Is Marketing over Facebook a Battle for Likes/Followers?

Marketing over Facebook has convulsed. It is now a battle for likes/followers. Firms are waging cold wars, wherein the highest number of followers is considered the winner without an assertion. This picturesque is very well known to us and yet marketers follow the path blindfolded.

Let us analyze the common mistakes committed by most of the marketers.

Fan Page is not a Petri Dish

‘Create a fan page; buy thousands of likes and update the status with fluffy contents’ seems to be the motto of new firms. No wonder, results fail to show. Fan page is not a Petri dish where you grow your fans like organisms. In relation, fan page is just another portal where your customers arrive to see what you have to offer.  Unless you give them something worth their time and money they will walk off with contempt.

First Impression is the Best Impression

Impress your customers with your fan page. Facebook has been very generous with providing various tools for designing your fan page. Though FBML is being deprecated HTML, CSS and JavaScript are there as your savior. Make sure to create a stunning landing page for your customers. Now, with the recent intrusion of Timeline it has been easier than ever. Just upload a cover photo of your firm or the latest product which is about to be launched and you are done.

Note how Apple has taken advantage of Timeline over their page.

After you are done with the impression work, the product you should offer should be worth their time. This brings to our next question.

Why should Customers stay on your Fan Page?

People log into their Facebook account for relaxation and entertainment. Unless you are the big player in the market you will have a hard time in convincing your customers. However, the good news is you do not have to convince them at all. Satiate their thirst for entertainment by throwing up a contest. Again, another mistake committed by marketers is to announce the contest through the status update. Creating a separate page for contests creates a better impression and appears to be professional, not to mention the increase in engagement. Below is a screenshot of how Blackberry engages their customers to a challenge.

Provide Discounts on Products & Freebies

There is nothing that sounds as good as freebies and discounts. Give away discount offer on your products and if possible provide some freebies. Customers will be attracted in hundreds and thousands to your fan page and you will reap success within no time. Personally discount on London pass coupons world soccer shop showed greater sales when sold through our page.

Should you buy Fans?

Before winding up we need to discuss the much debated topic of whether purchasing fans is ethical or not. Of course it is not ethical but apart from that purchasing fan has very less benefits. In fact there is hardly any benefit by purchasing fans. Some of the reason not to purchase fans is mentioned below:

1. Most of the fans sold are sham. Fake profiles are created on a larger scale and these are used to provide ‘likes’. Once the job is done through these fake profiles they longer serve any purpose.

2. The cost of a like goes anywhere from $1 to $1.33. Yearly budget for a small business might range from $500 to $6000. If this budget is used for marketing, you will not only achieve organic likes but an increased conversion rate.

3. After purchasing thousands of fans, fan page remains desolated. No engagement is found and rarely a share and few likes can be seen. This scenario is just the result of misleading people to like your page by false promises. ‘Joshua likes XXXX (name of the brand). Like us’, this sort of gaining likes is a lame one. Likes will be accrued but what are you looking for, likes or engagement? Instead write a short description with excellent copy. Likes gain through this tactic will provide better engagement as every like is really interested in what your brand does; not in what their friends have done.

Author:

Richie Richardson loves to write about Social Media Marketing, SEO and Internet marketing. He also writes about london pass code and world soccer shop code. They have some discount and various promo coupons which can prove beneficial.

Sources:

• Importance of Facebook Fans
• Marketing through Facebook
• 14 Powerful tips for Marketing over Facebook

Optimizing Your Landing Page for Better Conversions

Your Landing page is the heart of your site. Irrespective of whether you have a product or a service to sell, landing pages can provide a subsequent boost to the conversion rate. Optimizing them is not hard if you know when and where to tweak the various elements. However, the hardest part is to find the elements that require some tweaks. This brings us to the fact that there is no rule sculpted over the stones which provides guidance towards the perfect optimization of landing pages.

Some ideas can optimize your landing page for better performance. They are:

Loading speed:

A landing page that loads faster has better conversion rate when put into comparison with a page that loads slower. Therefore you very first aim should be to increase the loading speed of your landing page. Factors that can be an obstacle to increase the loading speed are:

1. Images: Too many images over your landing page can be responsible for slow loading. Though images are eye capturers and are very much essential, it is necessary that you limit their usage. Cut down on any images that is irrelevant to the content. As far as possible try to eliminate the images of huge sizes as these consume more loading time. A single image at any specific fold of the page is the best practice.

2. Videos: Videos are widely used to replace written content. However, you should be aware of the fact that videos can never replace written content. Some people have completely stripped their landing page of written content and have replaced them by a long sales video. Users those who have a high internet speed connection will be sated whereas the users with slow internet speed will have no other option but to leave the page.

A smart marketer will tell you to balance your page in terms of written content and videos. A video clip should be used only when you are unable to explain a certain idea in written content. For example, let us say you are promoting your dancing lessons. The landing page can be a mix of written content which will be used to promote your product and the videos can be used to show clips of some complex dancing steps which might be impossible to put into written words.

Note: In many cases the loading speed of your page is attributed to your hosting company. Webhostingpad and register.com are some of the hosting companies that provide excellent hosting with fast loading speed.

Length of the page

What should be the length of the page? Should I provide the readers with just the basic information or detailed information about the product? These two questions spring simultaneously while designing a landing page. Again, there is no rule stating the length and the amount of the information that has to be provided as the answer to the above two questions depends upon the answer of the following question, how much information do your customers require to trust your product?

The amount of information provided should be enough for your customers to trust your product. The content in question can be of just a short paragraph or can be a never ending landing page. However, your copywriter should be talented enough to create a stunning copy so that your reader is adhered to the page until they make a purchase. Moreover, a balance between video and content will make your landing page look great.

Tone of the copy

Personalization is the magic word when it comes to marketing. The sad part is the overuse of the magic word. Imagine yourself to be looking out for a product and you suddenly arrive at a landing page where it is full of colloquial language sprinkled with emoticons. Would you like to risk your $40 in purchasing the product though the price seems to be reasonable? Hardly any of us will make a purchase from such a place.

When marketers mean personalization, they are telling you to write a copy that can be taken as personal without losing the soul of business. An image of yours is critical when it comes to personalization. The next part is to write a copy which appears to be a personalized one while still holding the nature of business. Once you get a good copywriter this shouldn’t be much of a concern to you.

Experiment

In some cases changing just a sentence can affect the conversion rate. Therefore, consistent experiment with your landing page is necessary. Split experiment can provide better results when using trial and error methods.

These few tips will, though trivial, when applied can affect the conversion rate in huge numbers.

Author:

Richie Richardson is a prolific writer on Internet Marketing and Social Media. He also writes for webhostingpad discount codes and register.com discount codes. You can make use of the deals provided by webhostingpad and register.com for your hosting needs.

Sources:

• Landing page Optimization
• 10 Landing Page optimization Tactics
• 3 Secrets to Landing Page Optimization

The New Social Marketing Strategy with Google+

As a marketer, your social profile must be thriving on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But the important question is, ‘Is it thriving over Google+?’ I can assure you that most of you will answer in the negative. However, it is not too late. Grab a business page over at Google+ as soon as you finish reading this.

Google is smart and knows how to beat down its competitors. When Google+ was launched, none had the slightest idea that it will be used as a cutting edge in the market by Google. Yes, Google has merged the search engine and the social network as one. This attempt by Google can be described as ‘Social Searching’.

Search + Your World

It is the new Search plus Your World (Search plus Your World) I am talking about. When you do a Google search, being logged into your Google+ account, you will find that results are being personalized to match your taste. Let us consider that you are searching for ‘body building tips’ and if one of your friends within your circle has written about it then it will be shown to you in the search results. Seems good eh? Here comes the truth.

Google, in the name of personalizing your searches, is forcing the results of Google+ under your throat. How? Let me explain in a more elaborate manner. Suppose you wish to know about a certain brand or celebrity and you would like to give a search over Google. In the search results you will notice that the brand’ or celebrity’s Google+ profile is given preference. Now, do you understand what Google is up to? Yes, it is competing with other social networks taking advantage of its search engine.

Google gives less importance to other social network’s posts and therefore the more urgency in getting your business page over Google+ as soon as possible. A business page over Google+ will help people find your business over search results. However, just a page is not sufficient to boost your business to the required level. Here is one of my social marketing ideas that you can incorporate in your business page over Google+.

Ways to Win at Google +

It is more likely that Google+ posts are to be shown in the search results. Include the keyword in the title as well as the body of the post so that it will help the Google bots to index it and show over the search results. Here comes an added advantage to you as a marketer by including the keyword in posts. Instead of explaining it let me show you with a theoretical example.

Let us consider that you have a blog/website dealing with ‘Diet’ and you wish to optimize a certain article or page for a keyword. When doing a keyword search over any keyword tool you find the keyword ‘diet foods’ has high volume of search and with lesser competition. On the other hand the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ has the same value as ‘diet foods’ to a certain extent. Confused, you optimize your content for the keyword ‘diet foods’ and therefore leave the keyword ‘safe weight loss’.

After posting the article (optimized for ‘diet foods’) over your site, you generally share it to social networks by just pasting the link and allowing the social network to grab the first five lines of the content. In case of Google+ you can try the other way around. The article which was written around ‘Diet Foods’ can also be written around ‘Safe weight loss’, though the latter keyword cannot compensate wholly but it can at least be used as introducer to the content. Yes, write a title and a short description around the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ and manually paste it to the Google+. Later you can include the link of your content and let the social network have its way with it.

What are the Pros?

What is the advantage of doing this extra work? Let me remind you again that Google is going to crawl every post in Google+ and therefore your post which has a short description given by you manually as well as the short description which Google + has indexed for you over its network are both going to be shown over search result. Irrespective of whether a user searches for ‘diet foods’ or ‘safe weight loss’, the chances of your post appearing in the search result will increase.

The odd of the post being shown to the users increases if the user is within your circle. Therefore, it is better that you start focusing on Google+. At the same time do not abandon your audience over other network, because who knows what the future of social marketing will be.

Before I can wrap up, some of you might know that Google provides the ability of depersonalizing your search results. Yes, it’s true. But how many of you will depersonalize your search results and opt for a more global search? Maybe some of us would depersonalize the searches and would like a pure Google search. Will the common user care to do it? I do not think so. When most users find what they are searching for, none will care to depersonalize their search results.

Author:

Richie Richardson is a Social Marketing Expert and SEO Analyst. You can reach him over his blog www.zarrylyms.com where he discusses on current issues regarding Social Marketing, Branding, Affiliate Marketing, SEO and B2B.

Sources:

• Depersonalize
• Search plus Your World
• Google’s privacy policy change