Social Media Training for Marketers

From every ad, users can also steer themselves to an "ads preferences" settings page, where they can tell Facebook not to show them ads based on their inferred affinity for certain categories. Conversely, they can also select categories they are interested in.

Now users who click or tap on the drop-down menu on a Facebook ad and select "Why am I seeing this ad?" will be taken to a brief explanation for why that ad was shown to them. For instance, a user could be told they saw an ad because they're interested in televisions, and that Facebook's inference was based on pages they've liked and ads they've clicked on.

the new targeting is intended to help direct-response advertisers, in particular, to make their Facebook ads more relevant to their selected audience.

“[Marketers'] prioritization of images and hashtags over targeting specific audiences is completely backwards, and may reflect a more troubling lack of understanding about basic social media strategy,” she says. “How do you know which images are going to resonate with your audience if you don’t know who your audience is?”

Strauss identified that a sizable number of marketers “are using social channels in a non-useful manner: posting randomly, without a goal and without a true understanding of what can be accomplished on any particular social channel.”

If social content is to help your business, it’s important to post frequently and consistently. Thirty percent of managers post less than once a day, or they don’t have a schedule at all, leaving them outpaced by more productive users.

Reach is not public data, and very few people (likely less than 20 companies across the globe) have the ability to access a significant number of pages’ reach metrics. So most (if not all) of what you’ve read on the subject is probably irrelevant, or greatly exaggerated.

Among the 142 industries (Facebook page categories) we have in the sample, only 18 are up or steady. But among the 124 categories seeing their organic reach going down, there are still a lot of them reaching more than 15 or 20% of their fans organically for each post.

We focused on the Organic Reach metric for posts (the only one that cannot include paid reach) of over 6,000 pages. We then averaged Organic reach by industry and compared the results between the two periods (July 2013 & May 2014)

in May, 51% of digital media time was spent on mobile apps, while an amazing 60% of digital time was spent on mobile devices. That’s up from 50% a year ago.

Native advertising has come under fire for being deceptive. It is, claim critics, an attempt to fool readers into thinking they’re consuming content produced by the publication itself when in fact they’re consuming an ad. It’s this criticism that led Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai to ban ads masquerading as articles.

Outbrain banned native advertising from the inventory of content it promotes on websites.

In an AdAge post, Rafat Ali suggests the following ways to improve branded content: Approach a native advertising assignment from the customer’s perspective, answering their questions and solving their problems. Go deep, with a narrow focus and uniquely valuable content that appeals to a defined audience subset. Offer data not easily found elsewhere that provides genuine insight, including new ways to understand the business. Approach native advertising like an editor, not a marketer.

Multi-product ads enable businesses to showcase three products within a single ad unit, on desktop or mobile. Each product highlighted will have its own image, description, and click target.

Beginning today, multi-product ads are available to advertisers around the world via the Facebook ads application-programming interface. We’ll work to incorporate multi-product ads into our other ads interfaces later this year.

A new feature in Ads Manager and Power Editor allows businesses to easily build certain kinds of audiences — i.e., people who haven’t visited your website in a while, or people who have visited certain pages of your site.

In an analysis of social media ROI, there is a lot of what Time described as "proving" the media.

In a 2010 article in The Journal of Consumer Research, a Ph.D writing in Psychology Today summarizes: "We live in a world of advertising. It is a world of our making, of course. We don't like to pay the full price of things, so we allow other people to pay part of that price in exchange for letting them pass a message to us.... That information ultimately affects the way we make choices, whether we know it or not."

in a 2009 issue of The Journal of Database Management and Consumer Strategy Management, "ROI in social media: a look at the arguments," it was reported that 49% of consumers "made a purchase decision based on the information they found through social media sites," and that 45% of people who searched for information via social media sites "engaged in word of mouth," compared to 36% who found information on a company or news site

social media-driven campaigns would see the most growth in commercial production in 2014,

it makes sense that the commercial production space is shifting its efforts to viral video. Out of the US smartphone users surveyed, 44% said they watched viral videos on their phones, the second most popular digital video type they viewed regularly; 43% of computer users and 37% of tablet users also reported watching viral clips on those devices.

The top hurdle to managing rights and royalties for commercials was the need for a system to track them, cited by 32% of respondents. A close 30% were concerned about others using an asset despite not having the rights to it

study reinforces the importance of context that advertisers need to consider when deciding what content to promote and where via native advertising.

Over 8o percent of respondents said brand mattered, which poses a challenge for advertisers aiming to use native ad units to drive awareness.

Visitors to online news sites said they are more open to advertising on those sites that focus on a story rather than pitching a product.

Fewer marketers are using Instagram than other networks. 58% of marketers are on Instagram, compared to 94% on Twitter and 82% on Facebook. Naturally, less competition is going to translate to more opportunity. (Of course, as more marketers catch on, this will change.)

Instagram has a younger median age (27 years old), which may account for why users are more likely to interact with brands.

slick pics actually don’t produce nearly the same engagement rates as original “non-glossy pictures shot outside of a studio” – the agency’s description of what an “Instagram photo” should look like.

Part of the reason why advertisers spent more on Facebook, suggests Resolution Media, is that Facebook ads are cheaper: both impressions and clicks cost less on Facebook than on Twitter, so marketers are enticed to spend more. Plus, Facebook offered more extensive alpha and beta opportunities than Twitter.

cost-per-click (CPC) is down 2 percent year-over-year and 11 percent quarter-over-quarter, while clickthrough rate (CTR) rose 160 percent YoY and 20 percent QoQ. Facebook ad clicks overall were increased by 70 percent YoY and 48 percent QoQ. Impressions are up 40 percent YoY and 41 percent QoQ.

Comments on ad posts are up 16 percent YoY and 40 percent QoQ; likes are down 4 percent YoY and shares are up 2 percent. Engagement on video is up 25 percent YoY and 58 percent QoQ, showing that auto-play videos haven’t been as toxic as feared. Video plays are up 785 percent YoY and 134 percent QoQ after auto-play videos were implemented in Q4. Nearly 1/4 of all video plays on Facebook happen on Fridays. Posts with images still gain the most engagement, though the percentage of engagement for photo, link and text posts are all down YoY. Posts with links are up 77 percent YoY and 167 percent QoQ, as Facebook has made great strides in making link posts more visual. Most impressions in Q1 came on a Friday, with 15.7 percent of all impressions. Sunday is the least likely day to receive a comment on a post. Facebook referred revenue per visit is up 11 percent year-over-year and 2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Facebook produces 75 percent of traffic to retail sites, up 2 percent year-over-year and 13 percent quarter-over-quarter. Facebook refers 52 percent of social traffic to B2B high tech sites, up 34 percent year-over-year.

80 percent of companies believe they deliver superior customer service, only 8 percent of customers agree,

If a consumer contacts a business with a question or complaint, they typically expect a response within the hour. However, a Social Media Marketing University (SMMU) survey conducted in February shows that only 17 percent of businesses respond to customer complaints via social media within that hour time period and a surprising 21 percent of businesses never respond at all,

11 percent of brands have lost revenue, 15 percent have lost customers, and 26 percent have tarnished reputations, all because of negative comments on social media.

Not Registering Your Site With Bing

Missing “alt” Tags and Bad File Names

Not Taking Advantage of Google Authorship