Importance of LinkedIn to Social Media Marketing Strategy

Hi Everyone,

Today I would like to share with you about another important social media website. That is none other than LinkedIn which is the world’s largest professional website. Here we go,

LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional occupations, which was founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003. It is mainly used for professional networking. It is a business oriented network of decision makers, influencers and buyers. 

According to Wikipedia, as of June 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 225 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.

Apart from that, following statistics of the site will give you a clear idea of web’s largest professional site, LinkedIn and how it works.

• Two new users join LinkedIn every second.
• 64% LinkedIn users are outside the US.
• Over 10 million endorsements are given daily.
• 35% of LinkedIn users access the site daily and 42% of users update their profile regularly.
• No. of LinkedIn business pages are 2.7 million while No. of LinkedIn groups are 1.5 million.
• 81% of users belong to at least one group.
• In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 %from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace.

In perspective of different views of people, LinkedIn is probably the most underestimated and underused social media site on the web. But according to Alexa, it is the most important social network after Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. 

In nature, people show more professional and unique mind set when they use professional websites than dealing with their personal contacts. Therefore marketers should make their strategies in accordance with the different roles that these social media sites perform to absorb people’s different emotions. Simply people are experiencing profound emotion when they use LinkedIn which is significantly more different than that of the situations which they are in Twitter or Facebook.

People share their thoughts, ideas and emotions freely on personal networks such as Twitter or Facebook since they highly interact with their family, friends and loved ones. But on professional network such as LinkedIn, people are purposeful and inspirational and they are focusing to build and maintain unique identity and goal oriented character. In that sense, they express feeling with lesser freely.

Most researches have revealed the fact that the content of brand activity in professional networks is perceived higher than personal networks. Therefore it is important to read professionals’ mind sets and how they differently perceive brands in their lives.

How does LinkedIn benefit you?

• You can involve with thousands of decision makers by creating LinkedIn profiles and groups. People in your group are always interested in becoming a valuable connection. Since most of your connections are great decision makers in their field, you may be benefited of being a member of the site.

• You can target new connections by using the site’s advanced features such as names, job title, verticals, companies, networks, geographic ranges, schools, education, industry experts, groups and interests.

• Since LinkedIn is web’s largest professional site, vast number of talented professionals is there which is capable enough of performing your expected campaign. It helps you to get your preferred task done in qualitative manner.

• You can link your Twitter, Facebook accounts, blogs and other web property to your LinkedIn profiles, which allows you to automatically update your LinkedIn profile with activity on the other networks.

• Since you deal with professional-based network of clients, companies, associations and vendors, LinkedIn helps you to increase your networking ability. Simply, LinkedIn isn’t about connecting with consumers like Facebook or Twitter, it’s about connecting businesses.

• LinkedIn Answers are used by the professional business organizations to find experts and to develop meaningful relationships. These LinkedIn answers are helpful to you to collect more new clients.

• LinkedIn Polls offers a great way to do market research within your own networks and within the LinkedIn community. Since your connections of LinkedIn are professionals and decision makers in a particular field, the result of your market research is very much productive.

Therefore you can improve your entire social media marketing strategy with the information provided by the site such as competitive analysis, polls, and researching tools.

Your social marketing portfolio will be valued greatly with LinkedIn’s integration tools. If you have not placed your brand engagement in professional network like LinkedIn, you may have missed a major opportunity in your social media marketing strategy. Therefore it is obvious to practise both personal and professional networks for a successful social media strategy. In that sense, a professional network such as LinkedIn helps one to succeed life goals and enhance one’s strong desire to influence others.

Cheers!!! 

How FMCG brands can reach to the right target markets using Google Display Network

Hi Everyone,

With the rapid involvement of people in the internet, most firms are ready to allocate substantial amount of time, money and other resources for appearing advertisements in web sites. In that sense, Google Display Network lets FMCG brands place ads on a variety of news sites, blogs and other niche sites across the internet to reach more potential customers. Simply Google Display Network is a tool which helps companies can retain their existing customers and attract potential customers towards them by displaying their ads in different websites where people are highly engaging in.

What does Display Advertising provide firms?

·         Create all types of ads - text, image, interactive and video ads.

·         Place those ads on websites that are relevant to what you’re selling.

·         Show those ads to the people that are likely to be most interested.

·         Manage and track your budget, campaigns and results as you go.

How does Google Display Network help firms?

It is very much easier to firms catch the right set of customers towards them with displaying the particular ads. When increasing the number of clicks for the ads, it leads more awareness of the firm. And potential customers can have more understanding about the firm and its products. Further this tool helps firms to repeatedly display the particular ads to only identified set of customers and which will result to generate more sales as well. Not only that, firms are in a position to take the target audience towards their own websites and other web property using those advertisements.  Most importantly, your advertisements can be displayed on most of the websites which your customers visit with the help of tool, “Re-targeting”. That will easily guide your customers to have a meaningful relationship with the firm.   

It is very essential to establish solid campaign structure foundation to avoid crashing and burning on Google Display Network.

Above is the front page of a popular cricket website. There are plenty of display advertisements in it. It needs some time for people to separate the content of the particular website and advertisements. Anyhow since millions of people visit in this website, companies have still possibility to reach to their target customers. 

Here it is important to keep focusing on the creativity, uniqueness and attractiveness of your advertisement. If you are in the position to concentrate on those aspects, you won’t be unable to fulfill your objectives.

Cheers!!!    

The Role of YouTube in Social Media Marketing

Hi everyone!

People always enjoy watching videos instead of reading textual contents. Video has become an integral part of Internet users' online experience. As a result of it, every single individual surfs videos in the internet. YouTube is the well known website for videos by every internet user. Without surprisingly, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world behind Google.

The following striking statistics of the site will definitely make all surprise. Just take a look at some of them.

• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month.
• More than 3 billion video views per day.
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside of the United States.
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth.
• People watch one billion views a day on YouTube mobile.
• YouTube is localized in 53 countries and across 61 languages.
• 25% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices.
• YouTube is available on hundreds of millions of devices.
• Content ID scans over 100 years of video every day.

Even though YouTube records such amazing stats, most people have not still realized that it’s an excellent place where marketers can promote their products and service with ease to find new customers. But it should be noted that businesses that have identified the importance of video marketing have vastly benefited with utilizing the service of YouTube. They’re currently making more money with their uploaded videos on YouTube.

If you wish to increase your online visibility, build trust and convert prospects into customers, then YouTube marketing is much needed to be a part of your social media marketing activities. In the modern contest, we experience faster connection speeds, unlimited hosting, and a video camera in every single person’s pocket or purse with the results of technological enhancement. That helps each and every individual to create and share videos very comfortably and easily.

YouTube has given a forum to share your innovative ideas publishing as a video to cater more customers towards your firm. And further you can create links to take viewers your website or other web property with the help of your promoted videos. Therefore businesses should be taking advantage of this medium to market engaging content to their consumers.

How do you promote your video to your target audience?

No website hosts videos as much as YouTube does. It is the home of the viral video. That means a video in YouTube spreads to a large audience on the Internet quickly. Advertisers can use other social media forums, such as Facebook or Twitter, to guide consumers to particular YouTube videos. Especially more popular videos drag customers to the YouTube home page and increasing the website traffic. Further you can promote your videos through blog reviews and forums. Promoting your videos on YouTube with sound number of contacts will generate a high traffic to your website, which will result in great conversion rates as well.

How would you upload your video on YouTube?

YouTube allows any individual to create own free YouTube channel. This allocates you an online location to upload for all types of videos related to the product or service that you are marketing. Firms can establish a branded user channel by paying a fee to YouTube, which receives them more options and features to improve their pages. Moreover you can add new videos and revise the existing videos while you are keeping your older videos on your channel.

How would you measure your videos?

One of the greatest features which YouTube provides is, it shows the number of views the particular video has received. Firms do not have to calculate it using any mathematical methods or techniques. Instead, it simply shows right below the video posted. This allows marketers to identify which extent their videos have been watched by people and how successful their video campaign is. Further permission for leaving comments and suggestions on each video provides firms with an idea of enhancing its future projects.

Most of the time, it is believed that short videos are very much suitable to display on Youtube. Nevertheless long videos with more information are still great to upload since people truly dislike and hesitate in reading lengthy pages of textual content.

Miscellaneous services provided by YouTube

YouTube helps you to attract more customers towards to your website and other web property. They are, buying advertising on the home page or buying advertising that runs beside certain videos. Further you can also use keywords as well.  When certain search terms are used on YouTube, it will trigger videos to appear as an option for users. Then you have to pay YouTube based on how many users choose to watch your video.

Is it a need of optimizing your video?

Video marketing is supposed to be the next generation of internet marketing. Incredibly, over 25% of the web traffic to businesses now comes from Youtube.  

It is much needed to optimize your video content to cater the maximum targeted audience since the amount of traffic from Youtube is gradually rising. Therefore video search engine optimization can be more effective to compete the market. And if your target customers contain different backgrounds, video marketing is the ideal way where you can reach them with ease. Further you should highly focus on creating quality and interactive videos to attract your viewers.

You can create videos with innovative concept and popularize your products so that your potential customers are more excited. It can be called as guerrilla marketing. Simply the latest movement of video marketing is guerrilla marketing.

Cheers!!!

Facebook Advertising for Targeting a Niche Audience

Hi everyone,

It is so glad to stop by to write a blog article again. Today I would like to share with you another interesting topic under Digital Marketing. That is how a firm can use Facebook advertising to target Niche audience.

Facebook…How simple that word is! And how close it is to the people in 21^st century! Do you know the number of population in Facebook right now is just behind to the population of China and India? In other words, if Facebook were a country, it has the third largest population in the world. That statistics itself talks about how people have immensely interacted and addicted with it in such a short period of time.

Since the world is more connected, many of the new things you discover on Facebook come from your friends. Facebook is one of the most influential social media tools where people use to share their thoughts, interests and ideas with their friends and loved ones while being a part of the global community. Amazingly, Facebook has allowed individuals to connect with friends and the world around them and make the world more social while creating more personalized experiences.

Under these circumstances, Facebook has become one of the most powerful promotional tools in the contemporary business world.

Facebook has given the opportunity to businesses to promote their brand and win niche markets. Facebook advertising tool helps companies to target the exact target group of customers in relatively short time period at lower monetary cost. And firms are given the initiative to market advertisements more flexible and attractive manner.

A company can promote their brand in Facebook creating a fan page. Facebook fan page is a public profile on Facebook for use by businesses, celebrities that allows your customers to follow you and interact with the updates and making customers views. It enables firms to get existing customer awareness and reaching potential fans as well.  

How can you create and maintain effective Facebook fan page?

You can easily create a Facebook fan page for your product/ brand free of charge after following very basic set of steps. And then you need to connect with right set of customers. That means firm should be able to cater customers who have necessity, interest and desire towards your product. You can attract fans by inviting them to like your fan page.

Apart from that, with the facility of Facebook advertising, you can have more fans to your page by paying an affordable amount to Facebook. Further it is much needed to put regular updates and promotional campaigns in the page so that firm can have a great bond and active participation with its identified customers.

How can you target right set of customers?

You can create Facebook advertisements and sponsorship events to target customers. Here Facebook helps you to target the needed customers based on different variables such as location, age, birthday, sex, education work places and etc. The following image shows what the characteristics which Facebook has made firms to target right set of their customers.

How does Facebook help you to attract new customers?

Modern consumer has got used to sharing his/her personal experiences with friends which may be either positive or negative sentiments. That has been the opportunity to businesses to focus on these tools and get willingness of customers towards them.

When customers like, comment and share your posts related to the brand, it will be visible to number of people in the site (friends of the person who liked or commented or shared) which lead to have more brand popularity. Moreover firms are allowed to reach vast number of customer audience through uploading fascinating pictures, videos and audios.

In addition to that, firms can upload a unique cover photo and profile picture which best describe about the organization and its operation. These help customers to identify firms separately among the different brands. Facebook events and groups can also used as a social media tool to promote brands other than Facebook fan pages.

And also firms can display personalized ads to their niche audience according to customers’ real interests, desires & values and what they have said, they liked in their profile, which makes their experience on Facebook even better.

Therefore if companies are interested in building meaningful long term relationship with its target customers, we can assure that Facebook advertising is the best social media tool which a firm can simply practise.

Cheers!!!

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing

Hi everyone,

In today’s my blog, I would like to talk about Social Media Marketing and its effect towards the success of your brand or company.

According to the Wikipedia, Social Media Marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.

Simply social media marketing is the way of people having conversation online. Here companies make effort of securing place of their brand and increasing the likability of the particular product through the online conversations taking place on social media web.

Social networking websites help firms and individuals to have interaction with one another and build long term relationships. Social Media Marketing in the sense, most people may think that it is just a way of pushing your advertisement on the Facebook or YouTube. Simply it is not. You have to involve with social media websites and get the different views of customers.

The other key factor is most of the time people share their personal experience through these sites as this is one of the easiest ways individuals can make their views to their loved ones. Therefore you should not control the different views and comments customers made even if they are negatively affected to your brand. You have to get both positive and negative thoughts of customers made to your brand as social media marketing is not a one-way broadcasting tool. Simply you should let more traffic bring to your product and company.

And further you cannot always put your hopes towards the advertisement success as it just appears on the social media sites. You need to have a meaningful conversation online with your customers about your brands.

Moreover, Social networking sites allow individual followers to express their “like” or “dislike” or “retweet” or “repost” or “leave comments” related to the product being promoted. With the result of making one’s views towards particular brand, all of the users’ connections are able to see what each individual’s views are. Therefore reaching more people will be more benefited upon the firm and individuals to make their purchasing decisions as they have more information under their belt. Since the information about a particular product and no of views and comments related to that product are being put in substantial amount, we can say that social networking sites act as word of mouth.

Now it’s high time I analyzed the success of social media sites of a particular company with respect to its major competitors. Here I use the tool called “Social Media Brand Health Check” to carry out the analysis.  In this analysis, we focus on 11 criteria under the major categories of Reach, Quality of Audience, Engagement, Share of Voice and Sentiment.

·        Reach- How many people you reach through your social media profiles?

·        Quality of Audience- How relevant is your reach to your target market?

·        Engagement- How deeply people engage with your brand?

·        Share of Voice- How often people talk about your brand?

·        Sentiment- How positive or negative the conversations about your brand?

Here is the table I use to carry out the analysis to identify where your brand or company stands in social media with respect to your competitors.

Your brand’s level of satisfaction to each criterion would be given as follows;

0-Totally Dissatisfied

1-    Somewhat Dissatisfied

2-    Neutral

3-    Somewhat Satisfied

4-    Very Satisfied

Social Media Brand Health Check Score of the particular company will be interpreted as follows;

If your Score is Below 25

You are seriously in 'Social Media Trouble'. You need to speed up your adaptation to the new media landscapes. You need to prioritize your social media goals, and start strengthening at least a few areas from the criterion used in above health check.

If your Score is from 26 to 50

There can be a few areas where you are really strong on Social Media. Find out those few areas and make them stronger and maintain. Find out the areas where you are weak, and address the issues.

If your Score is from 51 to 80

You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. However, there can be few areas where you can strengthen your presence.

If your Score is Above 81

Your brand rocks on Social Media! Keep it up, and continue monitoring new developments.

Here we go! My selected company for the analysis is KFC Sri Lanka. Here I have identified Keells Super as one of the major competitors of KFC Sri Lanka.

 According to the results earned, we can say that there is almost equal number of Facebook fans for both brands. But over 90% of fans of KFC are local fans. That’s one of the great achievements KFC Sri Lanka has made in the social media marketing. But when we concentrate on the number of people who are talking about KFC on Face book, that’s just 1316 fans. That is over 50% lesser than Keells super as Keells Super has achieved 3373 fan talkers.

When we move to the Twitter follower analysis, there is very poor number of twitter followers for both brands compared to their Facebook fans and relatively popular brand or company in the world. KFC Sri Lanka is much needed to highly focus on further about twitter and strive to attract more twitter followers as well. But Since KFC has good twitter followers than that of Keells Super twitter followers; KFC leads Keells Super numerically. 

When we consider the number of youtube viewers, that’s also not a significant amount. That number is too far more behind in comparison with Facebook fans. Therefore KFC needs to put much effort to fascinate more viewers in their youtube channel activities as well. Here KFC can make promotional efforts like doing competitions and posting attractive advertisements in Facebook and which can be used to enhance the number of twitter followers and youtube viewers. And KFC Sri Lanka is active on other 3 social media networks while Keells Super is active on only one.

KLOUT score defines how well a company or brand involves and influences their target customers in the social media sites. KFC has a sound KLOUT Score comparing to Keells Super.

When we consider the criterion of ‘share of voice’, each company gains 20 out of the top 20 post results in Google blog search. But KFC is a multinational brand; the results are not all about KFC Sri Lanka.

And as both of them are not significantly involving with twitter, we cannot see a high value of twitter mentions during the last 48 hours. Simply as far as Twitter is concerned, they are much essential to get involved with actions of Twitter for the success of social media marketing.

Then negative sentiments for the brands are concerned; KFC has less negative thoughts of its customers compared to its competitors. That value is understandable as companies naturally expect them in those domains since customers are free to write their thoughts in social media websites.

KFC Sri Lanka’s SOCIAL MEDIA HEALTH SCORE is 72.72%. We can conclude that KFC Sri Lanka is comparatively successful in the social media. But there are a lot of areas where they have to strengthen. Therefore it is prominent to investigate their lacking areas in accordance with this analysis and make necessary things to rock in social media marketing.  

Hope you all get a great understanding the value of social media marketing of going through the above analysis. So simply, after doing this analysis you can realize where your brand stands with in social media marketing and what the areas you have to cover to be more popular among your valued customers.  

Cheers!!! 

Advertising with Google Adwords

Hi everyone!

In today’s blog I am going to discuss on how you can promote your website or brand with the help of using Google AdWord tool. First of all I would like to explain the Search Engine Marketing and its elements.

According to the Wikipedia, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.

There are two main categories we can identify under Search Engine Marketing;

1.      SEO - Search Engine Optimization

2.      Paid Advertising  

                                I.            PPC/ CPC - Pay Per Click/ Cost Per Click

                             II.            CPM - Cost Per Thousand Impressions

                          III.            CPA - Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition

In this blog post, I will be explaining about how we can make a PPC, which is under paid advertising, using Google adword tool. This is very much helpful to modern businesses as every and each firm is eagerly concerning to first reach to customers and get the attraction towards them.

Here is the screen shot to get a basic understanding what SEO & PPC are.

PPC advertisements help companies to promote their websites by putting their website link on the top of the search results. And companies will be able to make sure that their right set of target customers has access to the website within the expected time period. Further as companies should only pay if there are customer clicks on the particular website, this tool is therefore very much useful to companies to reduce resource wastages.

Once we use Google adword tool to create our campaign, we can continue it with providing different keywords and making regular payments to Google.

Here is a sample keyword search for newspapers in Sri Lanka.

Without surprisingly, you can see straight advertisements related to my keyword in the above image.

Now let’s move on to identify the best keywords which can be used for the advertisements of newspapers in Sri Lanka. Here we identify general words which people use to type on the search engine box to find related to which they are needed.  We can log in to Google adwords using gmail account and do the keyword research free of charge. Then it will appear the following screen.

Here the key word has been mentioned as “Newspapers in Sri Lanka”. Under the category-Newspapers. And then my target location is Sri Lanka and target language is English. After searching you will receive a list of results as follows;

Google provides most relevant key words under the results list. Then you can select most preferred key words to use optimizing your advertisement by ticking the cage related to the item. After that you can just select key words you wish and download them to an excel sheet.  

The next task is to create the advertising campaign with using the above results. Here first click Campaigns tab and then click on new campaign. And select the type as “Search and Display Network”. You should give a name for the campaign name and fill bid and budget amounts. Then you can see the following screen.

After that there’s a box at the bottom of the page to select keywords which you have downloaded to an excel sheet. Finally, Save and continue.

The particular advertisement will be activated after you confirm the payment and the advertisement can be seen in the search results until your daily budget exceeded.

The advertisement will be shown to anyone who searches with your selected keywords or phrases. Therefore this is one of the more productive ways of advertising to people who are highly involving with the internet and searching information to buy their products.

Google Adwords tool is really helpful for firms to get high attraction of potential customers at very low cost and to be more popular within their target audience.

Cheers!!!