Archive for the ‘News’ Category

What’s the secret to an engaging Facebook business page? According to the results of an internal study revealed by Facebook yesterday, posting content about subjects related to your brand is your best bet. The study sought to identify how post topics relate to engagement, which can help marketers understand which of their content is the most effective at getting fans to engage with their Facebook business page — both organically, and through Facebook ad and Sponsored Stories promotion.

About the Facebook Study

Facebook’s study looked at four weeks’ worth of page posts from 23 brands spanning six industries, and Facebook categorized each post into one of three buckets:

1. Posts About Products or Services: e.g. “Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.” (Facebook’s travel brand example)
2. Brand-Related Posts: “I decided to go on my first cruise because______.” (Facebook’s travel brand example)
3. Posts Unrelated to the Brand: “Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!” (Facebook’s travel brand example)

Study Results

Overall, Facebook found that posts that fell into that second bucket (brand-related posts), were the most significant predictor of page engagement.

And remember, according to Facebook, an ‘engaged user‘ is a person who has clicked anywhere on your post. In other words, engagement means that a person has performed an action on your post, such as liking it, sharing it, commenting on it, clicking on a link you share, viewing a picture, watching a video, answering a question you pose, RSVP-ing to an event you post, etc.

Facebook also reported on several content posting best practices to consider, depending on your Facebook marketing goals:

• Goal = Generating Shares: Facebook recommends posting about topics related to your brand and leveraging photos, photo albums, and video content.
• Goal = Generating Likes: Facebook suggests posting about topics related to your brand and using a clear call-to-action, such as “Like this if …”
• Goal = Generating Comments: Again, make the post about your brand, and spark discussion by posing a question in your post.

Pair Best Practices With Your Own Facebook Page Insights

Overall, the results from Facebook’s study are probably what you’d expect. It’s easy to understand, for example, why a reliance on product-specific posts would generate less engagement. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if a user is following your brand on Facebook, they’ve already had some initial interest in your brand that made them want to follow you. As such, posting content unrelated to your brand — like the latest internet meme that has nothing to do with your business — is unnecessary. So it’s understandable that going the middle ground, and focusing on brand-related content, is the best driver of engagement.

That being said, marketers should pair this knowledge with the data they gather from their own page’s Facebook Insights to make the best decisions about their Facebook content strategies. To learn how to analyze your Facebook Insights to inform your content strategy, check out our informative blog post and video on the subject.

And hey, if your brand can be incorporated into that popular new internet meme, go for it! HubSpot’s own Facebook page has had success with this very tactic, which is evident by the screenshot below.

What do you think of the Facebook study? How does your Facebook content strategy stack up according to Facebook’s content recommendations?

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee

When faced with a blank computer screen and a looming deadline for new marketing copy, most people get a little uptight. It’s intimidating to capture everything you want a prospect to know and share it in a compelling way. Your product or service is superb, and you have so much to say. How will you do it justice?

Unfortunately, most marketing copy is dreadful.

Here are the most common mistakes.

1. We do a brain dump, sharing everything we know.
2. We want to demonstrate that we’re experts, so we use impressive words and jargon that shows we’re in the know.
3. We cram too many words into the piece because it’s all important.
4. We talk about our company, our product, our people… but not about our customers.

If you make even one of those mistakes, odds are your prospects are taking a glance at your first two or three sentences—then moving on. You haven’t invited them into the conversation. You’re just talking about you.

Remember that you are trying to start a conversation. Who would you rather talk to: someone who walks up to you and asks a question about you, or a person who walks up and starts telling you all about themselves?

So, how do we avoid those mistakes?

Consider How Your Prospects Talk

I can have the best deal in the world, but if I tell you about it in Japanese and you don’t speak Japanese… you can’t possibly want what I am selling.

You need to know your prospect well enough that you know how they talk:

• Are they engineers who use very precise, detailed language and acronyms?
• Are they teachers who speak with affection and pride about their students?
• Are they purchasing agents who need to squeeze every penny from the deal and deliver the highest ROI possible?

Understanding the language your target audience uses and how they’re going to have to sell your offering up and down the food chain will allow you to craft your message in their native tongue.

Your prospects are busy. They won’t take the time to decipher your marketing messages. If they don’t instantly understand your message and see that you’re talking to them, they’ll pass over your messages every time.

(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Funny Nerds)

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston – Flickr

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities.

You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different.

Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen.

Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads, content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords.

A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer.

Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search.

That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective.

Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

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All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich | http://www.toprankblog.com