Name your Facebook page after your business. By using the same business name you use for your directory listings on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, CitySearch, Ask Local, etc., you crate consistent data which sends trust to the search engines and helps your business rank higher in Google.
Get your custom Facebook URL for your business. Go to facebook.com/username and choose a vanity URL that matches the name of your business. That way, users can easily find and remember your page. You must have at least 25 fans on your page to be able to claim your vanity URL.
Post to your Facebook business page at least once per day. Talk about interesting tangential news—local town events, industry news, etc. You can of course promote your business, but be careful not to spam users with daily promotions. Become a trusted source of information in your industry.
Ask questions. Posing inquiries to your fans encourages participation, which in turn increases your engagement score and your page’s ability to show up in the News Feed of your users. You want an engagement rate is over 2% and a Post Quality Score of more than 5 (your Post Quality Score is a measurement of how engaging your Posts have been to users over a seven-day period.
Run a small Facebook ad budget. We recommend $1-2 a day to start to help you build your fan base to a few hundred fans. Posting to your page is meaningless if you have only a dozen fans. Overcome the chicken-and-egg issue by posting and running ads at the same time.
Use coupons and specials. Maybe you’re a cosmetic surgeon and you can offer $10 Botox on Mondays. Tell people about that, with redemption via your coupon code, so you can track them. Better yet, have a tab for coupons on your website and Facebook page with a printable coupon that has dotted lines around the edge and a fake bar code. Make sure to tell your audience that these are special promotions offered to Facebook fans only—that way, they see a direct correlation between being a fan and saving money.
Get testimonials. Do this across Google, Yelp, Facebook, and elsewhere. Consider thanking folks who post a review with a special offer– free coffee, for example. You could also enter everyone who writes a review in a specific time period into a contest to win a free product or service. Prospective customers increasingly rely upon user reviews in deciding what business to select.
Tie your marketing together. Cross-pollinate between your website, business cards, Facebook page, twitter, and other marketing materials. This has a multiplying effect. Put your Facebook URL on your business cards and email signature, and include a link to your Facebook page and a Like button on your website.
Don’t hire a consultant, at least not at the start. Only you can source content, ask clients for reviews, and speak passionately as the voice of your business. Later you can delegate tasks to your office manager or intern. You can license technology, but you must own the marketing.
Network with other local businesses. Not only can you share ideas, but also cross-promote your businesses. No business can understand and identify with you better than another local business in the same geographic area.
For more information, tune into the web class, “Killer Facebook Landing Pages—What Works and Why” with Dennis Yu on Wednesday, October 13th at 10:00am PDT/1:00pm EDT. Sign up for free here: http://landingpagesuccesssummit.com/.
Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. He has written articles for and been interviewed by such media outlets as National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox, and KTLA-TV. He has spoken at Search Marketing Expo, HostingCon, Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Convention, and Ultralight Startups. Yu has also counseled the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues for social networks. Yu is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal.
3 days ago we first noticed the ability to share your ads account with other users via 3 permission levels– reports only, general user, and administrator. Not all accounts will have this feature enabled, but if you do have it, it will be under “settings”.
As an agency managing hundreds of Facebook pages and accounts, our opinion? It’s about time! Standard practice in Google AdWords and other PPC platforms is to allow clients to share access with their agency via the My Client Center interface, which allows many users to manage an account. Previously, you had to either create separate dummy accounts for each client (cumbersome), run them under your agency account (but then you can’t specifically share out access to particular client campaigns), or run under a personal account (yes, we know many folks that do that). In the same way that you can have multiple page admins, you can have multiple ad admins.
Facebook has made amazing progress in the last 6 months with improving their advertising tools. Here are items that would make their platform even better:
Enable frequency capping so you don’t waste inventory.
Allow negation targeting or placement targets (maybe you don’t want to run inside a poker app, for example)
Allow agencies to create multiple accounts for clients under a single domain (client1@blitzlocal.com, client2@blitzlocal.com), though there is potential for abuse here.
Provide a desktop tool like Google AdWords Editor.
Enable CPA bidding to allow for conversion optimization.
Add more metrics to the Facebook Ads API.
Reveal the ad Quality Score, like Google does.
Better UI reporting– show trends as opposed to raw output data.
If you are an agency, then the ability to manage multiple accounts has now saved you massive headaches. We look forward to Facebook adding more Google-esque features in addition to the pure social features that makes Facebook advertising so special.
Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a firm that specializes in Facebook advertising for brands and local advertising for yellow page category businesses.
Facebook has less than 1% penetration in 7 of the 10 most populous countries
That’s right. They have 36,180 users out of the 1.3 billion people in China, 9.6 million users out of 1.2 billion people in India, and the list goes on. They do have 42% penetration in United States, where 126 million of their base of almost 500 million users reside. Facebook may appear to be the dominant player in social networking from a US perspective, but they are getting creamed by in other countries:
* In Russia, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte each have over 30 million users, while Facebook has 1.1 million. * In Korea, Cyworld has 18 million users out of a population of 48 million, which is about the same dominant ratio Facebook has with US users. * And don’t forget Qzone in China with 376 million users, just behind what Facebook has.
* And the list goes on.
So if you’re truly a global brand, you need to be on these other sites– many of which you may not have even heard of if you live in the United States. Even MySpace, which has lost 20% the last year, versus the 30% gain that Facebook has had, is still a force at 1/3rd the size of Facebook. And that’s not even counting the formidable other properties owned within the Fox network.
Whether you’re a US-based brand that has presences in other countries, an international brand with decentralized management, or a country-specific brand, it makes sense to have experts in local markets that have their fingers on the pulse. Note that in the Philippines or Indonesia, for example, you can buy targeted traffic at a 3 cent CPM bid, which often works out to a penny per thousand impressions, since you pay only a portion of your maximum bid. Consider new markets for your products and services.
The world is not accurately represented by Facebook.
Click here to see the country stats from last year.
BlitzLocal CEO Dennis Yu is speaking June 9-10 at The SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conference and Expo in Toronto. Here’s the rundown of the event — hope to see you there!
Facebook Feeding Frenzy: Targeting Opportunities, Privacy Challenges
Facebook and other social media platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn) offer tremendous new segmentation and ad targeting opportunities to marketers. Ahead-of-the-curve marketers are already researching segments, evaluating strategies, testing ad creative, and getting into the weeds measuring performance in this unprecedented targeting playground where interconnected users are willing to openly share their interests and content.
But is it all too easy for marketers because Facebook et al. are cavalier about privacy and disclosure? Is a user backlash or a regulatory firestorm on the horizon? Canada is notorious in that its Privacy Commissioner openly challenged Facebook on its default settings and disclosure. Which way will the wind be blowing in a year’s time? Panelists explore both the opportunistic and paranoid perspectives on social media marketing. Take your pick.
Moderator:
Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & President, Page Zero Media
Speakers:
Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.
Dennis Yu, Chief Executive Officer, BlitzLocal
(Editor’s note: this guest post is by Rory Mackay of Websitetips.com.au. It was geo-limited but has great ideas to inspire for other markets and projects. “Seeding” is the perfect metaphor — a concept sown into social media that sprouts all kinds of creative activity by fans and their friends.)
The My Kitchen Sucks campaign run by IKEA in Australia has set a cracking pace in the first two weeks. The brief that Thinq (digital agency) worked around was ‘Drive kitchen sales over a period of 2 months’. The target group was women who were in the market for a new kitchen. A restriction on the campaign was that the message should only be available in two Australian cities (franchise ruling).
What Thinq did was turn the tables on the campaign. They knew that buying a kitchen is not an instantaneous decision but they knew that they could influence that decision. Along the way they would pick up impulse shoppers, raise brand awareness and create buzz.
Brainstorming campaign ideas, it was decided instead of selling the virtues of IKEA kitchens that they would let IKEA kitchen buyers talk about themselves and their kitchens. Let them let it all hang out, the good the bad and the ugly. The problem was managing negative comments which are always a huge headache and worry for management, and this campaign had the potential to open IKEA to a lot of negativity.
The trick was to channel this negative feedback into something positive. What they came up with was a social competition that allowed people to show how bad their kitchen really is. The winner which would be voted upon would then win a new installed kitchen from IKEA. The clincher concept to the campaign was ‘don’t give people a chance to win, ask them to earn it’.
The voting mechanism setup was built along a points system which people earned as they shared their kitchen with their friends. As people share their terrible kitchen so they gathered points and the person with the most points wins a new installed kitchen. Points are earned for submissions that are shared across Twitter and Facebook.
Two weeks into the campaign:
Facebook has become the number one referrer site.
Customers have setup their own viral campaigns.
The campaign is currently earning $60,000 a week for IKEA.
Over 1,100 kitchens were submitted in the first week.
Thousands of tagged kitchen images pointing back to the competition.
The leading kitchen has received over 800 votes.
One of the great things about this campaign was the small budget. Beside production costs of the real estate only AU$4000 was spent in seeding the competition. This was done via two bought email lists, which received one blast each.
Some user generated viral things people are doing to earn their new kitchen are …