Tag: Facebook

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Boomers Embrace Facebook

While Facebook has long been home for Generation Y, now approaching 30 and online since they were still in university or graduate school, with the younger generation, and Generation X also long on the network, the fastest growing group on Facebook is Baby Boomers, now approaching retirement, and grandparents. Social media is not merely a marketing touchpoint to reach those under 45, but it’s also an important channel to reach Boomers. NBC News’s Tom Brokaw explores how Boomers embrace the medium.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Top Reasons People Unsubscribe from Facebook Pages

Sometimes, people new to social media don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter. This is a relatively simple thing, but the consequences of misuse can have serious implications for your brand.

Too many people treat Facebook like Twitter — frequent status updates, posting multiple times a day. The consequences not only mean that, because they don’t understand Twitter, they are missing out on conversation, website traffic, and outreach to potential new leads, but it also means that they might be upsetting and annoying their existing Facebook fan base. This will result in losing fans, potential customers, and even potentially cause negative word-of-mouth. This is one of the basic reasons why it’s important to have professional community management and an open organizational structure that takes advantage of the Groundswell.

Here are one person’s comments/summary. We concur:

-Waning interest in the brand
-Complaints about the information offered on fan pages w
-Posting too often or posting uninteresting information

Brands need to focus on content strategy and community management if they want to see healthy, active and engaged communities!!

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10 Reasons NOT to Delete Your Facebook Account

The following is a guest post from Natan Gesher and was first posted on his blog Lines Writing Lines and is reprinted with permission of the author. The views expressed are entirely his own.

If you’re in the habit of following these things, you’ve by no doubt now read Dan Yoder’s 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. I’ve seen it posted in six or seven places in just the past few hours. Unfortunately, it makes less and less sense every time I skim it. For the following reasons and for many others, I am not planning to delete my Facebook account:

Keeping in touch with Facebook

10. I moved from America to Israel in 2004, leaving behind my entire family and almost every friend I’d ever known. Though I didn’t get a Facebook account until 2005, I’ve been using it daily for the past five years to stay in touch with friends and relatives. Facebook makes it extremely inexpensive and highly efficient to get out important news about myself and to find out important news about other people with whom I never was very close. At the same time, it has never replaced traditional means of communication like telephone calls; nor should it.

Business networking with Facebook

9. LinkedIn is there and it does a fine job, but work is only one part of my life and there’s no chance for a prospective employer or client to get to know me by my LinkedIn page. I add my coworkers as Facebook friends and I’ll do the same for my clients. If they don’t accept me, I don’t mind at all, but I think they’ll want to get a better understanding of who I am and what I like, to the extent that information on Facebook supplements my real personality.

Photo sharing on Facebook

8. I understand that Facebook is now the world’s biggest photo-sharing site. There are others, like Flickr and Picasa, that have lots of features and are more professional, and more serious solutions like installing Gallery on your own domain. But for ease of tagging, getting photos to lots and lots of people – but not to random strangers – and sheer simplicity, sharing photos with Facebook makes perfect sense.

Connecting with new friends on Facebook

7. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been out and met someone or a few people, but only gotten first names. In the old days, meeting someone and speaking for a few minutes meant that I’d either have to ask for a telephone number to continue the conversation, with might seem a little too forward (and I don’t enjoy talking on the telephone very much) or attempting to follow up through a friend-of-a-friend, which could be cumbersome (I’ve never been comfortable meeting someone and then asking for an email address). It’s now extremely handy to use Facebook to connect with a new contact, even given just a first name and a mutual friend. This might be to continue a discussion about some interesting issue, to finish tagging a photo, to pass along information about a job or an apartment or just to stay in touch in the future. It’s clean, it’s easy and it works.

Using Facebook ads

6. Recently, while looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, I used Facebook ads to get the word out and drive people to read my message that I was willing to pay a NIS 3500 finder’s fee for information leading to me renting an apartment. A very large percentage of the site’s traffic was generated by these Facebook ads, leading to several actionable tips. My somewhat creative use of Facebook ads was profiled in an article in TheMarker, the business section of Haaretz, but in fact I believe that I was using Facebook’s advertising platform in exactly the way it was designed and for exactly its purpose. Gone are the days when ad campaigns cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just to plan and start. I set $10 daily limits for my ads and didn’t have any knowledge of the system beyond what’s available in Facebook’s own FAQs. It’s so easy to use Facebook ads, I could almost train my dog to use them.

Facebook’s privacy settings

5. Complaints about how Facebook sets up its privacy settings are a dime a dozen, but I challenge anyone to come up with another comparable web service that gives its users more powerful, granular control over their information than Facebook does. You can choose exactly who gets to see every little thing you do on Facebook or set global settings and just stick with them. True, they change their privacy options all the time and true, it gets pretty confusing, but it’s getting confusing because it’s getting more detailed and more complex, which is a good thing. And the bottom line is that no information is available about you that you don’t put on Facebook in the first place: if you want to have a profile with just your first name, last initial and favorite television shows, you can do that. This isn’t to say that privacy isn’t a big concern. It is, but it’s also crazy to complain that Facebook is spreading your information every which way if you don’t use Facebook’s own options to control who sees your information.

Remembering people’s details with Facebook

4. Whenever someone I know travels, I always ask for a postcard to add to my collection. “But what’s your address?” they always ask. And I always say: “It’s on my Facebook page.” When I meet someone who asks for my phone number, I could recite the ten digits or write them down, but it’s a hell of a lot easier just to give my Facebook username – which, conveniently, is the same as my first name. When someone wants to know my birthday to wish me a happy birthday – it’s there, and it even reminds my friends and family on Facebook when my birthday is approaching. I have a Birthdays calendar in iCal too, so I can see when important birthdays are coming… but there are hundreds more birthdays in my Facebook account.

Everyone is on Facebook

3. As often happens, Farhad Manjoo said it best: “There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook… it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant [and mobile phones]… Facebook is now at that same point – whether or not you intend it, you’re saying something by staying away.” What does it say to me when I meet someone who doesn’t have Facebook? Something like: I don’t want to stay in touch with you. Or perhaps: Please leave me alone. Or even: Community is not important to me. These are perfectly valid sentiments, but if you do want to stay in touch, if you don’t want to be left alone, if communitydoes matter to you, then you’ll find a way to use the tool that’s expected of you.

Facebook gets better all the time

2. I’m actually ambivalent about Facebook’s progress and I include this one even though, while I think it’s true that Facebook does get better all the time, it also gets worse. I miss the days when Facebook was mainly about networks (and then groups) and I think becoming a “fan” of a “page” is lame, which is why I’ve never done it. I think most Facebook applications like the Farmville thing and the Mafia Wars thing are complete crap, which is why I’ve never used them (and why I’ve blocked them from spamming me). At the same time, Facebook’s integration with the wider web is very cool and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities – who knows, maybe one day Facebook will be the next Google, the first stop for people who want to find something on the internet. And where else on the internet do people join a site with their real names (first and last) and real pictures, one account per person? Facebook could be the long sought source for online micropayments, one-click identity verification without credit cards, etc, etc.

It’s a pain in the ass to quit Facebook

1. This is in response to Dan Yoder’s point three: “Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.” It seems circular to me that it’s hard to close your Facebook account would be an argument for why you should close your Facebook account, but I understand that many people see it that way. Just ask yourself: is it really worth it? Facebook is entertaining, useful, efficient, free, generally a good idea to use and possibly will be even more essential in the future. If you don’t like making your information public, limit the amount of information you share. You don’t even have to give a real last name to use Facebook; you don’t have to use your normal email address; you don’t have to join your company’s network or accept your boss’s friend request. Is it really worth canceling your account for the vaguest and lamest reasons? Nope. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and keep the damn account open.

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Tropicana Las Vegas Hotel Uses Social Media to Drive Customers and Increase Customer Satisfaction

How does one Las Vegas hotel use review sites like Yelp to gain customers and encourage return customers? Simple: Good customer service and responding to every post, including negative reviews. The Tropicana Las Vegas’s willingness to engage negative reviews and see them as opportunity for improvement is one important key of this Los Vegas hotel’s success in online marketing.

The following is a guest post from Nicole Marshall, Guest Experience Specialist at the Tropicana Las Vegas. Check out their pages on Twitter and Facebook, as well.

Tropicana Las Vegas is changing everything! We have been under new ownership since July 2009 and since then we have been making great strides to change our entire culture, both physical and service related. Social Media plays a very important role in this; as the customer of today is far more technically savvy then that of 10 or even 5 years ago. It used to be if you had a great experience, you would tell your friends and maybe a local newspaper. Now a days you can Tweet, Blog, Facebook or Yelp right from the hotel room or restaurant table. There is no lag time and you reach a much greater audience then your immediate friends. It used to be one person could tell up to 5 people, who tell 5 more and so on. Now, one person can reach 100 people who then tell 150 more and it balloons from there. For Tropicana Las Vegas, this is a great way to get the word out about our transformation.

Having a company website is crucial, but today, you need a larger online footprint to be able to go reach your customers. Facebook is a great avenue for chatter as well as a marketing tool.. The wonderful thing about Facebook and other social media avenues is that you can successfully manage a page or site with very little technical training. If you can point and click, you are in! In order to create a site or page that is engaging and savvy, it does help to have a marketing and customer service related background. After all, if something is boring, you are going to lose interest fast! Everything needs to be done keeping the target audience in mind.

What sets the Tropicana Las Vegas apart is our commitment to excellence and our customer focus. Our Facebook site, for example, is more than just a place for fans to post their comments and share pictures. We post a minimum of three times a week to ensure we are always staying on the minds of our friends without over saturating them. We also answer every post. By doing so, we’ve created raving fans! In addition, we share many of the comments with our team members to ensure it happens again! We also personally assist with reservations. In other words, we treat you like family and not revenue. The response and support from our fans is overwhelming on Facebook. There is nowhere else in the city that you are going to receive such personal and professional “online” service from a real person. We do this not only through Facebook, but through several other “virtual” outlets as well, like Trip Advisor and Yelp.

With the good, there will always be the bad. With a generation of technically savvy customers, if they want to say something negative, they will find an outlet. We welcome this feedback. After all, if we have no idea something is broke, how can we fix it? However, be assured that once you tell us it is broke, we will not only fix it but also invite you back as a “VIP” to prove it to you!

The best suggestion for a company starting to dabble in social media is start small and ensure that you never make a promise you, or your company, cannot deliver on. You have to stay flexible yet consistent, empathetic yet company focused. And remember to have fun with it.

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The ROI of Social is "Will Your Business Be Around in 5 Years?"

I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).

A few facts, from Socionomics:

  1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
  2. 96% of them have joined a social network
  3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
  4. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  5. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.
  6. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
  7. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
  8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  9. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  10. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  12. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  13. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  14. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  15. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  16. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  17. Only 14% trust advertisements
  18. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  19. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  20. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  21. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
  22. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  23. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  24. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  25. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
  26. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
  27. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

How is your company reacting?

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How much time do you spend on inbound marketing?

As mentioned in the previous blog post about inbound marketing, one of the core tasks of inbound marketing is content creation.

The central component of inbound marketing is content creation. This could mean anything from writing a blog post, having posts and conversation on Twitter or another microblogging service, interacting on groups and pages on Facebook, or creating and administering a page on Facebook. Perhaps it’s creating a video cast or podcast. Content creation can be further narrowed down into two more categories:

  • Tasks that are initial and time-consuming but not ongoing. Examples might include creating a custom landing page, writing SEO metadata for your website and doing keyword research for your static pages. Writing static page web copy is another example. These tasks take a long time but then they stop. It may be a full time job for a month, but when you’re done, the time commitment lessens –  though it’s not totally over.
  • Community management – Writing frequent blog posts, responding to comments, commenting on other’s blogs, interacting and engaging with the twitterati, update your Facebook status, comment on linked in groups, etc.

Another important concern is data analysis. Sure, you have written copy for your website and have metadata. Yes, your Facebook page has a beautiful landing tab with conversion form. The design work is done. But is it doing its job? Are you doing A/B testing to test the effectiveness of your landing page? Are you using your analytics tools to track conversions? Are there new searches and keywords to consider optimizing for? A few hours a week need to be devoted to analyzing and constantly tweaking your content. Perhaps your website still says © 2005 – or worse. Have you updated this?

One of the core content hubs is a blog. A recent post by HubSpot on the fast evolution of SEO makes essential point both about the SEO and lead-generation benefits of blogging and on the time commitment that content creation takes.

What is the most important thing an SMB can do to improve organic traffic?

A Blog. Period.

Write content, have others write content and make it engaging and relevant, then the links will come. I Can’t even begin to tell you the potential here, if you are willing to engage for a few hours a week.

What’s the point? Content creation takes TIME!

The amount of time required in content creation is often underestimated. Yet, inbound marketing practioners say that the amount of time (remember, this is a general rule – it could take less or more time depending on your specific task) is at least two hours daily.

Chris Brogan writes (“How much time should I spend on social media?”) that “2 hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts.” Matt Dickman of Fleishman-Hillard agrees (“The two hour minimum“) with Chris Brogan. He set the “two hour minimum per day” rule.

Two hours a day? Just to go update Facebook and go on Twitter and do all this unimportant social media stuff is TWO HOURS A DAY? Really? What do you do with the two hours? Chris Brogan and Matt Dickman divide it up differently but the core is: listen, listen some more, interact, engage!

This is how Chris Brogan divides up his time:

  • 1/4 for Listening – Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? See grow bigger ears. In this space, I also count reading (reading other people’s blogs and other online materials).
  • 1/2 for Commenting/Communicating – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on the various channels where they reach you. If that’s Twitter, email, or wherever you hang out, fine. In the commenting timeframe, I also include sharing. Be sure to tweet links to great articles, use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Facebook share, and all the other various tools that help people find the good stuff. In Google reader, a simple SHIFT-S gives an article a whole lot of new potential fans. In here, I might also add the act of linking in and connecting with people on various networks.
  • 1/4 for Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication. This might include blogging, making video or audio, creating email newsletters, and anything else you’re building to contribute something to the space. It might be posting those event photos in Flickr and on Facebook. Whatever it is, creating content of some kind should take up 1/4 of your social media efforts, as this is the way you get found. Search engines thrive on new content. Humans seek out new material. The more you can be helpful, the better your opportunities.

Dickard divides his time up similarly.

Listen – Check your feed reader, check your Google alerts, monitor Tweetdeck, do a Twitter search (unless you’ve added them into your reader), check Technorati (you never know), look at your commenting service (co.Comment/Backtype/etc.) to see who has replied to you. This isn’t a one-time thing, set a schedule through the day and check back for 5 minutes.

Engage – Monitor those conversations through the day and reply as close to realtime as you can. Overnight delays are common and (I think) accepted in most cases. During the workday, however, you can make more impact by replying within 2-4 hours. If you have a blog, write a post or at least brainstorm new ideas based on what you’re seeing.

Discover – Another part of the day should spawn from the listening and engagement phases. You should constantly look for new blogs, people on Twitter to follow, new relevant posts to comment on, etc.

How long do you spend on your inbound marketing tasks? How do you divide them up?

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Why Fan a Brand on Facebook?

As mentioned in a previous post that social media fans are more likely to buy, there’s also another question. Why do people fan brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter?

According to eMarketer:

The top reason to friend a brand on Facebook was to receive discounts, followed by simply being a customer of the company and a desire to show others that they support the brand. On Twitter, discounts, up-to-the-minute information and exclusive content were the main draws; only 2% of respondents followed brands on Twitter to show their support.

The findings are largely in line with previous research about what social followers want, but the results changed when Chadwick Martin Bailey asked respondents about why they had first decided to follow brands, and allowed them to choose as many reasons as they liked.

Among Facebook fans, the top reasons were being a customer (49%) and to show support (42%), with discounts and promotions coming in third (40%). Another 34% simply said it was fun and entertaining to become a fan. On Twitter, being a customer won out (51%), with discounts (44%) and fun (42%) rounding out the top three.

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Social Fans More Likely to Buy

Brands are still a bit slow on the social media bandwagon. Some are still wondering why they should join it. A new report from eMarketer gives a good answer. People who follow brands on social media are more likely to buy. According to Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate social friends and followers are more likely to purchase from brands that they are fans of.

More than one-half of Facebook fans said that they are more likely to make a purchase with brands that they are fans of. 67% of Twitter followers reported the same.

60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly eight in 10.

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Social Media for Social Good

Social Media doesn’t just sell technology (although Dell claims that they’ve made over $1 million in sales due to their Twitter presence), or shoes (although Zappos has also been raking in the big bucks), but it also saves lives and does good.

Whether it’s a religious organization, charity fundraising campaign, or trade group, or promoting democracy, social media does good.

If you’ve been paying attention, social media has been recently saving lives in Haiti and promoting democracy in China and Iran. Ben Parr of Mashable has a new story posted on CNN about the social web.

According to Parr, “In all three cases — China, Haiti and Iran — social media has had an impact, especially as the course of events evolved. Real-time communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook have spread the word about what’s happening within these nations, long before the mainstream media prints the story. These tools have also created a level awareness we’ve never seen before.”

As of this writing, over $11 million has been raised – just via text messaging – for earthquake relief in Haiti. Google is highlighting ways to help – texting, online payment, or even Google Voice.

Twitter and Facebook are also being used to help raise funds for disaster relief.

Twitter is helping to promote individual country’s roles in the Haitian relief effort. The Israeli Defence Forces spokespersons office created a Twitter account at @IDFatHaiti to showcase that country’s role in helping Haiti..

How are you using social media for social good?