to respond to a simple question at the end of the post, such as “What new widget would you like XYZ Company to produce?” Do not put the question at the beginning of the post or buried somewhere in the middle – it is far less likely to be seen.

Social Media Marketing Tip #4: Get out of sell mode

Too many businesses still don’t understand that Facebook is about interaction; a Facebook page is not a newspaper advertisement and it’s not even a company website. If all your posts are sales-oriented — “Check out our sale!”, “Look at our new products!”, “Did you know we just got our fall items in?!” — very few people are going to comment on it, like it, or share it.

From a business perspective, Facebook is less like a sales meeting with a prospective new client and more like a networking meeting where you have a chance to meet contacts and build relationships. To be effective at social media marketing, instead of constantly talking about your products, throw in an occasional picture of a colleague’s new puppy or a bit of industry news from a website that’s not your own.

Social Media Marketing Tip #5: Ask for content in a compelling way

You might remember what poor Domino’s went through a few years ago when a couple of not-thinking-straight employees posted a video on YouTube demonstrating how to cough on, sneeze on, and otherwise molest an innocent pizza before shipping it out to the customer.

[youlist vid=”OhBmWxQpedI” width=”400″ height=”300″]

The video went viral, but Domino’s handled it well. One of their innovative responses was to fight fire with fire: They encouraged customers to send in photos and videos of the delicious pizzas they had received from Domino’s. The best entries would win $500 gift certificates. Dominoes leveraged social media marketing skillfully.

In the same way, consider following Domino’s lead and holding a video contest or photo contest on your Facebook page. Make the contest prize something worth competing for, then watch the content and social engagement pour in.

These are just five social media marketing tips to get your creative juices flowing when it comes to increasing user engagement on your Facebook page.

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The Social Media Revolution Will Not Be Televised But it Will be on Your SmartPhone

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Social media, social media, social media: it seems like social media is all anyone ever talks about anymore when it comes to online marketing, or even marketing in general. These days, it’s practically more common to hear spokespeople say, “Visit us on Facebook at ____” than it is to hear them say “Visit us online at ____” or “Call for a free catalog”. With so many people talking about social media and clamoring to be in the front seat of the social media bandwagon, it’s hard to sort out exactly how social media has already affected businesses, and what changes might be expected for the future.

Almost one in five human beings on the planet who have access to the internet have a Facebook account. Meanwhile, there are 65 million Twitter posts each day, and 2 billion YouTube video views per day (Source: ReadWriteWeb.com). However, what does all of this mean for the way we conduct business? Furthermore, how will social media continue to evolve in 2011? Here are a few ideas about the changing face of social media, and what it means for both marketing professionals and the bottom line of businesses everywhere.

As a culture, we have experienced several profound shifts in the way we receive and process information about our world. The first shift was from word-of-mouth gossip to slightly more reliable newspapers, an era that lasted until television took hold and men like Walter Cronkite helped us to watch and interpret the news of the day. In the last several years, the shift has clearly been away from television and towards the internet. TV news is scrambling to hold onto its piece of the pie by offering online video, blogs, Facebook pages, and ongoing Twitter conversations. However, the next step is from the computer to the smart phone.

At the moment, only 21% of mobile phone users own smart phones, but this will change in 2011. According to the Nielsen blog, the US market will have more smart phones than feature phones by the end of the year (Source: CyberJournalist.net).

Social Media and the Smart Phone revolution: other facts marketers should know

1. According to its forecast, IDC says the number of downloaded mobile apps is expected to increase from 10.9 billion worldwide in 2010 to more than 76.9 billion in 2014. In addition, worldwide mobile apps revenues will experience similar growth, surpassing $35 billion in 2014.
2. Email access is declining for computers, but rising for iPhones
3. Close to 40% of Facebook users access the social network through their phone (Source: Facebook.com).
4. 200 mobile operators in 60 countries are deploying and promoting Facebook mobile products (Source: Facebook.com).

To join in the rush to integrate Social Media with Smart Phones, businesses need to do three things

1. Make sure that their existing social media is mobile-friendly.
2. Test web and video content on mobile devices.
3. Successfully communicate to their customers what available apps and other mobile goodies they have available, and make it readily accessible.

Broadcast Yourself via Social Media

[4thwebvids video=”Pblj3JHF-Jo” embeddedHeight=”295″ embeddedWidth=”480″ autoplay=”false”]

YouTube’s longtime slogan, “broadcast yourself”, will be more relevant than ever as online videos multiply like overactive rabbits. Video content online has taken off in the last two to three years, but in 2011 expect it to get even bigger. October 2010 alone saw 5.4 billion video views worldwide, including 2 billion views on Facebook. (Source: ComScore.com).

Businesses forget about YouTube as a social media outlet at their own peril. Just as companies that were painfully behind the times in the early 2000s claimed they didn’t need a website, companies today will fall behind the times if they don’t have a YouTube channel, or some other way of promoting video content and integrating it across multiple online marketing channels.

Facts about online video every Social Media marketer should know

1. Nearly half of business executives age 40 and under report utilizing video to help them make decisions about vendors – this number will only increase as 20 somethings and 30 somethings climb the corporate ladder (Source: eMarketer.com).
2. 90% of videos watched online are watched on YouTube (Source: SocialMediaB2B.com).
3. The average consumer watches 182 online videos every month (Source: DigitalBuzzBlog.com).

What does this mean for businesses? If they don’t have video on their website now, they will by the end of 2011, unless they want to look like a dinosaur.

The World Will Be Different in 2011, But the Same

As Mark Zuckerberg told Time in his Person of the Year interview, humans “parse data” via the algorithm of relationships. That is the key fact, he says, that has made the social networking revolution possible. People don’t want an internet full of strangers; they want the internet to feel as cozy and safe as their living room.

Zuckerberg sees the future of Facebook as an entity that is more and more woven into the very fabric of the internet. If he’s right, one day online users might surf to a site like CNN.com, and instead of seeing comments on news stories by strangers, comments by their Facebook friends might pop to the top of the list.

As the Person of the Year honor and recent Golden Globes for The Social Network clearly demonstrate, Zuckerberg’s way of approaching the internet have struck a chord with the citizens of the digital world. Social media has fundamentally changed the way we think about everything – from how we keep in touch with grandma to how we buy new shoes – but what hasn’t changed is why social media is so popular. Ultimately, it is Zuckerberg’s insight that we “parse” the world through our relationships with others that is the golden goose laying the golden eggs of social media marketing.

Businesses that want to succeed with social media marketing in 2011 must always remember this basic fact: fancy Facebook landing pages, high-quality videos, and constant Twitter updates are not what their customers are looking for. What they are looking for is a way to connect, a way to interact, a way to feel like they “know” the people they are buying from. In other words, businesses would do well to keep in mind that the first, most important word in “social media marketing” is still, and always will be, “social”.

Media Consumption 2011 (Infographic)

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Ad Age presents an Infographic of the results of an extensive survey profiling media use in 2011 by type of media, generation, and time of day.

8 Common Online Marketing Mistakes

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The promises online marketing seems to offer are many and great: measurable results, laser-beam accuracy in targeting specific demographics, lower costs than television and newspaper advertising. Nevertheless, some marketers who have jumped onto the online marketing bandwagon aren’t seeing the kind of results they had hoped for in their company’s bottom line. What’s the problem? These online marketing firms are probably falling victim to one or more of the most common mistakes in online marketing. In the course of this article, we’ll sketch out 8 of these common online marketing mistakes, with hints on how to avoid them.

1. Online Marketing Firms Leap Before they Look

By far the most common mistake online marketing firms are making are leaping before they look. That is, marketers are diving into forums such as Facebook, YouTube channels, AdSense, and other forms of online marketing without first forming a cohesive strategy for their online marketing agenda. As a result they end up with disparate, incongruous online marketing that confuses customers about their brand rather than building on that brand.

Online marketing is a completely different world, and it is as big and as important (or it will be soon) as any other media channel. Just as a marketer would never dare to release a series of television spots without a very clear idea of how they would use the spots to shape perception of the brand and tie in to other marketing efforts, they shouldn’t dare to leap into online marketing without a clear, cohesive online marketing strategy.

2. Tricked Into Thinking They’re Too Old to be Smart

A white collar professional with experience in sales and marketing who now owns her own real estate firm recently confessed to me, “I don’t have a PayPal account. I think I missed the age cut-off.” Too many marketers “of a certain age” view are stuck in the view that old dogs can’t learn new tricks, and therefore they must rely upon the young, hip, chic online marketing firms who make lofty promises about campaigns that go viral and engage millions of viewers.

Don’t be intimidated by online marketing, and don’t rely solely upon online marketing experts who pat you on the head and say in a patronizing tone, “Don’t worry your pretty little head over how it works.” Instead, take the time to get educated and deepen your understanding on who’s actually engaging different types of online content, how they’re engaging that content, and what actions they take after they see an online marketing campaign – just as you would with any other marketing genre. Online marketing is a brave new world, but there are plenty of tour books and guides who can teach you the ropes, no matter what your age.

3. Online Marketing Firms Abandon Email Marketing

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would very much like marketers to believe that the age of email is over, but this is not true. In crafting an online marketing strategy, don’t ignore the power of email. It is still a major player when it comes to getting consumers to take action.

4. They Prostrate Before the Shrine of Google

Google is powerful, there’s no doubt about it. Putting a company’s website, or alternate domain names related to that website, into the first few slots on Google’s search engine results page is still the best way to get free, qualified website traffic.

However, just getting high marks on Google isn’t enough to convert traffic into sales. That takes good content and clever marketing messages.

5. They Prostrate Before the Shrine of Facebook (or Twitter)

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is the new Big Man on Campus, but just as online marketing firms shouldn’t put all their eggs in the one basket of Google, neither should they put all their eggs in the basket of Facebook, or for that matter Twitter.

Social media is powerful when used correctly. Again, though, without carefully, deliberately linking social media to meaningful marketing calls-to-action and the rest of a marketing campaign, social media is just another online marketing red herring. It is time for marketers to relearn the lesson that their efforts on Google, Facebook, and Twitter only work when combined with other well-honed marketing components.

6. Their Blog’s a Bore

Content, content, content – content is king online, right? Content is where keywords are artfully sprinkled in. Content is what you feed the insatiable, Little Shop of Horrors search engine known as Google. Content is ultimately what brings people to the site.

But does content bring people back to the site? It doesn’t if the blogs and articles are boring and too obviously self-promoting.

Content is a place to impress and intrigue consumers, not a place to jam in as many keyword phrases as possible and tell the same old story with each blog post. “We’re great. We offer these services. Did we mention we’re great? These are the services we offer.”

Good content isn’t mere product promotion, and blogs shouldn’t tell the same story, slightly re-phrased, again and again. Compelling content is educational, fresh, humorous, controversial, confident, and/or a little bit of all of those things. This is the content that online marketing firms should be creating.

7. Online Marketing Firms Forget that Brands Still Matter

Online marketing is still essentially about brand development. Good online marketing firms still evaluate every online campaign against how it will shape the brand. Multiple online marketing channels aimed at slightly different audiences sometimes lead marketers to stray from their brand’s main message and confuse consumers. A confusing brand is a brand that will not profit.

8. They Fail to Reach Connectors

Campaigns go viral not because they reach a lot of people; campaigns go viral because they reach the right people. The online world’s connectors are like the matchmakers of the 21st century. With a grin and a pat on the knee, they wink and say, “You will absolutely LOVE this one.” They aren’t necessarily the people who have the most Facebook friends or Twitter followers. They are people who have influence amongst their friends and a passion about a certain product or online campaign. Campaigns that don’t spur these connectors or influencers into actions are campaigns that should be declared dead on arrival.

Will online marketing live up to its great promises? For some companies, it already is. For other companies, it’s failing abysmally. The problem is not the online world itself, but the marketing strategies (or lack thereof) that marketers are applying to the online medium. Start examining your own online marketing efforts against the eight common mistakes above and make changes accordingly.

Taking Charge of Online Brand Reputation

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Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin’ to say
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
[They] act like they forgot about Dre.

— Rapper Eminem on rap legend Dr. Dre’s song, “Forgot About Dre”

Brand management for rappers is relatively straight-forward: if someone disses you in their lyrics or out of them, you write an even more clever lyric to dis them right back. Audiences will vote for the better rapper with their dollars.

If only corporations and CMOs could issue biting mix-tapes to defend themselves against their critics! What might such a defense look like?

Y’all know me, still the same Mickey D’s,
I been low key since SuperSize Me,
Hated on by Spurlock’s Gs.
But who gave you Big Macs,
Happy Meals an’ pancake stacks,
Chicken nuggets an’ BBQ snacks?
Yeah — you got somethin’ to say?? Shut yo traps!

On the other hand, perhaps it’s a good thing that CMOs don’t make mix tapes.

Online Brand Reputation Takes Style and Smarts

The online world is the Wild West when it comes to managing brand reputation. In the past, a disgruntled customer might tell a few friends about his bad experiences; these days, he publishes his experiences on his blog or on YouTube for the whole world to see. If he’s clever enough or influential enough, one blog post or video can go viral, and the brand quickly becomes the day’s laughing stock. Social media is great when it works in a brand’s favor; when it works against a brand, it can be a PR nightmare.

Today’s net-savvy CMO will focus on three main strategies for controlling negative internet press:

1. Keep an ear to the ground to detect upcoming waves of negative press;
2. Control where negative comments fall on the search engine results page (SERP);
3. Fight fire with fire by responding to negative comments swiftly and definitively.

Keeping an Ear to the Ground

The easiest way to find out what’s being said about a brand and what message about that brand is dominating is to run a Google search. However, a Google search only reveals what has already surfaced to the top of the conversation; to detect a negative trend before it starts, marketers should take advantage of “early alert systems”.

Google, Google News, Yahoo, Technorati, and other sites offer easy ways to monitor the ongoing online conversation. For instance, “Rob’s Pet Store” can set up a Google News alert so that the owner will receive an email whenever any news story that appears with the keywords “Rob’s Pet Store” appears in the news. Technorati lists popular tags used in the last month, as well as a daily list of Top 100 posts across the internet.

Google Alerts is one of the simplest of these tools to use. It allows users to set up a list of keywords for Google to monitor, and allows the user to choose which internet channels to monitor (i.e., blogs, video, news, forums, etc). Smart marketers will set up a few Google Alerts to monitor what’s being said both about their own brand and products, as well as competitors’ brands and products. This “early alert system” allows marketers to spot trouble for their brand’s reputation before it becomes unmanageable, and respond to problems immediately.

Controlling SERP Real Estate

Even if a company’s website has been properly optimized for search so that it falls consistently into the top three search engine results for certain keywords, the company can’t take up the whole first page of search engine results – or can it?

Any given website domain can only take up two or three search engine results, leaving about a dozen other results that may feature competitors’ websites or negative press. However, marketers can control more real estate on the SERP by using the following strategies:

1. Create multiple domains – for example, instead of relying only upon MyDomain.com for traffic, add Blog.MyDomain.com, Careers.MyDomain.com, News.MyDomain.com, MyDomain2.com, etc. Each of these alternate domains should contain proper SEO content with links back to the main domain.

2. Optimize press releases — any press release published online should be optimized and contain links back to the main domain.

3. Crowd out negative comments with positive ones — for example, when Domino’s Pizza faced a YouTube video featuring employees doing some naughty things to pizza, they responded with multiple positive YouTube videos of their own, pushing the bad video down in the search engine results (Source: iMediaConnection.com http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26309.asp).

Fight Fire with Fire by Responding Immediately

In 2009, a Southwest Airlines plane had to make an emergency landing in West Virginia due to a huge hole in their fuselage. One of the most frightening possible events happened on the plane: after a loud POP!, the oxygen masks came down.

Internet-savvy passengers knew what to do – turn to Twitter. Within hours, photos taken by phone appeared online – a public relations disaster in the making (Source: AirCrewBuzz.com). However, Southwest knew what to do, too. They responded to social media conversation with social media of their own. First they tweeted about their official press release, then they followed up with another tweet stating that all their planes were inspected overnight, and finally they tweeted again to say that all the passengers on the holey flight were being fully refunded.

Too often, marketers feel like the social media conversation is outside their control, leading many to avoid that conversation altogether. For better or for worse, though, Facebook has enough users (500 million) that if it were a country, it would be one of the most populated in the world. Social media can no longer be ignored, so marketers instead should take an, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude, while simultaneously monitoring and controlling the Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter tittering.

By monitoring the online conversation about their brand, controlling search engine real estate, and responding swiftly to any negative press, CMOs can successfully manage their brand’s reputation on the internet. Although the internet is still the Wild West for now, CMOs can appoint themselves as Sheriffs, and reign in the evildoers – not unlike Sheriff Dr. Dre and his Deputy Eminem reigning in those misbehaving, dissing rappers:

I told ’em all, all them little gangstas
Who you think helped mold ’em all?
Now you wanna run around talkin’ ’bout guns like I ain’t got none
What you think I sold ’em all?

— Dr. Dre, “Forgot About Dre”