(MKTG 347) Week 9 - Boosting Posts on Facebook

When you create a page on Facebook you have the option to boost your post. This costs money so it may not be something you are looking to do right now, but it is always something good to know. The Facebook page I have created was for a project I created for one of my marketing classes. I was looking into all of the different features Facebook offers for my page and came across a tips section. This section showed me the option to boost my post. And here is what I learned when I read over the suggestions Facebook gave me.

First off, you may not know this, Facebook does not actually guarantee that your post will show up in newsfeed of people who liked your page. Seems kind of weird right? But it's true. So when you post something you have the option to boost your post which will tell Facebook that you want more people who liked your page to see what you posted. When you boost a post you have a few different options of who you want to reach. You can reach specific people based on gender, age, location, language, etc. All of these demographic variables can be taken into consideration when you decided to boost your post.

You can also set up your own budget for this. You can use one of Facebook's preselected budgets or you can create your own. Facebook does ensure that you never spend more then you have indicated. You have the option to add a debit or credit card or use Paypal to pay for your boost. A payment form needs to be saved because your card or account will be charged differently based on how you set up your budget. Facebook has also made it easy to boost your posts from a mobile device as well.

While these next few tips do not directly relate to boosting posts they can be helpful in creating a post that is worthy of being boosted. Facebook actually provides a link to a page that gives something interesting tips on creating content that is relevant and worthy of reading. Facebook suggest that you keep your post short because people scrolling through their newsfeeds are not going to want to read a lengthy paragraph. You should also include images to make your post more appealing and intriguing. Make sure your image is relevant and high quality. Make sure that you link to your website or link to the item you are talking about in your post. The worst thing you can do is talk about how amazing your product is and then not give the reader anywhere to find your product. Lastly, you should always respond to any comments left on your boosted post. You paid money for people to see this post and if they have any questions you want to address them so that the customer can go ahead and make a purchase. Make sure to follow through with what you are doing.

So really boosting a post is up to you. If you think it could be effective for your business and it can help you reach more people then give it a try. There's no harm in running a small scale trial and seeing what type of results it produces. Just remember to always track your ROI so you know what works and what doesn't.

This is what you would click on if you wanted to boost your post.

(MKTG 347) Week 8 - Hootsuite

Chapter 7 of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses using the website Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool that can help you manage all of your social media accounts in one place. Hootsuite can be used to post content to multiple sites at once, schedule posts, and track what is being said about your company. This website is free but you can also upgrade your plan and get more options of things you can track and do.

Hootsuite also has something called Hootsuite University which is basically a learning module that teaches you about social media marketing and then gives you a certificate at the end. It may be something to look into if you want to learn more about this topic. For my class we have to become Hootsuite certified which is awesome because it just adds to the knowledge we are learning in our class about social media marketing.

Kelsey actually shows you how to setup a Hootsuite account and get started on the site. He suggests starting with a free account until you know if this website is something you will really use. Often times we get a little excited and think we are going to accomplish so much and in the end what we choose to do may have not been the best thing for our business. So instead, set small achievable goals and see how you do with those. If Hootsuite ends up being something that helps you achieve your goals then you can consider looking at the paid options.

The next step you will see once you create your account is linking your social media accounts to Hootsuite. You can link your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, etc. to your Hootsuite account. This is why it is important to have a presence on social media because then you will have more options of where you want to post to reach your target audience. If you do not have official company accounts yet you can always try adding your own personal accounts and just seeing how Hootsuite works. You may want to just get a feel for things before you commit to making a bunch of social media accounts. With the free version of Hootsuite you will only be allowed to link three social media sites so pick the ones that most relate to your audience.

If you want you can add a feature called streams which basically track when people mention your name on social media. This can be really helpful because if a customer is having a problem or has a complaint you can quickly address it and solve any issues.

Remember, exploring Hootsuite may be your best option before you actually purchase any type of package. Free tools are always fun and can actually be very helpful! Give it a try!

(MKTG 347) Week 7 - LinkedIn & Social Media Marketing

Chapter 6 of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses LinkedIn and how it can work with your social media marketing strategy. Kelsey suggests that LinkedIn is most successful when you are a company that works B2B not B2C. Kelsey also says that LinkedIn is a strong tool for individuals. You can use LinkedIn to basically sell your self to potential employers. You can add skills, work experience, and any other accomplishment you have to help boost your appeal to employers. It is a good networking website and can help you make connections that could be beneficial in the future. If you use LinkedIn properly it is really a "people helping people" website.

Another important reason to keep your own LinkedIn profile up-to-date is because if you begin to work for a company, potential employees will start seeking you out. Also, potential business partners for the company may look at your profile to learn more about the business. It may seem pointless to update your work and keep adding skills to your profile when you already have a job, but you never know who may be looking. You want to present your best self all the time on your page.

Creating connections on LinkedIn is also very important. You should be seeking out friends, family, coworkers, etc., that you can connect with. This can open up doors to other people that may be able to provide you with job opportunities or even keep you connected in your field. The major thing to keep in mind when connecting with people is to not feel shy. Everyone, well most people, are on LinkedIn because they want to further their careers. So you should not feel weird connection because you all have the same goal in mind.

LinkedIn can be used for businesses to update the public about going-ons as well as job postings. LinkedIn has special pages and advertising that companies can explore if they choose to do so. This may not be something your company needs to do, but at a bare minimum you should at least have a presence on this site. Something you may want to do is write a blog and then share your blog posts on LinkedIn. That way potential employees or customers can learn more about you, even if their intention isn't to make a purchase or do business at this point. You can also convince them through more posts or they may even get to know your company well enough that they refer people to you.

(MKTG 347) Week 6 - Twitter

Chapter Five of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses the use of Twitter as a social media marketing tool. According to Kelsey Twitter is a social media channel that will stay around for awhile and one that businesses will always use for posts. Twitter is similar to Facebook in the aspect that not many people make purchases from the social media sites. Obviously there are exceptions to this statement but in general it seems that peoples intent to purchase is much lower on social media sites.

Twitter is often used by the younger demographic to complain about a product or reach the company to issue a complaint about a product. With this being said, a business needs to learn how to interact with their customers via Twitter. There is an expectation that if a consumer has an issue and they tweet the company about it that the company will reply in a timely manner.

There are a few basic concepts that you need to understand about Twitter before you start using it. When you tweet something you are only limited to 140 characters so what you say needs to be short concise and to the point. Also, you want to make sure that your name on Twitter reflects your company if you do not use your companies name. This is because when someone tweets to your company they have to @ the company name. So if I was looking for a company called Top Tail  I would start by searching for this @: @TopTail. Another concept to keep in mind is that Twitter uses hashtags (#) to associate the post with a topic. If I were talking about a dog leash from Top Tail and i wanted to say that dogs rules I could easily create a tweet as follows: This @TopTail dog leash is the perfect leash for my pooch and I! #dogsrule . This post is something a customer could tweet about your product and than anyone else searching the hashtag dogs rule will see this post.

Twitter does offer different forms of advertising such as promoted tweets and leveraging advertisements. However, it is important to keep in mind whether or not the money you are spending on advertising is benefiting your business. Maybe there is a different strategy you should be using with Twitter. Maybe you should be monitoring your account more or maybe you should start focusing on another social media channel. You always need to remember to look at your ROI. Always, always, always!

Hashtags can be used strategically to help increase engagement amongst your audience. However, you need to be careful that you do not over use or annoy your followers with your hashtags.

(MKTG 347) Week 5 - Facebook Advertisments

Chapter 3 of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey talks about how to create Facebook ads. Facebook advertising can be beneficial to some business. However, as I discussed in the previous blog post, Facebook may not be the right social media site for every company to use. If you believe that Facebook works for your company than there are a couple of options for advertising on Facebook. The two most common types of Facebook advertisements appear either on the side of your Facebook page or in your newsfeed when you're scrolling. The following image shows an example of an ad that appears on the side of your newsfeed.

Facebook ads can be used for more than just selling your product or service. You can use Facebook ads to promote your blog or website. If you post content on a topic and you want more people to see it you can try creating a Facebook advertisement to promote the blog and gain a larger audience. When creating your advertisement you should always remember that to make your ad the most successful you should enable it for mobile users as well. If you think about it, a significant amount of people access social media sites via their mobile devices. If they cannot see your ad then you may be missing an important population of potential customers. 

If you do not think that setting up a Facebook page will be profitable then you may want consider setting one up for credibility purposes. If every business that you compete with has a Facebook page and you don't, it may seem a little fishy to customers. Customers like to be able to do their research when attempting to make a purchase and if they can't find you online they may not trust your business. Also, being present on social media allows you to interact with your customers which in return can build brand loyalty. 

One last idea that Kelsey brings up is that purchase intent on Facebook is low when compared to search engines like Google. When people go to Facebook they typically visit the site to see what their friends are doing. So an advertisement on Google may bring in more purchase intent while an advertisement on Facebook may lead to brand awareness. 

Citation: Kelsey, Todd. CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing. RGB Press. 2015. Print.

(MKTG 347) Week 4 - Facebook Pages

Chapter 3 of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses Facebook and how creating a Facebook page for business has both pros and cons. By now most people know or have at least seen a  Facebook page before. Facebook is basically a mini website for yourself or business. The only difference is that you do not get to design the website rather Facebook has its own setup for you. Something important to keep in mind when setting up a Facebook page is that you can change the URL to something shorter. Typically when you create a page your URL is extremely long with random letters, however you can change this to something that is shorter and relevant. For example, if you had a dog business called Top Tail you could change it to Facebook.com/toptaildogs. This will make it easier for customers to get to your page. Something else that is important to keep in mind is that you should post a profile picture and cover photo on your page so that people can see who you are when they land on your page.

The next section of chapter three discusses the importance of understanding Facebook's business model. At first you were able to create a Facebook page and then your page would be promoted based on the amount of likes you had. However, as Facebook realized that they needed/could make money off of this they began charging people to boost their posts. Kelsey does mention that it is possible to be successful without paying to boost but in the end the success may be short-lived.

Something important to keep in mind when using social media is your ROI. It is easy to get caught up in the hype of having a social media presence but in the end, if it isn't benefiting your businesses you shouldn't be using it. There may be a different social media site or even a different type of advertising that suits your business better than being online. One way to track your ROI is to either connect your page to Google Analytics or to use the Analytics that Facebook provides you with. When you go to your page you can see to how many people your page was served too. This will show you how many people potentially saw your page. However, this will not show you how many people actually viewed your page or how many people actually did anything when they got to your page. It is always important to remember that tracking ROI can save you in the end.

Citation: Kelsey, Todd. CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing. RGB Press. 2015. Print.

(MKTG 347) Week 3 - Content Creation

Chapter two of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses social media content development. Kelsey suggests looking at content creation in three forms: curation, creation, and collaboration. Curating content means that you go find appealing content online and then share it, comment on it, or review it. The author gives an example of when you are creating a blog post you can gather a bunch of relevant posts from other blogs and embed links from these blogs into yours. That way you can write reviews and create interesting content while still giving credit.

Creation is just how it sounds, you make up all the content on your own. So if you had a great idea for a blog post or you wanted to create a really exciting video, you could do so by posting it to social media. Sometimes creation can be hard if you are lacking on ideas but if you know what your target audience likes than you can better tailor created content to meet their needs.

The third viewpoint of content creation is collaboration. If you are on a limited budget or do not fully understand certain aspects of content development it may be helpful to work with others. If you are not an amazing writing but can pull together some nice graphics than you should consider patterning up with someone who knows how to write. By combining your two skills you will be able to create some really well made content.

Creating appealing content is extremely important if your goal is to increase traffic. Your audience will not be drawn in by something that is irrelevant to their interests. This is why understanding who you are talking to in your posts is very important. If you are creating content for a business that values the use of products that are not tested on animals than you most certainly should not be supporting or writing about something that goes against this view point. Most likely, your target audience is going to stand behind the company's values so if you change the company value in a post you make you could harm the business' reputation. Deciding what medium to use to reach your target market is also important. If your audience enjoys reading, than a blog post may be something to consider. If your target audience is more into watching tv or videos, than posting content on YouTube could be beneficial. As you can see, it is essential that you understand your target audience.

Citation: Kelsey, Todd. CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing. RGB Press. 2015. Print.

(MKTG 347) Week 2 - Social Media Introduction

The book Casa Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey is very informative and provides a solid introduction to social media marketing. The first chapter discusses how to have fun with social media and possibly even get a social media job. The first topic that is brought up is ROI, or return on investment. It is important to understand that social media needs to have a purpose when used in a business setting. Money spent on social media needs to be measured and the impact recorded. Understanding whether a social media strategy is effective or not can help reduce costs in the long run. 

Another topic discussed in chapter one is engagement. Customer engagement through the use of the internet has grown significantly. Kelsey talks about how engaging your customer using relevant content and interesting promotions can really make the difference between a successful digital marketing plan and an ineffective one. While it is crucial to engage your customer you also need to make sure that all that 'engaging'  that is going on is leading to sales for the business or at least potential sales. Kelsey makes an extremely valid point when he says that social media is not just about posting but it is also about listening. Not only do you need to post and engage with happy customers but also with angry or frustrated customers. Negative publicity can damage a company's reputation so it is important to monitor what is being said about the business online.

A chart in chapter one actually showed the top social networking sites as of January 2014. I was not at all surprised to find that Facebook was number one on the list, however I was surprised to find that YouTube was number two on the list, surpassing Twitter. Obviously a video channel, YouTube, may not make sense for some companies but there are so many other ways to utilize YouTube that can benefit many different types of businesses. It will be interesting to see how these trends change over the years and whether or not new social media sites take over Facebook's number one spot. 

Citation: Kelsey, Todd. CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing. RGB Press. 2015. Print.

Facebook Ads

This week I created my first Facebook Ad. The ad was an experiment to see how Facebook Ads work and to see what data I would be able to obtain from making one. When you go to Facebook Ads there is a screen that prompts you on the steps to take in order to make your ad. The first thing it asks you to decide is what the objective of your campaign is going to be. I chose the goal of sending people to me website (or blog). Then you have to type in the address of your website/blog so Facebook knows what link to use. The next step allows you to decide what your target market is. You can chose where and who sees your ad. For my example I chose a broad target market containing people who are 18 years or older, who are from the USA, and who enjoy social media and web analytics.

The next step in creating your ad is a very important one. You have to chose the amount of money you want to spend on promoting your ad and the time frame you want to have this completed in. Facebook automatically selects your budget to be daily, which means the amount of money you entered will be spent every day. So if you put in $5.00 you would be spending $5.00 everyday for the length you of your ad. If you click the drop down menu next daily budget you can change it to lifetime budget. A lifetime budget means that you will only spend $5.00 total for the length of your campaign.

The last couple of steps ask you to put in an image for your ad and also fill out some information regarding the content of your website/blog. The image will be shown with your blog when it is promoted so you should pick an image that is relevant to your blog. When you fill out the information regarding your website/blog make sure you put in correct information that will let the viewer of your ad know what your website/blog is about. Once you complete all of these steps you just have to pay for your ad and Facebook will do the rest!

This is an example of what happened when my Facebook Ad was set in place. You are able to see things such as who was viewing your ad and how much money you spent per click.