social marketing

Engaging Social Posts that Don’t Suck

Social Posts onto Facebook and Twitter are important for companies… they serve many purposes, but first and foremost of those purposes should be ENGAGEMENT.

What the heck is engagement?  This picture should tell the story.. or click it or the presentation below to learn more.   Engagement, as you can see, leads to success… which is what Business is supposed to be about.

So, how do you write engaging posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so forth, without them sucking?
Well I’ve put together a little training presentation on just that.

Enjoy!  Comments welcome!

Experimenting with Facebook Ads

I’ve run literally many hundreds of thousands of dollars ($200,000+) of Facebook Ads, and I’m still experimenting.

Yes, I have a formula that works well… and it’s called “experimenting”.

See, even the most successful mix of target, photo, image, link, landing page, etc… that works this week will lose its effectiveness over time (sometimes in a matter of weeks!)!

So, what I do is religiously experiment… to do this right, I change just 1 variable at at time.

The hard part: measuring actual effectiveness…. to do this: I try to look not just at clicks, but also at conversions.  There is a fine balance between conversion rate and click rate.  Generally you want to optimize for conversions, but on Facebook, getting a click often means getting viral impressions as well.. and that can lead to ‘pseudo-organic’ conversion that you don’t realize came from viral impressions…

Anyways, for those of you out there experimenting with Facebook Ads.. don’t give up.  Experimentation is the name of the game.

Is Zynga Marketing Dumb?

The short answer is yes.  The longer answer is yes… but it’s complicated!  A good friend of mine recently blogged that he thinks Zynga Marketing is failing because they don’t adjust pricing in a failing game.  I disagree with this statement, although he is on to something (but the problem is bigger).  Pricing is extremely complicated in social games and is based on strategy: so changing pricing at the whims of players is bad.  That said, there is a problem at Zynga with their marketing, and I’ll tell you what it is.

I’ve been in Social Network marketing since 2008, running my own business Karmaback, and recently joined venture form Creeris Ventures where I have been (and still am) consulting by running Marketing at Night Owl Games (Dungeon Overlord is the free game I run).  Anyways, in my experience in social games, the key to marketing is: 1.) know your target customer. and then 2.) MEASURE everything.

So what is Zynga doing wrong?  I’m not sure, I don’t have their data… but I think I know what is going on.  They are doing a classic mistake with branding: “Line Extensions”.  So many executives think that “we can leverage the brand we built by doing a new kind of thing with the brand.”  This is flawed thinking.  Re-using the brand to target the same customers with almost the same thing is usually fine and good.. but using the brand for a NEW product/game/service/model/target customer is bound to fail.  Colgate frozen dinners anyone?

With Zynga, their problem is not making a Pay-to-Play game and sticking to it… their problem is trying to extend the Zynga brand into pay-to-play.  The need to create a new company/brand that caters to “hardcore” gamers or gamers that are willing to pay more to play more type… Then the new brand can focus on games like that.

So, Zynga, get a clue.  Stick Zynga in your brand closet and keep it for “Ville” type games.  You need to build a NEW brand if you want to make different kinds of games for new markets and players.

New LOWER Pricing for Karmaback!

Great News for you Social Network Marketing Gurus….

You have a new tool at your disposal… Karmaback!

Karamback is now Free to try for 30-days… and is “all-inclusive!”, including fully custom apps!
It’s just $49.99/month after that!

Yep, that includes ALL our tools:

  • PostOnTime.com which lets you schedule social posts to Twitter and Facebook, and “photo upload posts” to Facebook… for ANY time you want, with fast and deep analytics!  Yep, includes your own branded app!
  • Sweepmaker.com which lets you build a FULLY custom Sweepstakes to run in your Facebook or Twitter, Including your own custom app.
  • Fanpage Tab Builder, which lets you build full HTML Fanpage tabs, with just a few clicks!
  • Referral Contest Builder.
  • Track-able Links
  • Viral Coupons (Social Coupons with any twist you prefer: like-gated, claim-gated, share-gated, etc.).
  • AND MORE!
  • ALL INCLUDED, free to try, 30-days, and just $49.99/month after that.

7 reasons to Fail Early & Cheaply

Since everyone knows 19 out of 20 start-ups will fail… why not fail as soon as you can and as cheaply as you can?  In fact, recent evidence suggests that the #1 reason start-ups fail is trying to scale up too quickly/too soon.  Here are 7 reasons to FAIL as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible:

  1. Whenever you fail, you almost always learn more than if you succeed… especially if you start out with the goal of learning/deciding if a hypothesis will work.
  2. If you can fail quickly, you will likely have time and energy enough to try again!  (not necessarily a ‘new’ start-up, but instead another “hypothesis”/product variation to test in the current one).
  3. If you fail cheaply, you may have money enough to try again!
  4. If you fail early, you avoid spending too much time on a bad idea.
  5. If you fail cheaply, you haven’t invested too much “sunk costs” into the idea, and can let it die more quickly.
  6. If you can fail quickly, it means you have wisely set criteria for failure (a rare thing indeed!)!
  7. If and when you succeed, you KNOW you have something, because you have defined (wisely) what success is, and your past failures prove that the current situation is “Worth” scaling up!
Final word of warning: Scaling up itself is a difficult challenge, so use the term literally, and slowly increase the rate of growth, rather than step function.

Social Network Posts… Work.

This week Buddy Media sent an email to their subscribers with advice on how to make good Social Network Posts…  Two interesting nuggets here:  1.) Email Marketing works… I opened it, read it, and liked it.  2.) The advice is right on target.  Post short messages, use full URLs, ask for a call to action, and post outside business hours.  In fact, their findings: 20% higher engagement when posting off-hours, is perhaps conservative, (I’ve seen 75%-100% higher engagement when posting off-hours).

How do you post off-hours? Why not use my PostOnTime.com tool?  It lets you schedule posts for whenever you want (even when you are out of office). It also gives you awesome options such as photo upload posts, and more…  http://postontime.com  Try it Free! 🙂

Skeptical About Fake Social Marketing

Fake Social Marketing = the kind of contrived, half-hearted attention you try to garner by having a Fanpage or Twitter follower… but it serves no purpose other then as a huge mega-phone.

You are just saying nothing to people who don’t care.
Real Social Marketing = when you have people that *actually* care… and that you have an interactive conversation with those people, and actually listen and react to what is said.
I am skeptical of the value of “Fake Social Marketing”.  I think it has ‘some’ value, actually… at least you are making some effort, even if it is not social.  Fake Social Marketing is more like a “Blog” than an actual social site.  I think most companies take this approach because “Real Social” is harder and more risky.  These kinds of companies might use tools (such as those available by my own company: http://karmaback.com ) to rapidly grow fans & followers, then spam them with messages but ignore any responses.  That was NEVER the intent of how to use Karmaback….. I am a much stronger believer in “real social”.
Real Social Marketing is when companies use Karmaback to REWARD their existing fans/followers with a sweepstakes or discount/coupon… and a side-effect of the Reward is that you get a few more fans/followers… (it’s not necessarily the primary goal).  Meanwhile, Karmaback’s PostOnTime tool is used to help coordinate when messages get said/planned messages… but someone STILL should be interacting with the comments/responses after the post has been made.  Incidentally, the posts themselves should be useful/helpful/informative/or conversation starting… A great example would be asking your Fans/Followers if you should have a certain feature or not.
So, consider this when you are planning your Social Marketing campaign… Focus on the “real social”.  Don’t just blindly post… read and respond.  And don’t bribe, but reward.

Research Brief: how to write “engaging” Social Posts on Facebook and Twitter

According to eMarketer.com’s recent study, having a picture and a clear call to action (e.g. request for likes or comments) leads to the most engaging social posts: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008677.  My own research by running social campaigns for 6 Fanpages simultaneously has led me to agree with this, except for 1 additional comment: Keep it short!

Keeping your posts short, and varying the time of their postings (possibly using my companies own tool: postontime.com) is the way to go!  Shorter posts are more likely to get read, and short posts with calls to action (“Like this if…”).

For more tips on making your social campaigns work, check out my white paper here.

Harlan

Top Tips for Social Network Marketing!

My top tips for Social Network Marketing are very simple: * full details and white-paper here

  1. Acquire lots of fans.  (try a Karmaback Sweepstakes to help!)
  2. Engage fans with REGULAR and ENGAGING posts.
  3. Convert fans into customers by making them unique/special offers (only for fans).

It is nice when the marketing industry in general agrees with you!  Check out “Involver’s” top tips as well (note: matches mine very closely):
http://blog.involver.com/2011/10/07/social-media-marketing-tips-to-i

  1. Post Regularly
  2. Time your Posts.

So, how can you do 1 and 2 VERY easily?
For Facebook and Twitter try my new tool: http://postontime.com

Marketers want to better measure Social

Ever wanted to know exactly what Social Network Marketing is doing for you?  You are not alone.
According to eMarketer.com measuring social effectiveness is of paramount concern.

My question is what do you want to measure?

Respond to me here or by email to harlan@karmaback.com

Karmaback builds tools to improve Social Marketing effectivness… tell me what you want us to measure, and if we’re not doing it already, we will be!