Social Networking

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.

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! 🙂

Obvious and True: Fans and Followers are a Very Targeted Audience.

One of my favorite blogs (The Marketingsherpa Blog) recently posted the result of a study that showed “like search traffic, social media traffic tends to be very qualified” This stunning statement came from Maura Ginty, Senior Manager, Search and Social, Autodesk.  Is it any big surprise?  

Let me think, people who like you, follow you, fan you, or are searching for you on social networks are a targeted audience.  While this does seem obvious at first glance, what is interesting about what Autodesk has done is that they actually developed a keen way to measure it.  Unfortunately, their measurement stops at “sentiment”.  Karmaback would like to take that measurement all the way through the sale.

According to Adam Sutton (Marketingsherpa),  “the [Autodesk] team can calculate the velocity of a marketing message — the number of people a message reaches in a certain amount of time in social media — and combine it with a sentiment analysis”.  And while this is nice… speed of message, sentiment of message, I find it lacking in 1 key area: the Sales!  Why is it people assume that sentiment leads to sales?  

Remember, for a sale to happen, you need to have 3 key elements: demand (sure, we can call that sentiment), price (there needs to be a match between price and demand!  Economics 101), and place (a place to buy, to shop, to complete the purchase, that is convenient & fast).

Here’s a Social Marketing Tip.  Ask for the sale!  Heck, even play with the price (promotions).  While you are at it, why not let them go ahead and buy, directly inside Facebook?  (place).

Social Confusion, engineering explanation of social networks.

Recently, I attended a start-up meetup conference here in Austin Texas. It was a really useful conference, focused on learning and practical knowledge. As always Brett Hurt did a great job with the keynote. The one thing that became clear, almost as a theme for the day, is that most people don’t really understand social networking. Engineers in particular will quickly get lost in the quagmire, mainly because of lack of definition and lack of metrics. After hearing all the debate, I think I can explain at least part of the social confusion on new social media… in terms engineers might be able to make sense of.

First definitions:
Social Networks: Websites where users can communicate with other users. Includes Facebook, MySpace, Blogs, Forums, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost any modern website with feedback tools.

Social Networking: the act of using Social Networks to some purpose, either personal or as a business.

Share of Voice: a metric (no standard units) that tries to measure how many people are talking about your company or product… especially on blogs and social networks.

Web 2.0: a useless term referring to “making a website capable of letting users talk to each other”… yes forums have been doing this since BBS, hence its silliness as a moniker.

Now what is all the hub-bub about? Three things simultaneously, that I will separate:

1. Social Networks (e.g. people who own the websites, and the vulture companies that surround them), are “possibly” making money because LOTS of people are using Social Networks today.

2. It may be profitable for Companies to “use” Social Networking to accomplish some goal(s). E.g. companies and individuals at companies should consider USING Social Networking, but only for some MEASURABLE GOAL… too many companies are using Social Networking with no goal other than to ‘advertise’. Hint: Google is probably better for ya’.

3. Companies need to beware and pay attention to Social Networks, because that is where much of the Share of Voice can be seen, and customers are talking about you there.

With this common language, you can see, its not really that BIG of a thing, unless you consider the fact that SO many people are using them.

So, get off your duff and listen up. Companies need to wise up and pay attention to social networks message for you and STOP trying to use them so much…its not working.

In other words, rather than focusing on only 1-aspect of social networks (how to ‘use’ them for increased sales/revenue directly, item #2 above), consider the other 2 aspects of social networks (1 and 3 above).. and pay attention to the conversation (example: a good community manager) and get a presence on these social networks for that purpose (1. participate). Trust me, people WANT to talk about you/your company, you just have to be there and be listening.

photo attribution: