social media marketing

How to Spy on Competitors’ Facebook Ad Strategy

Picture this: One fine Saturday, while enjoying morning tea, you log into your Facebook, the largest social media channel in the world, and are promptly greeted by an advertisement from one of your competitors. They are running a carousel of product images depicting their Black Friday promos. Blasted! Your competitor is reaching out to a demographic by using a strategy that your brand is not.

There are two issues to address. The first issue is that retailers are advertising Black Friday deals earlier each year! Amazon officially launched the holiday shopping season on November 1. Black Friday retail sales declined $1 billion last year. Early promotions like Amazon’s cannibalize the turkey day weekend sales. Holiday shopping might be a time-honored tradition but the race to the mall is fading.

The second issue is the increasing use of social media advertising to reach targeted age ranges. If you are already on tracking social media growth and sales, then this is not an issue. However, if your posts are having trouble getting through the algorithm then a paid strategy may give you a boost to an acceptable ROI.

Your brand is not even on the playing field if your social media game plan is not a serious and tracked part of your marketing strategy. Revisiting your own social media plan is an important part of keeping current with trends and effective campaigns.

Brands I work with plan out their marketing calendars months in advance. Marketing must evolve with changing landscapes and sometimes that requires a mid-quarter strategy shift. Fortunately, the barrier to entry for social media ads is low and most options are open to all budgets.

A thorough social media audit involves identifying and monitoring competitors. If you own a small business you might not view global brands as competitors. We can still learn a lot from what they do and how they execute. If you are a brand with a large social media following and a diverse marketing plan, then monitoring competitors is important for identifying missed opportunities and tracking progress.

So why did you see your competitor’s advertisement on social media? Certainly you are not buying from them! There are unlimited combinations of factors that can result in you falling into any advertiser’s targeting bucket. The simplest is that you visited their website recently. Advertisers using tracking pixels can opt to show social media ads to those that have visited their website. A narrower target would be to show the ads to those who have visited within a certain timeframe or fall within a certain age range.

My latest video featured on Entrepreneur Magazine online video channel talks about how to see your competitor’s Facebook ad targeting.

This is a form of behavior targeting and is often used as part of re-marketing strategies. For example if a shopper visited a website with the past week but did NOT hit the thank you page of the checkout then that person is a good shopper to re-target. Why? Because they have intention (they visited the website) but did not convert (they did not pay for anything.) Someone who visited the website and added products to their online shopping cart but did not pay is an even better candidate for re-marketing.

Potential customers can be targeted or excluded as targets based on email lists, interests, behaviors, gender, age, past buying decisions and hundreds of other factors. This type of targeting is available on the major social channels: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. It is really all a copy of what AdWords begin.

Like any marketing plan, a successful Facebook campaign involves trial and error. Advertisers must find the right mix of audience targeting, an appropriate offer, creatives that resonate with that audience, and an optimized landing page.

For more video on digital marketing, subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/metronycom

Source:
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/199560/why-did-black-friday-sales-fall-by-1-billion

How to Download a List of Your Twitter Followers

by Admin

How to Download a List of Your Twitter Followers

Twitter is not dead! Your followers are valuable and I am going to show you how to download a list of your Twitter followers.

Two days ago, I sat at a social media conference in Boston where I had the good fortune of sitting and chatting with three other social media pros – a marketing professor, a financial industry consultant, and another who works in corporate communications. We learned quite a bit from each other sitting at a round-table rather than a typical auditorium style seating. I found myself defending Twitter as a social media marketing channel.

One of the most common question I hear is, ‘What social media channel should my business use?” I have an overview of social channel stats on a YouTube video. (By the way, your brand should most likely be on YouTube too!) I will agree Twitter’s user growth is stagnating, but they are making changes to the channel to stay relevant and keep up with other giants such as Facebook. Twitter has targeted audiences for paid social ads. There is Twitter tracking that is easy to install. Yes, posts are limited to 140 characters, but that allows users to skim for the content they really want.

Our Twitter followers are valuable. We can market to them or even more them over to other social media ad platforms like Facebook. I need a list of Twitter followers for an old-school promotion. New Twitter followers will receive some SWAG – a hat or t-shirt. First, we had to verify that they follow the client’s account. Getting your Twitter followers is easy. There is a great get Twitter followers spreadsheet on Google Drive. You will need a Twitter developer’s API key to use it, but it works quote well.

I have been looking for a neat tool like this for some time, so finding this easy way to download Twitter followers was a huge help!

Download a List of Your Twitter Followers:

Go to the original spreadsheet on Google Drive
Save your own copy
Get a Twitter API key if you don’t already have one
Grant access to the script
Verify that you are connected
Choose the data you want, and then hit one key to download your followers!

How to Advertise on Snapchat

by Admin

How to Advertise on Snapchat

In case the idea of embarrassing your teenager has kept you off Snapchat, let’s cover some basics before getting into how to advertise on Snapchat. Snapchat is a fun mobile only app where users upload video and photos. The images are sent to individual friends, or saved to a story that lives on the app for 24 hours. There app has more features including chat, stickers, marking up images, but short-lived photos and images things gives you the idea.

Over 60% of U.S. 13 to 34 year-old smartphone users are on Snapchat web app. Nearly 100 million people use the Snapchat app each day to consume 8+ Billion video views. Yeah, 8 BILLION videos every day! Snapchat video viewership rivals that of Facebook.

The average Snapchatter is between 13 and 24 years old, with 37% of users falling into the 18 to 24 year old range. Snapchat is the best social channel to reach out to this young demographic.

Snapchat’s fun disappearing content is definitely a unique challenge for brands wishing to connect with the audience on this channel. Content posted by brands is short-lived, always entertaining and frequently humorous. Snapchat forces brands to develop a content marketing and advertising strategy that impresses fast!

The app offers opportunities for brands to advertise to Snapchatters. Businesses can buy 3V ads, which are interstitial ads, within branded content such as the CNN story. Individuals and brands can purchase local geofilters. The geofilter offers an effective way to advertise locally, in real time. They are quick and easy to set-up.

A geofilter is an image overlay that users within a certain geographic perimeter can see and add to their snaps. The snaps are saved to a live, local story. For example, those using Snapchat during New Year’s Eve in Times Square can opt to add the New Year’s Eve filter to their snaps before they are sent or saved. The geofilter is offered to everyone within a predetermined geographical area.

Snapchat offers two types of geofilters:

A Personal Geofilter is one that doesn’t include any branding, business marks/names, or logos, and doesn’t promote a business or a brand
A Business Geofilter is one that promotes a business or a brand

A geofilter covers a geographical area between 20 thousand and 5 million square feet. They are purchased for a maximum of 30 days. A “fence,” chosen by the advertiser, while placing the order determines the geographical coverage.

Buying a geofilter on Snapchat is easy. The web app, Snapchat.com, has an easy-to-follow- web interface for individuals, designers, and businesses to download example templates. Snapchat geofilters are 1080px wide by 1920px high and must be in .png format. Download a Snapchat ad template or design your geofilter, upload it to Snapchat, and then move on to picking the dates the geofilter will run and choose the geographical area – called a fence. Snapchat employs an easy-to-use Google Maps interface to help choose the fence. After that, enter payment information and the Snapchat ad is good-to-go. The ad price is dependent on the duration and day of week. Snapchat reviews geofilters within one business day.

For now, there is no targeting based on age, gender, or interests. However, the geofilter represents a new and unique way to advertise locally, in real time. It also helps brands reach out to a demographic that Facebook lacks and Instagram barely reaches.

Social Channel Instagram Evolves

by Admin

Social Channel Instagram Evolves

Instagram announced last week, the social channel is altering its algorithm to show users posts they are likely to “want to see.” Currently posts to show in reverse chronological order. Instagram boasts over 400 million active users.

This algorithm change is not unexpected. The new format is similar to Facebook’s methodology. Facebook owns Instagram. After a long test period, Instagram opened up advertising to everyone last fall. Advertisers only need a Facebook page to advertise on Instagram. Yes! That’s correct. You do not need an Instagram account to advertise on Instagram. Ads can be posted and managed from your Facebook ads manager.

Instagram now allows video ads too. The race to capture video users is heated. Facebook made it clear that it wants a bigger portion of YouTube’s audience. Facebook favors native video in organic posts. Both Facebook and Instagram have video ad capability.

A study by Quintly showed the average Instagram brand posts just over one time per day. This is an increase over the first half of 2015. However, as the social channel grows, the engagement rate dropped significantly, by 40% [Figure 1]. According to the Quintly study, video posts increased from 1.78 posts per day to 2.77 on Instagram.

Figure 1

This may be due to the larger audiences that brands boast but it is a metric to keep an eye on. Engagement from Instagram is difficult enough to track. Posts cannot contain links so there are no click though rate metrics to track. However, Instagram ads do have actionable buttons including “learn more” and “shop now.”

Instagram gave us the ability to manage multiple accounts from one device. This is available for Android and iOS users. The remainder of the recent updates (algorithm, ads platform) have been to improve Instagram’s bottom line.